Although this monograph was submitted with the Indian Institute of Advanced Study [IIAS], Shimla by its due date in 2018, I had requested the concerned authorities to delay the publication with a specific end in view. I wanted to supplement my study on Bihar, eastern Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, and Himachal Pradesh with some further work in Jharkhand soon after my stint in Shimla [2016-2018] came to an end. The purpose was to expand the terrain of work geographically, linguistically and culturally, enabling me to use the rather expansive phrase 'Hindi belt' in the title with greater license. Thanks however to the climate of research grants in the subsequent period, my attempts to procure funds for work on Jharkhand failed repeatedly. Just as I was mustering up my personal resources to finance a research stint in Jharkhand, we were met with the miasmic gusts of the Covid pandemic that made all free-wheeling travel impossible for over two years. To avoid further delay, this volume thus has to go to the press largely as it was in 2018. My continuing work on the Hindi belt will have to await another volume and hopefully an adequate research grant.
My two years at the Institute of Advanced Study [IIAS], Shimla were made enormously fruitful with great help from the staff of the institute as well as the numerous colleagues who were freely available for wide-ranging discussions and rarely shied away from making incursions into academic fields far beyond their formal calling. Similarly, as area experts in a variety of fields, they rarely discouraged intruders who often came in with bold queries and hypotheses bordering on plain rampage, welcoming all such overtures with amused but encouraging gestures. The 'Thursday
Presentations, [a weekly afternoon routine followed by high tea at the Fellow's Lounge] revered at the institute, had a lasting impact on many a Fellow who recovered from their long-held biases and theoretical tethers with great willingness and pleasure, and also hefted somewhat isolated scholars like me out of their well. practised ruts. Rather strikingly, even though it was pleasing to have one's work acknowledged by a colleague from the same or similar field, the fresh learning often came in the shape of queries and critique from Fellows attached to the most distant fields of research.
Often these discussions overflowed into the numerous uphill and downhill walks and get togethers at the Fellows' residences over glasses of tea and stronger beverages. What we all gained from the free and unclouded exchanges during the two-year stint is comparable to no other experience for its intensity but that perhaps of writing an early PhD, though without the formal constraints or concerns of career moves. It is indeed ironic how a rarefied intellectual atmosphere can smoothly land us back to native realities, whereas the hard realities of professional chores may only see us stuck over doctrinaire positions and stray away from the solid ground of fresh experience! Unlike the bureaucracies elsewhere, the often-amused IIAS staff indulged our idiosyncrasies with affection and understood the irony well, thanks to their longstanding experience with "half-mad professors' roaming its lordly corridors, since the late 1960s. The institute personnel, right across to its forever toiling gardeners, seemed aware that the relative isolation of the Fellows in Shimla has indeed fructified in dozens of masterly tomes published by the IIAS in the last six decades. Their goodwill was also passed to the friendly shopkeepers of the Boileuganj market down below, who saw us with awed reverence, as haloed visitors from an exoplanet
who nevertheless require their daily grocery. I thus have to express my deep gratitude to the institution and more concretely the people, the faces that crowd my mind as I write these lines. I do of course hope that the incoming generations of the Fellows at IIAS will enjoy the same degree of effervescent freedom and spontaneous ease of debate and disagreements in carrying out their self-assigned projects. For every chapter of a volume read in peace and quiet, for every item of empirical data analysed, the institute at Shimla offered the unique reward of a view of the hoary cedars and oaks, and on a clear day, the snowy peaks glistening on the horizon through the enormous viceregal windows. These deserve my gratitude too!
Why a Comparative Study of the Regional Music Industries?
This volume is a culmination of the research work carried out during the period May 2016-May 2018 in Shimla at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study [IIAS), and forms the basis for a comparison between the entertainment industries in Himachal, Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh, and Haryana. The study in Himachal was preceded by fieldwork in Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh in 2009-10 and in Haryana in 2013-2014 along similar lines; the purpose being to map the growth of the regional cultures and languages through modern media technologies such as compact discs and the internet, and other props and vehicles of the digital format. It is important to declare at the outset that the research strategy employed in the three states differed somewhat and these differences were dictated by the practical situations on ground and also the methodological approach appropriate to the specific contexts. Such differences however do not affect the comparability of the three different regions since the chief research objectives remain entirely the same.
In the case of Himachal Pradesh, I was able to cover as wide a terrain for fieldwork as possible during the initial stint of research in 2016. The expectation was that over time a good overall scanning of the cultural terrain would reveal those prominent sites of research that deserve more attention than the rest, in order to lend depth and density to the final outcomes, embracing the selected regions from the Hindi speaking parts of India. The ethnographic and secondary research were thus preceded by what may be termed a longish phase of reconnaissance in and around Shimla, its numerous suburbs and residential satellites, including the semi-urban countryside. Following the logic of fieldwork based on snowballing contacts thus, the monograph may seem somewhat uneven in terms of the findings presented. But in the chapters to follow, there will be a more detailed explanation for the choice of this research strategy. At this introductory stage, suffice it to say that looking at the cultural terrain of Himachal Pradesh on its own has helped me as a researcher to shed off likely biases carried from earlier work done in Bihar, eastern Uttar Pradesh and Haryana. It may seem overcautious to reiterate this but it seemed important for a substantial comparative study to look at each region on its own before getting down to elaborate comparisons. This can only be done by making due note of the concerns derived from the artists, producers and the personnel of the culture industry of the specific region, rather than a wholesale imposition of one's own preoccupations as impinging legacies from earlier studies. A similar research strategy was followed in the case of Haryana. The researcher ensured that he did not overwhelm his study of Haryana with concerns inherited from the preceding project on Bihar and this decision in hindsight proved vital to the success of the study in Haryana, opening up fresh and at times unforeseen sources and terrains of empirical material. To put it somewhat philosophically, it must be understood that the intent to compare by itself implies that the chosen entities are or must be comparable. The weight of such presumption is considerably lightened if one begins to look for the uniqueness of each entity with the same keenness that is devoted to the comparable features. In this sense, the present monograph carries what may be called a broad cultural topography of the Himachal region even though it may be lacking in detailed and in-depth information on some of the research sites and their relative significance. To put it more practically, after considerable sniffing around the cultural landscape, the researcher acquired sufficient clarity of purpose and planning to begin a more intensive quarrying of information and perspectives at the scrupulously selected sites.
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