“What unites Indians is a love for songs”: Adivasi music – Rajasthan and Gujarat

Our historical memory privileges singers – such as Kabir, Mira, Nanak, and Akka Mahadevi – over other cultural icons

It should not be an exaggeration if one claims that in terms of the average citizen’s ability to recall a large number of songs and to hum them in however terrible a voice, India probably tops the world chart.

When I was three or four years old, my father brought home a radio set. This was six decades ago. It was among the few radiograms that the village had by then, a proud possession for us and quite a public spectacle for the neighbours.[…]

Six decades later, I still recall with great clarity the sweet melodies I heard coming through the first radio programme I ever heard. Over these decades, I have been listening to the radio, almost entirely for the musical part of its broadcast. Of course, it was not the radio alone that brought songs to me. They came from older members of the family who used to hum while carrying out activities at home. They came to one during festivals and weddings and during ceremonies associated with welcoming new arrivals in the family. They came from wandering mendicants, bullock-cart drivers, farmers engrossed in sowing fields, women gathered to make pickles and spices, katha and kirtan performers and the sweetest among them came from mothers trying to put babies to sleep.

Later, much later, when I was in my thirties, I started working with adivasis in western India. Whenever our discussion revolved round their identity, they invariably alluded to the traditions of songs they had. By then, I had read plenty of Marx, Gandhi, Ambedkar and Lohia, and I liked to imagine that adivasis would want to speak in agony about the injustice that the ‘system’ had caused them. To my surprise, they were not as much articulate about things political as they were about things cultural. Through my years of work with them, I have met individuals who can go on singing the entire Mahabharata. The Bhils living on the border of Rajasthan and Gujarat have several epics of their own: the singers took immense pride in rendering the entire opus, without missing out a single syllable. I also came across members of the Bharthari community from central Indian forest states who could render, just for the asking, an entire saga of a legendary king. A friend of mine from the Banjara community once told me that the Banjaras have a poetic genre called ‘lehngi’. When I suggested that he should pen them down if he remembered any of the compositions, he said that he could recall close to 6,000 ‘lehngis’. I was not stunned by his claim because previously I had heard from a friend from the Nayak community that he knew more than 9,000 songs. And this one had a great voice. I still recall how mesmerized I was when he sang for a few hours, one song after another. […]

The tribes and castes in India are communities apart. Those who belong to castes belong to no tribes, and those who belong to tribes are outside the caste pyramid. What brings them together is probably their love for songs. […]

Source: “What unites Indians is a love for songs” by Ganesh [G.N.] Devy (The Telegraph, 1 November 2019)
URL: https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/the-musical-legacy-of-kabir-mira-nanak-tukaram-akka-mahadevi-what-unites-indians-is-a-love-for-songs/cid/1716091
Date Visited: 14 July 2022

[Bold typeface added above for emphasis]

“The great diversity of music in India is a direct manifestation of the diversity and fragmentation of the population in terms of race, religion, language, and other aspects of culture. […] The songs vary in detail, not only from one region to another, but also within a region among the different strata of society.” – NA Jairazbhoy in “Tribal, Folk and Devotional Music” >>

Related posts

• Accountability | Adverse inclusion | Constitution
• Adivasi (Adibasi) | Scheduled Tribes (ST) | Classifications in different states | Denotified Tribe vs. “criminal tribe“
• Colonial policies
• Community facilities | NGO | Organizations
• Crafts and visual arts
• Customs | Homes and utensils
• Demographic Status of Scheduled Tribe Population of India (Census figures 2011)
• eJournals, eBooks & reports | eLearning | Background guide for education
• Fact checking | Who are Scheduled Tribes?
• History
• Languages and linguistic heritage | Endangered languages
• Literature and bibliographies | Literature – fiction | Poetry
• Music and dance | Performing arts
• Particularly vulnerable tribal group
• Publishers: Adivaani | Bhasha | Kalpavriksh | Tara | Tulika
• Revival of traditions
• Seasons and festivals
• Storytelling
• Success stories
• Tribal elders
• Video | Tribes in Transition-III: “Indigenous Cultures in the Digital Era”
• Video | Celestial Dancers of Manipur
• Worship and rituals

Regions of India – Tribal heritage & indigenous knowledge

• Andaman and Nicobar Islands
• Bastar
• Chotanagpur
• Gadchiroli
• Narmada
• Nilgiri Biosphere
• Wayanad
• Western Ghats – tribal heritage & ecology

Up-to-date information on India’s Zonal Cultural Centers | Government website

• Eastern Zonal Cultural Centre, Kolkata
  Eastern region – Eastern Zonal Council
• North Central Zone Cultural Centre, Prayagraj
  Uttar Pradesh
• North East Zone Cultural Centre, Dimapur
  Seven Sister States & Sikkim – North Eastern Council
• North Zone Cultural Centre, Patiala
  Northern region – Northern Zonal Council
• South Central Zone Cultural Centre, Nagpur
  Central region – Central Zonal Council
• South Zone Cultural Centre, Thanjavur
  Southern region – Southern Zonal Council
• West Zone Cultural Centre, Udaipur
  Western region –  Western Zonal Council

Find up-to-date information provided by, for and about Indian authors, researchers, officials, and educators | More search options >>
Search tips: in the search field seen below, combine the name of any particular state, language or region with that of any tribal (Adivasi) community; add keywords of special interest (health, nutrition endangered language, illegal mining, sacred grove); learn about the rights of Scheduled Tribes such as the Forest Rights Act (FRA); and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, women’s rights, and children’s right to education; specify any other issue or news item you want to learn more about (biodiversity, climate change, ecology, economic development, ethnobotany, ethnomedicine, global warming, effective measures to prevent rural poverty, bonded labour, and human trafficking).

For a list of websites included in a single search, click here. To search Indian periodicals, magazines, web portals and other sources safely, click here. To find an Indian PhD thesis on a particular tribal community, region and related issues, click here >>