Custodian of folk songs

In the mid-1970s, a young man with a jhola slung over his shoulder could often be seen wandering through the villages of Malwa, striking up the unlikeliest of conversations. His request was simple yet unusual: asking the villagers to sing. It didn’t matter if the songs were laced with cuss words or touched on forbidden themes — he wanted to hear whatever had been passed down through generations. As they sang, he would jot down the lyrics in his notebook. Five decades later, with the submission of his 12th and final volume for publication, it’s impossible to say just how many folk songs his jhola ended up carrying.

For close to 50 years, Prof Nahar Singh, who retired from Panjab University’s Punjabi Department in 2012, quietly carried out the monumental work of preserving the cultural soul of a Punjab in transition through its folk songs, and interpreting them for future generations. Over the years, he and his students have journeyed from village to village in the Malwa region, listening to the voices of rural men and women, and carefully recording their songs, stories, and traditions.

Studying at Chandigarh’s DAV College in 1975, Nahar Singh had little interest in folk songs. Coming from the radical left Punjab Students Union, growing up in those heady times, he was more inclined towards literature — criticism and theory. But his teacher Kesar Singh wanted him to go and work among “people”, real people who dwelled away from the world of books. He wanted him to explore the songs they sang. Still not much interested in fieldwork, he decided to undertake a formal study of Malwa’s folk forms. He could then explore literary theory, his calling.

Or so he thought. But, a field trip uncorks the mind, demolishes preconceived notions.

In a Punjab rapidly changing under the blitzkrieg of the Green Revolution, the penetration of capital was redefining social relations. Old customs and traditions, where collective labour and cooperation had been the norm, were suddenly out of place. The village that was had a certain kind of tribal instinct, a value system, an interdependence. “Oho pind mere saamne tut reha si.” And it was exploding at an unprecedented pace. “As you move away from the traditional cultural pattern of the traditional life of a traditional village, you call it development, but it haunts us,” he adds.

It didn’t take Nahar Singh much time to realise that he was in the midst of studying and documenting this cultural transformation of Punjab through its songs.

As a lecturer at 22, unmarried then, he had enough money at his disposal and moved about frequently. As Nahar Singh travelled across Malwa, he realised that these marginalised folk, pushed further to the periphery in this new world, looked at things very differently from those like him. “Malwa is semi-desert, making the life of people very harsh. When would it become vibrant? At the time of weddings, when people would sing. I often say that life in Malwa is rough as khaddar fabric, but their songs are soft as threads of silk. Their expressions were exaggerated, but the idiom was their very own.”

Nahar Singh says folk songs thrive only among the marginalised and the producer is the consumer. So, sometimes he would be sitting in the winter sun with the cattle grazers, intently listening to their songs, and at times with attached labourers singing as they toiled in the fields. He would be attending pre-wedding events where women sang suhaag and ghoris, or he was at funerals, listening to keerne or songs of death sung by mirasans.

Nahar Singh was once shooed away by villagers — “Tere varge bahut chor-uchakke aunde ne”. He also recalls being treated to songs of lust and longing unabashedly by women who knew his mother. “Eh taan Jamero da munda hai,” they said. For them, he was just a village lad — “he wouldn’t understand”. Merging in those gatherings like a fly on the wall, he was hearing the rhythm ebb, perhaps listening to some songs one last time before they were to be lost in modernity.

Often, they wouldn’t notice him as they went on with their songs of love, separation, toil, happiness, sadness, playfulness, harvest, rivers, wars, weddings, funerals...

For four-five years, he went around like a man possessed, jotting down one song after another, from one village to another. And as he summed up his thesis, he found himself engulfed in the women’s tragic sensibility. “That is what pushed me deeper into the world of folk songs.” This realisation was the turning point in his journey. This is when he began to explore the deeper meanings in folk songs, churning out volume after volume of folk songs and analysing these songs to give a cultural anthropological view of the Punjab of those times. And that is what makes his contribution to Punjabi folklore immeasurable and invaluable.

“The expression in men’s folk songs is very flat, but that of women is layered, poetic. Theirs were songs of separation, sadness. A woman’s sensibility emerges out of her social environment, cultural ethos and it was totally different from what men experienced. These were songs of suhaag, maternal home, poverty, of separation during World War I, of the mother-in-law’s torment, social relations and their constraints. There were songs of cultural suffocation and depicted several tragic situations in the life of a woman. I theorised that for these women, the in-laws’ house was an extension of a repressive state. Can you believe it, there are hardly songs of love in Punjab? There are just songs of separation, birhada.”

Nahar Singh says music’s psychic role comes to the fore when women sing together in groups of two, their heads leaning towards each other. “I would listen to their songs and wonder that while the houses in the Fatehgarh Sahib village that I grew up in were of unbaked bricks, kutcha roofs, the village of folk songs was the father’s village, babul da des. Babul is the emperor here, and his home, her castle. Where did that come from? It is imagination of a woman — an absolute expression of her dreams, desires.”

Long before feminism became a fad, Nahar Singh had already begun to view women’s experiences through their own lens, recognising the significance of their struggle to assert their feminine identity. He tried to capture that in the slightest of hints they threw his way — baring deep dimensions of relationships. “For instance, when she is talking about her mother, father and brother, she is formal, stands at a distance and then says her thing. But when she is talking to her mother, she is informal, bold, uninhibited. I have tried to catch these small details.”

Sample this:

Ambaan de thalle-thalle jaandeya ve nikkeya sadhua

Ambaan da jhad gaya boor ve

thug banjareya

Choga ta tere saj reha ve nikkeya sadhua

Kurte da hoya vichaar ve thug banjareya

O young sadhu walking beneath the

mango trees

The mango blossoms have fallen on you,

o cheating nomad

The robe suits you well, o young sage

Consider wearing a kurta,

o cheating nomad

“The woman is looking at a young saadhu, but is imagining him as her Ranjha, her husband, which is why she asks him if he would like to wear a kurta, more suited to a family man,” Nahar Singh says, adding that the metaphors women have chosen are profound. “Sitthniaan, for instance, are all about sexuality, but the way they have expressed it through symbols is astounding.”

Nahar Singh says the village women who sang to him and fed him on several occasions were like mothers to him and he felt indebted to preserve their treasure. “Besides the intellectual importance of my work, this was a huge emotional angle behind my lifelong involvement.”

He was privy to their innermost feelings. There were so many times when the women would sit down and sing viyog de geet (songs of separation) and start crying. They would hug him, soon breaking into another song, and this time laughing. They would sing of their youth, their desires, sometimes a risqué song, and suddenly realise he was among them!

He blended into them so well, they wouldn’t notice him. The young man had learned something by his experience. Nahar Singh set strict rules for himself: “Not to intervene as a scholar. To enter that milieu maintaining harmony with that space, without any restriction. Tusi radakne nahi chahide ho — your presence shouldn’t bother them. They should not come to know that you are recording. I wouldn’t overtly tell the women to sing. We would just talk about things and then a song would come up. Naturally, this wasn’t time-bound. They just went with the flow.”

Of the songs documented over the years, only one-third made it to his books. “Songs in Malwa were very repetitive,” says Nahar Singh, adding that from Russia to Malwa, the folk songs are the same. “Any construction of folklore is nationalistic and ethnic in form and its content is universal. Songs from Doaba would have more mention of seasonal rivulets, rains, mangoes, but the content, human feelings and reactions, and cultural responses are the same.”

If Nahar Singh’s initial research can be seen in continuity of the work done by the likes of Devender Satyarthi, Amrita Pritam and MS Randhawa, there are several who followed him. Karamjit Singh recorded songs of Doaba, Kulwant Aulakh of Majha and Charanjit of Puadhi language. What sets Nahar Singh apart is his scholarship.

Of the last 50 years, if 10 were spent collecting folk songs and penning down their compositions following scientific research methodology, while also carefully avoiding the temptation to centralise sub-dialects, 40 were spent theorising these songs, their grammar and the many layers.

Dr Gibb Schreffler, Associate Professor of Music, Pomona College (US), spent six months with Nahar Singh when writing his 2021 book on dhol. In the article, ‘Suhag and Ghorian: Cultural Elucidation in a Female Voice’, he writes of Nahar Singh: “He is the scholar who has perhaps done the most systematic work on traditional Punjabi songs, and his anthology of the songs of Malwa represents one of the most significant contributions to the study of Punjabi music. Unfortunately, Nahar Singh’s work, begun in 1976 and first published in the 1980s, remains practically ignored by writers in English; I cannot recall having seen a single English author who has cited Nahar Singh, even when he or she makes a reference to ‘Punjabi folk song’.”

Talking to The Tribune, he says, “What is unique is that Nahar Singh has not only done his scholarship in Punjabi language, but that he combines both theoretical analysis in Punjabi and folk language knowledge.”

Dr Schreffler says it is important to note that most Punjabi traditional songs are in fact songs of women. “There is something of anthropological significance to this. Why is it, we may ask, that composed songs for entertainment of audiences are mostly in the hands of men, while the most traditional, orally transmitted songs, have been the property of Punjabi women? Nahar Singh’s work tackles this through the analysis of Punjabi women’s historical position,” says Dr Schreffler, who has translated some of his work into English.

Prof Nahar Singh taught for decades, retiring from PU after earlier stints in DAV College, Chandigarh, and Punjabi University. It has been over a year since he, now based in Canada, submitted his last book. As he awaits its publication, he rues just one thing — that his collection of folk songs is talked about more than his scholarship on the subject.

“After four volumes, I realised that people read songs and move on. That wasn’t my intent. I want people to deeply understand their culture. There are long introductions to my volumes. I want Punjabis to read my interpretations, my formulations. They are welcome to demolish my research, but they must engage with it,” he says.

While wandering through the villages of Malwa, Nahar Singh made certain promises to the folk singers. He says in these volumes, he has tried to fulfil those. “My greatest desire is that the folk singers read these collections and find within them the very songs they once sang to me. And they have every right to ask: ‘Kite jhole wale bai ne koi khot taan nai mila ditti? Has the man with the jhola distorted them in any way?’”

Sitting at his home in Chandigarh recently and reading out from his books, he seems a fulfilled man: “I think I have done my best.”

Folk verse

Tutte hoe shishe tai vekhia je tar ke

doli vich an baithi doven palle jhar ke

dil vich khial dadha dadhian di mar da

gadde ute aa gaia sanduk mutiar da

If you were to look into the broken

mirror you’d see her

Sitting in the palanquin as both parents claim helplessness.

In her heart is the fear of beatings from high-handed in-laws.

On the cart arrived the maiden’s trunk.

Bibi patalie ni patang jaie

apne babal raje kolon kush mang laie

babal ghar dita sohna var dita

harian bagan vichon phull tor dita.

O slender girl, like a kite,

From your kingly father ask for

something.

Father gave a house, and a handsome husband.

Out of lush gardens he plucked a flower.

— Translations by Dr Gibb Schreffler, Associate Professor of Music, Pomona College (US)

(The article first appeared on August 3, 2025)