Voices from the Deep South: the rise of Pattu song cultures of South Asia

ongoing

VOICES offers a new, large-scale perspective on the history of song-performing cultures of South India in premodern and colonial contexts. More than a song, pattu stands for a multitude of interrelated constellations of song traditions - a galaxy of regional song cultures. One region alone (Kerala) boasts nearly eighty song genres, many of epic proportions: from songs of heroes and place through verses to awake a deity or activate a curse, to songs of ecstatic praise. Most are embedded in recurring ritual events, linked to matrilineal order and performers of subaltern roots. Some connect to minorities: Christians, Muslims, Jews. Pattu invokes practices of deploying skills stored in songs to cure diseases, restore prosperity, empower listeners, or otherwise affect reality. From the 13th c. CE on, the song genres influenced literary forms as trans-medial textuality and cultural technology to store knowledge and generate trust. This rich universe remains understudied. Building a digital archive, VOICES will explore ways in which the sonic ecumene of singing the local in shared imaginary of the South proved resilient over centuries and embraced two languages of prestige: Tamil and Sanskrit. We shall study ontologies of singing the body, the suffering and deliverance, the humane and divine, movement and restraint in this unique subaltern record. We aim at a new understanding of the processes of forging identities at the crossroad of the literary and folk by mapping genre distribution, narrative patterns, transmission modes and cultural economies while identifying key moments of historical change. Fusing ethnomusicology, media and literary studies, VOICES wants to show why tracking this evolution has the potential to reveal intriguing trajectories of the formation of premodern expressive ecologies. Enriched by optics of genre economy, it promises new analytical tools for studying infrastructures of communication and meaning-making practices across South Asia and beyond.