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MUSICS ABROAD
SPEAKER: ANNA SCHULTZ, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Between the 1880s and 1940s, Bene Israel kirtan—a genre combining song, biblical storytelling, and Jewish pedagogy—was the most popular form of Marathi Jewish performance. Enthusiasm for Jewish kirtan waned as Bene Israel people began migrating to Israel in the 1950s and 60s, and it had nearly disappeared by the time it was revived by Indo-Israeli women in the 1990s. This talk explores the revival, regendering, and retranslation of kirtan by Flora Samuel (née Mani Ashtamkar), a teacher and headmistress who became a leader in the Indian Jewish community after migrating from Bombay to Israel in the 1960s. Mrs. Samuel redesigned the performance format of kirtan to resonate with the structure of Indian women’s groups in Israel, regendered it by introducing songs from women’s oral tradition, and retranslated song texts to situate them more firmly in Israeli Indian Jewish life. Her innovations positioned kirtan in a new time and place, bringing the Indian Jewish diaspora home, both literally and metaphorically.
Anna Schultz is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Chicago, where she is also an associate member of the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations and a member of the Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies. The core issue animating her research in India and beyond is music’s power to activate profound religious experiences that in turn shape other identities. Her first book, Singing a Hindu Nation: Marathi Devotional Performance and Nationalism, was published by Oxford University Press in 2013, and her second book, Songs of Translation: Bene Israel Gender and Textual Orality, is also under contract with OUP.
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