Caller tunes in Meghalaya’s Kongthong echo at Krishnakriti docu fest
Hyderabad, Jan 9: A tribal village in India’s remote northeast has its members calling out children by whistling tunes of individual distinctness, a film screened in this city revealed to the curiosity and fun of its audience.
‘Resonance of Mother’s Melody’, which featured as the first documentary at the ongoing Krishnakriti Festival of Arts and Culture, showed residents of a matrilineal Khasi hamlet in rugged Meghalaya sticking to this age-old mode of communication defined by a special tune the mother gives to her child during initial phase of breastfeeding.
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| Filmmaker Dip Bhuyan |
Kongthong, which is an agglomeration of 19 hamlets with a total of 120 households and a population of little over 550, is perhaps the only place in the country where people communicate among themselves through whistling and using different tunes to call each other, according to Dip Bhuyan, the director of the 23-minute work made in 2013 after four pre-shoot visit to the hilltop 70 km south of the state’s capital of Shillong.
“It was a young researcher who first came to know of this place and its caller tunes. She then led a group of friends to the place to explore more. She observed it and had interactions with the villagers,” recalls self-taught filmmaker Bhuyan, a native of Assam, having graduated from Cotton College in Guwahati before completing his masters in Statistics from Delhi University in 1991. “The mothers give the whistle tune, which, at a later stage of growth, gets a shorter version that is used for communication.”
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| Filmmaker Renuka George |
It is another matter that each child has otherwise a proper name, which gets registered in the neighbourhood school.
Bhuyan’s colour movie, which has won applause at screenings abroad and at Indian festivals including IFFI Goa, starts with the journey of the researcher and goes on to capture the caller tunes of Kongthang, prompting the team to arrive at certain key findings—based also on the narrative of the local headman, who estimates the village is roughly two centuries old.
A second film screened at the Krishnakriti2016 essayed the life of (late) Hindustani instrumentalist Asad Ali Khan. The 70-minute eponymous documentary made in 2010 was a distilled version of footages that ran to 60 hours after 22 days of stay in the rudra veena master’s native Rampur in Uttar Pradesh, director Renuka George said.
“The rudra veena is a difficult instrument; Khan sahib was perhaps among the last to use it in its original form,” said the filmmaker, a Delhi-based Malayali hailing from Tiruvalla in south-central Kerala. “The vajrasana posture in which you ideally sit to play the huge instrument which requires both physical and spiritual involvement is in itself a kind of penance.”
The two films at the festival were succeeded by a stage concert by ghazal vocalist Chinmayi Sripada along with pianist Anil Srinivasan of Chennai.
“For our generation, Hariharan is our icon. We all strive to sing like him,” said young playback singer Chinmayi, midway the 80-minute programme.
Added 38-year-old Anil, who is educated in the American universities of Souther California and Columbia: “It is great to use a western instrument in various genres of Indian music.”
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