The just-launched Oxford encyclopedia of Indian music spans across raagas, rare instruments, and folk and classical musicians. For once, Bollywood music may find its attention divided

The Oxford University Press published the Oxford Encyclopaedia of the Music of India last month, a three volume set that promises to reveal closely guarded secrets about Indian music.

Sunday MidDay got two musiciansu00a0-- Nelson OJ (31), a composer who fuses classical raagas with electronica and posts them on MySpace for everyone to hear, and Jatanil Banerjee (31),u00a0 a trained Hindustani classical musician, composer and concert flute player, to thumb through the pages for a conversational review.


Musicians Jatanil Banerjee and Nelson OJ leaf through the
pages of OUP's Encyclopaedia of the Music of India. Pics /Anuja Gupta

Did the encyclopaedia excite you? Any first thoughts?
Nelson: My first reaction was whether it would carry information on instruments. I didn't expect anything on musicians barring the top few that India venerates.

To my surprise, the volumes carry interesting content on musicians most of us don't know of; all exponents in their fields. Several of those who find a mention are still alive, which is goodu00a0-- it proves that the books offer contemporary information too.

Jatanil: I thought, 'wow!', and I expected a 20-volume tome. It's good that the process of documentation has begun. I like the presentation and layout. It contains a lot of material on personalities from a music history spanning 500 years. I've probably heard of only 10 per cent of them!
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Any particularly interesting bits?
Nelson: I found some rare photographs tracing the evolution of the sitar, which I was personally excited to find. It also carries descriptions of different musical cultures within Indiau00a0-- tribal and folk included, that once again, most readers may not know of thanks to our fixation with classical forms of music.

Jatanil: I came across a reference to Dadra; we traditionally know of it as taal. What I didn't know was that it is actually named after a semi-folk, semi-classical genre of music that developed in western India.