From Market Corruption to Musical Collusion: The Patronage and Music of Punjabi Logistics, 1925-2025

Abstract

One political imperative has carried into the present from 19th-century British colonial governance, through post-Independence Indian national governance from 1947, and after the midcentury transnational pressures to industrialize agriculture termed the “Green Revolution.” This imperative: the Punjab province must produce and circulate more foodgrains in its supply chains for the sake of “development,” using the economic calculations of value across spatiotemporal motion termed “logistics,” and the increasingly capital-intensive agricultural techniques that these calculations require. But in Indian Punjab today in the aftermath of logistical development, impoverished villages wracked with opiate addiction depend on migrant truckers in Canada and Britain – logistical workers of a different stripe – whose donations fund massive village festivals. Both charismatic politicians and career criminals wield music for political gain within these wrestling and tractor tournaments, commissioning poetic and musical verses praising themselves and excoriating enemies, and ordering the extortion and assassination of controversial politically-affiliated musicians. These performances transcend mere rhetoric, generating political networks – including feuding criminal organizations – extending transnationally from villages to diasporic enclaves, and mediating millions of dollars in patronage. Yet the political figures who attempted to expand Punjab’s agrarian supply chains also sought to combat these patronage practices, which they considered corruption, and did so by using musical propaganda. What might the different potencies political actors assign music – capacities to repair or corrupt – indicate about the political economy of India and its diaspora, and about how people navigate its pressures and dangers? How do people attempt to turn the same musics into tools to seduce, symptoms of decline, and reasons to kill? I examine how people in Punjab have particularly invested music with political potential at moments where the pecuniary calculations of logistics overlap with the moral calculus of patronage (or its illicit equivalent, corruption). My first section examines the history of music in logistical policy. I begin in Chapter 1 with colonial development policies, whose efforts to expand agrarian supply chains and instill logistical calculations in Punjabi peasants through music propaganda and magic lantern shows failed to convince Punjabis, but convinced British nobility. Chapter 2 shows the continuation of these calculations among Indian nationalists, who pulled British political economic, and logistical, calculations of food supply and hungry mouths into new forms of eugenic population restriction, and new forms of eugenic musical propaganda. Chapter 3 uses oral history and government-internal documents to examine how these programs still target Punjabi villagers today, using the promise of musical persuasion to elide coerced sterilizations. My second section ethnographically examines music in the logistics-facing actions of interlocutors, actions built upon the aftermath of the policies in the first section. Chapter 4 maps how patronage and music remitted from North American truckers fuel Punjabi undocumented emigration over the US-Mexico border, and conflict in rural Punjab. Chapter 5 examines how the music and murder of Sidhu Moosewala, Punjab’s most famous musician, became grist for popular theorizations about the shadowy patronage relationships that structured Punjab’s agrarian-logistical politics, relationships that Moosewala’s music might symptomize, catalyze, or combat.