Jungoo, Dooah and Songs of Jaunpur Garhwal
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Jungoo, Dooah and Songs of Jaunpur Garhwal

Knowledge TraditionsPractices and RitualsPeople
in Interview
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Sanyukta Sharma

Sanyukta Sharma is a filmmaker whose work encompasses documentaries, fiction, audio and visual arts. She is particularly interested in understanding the ecological identity of an industrialised individual through the imaginary worlds that envelop private and community life. She has completed a diploma in Film Direction at Film and Television Institute of India in 2014. She is also co-founder of Space–Time Trains, a creative and alternative space for pedagogic practices around filmmaking.

Jungoo and Dooah are agricultural folk song traditions from the Jaunpur and Jaunsar region of Garhwal, Uttarakhand. These video conversations are an attempt to unravel the history and sociology of the song practices.

The people interviewed for this purpose include Surendra Pundir, writer and folk researcher based in Dehradun and Mussoorie, who has compiled books about Jaunpur, including Jaunpur ke Lok Geet (The Folk Songs of Jaunpur). There are detailed interactions with Anuradha Gupta, co-founder of Society for Integrated Development of Himalayas (SIDH), an organisation that has worked towards promoting awareness about and archiving folk traditions in Jaunpur since 1989, and Gayatri Chatterjee, a film scholar, who specialises in music and performance, and has authored books like Mother India and Awaara. 

This documentation, however, would have been incomplete without the insights provided by the farmers of Jaunpur, Gopal Singh, Santram Singh and Bina Panwar, who are known locally for their knowledge of traditional singing. 

Each interviewee provides fresh perspectives into looking at the two folk song forms that in our industrial world are fading out of public memory.