Tunes to remember: Meet the children acting as lorekeepers

Youngsters across Kerala are using smartphones to record elders as they sing folk songs, tell tales, for a project by the NGO ARPO.

Twelve-year-old Navathej K enjoys listening to his aunt Savitri Palakandi sing an old Malayalam folk song about a boy who slips away from his watchful grandmother. As the song goes, the grandmother looks for him among his friends, asking them a host of questions. They know where he is, but offer cheeky, rhyming answers instead.

A student films the folklore researcher Pappan Kavil as he begins to tell a tale.

This bit of folklore, and Navathej’s memory of his aunt, have now been archived by the Kerala-based NGO Archival and Research Project (ARPO)’s LoreKeepers initiative, run in collaboration with the non-profit Faizal and Shabana Foundation.

From across the state, via a network of 50 schools, children are sending in submissions like Navathej’s. So far, in about 15 months, LoreKeepers has collected over 1,000 folk songs and folk tales from 11 of the 14 districts.

“The cultural diversity in Kerala is immense,” says Sruthin Lal, 33, founder-director of ARPO. “Communities have their own dialects and art forms, which in turn have regional variations. And yet most of what we know – from Kathakali to Mohiniyattam – is confined to art forms that are traditionally the preserve of the upper castes.”

This invisibilises many of the state’s peoples, and puts their oral traditions at risk. Their songs and tales were once a large part of local entertainment and festivities; they were lullabies; or tunes that families might sing at a celebration, a harvest fair, or just on a regular evening. In a rapidly urbanising Kerala, such occasions and habits are changing or fading away. This sparked the mission of archiving what remains — through the children who are the newest links in a long line of young listeners that goes back centuries.

“The LoreKeepers initiative turned out to be the medium that connected two or three generations in this manner,” says ARPO project manager Sidharth Ajith, 25.

Being asked to record their favourite songs and stories served the primary function of reminding the children that these bits of their history and culture matter. It prompted them to seek out older relatives, the guardians of such lore. And, because the children were invited to write a note about each item they recorded, they gained a better understanding of what the song or story they had been listening to for years, actually meant.

They began to ask questions about the farming practices described, or the different festivities.

Navathej invited a few of his neighbours, who belong to the Parayan community of Dalits, to record some of their songs. He says he now understands more deeply how differently they once lived, and how they were mistreated. There are songs about their interactions with landlords that were particularly sad, he says.

About 800 of the 1,000 songs, Sidharth says, have come from Dalit communities. (The videos are available on the LoreKeepers YouTube channel.) Here is one, contributed by Sulochana, 54, from Mukkam in Kozhikode…

“Hey cuckoo, in the paddy fields,

Can you sing your precious song?

I planted the paddy here, and I planted it there,

I planted it in the field everywhere.

And yet, when I return from the field,

I am an untouchable to the landlord.

When I harvest the rice, there is no untouchability,

But I’m an untouchable again, after filling the granary.

Hey cuckoo, in the paddy fields,

Can you sing your precious song?”

Alongside the archiving, ARPO is working with teachers to help explain to children what folklore is, and why it is being lost, and archived, around the world. The teachers talk about how, without the invisible and largely unacknowledged work of their elders, these elements of history and identity would have been lost to their tribes.

As part of the project, accordingly, information about the lorekeeper is logged with each video. So are brief descriptions of agricultural practices, fading foods and recipes and even superstitions, creating a record of microcultures as they existed before the uniformalising influences of colonialism, industrialisation and urban living.

It isn’t all tales of near-loss. There is humour in the tunes too, says Jisha CP, a Malayalam teacher in Kozhikode. Her late grandfather, for instance, would sing to her aunts a ditty about a girl who is sent to fetch tea from the local tea shop, but lingers there, flirting with the young vendor, while the hungry goats at home are crying and her family members at home are fainting because they haven’t had their chai, says Jisha, laughing.

For many elders, the project is serving to spark now-distant memories. Sruthin of ARPO says his grandmother Padmini Amma, 78, began to tell him about, and sing to him, songs that she hadn’t thought about in decades.

“When I first I told her, during a visit home to Kozhikode, that we were collecting these stories, she couldn’t recollect any,” he says. “A while later, when she came to visit me in Kochi, she said she had brought something for me, and it was in her mind.” She sang 10 songs for the project, he adds. “She said she remembered them because, after all these years, there was a need for them again.”