Songs of Absence and Presence
আছে, ছিলো, আর নেই-এর গান
Flute of the Dumka Hills
This chapter is about the songs of the Santals, whom Bake recorded in a Baptist mission in Kairabani in the Dumka Hills in 1931. We went with the recordings to Dumka in January 2017, and travelled around with a group of young social workers. When I listened back to the recordings and wrote my chapter on Bake’s Santal recordings four years later, I found myself struggling to get close enough to the song. In these sub-chapters I am trying to listen through others and I am presenting here a story of that mediated listening.
They were all insiders to the sound of Arnold Bake’s recordings from the Dumka Hills, yet they were all different too. The listening sessions in Kairabani, Harinsingha, Jamuasol and at Johar and NELC in Dumka in Dumka town, revealed a range of reception and interpretation of the sounds held in Bake’s Santal cylinders.
After 2017, I met several people, native speakers of Santali or scholars, with whom I listened not only to Bake’s recordings but also to The Travelling Archive’s recordings from Dumka. They had an insider-outsider perspective on the recordings.
