Canara Coast · Western Coastal Strip
Work, land, marriage, birth and the community's own history, sung mainly by women and mainly unaccompanied, with a chorus answering a lead line. The repertoire is large, is held entirely in memory, and is the reason the community's oral tradition has been recorded at all.
Sung at: Sowing, transplanting, harvest, weddings and household ritual. Sukri Bommagowda, who was awarded the Padma Shri in 2017, is the singer through whom most of it reached broadcast and archive.
Processional songs sung house to house by men in feathered headdress as they dance and collect contributions. Each village has its own route and its own order of houses.
Sung at: The Suggi and Holi weeks in March.
Blessing songs sung by women through the wedding sequence — at the oil bath, the turmeric, the arrival of the groom's party — with verses that name the households involved and are adjusted for each marriage.
Sung at: Weddings.
The sung text of the dance-drama, in metrical Kannada verse drawn from the epics and the puranas. Some prasangas are centuries old and others are written now; the singer carries the whole night on them.
Sung at: All-night performances, November to May.
The devotional compositions of the Haridasa poets, sung by village bhajana groups across the areca uplands and forming the standard repertoire an amateur singer here is expected to know.
Sung at: Bhajana evenings and temple festivals.
Call-and-response singing over hand drums. Researchers have recorded only a small residue of retained African vocabulary in the ritual repertoire; the community's everyday languages today are those of the districts they live in, which is itself a record of four centuries of settlement.
Sung at: Weddings, festivals and gatherings.
Cyclic verses sung in a ring to a single-headed clay drum, with the pitch bent by pressing the drum against the body. The form is closer to a rhythmic conversation than to a narrative song.
Sung at: Suggi and evening gatherings.
The folk songs of Canara Coast — what they are about, who sings them and when. (7)