Marava & Ramnad · Eastern Coastal Plains
The ballad of a Brahmin who leaves his caste to marry into a leather-working family and is deified — sung to the beaten bow, and one of the few long Tamil oral epics still performed at full length.
Sung at: Village temple festivals, overnight.
Praise and invocation of the village guardian deities whose terracotta horses stand at the field edges, sung with urumi and thappu at the annual kodai festival.
Sung at: Guardian-deity festivals.
Work songs of the fishing coast, timed to a hauling rhythm, with a substantial body of verses about voyages, weather and men who did not come back.
Sung at: Launching and hauling.
Congregational devotional singing in the bhajana sampradaya, performed in mansion courtyards and in the nine clan temples on a fixed annual calendar.
Sung at: Clan temple festivals and household observances.
Praise of the Prophet and of local saints, in Tamil metres, historically written and printed in Arabic script. Kayalpattinam and Kilakarai were among the centres of the tradition.
Sung at: Mawlid, Muharram and dargah observances.
Sung lament by women, improvised on the spot and addressed to the dead, accompanied on this coast by parai drumming.
Sung at: Death.
Sung narratives of the eighteenth-century Sivaganga resistance, kept in oral circulation long before they entered any textbook.
Sung at: Guru puja days and village gatherings.
The folk songs of Marava & Ramnad — what they are about, who sings them and when. (7)