The cover illustration is an untitled photograph by Rahoul Contractor (1953–85) taken during the early 1980s in the town of Mundra, Kutch, in western India. An elderly photographer poses beside a portrait of himself as a young professional. (Reproduced with the permission of Mr. Contractor's family.)
Our first two essays take us back to the 1930s as Tamil artists and audiences become crazy about “the modern” and the new. Stephen Putnam Hughes looks at how the music recording industry and the gramophone transformed Tamil drama and cinema and gave rise to a new mass culture of film songs. Tamil film songs summoned a new community of music listeners, but not without refashioning class distinctions of musical taste and striking some members of the listening public as a menace to Karnatic classical performance. Paula Richman treats us to a study of the Narata-Ramayanam(?)—a quirky, bewildering, and subversive sequel to the...