For Auckland-based singer Balamohan Shingade, singing Hindustani music amid efforts to frame it as Hindu nationalist heritage means refusing to let a plural, historically layered tradition be treated as the property of one religion or political movement. It also means asking who chooses the venue, repertoire and performers—and who is made to feel they belong. His October 2024 essay offers a first-person account, not a survey of Hindustani musicians or diaspora communities.
What is at stake in the phrase “co-opt the tradition”?
Shingade uses co-optation to describe presenting Hindustani music as Hindu cultural property, casting non-Hindu inheritance as an intrusion, and using performances to advance an exclusionary idea of national culture. His concern is not that Hindu musicians perform the music, or that Hinduism and Hindustani music have no historical connections. It is that a political project can turn those connections into a claim of exclusive ownership.
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That distinction matters: Hindutva is a political ideology, Hinduism is a religion, and Hindu musicians are not a single political group. Shingade explicitly distinguishes Hindutva adherents from Hindus generally. His essay is about the politics he encountered in particular Auckland settings, not a judgment about every Hindu organization or concert.
As Shingade puts it, “The truth remains that Hindustani music does not belong to Hinduism as a religion, let alone Hindutva as a political ideology.” The point is not to assign the tradition to another community. It is to resist making musical inheritance conditional on religious identity.
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Why is Hindustani music’s history contested?
“Classical” and “national” were made through institutions
Hindustani music’s modern status as Indian classical music was shaped by reformers and institutions, rather than simply passed down unchanged as a national tradition. In Two Men and Music: Nationalism and the Making of an Indian Classical Tradition (2005), historian Janaki Bakhle examines the role of figures including Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande and Vishnu Digambar Paluskar, and the conferences and institutions that helped define the tradition. Her account argues that this process involved colonial and exclusionary practices, including the marginalization of Muslims even as Muslim musicians had played a major role in the music being established as national culture.
Reform widened access and also displaced older settings
Bob van der Linden’s 2022 chapter, “Hindu Nationalism and North Indian Music in the Global Age,” describes how schools, conferences, notation, theory, concert arrangements and curated repertoires helped institutionalize a classical form. The changes created new routes into music and supported social mobility for an emerging Hindu middle class. They also shifted music away from courtly and hereditary settings, where many hereditary practitioners were Muslim. Van der Linden calls the process “Hinduization,” but cautions against treating it as a simple transfer from one community to another.
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Musicians crossed the lines that a tidy communal account might imply: Hindu students learned from Muslim teachers, Hindu and Muslim musicians collaborated, and some Muslim artists took part in reform. The history is therefore contested and uneven, not a story in which every member of one community gained while every member of another lost.
The tradition has never been only a concert canon
Anna Morcom’s 2026 The Multiplicities of Hindustani Music: Re-envisioning a National Tradition emphasizes the range of settings in which the music has lived: courts, fairs, festivals, temples, Sufi shrines, and commercial and state patronage. Its account also points to connections between khyal and qawwali and to the tradition’s interdependence with other forms. That wider history complicates any claim that Hindustani music has a single religious home or can be reduced to one officially defined canon.
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What did Shingade encounter in Auckland?
In his October 22, 2024 essay, Shingade describes singing in Auckland, or Tāmaki Makaurau, and being asked to perform beneath saffron banners. He also recounts pressure concerning whether his accompanists could participate. He interprets these experiences as attempts to position Hindustani music within a Hindu nationalist project.
Shingade estimates that the influence he describes reaches “some 50 cultural and religious organisations in Aotearoa New Zealand.” That is his estimate; it should not be read as an independently verified count or as evidence of how representative his experience is across New Zealand or the wider diaspora. His essay is valuable as a situated account of the choices and pressures he says he faced, not as prevalence data.
He also recounts the cancellation of a T. M. Krishna concert in Maryland in 2018 after objections to Christian hymns, as well as another canceled performance in India. These are events as Shingade reports them in his essay; they illustrate the argument he makes about repertoire and belonging, rather than establishing a broader pattern on their own.
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Why do venue, repertoire and performers matter?
A performance communicates through more than sound. Shingade’s account draws attention to the context in which music is presented: banners and institutional framing can imply who the event represents; repertoire can be treated as acceptable or suspect; and decisions about accompanists determine who is permitted to take part. These are not merely logistical details when the performance is also presented as a statement about national culture.
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Random freezes, missing sound and display glitches usually trace back to one bad driver. Find and replace yours safely.Free scan · under a minuteThis does not mean that a particular banner, devotional composition or venue automatically proves political intent. It means that the choices deserve attention when they are used to define the music’s ownership or to restrict participation. Shingade’s question—“what does it mean to represent national culture in the diaspora”—is about the power to set those terms, not just about the performer’s identity.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What can pluralistic practice look like?
Shingade argues for resisting communal boundaries by singing across religious repertoires and making participation possible. His approach is not to deny the history of exclusion, but to face it while refusing to let it dictate who can inherit or perform the music. As he writes, “To inherit such a cultural tradition requires us to locate ourselves at the crossroads of social-political transformations in the present day.”
- Ask how the event frames the music. Is it presented as a shared and layered tradition, or as proof of one group’s exclusive cultural claim?
- Notice who has agency. Who selects the repertoire, sets the terms of participation and decides which performers appear?
- Keep history complicated. Acknowledge both the institutional marginalization of Muslim hereditary musicians and the collaboration and exchange that also shaped modern Hindustani music.
- Separate religious participation from political ownership. A Hindu devotional context can be part of the music’s history without making Hindustani music the property of Hindutva—or of any single community.
These questions do not produce a universal test for whether a concert is inclusive. They help make visible the choices through which a performance can either narrow or open the meaning of inheritance.
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What it means to sing under these conditions
In Shingade’s account, singing Hindustani music is not politically neutral simply because the notes belong to an artistic tradition. The act can challenge an exclusive claim by keeping its varied histories, repertoires and participants in view. That position neither treats Hindutva as synonymous with Hinduism nor erases the exclusions involved in making music “national.” It asks that inheritance remain plural—and that the people who sustain the music have room to participate without being asked to surrender that plurality.
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