“The relationship the middle class had with north Indian classical music from the mid-19th century onward was hardly lacking in ambivalence. It was identified with the prostitutes’ quarters, and with the bazaar, where its most accomplished practitioners were reportedly found. … By the time the middle class began to show a grudging but genuine curiosity, it had become, by the new standards of 19th-century India, disreputable, and had to, in a sense, be Vedantaised.”