South Asian / Indian
South Asian / Indian music spans cinema-driven mass song, raga-based classical systems, devotional forms, regional folk traditions, and diasporic dancefloor hybrids, but it is consistently marked by melodic centrality, strong text-music relationship, and rhythmic systems more nuanced than simple backbeat pop. It can be intimate and microtonal, orchestral and cinematic, or physically explosive on a wedding dancefloor—sometimes all in the same cultural ecosystem.
History
Ancient art-music lineages, Sufi traditions, regional folk repertoires, and 20th-century film modernity coexist in this family; radio, cinema, cassettes, migration, and diasporic club culture helped place filmi, bhangra, indipop, ghazal, qawwali, and folk revival into new commercial relation with Hindustani and Carnatic classical traditions, while digital media later collapsed regional distance and accelerated crossover across India, Pakistan, and the diaspora.
Defining artists
Essential listening
Sources
- Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Darbar
- Smithsonian Folkways
- South Asian music histories