‘You have to feel to sing!’: popular music classes and the transmission of ‘feel’ in contemporary India

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article investigates the practice of teaching and learning to ‘feel’ through film songs within the shifting political economy of contemporary India. Drawing on ethnographic research in a Mumbai popular music institute, I examine how music teachers use Hindi film songs alongside discourses of ‘feel’ to effect simultaneous shifts in students’ performances and embodied subjectivity. Situating the musical transmission of ‘feel’ within a consumption-oriented affective public culture, I argue that ‘feel’ is a newly desirable commodity that is sought out through product consumption and through artistic training. Bridging recent ethnomusicological work on affective pedagogy and scholarship on the role of affect in late capitalism, this article demonstrates that the cultivation of ‘feel’ through popular song in this music pedagogical context functions as a mode of affective labour that is critically linked to the formation of new expressive subjectivities and consumerist publics in contemporary India.