[Reader-list] IPTA -Emerging aspects 1

[Sumangala Damodaran]

IPTA in the Early Years� Emerging Aspects.

I would like to share some of the interesting aspects of what I have collected as part of the documentation of songs of the IPTA in Hindi and English. The first among these is the discovery of how vibrant the decades of the 1940s and 1950s appears to have been in terms of the musical styles used and the number and types of songs written. For someone like me who sang as part of the protest music tradition from the early eighties onwards, the sheer range has been mind boggling. For example, there are songs in entrenched folk styles with extremely contemporary lyrics as well as westernised songs both being composed and sung by the same person. There are highly lilting, pathos-ridden individual songs as well as well-orchestrated collective agitational songs written around the same theme. If one compares the range of the �40s and �50s with the tradition later, say from the �70s onwards, the latter is significantly more limited in terms of types of songs sung. For example, the largest
 number of songs written and composed in later years are collective songs with more direct messages of protest, with far less emphasis on either subtle enunciation of any specific forms, or on experimentation with form itself. The decline of the individual song and its implications are one of the aspects that I am currently investigating.


		
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