This chapter reflects on doing ethnographic fieldwork in contemporary India across music education spaces that embody different historical imaginaries and social hierarchies. It compares settings such as guru-shishya pedagogies, institutional music schools, and university contexts to show how “tradition” and “modernity” co-exist, overlap, and are actively produced in everyday practice. The chapter argues that these spaces are not simply successive “stages” but co-present temporal regimes that shape how musicians narrate authority, authenticity, and change. By foregrounding the researcher’ shifting positionality and the ethics of representation, it offers a methodological account of how to study entangled musical histories in living, contested cultural environments.