Anthropology of Sound Santal Tribe

The present work is an anthropological study of sound based on an empirical study among the Santal, a tribe of Proto-Australoid origin of Eastern India also settled in majority in the Birbhum district of West Bengal, India. This work is the first of its kind in the field of Social-Cultural Anthropology and is based on the idea that apart from understanding social reality using observation-based established anthropological approaches there can be hearing-based approach to understand human reality. 
 Sound is an extremely important part of human life. It is not possible for a man to communicate without it. Not only that, sound brings awareness and helps in organizing human life. In fact, the vital functions of life –experiencing and life-expressing are grounded in it. Therefore, its study in social-cultural context of a society as an alternative paradigm is meaningful.     
The present study, apart from introducing the subject and arriving at some generalizations in its concluding part ,has been organized under five chapters each dealing with the Santal classificatory system of sounds, their mode of transmission of vocabulary of sounds, material sounds, animal and bird sounds and human sounds respectively. In all these, an attempt has been made to deal with the function and meaning of various types of sounds constituting the Santal auditory world that help them regulate their  life and maintain and perpetuate their society harmoniously.   
Onkar Prasad (b.1948) is an anthropologist and ethnomusicologist. He was formerly Professor at the Dept. of Anthropology and Dean, Vidya  Bhavan (Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences), Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, W. Bengal. Among his major works are Folk Music and Folk Dances of Banaras reprinted in 2010 by The Anthropological Survey of India, Kolkata; Santal Music: A Study in Pattern and Process of Cultural Persistence reprinted in 2013 by Inter-India Publications, New Delhi and Methods of Raga Formation and Music Analysis(jointly with his teacher, Prof. Mohan Singh Khangura ,a music maestro) published in 2015 by Parampara, Kolkata. His book, Musical Cosmology of the Santal which deals with the cosmological dimension of the Santal music, has been published by B.R. Publishing Corporation, New Delhi in 2016.Dr. Prasad is credited for nurturing Creative Anthropology. Introduction of Auto Graphic Method, Anthropophilosophic Perspective and the concept of Sadharanikaran (Commonization) to understand the process through which the Indian civilization persists cutting across ethnic, linguistic and regional boundaries of the country are among his recent additions to the field of Social-Cultural Anthropology.