This dissertation concerns a contemporary movement of social and cultural reclamation among the Manganiyar, a community of hereditary musicians in Western Rajasthan, India. I aim to tell the story of the Manganiyar coming to grips with a fading patronage tradition and an ingrained institutional framework with which their very lives intertwine.

The kernel of this dissertation is the study of musical patronage, and through this, the innovative reorganizations of musical practices among the Manganiyar. I aim to examine the shifts in knowledge and subjectivity shaping and being shaped by these innovations. Customarily the Manganiyar, a community considered to have been extremely low caste and lacking voice and class mobility, have provided family genealogies and ceremonial music to their hereditary patrons for remuneration for at least the past three centuries. They have been affiliated not only with individual patron families, but entire family lineages over many generations through social and economic co-dependence. With modernization the importance of these customary patronage relationships is waning and in their location, development initiatives, cultural tourism, and more modern modes of musical production are filling in, pointing to new ways of understanding the ways in which cultural subjectivities can be imagined and inscribed through music.

Through ethnographic accounts, I engage with specific Manganiyars who have founded their own non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and examine their engagements with development discourse, education, and cultural preservation. My analysis extends beyond the evaluation of these individual projects in terms of success or failure, but rather seeks to understand what these musicians strive to change in their community, the tools they use, and the calculations that they apply to do so.

Just as the arms of a compass cross at a determined point, the crucial concepts of institutionalization, cultural tourism, development discourse, and musical change intersect in a provocative nexus in the center of the Thar Desert and the heart of a hereditary musician community. They locate the coordinates of a place and tell the story of a community actively involved in the cultivation of dynamic ways of being, dedicated to the sustainability of livelihood through musical practice.