How citizen archivists in South Asia confront the online marginalization of oral cultures and languages

What can an O Bele folk song from the Tulu community in southern India tell us about how farmers would entertain themselves while planting crops? What can a Tharu folk song from Nepal illuminate about the issue of migration of men for work and potentially also of a river? What does the depiction of Lord Shiva being robbed while taking a nap, a frequent instance of anthropomorphism in Angika folk songs from India and Nepal, teach us about the contrast between prescriptive forms of gods in scriptures and their depiction in everyday folk practices? Or what can oral culture videos explain about the rise of Torwali speakers from Pakistan against the marginalization of their culture by the prominent religio-political practices?

Oral narratives like folk songs and oral history explore the realities of common people that are rarely emphasized in mainstream education, knowledge sharing, and mass media. The medium of expression, i.e., the exclusively oral sharing of these beliefs and knowledge systems, further alienates them in a text-centric world. In a bid to challenge this, citizen archivists have recorded oral culture videos, uploaded them on Wikimedia Commons, and are transcribing them for accessibility, linking them to open knowledge platforms like Wikisource and Wikipedia, and writing blogs about their experience. These activities are being guided and supported by the project “Enhancing Indic oral culture on Wikimedia projects.” Thus, citizen archivists from 14 South Asian language communities have yielded 227 recorded folk songs, riddles, oral histories, medicinal knowledge, and more.

Although this article talks about only a few communities that have recorded their culture, the archived oral culture videos have captured generations of knowledge now at risk of disappearance under culture homogenization.

How modernization is eroding Tulu agricultural folk songs

In Tulu, O bele pardhana folk songs are the stories of Daiva (revered spirits in the coastal region of Tulunadu) sung in agricultural fields by farmers as a means to entertain themselves during the cropping and harvesting seasons. For instance, the O Bele song narrates a girl’s journey from childhood to marriage — one person sings the lyrics and others join in the chorus “O Bele.” Called “kabithe” (poems) locally, agricultural songs like these were practiced communally, with farmers sitting in a row and singing one by one while sowing seeds.

Kavitha Ganesh, one of the Tulu citizen archivists who collected folk songs, medicinal knowledge, oral history, etc., contemplates over a phone interviewthe vanishing of Tulu agricultural folk songs as an indication of their change in lifestyle, under pressure from the challenging economics of agriculture:

The singer in the video showed us the crop field in which they used to sing together. But old people no longer practice farming and don’t remember these songs very well. Machines are replacing people, young people aren’t practicing farming, so they are not learning these songs either. They would rather become sweepers in malls as field work is quite hard and does not pay enough to even buy oil and spices. People are moving from grains to areca farming, it requires less investment.

Documenting these is a race against time, as in Angika language, my mother recalls that agricultural folk songs, once abundant in her childhood, have now completely vanished.

A less severe image of gods in Angika folk songs within subaltern folk practice

In the evaluation of the around 80 Angika folk songs I collected, many of them with a religious strain sung by Dalit women, gods are more in the role of family elders than the almighty, and sometimes a goddess is envisioned as a bride adorned in jewels. For instance, in one of the Shibguru songs, lord Shiva is robbed while napping in the temple on a summer afternoon. The opening lyrics are:

“बिना नयन के सुतल छै सिबगुरु
मंदिर म घुस गेलै चोरवा”
‘Lord Shiva was sleeping without his third eye,
the thieves took advantage and broke into the temple’.

His wife, goddess Parvati complains about the inconvenience that the theft of her jewels caused her, like any Angika speaking married woman would her husband.

This depiction of gods is in contrast to their usual glorious descriptions in scriptures. Here he sleeps like normal people, without his destruction-capable third-eye, and susceptible to robbery. In another song, Shiva is described as planting poppy on Ganga’s riverside. It goes on to show that this folk culture mainly practiced by Dalit people — a group of people alienated from society by the caste system — has created versions of gods that are not set apart but share their lifestyle. The daily life of the divine couple living in the remote wilderness of Kailash is not very different from the laborer farmer living in the rocky terrain of a village in Banka, Bihar-imagined living inside the temple built for them there.

Practicing oral culture in response to suppression of identity

Torwali, an endangered language, had its identity repressed because of its ethnic and musical quality, emboldened itself with the Simam Festival 2011. This effort by Idara Baraye Taleem-o-Taraqi’s (IBT) is ethnography in action to safeguard identity against puritanical religious extremism that forbade this minority community from practicing their culture. The founder of IBT has made several new and old videos available on Commons.

The curious case of the meandering Kosi river

For example, ever since Sanjib Chaudhary documented a folk song in his mother tongue Eastern Tharu (a Nepali language), about a man who has to cross a big river to migrate to the next town, it has ignited in him the curiosity about the song’s link to Kosi river’s history. He is trying to establish the link between this folk song transmitted orally over generations and how it might relate to the change in the course of the river. He says:

This Tharu folk song details seasonal migration from Saptari to Morang describes a man needing to cross a dangerous Sursari/Saptari river (सुरसरी धारे); the singer, his beloved, warns him to stay. This ancient song, shared across four districts, omits mention of the much larger Kosi River, now on the same route. This absence is surprising, so I am doing research aimed at understanding Kosi’s diversion history to see if Sursari was once the dominant river.

Sanjib’s case is an instance of how oral culture in the form of folk songs, oral history etc. can be living knowledge forms that can lead to a sense of identity, belonging, and intellectual curiosity towards one’s culture.

In practice: Agency over culture representation by underrepresented communities

Oral culture is connected to everyday realities from socioeconomic issues, historical events, to lifestyle shifts. These videos are uploaded on open knowledge platforms like Wikimedia Commons, Wikisource, and also linked to Wikipedia articles — an example is a recitation about Tulu folk heroes Koti and Chennayya added to this Wikipedia article. This is an example of inclusion of these previously orally transmitted knowledge onto mainstream knowledge platforms.

Documentation of these narratives by citizen archivists who are native speakers of the languages ensures that these are not excluded from the mainstream knowledge forms online, thus supporting epistemic and social justice. In addition, this decreases chances of unethical data collection because of their direct involvement in selection, recording, and sharing. Archiving these oral practices with camera phones has made the documentation process accessible to the practitioners of these cultures and the content is then available also to the speakers of these languages.

This story originally appeared on Global Voices on 21 November 2025.