Table of Content
- Songs of the Bengal Patua: Painting Through Voice
- Music of the Warli Tribe: The Rhythm of Earth and Sky
- Songs of the Gond Tribes: Stilts, Drums, and a Festival of Fire
- Devotional Songs of the Kanwar Yatra: Feet That Sing
- Conclusion: The Echo That Remains
Ever wondered how culture translates from one generation to another?
Books and scriptures play their part—but perhaps one of the most profound and enduring vessels of tradition has been the human voice itself.
Word of mouth – songs and poem, which have vesseled our tradition from ages.
Through rhythm, melody, and storytelling, communities have preserved their myths, social customs, and spiritual beliefs across centuries.
This article travels through India’s rich landscape of oral traditions—stopping by the scrolls of the Bengal Patua, the rhythmic walls of the Warli tribes, the ecstatic dances of the Gonds, and the saffron-sung devotion of the Kanwariyas. In each, song is not mere entertainment; it is history, prayer, protest, memory.
Songs of the Bengal Patua: Painting Through Voice
In the rural heartlands of Bengal, art unfolds on scrolls—and then, it sings.
Patua Sangeet, a genre of folk music performed by patuas (itinerant scroll painters), is as much a visual art as it is oral. As the patua slowly unfurls their hand-painted canvas—called a pat—they narrate the story through song and stylized gesture. The scroll and the song walk together.
The tales are deeply varied—drawing from Hindu mythology, Islamic folk legends, Buddhist stories, and even present-day social narratives. One scroll might sing of Krishna’s playful miracles, another might reflect on drought and injustice:
"The sins of the king visit the subjects;
Laksmi or good luck leaves a household on account of the sins of the mistress of the house;
Similarly, when there is drought, an emperor's subjects leave the land."
In a Yama pat, which portrays the afterlife, the song grows darker:
Yama rajer may baisa achhe tamar dekchi laiya
Ati papi manuser kalla dichhe se deke phelaiye
(Yama’s mother sits with her cooking pot—she tosses in the heads of great sinners and stirs them around)
Scrolls like the Gazir Pat, devoted to Gazi Pir, a legendary Muslim warrior-saint, were once sung across both Hindu and Muslim communities of Bengal and Bangladesh. The patua begins with a reverent invocation to the saint before describing his miracles—fighting tigers, healing the sick, protecting the weak.
Even present-day tragedies are not beyond the reach of the Patua voice. After the 2004 tsunami, Swarna Chitrakar, a celebrated scroll artist, painted and sang of the disaster—bearing witness with ink and song.
Ei pralay jatri, bhenge dilo griho
Shishu-nari bhasa gelo, keu roilo keu gelo
Amra dekhlam sei shob drishya, jeno kono swapno noy bhoyonkor satya
This tsunami traveller, broke homes apart
Children and women were washed away, some survived, others vanished
We saw it all unfold—like a nightmare, too real to be imagined
Swarna Chitrakar - Kolkata
Music of the Warli Tribe: The Rhythm of Earth and Sky
Tucked into the folds of Maharashtra’s Sahyadri hills lives the Warli tribe, where songs are not just sung—they are painted on mud walls and breathed into life with every beat of the drum.
Warli music is inherently ritualistic. Sung primarily by women during life-cycle events—birth, marriage, harvest, and death—it invokes the deities, natural forces, and ancestors that govern the tribe’s cosmology. The musical traditions are simple, repetitive, and hypnotic, but never simplistic. They echo the patterns seen in their Warli paintings—circles, spirals, and lines that spiral like time itself.
The Warli drum is central. Tarpa, a trumpet-like wind instrument, guides group dances in circular formations. During the harvest moon, dancers form a spiral around the tarpa player, feet tapping to the beat of fertility and community.
A typical wedding chant goes:
Gaon aaya devta, le aayi varsha
Gaon ne diya kanya, ban gaye bandhan
The god arrived in our village, and brought the rains with him
The village gave its daughter, and a sacred bond was made
Their music, like their art, is rooted in nature—but it grows with each new generation who continues the cycle of listening and singing.
bridegroom, dongripada
Songs of the Gond Tribes: Stilts, Drums, and a Festival of Fire
A buffalo-horn trumpet, the hakum, announces the joyful harvest festival, and varying types of drums—mandri, kotoloka, and kundir—take over. A group of women chant antiphonally in leadership of the wedding festivities. Men dance on stilts, creating an intoxicating rhythm that is guided by drums. This is a snapshot of the musical practices found within the Bastar district of India, a region mostly comprised of tribal groups including the Muria and the Gonds.
Among the Gonds, song is woven into the very fabric of life. It is sung at birth and at death, at the onset of rains and during hunting expeditions, at weddings and around cooking fires. Each occasion calls for a specific rhythm, a tune passed down not in ink but in the breath of elders and the bodies of dancers.
Their devotional songs praise local deities like Pharsapen, god of protection, or Bada Deo, the great ancestral spirit. Nature is sacred: rivers, forests, animals all find place in the Gond musical landscape.
One song, often sung during the festival of Madai, honors the spirits of the forest:
Mori mori ayi re, phool ke saath naach re
Pedon ke tale baje dhol, jungal mein devta aay re
The peacock dances in with flowers in her trail
Beneath the trees the drums resound—our forest god arrives
Their narrative songs, called suhagin or bhajana, also recount tribal epics, ancestral migrations, or battles. These are often accompanied by folk instruments such as the kalangi (flute) or banam (a one-stringed fiddle). The tone can be festive or solemn, but always deeply communal.
In wedding processions, men dance wearing masks and stilts, while women sing songs like:
Tor ban ban jaye dulha re
Sona jaisa chamke, phoolon se sajaye
Your groom walks like the forest wind
Shining like gold, adorned in flowers
What makes Gond music particularly special is its sync with the seasons—songs evolve as nature shifts. In spring, love ballads blossom; in monsoon, they invoke rain; in winter, they call the warmth of fire and kinship.
Even as modernization nibbles at the edges of tribal life, in the forests and fields of Bastar, the Gonds still sing—not just for survival, but for belonging.
wedding procession
Devotional Songs of the Kanwar Yatra: Feet That Sing
The Kanwar Yatra is a vibrant expression of devotion, where countless saffron-clad Kanwariyas embark on a sacred journey during the monsoon month of Shravan. They walk barefoot for miles, carrying ornately decorated kanwars—bamboo yokes strung with pots of holy Ganges water—to offer at Shiva temples.
This pilgrimage echoes ancient legends. In one, when Lord Shiva consumed the deadly poison halahal from the churning of the cosmic ocean, the gods poured Ganges water over him to ease his pain. In another, it was Parashuram, the sixth avatar of Vishnu, who undertook the first Kanwar journey.
As they walk, the Kanwariyas sing—songs of praise, of longing, of surrender. The roads become rivers of rhythm.
One such folk song, chanted during the journey:
Bam bam bhole, nandi ke sawari
Ganga jal laye, tere dwaar hamari
Bam bam Bhole, rider of Nandi
We bring Ganga’s water to your door, humbly
The songs unify thousands—strangers become brothers under the weight of devotion and the sound of bhajans carried by the wind. These are not polished compositions. They are raw and reverent, sung with cracked voices and tired feet, echoing with love and surrender.
Bol Kawariya Bol Bam
Conclusion: The Echo That Remains
Across painted scrolls, forest clearings, mud-walled homes, and winding pilgrim roads—the song survives. It carries gods and ancestors, grief and joy, protest and prayer. These oral traditions are not just echoes from the past—they are living, breathing archives of collective memory, constantly rewritten in the voices of those who remember.
In an age where data is stored in silicon and knowledge is Googled, these folk songs remind us of an older way of knowing—where wisdom is sung, not cited. Where a grandmother’s lullaby holds more than melody; it holds myth. Where a traveler sings not just to pass the miles, but to carry forward an ancient pact between land, language, and longing.
So the next time you hear a song in a language you don’t know, with a beat you’ve never danced to—listen closer. You might be hearing a story that has traveled further than any book ever could.
References
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"Patua Sangit." Banglapedia: National Encyclopedia of Bangladesh.
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"The Warli Tribe & Their Music." Vishnuias.com.
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Tribal Music of India: The Muria and Maria Gonds of Madhya Pradesh. Smithsonian Folkways.
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"India: Kanwar Yatra – Mythology of the Pilgrimage of Lord Shiva’s Kanvaris." Earthstoriez.
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"Kanwar Yatra: Spiritual Journey to BJP’s Hindutva Pitch Explained." The Hindu.
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"Kanwar Yatra." AboutUttarakhand.com.
