The Musical Making of Bengali Britain, c. 1961-1989

Abstract

Much of the making of present-day multicultural Britain owes to immigration, including Bengalis from East Pakistan—later Bangladesh—and the Indian state of West Bengal, especially after the second half of the twentieth century. Weaving together Bengali, English, and Sylheti sources, archival and governmental records, old newspapers, song texts, memoirs, film, interviews, and embodied reflections in the form of personal fieldnotes, this thesis presents the first multisensorial and reflexive music history of Bengali Britain, both from a bottom-up and top-down approach.
Foregrounding diasporic Bengali and allied music-making, this thesis aims to 1) challenge monolithic notions of Bengaliness in the context of evolving political, socioeconomic and cultural realities in desh (home) and bidesh (away); 2) introspect Bengali citizenly identities’ fostering of personal and familial intimacies; 3) publics; and 4) understand “subaltern” positionalities.
In the Introduction, I sketch a historical and historiographical background and set out the main themes and methodology. Chapter One reconstructs musical programmes around Rabindranath Tagore’s birth centenary celebrations in Britain to locate Bengali musicalities. Chapter Two studies the role of music, or the lack thereof, in the birthing of Bangladesh, lending an ear to both pro-Bangladesh and anti-Bangladesh parties. Chapter Three attempts to capture the eventful 1970s and 1980s in three case studies: cultural nationalism and antiracism, restaurateurship, and music classes. Voyaging back to the 1960s, Chapter Four reimagines Baul musicians’ journey to Britain and travels until the late 1980s to study the adaptation of an “old” sound in “new” geographies, appropriations of “Baul”, and simultaneously performances and reception in “mainstream” spaces. Summarising the four chapters, I conclude by answering the posed questions and laying out future research
possibilities.