Continuity in change: a restudy of Arnold Adriaan Bake's research on the devotional and folk music traditions of Bengal 1925-56

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This dissertation is a restudy of the fieldwork that the Dutch musicologist and indologist Arnold Adriaan Bake (1899-1963) conducted in the Bengal region between 1925 and 1956. My thesis pursues two central aims. Firstly, I study Bake's research on five different genres of folk and devotional music and dance, by investigating his interactions with Bengali scholars and performers. I argue that Bengali scholars shaped Bake's views on communities and their performing arts with often stereotypical and idealised characterisations, and that he used his connections to civil servants and missionaries to facilitate his fieldwork. Secondly, I study the development of the five genres from the early twentieth century until the present, in the Indian states of West Bengal and Jharkhand, and Bangladesh. In this context, I argue that the academic reframing of Bengali folk music and dance in the first half of the twentieth century influenced many genres till the present. For my research critique, my methodology is an evaluation of Bake's sound and film recordings and related published and unpublished material, which I have carried out with the help of scholars and performers of cultural heritage communities in India and Bangladesh. For studying the continuity and change of the genres, I have conducted ethnographic observation in West Bengal, Jharkhand, and Bangladesh, to study the current living circumstances of performers, and to record and analyse their performances. Additionally, I consulted secondary sources, including the audiovisual documentation of genres in contemporary archival collections and online, to get a wider picture of current performance practice in the Bengal region.