Imperial music examinations in South Asia: colonial imaginaries, postcolonial realities

ABSTRACT How were colonial music examinations received in South Asia? Since 1898, the British-based Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (ABRSM) has offered certificates in Western art music in the region. Focusing on Ceylon/Sri Lanka and Bombay/Mumbai (North India), this article delves into archival correspondence retrieved – not without challenges – from the ABRSM’s headquarters in London. The documents reveal that as with other pedagogical missions civilisatrice, Victorian values, practices, and gendered behaviours associated with European music were transmitted to South Asia. In Ceylon and Bombay, the examinations attracted English-educated, middle-to-upper class women for whom such music qualifications represented the potential for social, cultural, and economic capital. Men from well-off backgrounds, on the other hand, were deterred from pursuing music professionally. Most importantly, the letters speak of Indigenous resistance to systemic colonial assumptions, as postcolonial South Asians greeted the Board’s tacit notions in promoting music certificates with their own discerning, often-unspoken beliefs. Read contrapuntally, along, and against the archival grain, South Asian voices and agencies emerge fully engaged in the evolving intricacies of imperial music education.