Even as the Keychange Manifesto encourages a collectivised language around research for comparable cross-border data sets, this itself raises a further question; who gets to determine what this looks like? How do we get there? Whose insights into interrogating the data take precedence? The world has its ever-expanding colonial histories, current politics and national macro and micro cultures of countries and continents. India is a vast example in itself, demonstrating how a linear approach, often from a colonial gaze to research, does not work in all its complexities and intricacies. Rather, it raises different questions. And so in this installment of Internal Perspectives, we invite Vahishtai Ghosh, who gives us thought-provoking insights in this personal essay. In their own words, we ask; “who gets counted, who even counts to begin with, and finally – who really gets to decide any of this?’’ 

Before the Counting Begins: Notes on Research, Gender and Music in India 

This was a difficult piece to write. Not least because I write this in Edinburgh, close to 4,500 miles away from my home in Mumbai and the brief itself was a challenging one. I write this as India is currently in the throes of a wave of Gen Z protests across the country, most notably in the capital city of Delhi, against the removal of approximately 130 million names from the nation’s electoral rolls. India’s Election Commission says that it is clearing out the dead, the duplicated and those who have relocated – others call it a purge that disenfranchises the country’s most marginalised citizens. Analyses from some states suggest that women, Muslims, and voters in some Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe dominated areas have been disproportionately affected. These are people for whom challenging the decision and claiming re-entry onto the rolls is nothing short of an oppressively complex administrative process. The nation’s young people have taken to the streets in response, in the face of government crackdowns on their dissent, fighting for the most fundamental democratic rights. It is an extraordinary set of events to ponder over as I sit down to write this. I cannot pretend to observe any of this dispassionately, but beyond what it makes me feel as an Indian (particularly an Indian away from home), it also puts the underlying premise of the question I have been asked to consider into stark perspective: who gets counted, who even counts to begin with, and finally – who really gets to decide any of this? 

The problem of who gets counted and why is a recurring one in many contexts and conversations. Music is no exception. The questions above sit at the heart of what I was roughly asked to write about here: what we know, what we do not know, and what we should know about gender inequity in India’s music industry. The inquiry is important. Better research and stronger knowledge bases matter immensely if we are being serious about equity, rather than representation in its most superficial sense. My discomfort with the question, then, was not because it was the wrong question to ask. Rather, it came from wondering how far those questions could actually take us on their own. By that same token, it is not a neutral question. The question arrives from the Global Minority and through a very particular institutional understanding of what equity research looks like. It inevitably carries at least some preconceived assumptions about who we mean by ‘women and gender-diverse people’, what we recognise as an ‘Indian music industry’, what kinds of knowledge production qualify as research, and ultimately what kinds of research might actually produce material change for said Indian women and gender-diverse people in music.

I came into music somewhat (very) sideways. My training is as a historian. This is a point I never fail to talk about when asked (not that anyone did ask here!) because it colours so much of how I see the world. Try as I may, it is difficult to shake off. I have always been very interested in what the record has to say, who is saying it, who is keeping the record, why, and how. Good historical training teaches you very quickly that an archive or a record is not a neutral repository of everything worth knowing about a given matter or time. Human beings, with very particular social and political positionalities, decided what was recorded, what categories it was recorded under, what was preserved and, just as crucially, what was not. Your work begins with what lies in front of you, but it rarely ever ends there. The practice of good historical interrogation is learning to read along the grain and also against it, to notice absences, and to question why we know some things extraordinarily well, while other things need reconstruction from fragments or whispers.  

I find myself bringing these instincts into equity work in music all the time. A fantastic report can tell us something deeply important about gender inequity, and still tell us very little about the people contained within the categories it creates. Increasingly, we are improving at approaching questions of inequity with an intersectional lens. In other words, we are getting better at recognising that gender does not exist separately from race or ethnicity, class, sexuality, disability, nationality, migration status, and the myriad other things that can shape a person’s access to both, opportunity and visibility. 

India is a particularly unforgiving place to forget this. It is staggeringly large, staggeringly diverse, and staggeringly unequal. Caste, class, religion, language, region, rurality, sexuality, gender identity and access to formal institutions can fundamentally alter what a life – and therefore, a life in music – looks like. More importantly, these are not merely additional variables to be placed alongside gender in any analysis of work in Indian music. They have their own histories and contemporary relationships to musical labour, legitimacy and power. Research designed to understand gender inequity in the ‘Indian music industry’ cannot assume in advance that the category of ‘women and gender-diverse people’ describes a group whose relationship to music, work or even public life is remotely uniform.  

Similarly, it must not be assumed that the ‘Indian music industry’ is one singular industry, or even that everyone making a life through music in India would necessarily recognise themselves as belonging to one. Recorded music, film music, classical traditions, regional and folk forms, indie music, teachers, sound engineers, DJs, brass bands, devotional performers and musicians working through entirely ‘informal’ and non-commercial spaces of music production can all fall under the umbrella when it is useful to call them an industry. They do not necessarily share the same histories, institutions, routes into work, measures of success and access, relationships to money or, least of all, forms of social legitimacy. The terms ‘industry’ – or even ‘industries’ – can be useful shorthand when trying to grapple with understanding music making in India. But, even in its most judicious and nuanced use, it can be capable of obscuring an enormous amount of information, especially when it comes to work around equity. 

And yet, we do have research, a fair bit of it in fact. We are not starting from nothing. We have remarkable examples of fine-grained research into the ways caste, gender, geography and cultural legitimacy shape the many different musical worlds that India contains. We also have academic work across history, sociology, ethnomusicology and cultural studies, oral histories, community archives and locally specific research projects that document musical lives which may never appear in an industry focused survey or study at all. Some research is national in scale, but much of it is regional, occupational, situated in particular linguistic, social and musical traditions. Of course, we also have industry and policy research on recorded and informal music economies. 

Take, for instance, the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations’ (ICRIER) whose work illustrates the trade-off one often finds between occupational detail and a scale as staggering as India’s. Its 2022 study of India’s informal music industry commissioned by the Indian Music Industry (IMI) surveyed 1,574 people, from independent artists and music teachers to sound engineers, DJs and brass bands. Tucked into an appendix is a table that, almost incidentally, tells a fascinating gender story of its own. Women made up 45.3% of the music teachers surveyed, compared with 17.1% of independent musicians, 11.4% of brass-band workers, 2.9% of DJs and just 1.5% of sound engineers. These are not national estimates, but the differences are striking: even within a single study, ‘women in music’ looks radically different depending on which kind of work is being counted. 

The table tells us as much about where women are as where they are not, and it is difficult not to read it against the broader social conditions under which women work in India. Teaching is music work that can mostly happen within the space of the home and by day, and carries a ‘respectability’ that a wedding procession at night, a DJ booth or a mixing desk may not. To wit, the work in which women are most visible is the work they have been permitted to do. What the study does not tell us is how many of these women are LGBTQIA+, from oppressed castes or minority religions, educated in English, and so on. Despite all of this, its immense value lies in where it chose to look: at brass bands, DJs, music teachers and sound engineers, whose work rarely figures in an industry usually measured through record labels, film and streaming. 

The value of more situated research becomes especially clear here. Pranathi Diwakar’s work in Chennai looks at Carnatic and Gaana music as disparate musical worlds inextricably shaped by caste, geography, institutions and vastly different forms of cultural legitimacy. Rasika Ajotikar’s work on Dalit women’s musical labour in Maharashtra, and K. Kalyani’s research on Dalit-Bahujan and anti-caste musical cultures in North India, similarly show us things that an economic survey is simply not built to capture: how histories of caste shape who is understood as a musician, whose labour is treated as art, whose music is granted legitimacy, and whose cultural production is more easily relegated to the categories of ‘tradition’, ‘community’ or ‘activism’ rather than ‘industry’.  

The Grindmill Songs Project takes that problem somewhere else again. The archive contains more than 100,000 ovi; couplets sung largely by women in rural Maharashtra while grinding grain and carrying out domestic work. Their music touches on marriage, class, patriarchy, religion, migration, and also on caste, B.R. Ambedkar and the radical anti-caste politics with which his name is inseparable in modern India. None of this is ‘music industry research’ in the sense that is so familiar to us, and these women should not be retrofitted into a category of professional music workers. But I believe the project matters in conversations like this because it preserves a phenomenal, monumental and inherently political body of musical knowledge produced within gendered labour, rather than music classified as labour in itself. Begin the research with the category of ‘music worker’ or ‘women in the music industry’, and these women and the entire musical world(s) they have created can disappear before the counting has even begun. 

I do not mean to imply that large-scale quantitative research is less useful. Quite the opposite. Its scale is precisely what gives it enormous value, and enormous power. However, inequities in India do not arrange themselves neatly into static categories, still less into categories that resolve into a single axis of understanding. The point is to resist wanting them to. India still carries the scars of a long history of precisely that urge. The British colonial state, confronted with a society it could not ‘read’, set about making it legible: counting, classifying and fixing people into tidy categories, caste chief among them, for the sake of an ‘understanding’ that served its own administration. That history should, at the very least, make us wary of mistaking neat categories for neutral ones, or legibility for understanding. Picture a report announcing that women make up 55% of the Indian music industry. For people in the Global Minority, it would be very shiny, quotable and comparable. But it would also be almost entirely useless. Which women? Doing what work? In which languages, regions and musical traditions? Under what conditions? On whose terms? Who has access to a studio, a stage, a teacher, a union, a label, a grant, a night-time venue? Or, even more simply, who gets counted as a woman in Indian music at all? If there is work to be done here, it lies in understanding the people within the numbers. That will mean looking beyond those already legible to folks in Europe and North America: the English-speaking, urban and relatively privileged, often cisgender and heterosexual, disproportionately from dominant or oppressor-caste backgrounds; the people we meet on panels and at conferences (myself among them). It means asking the people actually doing this work what we are missing, and allowing their answers to change the questions themselves. 

There remains another question that came up in conversation around this piece: how research like this might be funded in the absence of the state. I do not have a tidy answer, and I am wary of anyone who claims to. Money from governments, industry, universities or international bodies each arrives with its own priorities, and whoever pays will, in some measure, shape what gets asked. So the funder is one question, but a more crucial one is what exactly their money makes possible: who is given the time and resources to ask the questions, whose knowledge is treated as expertise, who gets to answer, and who retains some ownership over what is produced.

It is here that my training in history returns most insistently. We are often left to reconstruct lives from traces kept by institutions with every interest in recording them, and little in hearing them. Research produced now need not leave the same problem for whoever looks back at this moment. No record of women and gender-diverse people in Indian music will ever be complete. I believe what matters is whether its absences keep falling along the same lines of power the research sets out to interrogate. Perhaps, if those with the resources to shape and fund this work are more attentive to this now, fewer musical lives in India and beyond will remain in fragments and whispers.