Shashikala Srinivasan - Shashikala Srinivasan

Indian Classical Music and the near-absence of Harmony

By Shashikala Srinivasan | May 7, 2024October 25, 2024 by Shashikala Srinivasan

A young, musically talented nephew of mine, raised a question: Why is it that Indian classical music did not explore harmony like Western music did? Even when they encountered new European instruments like harmonium and violin, the Indians made it an accompaniment to individual, vocal renderings rather than use it for exploring harmony, he observed. As far as he was concerned, moving from monophony to harmony and polyphony was a natural progression in the evolution…

Making Sense of Superstitions

By Shashikala Srinivasan | March 5, 2024April 29, 2025 by Shashikala Srinivasan

Today, our everyday lives are fraught with some kind of larger intellectual conflict. This comes to the fore especially when youngsters are forced to take part in a ritual, say like a Shraadha, or a pooja. Aren’t these superstitions which any educated person should shed? Why are we being forced to perform these outdated traditions which are irrational and have no scientific basis? While it was alright to hold on to these practice two centuries…

The Confusion between Liberal (Arts) Education and Liberalism

By Shashikala Srinivasan | February 4, 2024April 25, 2025 by Shashikala Srinivasan

One of the problems confronting us today is the lack of an appropriate idiom for discussing education in our times. Even our new age ‘liberal arts’ institutions that have come up all over India today do not give their students a sense of what it means to be educated in this way. One of the reasons for this is, perhaps, that our discussions on liberal (arts) education are suffused with the views of liberalism; sometimes…

Indian Classical Music and the near-absence of Harmony

Making Sense of Superstitions

The Confusion between Liberal (Arts) Education and Liberalism

A Response to Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s article on decolonization