Introduction: Western popular music and Indian modernity 1. The bi-musical subject: Dwarkanath Tagore and European music in early-nineteenth century Calcutta 2. Rhythm, noise and action: Decoding R.D. Burman’s soundtracks of Bombay 3. The Beatles, the bands, and Bollywood: dialectical identities of India’s popular music 4. Beatlemania in Bombay 5. Contextualizing the voice of a female pop artist: Western music and Indian modernity 6. ‘All Divine’: Mapping the intersections between spirituality and modernity in independent Indian music 7. Broadcasting the popular: All India Radio’s western music programming in the postcolonial era 8. ‘If Madonna can…’: emergence of the female indipop star in the 1990s MTV cultural economy 9. Rocking in Kasba: “band” music, contemporary Bengali cinema, and Anjan Dutta’s lost Kolkata 10. Sounding against culture? The tenors of western music in a colonial small town 11. ‘A distant echo attracts me, fragrance of life beyond’: growing up a metalhead in India