Rajasthan's Folk Music: Songs of Desert and Court

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Rajasthan produces more professional folk musicians per head than almost anywhere else in India, and the reason is economic rather than romantic. In the desert districts of the west, where agriculture was precarious and the political landscape was a patchwork of Rajput chiefdoms, music became a hereditary service occupation with named patrons, fixed obligations and inherited rights. Two communities dominate that world: the Manganiyar and the Langa. Both are Muslim. Both have sung for centuries, in many cases for Hindu patron families. That arrangement is the single most important fact about Rajasthani folk music, and it explains almost everything about how the repertoire sounds.

The patron system that built the repertoire

Manganiyar families, concentrated around Jaisalmer and Barmer, sang for Rajput jajmans, patron households whose weddings, births and funerals they were obliged to attend and whose genealogies they were obliged to remember. A Manganiyar singer could recite a patron lineage back many generations, which made him an archive as much as an entertainer. Langa families, further west and south around Barmer, served largely Sindhi Sipahi patrons, and their repertoire leans towards devotional and Sufi material. The two communities are distinguished by instrument as much as by patron. The Manganiyar signature instrument is the kamaicha, a bowed lute carved from a single block of wood with a large round belly covered in goatskin and a bank of sympathetic strings, an instrument played essentially nowhere else on earth. The Langa signature is the sindhi sarangi, a smaller bowed instrument with a brighter attack, and the satara and algoza, paired flutes played with circular breathing so the drone never stops.

Percussion is spare: the khartal, four flat blocks of hardwood held two per hand and rattled with a wrist action that produces a startling rate of articulation, plus the dholak and sometimes the morchang, a metal jaw harp whose twanging overtones are a recognisable Rajasthani colour. There are no tabla and rarely a harmonium in the older ensembles, though the harmonium has crept in over the past century.

Court melody and village melody

Rajasthani music is often split into a courtly register and a village register, though the boundary leaks. The courtly register is represented by Maand, a light classical mode associated with the Marwar and Bikaner courts and used for songs of longing and welcome. Its most famous vehicle is Kesariya Balam Aavo Ni, Padharo Mhare Des, a wife's call to an absent husband that has become an unofficial anthem of the state and, somewhat against its own meaning, a tourism slogan. The Bikaner singer Allah Jilai Bai is generally credited with carrying Maand to a national audience through radio in the middle of the twentieth century.

The village register covers seasonal and ceremonial song: panihari songs about drawing water, monsoon songs, wedding cycles sung by women, and long devotional narratives. The most spectacular of these are the phad epics. A bhopa, a priest singer, unrolls a long painted cloth scroll depicting the exploits of a deified hero and performs through the night, his wife holding a lamp to illuminate whichever painted panel corresponds to the verse in hand. The best known cycles are those of Pabuji, a fourteenth century Rathore hero who is said to have brought camels to the region, and of Devnarayan. The Pabuji bhopa accompanies himself on the ravanhattha, a spike fiddle with a coconut resonator; Devnarayan singers use the jantar, a stick zither with gourd resonators. A single Pabuji performance in full can take several nights, and the epic has been documented in scholarly detail by the British Indologist John D. Smith.

Dance, and the modern stage

Rajasthani dance forms travel with the music. Ghoomar, the circling women's dance with a spinning skirt, is usually described as originating among the Bhil communities and later adopted by Rajput households. Kalbelia, the sinuous dance of the Kalbelia community, historically snake handlers, was inscribed by UNESCO on its intangible heritage list in 2010, a designation that changed the economics of the community faster than any government scheme had. Terah Taali is performed seated by women of the Kamad community in worship of the folk deity Ramdev, with thirteen small brass cymbals tied to the body and struck in sequence. Kacchi Ghodi, the dummy horse dance, accompanies wedding processions.

The tradition's twentieth century crisis was the collapse of the patron economy. Princely states were integrated into the Indian union after 1947 and privy purses were abolished in the early 1970s, which removed the income base that had sustained hereditary musicians. What replaced it was the concert stage. Komal Kothari, the folklorist based in Jodhpur, spent decades documenting Langa and Manganiyar repertoire and pushing musicians towards national and international festivals, a project that preserved the music while changing its function from ritual obligation to performance. That trajectory continued with productions such as Roysten Abel's The Manganiyar Seduction, which stacks dozens of musicians in illuminated boxes, and with the Rajasthan International Folk Festival held at Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur around the autumn full moon of Sharad Purnima.

Purists complain, reasonably, that a Manganiyar playing a forty minute festival set is doing something different from a Manganiyar singing a patron's genealogy at a village wedding. Musicians tend to reply that the festival pays. Both are correct. What is clear is that the kamaicha, an instrument that came within a generation of disappearing because young players preferred the more marketable sarangi, survives today largely because outside audiences learned to ask for it.

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