Dr. Nilanjana Bhattacharjya is an ethnomusicologist who specializes in South Asian music and film. Currently an Honors Faculty Fellow at Barrett, the Honors College at Arizona State University, Nilanjana received her B.A., cum laude, from Wellesley College and earned her Masters and Ph.D. in Musicology from Cornell University. She has previously taught courses on music, migration, and displacement; music, ethnicity, and race; music and gender; music, technology, and globalization; and music and film in addition to surveys of historical and contemporary popular music traditions from the United States, Africa, the Arab World, and South Asia.
What is an ethnomusicologist?
An ethnomusicologist is a scholar who studies the relationship between different forms of music and the culture(s) that produce them. That entails understanding the role of music in people’s lives and what it means to them, as well as how music itself embodies those relationships. It is a discipline that originated as a sub-specialty of anthropology, so doing fieldwork (spending time within the cultures we study, where we observe and often participate in the cultures themselves) is important to our discipline.
What is a typical day like for you?
On an ideal day, I wake up early to get to the gym, but after that, I usually have a number of things that need to get done— even if I’m only in the classroom a few hours a day. I try to focus on my own research and writing projects at the start of the day, after which point I will deal with urgent emails and other things that may need to be completed that day— if they haven’t been already. In addition to preparing our discussion of whatever text I may be teaching that day or the next and grading papers, I may spend some time writing a recommendation letter for a student, or writing a report for a committee that I serve on. I may also attend a meeting or two, and I may hold office hours to speak to students who are working on their next papers— or to discuss their ideas in relation to other things outside the class, such as their application for a fellowship, or their progress on their thesis projects.
On a less than ideal day, I don’t get to my writing, but I feel more grounded after I’ve done the things that need to get done— eaten breakfast, gone to the gym, and spent at least some time thinking about my research.
How did you get into this line or work? Was there a specific event that led to this career path?
Being a professor requires in most cases a PhD, and mine is in musicology, from Cornell University. I had always been heavily involved around music since I was a child because I did play the violin and piano quite seriously, but when I started college and began to take music classes so I could receive financial aid for my violin lessons, I discovered that I was fascinated by the academic study of music, outside performance. I’m laughing at why I took those classes now, but they were such a source of joy and wonder that it became very difficult for me at that point in my life to consider doing anything else than studying and thinking about music for the rest of my life.
Convincing my parents back then that I couldn’t go to medical school was not an easy task, but I think they are now grateful that I am happy in the life I have created for myself. I started my MA/PhD program at Cornell when I was 21 just after graduation because I was able to enter a fully funded program, and I intended at that point to write about Schubert and Brahms. My interests and focus changed in ways that I’d never have anticipated back then, and sometimes I wonder if taking a little time off before starting grad school would have led me down a different path.In my present position, I am able to teach music, but I also teach about visual art, film, philosophy, and literature— all of which significantly figure into my thinking these days.
I ended up writing a dissertation on British South Asian musicians in the late 1990s, which was as far away from my proposed topic of study, but there was a progression from my feeling a bit constrained within 18th century and 19th century music, my interest in the relationships between music and Empire, and my curiosity about a relatively new (at least then) group of musicians of South Asian descent who were starting to make waves in mainstream British popular music— and the respective ways in which they were negotiating their ethnicity and heritage.
Where have you lived? Where do you live now?
I was born in Portland, Maine, but I only lived there until I was about 3. I spent the next 10 years in Auburn, Alabama (!), and I spent my college and high school years in Wellesley, Massachusetts just outside of Boston. I then spent a long time in Ithaca, NY when I attended grad school at Cornell. That was followed by a one-year fellowship at Mount Holyoke College in western Massachusetts, which led to a position at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. I left two and a half years ago for Barrett, the Honors College at ASU, teach in an interdisciplinary, and actually live with my husband, who also teaches at ASU.
I consider myself to be primarily South Asian American, as well as Asian American and Indian American. When I was growing up in Alabama in the 1980s, my parents and their friends didn’t have the luxury of choosing friends from the region of India they had immigrated from, so we grew up with a range of local aunties and uncles who spoke Bengali, Hindi, Punjabi, and Telegu amongst themselves— and English with each other. The people who grew up alongside me there were conscious of the fact that we were all brown— and shared a similar history in South Asia, as well as in Alabama, even if we did not necessarily share the same faith or languages in our houses. When I went to graduate school, many of my close friends happened to be from India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, and I was always conscious of the fact that we share so much— even if our passports didn’t match. I prefer telling people I’m South Asian American, because it speaks to that broader sense of identity that transcends potentially divisive and more specific political, regional, and religious affiliations.
Has there been a time in your life when your ethnicity or gender has had an impact on your choices or opportunities? How did you work through that?
My parents wanted me to go medical school and become a doctor because they were convinced that life was hard in this country, and that education and a stable job were the way forward. They’re right in so many ways, but that path was not one that I could follow. When I first started attending musicology and ethnomusicology conferences as a graduate student, I could count on one hand the number of people who were also South Asian American. There weren’t many of us in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and I’m so happy that is changing now. I was at time frustrated when I told people I was (in my first part of graduate school) focusing on 18th and 19th century Austrian and German music, and all they could ask me about is whether I was interested in Indian music. I didn’t want to be pigeonholed at all, and to be truthful, Indian music was really not something I was thinking about much in my early 20s. These days I sometimes have to remind people that I am trained extensively in western classical music, because they assume that I don’t know anything besides Indian music— because I look Indian, and because that leads to people assuming that’s all I know. It also frustrates me when people in the US ask if I’m American, and perhaps that is one of the things that led me to doing my research in London. It was one of the few places where I could pass as a local, at least until I opened my mouth.
Doing fieldwork research as a brown woman is something I’m increasingly conscious of these days. I also think about how I’m perceived in the classroom. I am more comfortable with my identity in the classroom, and I am always grateful to recognize when other young women of color find that they can connect with me in the classroom because they see at least part of themselves in me— something that I’ll confess that I didn’t necessarily always have in my own experience as a student. With respect to my research, doing fieldwork in my 20s meant that I was able to do a great many things that I probably wouldn’t be able to do now, because these days, I’m more conscious of my vulnerability and safety in the spaces in which I observe and talk to people. I’m also increasingly conscious of how I am read when I meet people in India and in Great Britain— as somebody who looks like people whom they know (and probably expect certain behavior from), but who ends up being a woman who acts and speaks differently, and who has an entirely different history.
What is a challenge that you’re currently working through?
I’m trying to get back into working on my book manuscript, based on my dissertation, because I’m trying to send it off finally. It involves telling a story that doesn’t have a triumphant ending, and I’ve struggled with how to approach that for many years. It’s also just plain hard to keep at it each day, but I’m inspired by a number of friends who have published their own books in recent years. On the days when I wonder (and there are those days) whether writing on the particular moment I discuss in my discussion is worthwhile, I try to remember the late theorist Stuart Hall’s words that ephemeral events are also worthy of study.
Do you have any favorite books that you’d like to suggest to our readers?
One of my favorite books is Amitav Ghosh’s nonfiction book, In an Antique Land. It is a beautifully written book, but its honesty in confronting what it means to do research on things that most people wouldn’t pay attention to while the world goes on around you is something that has stayed with me since the first time I read it years ago. Sometimes tracking down that obscure detail will lead to new worlds and connections most people can only dream of, and occasionally it leads to dead ends that can only be put into context years later, after the fact.
