a family tradition

"Latcho Drom," which means "Safe journey" in the Rom language, is a musical odyssey which tells the story of the Gypsy diaspora, by following the trail of these singular and mysterious people from the land of their origin, in the deserts of Rajasthan in northwestern India, through Egypt and across the Mediterranean to Turkey and Rumania, then westward across Europe to Spain's Atlantic shore. Filmed in its numerous locations in the early nineties by Tony Gatlif, it was for a short time available on DVD, but now is once again only available on videotape. At the moment, Amazon has access to several sellers vending used copies of the tape for reasonable prices (under $40).

Although the entire film is an education, I found the most affecting portions of it to be near the beginning, which shows families of nomadic herders, accompanied by their goats, camels, and donkeys, carrying their meager possessions in carts and barrows and whatever wealth they have on their bodies, moving through an inhospitable landscape and finding time to celebrate their lives. This is a purely tribal and almost completely illiterate society, whose songs, stories, instrumentation, and dances are transmitted orally from one generated to the next, and necessarily learned by rote.

Memorization with the objective of permanent retention is a powerful learning tool, and underestimated in literate societies where written records have rendered it superfluous. It enables the learner to absorb and then transmit knowledge with careful attention to the tiniest details, as these three young women have obviously done in learning the words, the timing, and the accompanying choreographed movements of the traditional tribal song they perform here near the beginning of Gatlif's movie.

In a remarkable study entitled "Homer in India" which ran in the November 20, 2006 issue of the New Yorker, South Asia scholar William Dalrymple examines the public performances of epic poems in Rajasthan. "(I)t seemed extraordinary," he wrote, "to find in modern Rajasthan performers who were still the guardians of an entire self-contained oral culture...I longed to know how the bhopas (performers), who were always simple villagers -- ploughmen, cowherds, and so on -- could remember such colossal quantities of verse."

His conclusion was that their capacity for memorization is enhanced, not impeded by illiteracy. Dalrymple was present for one complete performance of the epic of the god Pabuji, which required 56 hours for the bhopa to recite, in seven consecutive eight-hour nightly performances. The rural people and nomads occupying the deserts of Rajasthan and Gujarat, where the ancient epics are most commonly performed today, are the most conservative element in the most conservative states of modern India, and Dalrymple believes that "illiteracy seems an essential condition for preserving the performance of an oral epic. It was the ability of the bard to read, rather than changes in the tastes of his audience, that sounded the death knell for the oral tradition. Just as the blind can develop a heightened sense of hearing, smell, and touch to compensate for their loss of vision, so it seems that the illiterate have a capacity to remember in a way that the literate simply do not."

Understandably, learning by rote has a bad reputation among educators nowadays. But it would be a mistake to underestimate the power and beauty of what was for thousands of years the one indispensable tool for learning and the transmission of civilization and civilized values, and is still, among obscure people in a few remote and barely accessible places, a family tradition.