Voices from the Deep South: The Rise of Pāṭṭu Song Cultures of South Asia

VOICES offers a new, large-scale perspective on the history of song-performing cultures of South India in premodern and colonial contexts. More than a song, pāṭṭu denotes a multitude of interrelated constellations of song traditions - a galaxy of regional song cultures. One region alone (Kerala) boasts nearly eighty song genres, many of epic proportions: from songs of heroes and places, through verses intended to awaken a deity or activate a curse, to songs of ecstatic praise. Most are embedded in recurring ritual events and are linked to matrilineal social orders and performers of subaltern roots. Some are associated with minority communities, including Christians, Muslims, and Jews.

Pāṭṭu invokes practices of deploying skills stored in songs to cure diseases, restore prosperity, empower listeners, or otherwise affect reality. From the 13th century CE on, the song genres influenced literary forms as trans-medial textuality and cultural technology for storing knowledge and generating trust. This rich universe remains understudied.

Building a digital archive, VOICES will explore the ways in which the sonic ecumene of singing the local within a shared imaginary of the South has proven resilient over centuries and embraced two languages of prestige: Tamil and Sanskrit. We shall study ontologies of singing the body, the suffering and deliverance, the humane and divine, movement and restraint in this unique subaltern record.

The project aims to advance a new understanding of the processes of identity formation at the crossroads of the literary and the folk by mapping genre distribution, narrative patterns, transmission modes and cultural economies, while identifying key moments of historical change. Fusing ethnomusicology, media and literary studies, VOICES wants to show why tracking this evolution has the potential to reveal intriguing trajectories of the formation of premodern expressive ecologies. Enriched by the optics of genre economy, the project promises new analytical tools for studying infrastructures of communication and meaning-making practices across South Asia and beyond.