Abstract
This thesis is a historical ethnography of musical cultivation, transmission and performance in twentieth century North India. It proceeds along two tracks, one historical and focused on the national encounter with this tradition and the other ethnographic and focused on the musicians' manners of pedagogy, anecdotal narration and performance. Regarding the former, I examine how the musician and the tradition, so maligned in the early years of nationalist thought, came so centrally to signify a national cultural aesthetic. Regarding the latter, I examine how the musicians' craft of music making proved extraordinarily malleable to those very historical shifts that threatened its existence, while also proving intractable to scientific forms of knowledge, pedagogy and performance.
