Epic Television – Music and Sound in Ramayan and Mahabharat

Abstract

Dissertation zur Erlangung des philosophischen Doktorgrades an der Philosophischen Fakultät der Georg-August-Universität Göttingen vorgelegt von Britta Lesniak aus Detmold Göttingen 2017 II was invaluable and always gave me impulses to think my work further. Prof. Dr. Andreas Waczkat I thank for his willingness to be a third reader of this dissertation, and his helpful feedback during earlier presentations. I want to thank Frank Kelleter and every member and associate member of the entire DFG-Research Unit Popular Seriality: Aesthetics and Practice for including me in this fantastic group for three years and for all the input and exchange during this time, from which I benefited immensely. For financing my research and writing with scholarships and funding, and for the substantial ideational support I want to thank the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes and the Graduiertenschule für Geisteswissenschaften Göttingen. My research in New Delhi and Mumbai, India, in 2015 and 2016 would have been impossible without the help from several people. I want to thank Prof. Dr. Philip Lutgendorf for providing me with the material from which I got my first contacts, and Dr. Shubha Chaudhuri at the Archives and Research Center for Ethnomusicology in Gurgaon for her help with my work there and her input. Minnie Vaid and Nitish Bharadwaj were especially helpful when I was trying to get my research started. They generously provided me with contacts and sacrificed their time to meet me, be interviewed by me and spend time with me. Thank you very much. I further want to thank (in alphabetical order) all those people who spent their spare time talking with me and answering my many -and often weird -questions: