
Music of India
How a music form inspired by the songs of camel drivers of Punjab-Sindh became popular in Bengal
The word wild pops up often in colonial descriptions of the tappa, a dazzlingly fast-paced, quirky music form that revels in the art of the unpredictable. “Wild but pleasing when understood,” says 18th-century music collector William Hamilton Bird in Oriental Miscellany (1789). Says Sarah Plowden, another 18th-century chronicler of Hindustani