Kirsten Paige

Accounts of the piano in Southeast Asia often cast the instrument as pervasive bourgeois import. But “Keyboard Botany” takes the opposite approach. Focusing on the production and circulation of “tropical” pianos—keyboard instruments inured to heat, insects, and humidity—in India, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka between about 1840 and 1910, “Keyboard Botany” contends that local piano firms were imbricated in the historical creation and propagation of imperial environmental infrastructure, policy, and liberal culture. Asking how the instrument played into the space and texture of empire, this project examines the piano’s intellectual and material mobilities, its purveyors’ participation in British agricultural exhibitions and the plantation economy, and the ecological politics of making music on these instruments. Keyboard Botany ultimately argues that the “tropical” piano negotiated overlapping modalities of colonial pedagogy and discipline that at once remade bodies and land, habits and habitats.