Anthropology of Sound Santal Tribe

Email

Whatsapp

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Copy link

About the Book The present work is an anthropological study of sound based on an empirical study among the Santal, a tribe of Proto-Australoid origin of Eastern India also settled in majority in the Birbhum district of West Bengal, India. This work is the first of its kind in the field of Social-Cultural Anthropology and is based on the idea that apart from understanding social reality using observation-based established anthropological approaches there can be hearing-based approach to understand human reality.

Sound is an extremely important part of human life. It is not possible for a man to communicate without it. Not only that, sound brings awareness and helps in organizing human life. In fact, the vital functions of life -experiencing, and life expressing are grounded in it. Therefore, its study in social-cultural context of a society as an alternative paradigm is meaningful.

The present study, apart from introducing the subject and arriving at some generalizations in its concluding part has been organized under five chapters each dealing with the Santal classificatory system of sounds, their mode of transmission of vocabulary of sounds, material sounds, animal and bird sounds and human sounds respectively. In all these, an attempt has been made to deal with the function and meaning of various types of sounds constituting the Santal auditory world that help them regulate their life and maintain and perpetuate their society harmoniously.

About the Author Onkar Prasad (b.1948) is an anthropologist and ethnomusicologist. He was formerly Professor at the Dept. of Anthropology and Dean, Vidya Bhavan (Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences), Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, W. Bengal. Among his major works are Folk Music and Folk Dances of Banaras reprinted in 2010 by The Anthropological Survey of India, Kolkata; Santal Music: A Study in Pattern and Process of Cultural Persistence reprinted in 2013 by Inter-India Publications, New Delhi and Methods of Raga Formation and Music Analysis(jointly with his teacher, Prof. Mohan Singh Khangura a music maestro) published in 2015 by Parampara, Kolkata. His book, Musical Cosmology of the Santal which deals with the cosmological dimension of the Santal music, has been published by B.R. Publishing Corporation, New Delhi in 2016.Dr. Prasad is credited for nurturing Creative Anthropology. Introduction of Auto Graphic Method, Anthropophilosophic Perspective and the concept of Sadharanikaran (Commonization) to understand the process through which the Indian civilization persists cutting across ethnic, linguistic and regional boundaries of the country are among his recent additions to the field of Social-Cultural. Anthropology.

Foreword Much has been written on sound in Indian philosophy, theology and tantra. Much work has been done in acoustics but an anthropological work by Professor Onkar Prasad on sound among the Santal, a tribal community of India, is a novel one. His work provides us an immense scope to understand the basics of what has been said in various classical literature of India.

I find that Prasad has collected quite a good number of indigenous terms on sound. It is quite surpirsing find that the Santal have noted and coined terms for even minute differences in sound phenomena caused by a single object, thereby, reflecting their high level of sensitivity towards the sound phenomena of the environment which the rural and the urban civilized people have been lacking to a great extent. These terms also serve as means not only for reconstructing the way of life of the Santal in the past set up of ecology but also for the changes that are on in their life style due to the impact of urbanization and modernization.

Dr. Prasad, in his work, deals with the Santal perception of sound phenomena and also tries to relate it to the larger context of the knowledge system of human society in general and Indian society in particular. He has also attempted to arrive at some generalizations in respect of the basic principles of sound operating at the ground as well as the cosmic levels. His twofold observations regarding the inherent quality of sound viz metaphysical and physical are worth noting. Such work needs to be done among other communities of India to enrich our knowledge about some unknown areas of sound. Prof. Prasad's work is a good example in this regard.

Introduction Sound, which is a sensation detected by the ear, caused by the vibration of the air surrounding it, creates awareness and affects the human sense of the cosmos. It is more effective than the other four human senses taste, touch, smell and vision. Taste and smell, as observed by Ong (1982) are not much of a help in registering interiority or exteriority. Touch partly destroys interiority in the process of perceiving it. Hearing can register interiority without violating it. Sounds all register the interior structures of whatever it is that produces them. Vision being unidirectional at a time, isolates man from what is around him but sound incorporates. Sound puts man at the centre of the auditory world and envelops, establishing him at a kind of core of sensation and existence (Pp. 71-72). This characteristic of sound, which points to its utmost importance in the life of man demands its special study from the anthropological perspective with a view to understanding his perception about it. By 'perception' here it means 'sensory experiences which have gained meaning or significance in the life of a man or a community.

Perceptions about sound are available to a great extent in philosophical traditions of both the Oriental and the Occidental schools of thought and to a lesser extent in ethnographic studies on some tribes throughout the world. These need to be discussed here, in brief, for the purpose of drawing some inferences and formulation of some propositions which in the present study may direct us to find the order among the facts and to arrive at some generalizations on the basis of the empirical work.

**Contents and Sample Pages**