This lecture explores intersections of gender, language, textuality, and orality in Marathi Jewish songs of the Bene Israel people of Bombay. Bene Israel women gather weekly to sing from handwritten notebooks of song texts gleaned from various sources: published songbooks, friends’ notebooks, aural memory, and recordings. Tunes, however, are almost never notated. Thus, song notebooks occupy a border between the textual and the oral and provide a window into how sharing, listening, and reading inflect the formulation of Indian Jewish women’s song repertoires. Moreover, these notebooks evince traces of Jewish men’s early dominance in and later abandonment of Marathi publishing, a trajectory that left a lacuna in Marathi-language Jewish performing arts that was filled by women, who eschewed publishing to transmit Marathi songs through this notebook-mediated oral tradition. This lecture trains a wide focus on gender and transcription to introduce the repertoire as a whole, but also narrows the lens on some of the best-loved Marathi Jewish songs inscribed in these notebooks, many of which bear some relation to theatrical or film music.

Anna Schultz is an assistant professor of ethnomusicology at Stanford University and specializes in the music of South Asia, music and nationalism, music and religious experience, Indo-Caribbean music, diaspora and migration, music transmission, Hindi film music, Jewish music in India, and country and bluegrass music. Her current research is focused on gender and minority identity in the paraliturgical music of the Bene Israel (Marathi-speaking Jews) of India and Israel.

Schultz’s writings concern regional performance of Hindu nationalism, style and patronage in Marathi kirtan, aesthetics of suffering in the Indo-Caribbean diaspora, mobile recording technology and ethnomusicological research, Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, and nostalgia and forgetting in the song Kentucky. Her book Singing a Hindu Nation (Oxford University Press, 2013) is on the role of regional (Maharashtrian) performance idioms in the construction of religious nationalism in India. Schultz received her PhD from the University of Illinois, a master’s degree from the University of Chicago in social science, and a bachelor’s degree from Beloit College in music and anthropology.

Free (Sponsored by the William E. Valente Endowment and Jewish Studies)