Pushing the Boundaries of Online Access and Repatriation with Tagore's Transformative Torch

This talk will describe a recently begun project with the working title Tagore's Transformative Torch. As a collaboration between the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive and UCLA Digital Library, it will create an online repository and a point of encounter for the traditional music, dance, puppetry, and other creative arts of the Indian subcontinent. Through its map-based interface, users will be able to see how creative practices have evolved (or not evolved) over time in individual regions, states, and villages. The audio-visual and textual content will come from a vast repository of research stretching back to the work of Dutch ethnomusicologist Arnold Bake starting in the 1930s, through the work of his pupil Nazir Ali Jairazbhoy (founder of the ARCE and founding Chair of the UCLA Department of Ethnomusicology), to his work together with Amy Catlin-Jairazbhoy, who has continued to work with the collections and participants in India. This unbroken line of eighty years of fieldwork reflects, in both methodology and content, the vision of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), prolific Bengali artist, composer, Nobel laureate poet, educationalist, and philosopher, who inspired the work of his follower Bake. Bake's materials are housed in a number of institutions in Europe, North America and South Asia, and UCLA plans to coordinate with them as the project progresses. Tagore's Transformative Torch is envisioned as a platform for access for scholars and students as well as members of the indigenous communities represented, as one mode of repatriation to compliment the on-going repatriation work of Catlin-Jairazbhoy and institutions like ARCE.