On a voyage of discovery
BHAWANI CHEERATH
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Ethno-musicologist Laurent Aubert is Curator of the Ethnographic Museum of Geneva.
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In our interactions with the villagers, they were the master and we were the students. An exchange which was always brilliant, may be technologically poor but culturally rich.
CULTURE TRAVELLER: Laurent Aubert tries to document rituals, folk arts and oral traditions. Photo: S. Gopakumar.
"Little traditions," the music of the "other," the world and its "double," what does all this mean to the layman.
After continuous research on identities across continents, Laurent Aubert, an ethno-musicologist, tells you that it is always the question of identity, integration, transmission, safeguarding, adaptation and diffusion of the varying strains of the traditional with the contemporary.
To make it simpler he takes you to fusion - Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the African percussion and L. Subramaniam come together to give us a new music, but fusion isn't new he explains. "This sort of music is inevitable in the contemporary world. Finding common levels reduce the identity of individual music. Transgressing as well as creating at the same time would result in what is attractive to some and confusing to others."
Early influences
How did he get drawn into ethnography? Well, the golden thread was provided by music.
"Very early in my teens I used to spend my holidays with my mother in Senegal, and that gave me a feel of the African music. Then came frequent visits to uncles in Benares. I don't know whether it's by choice or it just happened. There were a lot of the images of these worlds that I carried with me. Learning the sarod for 10 years was yet another step in that direction," says Aubert.
The journeys to understand the unseen part of the culture has brought him to Kerala to experience first hand the diversity of its rituals, customs, and the fine balance between the traditional and the modern.
As Curator of the Ethnographic Museum of Geneva, documenting the memory of a tradition is a significant part of his projects in Kerala. He was in Thiruvananthapuram to inaugurate an exhibition of photographs organised by Alliance Francaise de Trivandrum in collaboration with the Embassy of France.
"The oral tradition is only an image, if there is no transmission. It therefore is essential to have archives that protect for posterity and provide the link for the younger generation," says this musician-ethnographer.
Laurent Aubert is of the view that documentaries or films on Kerala should carry as little by way of explanation so as to ensure an understanding untainted by intermediary comments.
Delving deeper into studying Pulluvanpattu, Thirayattam, Theyyam and Pavakathakali, documenting the living rituals is one way of preserving the memory of a tradition, he says.
On his fifth visit to this land of painted Gods and Goddesses he has learnt very many things from Kerala.
"In our interactions with villagers, they were the master and we were the students. An exchange which was always brilliant, may be technologically poor but culturally rich," concludes Laurent Aubert.
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