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Paper short abstract

This paper explores Irula indigenous song-making through Moonge and Kohal practices, showing how melodies emerge silently during everyday life. Using interviews and minimal intervention, it reimagines participant observation to trace subjectivity, memory, and embodied composition beyond performance.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines musical composition among the Irula community of Attappadi, South India, as a largely silent, embodied, and affective process that unfolds beyond formal performance and explicit authorship. Focusing on wind instruments, the Moonge (bamboo flute) and the Kohal (a flute-like wind instrument), it traces how melodies emerge during everyday activities such as cattle herding and leisure, long before they take ritual form. While the Kohal is a complex instrument played mainly by elders in ceremonial contexts, proficiency in it depends on years of informal engagement with the Moonge, a simpler instrument learned through ordinary labour and play.

Methodologically, the paper reimagines participant observation through low-intensity, reversible interventions that align with local modes of learning. Walking interviews accompany Moonge players during herding, while audio diaries and delayed elicitation capture retrospective reflections on when and how tunes “arrive.” Rather than initiating composition, the researcher’s presence functions as attentive co-presence, making perceptible moments of humming, pauses, partial melodies, breath regulation, and finger memory, forms often dismissed as non-activity.

Ethnographic traces include melodic fragments, repeated phrases, bodily gestures, rejected sounds, and life-course transitions from Moonge to Kohal, analysed across multiple temporal scales. Comparison across cases is enabled through shared processes of emergence and apprenticeship rather than metrics or autobiographical reduction. Drawing on theories of silence, affect, and memory, the paper also reflects on ethical questions of documentation, consent, and rendering inner creative dynamics intersubjective. It argues that silence and incompleteness are not methodological limits but central ethnographic data for understanding indigenous creativity.