KA HO!?

Culture is a shared entity as acknowledged by Conrad Phillip Kottak . Folk songs and folk traditions often make up a significant aspect of such ‘culture’ as shared by people both in and out of a nation. With reference to India and the Indian Diaspora, folk songs have played a huge role in uniting masses and providing disparate groups with a shared ‘culture’.

The Bhojpuri folksongs shared by the people of North India, mainly Bihar and Uttar Pradesh is one such example. It is a genre that has transcended the usual gender and caste boundaries to become a shared love of the people. Bhojpuri, a dialect of Hindi is spoken, with slight variations, over large parts of Northern India. Folk music plays a very important role in Northern India where it features in every ceremony from weddings to funerals, with different songs for each part of the ceremony, welcoming the groom, the arrival of the bride, the wedding itself and the bride’s bittersweet farewell, etc. There are also songs for each of the different seasons and times of harvest. Indian folk music is very diverse, reflecting the variety of cultures in the subcontinent. To take merely the political unit of Bihar state as an example, it encompasses the culturally distinct entities of the Bhojpuri dialect region, the Mithila dialect region as well as 29 tribal groups. Music styles are also differentiated by jati (caste), sex and context. Furthermore folkdance and drama must be considered in conjunction with vocal and instrumental music. Folksong, with or without instrumental support, and instrumental music are often partners of folkdance. Folk theatre (like ancient classical theatre) and most Indian films feature a tripartite integration of song, dance and drama, showing the everlasting influence of folk music even in today’s modernized movie songs. Themes have remained unchanged, focusing on weddings, farewells and the ever popular “male-female one-up man-ship”.

Folk music in India has even played the role of mediator among religions, which few other art forms or even people have been able to do. While the kirtan theoretically bypasses caste and class divisions, it and the bhajan, another type of devotional song, are clearly Hindu; their Muslim counterpart is qawwali. Other cultural groups such as the Bauls of Bengal disregard the boundaries of any religious system and their songs reflect this. Village songs have revealed a disregard for religious separatism. In a woman's song from Bhojpuri (Uttar Pradesh) Allah, the Muslim God is appealed to in a song for the Hindu smallpox goddess, Sitala. It has been noted that this song refers indirectly to the story of the marriage of Sitala with Allah which was apparently widespread before independence and partition movements developed, as was the participation of Hindu and Muslim communities in each other's religious festivals.

Long before Partition however, it was another act of the colonial rulers that created a wide Indian Diaspora and along with that, expanded the use f Bhojpuri and popularized its music. The continuous migration of landless labourers from Bihar and Eastern U P during the British raj to far-off places in the Mediterranean and the Pacific left a trail of pathos and sentimentalism for the mother country which resulted in the creation of new customs and an immensely rich literature that continues to be a living tradition in these areas, according to a study; however it also resulted in what some esteemed professors call the ‘fossilization of culture’. This is a phenomenon whereby immigrants leave the mother country with their cultures and traditions, and continue to preserve them long after the mother country has moved forward. An excellent example would be the main case study for this essay, the preservation of Bhojpuri music among the Indian Diaspora.
The folk songs, that depict the pathos of families whose loved ones had left them and never returned, as also the agonies of destitute peoples struggling for survival in an alien land, are being systematically compiled and documented jointly by a social science institute here and two other institutions, one of The Netherlands and Surinam, both countries home to a sizeable and now financially well-off Bhojpuri community.
"The Bidesia project which derives its name from the songs composed by legendary Bhojpuri poet Bhikari Thakur, tends to study the social and cultural changes that were caused by the migration from the Bhojpuri belt ," says Dr Badri Narain Tiwari of Gobind Ballabh Pant Social Science Institute (GBPSSI). The project is being undertaken by GBPSSI in collaboration with Royal Tropical Institue, Amsterdam and IMWO, a social science institute affiliated to the University of Surinam. Describing the psyche of the woman prototype, who is usually the protagonist of Bidesia songs, Tiwari quotes from a Bhojpuri verse "my husband went in search of gold, my hair turned silver. Neither gold was found, nor my husband returned. He settled down in an alien land." "These lines poignantly describe the pain experienced by the migrants' families . The ones who left the country could later establish no contact with their kin back home, who spent virtually their entire lives waiting and hoping," Tiwari says .
The migrants, who are left in a distant land with their hopes for a better future shattered, strive in a myriad ways to keep memories of homeland alive, which provides them with the resilience to endure the daily grind. The trauma of the migrants can be seen in the Bhojpuri songs sung in foreign countries in which an older generation recalls how it had come to distant lands with the hopes of a good life. Now their descendants, often a product of one settled migrant ‘importing’ a spouse from the motherland and settling up a family in the new country. These lines of first-generation citizens are often a mix of traditions of the motherland and the nation in which they were born. Folk songs and such fusion music is a very strong tool of maintaining their indigenous culture. In Singapore this is clearly visible in the large number of youth members in the newly established Bhojpuri society, to which the author belongs.
It is this ‘youth wing’ which often is the most involved in the society’s activities, going so far as to re-establish festivals which Singapore has not seen in a long time on such a scale, eg. Holi (Phaguwa), the festival of colours, often celebrated as the North Indian New Year. One very important factor that repeatedly came up in meetings was the relevance of music in making these third and fourth generation Singaporeans realize their Bhojpuri roots and the magic of their own dialect. The Singaporean Bhojpuri Society often invites Bhojpuri poets and musicians from different countries as well as from the mother land, to perform at major festivals and have even tried to popularize the use of Bhojpuri in temple activities.
Commercial interests have joined the fray and are making the search for culture even more interesting by creating funky remixes of traditional Bhojpuri folksongs and thus creating a wider appeal. HMV is targeting mainly the Indian migrant population with its Bhojpuri remixes. HMV says it was inspired to tap the market after the runaway remix-hit, Kaanta Laga . The hit song from HMV is already doing the rounds of satellite channels and has set sales soaring . HMV even admitted its target audience was mostly the huge migrant population . HMV’s competition with old war horse T-series has provided the migrants with a larger range of Bhojpuri music as HMV’s remixes are radically different from T-Series’ use of well-established singers like Radhey Sham Rasia, Guddu Rangeela and Manoj Tiwari who render folk songs and bhajans in the traditionally manner.

As such, it is apparent how essential folk music and the festivals described in them are important to Diasporic groups who have little scope of returning ‘home’ due to financial interests. The quest for culture in an increasingly Westernised world is making these migrants turn back towards a search for their differentiating factor so as to avoid becoming just another face in the crowd. As most Diasporic groups share a common history of having left the motherland due to financial reasons, they have developed a shared cultural inheritance although these groups may never have met and are separated through large geographical boundaries. The advent of communication technology has allowed numerous Diasporic Bhojpuri groups to spring up on the Internet and the success of Bhojpuri is making other Indian dialects equally popular, including Awadhi and Maithili. A result of Acculturalation as well as a simple need to preserve their own cultures, cultural features in these traditional folk songs have changed but their motive has not, they still serve to unite Indians world wide in a shared dialect and also interest the youth in their heritage.