Santhosh DD

This Foundation Project, implemented by IFA, aims to deepen the documentation and critical study of the Somana Kunita masked ritual-dance and its sobāne songs in Hassan district, Karnataka. The project will record and translate sobāne, map their histories and local variations, and stage practice-led re-enactments and community conversations that tease out the gendered stories hidden within this living oral tradition. Santhosh DD is the Coordinator of this project.

Santhosh DD is a folk singer and theatre artist from Dindaguru village in Hassan district. He completed an MA from Ninasam Theatre Institute and has been working as a theatre trainer for the past 15 years. He has worked as a theatre teacher at Bharateeya Rangashikshana Kendra of Mysore Rangayana. Later, he completed an M.A. in Drama from Dr. Gangubai Hangal Music and Performing Arts University, Mysore. He is currently exploring literature in oral traditions. Given his interests and combined experience as a practitioner and researcher, he is best placed to be the Project Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA.

Somana Kunita is a ritual deeply rooted in local life, but sobāne, the short, powerful ritual songs sung mainly by women, have been recorded unevenly, if at all. These songs carry layered stories about belonging, violence, reverence, and silence. One sustained mystery the research follows asks: where is Satyamma in the sobāne? The sobāne sometimes praise a woman turned goddess while simultaneously sealing her mouth. That paradox, deification through enforced silence, raises urgent questions about gender, memory, and ritual authority. The project treats those questions as entry points into broader themes: how oral forms change when they move between villages, how male and female voices are separated in performance, and how a ritual that once included practices like sati sahagamana has been adapted, contested, and preserved across generations.

The project uses an integrated, practice-led approach. Fieldwork will record sobāne and Somana Kunita performances across villages in and around Anekere, Kalkere, Bagur, Vala Gere, and Tejigere to capture local variants and associated stories. Each recording session will be paired with participant observation, conversations with singers, instrument players, and patrons, and the collection of material culture, such as ritual props and song notes. Transcription will be close and performative: lines will be notated with timing, vocal cues, and musical phrasing. The translation into English will be annotated so that the performative features survive on the page. Critically, the research stages small practice workshops that use approaches from epic theatre and Third Theatre to pause, interrogate, and re-enact sobāne episodes. These workshops will create a public laboratory where communities, performers, and researchers think together through questions of silence, agency, and meaning. Through a cross-regional comparison of sobāne songs, the project will explore how memory, voice, and ritual evolve across geographies. The use of performative strategies, such as Karapala Mela, a nearly extinct narrative folk form, will add a critical and innovative layer to the research, allowing traditional knowledge to be reinterpreted and questioned in public space. Ethical permissions, informed consent, and community-led selection will guide every step. Throughout, the coordinator will keep a reflexive research journal that records his positionality as performer and researcher.

The outcome of the project will be a collection of Somana Kunita and sobāne recordings, a reflective documentation of research findings that situates the practice historically and personally, and a final performance. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA, along with the final reports, will include the audiovisual archive of the songs and the documentation of research findings.

This project aligns with the framework of IFA’s Arts Research programme by centring practice-led inquiry and recovering a regionally rooted, under-documented tradition. By integrating performative forms like Karapala Mela to publicly interrogate inherited tradition, and by comparing sobāne across districts, this research does not just preserve a vanishing form; it animates it. It reclaims folk ritual as a living, contested space of inquiry. This layered, embodied, and deeply place-based approach is rare in arts research, and it promises to open new ways of understanding oral literature, community memory, and the transformative potential of performance.

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm and document it through an Implementation Memorandum. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees.

The Project is part-supported by BNP Paribas India.