LORE - Recall, Recollect, Reflect

A Community Oral History Archival Project

Tamarind Tree in collaboration with the Centre for Social Studies, Surat, Gurjarat, runs a community driven Oral History project in the western region of India with an emphasis on the Warli and Kokna tribes.   The project began in April 2009, with the aim of building a community driven digital archive of the oral folklore, history, myths and legends of these communities. Founded in the belief that capturing the vibrant living traditions of the tribals demands subaltern sensitivities, the project began training tribal youth in the tools of oral history collection. A small team of tribal youth armed with the now affordable digital technology went out in the tribal talukas of Dahanu and Jawahar to collect stories, myths, legends, rituals, beliefs and practices of the Warlis and Koknas.

Over the last two years,  the project has collected about 100 hours of video footage which includes stories and narratives by the traditional healer who plays the Ghagli (an instrument made out of a local gourd), the thalawala, who produces vibratory and hypnotic music with the help of a string stuck to a plate while reciting stories and folklore. The project has also captured current agricultural processes like “rab” (slash and burn) and is attempting to demystify this technique, since this practice of the tribals has lead to considerable exploitation by the forest department and increasing prejudice by environmentalists, who claim that these practices are destroying the forests. 

These stories, rooted in their real life experiences, connote generational understanding of the world. Wrath of nature, fear of moneylenders, and Parsi landlords, power of divine spirits and contemporary social and political observations are some of the themes.

With the rapid collection of video content, the project simultaneously began developing a system of storage, classification,cataloging, indexing, and retrieval of the archived footage all in open source technology and software.. The challenge has been to use the tools of new media to develop a prototype of storage and retrieval entirely in open source technology. Finding open source solutions in the proprietary world of video and audio codec's has been an uphill task. However the project now has a tested model for the storage and retrieval of digital content which includes the processes of capturing footage, technical editing and output in open source formats.

Currently, the project is covering the two communities of Warlis and Koknas, since there is a considerable cultural and social overlap in them. The geogrpahical area is Dahanu Taluka (home to 65 percent tribal population, predominantly Warlis and borders of Jawahar Taluka, also predominantly tribal) in Maharashtra.  

The Oral history initiative is not a static, one-time-collection-of-stories effort. The objective is to be able to collect, capture and present a people as they see themselves and the world in a contemporary context. Reconstructing and contextualising the past is an essential component of building this understanding. 

The project aims to go beyond the collection of religious myths to the oral traditions of songs, legends, stories and sagas, that is part of the collective memory of the tribals. It is here that we hope to gain an understanding of the identity and self-perception of the Warlis and Koknas and how they position themselves both with regard to their natural environment and how they react to the encroachment of their social and physical space by outsiders. 

The project believes that an outsider  “anthropological” view will only have limited access to the intriguing world of the tribals. The process of collection of oral hisory by the subaltern communities is equally imperative as the final outputs. The content of the oral history archive is being  generated over a period of years by the youth members of the tribal community.