Honey Wind: Sounds from a Santal Village is a soundwalk through a village of the Santals in West Bengal, from early morning until night. It holds music, songs and dances, and also the daily activities of the village between them: waking up, the pond, children and animals, the blacksmith, the walk to the evening festival. The result is a document of how a community sounds as a whole, not a selection of performances.
The recordings were made on location in November 1994 by Peter Pannke and Andres Bosshard, as part of a research project on the Santals by the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in New Delhi. They took place in villages near Santiniketan in the Birbhum District, with musical ensembles from Bandlodanga, Lolapukurdanga, Mohisadel, Pathorghata and Baganpara. The material was mixed at the studios of Sender Freies Berlin, with Dieter Hauer producing and editing. The booklet by Pannke and Onkar Prassad includes the song texts in translation.
The Santals live in north-eastern India, in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. Numbering about four million, they are the second largest tribal community in India, and their belief in bongas, nature spirits, sets them apart from their neighbours. They have their own idea of sound, in three categories: sade, made by striking objects together; rak, the calls of animals; and aran, human sounds, divided again into ror, speech, and rar, song. Sounds tell the village what is happening inside and outside it, and orient people in time and space. The tracks follow this map. Don' songs return several times through the day, with melodies of the sohrae, lagre and dasae, singa and tamak', drum beats on tumdak' and tamak', and the dance songs of the evening: gilwari, don' and karam.
The album sits between ethnography and sound art. Its order is that of a day in the village rather than a concert programme, so music appears where it would be heard, among speech, work and animals.
A CD of 73 minutes in Wergo's Music of World Cultures series, catalogue SM 1612 2, released in 1997 with a 24-page booklet in German and English.
