Unbox 2013

In December 2013 we had an invitation from a designer and architects’ collective, Quicksand, to participate in Unbox ‘a young festival’, then in their third year. ‘We try and bring together diverse voices to a single space for interesting experiences and conversations spanning design, development, craft, art, performance, activism and music,’ one of their convenors, Akshay Roongta, wrote. ‘I have been using the ‘traveling archive’ website like a jukebox for some time and have been deeply interested in the process and philosophy of what you have been doing. This year we are trying a different take on things by having more ‘hands-on’ workshops and experiences. We were hoping that we could have your presence at the festival to take a workshop and participate in certain conversations about ethnomusicology, field recordings and folk traditions in general.’

The result was a field recording workshop and a presentation entitled ‘Stories in Sound: Journeying to the field with The Travelling Archive, to explore music as a lived experience and memory.’ We had already been working on the theme of migration, memory and music (search Moushumi Bhowmik Collection on the British Library’s Sound and Audio Visual Archives catalogue here). We had collected stories and songs about the migration of music of Bengal crossing the ‘seven seas and thirteen oceans’, during our field recording trips in London. There were movements of people within our region, forced or willed migrations of labour—people migrating not as individuals but as communities, which we had had glimpses of throughout our journeys, such as in the tea gardens of Sylhet way back in 2004. Participating in this festival could open up that field for us.

So, at Unbox 2013, we had decided to take workshop participants to a field recording session with some Bengali migrant workers living in Delhi/Gurgaon; later we would listen together to the recordings and draw our different meanings from them and ask our own questions.

On 9 February 2013, we went with our three workshop participants to South City II of Gurgaon, to the home of Prabhangshu, who worked as a cook in the home of our friend Sudeshna. Here we have a written response to the workshop from two of our ‘students’, Manan and Sarthak, and the video is from Gauri Sanghvi, the third member of the team.

The photos are taken by Manan and Gauri.

From the other side…

From Manan Sanghvi and Sarthak Parikh. Email sent on Sun, Mar 3, 2013 at 1:29 PM

This blog entry was taking forever, so Sarthak and I went to Banganga at midnight a few days ago to write it up. What we ended up doing however was talking about the Travelling Archives and recording it!

What we’ve finally managed to do is get it all down on paper, but we both feel that our recordings do much more justice to the amazing journey we’ve had with Sukanta and Moushumi.

We were attending the Unbox Festival in Delhi in the first week of February and Moushumi and Sukanta were conducting a Travelling Archives workshop at the festival. Although we’d been given a booklet giving details on the various workshops, we decided to head over to the Travelling Archives with absolutely no preconceptions. As we told them later, we’d joined them hoping to learn something completely different, and that’s exactly how it turned out to be!

We were small group, Moushumi, Sukanta, Gauri, Sarthak and I. We met early Saturday morning and discussed what we’d be doing in the workshop. As we started to realize what we would be doing during the day, we started appreciating the sensitivity of the assignment we had enrolled ourselves in.

Music is a very personal journey for us all. Moushumi’s and Sukanta’s musical journey, independently and as the Travelling Archives is very powerful and moving. We felt it was so much more than just archiving the folk music of Bengal. It was an expedition into the lives of people, hearing their stories, listen to their songs and feel their joy, devotion, love and longing.

We traveled to Gurgaon to meet a community of Bengali migrants who worked as domestic help and cooks in the neighborhood. We had been invited to Prabhangshu’s house, who is a cook at, Moushumi’s friend Sudeshna’s home. Along with Sudeshna, we followed Prabhangshu to his community.

They introduced us as their students, but Sarthak and I had absolutely no experience with anthropological fieldwork. Although we had joined as observers, we became involved in the discussions, with Moushumi and Sukanta doing most of the translation.For us, it was a window into a culture so rich and varied.

We met Sankar who sang songs of Radha and Krishna. We then met an old man, who had under very unfortunate circumstances migrated very recently to Gurgaon. He was a fisherman in the sunderbans, a Jatra performer and had once been a guide to botanists exploring sunderbans. He had also been jailed in Bangladesh for crossing over the maritime borders. He was so moved when he listened to Sukanta’s Jatra recordings that he started to sing and dance and cry. We could only wonder how strongly he was longing for the sunderbans and the forces that had drawn him here.

We had some great omelets, lucchi and batata bhaji prepared by Prabhangshu’s bhabhi while the discussions continued.

As we said our final goodbyes to the community and drove back to the festival, they told us how apprehensive they were in having others involved in their field work. Indeed even we realized how difficult it was to establish a bond of trust with strangers and request them to share their songs and stories with us.

I had been traveling for over a month now and when I was in Kolkata for work a few days later, Moushumi and Sukanta invited me over to dinner. I had been away from home for too long and I was travel weary and lonesome. With rum and coke by Sukanta and a meal cooked by Moushumi that reminded me of home, I felt an immense longing for home but their warmth made me feel right at home.

Maybe that is why the old man we met in Gurgaon started singing for us.

Maybe the only thing a travel weary soul yearns for is to be heard.

Maybe that is what makes the Travelling Archives so special for us.

For Sukanta & Moushumi

Manan & Sarthak.