Denise Nuttall
4. The various masters of tabla mentioned here represent a variety of schools. This list
of masters does not include all whom were or are significant in the music industry in Ustad
Allah Rakha’s generation or in the current generation. For a more complete history of the
various schools of tabla and their history and lineages, please see Aban Mistry’s Pakhawaj
and Tabla: History, Schools and Traditions ( 1984 ).
5. I have traveled back and forth from Canada to India every year for the past ten years
living in Mumbai in the summers to learn and research tabla and visiting briefly in the win-
ters for the annual music season. Foreign students who travel to India in the winter spend
time with their teachers in music class, attending concerts together, and generally traveling
with their teacher throughout the country.
6. Traditionally, most tabla players in the public sphere in India have been male. Although
as tabla moves around the globe and the number of women learning classical Hindustani
tabla increases, in India, it is still difficult for many women to take up the life of a tabla art-
ist the way men can and do. There are many complex issues surrounding this problem, not
the least of which is control over and access to patronage and performing-arts dollars. In
Ustad Allah Rakha’s school, there were only a handful of Indian female students when I be-
gan my research in 1995 , and today the number remains the same. One female student of
the Punjab gharana, Anuradha Pal, is an exception to the rule that only male tabla players
can succeed. Recently, another young woman, Rimpa Shiva (Farukhabad gharana), from
Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) has been mesmerizing audiences around the globe. Outside of
India, female tabla percussionists seem to be on the increase. Various women from all over
the world travel to California to learn from Zakir Hussain. One of Zakirji’s students, Dana
Pandey, has also climbed up through the ranks in the California school and performs along-
side Zakirji in the percussive-based ensemble the Rhythm Experience.
7. Much of the research prior to the early 1990 s treated the body as a sign, symbol,
or linguistic metaphor for culture itself. It is this very idea of the body that pervades an-
thropological analyses and descriptions of everyday life. These past theories of the body
in anthropology have almost exclusively focused on the social and cultural construction
of an embodied self (Mauss 1973 ; Douglas 1966 , 1970 , 1975 ), following the Durkheim-
ian model of the social body as essentially a moral one. Both Mauss and Douglas empha-
sized the connection between the physical and social bodies in relation to the individual,
culture, and society. Whereas Mauss attended to the cultural construction of “body tech-
niques” such as walking, sitting, or standing (Mauss 1973 ), Douglas treated the body as a
classificatory schema, or as a metaphor for society at large. They firmly established in an-
thropology the idea of body as a sign or as a representation of culture. In contrast, Fabian
( 2000 , 8 ) stresses that we get to “that which is real when we allow ourselves to be touched
by lived experiences.”
GlossaryThe musical and dance definitions do not encompass all possible meanings or current
usages in Hindustani and Karnatic practices. The ethnomusicological definitions are ad-
opted from Gottlieb ( 1993 ), Ranade ( 1990 ), and Nuttall ( 1991 ).
Abbaji Muslim address for father.
Bansuri (Hindi)Bans (Sanskrit) Vamsha. Hindustani flute made of bamboo.