Mobile Folklorists Jim Ankan Deka and Tse Ring La Travel to Remote Corners to Record Forgotten Folk Songs
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| Tse Ring La & Jim Ankan Deka with Folk Singer Rangtu Ronrang (middle) |
How Jim Ankan Deka and Tse Ring La are travelling across Northeast India to document the songs, stories and people behind a living musical heritage.
A folk song can travel for generations without ever being written down.
It can live in the memory of an elder, pass from one singer to another, accompany a harvest, a ritual, a journey or a celebration, and remain part of a community's collective memory without ever entering a recording studio.
But what happens when the person who remembers it is gone?
What happens when a language begins to disappear, when younger generations no longer learn the old songs, or when a tradition that once belonged to an entire community survives in the memory of only one or two people?
This question lies at the heart of a growing body of work by Jim Ankan Deka and filmmaker Tse Ring La.
Together, they are developing an approach they call the Mobile Folklorist - travelling into remote and interior communities with cameras, microphones and a compact recording setup to document traditional music where it is still alive.
Their philosophy is simple:
Instead of bringing folk music into a studio, bring the studio to the folk.
From Music Malt to the field
The idea has deep roots in the philosophy of Music Malt.
Music Malt Studios was founded in Bengaluru in 2012 by musician and producer Jim Ankan Deka. From its early years, the studio's work extended beyond conventional studio walls, taking recording facilities into villages and interior places and giving folk and traditional musicians the opportunity to record in their own surroundings.
Over the years, Music Malt's work has continued to explore the meeting point between contemporary music production and traditional musical cultures.
Projects such as Music Malt Live Sessions have brought musicians and older Assamese songs and folk melodies into contemporary listening spaces.
But the work was gradually moving somewhere else.
Instead of asking, Who can we bring into the studio?
The question became:
Who is still singing out there - and where can we find them?
That question takes the recording process far beyond the studio.
It takes it onto mountain roads, into forests and villages, across difficult terrain and into communities that may have little or no representation in the conventional music industry.
And that is where the idea of the Mobile Folklorist begins.
The studio travels
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| Jim setting up the travel studio at a village |
There is no permanent studio in this kind of fieldwork.
The equipment travels.
So do the people behind it.
Jim Ankan Deka brings his experience as a musician, composer, producer and recording professional. Tse Ring La brings filmmaking and visual storytelling into the process.
Together, they travel in search of traditional singers, musicians and knowledge holders.
Sometimes the journey begins with a local contact. Sometimes it is a recommendation from someone in a village. Sometimes one singer leads them to another.
And sometimes a song is discovered simply because someone says:
“There is an old person here who still knows this song.”
That sentence can lead to an entire journey.
More than recording a song
The objective is not simply to make an audio recording.
A song is only one part of the story.
The Mobile Folklorists try to understand the person who sings it, the community they belong to and the circumstances in which the song has traditionally existed.
Who taught the singer?
What does the song mean?
When is it performed?
What language is it sung in?
Is it connected to agriculture, ritual, war, prayer, celebration, courtship or everyday life?
Who else remembers it?
And perhaps most importantly:
Will anyone still remember it twenty or fifty years from now?
These questions transform a recording session into a piece of cultural documentation.
The singer's voice becomes an archive.
But so does the story behind the voice.
The landscape is part of the recording
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| Folk singer Tusam Longri with Jim Ankan Deka at Khamdu Village near Jairampur, Arunachal Pradesh |
One of the defining characteristics of this work is that the musicians are not removed from their surroundings.
They are recorded where their traditions actually live.
A village house can become the recording space.
A courtyard can become a performance space.
The surrounding mountains, forests, fields, homes, people and everyday sounds become part of the visual and sonic environment.
This matters because traditional music rarely exists separately from the life of a community.
A song may have been created for a particular season.
A melody may be connected to a ritual.
A rhythm may accompany agricultural work.
A particular verse may contain a memory of an event.
The environment therefore becomes part of the documentation.
The objective is not to create a polished studio version that removes the imperfections of the original setting.
It is to preserve something of the place in which the song still lives.
When the singer may be the archive
Among the most powerful encounters are those in which a traditional song has survived through very few people.
There may be no written notation.
No published lyrics.
No commercial recording.
No searchable archive.
There may simply be a person who remembers.
In such situations, documenting the singer becomes more than recording a performance.
It becomes an attempt to preserve a piece of knowledge before it disappears from living memory.
And this is where the work becomes particularly urgent.
Northeast India is home to extraordinary linguistic and cultural diversity. Its traditional music reflects the histories, environments and identities of dozens of communities.
But cultural traditions do not exist outside time.
Languages change.
Communities change.
Musical preferences change.
Younger generations migrate.
Old rituals may be performed less frequently.
And oral traditions can become increasingly fragile when the chain of transmission between generations weakens.
The Mobile Folklorists cannot stop that process.
But they can document what exists.
From folk song to documentary
The work does not end when the recording is finished.
The journey itself becomes part of the story.
The films document the road to the community, the people encountered along the way, the search for the singer and the circumstances surrounding the recording.
The audience is therefore invited into more than a performance.
They see the place.
They meet the singer.
They learn about the song.
They discover its meaning.
And they experience something of the journey that made the recording possible.
This transforms the traditional music recording into a form of travel documentary, field recording and cultural storytelling.
A viewer may begin by listening to a song.
But by the end, they may know something about the community that created it.
Documenting living culture
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| Tse Ring La with female folk artists of Manmao village in Arunachal Pradesh |
There is an important distinction in this approach.
The Mobile Folklorists are not attempting to present traditional communities as frozen remnants of the past.
They are documenting living culture.
Folk traditions change.
Songs are adapted.
Languages evolve.
Performers interpret old material in new ways.
Communities negotiate between inherited traditions and contemporary life.
That is part of the story too.
The purpose of documentation is therefore not to decide what is “pure” or “authentic.”
It is to listen carefully to what people themselves carry, remember and choose to share.
The singer is not merely a performer.
They are a knowledge holder.
And the recording becomes a bridge between that knowledge and generations who may otherwise never encounter it.
A museum without walls
This philosophy also gives meaning to the larger idea of a Mobile Folklorist Museum.
A conventional museum gathers objects into a physical building.
The Mobile Folklorist works differently.
The archive travels to the community.
Instead of removing a cultural expression from its environment, the documentation is created within that environment and can later travel digitally to audiences everywhere.
The museum has no fixed walls.
Its exhibits can be voices.
Songs.
Stories.
Languages.
Faces.
Landscapes.
Memories.
And journeys.
Its collection is not made up of objects that have been taken away from their communities.
It is made up of recordings that allow people to encounter those communities without erasing the context from which the recordings came.
An archive for the future
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| Tse Ring La (right), Jim Ankan Deka and intern Bullo Tunu with folk singer Lungtu Musang and other people from Manmao village in Arunachal Pradesh |
The value of this work extends beyond music.
These recordings can become resources for researchers, musicians, filmmakers, educators, students, cultural practitioners and future generations.
A researcher may hear a language that is becoming less commonly spoken.
A young musician may discover a melody from their own region.
A student may hear the voice of a singer from a generation they never had the opportunity to meet.
A filmmaker may discover a story.
And a community member may simply hear the voice of an ancestor's generation.
That is the power of an archive.
It allows the present to speak to the future.
The journey is part of the archive
Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of the Mobile Folklorist project is that the archive does not begin when the microphone is switched on.
It begins much earlier.
It begins with the journey.
The road into the village.
The person who provides a name.
The conversation that leads to a singer.
The search for someone who remembers the lyrics.
The walk to a house.
The first conversation.
The preparation of the recording equipment.
The moment when the singer finally begins.
All of these things form part of the story.
Because sometimes the most important part of a song is not simply what is sung.
It is who remembers it, where it survived, and how it was found.
The Mobile Folklorist
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| Folk singer Guru Pema Tashi Trangpodar with Jim Ankan Deka in Morshing, Arunachal Pradesh |
For Jim Ankan Deka and Tse Ring La, the term Mobile Folklorists is therefore more than a description of travelling with recording equipment.
It represents a way of working.
They travel to the tradition rather than asking the tradition to travel to them.
They listen before they record.
They document the singer as well as the song.
They film the landscape as well as the performance.
And they treat the journey as part of the story.
In doing so, their work sits at the intersection of music, filmmaking, travel, field recording, oral history and cultural preservation.
It is an extension of a philosophy that has long been part of Music Malt's work: making space for music and musicians outside conventional boundaries.
Only now, the boundaries are much farther away.
Beyond the studio.
Beyond the city.
Beyond the familiar.
Into the villages, mountains and communities where songs still live in memory.
And perhaps that is the simplest way to describe the Mobile Folklorist:
A person who travels with a studio, but whose real purpose is to listen.
Because somewhere in a remote corner of Northeast India, there may still be a song that exists only in the memory of one person.
The Mobile Folklorists are trying to find it before the silence does.