Goa & Gomantak · Western Coastal Strip
Love, courtship, separation and — in a substantial minority of the surviving texts — grievance against landlords, priests and colonial officials, sung in a slow six-eight and in a Konkani heavily inflected with Portuguese.
Sung at: Weddings, feasts and competitive festivals. Unusually for an Indian folk repertoire, the mando has been written down and published since the nineteenth century, so its authorship is often known.
Village life at speed — fish sellers, gossip, drink, mothers-in-law. The dulpod exists to break the mando's formality, and the pairing is fixed.
Sung at: Immediately after a mando, at the same gathering.
A temple dancer and a boatman, and by extension the crossing between two worlds. Sung by Catholic performers about Hindu subjects, in a melodic idiom that borrows from both.
Sung at: Stage and feast.
Household, harvest, fertility and the women's own concerns, sung in call and response between two facing rows over successive nights and never with men present.
Sung at: Paush nights on the village mand.
Short cyclic verses that carry the accelerating breath rhythm of the dance rather than a narrative.
Sung at: Ganesh Chaturthi and the monsoon months.
Blessing and instruction sung by older women as coconut milk is applied to the bride and groom. The ceremony is Catholic and the song form is the same ovi that Konkani and Marathi Hindu women sing at the grindstone.
Sung at: The ros ceremony on the eve of a Catholic wedding.
Sowing, transplanting and harvest, sung by the community whose labour built and maintained the khazan fields.
Sung at: Field work and Kunbi village festivals.
Current politics, migration, price rises and language policy, written fresh each season and sung to a brass band. Audiences follow the songs specifically, and a cantar can move public opinion in a way the spoken scenes do not.
Sung at: Between the acts of a tiatr.
The folk songs of Goa & Gomantak — what they are about, who sings them and when. (8)