North Konkan · Western Coastal Strip
The sea as employer and as risk — waiting for a boat, the wind turning, the price at the auction, and the woman who runs the selling end of the business while the man is at sea.
Sung at: Narali Purnima, weddings and launches. The commercial recordings that made these songs famous smoothed the dialect considerably; village singing is faster and less melodic.
Two-line verses about a woman's parents, her brother, her labour and her married household, improvised within a fixed metre.
Sung at: At the grindstone, before dawn. Documented in very large collections precisely because the form was disappearing as querns did.
The water poured and the threshold crossed as the bride leaves her father's house — the East Indian community's best-known song, sung at the door itself.
Sung at: The bride's departure at a wedding.
Address to the mother goddess of the marriage square, sung by the women painting the wall over several days. The song and the painting are one ritual, not two.
Sung at: Marriage, while the chauk is painted.
Rival panels arguing creation, the nature of the divine and local politics in extempore verse, through the night, until one side runs out of answers.
Sung at: Village fairs.
Praise of the prophet Elijah, sung in Marathi with Hebrew liturgical passages — the clearest surviving evidence of how far the Bene Israel had assimilated linguistically before the nineteenth century.
Sung at: Vow fulfilment and thanksgiving.
Neighbourhood devotional singing twice a day for ten days, and the immersion procession songs that follow. The public form of the festival is barely a century and a half old and its repertoire is still being added to.
Sung at: Ganesh Chaturthi.
The folk songs of North Konkan — what they are about, who sings them and when. (7)