Jazz in the Global Arena: The Case of Colonized Bombay, 1920–1947

The focus of this chapter is on a jazz cityscape, Bombay, from the 1920s to the end of its colonial days in 1947. Bombay boasted an impressive—in both number and pedigree—level of music activity. Commentators of the time were prone to see their milieu in highly dynamic terms, especially when it came to musical developments. In this chapter I explore how the microsystem of the Bombay jazz scene encompassed larger social and ethnic structures. It explores the kinds of historical complexities and inequities of the historical processes evolving in Bombay through a music born, the jazz canon has it, as far away as New Orleans.