The trumpet and the drum: music and reclaiming the delinquent child

Projects to reclaim the delinquent child were symbolically important to late colonial modernity. Controlling the bodies and reforming the minds of a small number of children became a way for politicians and administrators to prove their own scientific modernity and offered a symbolic space in which supposedly wayward children could be educated into new relationships with the state. This chapter focuses on the role of music and participation in brass bands as a means of disciplining children into particular forms of modern citizenship through looking at the records of the Reformatories and Certified Schools in the Madras Presidency. It then draws parallels with the ways in which Salvation Army missionaries in South India used musical training as part of their project to reform children from the Criminal Tribes settlements into respectable and morally upright future citizens, their participation in uniformed musical performances both contesting and reinforcing the rigidity of late colonial racialised hierarchies and the perception that Indian children were irredeemably flawed. Through a close reading of the administrative records, the memoirs and photographs of missionaries and the silent moving images captured in the British Film archive which show the bands marching and performing, the chapter considers the ways in which musically gifted children separated from familial support networks were regulated into modern patterns of daily behaviour and modern understandings of the self as individualised rights-bearing subjects. It considers the details of the children’s lives and daily routines, musical training and career trajectories to glean fleeting hints of their daily lives and capacity to make choices, using adult-authored sources to give some insight into the opportunities offered to musically gifted children, and also querying the limitations of this source material. By focusing on a group of exceptional children, chosen because of perceived natural ability, the chapter unpicks how the colonial juvenile justice system was used to inculcate new forms of loyalty and to discipline future children into the moral and social hierarchies of late colonial modernity.