Youtube Videos for conservation of Fading unwritten Cultures
By: Pravin Raj Joshi
Tags: Unwritten Culture, Nepali Culture, Culture Conservation, YouTube, Conservation

4 years back I visited Lung, Pyuthan in extremely rural Nepal, for a special festival that happens once every 5 years.

This festival, unknown to most of Nepal, saw over a hundred thousand people accent to the top of a steep hill and perform a ritual that has a history of atleast 500 years. Almost all of the ritual performed is passed on orally from generations to generations through priests, known as Dhami in these parts. There are no books that talk about the rituals, practices or purposes of this festival.

When I returned home, I uploaded some of the videos that I had taken of this festival. Then I searched on Youtube and found that many people had uploaded videos from different perspective of the same festival.

From last year I got into this zone of learning music of Nepal. I wanted to listen and play these tunes, as many different ones as possible. I searched around the web for written music. My expectation was that I would find books with sheet music or music written in some way. I could find just a couple of pieces in research papers on ethno-musicology. To add I could find hardly any written material even in the musical types that I had heard of.



I went to bookstores to search and all I could find were 3 books that introduced some of the types of music and dances. Storekeeper told me that these books were courses taught to music students at the Undergraduate level.

While reading these books I started to check for more material, but multiple searches in multiple search engine amounted to hardly anything. But Youtube got a lot of videos put up by people, either performing or watching in close proximity, and most often with very less views. so I started listing these videos and maintained in my blog (http://www.prjoshi.com/music-list/).

Over period of time I realized it was the same for dances, festivals and other cultural activities — they are mostly unwritten, but there are quite a few video content if one knows how to search for them.

While searching through many of music or dance varieties I kept stumbling across articles like “Karnali’s Traditional Dance Hudke Slowly Fading” and “Concern over fading folk culture in Jajarkot”. Reading through these articles repeatedly point at technological advancement, influence of western culture, people moving out of villages, older people who practiced these cultures dying and a growing lack of interest for the older culture among the youth.

I got a first hand view of this when I requested a person who lives in a village of Hudke players to get me a hudke, a double sided drum instrument. His search for 6 months nearly went futile as there were hardly any people who knew how to make it. Finally he found an old person who agreed to make it.

As we move forward more and more cultures will fade away or get merged with others with the exposure of the Internet as well as intermingling of World cultures. Unwritten ones will be lost forever.

In conversation with a Madal (Nepali drum) player from Pyuthan, he told me that before they used to play different tunes during the Teez festival. Then the madal playing got replaced by loud speakers and music players for a while. Then people from his village felt the old cultures were going away and started to revive it back after about 10 years. He said even he now plays the tunes that are more common in music videos as people demand for that. Madal may have revived, but tunes have changed. The older ones will be lost when his generation fades.

Another flute player from Eastern Nepal says now he has to mix older tunes with newer tunes to make it more acceptable by the listeners. In a journal article on Asian Music that I found online, written by P.D. Greene, a new term “Lok Pop” has been coined to this particular brand of re-organized Nepali cultural music. Lok Pop is now the music of the masses and most old cultural music players have had to shift to this style to keep playing.

Technological advancement, one of the main causes blamed for decline of old culture, may also provide a solution for the conversation of them, specially the unwritten ones.

Youtube has been a good source of putting up videos for a while now. Many people have put up videos related to their culture, activities in their villages and of festivals and ceremonies that make sense to them. People have now expanded to Facebook to put up these videos as their friends and families connect on it.

With a large population of Nepal outside for work, study, etc. Youtube, Facebook and other video upload sites provide a good way of staying connected by sharing videos. Barriers of the English language and most often even lack of education promotes people to make and upload videos.

Taking above logic I started building Viewpedia (www.viewpedia.org) as a test platform to try and collect video listing of music, dances and other activities of Nepal. Currently I have made a list of over 150 different varieties of music and dances to which there are hardly any pages on the web. I have had to do a lot of searches, have had to watch a lot of videos (currently I think I stand at around 60,000 videos that I have watched on Youtube), videos with a very few views and mostly deep down in searches. In all this there is a lot of culture, those that are fading away, made into videos that can be used for conservation.

Thinking a little it feels that other such cultures also have a lot of their unwritten content as videos and platform like Youtube can be used to create such conversation efforts.

The only thing left to think of is how to do this fast enough, so that the generation that is among the last to follow the old cultures can verify them before they pass.

Articles that I have referenced:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292862119_Nepal's_Lok_Pop_music_Representations_of_the_folk_tropes_of_memory_and_studio_technologies

https://www.jstor.org/stable/834421?seq=1 — same as above, but different link

https://myrepublica.nagariknetwork.com/news/concern-over-fading-folk-culture-in-jajarkot/

https://www.nepalisansar.com/culture/karnalis-traditional-dance-hudke-slowly-fading/

https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Nikkei-Asia-Prizes/Saving-Nepal-s-musical-instruments-from-fading-into-the-past

https://moless.gov.np/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Migration-Report-2020-English.pdf