UNESCO goodwill
ambassador Madanjeet Singh traces the secular legacy
of India’s oral tradition
 |
Madanjeet
Singh |
It was in Kashmir
that I first became aware of the prevailing influence of oral folk culture
in India. There, I met Aasi, the ‘coolie poet’, an illiterate
Muslim labourer in Srinagar. His secular poetry had inspired all communities,
Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and Christians, to form a cultural
front against the kabaili (tribal) invaders who attacked the valley
in 1948 soon after partition. He was a devotee of Kashmir’s patron
Sufi saint, Hazrat Nuruddin Nurani and often went to pray in his shrine
— one floor used as a temple, the other as a mosque.
Many Kashmiri poets
like Lalla and Lal Ded (14th century), were women, who wrote poems about
Shiva. Hubb Khatun (16th century) and Arani-mal (18th century) were
famous for their love lyrics. And a lot of poetic literature by Muslims
in Kashmiri betrays strong Hindu influences.
Aasi’s poetry
took the form of verses intoned as if part of a Vedic ritual. The Vedas
(c.1500–1200 bc) are inherently secular. They extolled Nature
deities such as Agni (fire), Surya (sun), Usha (the dawn) and Indra
(rain and storm). This liturgical corpus preserved orally and handed
down through generations. The addition of rhythm and beat aided memorisation,
and thus music, became an integral part of this oral tradition, which
resonates throughout Indian folk culture now.
 |
| |
The all-embracing character
of this folk culture comes into focus as it travels
the world. It was marvellous to see the
Mahabharata and Ramayana played by
Indonesian Muslims at the roadside |
South Asian folk
music and dance are predominantly secular as the oral traditions derive
from animistic cultures, which’ve been preserved by tribal communities.
The adivasis of central and eastern India (Murias, Bhils, Gonds, Juangs
and Santhals) are the most uninhibited in their song and dance. Bauls,
the lonely wandering minstrels of Bengal, do not belong to any religious
denomination. They believe in the religion of ‘humanity’
and roam endlessly seeking the ‘Supreme Being’ within, through
music, devotion and love.
Be it Bhangra, the
male harvest dance of Punjab, the Rajasthani ghoomar, the Lambadi gypsy
women of Andhra Pradesh, or the kolyacha dance indigenous to the Konkan
coast, the variety of ritualistic folk dances in India are all inherently
secular. Many also have magical significance and are connected with
ancient cults.
The karakam dance
of Tamil Nadu is mainly performed at an annual festival in front of
the image of Mariyammai (the goddess of pestilence) to deter her from
unleashing an epidemic. Kathakali, indigenous to southwestern India,
takes its subject matter from the Ramayana, the Maha-bharata, and Saiva
literature. The faces of the dancers are made-up elaborately to look
like painted masks.
Masked dances, in
fact, are among the most ancient of cultural objects. The Himalayan
region is known for its fantastic masked dancers. In Ladakh, dancers
impersonate yaks with men mounted on their back. In sada tapa tsen,
men wear gorgeous brocades and long tunics with wide flapping sleeves.
Skulls arranged as a diadem are a prominent feature of their grotesquely
grinning wooden masks, representing spirits of the other world. The
chhau, a unique form in Bihar, have masks with predominantly human features
slightly modified to suggest the element they portray — rainbows,
night, flowers. Their serene expressions painted in simple, flat colours
differ radically from the elaborate makeup of kathakali, or the exaggerated
ghoulishness of the Noh and Kandyan masks.
In Kerala, the Therayattam
festival is held to propitiate gods and demons. Dancers in awe-inspiring
costumes and hideous masks, enact weird rituals before the village shrine.
In Madhya Pradesh, men and women of the Muria tribe, perform the bison
horn dance. Wearing horned headdresses with a tall tuft of feathers
and a fringe of cowry shells over their faces, the men carry a log-shaped
drum around their necks. The women, their heads surmounted by solid-brass
chaplets and their breasts covered with heavy metal necklaces, carry
sticks in their right hands like drum majorettes. About a 100 performers
dance at a time. The ‘bisons’ attack each other, spearing
up leaves with their horns and chasing the female dancers in a dynamic
interpretation of nature’s mating season.
The all-embracing
character of this folk culture comes into focus as it travels around
the world, blending with the mythology, history and geography of different
countries. Until recently, it was marvellous to see the Mahabharata
and the Ramayana played by Indonesian Muslims at the roadside. So also
the Wayang puppet theatre, where the master puppeteer enacted characters
from great Indian epics, interwoven with indigenous myths, while singers
and musicians play melodies on local bronze instruments and beat on
gamelan drums.
Folk music can be
very contemporary and political. Folk songs can serve as chronicle,
newspaper and agent of enculturation. In modern societies, folk music
is perpetuated by ethnic and religious minorities, among whom it is
thought to promote self-esteem and social solidarity.
The web of these
oral interactions laid the foundation of some of the most magnificent
monuments worldwide. This is illustrated by a series of sun temples
built on the premise of identical mythologies. Legend has it that Krishna’s
son, Samba cured his leprosy by spending 12 years in Mitrabana, the
forest of Mitra, found on the bank of the river Chandrabrabha. Grateful,
Samba built a great sun temple at Sambapura (modern day Multan in Pakistan).
Long after the Multan shrine was destroyed, the Chandrabrabha myth was
carried on the wings of traditional folklore. The legend spread as far
as Indonesia where a 5th century inscription, attributed to Samba by
the Indonesian king Purnavaman, mentions the river Chandraprabha. Curiously,
the myth does not stop in Indonesia but returns to Konarak in India,
where a magnificent 13th century Surya temple was built and the river
Chandraprabha identified with a pool of water in a nearby forest called
Mitrabana.
Great works of art
were also created by oral cultures. Having achieved Enlightenment, the
Buddha (born c. 563 bc) travelled far preaching his secular message
of ‘religious agnosticism’. After his death (c. 483 bc),
his followers propagated his Theravada doctrine as they built cave monasteries
along the silk route. These ‘cultural stopovers’ became
important adjuncts to the oral tradition and local scribes, painters
and sculptors propagated the Buddha’s message.
The Jataka stories
of the Ajanta cave paintings, in fact, are said to derive from another
storehouse of Indian oral and intangible heritage — Panchatantra,
Sanskrit for ‘Five Chapters’. The original Sanskrit work,
now lost, may have originated at any time between 100 bc and ad 500.
The Persian royal physician, Burzo translated it into Pahlavi (Middle
Persian) in the 6th century. Although this work is also lost, a Syriac
translation has survived, together with the famous 8th century Arabic
translation of Ibn al-Muqaffa known as Kalilah wa Dimnah after the two
jackals that figure in the first story. The Arabic translation led on
to various other versions, including a second Syriac translation and
an 11th century version in Greek, the Stepha nites kai lehnelates, from
which translations were made into Latin and various Slavic languages.
The 17th century Turkish translation, the Hilmayunname, was based on
a 15th century Persian version, the Anwar-e-Suhayli. In Europe, a version
was written in Latin hexameters by the fabulist Baldo, probably in the
12th century, and in the 13th century, a Spanish translation was made
on the orders of Alfonso X of Leon and Castile. It was the 12th century
Hebrew version of Rabbi Joel, however, that became the source of most
European versions. The Panchatantra stories also travelled to Indonesia
through Old Javanese written literature and possibly through oral versions.
At the turn of the
millennium, South Asia’s social, cultural and religious landscape
underwent a radical transformation. The simple secular tenets of Theravada,
conceived by the historical Buddha, were discarded for metaphysical
notions of Mahayana and Vajrayana (Tantric) Buddhism and both were rejected
by an increasingly aggressive Hindu orthodoxy. The common people felt
left out by the Sanskrit curricula of the Gupta Empire, preferring the
use of their own locally spoken languages. At the same time, a large
number of Bhakti cults mushroomed around the mythology of Krishna, the
‘black’, the lover, the rebel.
In southern India,
the Alvar and Nayanar hymnists roamed the countryside from the 7th to
the 10th century. However, it was not until Bhakti notions interacted
with Sufism that a South Asian ‘renaissance’ flourished,
inspiring superb poetry and literature in regional languages rather
than Sanskrit. Foreign influences included the Sufi mysticism of Rabiah
al-Adawiyah, an Iraqi woman from Basra, who died in 801 ad, as well
as others from Egypt, Iran and Turkey. The Bhakti poet-saints hailed
from all sections of society, ranging from mendicants like Namdev, Tukaram,
Tulsidas, Surdas, Gorakhnath and Chandidas, to the Rajput princess of
Jodhpur, Mira Bai.
Mir Bulleh Shah
(1680–1758) was among the great Punjabi Sufi poets of the Qadiri
Shatari sect. He became the disciple of Inayat Shah, a low caste gardener,
and was subsequently known as ‘the sheikh of both worlds’.
To accept a menial worker as his master in the social conditions of
his times shook society to its core especially as he traced his descent
from the Prophet Mohammad. Musicians invariably accompanied the poet-saints.
Bala, a Hindu tabla player, and Mardana, a Muslim player of the string
instrument rabab, invariably accompanied Nanak, the first guru of the
Sikhs. Together, they reached as far as Mecca and Medina. The foundation
stone of the holiest of Sikh shrines in Amritsar was laid by Mian Mir,
a Sufi ascetic and its inner sanctum is named Harmandir after Shiva.
One of the oldest
Bengali books, Gorakhavijaya was written by Abd-ul-Karim. Muslims also
authored many padyavalis, poems celebrating the love of Krishna and
Radha. Bengali culture in particular emphasised the element of love,
which changed the notion of asceticism to mysticism. Several religious
sects attempted to harmonise Hindu and Muslim religious traditions at
different levels. The story of the Rajput princess Padmavati, originally
a romance, was beautifully recorded in Hindi by the 16thcentury Sufi
poet Malik Muhammad Jayasi, and later by the 17th century Bengali Muslim
poet Alaol. This tradition inspired modern poets such as Rabindranath
Tagore and Mohammad Iqbal. The synthesis between Bhakti and Sufi elements
also incorporated aspects from Buddhist literature, such as certain
Ismaili texts like Umm al-kitab. The Kalachakra also speaks of Mecca
and introduces Islamic formulas into mantras. This trend of religious
syncretisation appears to have continued as late as the 19th century,
when Raja Pratap Singh Judeo of Chhatarpur attempted to translate the
Bhakti-Sufi spirit into temple architecture. In one temple (on the unesco
list of culture heritage), the traditional domes on the top of a shrine
represent a Hindu shikara, a Buddhist stupa and the dome of a mosque.
The raja wanted the shrine to be open for worship to everyone, irrespective
of sex, class, caste or religion, much like the Sufi shrine in Kashmir,
where one floor was used as a temple and the other as a mosque.
The
writer is Founder, South Asia Foundation and
has written many books on heritage and culture
