Spatializing culture: Baithaks and the surviving classical music scene in Pakistan

Adopting an inter/transdisciplinary approach, this article brings together ethnography and an ethnomusicological “ecology model”—studying music in relation to the broader sociopolitical environment—with insights from Urban Studies to spatialize the interplay of practices, meanings, and materiality for studying the survival of Hindustani classical music in a postcolonial urban environment. After the partition of the South Asian subcontinent, the Hindustani classical music tradition did not find an auspicious national-institutional context in Pakistan as it did in India. And yet the tradition survives at and through baithaks (musical gatherings) in contemporary Pakistan. Going beyond the top-down and nation-state model for exploring the ecology of Hindustani classical music, this article attends to the space and culture of contemporary baithaks in the city of Lahore, often described as the “cultural capital of Pakistan.” The article frames baithak, a musician-led space, as an instantiation of space-making-from-below where its location, organization, and gendered context are explored in relation to the broader sociosymbolic dynamics concerning the survival of Hindustani classical music in contemporary Pakistan.