The Music of Hindostan c5.44

c5.44

But there are other conditions which need not be accepted. If the rulers of native states realized what a death-blow they were dealing at their own art by supporting or even allowing a brass band, if the clerk in a government office understood the indignity he was putting on a song by buying the gramophone which grinds it out to him after his day’s labour, if the Mohammedan ‘star’ singer knew that the harmonium with which he accompanies himself was ruining his chief asset, his musical ear, and if the girl who learns the pianoforte could see that all the progress she made was as sure a step towards her own denationalization as if she crossed the black water and never returned—they would pause before they laid such sacrilegious hands on Saraswatī. Excuses may be made for such practices, but there is one objection fatal to them all; the instruments are borrowed. We do not hear much about Roman music because it was so easy for them to get Greek slaves; and the importation of the gavotte and the minuet killed the English morris-dancers. To dismiss from India these foreign instruments would not be to check the natural, but to prune away an unnatural growth.