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Everyday Creativity: Singing Goddesses in the Himalayan Foothills
Everyday Creativity: Singing Goddesses in the Himalayan Foothills
Everyday Creativity: Singing Goddesses in the Himalayan Foothills
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Everyday Creativity: Singing Goddesses in the Himalayan Foothills

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Kirin Narayan’s imagination was captured the very first time that, as a girl visiting the Himalayas, she heard Kangra women join their voices together in song. Returning as an anthropologist, she became fascinated by how they spoke of singing as a form of enrichment, bringing feelings of accomplishment, companionship, happiness, and even good health—all benefits of the “everyday creativity” she explores in this book. Part ethnography, part musical discovery, part poetry, part memoir, and part unforgettable portraits of creative individuals, this unique work brings this remote region in North India alive in sight and sound while celebrating the incredible powers of music in our lives.
          
With rare and captivating eloquence, Narayan portrays Kangra songs about difficulties on the lives of goddesses and female saints as a path to well-being. Like the intricate geometries of mandalu patterns drawn in courtyards or the subtle balance of flavors in a meal, well-crafted songs offer a variety of deeply meaningful benefits: as a way of making something of value, as a means of establishing a community of shared pleasure and skill, as a path through hardships and limitations, and as an arena of renewed possibility. Everyday Creativity makes big the small world of Kangra song and opens up new ways of thinking about what creativity is to us and why we are so compelled to engage it.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateNov 22, 2016
ISBN9780226407739
Everyday Creativity: Singing Goddesses in the Himalayan Foothills

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    Everyday Creativity - Kirin Narayan

    Everyday Creativity

    Big Issues in Music

    A project of the Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology series

    Edited by Philip V. Bohlman and Ronald M. Radano

    ALSO IN THIS SERIES

    Music and Capitalism: A History of the Present

    by Timothy D. Taylor

    Everyday Creativity

    Singing Goddesses in the Himalayan Foothills

    Kirin Narayan

    The University of Chicago Press

    Chicago and London

    The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

    The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

    © 2016 by Kirin Narayan

    All rights reserved. Published 2016.

    Printed in the United States of America

    25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16    1 2 3 4 5

    ISBN-13: 978-0-226-40742-5 (cloth)

    ISBN-13: 978-0-226-40756-2 (paper)

    ISBN-13: 978-0-226-40773-9 (e-book)

    DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226407739.001.0001

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Names: Narayan, Kirin, author.

    Title: Everyday creativity : singing goddesses in the Himalayan foothills / Kirin Narayan.

    Other titles: Big issues in music.

    Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Series: Big issues in music

    Identifiers: LCCN 2016021174 | ISBN 9780226407425 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226407562 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226407739 (e-book)

    Subjects: LCSH: Music—Social aspects—India—Kāngra (District) | Women singers—India—Kāngra (District) | Kāngra (India : District)—Social life and customs.

    Classification: LCC ML3917.I4 N37 2016 | DDC 782.42162/914110082—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016021174

    This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

    With special thanks to Sarla Korla—Sarlaji

    brilliant, curious friend

    who has taught me so much about Kangra

    as she graciously connects worlds

    Contents

    Foreword

    Finding Form

    1.  Tending Lives through Songs

    2.  The Ground That Grows Songs

    3.  Attaining: The Mountain Daughter’s Many Forms

    4.  Playing: Krishna’s Mothers, Sister, and Lovers

    5.  Going: Saili as Plant and Goddess

    6.  Bathing: The Transformative Flows of Sound

    Reaching the Head

    A Note on Transliteration

    Acknowledgments

    Notes

    Bibliography

    Rāg Todi—Rāgamāla miniature, Village in West Bengal, opaque watercolor. Collection of Philip V. Bohlman, Berlin.

    Foreword: Todi in the Forest of Song

    Philip V. Bohlman

    How lovely are the songs that accompany Todi as she enters the forest depicted in the rāgamāla painting opening this foreword! Todi the goddess, Todi the enchantress, Todi the singer with a vīna draped about her body, Todi endowed with beauty, which she transmits to and through the stories that accompany her as an avatar for rāga, the form into which melody and narrative pour in the music of India and beyond across South Asia. Song inhabits the forms that emerge in the representations and narratives that follow Todi into the forest, even in this rāgamāla miniature from a village in West Bengal, geographically far removed from Kangra in the foothills of the Himalayas but connected by music and stories to the singing of women.

    It is particularly fitting that Todi lead us through the foreword to Kirin Narayan’s journey of song in the everyday creativity of women singers and storytellers in Kangra. In so doing, Todi also expands the very forests of Hinduism that resonate with song and proffer form to music. Todi comes to inhabit song, to shape herself as an avatar for music, thus evoking the vastness of music’s ontologies. It is this vastness that the singing goddesses of the Himalayan foothills also inhabit with their everyday creativity.

    Todi’s many musical forms and avatars notwithstanding, there are several that are especially suggestive for the big issues of music that unfold across the pages of this book. Clearly, the Todi entering the forest in the rāgamāla from the village in West Bengal is richly endowed with musical form and meaning. The genre of painting and representation we see here, rāgamāla, further specifies this Todi as a rāga, even more specifically as a rāgini, acknowledging her female attributes.

    Rāgas and rāginis contain and express differences in gender, and rāgini Todi makes it very clear why this is so. The rāgamāla images that represent the musical and narrative forms of rāga express gender clearly and meaningfully. Todi, as we see in the folk painting that opens this foreword, carries a vīna over her left shoulder. The vīna is not just any musical instrument; rather, it is the instrument that is most closely connected to Sarasvatī, the Hindu goddess associated with learning and the arts, particularly music. So important is her association with music, moreover, that Sarasvatī herself is most commonly depicted playing a vīna, for example in the shrines that spread across India to honor her during her festival season in midwinter, Sarasvatī Puja. In some interpretations, Sarasvatī’s body and the anthropomorphic body of the vīna are considered the same: the goddess is music, and music is the goddess.

    The vīna that Todi holds as she enters the forest is quite traditional, which is to say of more profoundly historical meaning in North India, and it therefore draws our attention to historical narratives that accompany the representation of rāga through other narratives, those of sacred origin, which, too, would honor the musical presence of Sarasvatī in the painting from the village in West Bengal. Stories always accompany rāgamāla paintings, and in counterpoint with the visual images they expand the universe of rāga’s representational meanings and the forms in which they appear. Characteristically, the stories that describe Todi in the forest revel in her beauty. Let’s listen to two of the best-known stories about rāgini Todi, while experiencing, even hearing, her rāgamāla image at the same moment (cited and translated in Kaufmann 1968, 550).

    Chaupayi’s story: The Almighty has made a wondrous creature in Todi. He appears to have spared no charm and grace in this act. Holding the nectar in her hands, she stands in a garden, and the world around her is filled with deep love. Hearing the enchanting sounds of Todi, herds of deer lose their way. The beauty of Todi is so enchanting that eyes drop after a glance at her. Nearby is a pond of clear, sweet water, sacred as Gangajal [waters of the Ganges; sacred water]. Taking her to be his own, Sarang extends his hands and beckons her to his side.

    Doha’s story: The lover always dwells inside her eyelids, but the lover has become an ascetic in his heart. Her mind is as confused as the deer, and she stands still in one spot in the garden.

    If Todi can assume all these forms—and, of course, many more—as rāga and rāgamāla, her kinship with the singing goddesses to whom Kirin Narayan listened with such obeisance in Kangra intensifies. Everything associated with Todi locates her in a universe cohabited by goddesses who sing as a means of aspiring to beauty and to life. Singing intensifies their lives, connecting the everyday to the universe they share through the creativity of song. These goddesses—Todi, Sarasvatī, their earthly sisters in Kangra—make and remake that universe with their songs and stories. They fill the universe with their songs, yet again evoking symbolic ontologies of sound and music, the sounded um that contains the harmony of the universe, its complete soundedness. The um also grounds the universe and its songs, bringing it back to earth in the everyday. The um is, for example, the primary note of each rāga. It is with Todi as she enters the forest; it is crucial for the form that she and her narrative avatars give to the rāgini that bears her name. Song and story converge in the rāgini, affording it the forms, too, to which we attach the abstract terminology of music, realized as technical symbols, learned practices, and absolute meanings. To share the forest with Todi and the singing goddesses, it behooves us also to turn to music and to find its forms in song.

    Todi is an especially eloquent storyteller. In her long history as a rāgini, she has assumed many forms, invited many to admire her in the narrative forests resonant with her songs. She invites many rāgas to join her, to weave their stories into hers. The vocal avatars with whom she consorts surely include the women of Kangra, the goddesses whose songs fill the everyday worlds that unfold in the stories filling the pages of the book that follows. Todi’s songs are gentle, yet profound, their stories at once lovely and complex.

    All accounts of Todi’s presence in Indian music history acknowledge that she has a remarkable presence. As a rāg (the North Indian form of rāga), she owes the importance of that presence to her familial genealogy, for she is one of the noblest members of the family, or thāta, of rāgs to which she also gives her name, Todi thāta. The family of rāgs that bears her name has a particularly interesting lineage. We know of it as a distinct thāta since at least the fifteenth century, but Todi as a rāg would enjoy an extensive familiarity with another rāg of considerable presence, Bhairavi, for the next four centuries or so, when Bhairavi—also a rāgini, representing Bhairavi worshiping Lord Bhairava on Mount Kailasa, often with cymbals in her hands—would go her own way in North Indian classical music but retain a scalar filial relationship in South India. The scales—the bare notes that we extract from countless stories sung by Todi and Bhairavi, North and South—are intriguing both for what they say and for what they do not say. Above all, what they say tells us a great deal about kinship. Perhaps in its simplest form, we could represent Todi’s ascent as a scale with the following Indian (sargam) notation and its Western equivalent, locating the primary note of sa on middle C (Jairazbhoy 1971, 97–99):

    Rāg Todi

    sa—re (komal)—ga (komal)—ma (tivra)—pa—dha (komal)—ni (śuddha)—sa

    C—D♭—E♭—F♯—G—A♭—B—C

    The sargam notation for Bhairavi is intriguing because of both similarities and differences, the latter resulting from liberty in performance practice, for example when the fourth pitch, ma, is occasionally played in an ascending pair with ma tivra:

    Rāg Bhairavi

    sa—re (komal)—ga (komal)—ma—pa—dha (komal)—ni (komal)—sa

    C—D♭—E♭—F—G—A♭—B♭—C

    Rāgs do not actually exist in such stripped-down forms, not least because they are characteristically played differently in ascent and descent, and because pitch content often belies more significant relationships. So much is at once the same and different. The Todi that is part of our story here, however, is notable for the ways in which her relationships ask us to think about the ways sameness enters difference and then enters into historical counterpoint.

    Todi makes it abundantly clear that the sameness with rāg Bhairavi is the source of a particular attraction. Todi and Bhairavi are both old and important rāgs, as are the thātas of whose lineage they are a part. Of particular interest, moreover, are rāgs that form in the narrative and musical spaces that conjoin Todi and Bhairavi. Rāgs that fill these spaces enact a type of ambiguity that complicates the gendered roles of Todi and Bhairavi as rāginis. Todi is distinctive among rāgs because its historical time of performance (late morning) is not confirmed by theories of time from the theoretical treatises, which instead associate it with the middle of the night or the middle of the afternoon (ibid., 99).

    It is into such spaces of ambiguity that Todi invites new rāgs, as if to seduce new songs and stories into her forest. No rāg has responded more fully to this invitation than Bilaskhani Todi. We might expect this rāg to affirm his kinship to Todi, but in fact his pitch content tells us that his closest relationship is to Bhairavi thāta. The naming of Bilaskhani Todi—tradition claims that Bilas Khan, the son of the great sixteenth-century musician and composer at the Mughal court, Tansen, sang the rāg as an alternative to Bhairavi while mourning his deceased father—stresses its syncretism and hybridity. Muslim tradition enters the narratives of Hinduism; male and female forms of rāg sound the potential of their union. Todi, in obeisance to Bhairavi, makes possible the proliferation of songs and stories.

    * * * *

    At the very core of the Big Issues in Music series is a musical ontology that is aesthetically singular and culturally plural, thereby challenging conventional European notions that music is a sonic object aesthetically autonomous and identifiable as music. By engaging the challenges posed by the big issues of music, we also embrace the potential to open the ontological questions in critical new ways, indeed, revealing the very ways in which music is more than itself. Kirin Narayan’s years of intensive listening and ethnography in the foothills of the Himalayas lead us to the domains in which music is more than itself with a rare and captivating eloquence, albeit one we have come to expect from her. In the songs that unleash the everyday creativity of Kangra, she draws together the stories that shape folktale and that are shaped by the rich fabric of stories that endow the narrativity of South Asian oral expression with life. That confluence is once again evident, indeed, captivating, in the women whose lives, as singing goddesses, bear witness creatively to the expressivity of well-being. Narayan’s book captures the everydayness of creativity in stunningly beautiful ways, which are ultimately inseparable from the vocal creativity in the narratives of the book itself. The confluence is complete, and new ontological dimensions accrue to the creativity of these singing goddesses.

    We experience the songs and stories of Kangra with Kirin Narayan as listeners and learners, attuned also to the disciplinary voice of one of anthropology’s most engaging thinkers and influential critics, and it is precisely for these reasons that Everyday Creativity serves to demonstrate where the big issues of music have some of the greatest potential to emerge. Her approach to music guides the listening reader across disciplinary boundaries, revealing the capaciousness of music’s big issues as shared spaces that belie common academic labels and subject categories.

    It may seem a contradiction to suggest that the big issues of music begin in the everyday and that they may be small, even intimate and personal, before they begin to do their disciplinary and discursive work. The stories and songs that the women of Kangra draw from their lives and shape through their memories, however, inevitably find form in the realm of the personal. It was no less the case with Todi, who may occupy a mythological world spanning centuries, but who comes alive for us in the forest she makes her own in the rāgamāla painting, to which historians also refer as a miniature. In the hands of a skilled musical portraitist like Kirin Narayan, the miniature becomes the portal through which we pass to encounter the big issues. Let us move, then, through the portal of Todi and her forest into the spaces that open beyond in the lives of the singing goddesses whose songs fill the pages of the book that follows.

    We begin with one of the most expansive ontological domains of musical thought, voice and song studies. Voice studies constitute a very important issue in music scholarship in the twenty-first century, while song studies have historically been a critical core to folklore and oral literature scholars. Historiographically as a folklorist and ethnographer attuned to narrative, Narayan is acutely engaged with the areas of oral literature and religious studies that emerged in modern scholarship in the late eighteenth century with Johann Gottfried Herder’s work on folk song, Volkslied, which Herder coins first in 1773, calling the fields of everyday life and world music into being. Narayan’s work finds form in this disciplinary lineage, and it does so from one of the most important traditions, the studies of gīta, song, in South Asian studies, which is as influential today as ever. It is in her discursive negotiations in Kangra—the spaces of overlap between Hindi and the local dialect she shares with the women of the region—that Narayan draws folklore and oral literature studies into the big issues, and in so doing, she remedies something long neglected in music scholarship, especially the rich traditions of philology and ethnography that these contribute to music history, theory, and ethnomusicology.

    Kirin Narayan’s revitalization of the intellectual history of voice and song studies further leads the reader to the core issue of ontology: with each song and with each story created in a goddess’s everyday world, she challenges the reader to think about what music is, not just in an ethnographic setting that is epistemologically different, but in a history of complex religious exchanges that lead us to think profoundly about music in different ways. In richly evocative ways, the book is an intellectual history of and about ontologies that are distinct from those of the Euro-American tradition. That history grows from the foundational texts and narratives of Hindu myth, but becomes richer through the ways Islam and Buddhism, as well as the local dialects of a sacred engagement with nature, cross the Kangra Valley again and again. The ontological tension between the women as tradition bearers and the historical longue durée of South Asian/Central Asian/East Asian culture emerges in this book with stunning beauty.

    The third big issue that Kirin Narayan luminously develops is the everyday presence of smallness and its multiple dimensions: intimacy, local kinship, creativity, and, above all, beauty. From the very beginning, she makes a powerful claim for a deep understanding of the small issues, even in a world of scholarship that sometimes seems more and more preoccupied with globalized big issues. Throughout the book, the big issues come alive in the small issues, not least because of the loving portrayal of the individuals and intimacies of subjects and authors. In and of themselves, the big issues of music in the pages that follow may not be new in every sense, but the ways in which Kirin Narayan draws them together, as the songs of village women gathering at the confluence of waters issuing from the Himalayas, hence drawing together experience from a vast universe, are possible only when the big issues of music are allowed to fill the expansive spaces of everyday creativity.

    References

    Jairazbhoy, N. A. 1971. The Rāgs of North Indian Music: Their Structure and Evolution. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

    Kaufmann, Walter. 1968. The Ragas of North India. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

    Finding Form

    Inside the carved wooden frame of an open doorway, women are singing. They sit cross-legged, crowded close, heads covered in bright swatches of color. Their voices pour together in wave after wave of repeating melody. No claps, no instruments measure the flow. Sometimes a single voice streams forward before others join in, sometimes a voice holds a note after others have retreated into silence. Then the song once again rises, gathering voices around the words.

    Who is that young girl listening from the courtyard outside? I shade my eyes against the midday sun, peering at myself, just fifteen years old. Amid rows of cross-legged guests with leaf plates on the ground before them, there sits Kirin, a self-conscious city girl. She can’t understand the mountain dialect yet, but she longs to know what the women are singing about. She thinks she hears the names of goddesses and gods. She thinks the songs might carry stories. This is the first feast she has attended in Kangra, at the base of the Western Himalayas. She has no inkling that three years later, her mother will move to this village and they will attend many more celebrations that involve women’s songs. She hasn’t yet formally met anthropology or folklore.

    But the singing draws her.

    And she listens.

    * * * *

    Singing makes the mind glad, said Subhadra-devi Pandit when I visited her home a few villages away and three decades later. She sat on a sofa, gazing toward the folder of songs I had selected to use in this book and that I hoped to confer about with her. Her thick white hair, parted in the middle, was tied back in a braid, and a gauzy pink chādru was looped around her head. Though she was almost eighty and increasingly frail, her voice was strong and melodious. Singing in the local mountain dialect, she moved across notes and sounds with limber certainty. Speaking either the local dialect of Pahari or else more formal Hindi, she developed an amused, almost teasing tone: her sentences carried festive, scalloped edges as they looped upward toward delighted exclamations or fluttered into laughter. My periodic reappearances had always seemed to entertain her.

    Gesturing toward my file folder containing songs, Subhadra-devi asked, So, what all do you have there?

    In past years, I could have handed her the folder, but now she had lost much of her vision. I set down my pen and began leafing through song texts that I’d selected for different chapters. Subhadra-devi listened with a faraway inward look and a smile.

    When I mentioned Chandrauli, the woman beautiful as moonlight, Subhadra-devi laughed, eyes still staring off into the mid-distance, but bright now with sparkle. I had recorded this song at the wedding where we’d first met in 1991, and Subhadra-devi recalled how a group of us had sat together, enjoying the winter sun during the break between rituals. But she couldn’t recall how the song began.

    "What was the ḍhak?" Subhadra-devi asked.

    The ḍhak is the base of a plant, where it emerges into visibility from the earth; this term also refers to the opening line of a song. After the first shoot of a ḍhak is located, the song can grow through collective memory, verse after unfolding verse to the song’s final point or head (sire)—like the tall tip of a plant.

    Give, Rukman, give me your form, I want to change my looks, I read aloud the Pahari words from the file before me. We had landed straight into the company of Hindu gods and goddesses, with dusky blue-skinned Krishna requesting the loan of his wife’s physical form so he might disguise himself as a woman. For Subhadra-devi, though, this song began from a different point: gathering makeup in preparation for Krishna’s cross-dressing. She started singing in a soft, high voice, amusement bubbling between her words: I summon peddlers from many countries; I want containers of eyeliner. She continued singing forward across verses, her version sometimes merging with, sometimes diverging from, the text before me.

    Verse after verse, Subhadra-devi sang toward the part of the story that she said she and fellow singers didn’t like to sing when unmarried girls were present; verse after verse, she continued onward to Krishna using his powers of illusion to stretch the night with Chandrauli across six months. Then, like so many other singers through the years, Subhadra-devi indulged me by answering my questions about particular words and retold the underlying story.

    In Kangra, as in many other villages across India, women’s group singing is thought to bring good fortune to happy events. As a gift of goodwill, singing affirms relations with the celebrating family, and so women feel obliged to show up for rituals that involve songs. Many women might gather, but only some women, like Subhadra-devi, know the appropriate songs and lead the collective singing. For them, being a singer isn’t an established professional role or a burdensome social duty. Rather, this is seen as a sukinni—a pleasurable personal interest (akin to the Hindi/Urdu word shauk). Song enthusiasts describe their songs as pyārā—both adorable and adored. Singing, they insist, is a means to cultivate states of mind that might rise beyond the confinement of routines, disappointments, and irrevocable events. Singing is so effective that one returns to it again and again.

    Taking pride in a polished literacy unusual for her generation, Subhadra-devi described the gladness created by singing as prasannatā, a Hindi word with Sanskrit roots that also means clear, bright, pure and connotes pleasure, delight, contentment, well-being, even benevolence. Though she no longer had the energy to attend song sessions across the village, Subhadra-devi emphasized how she continued to draw on songs. People used to call me for weddings, for birthdays, she recalled. Even now, sometimes, lying around, I sing a little. All kinds of unhappy thoughts can come into the mind. But with songs, your mind goes in another direction.

    I remembered how, soon after we first met, Subhadra-devi had playfully described singing as a kind of addiction: like alcoholics who craved a drink, and tea drinkers who longed for tea, a singer needed songs. "The more you sing, the more you have to sing, she explained. One song comes out after another song. However sad we are, whatever has happened in our lives, when we sit to sing we’re happy again."

    * * * *

    When women described all that songs brought to their lives, I reflected on how I might work their words into my writing about them. Women who identified as singers usually assumed that I shared the same enthusiastic predilection for singing—else why would I be so interested in songs? Subhadra-devi had assured me, When you know songs, you’ll be singing these when you’re alone. Cooking, washing, walking, whatever you’re doing, you’ll be singing some song. Though I love music and can usually carry a tune, I will confess to working with these songs more as an admiring outsider than an equally fervent singer. I enjoyed translating the songs, learning the stories they carried, and conversing with the singers. Gradually, I grasped that the zest with which women related to songs as a resource for living might connect to my own life too: as a form of everyday creativity.

    I insert the word everyday to shake creativity loose from a widespread association with innovation. In presenting Kangra women’s connections with their songs, I want to highlight the everyday creativity that can emerge in activities that might appear routine and even insignificant. Since singing requires only the voice, song offers a form of creativity accessible to people who might not control or own much else. Under the tutelage of Kangra singers, I learned how the very act of pulling a shared song from memory is a creative act: words and a melody must be reconstructed, whether led by an individual or pieced together in a group. Imaginatively appropriating available cultural knowledge, a singer brings tradition and community into conjunction with her life, and also adds her distinctive mark to the song in performance.

    As I became attuned to the ways that songs enhanced lives, I began to notice friends from diverse backgrounds—in Kangra and elsewhere—tweaking skills and realigning informal knowledge nurtured

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