A much awaited book...and a small, but impactful, publishing house

I have been watching out for the publication of this particular book about Hindustani classical music for a long long time…when I saw the reference of this book for the first time, sometime in 2000 or so, it was in the catalogue of the publisher, I thought I must have this book…at that time, I was totally ‘into’ music…reading about and listening to ‘fusion’ and Hindustani classical music…so much so that my actual research got derailed for some time…anyway, it said ‘forthcoming’ under a brief description of the book and a tentative list of topics…I wrote to the publisher and it was still ‘forthcoming’… I wrote after six months or so and it was still ‘forthcoming’…I had seen another book in the catalogue and decided to buy that…it was Ustad Alladiya Khan’s ‘autobiography,’ called ‘My Life.’… Ustad Alladiya Khan is the founder of the Jaipur-Atrauli Gharana, and his autobiography, dictated to his grandson towards the end of his illustrious life, is a fascinating moving picture of Hindustani classical music from the mid nineteenth century to almost the mid twentieth centuries … though I was vaguely aware of a bygone Hindustani classical world – the world of small principalities, their court singers, royal patronage, musical one-upmanship, singers and their families, bandishes being closely guarded like family treasures, etc. – Ustad Alladiya Khan’s book revealed this world in full colour…not through photographs, but through words…this is still a cherished book in my musical library…

For some time, I forgot about ‘forthcoming’ book…and recently, a few months back, I remembered that book again and felt that it would have ‘forthcome’ by now…I decided to check if the publisher had a website and I was pleasantly surprised to see that the publisher, Thema, had a website (www.themabooks.com) and more pleasantly, the book had forthcome!! …

Thema is a small publishing venture in Calcutta and publishes books in both English and Bengali…and it has got a compact and ‘impact’ful list of books in its various subsections…women’s studies, oral history, Indian history, children’s literature, culture studies, film studies, radical literature, science…

I browsed the site and saw two more books that interested me… I then spoke to them and placed an order for these three books…the books arrived yesterday…

Ok…the much awaited book is ‘Music and Modernity: North Indian Classical Music in An Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (edited by Amlan Dasgupta) … what first struck me was the subtitle…a reference to the famous essay by Walter Benjamin…The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction…the articles in this book range from early gramophone records to the forms of the Sarod and from women musicians to reflections on the Khayal…some articles do look tough…but that is challenge…

The other two books that I bought are Imaginary Maps, a book of short stories by Mahasweta Devi (Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak) and Manik Bandyopadhyay: Selected Stories (Edited and introduced by Malini Bhattacharya)… there are more that I want to read from Thema…one by one…