Khandesh · Deccan Inland Plateau
Farming labour, the mind, poverty, motherhood and old age, in short unrhymed lines of concrete image and no abstraction. Composed orally by a woman who could not write, transcribed by her son and published after her death in 1951.
Sung at: Composed at work — grinding, threshing, cooking. The collection is taught in Marathi schools, which means most of India's exposure to Ahirani is through one illiterate woman's verse.
Brothers, natal homes, marital households and the grind itself, sung in a fixed short metre by women working in pairs.
Sung at: At the hand quern before dawn.
Invitation, welcome and farewell addressed to the goddess installed in the house for a day or two, and to the rot bread offered to her.
Sung at: Shravan, at the Kanbai installation.
Courtship, boasting, village rivalry and the movement between villages, sung over large drums by lines of dancers who walk between hamlets for days.
Sung at: Holi week, on the Satpura slope.
Praise, teasing and ritual abuse exchanged between the two households across each stage of the ceremony, with a fixed sequence tied to specific rites.
Sung at: Weddings.
Songs addressed to the household's dead as they are offered aamras, puran poli and water from a new pot — the region's principal ancestor observance.
Sung at: Akshaya Tritiya, at the start of summer.
Cradle songs sung by women of the household when a child is first laid in the palna.
Sung at: Cradle rites and naming.
Marathi-language repertoire circulating in an Ahirani-speaking region — the clearest evidence of the valley's incorporation into a Marathi cultural sphere that its everyday speech sits outside.
Sung at: Fairs, Shivjayanti, wari dindis.
The folk songs of Khandesh — what they are about, who sings them and when. (8)