The recordings by Dutch ethnomusicologist Arnold Adrian Bake (pronounced bakh-uh) in India in the 1930s and later are one of the earliest of what may be called “ethnographic” recordings. The collection that has been digitised and deposited in ARCE. Bake travelled from Sindh, the Gujarat coast to Kerala and from Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala to Bengal and Nepal. The collection of his wax cylinders, tefichord, photographs, notebooks and film are housed at ARCE, the British Libraries, UCLA and SOAS. These early recordings suffer in quality from the early recording technology, but have nevertheless served as the basis for analysis of socio-musical change.

One of the central elements of the villupattu (bow song tradition) is its instruments. Minimally, the ensemble plays five instruments (The Bow, Hour-glass drum, Pot, Blocks, and Cymbals); on occasion, one or two others are added. In this section, we look at the various instruments played, along with their videos and audio recordings of them collected by Nazir Ali Jairazbhoy.