Music, Songs and Stories: Archival Selections from India
  • The Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology (ARCE) is a non-governmental organization established in 1982, with the aim of creating an integrated archive in India where recordings of Indian music and performance held in archives around the world could be made available through centralized mechanism. Today ARCE houses more than 25,000 hours of audiovisual recordings, including unique materials from all over India, ranging from the classical music genres to oral narratives. In 2016, ICHCAP supported the ARCE in digitizing around five hundred hours of analogue recordings through the Digitization Project of ICH-related Analogue Audiovisual Materials. Some of materials representative of Indian traditions were chosen and reproduced as [Music, Songs and Stories: Archival Selection from India], so they can be enjoyed by more people. The Indian collection consists of nine CDs that feature audio materials recorded between the 1930s and the 1990s. The CDs list seventy tracks, including songs of everyday life, oral epics, and tribal communities. The first and second CDs, in particular, feature tracks recorded by Arnold Adrian Bake (1899-1963), a Dutch folk musician. He recorded lullabies, work songs, and sounds of rituals and everyday life while he was traveling around India in the 1930s. Lullabies, work songs, and sounds of rituals and everyday life that he recorded while he was traveling around India in the 1930s are well presented here. This project is particularly important as it resulted in restoring analogue recordings at risk of permanent damage and digitizing them to enhance their academic value and public visibility. ICHCAP hopes that this collection will enable not just researchers in the relevant fields but also the general public to learn more about and become familiar with Indian ICH.
Historical Recordings from the 1930s of Arnold Bake Vol 1: Lullabies Historical Recordings from the 1930s of Arnold Bake Vol. II: Everyday Songs Sufi Traditions of North India Narrative Traditions – Oral Epics and Ballads Vol. I: The Tulu Paddana Narrative Traditions – Oral Epics and Ballads Vol. II: The Jagar and the Epic of Alha Women’s Voices from the Mountains Music of Bastar and Chhatisgarh Percussion and Performance – Drumming Traditions Kartatak Classical Instrumental Music – Nagaswaram performance by Kottur Rajrathnam Pillai 
  • The women performing here are not professional musicians. These songs are part of the everyday life of women. Women’s songs are often work songs sung while grinding, threshing, and pounding, as a way to while away the tedium of long laborious tasks and provide a rhythm as well as companionship. Women play a key role in rituals, singing narratives and ballads as well as life cycle songs for events such as birth, marriage, and death. Wedding songs form a large part of the repertoire of women in India. This important part of the intangible cultural heritage of India is disappearing with urbanization and migration to cities, and with mechanization that takes away the need for grinding and pounding. Moreover, recorded music and television are taking the place of song. Thus, the recording and documentation of these traditions becomes more important. Namely, recordings of the voices of the woman in the home and in the fields, who carry out the rituals for their families and the gods who protect them, hold immense value. This is a compilation of women’s songs from the foothills of the Himalayas, Kangra in Himachal Pradesh (the “land of the snows”), and from high up in the Garhwal Himalayas in Uttarakhand (the “northern land”). Though not connected, there are similarities in the themes between the ghasyari songs and khuder of Garhwal and the pakaharu of Kangra. Women sing about their hardships, such as their daily struggles with marriage, absent husbands, and about the friendship among women. These songs do not have any instrumental accompaniment. The songs are from the research conducted by two wo men researchers: Kirin Narayan and Ragini Deshpande. The songs from Kangra are those recorded and collected by Kirin Narayan, who has worked in Kangra, studying women’s songs and stories for many years. The selection presented here is from 1990 to 1991. Ragini Deshpande recorded and collected women’s songs in Chamoli, Garhwal, from 1981 to 1989. As Sangita Devi says quoted by Kiri Narayan, “Everyone can sing, but only when you know pain can you understand the song.”

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