Folklore And Intangible Cultural Heritage

To know India is to know its living traditions or in other words its ‘lok sanskriti’, called folklore in modern parlance. The Janapada Sampada Division focuses precisely on this rich and variegated stream of India’s cultural heritage, the bearers and repositories  of which are the folk, rural, tribal and other small scale communities of India whether living in villages, towns or on peripheries of mega cities. These traditions manifest themselves through oral, aural, visual and kinetic aesthetic expressions and are deeply rooted in seasonal, agrarian, ritual and festival and ceremonial calendars of communities. They play a vital role in the formation of cultural identities of specific groups on the one hand and of the Nation as a whole on the other.  It is also these traditions, which have travelled far and wide establishing cultural dialogues with countries lying outside its geographic boundaries thereby creating a cultural geography of the entire subcontinent.

Today under the onslaught of technification, globalization, displacement and migration these traditions, lifestyles and communities are disappearing. With this are vanishing the arts, crafts, skills, methods of resource management and conflict resolution. Though various initiatives are being launched by the Government, there is not enough skilled and trained cadre to take care of India’s cultural institutions, cultural industries and cultural management.  That apart, the Indian youth is today is unaware of rich and variegated cultural heritage and one singular reason for this is our educational system, which has failed to take into account this vast area of nation’s heritage. There is hardly any university in India, barring a few in the south, which offers any meaningful programme on India’s folklore heritage. Another fallout of this faulty education system has been the disappearance of traditional Indian epistemological approaches on the one hand and a lack of building up an Indian school of thought. Even in those few departments where folklore is being taught the emphasis is on western and European epistemologies and methodologies. To fill this huge academic gap and to prepare a skilled cadre, who will be able to take forward research as well as help frame viable policies to integrate culture as a major resource in the mainstream development programmes.

The present course will introduce the students to both Indian and western perspectives on what constitute folk and what defines its heritage or folklore in other words. It will introduce the students to different communities of India and different genres of Indian folklore. It will also introduce the students to document, archive, and digitalize cultural forms and artifacts. The focus will be on both theoretical and practical aspects of documentation, preservation, conservation and safeguarding of folklore and ICH in a holistic and context sensitive framework including the issues concerning intellectual property rights.

One of the major concerns of the course will be to introduce the students with Indian concepts and writings of great Indian thinkers on folklore.

In contemporary times the term ICH has acquired popularity and new meaningfulness due the adaptation by UNESCO of the conventions on safeguarding Folklore and Safeguarding ICH. The students would be introduced to the UNESCO conventions, and its various programmes related to ICH. They will be trained in preparing ICH dossiers, national inventories and registers for ICH. This will enable them to utilize their skills in various projects on ICH both by UNESCO and the Government of India. The course will raise a capable future cadre for the Cultural Heritage management for IGNCA and other such institutions.

Structure
The course will be module based and the students would be assessed at the end of the course through written examination.

Language of Instruction.
It will be bilingual. While some modules will be in English while others in Hindi.

Faculty
Some of the best scholars of Folkore in India would be conducting these courses. Along with regular online classes special on lectures by eminent scholars, practitioners, artists on different topics connected to the course will be organised

Course Instructor
Dr. Molly Kaushal
Prof. Performance Studies and
Hod, Janapada Sampada, IGNCA

Modules

Module 1 – Defining Folklore and Folkloristics

• Introduction to Folklore and ways of Studying Folklore
• Introduction to Indian Folkore and its Genres
• Indian Discourse on Folklore

 

Module 2 –  Performance Traditions

• Indian Narrative and Sung Traditions
• Heritage Of the Epics
•  Indian Folk Theatre
• Puppetry and Masked Performance Traditions

 

Module 3 – Arts and Crafts Tradition

• Indian Folk Painting Tradition
• Indian Votive Art Forms
• Indian Textiles

 

Module 4 – Wisdom Traditions and Healing Practices

• Traditional Practices in Resource Management and Ecological Wisdom
• Concept of Body and Man Nature Symbiosis
• Folk Healing Practices

 

Module 5 – Safeguarding Folklore

• UNESCO and ICH
• Archiving, Accessioning and Cataloguing
• Field Work and Ethnographic Audio Visual Documentation