What does it take to learn a song and pass it on? Direct experience is often primary: a singer hears a song performed by another, repeats it, and masters it; in this way, a song moves as oral, embodied knowledge from one person to another, and from one generation to the next. Yet the transmission of embodied knowledge can be facilitated, transformed, or even supplanted by disembodied forms. Written texts and musical notation make it possible to pass on a song independent of a singer's physical presence. Radio, phonograph, and digital media can transmit a song through the virtual presence of a singer, even at a great remove in space or time. Mouth and ear, stylus and parchment, microphone and tape recorder, smartphone and Internet—though the medium may change with technology or circumstance, the song remains the same. Or does it? To what extent do innovations in technologies of transmission transform traditional knowledge?
Some leading theorists of knowledge and technology have polarized orality and literacy in their efforts to explain how transmission and media affect the scope of traditional knowledge: thus Jack Goody's influential "literacy thesis" posits a causal link between the technology of writing and the advent of complex thought, arguing that certain forms of reasoning and knowledge production are precluded by strictly oral transmission (; , ). Meanwhile, Walter Ong () places societies on a continuum with orality and literacy at either pole, allowing for some hybridization (for instance, the "secondary orality" of sonic media) but nevertheless attributing a tremendous agency to written culture in the emergence of complex knowledge forms. To a large extent, this polarity between "the oral" and "the written" has been linked to a corresponding polarity between fluid and fixed forms of knowledge, with fluidity connoting orality and multiformity, and fixity connoting literacy and precision. Yet traditional forms of knowledge in India have tended to trouble such theories, and Indologists have pushed back against the arguments of Goody and Ong by adducing examples of highly complex, rational forms of knowledge composed and fixed by entirely oral means (; ; ); the foremost counterexample is the massive and ancient corpus of Sanskrit texts discussed in this study, the Vedas. Recently, Annette Wilke and Oliver Moebus () have reframed the debate by proposing sonality, the sounding of oral or written texts, as a "third space habitus" for transcending the dichotomy of orality and literacy in the study of Indian traditional knowledge; sonic cultures, they argue, whether transmitted by mouth, writing, or some other means, produce texts and knowledge forms of great complexity and scope. In its own small way, the case study below validates Wilke and Moebus's efforts to destabilize the entrenched polarities between orality/literacy and fluidity/fixity, showing how an archaic, fixed oral tradition—one that has consistently eschewed literary technologies in its transmission practices—embraces new digital technologies that enable the faithful replication of sound and gesture.
In what follows, I focus on the intersection of human bodies and digital technology in the transmission of the most ancient and esoteric (surviving) South Asian musical culture, the Jaiminīya Sāmaveda, among a regional sub-group of India's priestly Brahmincaste, the Nambudiris of Kerala. In particular, I explore how digital technology has strengthened one elderly teacher's authority in a fragile line of transmission, making it possible to pass on a musical repertoire on the verge of being forgotten. The pedagogical paradigm in this tradition—as in so many Indian traditions—is oral, face-to-face transmission from a "teacher" (guru) to a "student" (śiṣya), with a curriculum that takes years to complete. The central aim of this paper is to understand what happens when a flesh-and-blood teacher in a staunchly oral tradition innovates by consulting a digital archive of recorded performances to buttress his expertise. How is traditional knowledge transformed by innovations in technology? What are the implications for textual, pedagogical, and ritual authority when the human guru encounters the digital guru?
THE HUMAN GURU: PANJAL, KERALA (JULY 2010)
Sreejith, a student in his late twenties, sits with his legs crossed on the polished red concrete floor of his teacher's house. It is a small, enclosed porch on an erstwhile granary for the rice harvest that also serves as a private residence. A double door and two windows, wooden shutters closed, are set into pale blue stucco on the inner wall. Against this wall adorned by a mirror, a calendar, and a poster of the Hindu goddess Durga, there is an antique cot with no bedding. Two brown short-sleeved shirts, several towels, and a half-dozen muṇḍus—cotton garments worn wrapped around the waist—hang from a bar overhead. A wardrobe with books on top and two duffel bags make up the rest of the scant furnishings. Across from Sreejith, looking down on him slightly from a red plastic chair, sits his teacher Vasudevan, a man of eighty wearing bifocals and a digital watch. Shirtless and clad in a white muṇḍu, each man wears over his left shoulder and across his chest the sacred thread (Sanskrit yajñopavīta, Malayalam pūṇūl) that is the mark of the initiated Brahmin man.
I first met Vasudevan a month prior, in mid-June 2010, when the scholar Thennilapuram Mahadevan—also a Brahmin from Kerala, but of Tamil extraction—brought me to the village of Panjal, Kerala, to hear Vasudevan chant with his older brother. Having spent my early years in grad school studying the philology and history of Sāmavedic texts in the rare Jaiminīya tradition, I was keen to hear these texts in performance and learn more about surviving Sāmavedic cultures in South India. Over the next five weeks, guided by Mahadevan, I met, observed, and interviewed most of the few practitioners of Jaiminīya Sāmaveda still active in Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Focusing on techniques of transmission, I also made audio- and video-recordings of them teaching their students. In the course of my travels, I met Sreejith in a Nambudiri boarding school in Thrissur, where—although still a student himself—he had recently become employed teaching Sāmaveda to two boys. Now, coming to the end of my trip, I returned to Vasudevan's house, this time without Mahadevan; I was eager to observe him teaching Sreejith, reputed to be a talented and devoted student.
Just outside the room in the open air, I record the lesson with my video camera and audio recorder set up in the doorway. There is no space for me inside, and anyway I feel some constraint at intruding too closely on this intense, mirror-like exchange. Seated face-to-face, eyes fixed on one another as they sing, Vasudevan and Sreejith make identical nodding movements with their heads, as well as identical gestures with their right forearms, hands, and fingers. The lesson consists of several rounds of call-and-response, unfolding in a sequence that quickly becomes familiar: Vasudevan recites the Sanskrit lyrics without the melody, and Sreejith echoes him. Vasudevan corrects him as necessary in Malayalam and then moves on to a complete iteration of the song, combining lyrics and melody, which Sreejith repeats. Sometimes they run through it again together, or else Vasudevan just listens, interrupting occasionally to refine the student's performance. A single section of the song is passed back and forth in this fashion over the course of several minutes: recited, repeated, corrected; sung, repeated, confirmed. Other chunks follow this, until the whole song has been learned.
The art of Sāmaveda lies in uniting a melody (sāman) with a verse (ṛc); the union of the two—interpolated with fragments of words, phrases, sentences, and non-lexical syllables (stobha)—is called a song (Sanskrit gāna, Malayalam ōṭṭu). Practitioners call the musical contour of a given melody the svara (tone). Each melody with its distinctive svara may be sung to different verses and permutations of stobhas, resulting in the thousands of different gānas that make up the Sāmavedic repertoire. The "songs" of the Sāmaveda are quite different in form and function from songs as conventionally described in folklore, anthropology, religious studies, and other disciplines: they are neither heroic epics (), nor poems composed in performance (), nor expressive folksongs (), nor charismatic verses with instrumental accompaniment (). Moreover, Sāmavedic songs are taught not as fluid multiforms, but as definitive versions: the teacher's aim is to pass on the verses and melodies exactly as he learned them, and exactly as they have always been sung (more on this in the next section). Thus one might object that what Vasudevan is teaching Sreejith is not a "song" at all, but something quite different. All the same, I insist on this term for several reasons: first, the English word "song" generically refers to the union of words and melody; next, such a sense of "song" accurately translates the emic words in question (Sanskrit gāna, Malayalam ōṭṭu), which refer technically to the union of verse (ṛc) and melody (sāman); and finally, using "song" accentuates the explicitly musical nature of the Sāmavedic repertoire as opposed to the many other forms of text in the Vedic corpus, which include poetry, formulas, and prose.
On this day Vasudevan and Sreejith work on a song in praise of the storm-god Indra:
indram it gāthino bṛhat / indram arkāyibhīr ārkiṇaḥ / āyindraṃ vāṇīr hā hā / anūṣatā / hoyiḻā //
As given above, this lyric incorporates musical modifications—including the chopping up of words and the insertion of non-lexical syllables (stobha)—of the underlying verse. Rendered into English, the modified lyrics might run something like this: "Just to Indra have the singers bellowed aloft, to Indra the chanters with their cha-yants, to I-yindra their voices, hā hā, hoyiḻā."
A video clip ( ) contains a montage of the footage I took that day and reveals an entirely embodied flow of knowledge from one person to another, without written materials or teaching aids.
Several details should be emphasized. First is the way Vasudevan pauses and emphatically enunciates the words to make sure that his student articulates them with precision. Second is the gestures: whether singing out loud or sitting in silence while listening to one another, both men continuously make their hands swoop and dive, as if sculpting the melody in the air between them. Third is how the student aims to completely reproduce the substance and nuance of the teacher's performance—his posture, his movements, his voice. As they pass sections of the song back and forth, the two men fuse as if into a single body and its reflection, or into a single voice and its echo.
After working through two or three such sequences, the lesson ends. Vasudevan's wife greets us and we all chat in English about the rubber harvest and other matters of agricultural administration around their small family estate. I bid Sreejith goodbye in the driveway as he buttons up his shirt, slips on his sandals, and starts up his motorcycle, a vintage Enfield Bullet. It's four p.m. and he has a long rush-hour commute ahead of him: a two-hour drive back to the nearest city, Thrissur, where he must get some rest before rising to begin his own teaching the next morning at dawn. Although it is unorthodox for a current student like him to teach in his own right, he explains that the urgency of reviving these traditions is such that Vasudevan pressed him to take up the task. "He is my guru..." Sreejith adds, then trails off, implying through his silence that he must unquestioningly follow Vasudevan's direction.
The total obedience of the student to his teacher, as well as the intensity of the affective bond that takes shape between them over years of study, is encoded in the Sanskrit word guru. Literally, gurumeans "heavy," and its applied meaning of "teacher" retains a weighty resonance. As Minoru Hara observes, the guruis "a personal and subjective master...[and] the relation between guruand pupil (śiṣya) is a rather emotional one. Devotion and obedience are the media which tie one to the other" ( , 104). Hara differentiates gurufrom another Sanskrit word for teacher, ācārya, arguing that ācārya is a teacher in a generalized, institutional sense, while gurudesignates one's own particular teacher, a "heavy" figure in the student's life, inspiring veneration, awe, and dedication. In terms of chronology, Hara shows that ācārya is the older word, attested in the Vedas and associated with the objective and authoritative transmission of Vedic knowledge, while guru is younger, attested in post-Vedic theistic and renunciatory traditions and linked with the subjective and personal bond between teacher and student (, 93–94, 98–99). From this perspective, the two terms signal the difference between a fixed and authoritative mode of teaching and learning (captured by ācārya) and the fluid and accommodative practices demanded in the rapidly changing contexts of everyday life (guru). Whether or not such historical distinctions directly inform Sreejith's usage, the fact remains that although Vasudevan and his lineage as teachers of Sāmaveda are formally classified as ācāryas in the Nambudiri community (see below), Sreejith routinely refers to Vasudevan in informal conversation as his guru. Given the role that affect and emotion ultimately play in the outcome of Sreejith's learning, his use of this term may be an acknowledgment of the personal bond that undergirds their formal pedagogical relationship.
THE VEDAS AND VEDIC TRADITIONS
Orally composed almost three thousand years ago in northern India in an archaic form of Sanskrit (ca. 1200–600 BCE; , ), the Vedas (from Sanskrit veda,knowledge) are South Asia's oldest known corpus of texts and rituals (). The core texts of the corpus are the ancient mantra collections (saṃhitā), which contain thousands of mantras, Sanskrit texts of various types—metrical, musical, and otherwise (on mantra, see ; ). Layered on top of these collections are prose discourses about the meanings of mantras and rites (brāhmaṇa, āraṇyaka), metaphysical discussions about the self and soteriology (upaniṣad), and codifications of ritual praxis (sūtra). While there are four Vedas in all, threeof them—the Ṛgveda with its verses (ṛc), the Sāmavedawith its melodies (sāman), and the Yajurveda with its formulas (yajus)—have been distinguished by their deployment in sacrifice (yajña), the preeminent ritual institution of ancient Vedic culture. As a result, this "threefold wisdom" (trayī vidyā, Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa6.3.1.20; ), as Vedic texts frequently term the triad of ṛc, sāman, and yajus, has long been promoted at the expense of the somewhat marginalized fourth Veda, the Atharvaveda.
Conceived as a unitary corpus, the Vedas have been regarded by many Hindus over the centuries as foundational, authoritative, and even divinely revealed. Within some strands of Hindu theology, for instance, the Veda is "not of human origin" (apauruṣeya; see Pūrvamīmāṃsāsūtra 1.1.27–32 in ; , 19). Instead it is śruti (literally "that which is heard"; but more idiomatically, "learning by hearing" [ or "holy hearing" [), a form of auditory revelation granted to sages of the primeval past but capable of actualization in the present through the sounding of mantras. As such, the Vedic paradigm of knowledge has been influential in shaping Hindu "sonic theology" () and "acoustic piety" (). Moreover, the authority of the Vedas and Vedic ontologies and epistemologies have been central to broader linguistic, religious, philosophical, and literary currents in premodern India, involving not only Hindus but also Buddhists, Jains, and exponents of other traditions.
From the diachronic point of view, however, the Vedas did not form a canon in the sense of a single corpus—rather, as the pioneering research of Michael Witzel has shown, there is substantial evidence for Vedic canons, definitive recensions of oral texts in use by the Brahmins of a particular tribe or area (, 260; cf. for other perspectives on Vedic authority and canon). Such groups are the genesis of the Vedic "branches" (śākhā) in the ancient period—localized, hereditary lineages of Brahmins made up of specialists in a particular Veda and Vedic liturgy (; , , ). While exhibiting idiosyncrasies in language, hermeneutics, and praxis, these branches nevertheless partook in a widely shared textual, ritual, and religious culture that we may now broadly construe as Vedic—a culture that has persisted, in shifting forms, up to the present day.
Although manuscripts and printed editions have played a significant role in the wider dissemination of the Vedas in South Asia, orthodox Vedic transmission within the branches and across the centuries has been predominantly oral, motivated by an ideal of total fidelity to the definitive oral text: the corpus must be passed on with complete precision, with every syllable of every mantra intoned exactly as it always has been (; ). In this respect, orthodox Vedic transmission constitutes a fixed oral tradition and thus defies the boundaries of the academic category of "oral tradition," which most scholars since Albert Lord have predicated on some degree of fluidity. The ideal Vedic transmission favors the reproduction of completely fixed sounds and sequences over the generation of fluid variants and multiforms. While this orientation has often led practitioners to engage with the forms of mantras and rites first and their meanings only secondarily, it does not follow that Vedic mantras and rites, as provocatively claimed by Frits Staal, are necessarily "meaningless" ()—a rich emic tradition of interpretation, commentary, and linguistic inquiry attests otherwise. All the same, it is a fact that as the strength of Vedic oral traditions has dwindled over the centuries, practitioners have often chosen to focus on the faithful transmission of the oldest, most authoritative Vedic works, which are the mantra collections, and on the sounds of the mantras above all, with scant attention to their meaning.
EMBODIMENT, THE BODY AS TECHNOLOGY, AND THE "EMBODIED ARCHIVE"
As the above summary suggests, the rigorously and remarkably well-preserved textual and ritual cultures represented by Vedic traditions, as well as the broader sacral and religious value attributed to the mantras themselves, motivate a highly specific conceptualization of what it means to learn, transmit, or perform the elements of the corpus. Embodimentis a key factor: the practitioner learns, transmits, or performs the Veda by quite literally embodying it. This idea of a Brahmin being essentially identical with the texts he transmits has ancient roots. An aphorism in one of the oldest works of Vedic prose, composed ca. 1000 BCE, suggests that once a Brahmin has learned the Veda, his textual parentage supersedes even his biological parentage (Maitrāyaṇī Saṃhitā 4.8.1): "Why ask after a Brahmin's father or mother? If one understands the Veda to be existing in him, that is his father, that is his grandfather." And the very same idea persists today, as Borayin Larios (; ) has shown for modern Vedic traditions in Maharashtra: the Vedic practitioner, dubbed vedamūrti or "embodiment of the Veda," wields his authority in pedagogy and performance by embodying the texts he has mastered.
In service to this ideal of embodying a fixed text over many generations, Vedic transmission is rigidly circumscribed by hereditary, social, and pedagogical factors. To learn the Veda in the orthodox sense, teacher and student must be initiated Brahmins with a tradition of Vedic study extending back along the male line, and they must engage in many years of rigorous, face-to-face oral instruction. Vedic oral traditions overwhelmingly exhibit what I have elsewhere termed an "ideology of normative transmission" ()—a commitment to fixed orality, patrilineal descent, and specific types of Brahmanical socialization. This stance has fostered the continuity of recitation and ritual within a number of regional communities of vaidika ("Vedic") Brahmins from the ancient period up through the present day, a remarkable record with few parallels in human history (; ; ; ; ; ).
Noting the success of this long-running enterprise, Witzel has argued that certain forms of modern recitation present us with the embodied equivalent of "tape recordings" of Vedic mantras from the ancient period (, 258, 263). To achieve this replication of sound and text, Brahmins made use above all of their own bodies, developing an array of mnemonic techniques and somatic tools to assure precise transmission over long spans of time. As Staal has observed: "The eternity of mantras was not a transcendental or disembodied affair, but had to be realized by human means and depended for its continued realization on human instruments" (, 7). For instance, once the canonical forms of the mantras have been absorbed, advanced students learn to separate, invert, and otherwise reorder the constituent syllables in virtuosic feats of memory that promote mastery over the material (, 42–49; , 17–19). In addition, phonetic, metrical, and musical features of the text may be reinforced and internalized through head and hand movements. In Nambudiri Sāmaveda, as we saw above, practitioners deploy "hand-showing" (Malayalam kai-kāṭṭuka), a system of gestures that conveys the pitch, melodic contour, and rhythm of the song (, 220–48; , 451–52, 451n36). This gestural idiom, which has affinities with the more widespread use of "hand-signs" (Sanskrit mudrā)in many Sanskritic performance traditions (, 1: 359–75; ), is so precise that even signing in silence, without sound, is enough to convey a song in all its intricacy. As such, hand-showing obviates the need for a written system of musical notation, which the Nambudiris do not possess. The gestural idiom itself becomes a sort of somatic notation, inscribed through the movements of the body. It is notable that bearers of Jaiminīya traditions among Tamil Brahmin communities, who have their own oral and gestural traditions of the Jaiminīya repertoire (along with written notation), recognize Nambudiri Jaiminīya chanting and gestureas distinct (, 453; for literature on the Tamil Jaiminīyas, see ).
Thus Vedic transmission, as practiced by the Nambudiri Brahmins and by other Brahmin communities, is not merely oral: it is a fully embodied practice that makes use of the mind, eyes, ears, mouth, hands, and fingers all together, with the overarching aim of guaranteeing the mantra's eternity as precisely as the machinery of the human body will allow. The body is the technology, with no need for written, mechanical, or digital aids. Brahmins like Vasudevan and Sreejith who teach and learn traditions in this way are a veritable embodied archive of traditions. This embodied archive has been replicated generation after generation through the intensely rigorous transmission of knowledge from teacher to student. As we will see below, digital technology may offer new possibilities for assisting the replication of such archives, especially when the human bearers of tradition become unreliable or unavailable.
NAMBUDIRI BRAHMINS AND VEDIC TRADITIONS
Thennilapuram Mahadevan has spoken of the Brahmin's embodiment of his knowledge as the "human oral agency" of the Vedas (, 3; , 4–5), emphasizing the way given Brahmanical populations and their proprietary textual traditions have moved in tandem as a unified agency throughout the history of the subcontinent. This is evident in the epigraphic record, where the movements of Brahmin families, explicitly identified as experts belonging to particular Vedic branches, can be traced through deeds and land grants (; ; ). Broadly, the arc of their migrations moves east from the Vedic homeland in northwestern India in the first millennium BCE, then south into peninsular India (), where groups of Brahmins prospered under the patronage of south Indian kings over many centuries during the first millennium CE. Among these early arrivals in the south were the Nambudiri Brahmins, although the circumstances and dating of their entry into Kerala remain contested. Settling on the southwestern coast along the Arabian Sea in what is now the modern Indian state of Kerala, they soon established themselves as powerful landholders. The Nambudiris brought with them an impressive suite of Vedic textual and ritual expertise, organized into several different branches: the Kauṣītakaand Āśvalāyana belonging to the Ṛgveda; the Taittirīyaand Vādhūlabelonging to the Yajurveda; and the Jaiminīyabelonging to the Sāmaveda. Of these, the Kauṣītakins, Āśvalāyanas, and Taittirīyakas were well represented, while the Vādhūlas and Jaiminīyas came in much smaller numbers (, 1: 171–72). As a consequence, the former groups boast reasonably robust recitation traditions today, while Vādhūla recitation in Kerala has vanished, and Jaiminīya recitation in Kerala, as we will see below, has teetered on the brink of extinction for the last fifty years.
Nambudiri Brahmins have thus been established in Kerala for well over a thousand years, where they have maintained a position of religious and economic privilege. Speaking Malayalam and often educated in Classical Sanskrit as well as Vedic learning, many Nambudiris have also been prominent scholars, artists, and politicians. Nambudiri wealth and status were drastically reduced by the land reforms in the mid-twentieth century, when their feudal estates were divided and transferred to the ownership of the farmers who worked them. Moreover, Nambudiri families have not been immune to the cascades of social change in modern south India in recent decades, with many moving to the cities and giving up traditional lifestyles.
The Nambudiri ritual institution par excellence remains, as in ancient Vedic society, the category of sacrifice called śrauta for its relation to śruti; the Nambudiris specialize in the iteration known as the "piling of the fire altar" (agnicayana; ). Although such sacrifices have been in decline since the land reforms in Kerala, they continue to be performed every spring; the first years of the twenty-first century have even seen an uptick and some signs of revival (; ). Their performance requires the cooperation of experts from the three Vedas, including Sāmaveda. It has been the weakness of Sāmavedic lines of transmission, more than any other single factor, that has threatened the continuation of śrauta rituals in recent times (, 661–62; , 451, 453–54). Another occasion for Sāmavedic expertise is the "domestic" (gṛhya) rites practiced by orthoprax Nambudiri Jaiminīya families, at which an authorized Jaiminīya practitioner must officiate. The demand for śrauta and gṛhyaexpertise provides a practical impetus for ensuring the continuity of Sāmavedic transmission; one might say that these two ritual categories represent the key venues for the consumption of Sāmavedic knowledge. As such, this is a realm where concerns about the ritual authority mediated by transmission come to the fore: according to Nambudiri tradition, śrauta and gṛhya rites can only be conducted by authorized officiants with the proper training and status ( , 150–51). Let us now take up the hereditary and social norms that guard the textual, pedagogical, and ritual authority of Nambudiri Sāmaveda.
HEREDITARY AND SOCIAL REQUIREMENTS FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING NAMBUDIRI SĀMAVEDA
Among Nambudiris, the Jaiminīya branch, named for the ancient sage Jaiminī, is active in the transmission and performance of Sāmaveda; this is the branch to which Vasudevan and Sreejith were born. Compared to other Vedic branches represented in Nambudiri families, the Jaiminīya tradition is now vanishingly small. On more than one occasion, each man has spoken to me of his personal commitment to assuring the continuity of his heritage. Vasudevan explains it in terms of a dual obligation to the ancestral seers (Sanskrit ṛṣi) and to the Hindu deity Rāma: "It is my duty to my ancestors, the ṛṣis. We do this for Rāmaswāmi." In this way, the daily routines of teaching and learning in modern Kerala intersect with the primeval past of sages and gods. Sreejith frames his motivation differently: confronting what he sees as a bleak future for the old ways in modern India, he has resolved to do his part to make sure that Sāmavedic traditions are not forgotten.
Part and parcel of these old ways in the Nambudiri context is a set of strict norms that determine who may teach the Veda, who may learn it, and in what conditions—learning the Veda, for Nambudiris, is socially rooted and circumscribed. Traditionally, Nambudiris settled family by family on rural tracts known as manas, a term that refers to an agricultural estate and all that it encompasses, including the main house, family, household staff, paddy fields, and often a private temple. The mana also serves to identify the Nambudiri patrilineal descent group that owns the estate or has an ancestral connection to it. Pedagogical and priestly status is determined by this birthright: thus, members of a given mana pass on the texts and rituals of a particular Vedic branch. Nambudiri tradition recognizes twenty manasas authorized transmitters of Jaiminīya Sāmaveda. Of these, three are "teacher houses" (ācārya mana), with the hereditary duty to teach the songs and officiate in domestic rites for members of the seventeen "pupil houses" (śiṣya mana). All of the ancestral teacher houses are located in the single small village of Panjal in central Kerala where Vasudevan teaches Sreejith; this narrowly circumscribed region is the hallowed territory where all authorized transmissions take place (on the relations and localization of Jaiminīya houses see , 434; , 107). To be eligible for instruction, the Nambudiri student must also have undergone initiation into the Veda under the aegis of a teacher house and in accordance with the idiosyncrasies of Jaiminīya orthopraxy.Vasudevan and Sreejith meet these hereditary and social requirements; indeed, during my research, they were the onlyactiveJaiminīya teacher–student pairing to do so.
LIVES OF SINGERS, LIVES OF SONGS
With an eye toward giving a fuller account of these lives and the lives of the songs they pass on, I now mention a few biographical details. Born into one of the most venerable Jaiminīya teacher manas, Nellikkāṭṭu Māmaṇṇŭ, Vasudevan and his elder brother, Neelakanthan,learned the Sāmavedic repertoire from their father, an accomplished practitioner and ritualist revered in the community for his piety and orthopraxy. They completed their training as boys in the 1940s, just before the communist state government implemented sweeping land reforms that reduced Nambudiri agricultural holdings and the incomes derived from them. This change in political and economic fortunes, along with other broad-based social and technological changes (urbanization, access to secular education, electricity, etc.), contributed to the steady erosion of Nambudiri Sāmavedic traditions in the 1950s and 60s. As such, Vasudevan and Neelakanthan are part of the last generation of Nambudiris to learn the Jaiminīya repertoire in its entirety. Vasudevan worked for many years away from his ancestral mana, in the postal service in far-off Trivandrum, while his elder brother took over stewardship of the house and what was left of the estate after their father's death. Although acknowledged in the Nambudiri community as among the foremost living experts of Jaiminīya traditions, and often called upon to officiate at rituals where Sāmaveda was necessary, these brothers had few occasions to pass on their expertise. After their training, transmission of Jaiminīya traditions in their patriline faltered: neither man trained his own sons in Sāmaveda. Similar patterns occurred across all the Jaiminīya teacher houses during this period: in the 1960s, normative Sāmavedic transmission declined to the breaking point. In hindsight, it is clear that this break formed part of a broader turn among vaidika Brahmins across India away from traditional learning and livelihoods toward the opportunities afforded by secular education and careers (cf. ).
For his part, Sreejith hails from the nearby and equally venerable teacher mana Muṭṭattukāṭṭu Māmaṇṇŭ. Although born into a Jaiminīya household with a strong history of Sāmavedic expertise and ritual performance, Sreejith, like others of his 1980s generation, had scant opportunities for Vedic instruction as a child. Neither his father nor his grandfather learned the Veda. In terms of Sāmavedic accomplishment, the pride of the Muṭṭattukāṭṭu line was Sreejith's great uncle, the famous Itti Ravi Nambudiri, who officiated at numerous Vedic rituals (including the 1975 performance documented in ) and trained twenty-five students in his lifetime (, 110).Sreejith as a teenager was troubled by the decline of Jaiminīya traditions and wanted to do something about it. Although already well past the usual age for taking up Vedic study, he sought out Vasudevan as his guru and started to learn the Jaiminīya repertoire. At the time of the lesson described above, Sreejith was 28 and had been studying Sāmaveda on a part-time basis for more than a decade. It was not easy learning the repertoire with lessons only a few times a week, but Sreejith had managed to master a significant portion and seemed determined to persevere.
While his parents had at first been against his choice to study Veda—which they perceived as a distraction from his secular schooling, and worse, a dead end in terms of marriage and career prospects—his sense of commitment gradually won their respect. As the only member of the present generation to receive tuition from a widely respected teacher of the older generation, he soon came to be regarded as the "last hope" of Jaiminīya Sāmaveda in the Nambudiri community. The hope was that he would come to embody the musical knowledge possessed by the aging Vasudevan and other practitioners coming into their dotage, and that Jaiminīya traditions might thereby continue. Sreejith felt this responsibility acutely, as he saw it to be his personal success or failure that would be shared by all Nambudiris. By the time he was in his early twenties, this responsibility expanded to include not only his own learning but also the passing on of his own (limited) knowledge to a new generation: though still a student himself, he was recruited at a traditional Nambudiri boarding school (maṭham) in Thrissur to teach the Jaiminīya repertoire to two boys from Ṛgvedic manas on a full-time basis, for which he earned room, board, and a monthly stipend of less than 7000 rupees (approximately 100 USD). "Less than a desk clerk," he once told me ruefully. This job made his own progress as a student that much more arduous, as he was forced to commute back home after work to continue his own lessons. This he did three or four times a week, driving hours in Kerala traffic on his motorcycle.
The lesson between Vasudevan and Sreejith described above exemplifies the normative features of Nambudiri transmission: it is oral, accompanied by hand gestures, conducted within a single Vedic branch, and localized in the Jaiminīya stronghold of Panjal. Moreover, the relationship involves an authorized teacher and a properly initiated student. Two non-normative features of the lessons, however, emerge from the practitioners' biographies: first, Sreejith started studying at the relatively late age of fifteen, although traditional Veda study should commence with a boy's initiation before he is twelve years old (, 153); and second, Sreejith receives instruction from Vasudevan, who belongs to a neighboring teacher mana, when he should be learning from a member of his own house, which also boasts teacher status. When queried, neither man acknowledged these irregularities as such. Nor did their peers: the prevailing impression among Jaiminīyas in Panjal (as well as among other Nambudiris I talked to) was that this constituted an authoritative transfer of knowledge from a venerable teacher to a worthy student, perhaps the last of its kind. Observers would often tell me that the only authentic transmission of Jaiminīya songs currently taking place among Nambudiris was this one.
THE DIGITAL GURU: PANJAL, MARCH 2012
During a longer research visit the following year, I encountered another aspect of Vasudevan and Sreejith's pedagogy—this one decidedly non-normative by traditional Nambudiri standards. I had returned to Kerala to conduct nine months of dissertation research on Jaiminīya Sāmaveda; living in close proximity to Panjal, I was able to visit with Vasudevan and Sreejith and observe their lessons several times a week. At the start of each lesson and from time to time as they sang, Vasudevan would borrow Sreejith's smartphone and play back a digital audio recording of the piece they were working through. "I have to refresh myself," he would explain with a laugh, citing his failing memory. The digital recordings, he told me, were the fruit of an effort to document Nambudiri Sāmaveda undertaken by a local scholar in the late 1990s (; see below). Seated before a video camera and audio recorder, five practitioners of advanced age—including Vasudevan and his brother—had recorded the entirety of the Jaiminīya repertoire, amounting to more than one hundred hours of recitation. Now Vasudevan held this repertoire in the palm of his hand. Privately, I marveled at this interaction, mediated by digital technology, between the
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