Why critic is a custodian of a living tradition

There is a paradox at the heart of the performing arts. A painting may survive its painter and a manuscript its author, but a musical performance disappears almost at the moment of its creation. What remains is memory — and, when we are fortunate, a recording, an informed account or a piece of criticism capable of placing that fleeting experience within a larger artistic history.

For close to four decades, Manjari Sinha has occupied precisely this space between performance and memory.

A musicologist, critic and chronicler of Indian classical music and dance, Sinha has been selected for the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award for 2025 in Art Critique (Performing Arts). The recognition is significant not merely because of the length of her engagement with the arts, but because it draws attention to a profession that has gradually receded from the cultural pages of Indian newspapers: the specialist critic.

Criticism of classical music is an unusually demanding discipline. A performance cannot adequately be assessed through adjectives of approval or disapproval. To write meaningfully about a khayal recital, for instance, requires an understanding of raga grammar, composition, improvisation, voice culture, laya and the aesthetic vocabulary of a gharana. Dance asks for another range of knowledge—movement, rhythm, abhinaya, text, music and choreography.

Sinha came to criticism with this unusually broad preparation.

She studied Sanskrit at the postgraduate level at Allahabad University and music at Vikram University, Ujjain. At the Prayag Sangeet Samiti, she trained in Hindustani vocal music, tabla, sitar and Kathak, receiving the Sangeet Prabhakar qualification in these disciplines. Her training in sitar continued under Pandit Arvind Parikh, the distinguished disciple of Ustad Vilayat Khan.

This combination of textual scholarship and practical training has been central to her critical practice. It allows her to approach a performance not simply as an event to be reported but as part of a continuum — of repertoire, pedagogy, aesthetics and tradition.

Her Sanskrit background is particularly relevant. Indian music and dance carry behind them a substantial body of theoretical writing, from the Natya Shastra to later musicological texts such as the Sangeet Ratnakara. The ability to move between such textual traditions and the realities of contemporary performance gives criticism a depth that cultural reportage alone cannot provide.

Sinha has written extensively in both English and Hindi on Hindustani and Carnatic music, dance, books and recordings. Her criticism has appeared over the years in national newspapers and arts publications.

Taken individually, a newspaper review may appear ephemeral. Taken together over several decades, such writing becomes something else: an informal archive of India’s performing arts.

It records artists at different stages of their careers, the changing contours of festivals, the survival and transformation of gharanas, shifts in repertoire and presentation, and even changes in the relationship between performer and audience.

The critic, in this sense, is not merely judging a concert. The critic is documenting a tradition while it is changing.

This is especially important in Indian classical music, where a substantial part of artistic knowledge continues to be transmitted orally. Much of what distinguishes one musician from another—the architecture of a raga, the handling of a particular phrase, the treatment of a bandish or the inherited aesthetics of a gharana—may never exist as a written score. An informed review can therefore become evidence.

Sinha’s work has extended beyond periodic criticism into documentation. Her book on Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan is an important example. Bade Ghulam Ali Khan’s music represents one of the defining transformations of 20th-century Hindustani vocalism: an extraordinary synthesis of tonal beauty, agility, rhythmic imagination and the aesthetic inheritance associated with the Patiala-Kasur tradition. To document such a musician is inevitably to document a musical world.

Sinha has also contributed the chapter on Kathak to ‘Indian Dance: The Ultimate Metaphor’, reflecting the breadth of her engagement beyond music. Her writing encompasses classical dance traditions as well, an unusual range in an age when arts criticism has itself become increasingly specialised.

The ecosystem of classical performance in India is relatively small. Artists, organisers, critics, institutions and audiences repeatedly encounter one another. In such an environment, independent judgment can be difficult to sustain. Yet without the possibility of disagreement, criticism becomes publicity.

A serious critic must be able to recognise achievement without surrendering judgment, and to identify weakness without reducing criticism to fault-finding. Sinha’s writing has generally worked within this older conception of criticism—one in which the critic is first an attentive rasika, but also a student of the form. Technical observation consequently serves an aesthetic argument rather than becoming an exhibition of technical vocabulary.

For much of the 20th century, major newspapers regarded classical music, dance, theatre, literature and visual art as areas requiring specialist writers. Reviews were not peripheral supplements to cultural life; they were part of the conversation through which artistic reputations and aesthetic arguments developed. That space has contracted.

At the same time, social media has created an unprecedented volume of commentary around performance. A concert may now be photographed, filmed and praised online before the tanpura has been put away.

This democratisation of response has obvious virtues. Artists can reach audiences without institutional intermediaries, and listeners can participate in conversations from anywhere in the world. But response is not necessarily criticism.

Words such as “mesmerising”, “divine” and “sublime”, however sincerely meant, tell us little about how a raga was developed, why a composition mattered, whether improvisation enlarged the grammar of the raga or merely displayed virtuosity, or how an interpretation related to an inherited style.

Criticism requires something slower: knowledge, comparison, memory and the willingness to listen without the obligation to applaud. Criticism is cultural memory. This is why Sinha’s four decades of writing deserve to be viewed as more than a journalistic career.

Imagine trying to reconstruct the classical music landscape of Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata or Chennai several decades from now using only publicity material, social-media posts and institutional brochures. They would tell us who performed and where, but little about the music.

A critic leaves another kind of record. Who was singing what? How had an artist changed over a decade?  What was happening to a gharana? Which compositions were disappearing? How was the concert format changing? What happened when inherited aesthetics encountered new audiences and new technologies? Across decades, such observations accumulate into cultural history.

The significance of the Sangeet Natak Akademi honour to Manjari Sinha lies finally here. It acknowledges a writer, but also the act of informed listening itself.

Indian classical music has survived through the guru and the disciple, the performer and the patron, the institution and the audience. Its modern history has also depended on another, quieter figure—the person sitting somewhere beyond the stage lights, listening carefully and eventually turning sound into words. The performance ends. The critic makes it part of memory.

A resident of Gurugram in Haryana, Manjari Sinha is currently spending time with her children in Reston, Virginia, in the United States. Yet geographical distance has done little to diminish her enduring engagement with Indian classical music and dance. She remains deeply committed to preserving, interpreting and widening awareness of India’s rich performing-arts heritage.

Even while living abroad, Sinha continues to write regularly on Indian classical music and dance. Her work appears in Hindi publications, and she writes a column in a Chennai-based English magazine devoted to the performing arts.