Ritual songs and folksongs of the Hindus of Surinam

The Literary Background

The songs under examination must not be regarded as primitive or preliterate. They often show evidence of having followed the footsteps of the long literary tradition of India, or side by side with it. Some of the forms and subjects go back to great antiquity. For example, the interpolation of phrases and strophes, not connected with the context of the song, as jubilations - stobhas - was the practice of sāman singers in the earliest Vedic times (for the details of which vide Strangways '14: 250 ff.). The song of silpohanā inviting the ancestral spirits, pitṛs, has a form similar to VS. 19. 57 ff. and other mantras chanted at the Śrāddha ceremonies. The riddles or questions and answers in the birahās find their parallels in the Vedas (e.g. ṚV. 1. 164. 34, 35). It is curious that the birahā (song No. 82) speaks of the year as a cow, a motif vaguely reminiscent of ṚV. 1.164. The gaining of social acclaim and poetical or scholarly prestige by winning against a competitor in a series of versified questions and answers or some other form of exchange in instantaneous verse - as seen in the birahās - has been a very old tradition in India. For example in MB. Vanaparvan Ch. 133 Aṣṭāvakra gains admittance to the court after winning the favour of king Janaka in an exchange of questions and answers. Thereafter (Ch. 134) a similar exchange between Aṣṭāvakra and Bandī, the court scholar and poet, leads to the latter surrendering his court position and to the reinstatement to life of those whom he had previously defeated and deprived of life. Also in MB. (Vanaparvan Chs. 296,

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297) Yudhiṣṭhira saves the life of his brothers by answering questions put by a yakṣa. After some questions have been posed the challenge in the birahā (song No. 82, line II), ‘whoever would explain the meaning of my birahā - that is, whoever will answer my questions - may (thereafter) join me in singing’ seems to echo the yakṣa's own challenge; ‘Answer these four questions of mine and then you may have a drink of water.¹’

The sumiran in the birahā corresponds to the maṅgalācaraṇa or nāndī of the Sanskrit literature with all three of its forms, viz., āśīs - a blessing -, namaskriyā - a salutation to the deity -, and vastunirdeśa - a simple reference to the deity or one of its acts, or a moral precept. Similarly the jācanī, the finale of a birahā, is parallel to the bharata-vākya, the benediction at the end of a dramatic performance in the Sanskrit tradition.

The declaration of the maṅgala power of a song is in the well-known māhātmya tradition of Sanskrit literature and stotras.

Sometimes identical phrases are found in the Sanskrit stotras and our songs, for instance the invitation to Sarasvatī to abide on the singer's tongue (song No. 80 F) occurs in the traditional Sarasvatī-stotra: sā me vasatu jihvāyāṁ vīṇā-pustaka-dhāriṇī (May she who holds a vīṇa and a book abide on my tongue), or in the annual worship of Sarasvatī (Varṣakṛtyadīpaka: 269): sā me vāg-devateyaṁ nivasatu vadane (May this goddess of speech live in my mouth), or in Mārkaṇḍeya Purāṇa (23.57): sarva-jihvā sarasvatī (Sarasvatī is the tongue of all).

The titillās and many sohars narrating episodes may have been inspired by the traditional khaṇḍa-kāvyas. Some of their conversational contents also have a highly dramatic effect. The lyrics are certainly identical with the muktaka, the song compositions complete in themselves. The muktaka form of our songs must have been borrowed from numerous authors, from Vidyāpati to Kabīr. The songs of Vidyāpati, especially on Śiva, ‘are still sung in the temples of Mithilā and, out of his romantic compositions, many are also sung on the occasions of weddings and such festivities in the form of folksongs’ (Tivārī '54: 170 intr.). Our own song

1 Vide also Kosambi ('62: 10): ‘...the Upanishadic riddles which display so much mysticism and philosophy are only a step above the deadly riddles asked by yakṣas of strangers at sacred springs. The wrong answer in the earlier days meant ritual sacrifice of the intruder’.

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No. 36 seems to have taken its inspiration from Vidyāpati (pp. 310-311 etc.) describing Menā's horror at seeing Śiva, wrapped in snakes, as the prospective bridegroom for her daughter, and her refusal to wed Pārvatī to such a personage. The songs of Kabīr's nirguṇa tradition require no special discussion; their influence on the themes of our songs is all too evident. The songs of Sūradāsa, rather than Tulasīdāsa, seem to have made a considerable impact on the folk-singers because Tulasīdāsa did not use the muktaka form as Sūradāsa did. When the former did compose any muktakas they were in a linguistic style less comprehensible to the masses than that of the latter. Some of Sūradāsa's lines, if not complete songs, seem to have been borrowed or copied by our singers. Some examples of these can be given here.

caraṇa dhöi caraṇodaka līnhau...	:	1.239	(Cp. song No. 41)
tuma to tīni loka ke ṭhākura	:	1.239	(Cp. song No. 41)
bhakti binu baila birānā hvaiho	:	1.331	(Cp. song No. 66)
motini cauka purāye	:	9. 24	(Cp. song No. 23)
tapasī döu bhā̈ī	:	9.140	(Cp. song No. 69)
kahana lāge mohana maiyā maiyā...
dūri khelana jani jāhu	:	10.155	(Cp. song No. 9)

On the other hand it is not possible to place all our songs in a totally literary tradition. They still remain folksongs. Not only are so many of them free of the rules of prosody and rhyme etc., they seldom show the complicated literary embellishments of alaṅkāras etc. with the refinement customary in the written tradition. Furthermore they show evidence of the folk mind's independence in their motifs, many of which are not found in literature. A journey by stages is described as travelling ‘through one wilderness, and through the second wilderness, in the third one’ there is a note of finality (song No. 78). A crying woman is asked whether she has trouble from father-in-law or from mother-in-law or is it that her parental home is far (song Nos. 3, 4). To make a point in a family crisis somebody lies down covering himself from head to foot and others come round begging him to get up (song No. 78). Many of such motifs occur repeatedly even in identical words. The analogies are simple and the expressions are taken from the day to day world of the people; see for example song No. 30.

There are also many divergences from the legends etc. of the

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written literature. Even though the figures like Rāma and Kṛṣṇa are common to both the literary and the folk tradition, many of the episodes narrated are peculiar to our songs. They are either variants of the legends that might have existed from long ago and from which some might even have been borrowed by the literary authors, or they are new twists given to the literary stories to fit them into the folk context.

In song No. 1 Sītā has had her desire for a husband like Rāma fulfilled through the observance of various fasts and ascetic practices. In song No. 5 the queens of Daśaratha take a pregnancy-inducing wild root and consequently conceive. In song No. 87 Jaṭāyu loses the battle against the demon because the latter shoots a fire-missile. In song No. 69 there is a dialogue between Sītā and Mandodarī in which the latter takes Rāvaṇa's side. In song No. 88 Kṛṣṇa is supposed to have been fair and is stated to have turned dark because of the poisonous hisses of the snakes of the underworld.

There are also songs which radically condemn the popular Hindu concepts, giving new interpretations to some legends. These may have been handed down from non-Aryan sources, for example one of the songs (No. 70) in a series on Bali shows sympathy with him, advising him not to trust and not to give land to Viṣṇu, enumerating the latter's frauds such as the killing of Hiraṇyakaśipu, Prahlāda's father, and Rāvaṇa, the king of Laṅkā. While this echoes the advice of Śukra, the guru of dānavas, to Bali (vide Padmapurāṇa 25. 157-163)¹ the song is still remarkable in its hostility to Viṣṇu.

There are some deviations, however, which can more easily be explained. Subhadrā as Rāma's aunt (song No. 9), again as the aunt of Lava and Kuśa (song No. 8) and thus Rāma's sister, Kṛṣṇa as a guest of Rāma and Sītā (song No. 83), the river Sarayū, instead of Yamunā flowing by the city of Mathurā, (song No. 41), these allusions might at the first glance lead the listener of these songs to believe that perhaps the singers' distance from India had caused them to forget the tradition, but that is not the case. These deviations are found also in the versions published in India, for example, Subhadrā as Rāma's aunt (Tripāṭhī, '51. I: 182).

1 There Bali is referred to by the name Bāṣkali. For other references see Dīkṣitar's Purāṇa Index, vol. II, pp. 469-471.

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These are in fact metaphors to describe ideal human relationships by referring to the legendary figures related to various God-Incarnates. The concept of the ideal aunt, the ideal guest or the ideal city alone is meant to be conveyed. ‘Rāma’ even becomes the title of honour for any person in the expression ‘kavan rāmā’ (e.g. song No. 33) where, in actual singing, kavan, i.e. ‘which, ‘who’ or ‘some (person)’ is replaced by the name of the person who may be involved in any capacity in the ceremonial or other observance; he becomes ‘N.N. the Rāma’.