109 – Literary islands of Far South : pāṭṭu and other quixotic archipelagos of songs
South Asian scholarship’s new interest in song can be seen as marked by absorbing concepts from anthropology, musicology, sound and media studies. The mutual transfer of ideas opens chances to explore afresh the relationship between “literary” and “folk”. Both have long history of incorporating song as matter and form. India's far South, with its multitude of diverse lived-in song cultures, offers a uniquely rich area of study. Its emerging vernacular literary cultures grew by absorbing, adapting and transforming expressive forms developed within largely understudied song cultures of the subaltern. They themselves changed profoundly producing a variety of hybrid (trans-medial) cultural forms. One archipelago within broader patterns of literary cultures is made by pāṭṭu-songs: local stories of inequality, devotion, and transformation. Other archipelagos equally deserve closer study.
The panel explores song cultures as complex cultural objects and unique knowledge systems. It relates the lived-in song traditions with forms recognized as literary across the ecologies of Southern vernacular idioms and languages of prestige. We welcome papers adopting new approaches including such concepts as sensorial and sonic epistemologies, embodied knowledge, media-archaeology while looking at the archipelagos of South Indian song cultures in ways that question basic assumptions about oral and written, centre and periphery. Papers on specific singing and literary cultures asking questions about their patterns of circulation, communities of practice, performers, audiences and patrons, as well as social practices that shaped their sensorial, discursive, historical or political bodies.