Barak Valley · Eastern Himalaya & Brahmaputra Belt
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.
Sung at: 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.
Separation — from a lover, from God, or from a place, with the three deliberately left indistinguishable.
Sung at: Night gatherings, boat journeys.
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.
Sung at: Sufi gatherings and mazar urs.
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.
Sung at: Muharram.
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.
Sung at: The Manasa season, in the monsoon.
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.
Sung at: Karam and the estate festival calendar.
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.
Sung at: Sung on the water.
The folk songs of Barak Valley — what they are about, who sings them and when. (7)