The city will soon be home to an audio-visual (AV) archive of vanishing cultures and traditions of religious and ethnic minorities.
The South Regional Centre (SRC) of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts (IGNCA) is working towards creating India’s first ethnographic archive of folk, religious and tribal art. Once completed, it is expected to yield nearly 25,000 hours of AV material pertaining to the five southern States.
“This is a multi-year project and a mammoth undertaking,” said Deepti Navaratna who recently took over as Executive Director of IGNCA-SRC.
“This work is not for vanity, it has heritage value. We have begun with tribal and folks traditions of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. The overall project will be carried out in five phases over 2016-17. We have identified over 30 specific traditions, including the Karaga tradition of south India. We will document the Thigala community and the tribal origins of Draupadi worship in south India.”
Phase 1 of the project, which is under way, will run into several thousand hours of music, oral histories and interview footage. Archival will happen in multiple modes — audio, video, written and oral. Their rich histories will be classified and catalogued.
An important aspect of this project is that it features tribal, minority and multiple religions. For example, IGNCA will document the music of Hindu, Muslim and Roman Catholic communities among Siddi tribals, the Burrakatha of Andhra Pradesh, Yellamana Padagalu and Chowdaki Padagalu of Karnataka, and Krishnanattam, the famed music of Kerala temples.
“Among other things, we are into documenting ‘Siri Paardana’, a rare oral tradition of the Tuluva community in Karnataka,” she adds.
Motive for initiative
What was the idea behind creating this massive archival endeavour when the IGNCA also houses a 1,000-hour audio collection of classical music from the early 1900s?
“We must not stop at arranging concerts and lecture demonstrations, as there are multiple other cultural organisations doing it. Most of the programming focuses on classical arts such as Carnatic music or Bharatanatyam, while tribal and folk traditions languish. Often, cultural organisations have concerts of folk artists and stop there,” says Dr. Deepti. These vanishing traditions, she says, have to be researched into and their music, dance, oral histories and practices have to be preserved in written, audio, and visual for ethnographic documentation.
Ironically, most of such documentation is being done by foreign universities, by scholars who take great pains to come down to India and study our traditions, but eventually create archives of our heritage in other lands. “Our archival material should serve as a nodal centre for research and India must own its own well-curated collection of ethnographic research,” says Dr. Deepti.
