Hindustani music and gustemic lifeworlds: Studying the culinary mnemonic in musical analogies through autobiographical accounts

Abstract

In this study, we explore food as a vital cultural artifact to gain a glimpse into its pervasive fertility in the world of music. By conducting a qualitative textual analysis, we examine the potency of food in the quotidian practices of commensality that characterize the eccentric ways in which Hindustani music practitioners organize and transmit musical knowledge. We emphasize the analogies drawn by musicians of the Hindustani tradition featured in Sheila Dhar’s autobiographical Raga’n Josh and Namita Devidayal’s memoirs The Sixth String of Vilayat Khan and The Music Room. Exploring the analogical richness of food, we uncover the entanglements between the musical and the culinary, highlighting how food serves as a mnemonic vehicle, shaping the lifeworlds of these musicians. While Western music has seen extensive scholarship on food-related interventions, South Asian perspectives, particularly in the realm of Hindustani music, remain largely underexplored. In this study, we address that gap, demonstrating how food operates not just as sustenance but as a medium of cultural memory, identity, and transmission. By foregrounding intersections of identity-based experience, we utilize an interdisciplinary lens to illuminate the deeply intertwined roles of food and music in constructing and preserving the collective ways of seeing developed over time by Hindustani music performers. © 2025 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.