“This ethnomusicological documentary is about the psychological and economic transformation of a group of untouchable (outcaste) parai frame drummers from a village in Tamil Nadu, South India. Through the lens of rarely filmed folk performances and the experience of an American ethnomusicologist who comes to study with them, we see a group of nine drummers trying to eke out a living while negotiating on going discrimination in their village. The Hindu caste system constructs them and their drum as polluted because they play for funerals. As they professionalize however, they reconstruct their performance as music and their identity as worldly. They then get an opportunity to participate in the Chennai Sangamam folk festival where their reception by urbanites further positively transforms their self-understanding. The question then becomes, can they sustain these changes back in the village? Woven throughout the film are dynamic and rare examples of village folk dances, funeral lament, and drumming as well as the voices of the drummers, local activists, who tell the story of the process of working for the economic and social liberation of the oppressed Dalits of India through developing the folk arts.
If you teach about India in your classes, using this film is a great way to expose students to a variety of Indian folk arts, to teach about the caste system, and as an example of activist ethnomusicological filmmaking. You can accompany it with the article “Activist Ethnomusicology and Marginalized Music of South Asia,” from the Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology, edited by Pettan and Titon, 2015. The film is available for purchase by emailing me: zsherinian@ou.edu. It will also be available for streaming by mid-2017 with Alexander Street Press.
“
