Field of Study USA: Musical Instrument Training – World Music

Aruna Kharod

Aruna Kharod is an ethnomusicology PhD candidate at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin. She holds an MMus in ethnomusicology (2021) as well as a dual BA in Hindi language and literature and South Asian studies, all from UT Austin. Aruna’s doctoral dissertation examines transnational exchanges and histories of the sitar-making industry. Her research has been published in the International Journal of Traditional Arts and has been generously supported by the Smithsonian Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology, the Presser Foundation, Texas Folklife, and UT Austin’s most prestigious doctoral research award, the Donald D. Harrington Dissertation Fellowship (2022–23).

As a performing artist, Aruna is trained in Hindustani music and bharatanatyam dance. She studied sitar under the guidance of Professor Emeritus Stephen Slawek, a senior disciple of the late Pandit Ravi Shankar. She is currently under the training of renowned sitarist Vidushi Sahana Banerjee. Aruna teaches and performs bharatanatyam in central Texas as part of her guru, Dr. Sreedhara Akkihebbalu’s Kaveri Natya Yoga School of Bharatanatyam. She has also studied bharatanatyam and odissi intensively in India. Besides, Aruna has performed and taught Javanese gamelan for over five years.

Aruna is an ethnographic storyteller who is passionate about intergenerational and community-based work. Her notable projects include leading a project on Partition Songs in the Indian-American diaspora (2021); being involved in a digital humanities resource program on American sitar-making (2022); and being part of a mentorship programming series for women PhD students (2023). Aruna is also a photographer and budding documentary maker who focuses on hereditary and traditional luthiers and artists in the U.S. and India, as well as on intergenerational South Asian-American life. As an arts educator, Aruna leads and develops programming for audiences in public libraries, schools, senior centers, and museums around central Texas. She has worked as an artist-in-residence (Blanton Museum of Art, 2017), public outreach and programming liaison (Humanities Texas, 2021), and as a qualitative research consultant (Jugal’s Literature Festival, 2023).

Aruna’s Fulbright-Nehru project is studying sitar performance through individualized, immersive, traditional taalim, or training, under the tutelage of Vidushi Sahana Banerjee. She is also practicing the nuances of improvisatory techniques and musical theory as rooted in Banerjee’s distinctive interpretation of the Rampur Senia gharana.

Lauren Bausch

Prof. Lauren Bausch teaches at Dharma Realm Buddhist University, located in the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas in Ukiah, California. A specialist in the philosophy of the Brāhmaṇa texts, she is interested in exploring the relationship between Vedic tradition and early Indian Buddhism. She is the editor of Self, Sacrifice, and Cosmos: Vedic Thought, Ritual, and Philosophy (2019) and has written articles such as “The Kāṇva Brāhmaṇas and Buddhists in Kosala”, “Philosophy of Language in the Ṛgveda”, and “Bráhman as the Absolute in Late Brāhmaṇa Texts”. She completed her PhD in Sanskrit from the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2015.

Including a life-changing undergraduate semester in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Delhi and three semesters of dissertation fieldwork at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Prof. Bausch has been to India to study languages, conduct research, deliver lectures, and to volunteer. She has given invited lectures at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, the National Museum, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Savitribai Phule Pune University. She received the first annual International Association of Sanskrit Studies’ Honorary Research Fellowship in 2019 and organized a Vedic conference at Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune.

Prof. Bausch looks forward to building a community of scholars and practitioners that facilitates collaboration among Vedic and Buddhist specialists in the United States and India. She hopes that the book resulting from this Fulbright-Nehru research touches its readers by revealing something about their roots and will also give scholars of Hinduism a more comprehensive understanding of Vedic tradition and scholars of Buddhism a sound basis for understanding the cultural background of Gotama’s teachings.

Prof. Bausch’s Fulbright-Nehru project is investigating the philosophy of language and causality that is articulated in middle and late Vedic texts. She is identifying and examining the discourses within these texts around the nature of man and the absolute creating itself to experience relativity, while situating the philosophy of the Brāhmaṇa texts in the intellectual history of India. Rather than interpreting ritual activity through the lens of Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta, her research is probing the cosmologies, mythologies, and explanatory connections found throughout the Brāhmaṇa texts themselves. The results are expected to shed more light on the relationship between late Vedic thought and early Buddhism.

Hamsa Shanmugam

Hamsa Shanmugam completed her BA with honors from Brown University in May 2024. At Brown, she pursued a double concentration in health and human biology and music. Hamsa’s undergraduate honors thesis in ethnomusicology presented a musicological analysis of Thēvāram from a Carnatic music perspective and compared melodic frameworks between Thēvāram and Carnatic music. Her research interests are in ethnomusicology, specifically, Thēvāram, ancient Tamil music, and Carnatic music.

Hamsa is a Carnatic vocalist and violinist. She is a disciple of Dr. B. Balasubrahmaniyan and “Sangita Kalanidhi” Lalgudi Vijayalakshmi. Hamsa performs solo concerts regularly across the U.S. and India. She is the recipient of numerous prizes, scholarships, and fellowships in music. In 2022, Hamsa was the winner of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations’ Pratibha Sangam Global Carnatic Music Competition and was invited by the Indian government to give a musical tour across India.

Hamsa is the founder and co-president of Brown Bhairavi, Brown University’s premier South Asian classical music group. She has also served as the marketing lead for MIT Heritage Arts of South Asia, an organization dedicated to promoting South Asian classical art forms. Following her year in India with the Fulbright-Nehru fellowship, as part of the Program in Liberal Medical Education, the only combined BS/MD program in the Ivy League, Hamsa will matriculate to the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University to complete her MD degree.

In her Fulbright-Nehru project, Hamsa is conducting ethnomusicological research on Thēvāram, the Tamil devotional music of the Saiva tradition. Her research is exploring how Thēvāram concerts can be performed within the Carnatic kutcheri (concert) structures while maintaining Thēvāram’s musical and lyrical integrity; she is doing so by using undigitized musical archives and working with affiliates at Annamalai University and the Kapaleeswarar Temple. This project is set to culminate in the presentation of a full-length Thēvāram concert in the Carnatic concert format. Hamsa hopes that her work will broaden the horizons of Western musicology, enrich Carnatic music, expand Thēvāram’s reach, and allow more Tamil audiences in both Tamil Nadu and the diaspora to reconnect with this ancient musical tradition.