Musical Cosmology of Santal

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In India, there are 573 tribes of varied nature. But it is the Santal of Proto Australoid origin who drew attention of the administration, missionaries and academicians from different corners of the world for their revolutionary stance against the British. The Santal became their subject of portrayal. They were labeled also as hedonistic. However, very few scholars could probe deeply into their cosmic-view.

The present study is an attempt in this regard, analyzing and placing their musical repertoire in a broader context of cosmology. Apart from introducing the subject of musical cosmology Prof. Onkar Prasad places the entire corpus of the data under the chapters entitled Rhyming the Creation, Rhyming the Body Cosmology, Rhyming the Generative Cosmology, Rhyming to Spirits and Drumming the Cosmic Rhythm.

Prof. Onkar Prasad has been among the foremost scholars in India working on cosmological dimension specially, of the Santal music which demands an approach not of unilinear but multi and interdisciplinary nature.

Onkar Prasad (b.1948) is an anthropologist and ethnomusicologist. He was formerly Professor at the Dept. of Anthropology and Dean, Vidya Bhavan (Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences), Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, West Bengal. Among his major works are Folk Music and Folk Dances of Banaras reprinted in 2010 by The Anthropological Survey of India, Kolkata; Santal Music: A Study in Pattern and Process of Cultural Persistence reprinted in 2013 by Inter-India Publications, New Delhi and Methods of Raga Formation and Music Analysis (jointly with his teacher, Prof. Mohan Singh Khangura,a music maestro) published in 2015 by Parampara, Kolkata. He has developed a special field of research under the rubric Anthropology of Sound (Sonic Anthropology) and is credited for nurturing Creative Anthropology. Introduction of Auto Graphic Method and Anthropophilosophic Perspective are among his recent additions to the field of Social-Cultural Anthropology.