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 Throughout the world, indigenous rural music is fading out. It's overwhelmed by a modern, urban sound that propagates worldwide through web downloads and MP3 players. But sometimes, music that fades in one part of the world, say, remote parts of India, shows up again surprisingly far away. From Hayward, California, Lonny Shavelson brings us the sound of Indian nautanki.
Picture a rural Indian landscape of plowed farmland. The sky grows dark. Thousands of farmers and their families relax on the ground. Others sit on nearby rooftops or in trees. At ten at night, the crowd pushes back to make a circular clearing. Gas lanterns are lit, a dozen or so opera singers, actors and dancers prepare to perform until dawn -- and you have a nautanki, a Hindi folk opera once wildly popular in northern India.
Devendra Sharma, now a professor of communication at California State Fresno, grew up in India, where his father was a famed nautanki performer. "You can imagine if you have to throw your voice so that thousands of people around you can hear each word, how much power you have to have in your voice," he says, adding that he's been smitten by nautanki since he was a boy. Read more at VOA
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