Imagining Space, Creating Community: Emerging Tabla Practice in the Indo-Guyanese Diaspora

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Hindustani ceremonial tabla drumming, a long-established genre with roots in northern India, remains a cherished and important component for the New York City-based Indo-Guyanese community’s religious services. Through religious Hindustani tabla instruction, repertoire, and performance, members of this immigrant group maintain and construct new cultural links that identify the particular circumstances of their diasporic setting in New York City. What are the socio-musical dynamics that condition those trajectories? Through interviews with students and teachers of Hindustani classical music, this thesis highlights aspects of tabla performance and instruction practice particular to this diasporic community. I argue that through disparate cultural influences, the relationship between students and teachers informs ideas of Indian heritage while introducing foreign musical concepts that challenge established markers of Indo-Guyanese heritage. By closely examining this immigrant group’s emerging tabla practices, my project illuminates how New York’s Indo-Guyanese immigrant population actively debates the role of heritage within their community.