Reasons To Be Cheerful · 9 hours ago

The Musician Racing to Preserve a Disappearing Soundscape

When audiences mocked Rewben Mashangva for singing the ancient songs of his Tangkhul Naga tribe, calling them "too backward," he didn't abandon them - he wove them into the blues, creating what he calls "folk blues" that honors his ancestors while speaking to a generation raised on rock and K-Pop. For decades, he had trekked to over 200 remote villages, recording elders whose voices carried a thousand-year-old oral tradition that colonial suppression and cultural erosion had nearly silenced. Now his archive lives not just in a research institute, but in the throats of young musicians who say that singing these songs feels like "finally getting to know myself." His son Saka, who has performed alongside him since age three, understands that "the songs we sing, they feel like conversations - between me and my dad, between me and my ancestors." In a world losing a language every two weeks, Mashangva proved that preservation isn't about freezing culture in time, but about making it live and breathe in new mouths.