Festival of Indigenous Storytellers in Darjeeling this December

GANGTOK, 16 Oct: The 3rd Confluence, Festival of Indigenous Storytellers, 2012 is being organised at Darjeeling this year from 07-10 December. The 3-day event will showcase various storytelling traditions (including shamanic oral traditions) and will include storytellers from various tribal communities across the country, alongside professional storytellers.
This festival is the flagship event of Acoustic Traditional which brings our vanishing indigenous storytellers, every year, from across the country with a view to share and celebrate the different oral storytelling traditions and indigenous folklore and to support a growing outreach platform through which the voices of mountain and forest tribal communities can not only reach a national audience but also find relevance in urban India (through their stories).
As per a press release, this year, the festival focuses on the oral history and folklore of the Eastern Himalayas. With Acoustic Traditional’s ongoing One Tribe tour based on the documentation of the folklore of Jhamphey Mung (or the legendary snow creature in the region), the event includes a special highlight on Lepcha storytellers from Lingthem, Lingdem and Tinvong villages of Dzongu (the sacred land of the Lepcha tribal people) alongside Kiranti storytellers from across Sikkim and Darjeeling.
The festival includes various activities, workshops, special sessions, field visits, etc., to help enrich our understanding of this vanishing aspect of indigenous communities, vis-a-vis their cultural, spiritual and scientific linkages and importance, apart from the idea of keeping this ancient tradition alive.
With storytellers from across Manipur, Nagaland, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Kerela and from the mainstream storytelling arena, the 3-day event will showcase a diverse range of ancient storytelling traditions from across the country, the release mentions.
Initiated in 2010, with support from Sikkim State Culture and Heritage Department, Confluence, has been moving spaces over the last two years to include a larger participation of local communities.
The last date of registration for participants is 20 November. For more information you can contact acoustic.traditional@gmail.com.

Acoustic Traditional in Sikkim with tales of the Yeti

GANGTOK, 09 July: A group of young story tellers under the banner of Acoustic Traditional, a Bangalore based NGO launched a nine-month long campaign ‘One Tribe’ to rediscover the folk tales among different communities about the mythical snowman – the Yeti. The organisation this time aims to conduct a study on the Yeti in the eastern Himalayan region covering Nepal, Sikkim and few of the North Eastern states and some other states of India. Apart from that, the organisation also has plans of conducting a National Story Telling session based on myths and legends in particular.
Speaking to the media at the Press Club of Sikkim today, the Acoustic Traditional founder, Silal Mukhia, informed that they plan to stay in Sikkim for around 25 days during which the organisation will be visiting schools and hold storytelling sessions.
He added that the organisation had visited Sikkim in the year 2010 and organised a confluence on storytellers and also prepared a 100 meters long banner using digital art [on traditional stories] which has been registered in the Limca Book of Records- 2012.
He went on to add that, a new hunt has begun to discover tales of the Yeti and document the oral history, myths and legends related to the ‘Big Foot’ that many believe existed in the Himalayan Region of Nepal and Tibet.
“There have been many myths and confusion surrounding the existence of the Yeti, we will explore the specific areas in the Eastern Himalayan Region where sightings of the Yeti have been reported,” he said.
Speaking about the organization, he stated that the organisation was formed in 1999 and the members of Acoustic Traditional, mostly young tribals, are working with fifteen communities’ story tellers across the country to record their myths and legends.
“It is a voluntary organization based in Bangalore that works to promote oral storytelling and tribal folklore, especially of the mountain and forest-based communities”, Salil added.
During the nine-month long venture the team comprising of six members will explore parts of Sikkim, Darjeeling, Bhutan and Nepal interacting with the Shamans and the elderly who carry knowledge on Yeti.
He added that the members of the organization will spend a month in Sikkim and visit places such as Jawaharlal Nehru Road in East Sikkim, Sokphey in South, [a place named after the Yeti in Nepali ‘Sokpha’] and Samandim, a Western border between Sikkim and Darjeeling where the sightings of Yeti have been recorded in books written by some foresters and scholars.
“We have spoken to people of various communities and we believe that the yeti, ban jhankri and sokpa [another mythical creature that appears often in Nepali literature] are the same. Unlike people from the West who paint yeti as an abominable creature, local communities believe that it is a guide to the spiritual world on which shamanism is based,” he added.
Acoustic Traditional has already published “Lost Stories”, a book on oral storytelling about a year back. He added that lecturer at Gyalshing Government College and story teller Kachyo Lepcha is helping the team to reach out to the people of these areas. He also added that the findings and the research would be documented in the form of films and books.
“For the next one week we will finish all the official work of taking permission from the Sikkim Government to visit these places to avoid any kind of complications in the future” added, Abhishek Pradhan, a documentary film maker and also a team member.
This is also the first project of the upcoming Mountain Center for Study of Indigenous Story Telling Traditions in Darjeeling. The center will be an autonomous institute set up by Acoustic Traditional which will preserve indigenous oral history, folklores and many more which are on the verge of extinction. It will also help in research work related to indigenous studies, added Abhishek.