Special Report: How Cellphones Are Reviving India’s Folk Music Scene?

Spending time in rural India in the past few years, it has been difficult to miss the cellphone, especially in the hands of millennials. It has also been hard to ignore how rapidly the phone has been absorbed in the vernacular social fabric.

According to a Deloitte report, the sales of feature phones and smart phones, used as much for communication as for entertainment, are estimated to have surged by a 100% in the past year across India. In a nation where mobile phones are the primary entertainment device for those who own them, their use is now expanding to preserve and perpetuate traditional folk and tribal music.


As I documented the variety of traditional music in a small tribal village in north Maharashtra in 2012, I noticed a teenage girl was recording a group of women singing wedding songs using her phone.

Then, a few hours later, a youth shared a short clip from a documentary about tribal music with me via Bluetooth.

The cellphone, it appeared, had sparked anew an interest in traditional folk and tribal music in parts of rural India and was contributing to keeping these art forms alive. Being able to record and share pieces rapidly means music that was once only transmitted orally and restricted to archives can now be accessed and circulated amongst a new generation of Indians who live on their multimedia enabled phones.

Much of the music that circulates on these devices is from commercial genres produced either in India’s numerous film industries or in small backstreet digital studios that populate regional hubs. The small studios produce heavily auto-tuned songs that reflect local flavor in vernacular languages ranging from Bhojpuri in Bihar, Marwari in Rajasthan to Dehavali in Maharashtra. Occasionally, songs take the new digital culture as their subject: teasing about missed calls between lovers, crooning about erotically familiar ring tones, or even worshipping the local deity to a DJ’s beat.

In these contexts, the attention to traditional music, and the use of cellphones to record them, is remarkable. Most regions where people use cellphones to record folk forms have a rich live music culture. In semi-urban Bikaner in Rajasthan for instance, audiences throng to jaagrans—all-night concerts of devotional music—with their cellphones in hand. Here, I met Kanhaiyalal Meghwal, a fan of local musician Gavra Devi, and a particularly meticulous recordist. He records most concerts he attends, he says, loading the files on his computer and sharing them later with family and friends. He tells me about others whom, he says, sell the files to vendors of music downloads—the mainstays of the informal music economy— who sell music to most cellphone users in Bikaner and nearby villages.

Elsewhere in Rajasthan, for the past decade Khete Khan has documented cultural practices of the Manganiyar musician community, a group of hereditary professional musicians well known for their music. A Manganiar himself, Mr. Khan’s collection of digital audio files offers an insider perspective on Manganiyar culture and he maintains them as part of the Manganiyar Lok Sangeet Sansthan (Manganiar Folk Music Institute) archive in Jaisalmer and Hamira in Rajasthan. He told me that in 2011, he began using his cellphone to record spontaneous interviews with musicians from the community and described a new generation of Manganiyar musicians who are acquiring skills of their trade by listening on their mobile phones to rare archival recordings of senior musicians that are now digitized.

A similar thing is happening in communities where music isn’t the main source of livelihood. In the tribal regions of north Maharashtra’s Nandurbar district and Gujarat’s Chhota Udepur district, for example, musical connoisseurs compiled recordings of live performances made during Holi festivities to mark the onset of Spring. Some had set a favorite song as their ringtone. 

With gradual Internet penetration, short clips of such recordings are proudly posted on YouTube. Unlike in Rajasthan, the music here has virtually no audience beyond the region where it is produced and few organizations are working to preserve local culture. The fear that local languages and cultural forms will be wiped out in a generation is not unfounded. Recordings on cellphones not only help to preserve and circulate traditional culture, but also make it accessible by younger tech-savvy generations.