Professor Virinder Kalra (University of Manchester) was at York to speak about his new book, Sacred and Secular Musics: A Postcolonial Approach, in mid-November 2014. Professor Kalra examined the way in which the label ‘Classical’ comes to define a certain form of secular music in Europe and South Asia, a hierarchy of musical forms is created in which sacred music attempts to insert itself. Through the twentieth century, musicians are increasingly narrowed into particular genres and by the formation of the nation-states of India and Pakistan an inexorable logic of religio-musical division is in place.
