Prof. Shalini Ayyagari is an associate professor of music at the University of Pittsburgh and an ethnomusicologist who works across the fields of music in cultural contexts, South Asian studies, critical ethnography, and development studies.

Her first book, Music Resilience: Performing Manganiyar Music in the Indian Thar Desert, was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2022, and is based on 15 years of ethnographic fieldwork and primary sources research.  Musical Resilience is a sociocultural history and musical ethnography of the Manganiyar, a hereditary community of caste-based musicians who live in the Thar Desert on the India–Pakistan border and have maintained music within a patronage system as their livelihood for centuries.  In the book, Prof. Ayyagari chronicles the ways hereditary professional musicians in South Asia continue to make a relevant living through music despite postcolonial rearrangements of traditional patronage relationships and despite economic hardships and the lure of more lucrative non-music professions.

Prof. Ayyagari was previously on the faculty at American University.  Before that, she held a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at Dartmouth College and a Marilyn Yarbrough Dissertation/Teaching Predoctoral Fellowship at Kenyon College.  She received her PhD in music with a focus on ethnomusicology from the University of California, Berkeley, where her dissertation research was partially funded by a Fulbright IIE fellowship.  She completed her BA from Swarthmore College.

For her Fulbright-Nehru project, Prof. Ayyagari is centering the voices and music of the Manganiyar through collaboration, curation, and the archiving of their ethnographic video, audio, and written materials.  She is also piecing together the archival materials (1965–2003) of the late Komal Kothari, the main cultural entrepreneur who took these musicians and their music to the world outside their villages.  This archive was recently digitized at the Archives and Research Center for Ethnomusicology (ARCE).  Prof. Ayyagari is also working with the Manganiyar musicians to tell their own stories through transmediated filmmaking as practice for co-authorship and collaboration.