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Abstract:
One of the most salient marketing and exoticizing ploys in introducing the classical music
of India to the Western world during the 1960s centered on the trope of Eastern spirituality.
The West's spiritual reserve was bankrupt, foolishly spent in pursuit of material happiness,
a pursuit whose cost was met through economic Imperialism and an illegal war. The East,
especially mysterious India, was imagined as a place where spirituality and transcendental
peace were still to be found. The discourse of self realization that accompanied the musical
performances of such renowned masters of the tradition as Ustad Ali Akbar Khan and
Pandit Ravi Shankar certainly helped to further these notions of spiritual rebirth through
Indian musical experience. Possibly as a result of the link of Indian music's imputed
spirituality with its superficial, faddish popularity in the United States during that decade,
scholars seeking to carry out serious study of this tradition felt compelled not only to
distance themselves from the spirituality trope, but also to subvert the trope within their
own discourse - for example, by jokingly making reference to Indian music's appeal to those
seeking instant enlightenment (Neuman 1984: 9). As a result, I feel that some of the
ramifications of the very real pervasiveness of what I'll call the "spiritual component" of
Indian music remain understated in the abundance of scholarly research on the classical
music of India.
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