Marginalized Moor’s Music and Misunderstanding

Abstract

This research video documentary presents the story of a marginalized ethnic/cultural minority group in Sri Lanka that lives in the Eastern Province. This people, known as Moors, originating from Middle Eastern countries and India, arrived in Sri Lanka during the seventh century AD, bringing along their cultural traditions and customs. In Sri Lanka, they have established a unique characteristic way of life and a distinctive form of Islamic culture. They adopted Tamil as the language of communication. Performing arts and musical practices of this group are at risk and rapidly diminishing because of religious ideologies of strict Muslim communities/leaders and the marginalization from other cultural groups. In this narrative ethnographic study, we explore why music and performing arts practices of this particular group of Sri Lankan Muslims who live in Ampara are not observable and what are the contributing factors, in order to sustain cultural practices for the future generations. During the field visits, interviews and discussions were used to further interpret the data recorded on video. Currently, we do thematic analysis of the collected data. Our 20-minute long documentary presents important findings from a part of our research.