Inderjit Kaur

Associate Professor of Music

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Bio

Author of Sensational Rhythms of the Ineffable, ethnomusicologist Inderjit N Kaur’s research centers on how people enlist music to shape their everyday lived world—their experiences, identities, values, and actions. With expertise in South Asian music spanning the classical, folk, popular, and devotional, Kaur specializes in Sikh and Punjabi musical culture, in Punjab and the diaspora. She is a community-oriented, public-facing scholar, and currently serves as co-editor of the open-access online journal Music and Politics (Michigan Publishing).

Kaur holds two doctoral degrees from UC Berkeley, one from the Department of Music and a prior one from the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics. She has received extensive training in North Indian classical music and South Indian classical dance (Bharat Nātyam) and has been a life-long participant in Sikh Kīrtan practice, as singer, composer, listener, adjudicator, program curator, and ensemble director.

Kaur’s work is motivated by an urge to illuminate native epistemologies and forge decolonized research, pedagogy, and institutional development. Her analytical lens is interdisciplinary, grounded in native epistemology and in conversation with insights from fields such as phenomenology, sensory studies, affect studies, and sound studies. An important aspect of her research methodology is its centering of sensory ethnography.

Kaur’s research thus far has pursued ever-deeper understanding of musically engendered experience and meaning making, and the intertwining of embodied aesthetics and ethics, focusing on Sikh musical worship—specifically, Sabad Kīrtan (congregational singing of scriptural verse). She has worked for over two decades with Sikhs from diverse backgrounds and from around the globe, in India and the diaspora. Equally significant is the fact that she has built on her lifetime of participation in Sikh musical culture and her native understanding of and deep engagement with Sikh sacred texts. The chief analytical lens for this research has been Gurmat (Sikh scriptural philosophy and ethics), which she has brought into dialogue with fields such as anthropology, cognitive science, and phenomenology.

Kaur’s book, Sensational Rhythms of the Ineffable: Ethical Affects in Sabad Kīrtan, (Oxford University Press, copyright 2025) breaks new ground on several fronts. It is the first comprehensive study of Sikh Kīrtan that elucidates its transformative power by bringing together new insights from sacred texts with unprecedented in-depth analyses of its diverse musical styles, including the light, the AKJ, and the Gurmat Sangīt styles. Just as it executes a philosophically attuned analysis of Sikh devotional music, the book also offers a unique acoustically oriented interpretation of Sikh philosophy. Implementing decolonial research, the study uncovers a “Sikh theory of lived rhythm” from within the sacred songs to argue that intimate collaborations between the rhythms of the body, music, and everyday life are salient to the effectiveness of the non-discursive transmission of Gurmat (Sikh philosophy and ethics)—in particular, the foundational principles of oneness, parity, and non-othering.

Through her numerous publications, Kaur has made several critical interventions in the scholarship on Sikh musical worship. She has offered an interpretation of the term ghar in the musical designations of the Sikh primary scripture (2008, 2025); a critique of the circulation of the term gurmat sangīt amongst scholars, musicians, and congregations (2011); an argument for multiple authenticities in the musical styles of Sikh sabad Kīrtan (2016, 2025); a theorization of the term anhad nād and its ethical significance in Sikh scripture (2021, 2025); and a phenomenology of the term ras in Sikh scripture and practice (2022, 2025). Kaur’s phenomenological explorations of Sikh devotional experience can also be found in her publications on the Sikh intersensorial ecology of worship (2019); transnationalism (2018); and pilgrimage in Kenya (2023). These essays appear in journals such as the Yearbook of Traditional Music, and MusiCultures, and edited volumes such as the Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music Cultures.

Kaur is currently working on two book projects that delve deeper into issues of social justice and cultural historiography. These studies explore the role of Sikh and Punjabi expressive culture in a variety of contexts in Punjab and the diaspora.

Kaur’s teaching includes graduate seminars on research methods such as fieldwork and ethnography, and on understanding culture through an interdisciplinary lens, with particular focus on phenomenology, and affect studies, sensory studies, and sound studies. Her undergraduate courses cover South Asian musics, including classical, popular, folk, and devotional music. As research advisor, Kaur welcomes students in all areas of South Asian expressive culture as well as in analytical areas of her expertise.

Between music and economics, Kaur has taught previously at the University of California, Berkeley; University of California, Santa Cruz; Santa Clara University, and the University of San Francisco.

Kaur’s many leadership service roles include those at professional societies and at her home institution. For the Society for Ethnomusicology, Kaur is currently serving as a member of the Council, and has previously served as Co-chair of its South Asia Performing Arts Section (2019-2022), and as president of its Northern California Chapter (2017-2019). At the University of Michigan, Kaur has served as an Executive Committee member for the Center for South Asian Studies (2020-24), an Advisory Committee member for the Center for World Performance Studies (2021-24), and a Senate Assembly Representative for the School of Music, Theatre & Dance (2021-24).

As a public-facing scholar, Kaur has given numerous talks (available on YouTube), curated and adjudicated many Sabad Kīrtan programs, and published a DVD of Sikh historical compositions sung by the eleventh generation Sikh musician, the late Bhai Avtar Singh Ragi, and his ensemble. For community service, she has also been enlisted in several leadership roles, including serving as the founding director of the Hemkunt Foundation of New York’s Keertan Darbaar competition (2005-2006). She has herself founded the non-profit organization, the Sikh Music Heritage Institute in 2005. She currently serves on the Board of Trustees of The Sikh Foundation International.