Davesh Soneji holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies and is associate professor of South Asian studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is author of the award-winning book Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South India (University of Chicago Press, 2012). As a fellow at Yale ISM, Soneji will complete a new book entitled Unbounded Tunes: Genealogies of Musical Pluralism in Modern South India which examines the social and religious textures of Tamil music beyond the invented canon of “classical Karnatak music” as it was molded by dominant-caste cultural nationalists beginning in the 1920s. The project unfolds as a cluster of five subjugated histories of music from the modern Tamil-speaking world, including chapters on the music of the hybrid modern Tamil theatre (natakam); centuries-old traditions of Tamil Islamic and Catholic music; representations of Dalit musical traditions; and “waterborne tunes” that travel across the Indian Ocean into areas such as the Malay Peninsula through circuits of both imperial indenture and emergent Tamil capitalism. Unbounded Tunes illustrates how, until the third decade of the twentieth century, expansive, informal networks of sonic exchange created contexts for the emergence and patronage of religiously, aesthetically, and socially diverse forms of music among non-elite Tamil artists.
