Tulu Nadu · Western Coastal Strip
The Billava twin heroes, born to a woman of the community, trained in a garodi, wronged by the chieftain they served and killed young — after which they are worshipped as daivas in their own right. The epic is a charter for a whole community's shrines.
Sung at: Bhuta Kola nights, and paddy transplanting. Sung by male performers at a Kola and, in a longer and older-sounding version, by women working in flooded fields. Most of what has been recorded came from the fields.
The story of Siri and the women of her line across four generations — abandonment, a contested inheritance, and vindication. Women enter possession as these characters and speak in their voices.
Sung at: The Siri possession gatherings. One of the longest oral epics recorded from a living tradition in South India.
Antiphonal work song set to the rhythm of bending and planting, with teasing verses traded between rows of women. It disappears with the transplanter, and mechanised transplanting is removing it.
Sung at: Transplanting and harvest.
Episodes from the Mahabharata, Ramayana and Puranas, versified as a sequence of songs which the bhagavata sings and the actors argue out. Tulu-language prasangas are a twentieth-century addition and now fill houses.
Sung at: Night performances, November to May.
Blessing and leave-taking sung by older women as coconut milk is applied to the bride and groom — a pre-Christian ritual form carrying Christian content.
Sung at: The roce, the night before a Catholic wedding.
Circle songs sung to the strike of sticks, in a speech that shares vocabulary with Malayalam and grammar with Tulu, and whose form is shared with the Mappila coast to the south.
Sung at: Weddings.
The folk songs of Tulu Nadu — what they are about, who sings them and when. (6)