Oral Traditions, Manuscripts, and Digital Preservation: A Study of Rajasthan’s Folk Music within Indian Knowledge Systems.

Abstract

The oral traditions have traditionally been viewed as a simplistic form of education, cultural accommodation and persistence, and transmission of knowledge. These traditions have resulted in the Indian Knowledge System. The folk music culture of Rajasthan, the Maand, Panihari, Phad, and folk heritage repertoires of both the Manganiyar and Langa people, are the living archives, which preserve the ancient Indian ideologies, ecological wisdom, moral uprightness, and social practices of the ecology of the desert, in it. Traditional oral pedagogy and community-based apprenticeship has been employed in the past to teach this knowledge; the existence of folk music groups in the indigenous people is now facing a grave danger due to intergenerational differences, declining patronage and urbanization. It is on this basis that the paper critically addresses the issue of digital preservation as an additional way of preserving oral wisdom in the Indian Knowledge System. The paper elaborates on how audiovisual documentation, manuscripts digitalization, local lyrical tales, metadata-based archiving, and AI-aided transcription can be employed as a tool of continuing the continuum of musically transmitted knowledge in the area without jeopardizing the cultural integrity of the area. It centers on the production of conventional custodianship, and a technology mediated pedagogical device to support access, generational transfer, and durability, which is defined through the Community Owned Digital Archive Model (CODA). The study has been conducted through a combination of qualitative and exploratory research methodology, reviewed within the lenses of Indian Knowledge System. Purposive Selection based analyzation is taken into consideration which include academic literature, policy and institutional reports, archival data, authenticated sourced studies in context to Rajasthan’s folk music traditions, oral knowledge systems, and virtual heritage preservation. A significant attention is drawn towards the traditions such as Maand, Panihari, Phad, and the rich synchronization of the music in the Manganiyar and Langa communities. In-depth thematic categorization is done to come up with the latent themes related to oral pedagogy, cultural memory, community custodianship, ecological knowledge and digital preservation within the nature and scope of the locational extent of the Rajasthan.

The main argument of the research is the interconnection between the digital interventions and the native knowledge and community input; this networking can make the folk music culture of Rajasthan more robust and the knowledge systems more pertinent as the dynamic knowledge systems in contemporary India. ...