This book is a collection of papers presented at a colloquium on ‘AfroAsian Musical Imaginaries’ that was organized by the IIC-IRD (India International Centre-International Research Division) in collaboration with a multi-institutional project titled ‘Recentring AfroAsia: Musical and Human Migrations, 700–1500 AD’, that involved the University of the Western Cape, the University of the Witwatersrand, the University of Kwazulu-Natal, the University of Cape Town, the University of Dar es Salaam, the University of Addis Ababa and the Ambedkar University Delhi between 2016 and 2021. As part of an attempt to create a new scholarship that brings the two continents together, work by scholars from the project uncovering musical connections was brought into conversation with the work of other scholars and practitioners of music on similar themes. Based on an understanding that music can be an important lens through which cultural links between parts of the world that have long historical connections can be uncovered, even when these connections have not been adequately identified or acknowledged, the most important question posed by the papers in the book is how this can be done. The book also points towards how such scholarship and performative interactions can prise open several orthodoxies in the understanding of musical systems.

Published in association with India International Centre, New Delhi

is an academic and musician, whose experience spans teaching and research in economics, development studies and popular music studies. She has taught in Delhi University and Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University Delhi over a period of three decades, and is presently Director, Gender and Economics with International Development Economics Associates (IDEAs). She is also a visiting professor at Ashoka University, the University of Cape Town and the Institute for Human Development, Delhi. Apart from her academic involvements as an economist and social scientist, she is also a singer and composer. Her archiving and documentation of the musical tradition of the Indian People’s Theatre Association from the 1940s and 1950s resulted in a book titled The Radical Impulse: Music and Politics in the IPTA Tradition (2017) and the album Songs of Protest. She has performed from the documented repertoire extensively in India and abroad. She has collaborated with poets and musicians from South Africa as a founder member of the award-winning Insurrections Ensemble, and has also directed a multi-institutional project around music and migration in pre-colonial AfroAsia from 2016 until the present, which has resulted in two musical productions and a book titled Maps of Sorrow: Migration and Music in the Construction of Pre-Colonial AfroAsia (2023).