DhamailSylheti
Radha and Krishna as a frame for a wedding — courtship, separation and the bride leaving her father's house, sung by the women of both households in a clapping circle.
कब गाया जाता है: Weddings — the gaye holud, the bride's departure, the reception. Sung at Hindu and Muslim weddings across the valley and across the Surma plain. Kalika Prasad Bhattacharya's group Dohar carried the repertoire to a national audience from the late 1990s.
BicchediSylheti
Separation — from a lover, from God, or from a place, with the three deliberately left indistinguishable.
कब गाया जाता है: Night gatherings, boat journeys.
Marfati and murshidiSylheti and Bengali
The soul's relation to the murshid and to God, in a vocabulary shared with Baul singing and with almost none of its institutional structure.
कब गाया जाता है: Sufi gatherings and mazar urs.
Jari gaanSylheti
The martyrdom at Karbala, sung by a standing circle of men with a lead singer, and rhythmically closer to dhamail than to any Urdu marsiya.
कब गाया जाता है: Muharram.
Padmapuran gaanSylheti and Bengali
Behula and Lakhindar, and the goddess who controls snakebite — sung through the night by a lead reciter with a chorus, in a landscape where the snake risk peaks exactly when the water does.
कब गाया जाता है: The Manasa season, in the monsoon.
JhumurSadri
Work, courtship and the journey from home, sung in couplets to the madal by the tea-garden communities. The songs about leaving are older than anyone still singing them.
कब गाया जाता है: Karam and the estate festival calendar.
BhatialiSylheti and Bengali
The boatman's song, pitched long and open because it is meant to carry over a river. It belongs to the whole Surma–Meghna lowland and thins out as soon as the ground rises.
कब गाया जाता है: Sung on the water.