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Accepted Paper:
Arrival of the Devis’ Spirit: Filming Voice and Agentive Entanglement
Rajat Nayyar
(York University)
Aaji, an aging, lower-caste singer and rice farmer from a village in northern India, uses her distinctive voice/vocal traditions to engage with the spirit of the seven Devis (goddesses). This research reveals what multimodal anthropology might entail when collaborating with Devis' spirits.
Paper Abstract:
Aaji, an aging, lower-caste storyteller, singer, spirit medium, and rice farmer from a village in northern India, uses her distinctive voice/vocal traditions to engage with the spirit of the seven Devis (goddesses). She notes that her entanglements with the spirit have radically transformed and affected her voice and the vocal repertoires she learned from her mother. At the same time, Aaji highlights how she has long been modulating her singing voice and carefully blending her burping and yawning voice within her vocal repertoires upon the arrival of Devis. Although spirit mediumship is a very common practice in rural north India, Aaji’s practice as a spirit medium is unique in that it is inextricably tied to her mastery of vocal repertoires. Highlighting auto-ethnographic details of filming the spirit during Aaji’s rituals through a focus on embodied voice and vocal traditions, our work blurs the boundaries between the physical, spiritual, and digital worlds. While Jean Rouch omitted the spirit from his concept of ciné-trance, I argue that we must begin to think through what filming 'with' the spirits entails, particularly considering the role of voice in guiding the filmmaker through this process.
Article published in the June 2024 issue of The Drama Review journal.