A monthly column that explores any and every aspect of the performing arts. This month, singer Shruthi Veena Vishwanath writes about the origin of folk songs and why it is essential for performers to give credit where credit is due.
गावे बजावे लोक रिझावे
खबर नहीं अपने तन की!
They sing, play and entertain the world
but aren’t aware of their own body!
– Kabir
The 15th-century mystic who resisted easy classification and questioned identities, who can stake ownership over his songs? Who owns music? It is no easy question, and beginning to answer it, especially in the domain of the folk song, is fraught with nuances of power and access, and asks that we question ourselves outside the comfortable and the known.
A few years ago, I was walking down Grant Road when I saw a kirtankar with his veena. He was happy to sing when requested and started ‘Majhe Maher Pandhari’. I smiled and joined him softly. As he ended, I handed him some money. “Mauli, Mauli! But dada, this is Bhimsen Joshi’s tune? What is your tune?” He smiled. “This is my tune!” The abhanga, which had been taken from traditional varkari texts and performed on stage and radio, had made its way back into the varkari community.
No art is created in isolation. Inspiration from one form to another, from one musician to another is but a natural part of the evolution of any art. That you and I, theoretically, have the right to sing something in the public domain is unquestionable. However, that is the individualistic idea of art, and is devoid of the nuance that you and I may have very different kinds of access to the art and its rewards.
There are communities that have nurtured songs, poems and tunes in their lineages for hundreds of years. They carry with them subaltern histories and stories of resistance, hegemony and deep-rooted, hard-fought change.
When Prahlad Singh Tipaniya sings Kabir, he carries with him years of immersion with various teachers. His feet carry the tales of walking from village to village carrying the tambura on foot to an overnight satsang. His songs of Kabir, some passed down, but many from his own research, are sung by hundreds of people, mostly Dalit mandalis, for whom Kabir’s message of unity has given hope through centuries of caste oppression. “The problem isn’t people singing these songs,” Tipaniya tells me. I am one of possibly thousands whom he has encouraged to carry forward the Kabir songs he sings. “The problem is when you’ve not experienced it, when you aren’t struck. This is not music for personal gain. This is to push you to experience.”
When urban singers like me sing on stages, we often sing devoid of the social or personal context of the song. With the kind of social media reach and recording power we often tend to have, it takes barely one iteration of singing for the community that has kept the music for hundreds of years to be erased from the conversation. The music is then stripped from its social ethos and becomes another vessel for those with class and caste advantages to profit from.
Shilpa Mudbi of the Urban Folk Project says, “Folk songs (and material) are collectively owned by a group of people who have a certain understanding of the world. They live in their collective imagination. It therefore becomes that much more important that you credit the person, the community and the larger history that it comes from, else we lose this connection.
In a product-driven world, where artistes are invited by the number of new pieces they create, this ethos could be under threat. What is the reward for slow, immersion-based music? What is the reward for crediting the community?
When I first heard Baul music in the ashor (traditional performance setting) in rural Bengal, it felt as if this music, which I had heard ample times before on urban concert stages, was entering my being for the first time. A few years before, I had heard Kabir in Malwa and I felt like I knew why Kumar Gandharva had gone there for convalescence, and why he became the singer that he did.
The presence of women and men from the city sometimes challenges existing patriarchal narratives in rural song communities. In several, including the Mirs of Rajasthan and Malwi Kabir mandalis, women and girls are now beginning to learn and/or sing. The exchange of energies has shifted these spaces and will continue to do so. But it is the responsibility of those who seek these spaces to engage ethically, not for a one-time, one-way profit motive.
We sit at the threshold of these oral histories and performance traditions. The landscape has become almost unrecognisable in the decade that I have been singing and working on the ground, thanks to smartphones. Everywhere, individual singers are beginning to take centre stage, fast songs that work on social media are being sung. For the underlying ethos to not get lost completely, a collective consciousness is needed.
Tipaniya’s grandchildren now sing and engage with the Kabir tradition in different ways. The eldest, Mayank Tipaniya, films and records all his music for their thriving YouTube channel. Mayank says, “At the very least, credit the community that you learn from. Let their names also reach the wide world that you are reaching. That is the first step for the true emotion of the song to reach people. And that emotion is a rare thing these days.”
Shruthi Veena Vishwanath is a singer, songcatcher, stirrer of herstories, educator and curator. Her practice celebrates mystic music traditions from South Asia and beyond. Her work strives to bring voices that are not known, especially of women, to the fore. She has researched extensively on folk, spiritual and mystic songs of west, south-west and central India. Trained in classical music for many years, she later dived deep into the roots of mystic traditions, travelling and learning from traditional practitioners in rural areas. Vishwanath has performed at festivals and venues across the world, spoken at leading universities on music and poetry, and received multiple grants for research and performance. She currently leads an inclusive online community for song-learning called Music in the Machan.
This article was originally published in the October 2023 issue of the On Stage.
