Tejaswini Niranjana’s paper “Music in the Balance: Language, Modernity and Hindustani Sangeet in Dharwad” (12 January 2013) ponders the relationship between Hindustani music and Kannada nationalism in the Bombay-Karnataka region in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is a welcome move since there is a vacuum of scholarly discussion in this area. However, there seems to be a certain hasty conclusion about the very nature of this relation between Kannada nationalism and Hindustani music.