Musical and Cultural Interaction in Tribal Songs: A Study of Paraja
摘要
Paraja is a contemporary Indian fiction by Gopinath Mohanty, translated from Odia Classical Literature. It deals with the narratives of people from a tribal community called “Paraja” from the Koraput district of Odisha. The novel shares out exploitation of the tribal community by a non-tribal forest guard and money-lender “Sahukar,” who seeks to control the tribal way of living. The characters here create a realistic folk set in a three-dimensional landscape, like ecological balance, the suffering of the tribes, and the celebration of existence via music. Understanding folk culture generally has two main streams: one flows among the educated in the form of Vedas, Upanishads, and different branches of higher literature, and the other flows among the simple and innocent mass of people in the form of folklore. One of its parts is a folk song, particularly lip composition, spontaneous creation of the tribe with no education or academic training. However, it is a fact that while dealing with folk songs, one cannot isolate the musical element and record it or study it because all aspects of the process seem to be equally important and responsible for the process itself. This paper focused on the different folk songs of the Paraja tribe and how they acknowledge the importance of their creativity along with their cultural and traditional background. The study aims to examine the style of folksong and culture through Alan Lomax’s method of “Cantometrics” of human communication. Thus, the paper discloses the normative expressive behavior of Paraja folk songs that reveals folk performance style through human communication with culture.