Tradition · sung narrative tradition
Villu Pāṭṭu
Also known as Villupattu, Vil Pattu, bow song, Villu Pāṭṭu — the bow song
A southern Tamil form in which the instrument is a bow — a large wooden arc strung and mounted on a pot, struck with sticks by the lead narrator while a chorus answers. It belongs to the Kanyakumari and Tirunelveli country and is sung at village deity festivals, often through the night.
- Function
- Arts & performance
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 8.180, 77.430
Worth knowing
The repertoire includes the Kattadi and Muttarpatti stories of local deities who were historical people killed violently and afterwards worshipped — the bow song is one of the clearest places where the making of a village god out of a remembered death can be watched happening.
Connections (2)
- Devotional corpus onDevasahayam Pillai
Villu pāṭṭu is sung by Christians as readily as by Hindus in the far south, and the martyrdom of Devasahayam Pillai is one of its standard subjects — a Nair courtier converted, paraded on a buffalo, tortured and shot at Aralvaimozhi in 1752, told to the beat of a bow and a pot. The form carries the deaths of local people who became objects of veneration, and it does not much mind which religion is doing the venerating.
- Craft tradition ofSt Xavier's Cathedral, Kottār
The bow song belongs to the Kanyakumari and Tirunelveli country, where the Paravar and Nadar Christian populations are as old as the Catholic mission of the 1540s that Kottār cathedral grew out of. Villu pāṭṭu troupes perform at church festivals and at village deity festivals in the same week, with the same instrument and the same narrative structure, which is a fair description of how religion actually works on this coast.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Villu Paatu”. Sangeet Natak Akademi documentation; and the standard field studies of each tradition named in the entry.
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