Dooars & Terai · Eastern Himalaya & Brahmaputra Belt
Separation — a woman addressing an absent moishal or gariyal, or the herder addressing the road. Long lines, slow tempo, and the characteristic broken note.
Sung at: Herding, carting, and evening gatherings. Sung across this belt and eastward into Assam's Goalpara country, where the same repertoire is called Goalporia lokgeet.
Teasing, courtship and comic complaint, sung fast and short.
Sung at: The same gatherings, between Bhawaiya songs.
The Ramayana retold in local idiom, with the gidal singing, narrating and playing every part to the bena fiddle and a chorus.
Sung at: Winter, over several nights.
Work, love, and the plantation itself — recruitment, the sardar, the wage, the distance home. The plateau versions of the same tunes carry none of this.
Sung at: Karam, weddings, and after work.
The karam branch, the fasting sister, the brother's welfare, and the coming harvest.
Sung at: Karam Puja, through the night.
Addressed to Tusu as an unmarried girl of the household, and composed new each season — which is how current events enter the repertoire every year.
Sung at: Poush, ending at Makar Sankranti.
The Manasa narrative sung through a night with a leading singer and chorus, in a region where snakebite in a flooded paddy field was an ordinary cause of death.
Sung at: Manasa puja, in Sravan and Bhadra.
Butterflies, birds, the river and the new year, sung to the kham and siphung while the dance holds the cloth wide.
Sung at: Bwisagu.
The folk songs of Dooars & Terai — what they are about, who sings them and when. (8)