UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation excavates a forgotten history of Hindustani (North Indian) art music in the United States beginning with Bengali musician and restaurateur Sarat Lahiri (c. 1897-1941), whose name surfaces peripherally in the academic literature on American composer Henry Cowell (1897-1965), the New School for Social Research, and the 1930s Manhattan restaurant trade. By tracing scattered archival references to Lahiri and reconstructing a network of his collaborators, my research centers the migrations and activities of musicians from colonial India in the decades preceding Indian independence in 1947. These early-twentieth-century migrants navigated a world shaped by European colonialism, global anticolonial movements, nativist racism and legal exclusion in the United States, and the exoticist fantasies and commercial pressures of American Orientalism. They traversed social and economic landscapes characterized by sweeping change, unexpected encounters, and unforeseen hardships. Lahiri’s career in New York between 1923 and 1941 provides a means of engaging the Orientalism of the era, including its expressions in modernist movements in music and dance, and considering how this dynamic milieu shaped the everyday lives of working immigrant musicians. As I situate Lahiri and his contemporaries in contexts ranging from the local to the global, I discuss the involvement of artists, activists, and intellectuals from the Indian subcontinent across multiple domains of American cultural production in the early twentieth century.