Somali Panda Sonic Historiographer | Musicologist | Indian Classical Vocalist | Founder, Indus Band Foundation | Pioneer of Migrating Music
Panel Context
Second Summer School of IBRAD Urban Centre for Ecosystem Development
Theme: Social Processes That Bring Changes in Ecological Processes
Dates: June 25–27, 2025 | Venue: IBRAD, Kolkata
Emerging Issues of One Health, Cross-cutting Urban Health and Tribal Health
— A Sonic Historiographer’s Reflection on Memory, Culture, and Healing
Introduction
In both urban density and tribal isolation, health is not merely biomedical. It is emotional, cultural, sonic. It is about what we remember, what we forget, and what we pass on. The emerging issues of One Health must therefore be read as a cultural manuscript—where public health, indigenous voice, and environmental memory are interwoven.
One Health as an Aural Landscape
In traditional societies, health is not confined to the body—it is felt in forests, chanted in rituals, preserved in lullabies. Across tribal belts of India, songs are used to forecast monsoon, warn of disease, or grieve collective loss. These are not incidental. They are auditory archives of bio-cultural knowledge.
Similarly, in urban India, the disappearance of sonic heritage—temple bells replaced by traffic horns, folk songs drowned by commercial noise—mirrors a crisis of mental, social, and ecological disconnection. Can One Health also mean restoring the harmony of human-nature relationships through sound?
Urban Health and the Loss of Memory
In cities, health threats include:
- Noise pollution that disrupts mental equilibrium
- Hyperstimulation that disconnects us from inner rhythm
- Isolation that breaks community bonds
Urban spaces need soundscapes of healing: green corridors, open-air performances, music therapy, and community storytelling. Reclaiming sonic commons could be central to mental and public health.
Tribal Health and the Conservation of Cultural Memory
Tribal communities hold ancestral musical systems embedded in ecological cycles. Their songs encode medicinal knowledge, seasonal patterns, and community laws. Yet with displacement, many are losing not just land but also language, memory, and music.
Here, One Health must stand for cultural health. It must record, protect, and amplify these sonic traditions before they vanish. Initiatives must include:
- Ethnomusicological archiving
- Oral history documentation
- Community-led performances and healing rituals
Because a song lost is not just music—it is medicine, map, and memory apparently lost.
Sound, Ritual, and Behavioural Change
As a practitioner of what I define as Sonic Historiography, I explore how sound, chant, and music can serve as critical instruments for bridging cultural gaps and activating ecological awareness. Music is more than art; it is a shared memory system and a participatory ritual that invites reflection, empathy, and social action.
From the chants of forest-dwelling communities to urban soundscapes of pollution and silence, music holds the capacity to evoke what data cannot: emotionally embedded ecological consciousness.
One major inspiration behind my framework of Migrating Music is the historical movement of underground and urban folk music, which later emerged as world music. These musical forms, born out of subaltern, migrant, and resistant voices, have encoded histories of human journeys, diasporas, and ecological displacements since the days of Alexander’s campaigns across Asia. The evolving textures of such music reveal how human identity and environmental memory are inseparable.
From ancient Vedic chants to tribal incantations, sound has shaped behaviour, soothed trauma, and encoded ethics. Behavioural change communication under One Health should incorporate music and oral culture as instruments of awareness.
Let there be health songs, not just health slogans. Let urban youth be co-creators of sonic campaigns for environment and empathy. Let tribal children learn that their songlines matter in the fight for planetary health.
Conclusion: Toward a Harmonic Future
One Health is a chorus—not a solo. It must integrate the urban and the tribal, the scientific and the cultural, the modern and the ancestral.
To conserve memory is to conserve immunity.
To honour culture is to honour climate.
To record a tribal song is to preserve a way of knowing the Earth.
As a musicologist, I do not speak in statistics—I listen to silences, recover forgotten frequencies, and create bridges through rhythm and resonance. One Health must not only heal the body, but tune the soul of society.
Key Recommendations for Urban Community Engagement:
- Create Urban Folk Memory Projects using music to document and perform lost rivers, vanished birdsongs, or sacred trees.
- Engage Students with Sonic Historiography to bridge science and culture.
- Develop Local Festivals as Eco-Theatre Events rooted in place-based musical traditions.
- Deploy Mobile Sound Theatres that travel through slums, parks, and institutions.
Bibliography / Reference Listening
- WHO. One Health: Integrating Human, Animal and Environmental Health
- Ministry of Tribal Affairs (India). Cultural Expressions in Tribal Health Practices
- Panda, Somali. Sonic Histories: Songs of Migration, Memory, and Medicine (forthcoming)
- Centre for One Health India. Behavioural and Cultural Dimensions in One Health Communication
- UNESCO. Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage: Case Studies from Indigenous Communities
- Das, R. (2022). Urban Noise, Memory Loss and Sonic Ecology
- Documentation Archives of the Eastern Zonal Cultural Centre. Field Recordings of Tribal Healing Songs
Migrating Music 
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