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In addition to the former region of Punjab,
there is the submontane belt lying along the Himalayas. Kangra, Chamba and smaller valleys stretching back into the
Himalayas now in Himachal Pradesh, which plays an important
role in the evolution of Punjab's folk music; are home to
shepherds-players of algoza and flute-a deeply romantic people
whose delicate women inspired traditional painters. We see
them as raginis and nayakas in Pahari miniatures. The hills
are also the setting for ballads such as Heer-Ranjha,
Sassi-Pumu, Sohni-Mahiwal, Mirza-Sahiban and many other tales
of tragic love.
Each of these regions are linguistically and
culturally distinct and they each have their own musical
forms. The musical instruments of these regions are similar to
the musical instruments of Rajasthan and Gujarat and even some
instruments of Iran and Central Asia but the style of playing
and the compositions created with them have a unique flavour.
The folk instruments that accompany
performances are played with subtle nuances recognised by
those familiar with the corpus of the region's folk music. The
vitality, wholesomeness and purity of the people of Punjab are
ingrained in the melodies and rhythms of the instruments. But
more than anything else, it is the dialect that distinguishes
the folk music of various regions.
Punjab's most significant export is her
people: the adventurous Punjabis have fanned out all over
India and beyond to every country of the globe where they have
struggled and prospered. But however far away they wander in
search of a livelihood, they retain strong bonds with family
and friends left behind in Punjab. This, and the media
revolution that has put satellite television in the most
remote areas, explains the high level of cultural and musical
awareness seen even in dusty villages. Moreover, recording
technology has also become easily available. Punjab's capital
city, Chandigarh, boasts six (at the last count) recording
studios and Ludhiana has as many. This is a very mixed
blessing.
The studios have flooded Punjab with
cassettes of "folk music', replacing the strains of authentic
folk instruments with the renditions of the octopads and
synthesisers. Actual folk musical instruments and their
exponents are vanishing. Along with this, promotion and
marketing are doing their bit of damage. Agents are a
"showbiz" fact of life and traditional performers often get a
costly lesson in their ways. The touts with their shady
contracts fleece the gullible folk performer mercilessly but
if the performer is already poverty-stricken and making a
desperate bid for survival, he is more than likely to accept
whatever is doled out as if his talent were of no value.
At the same time, those who are in fact not
even mediocre are projected-often very successfully-as folk
performers. Putting on a surgeon's coat does not make a man a
surgeon; grinning from behind a dafla on a cassette cover does
not make him a folk singer.
Thanks to the advent of the electronic media,
entertainment is available at the push of a button. The
tenacious hold of the electronic media on the youth of Punjab
is evident from the tremendous popularity enjoyed by the small
screen idols like Apache Indian, Malkit Singh, Daler Mehendi
and Sukhvinder. There is also the escalating number of those
experimenting with the folk motif and merging it with the
foot-thumping beats to create the disco-bhangra, Punjabi Pop
and Punjabi-rap.
While the true propagators of the folk forms
languish in the villages, the patrons are lavishing adulation
on those who are obviously borrowing and blending a concoction
of the folk and the modern conceptualisations of what is being
served as "Punjabi music". The hype and commercialisation of
the music market may be inevitable but it is certainly not
pretty.
At the turn of the century, folk performers
of United Punjab enjoyed the patronage of the great princely
states, and to some extent the British overlords. Some of the
British administrators were also scholars and documented the
people and their culture. No serious student of Punjab can
ignore R.C. Temple's Legends of Punjab, or Sir Denzil
Ibbetsons' three volume compilation, A Glossary of the Tribes
and Castes of the Punjab and North-West Frontier Province.
Even today the old State Gazetteers are the bedrock of serious
research. However, it must be remembered that the authors of
these monumental works were not fluent in Punjabi and so one
must expect to find serious lacunae in comprehension and
transliteration.
Cultural continuity, in the sense of the
perpetuation of cultural traits from generation to generation
for centuries, holds within it a contradiction. It transforms
the main essence through the ages till the contemporary
components are a spectacularly convoluted form of what the
original might have been. In contrast, the paradox is that
nothing really changes-the stories are the same, the myths are
similar and the legends are undying. This continuity has been
maintained through the rich oral traditions of a people
especially through the group that has been specially ordained
by society to perpetuate this heritage.
Since the transmission of the folk tradition
is through the traditional guru-shishya parampara,
documentation and systematic compilation of lyrics and
literature does not form part of the system.
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