Find out information about the music dance society and culture of any tribe of india
Answers
Answer:
“Tribal, Folk and Devotional Music”
by NA Jairazbhoy in AL Basham (ed.). A Cultural History of India. London: Oxford University Press, 1975, pp. 234-237. Excerpt from Chapter XVI Music (pp. 212-242):
Classical music is the most refined and sophisticated music to be found in the subcontinent of India. There are many other forms, however, which have a specific function in the society, and these are by no means devoid of artistic expression. The great diversity of music in India is a direct manifestation of the diversity and fragmentation of the population in terms of race, religion, language, and other aspects of culture. The process of acculturation, so accelerated in modern times, is still not a very significant factor in many areas of the country. There remain remote pockets where tribal societies continue to live much as they have done for centuries. Even though some of these may show evidence of borrowing from higher cultures, they nevertheless manage to assimilate these elements into their own culture in such a way as to enhance their own identity.
There are more than a hundred different tribes in India, numbering more than 30,000,000 people, called Adivasis. They are found mostly in the hill regions, particularly in central and eastern India, extending to the Nilgiri Hills in the south. Racially, most of these tribes have been described as Proto-Australoid, and their religions as being animistic. Between them, they create a considerable variety of music, some of it tonally quite simple and involving only two or three notes, and some using as much as a full octave, usually pentatonic. Most of their music is monophonic, with the exception of the tribes in Manipur, Assam, where a simple form of polyphony is quite common.