In this article I explore the manner in which elements from a non-Western music appear in pop music and jazz. The music under discussion is that of the Indian subcontinent and the classical music of North India in particular. The essay covers references to Indian music in pop, rock and jazz from the sixties to the present day but concentrates mainly on the sixties and seventies, and, in the world of pop, on the music of the Beatles. The influence of orientalism on Western music is not a recent phenomena, as Reck (1985) notes, but its appearance in pop during the sixties meant that it reached a larger audience than ever before.

The cultural identity of the Indian subcontinent has survived countless onslaughts and displacements often by simply absorbing and Indianising alien elements. The many hybrids in lifestyle, language, food and religion spawned of Britain and India's long, love-hate relationship are a testament to this. And now the process is repeating itself in the new generation of South Asians born and educated in Britain. It is a unique generation, its acceptance or rejection of and by white British society will probably set the pattern for generations to come, and the musical fusion which voices their cultural duality tends towards mutual acceptance.

Though gramophones were imported in India before the beginning of the century, this was done privately by a few persons who were very rich and affluent. During their visits to Europe and other Western countries they would buy a gramophone machine for use at home because it was an attractive novelty and a handy medium of entertainment. In 1900 and for quite some time thereafter a gramophone was considered to be a show piece and a status symbol, as only the wealthy elite of the society could afford to possess it. Phonographs were commercially exploited in India only after the establishment of the office of the Mutoscope Biograph Company in Calcutta, on 7 July 1901, by one Mr J. Watson Harrod.

While engaged in research on the long-necked lute called Herati dutār in 1974, I was frequently told about a virtuoso dutāri (dutār player) who had died a few years earlier after a fight with a gang of ‘thugs’ in the city of Kandahar. His name was Amin-e Diwaneh. The Persian word diwāneh means ‘crazy’, and was applied to people who (in terms of Western psychiatry) might be classed as ‘insane’, though the cause of insanity was usually attributed to spirit possession. Diwāneh was also a description for individuals who were particularly erratic in their behaviour, and was often used affectionately. Amin the dutāri was such a person.

About a thousand years ago in northeastern India a group of spiritual adepts known as siddhācāryas sang poems about the discipline required of the individual who seeks ultimate release. These carýāpadas, as the poems are called, were eventually compiled and recorded in a manuscript found about a century ago in the Nepali Court Library by a Bengali scholar (Sastri), since when concordances have been recognised in the Tibetan scriptures and numerous articles have been written about them by a variety of learned scholars. The carýāpadas have aroused considerable interest, among other reasons, because of their language, which is considered the earliest record of the Bengali tongue (Chatterji 1970, pp. 90–116), and because of their religious precepts, which are based upon tantra (Bagchi 1933, 1956A, B). Tantra teaches the individual to pursue his own release from phenomenal existence through direct, empirical means, through the manipulation of his own physical and psychical constitution, and these means are learned viva voce from a preceptor who also demonstrates the necessary techniques.

Uruguay is a country of immigrants. By the middle of the last century little remained of its original inhabitants or their culture. To Spanish influences were added others, mainly of European origin, which together formed the hybrid culture which is twentieth-century Uruguay.

For the music industry the age of manufacture is now over. Companies (and company profits) are no longer organised around making things but depend on the creation of rights. In the industry's own jargon, each piece of music represents ‘a basket of rights’; the company task is to exploit as many of these rights as possible, not just those realised when it is sold in recorded form to the public, but also those realised when it is broadcast on radio or television, used on a film, commercial or video soundtrack, and so on. Musical rights (copyrights, performing rights) are the basic pop commodity and to understand the music business in the 1980s we have to understand how these rights work. In this article, then, I begin and end with record companies' uses of copyright law and ideology to defend themselves against current technological and political threats to income, but I also want to ask questions about how the law itself defines music and determines the possibilities of musical ‘exploitation’. And this means putting contemporary arguments (for and against the blank tape levy, for example) in historical perspective.