Singing and retelling the past

Abstract

"These old memories are very lovable, they exist in such good songs," remarked Bimla Pandit, an accomplished singer, to her circle of female in-laws as I sat with them on a verandah, sipping tea and checking through song transcriptions. This association between narrative songs in the local dialect and past ways of life confronted me often in my work on women's songs in the Himalayan foothills of Kangra, Northwest India. In this essay, I use ethnographic materials from Kangra to explore a few ways that sung and spoken retellings of a folklore form can invoke the past: Through linguistic terms; through the cultural logic of social practices; through chains of transmissions across generations and the conscious use of songs as teaching tools; and through marking an anthropologist's engagements across time. I focus my discussion around a women's song about Krishna's encounter with the gorgeous cowherd woman, Chandravali. Show more