Journey
Folk epics and the singers who carry them
Long narrative songs carried by hereditary performers rather than by manuscripts, each with its own instrument and its own quarrel with the official version: a Bundelkhandi war ballad, a Rajasthani painted scroll read by lamplight, a Chhattisgarh Mahabharata with Bhima at its centre, a Marathi ballad composed within living memory of the battles.
Stops (8)
- Ālhā-Khaṇḍ · Ālhā-Khaṇḍ — Mahoba, Bundelkhand
Fifty-odd episodes on the Banaphar brothers Alha and Udal, retainers of the Chandela king Parmal, and their losing war with Prithviraj Chauhan — sung competitively through the monsoon in an open-throated shout. The first written text was dictated to a British collector in the 1860s; after seven centuries oral, it is still not fixed.
- Pābūjī kī Phaḍ · Pābūjī kī Phaḍ — Shahpura and the Marwar villages
A painted cloth several metres long, made at Shahpura by hereditary Joshi families and unrolled at night by a bhopa singer whose wife holds the lamp to whichever panel the story has reached. Its subject, Pabuji, was a fourteenth-century Rathore chieftain who became the god of the camel-herders.
- Pāṇḍavānī · Pāṇḍavānī — Chhattisgarh
One performer, standing, with a tambura that becomes sword, mace and chariot in turn, telling the Mahabharata with Bhima as its hero rather than Arjuna. Teejan Bai broke into the standing kapalik style as a young woman in the 1970s, was driven out of her village for it, and ended with a Padma Vibhushan.
- Pawāḍā · Pawāḍā — Pune and the Maratha country
The Marathi war ballad, sung fast and loud by a shahir with a daf: Afzal Khan, Sinhagad, the escape from Agra. The earliest were composed within living memory of the events, which makes them close to reportage, and the form was taken up again by the Samyukta Maharashtra agitation of the 1950s.
- Burra Kathā · Burra Kathā — coastal Andhra
Three performers: a singer with a tambura and two drummers whose job is to interrupt him, one for comedy and one for commentary on the news. Because topicality is built into the form, it became the standard medium of the Telangana armed struggle, and performances were banned for a period by the Madras government.
- Villu Pāṭṭu · Villu Pāṭṭu — Kanyakumari and Tirunelveli
The instrument is a bow: a large strung arc mounted on a pot and beaten with sticks while the narrator sings and a chorus answers, through the night at village deity festivals. Much of its repertoire concerns local people killed violently and afterwards worshipped, which is deification caught in progress.
- Mānganiyār & Lāngā · Mānganiyār and Lāngā — Jaisalmer and Barmer
Muslim hereditary musicians who sing for named Hindu and Muslim patron families across generations, keeping their genealogies and their house songs and holding the right to be called and paid at births, marriages and deaths. Concert touring since the 1960s has given them their first income outside that contract.
- Bāul · Bāul — Kenduli and the Bengal countryside
Mendicant singers, half Vaishnava-Sahajiya and half Sufi fakir, who reject caste, temple and mosque and look for the divine inside the body. Lalon died at Kushtia in 1890 leaving several hundred songs and no statable religion; Tagore collected the melodies and took them into his own.