Bake/Jairazbhoy Digital Archive of South Asian Traditional Music and Arts
Owning Institution: UCLA, Ethnomusicology Archive
About this Collection
In 1963-1964, Nazir Ali Jairazbhoy (Founding Chair of the UCLA Department of Ethnomusicology) visited 8 states in India, recording tribal, folk, devotional, and classical musics. The research was designed to supplement Arnold Adriaan Bake's 1925-1929, 1931, 1932, 1938, and 1955-56 surveys of Indian music throughout the South Asian subcontinent (Bengal, (West Bengal and Bangladesh), Nepal, Tamilnadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Sindh (Pakistan)). Bake’s original fieldwork was to have resulted in a book on South Asian music--in collaboration with Tamil specialist John Ralston Marr and Nazir Ali Jairazbhoy—but with Bake’s sudden death in October 1963, the book could not be completed. In 1984, Nazir Ali Jairazbhoy and Amy Catlin-Jairazbhoy returned to the original sites of Bake’s 1938 fieldwork in South India (Tamilnadu, Kerala, and Karnataka) in order to solicit responses to Bake’s photographs and audio recordings of various Indian performance traditions in an examination of continuity and change. The restudy process has been repeated during twenty-four returns to many of Bake's original sites from 1991 until 2020, in which many of the materials have been repatriated, archived, and re-recorded in their places of origin. Along with various video scenes for lectures and published videos, one full-length interactive DVD has resulted from the restudy of two songs recorded in 1938 to the goddess Renuka/Yellamma: Music for a Goddess (Catlin-Jairazbhoy and Jairazbhoy: Apsara Media 2008). A curated selection of images and recordings from 1963-1964 and 1984 are included in this collection, as well as field recordings made by Bake in India on a Teficord machine, January 1938 to March 1939. View this collection on the contributor's website.View our statement on digital primary resources and historical description.
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