Everyday Creativity

Singing Goddesses in the Himalayan Foothills

Kirin Narayan

• Editorial: University of Chicago Press
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780226407739
• Categoría: Médias et arts de la scène
• Categoría: Musique

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.

Chapter 1

Tending Lives through Songs

When I was a teenager, my mother and I were for a time wanderers without a fixed home. Kind, elderly friends, Sardar Gurcharan Singh and his wife, Chattar Kaur, offered to take us in for the summer holidays. “Sardar Sahib” and “Mummy” invited us to their summer home in the Himalayan foothills—north of their usual home in Delhi, but not as far north as Jammu or Kashmir. So, in April 1975, Maw and I rocked along in a series of trains from the south. In Pathankot, we changed to a bus, our luggage was loaded onto the roof, and people pressed all around us along with trunks, bedrolls, and sacks of grain. Bus engine straining, we started into the hills. As we looped along narrow roads, the air thinned and cooled. We passed fields, riverbanks, stretches of forest, and clusters of adobe houses with slanted slate roofs. Suddenly, like specters that just might be unusually shaped clouds, we saw pale mountains. As we drew closer, the chain of mountains came into focus and color, rising from green wooded flanks toward black rock speckled with the whiteness of year-round glaciers and higher still to iced peaks glistening against the sky. These were the Dhauladhar or “White Bearing” mountains of the Western Himalayas that rim the northeastern horizon of the Kangra Valley.

Maw and I were still recovering from our long journey when Sardar Sahib and Mummy told us that we were all invited to a village-wide lunch feast. This feast, they said, would celebrate the first ritual haircut (munḍan) of a grandson of their old friend, “Masterji,” a local schoolmaster.

Oh, no! A feast would mean lots of people. In those years that I was neither child nor adult, perpetually awkward and out of place, I preferred meeting strangers through books. I had been eyeing the bookshelves filled with Mummy’s collection of Mills and Boon romance novels, slightly mildewed from winter rains. Alone with Maw, I would have put up a fuss about being dragged around and my right to read. As a guest, I meekly trailed along.

The mountains looked on from the northeastern horizon as we set out. We walked along an unpaved road bordered by terraced fields and dispersed clusters of houses. The wheat crop with spiky golden ears was almost ready for harvest, and wild pink roses and white-whorled jasmine bloomed along hedges. As we neared the central portion of the village, more houses were crowded together and the path narrowed, with smooth cobblestones. Sardar Sahib remembered how, when he and Mummy first came to this village from Lahore, they had ridden ponies for the last stretch of their journey. He pointed out that the rocks beneath our feet were worn smooth from passing caravans of traders along an old salt-trading route.

We could hear women chorusing songs even before we turned into the flattened space of a courtyard stretching between two old adobe houses. Senior male members of the family hosting the celebration greeted us, and for a moment we peered into the dark inner room where a ritual was underway amid flickering flames of oil lamps. A Pandit sat on the floor with geometrical white drawings traced around him and more maroon ritual drawings on the wall. The grandmother of the house, wearing a long ceremonial skirt, turned from assisting him to greet us too. Then we were back in the bright outdoors, joining other guests to settle cross-legged on the long strips of sackcloth that had been unrolled in many parallel lines across the courtyard’s flattened earth. Women’s songs streamed through an open door at the opposite side of the courtyard.

As newcomers to the village, we inevitably provided a spectacle: my tall American mother in her maroon-bordered sari and me in my navy-blue T-shirt, tiered maxiskirt, and unruly shoulder-length hair. At that age, other people’s stares could seem so scorching that the only way to make my own shade was by looking down. But this village setting was so different from anything I knew that I stared too.

I thought of what my father had told us about his childhood in British India. “Everyone covered their heads then,” he said. “You could tell so much about a person from what was on their head.” Here, too, in 1975, many adults’ heads were covered. Men wore starched white turbans, flat round black caps, or even “Kulu” caps with a bright crown-like strip of color; some men who seemed part of the ritual had knotted the edges of their handkerchiefs and placed these flat over their heads. Grown women’s faces were framed by scarves in long swatches of color loosely draped over the head and around the shoulders. I took in the rest of people’s outfits, too: older men wore long white shirts with black vests and loose cotton “pyjama” pants that narrowed at the calves, while younger men were dressed in the city styles of shirts and trousers. Women wore what I identified as “Punjabi suits”—that is, a tunic-like khamīz (that in the 1970s style ended above the knee, as though echoing miniskirts) and a baggy salvār of the same material, falling all the way to the ankles. Girls my age dressed the same, but their tightly braided hair was uncovered and they wore their scarves in a looping “U” across their chests and over their shoulders. No sari in sight; the only other skirt was the grandmother’s.

We found ourselves seated in long rows on the ground. Barefoot men started rushing up and down between the rows, pouring water from big metal jugs into our steel glasses, pushing mounds of rice onto our leaf plates. Then they came speeding by, ladling out a sequence of distinctively flavored courses, some cooked in yogurt, some pungent with mustard oil, many yellow with turmeric, one of crushed walnuts and dates. Mummy and Sardar Sahib chatted with Maw, but my attention was focused across the courtyard where women were singing. The listening is a bodily memory.

My right hand is at work, fingers mixing food in the leaf plate before me, and my ears are intent. An electric wire loops across the open courtyard, slicing the clear sky. The women’s singing glows with the mysteriousness of an unknown language in an unfamiliar place. Verses flow with an almost meandering hypnotic repetition until the women start in on a different song and the contours of repetition shift . . .

As a child in what had once been my Bombay home, I had loved playing the piano. This was a rented piano warped by salty breezes, with hollow notes and sticking keys, but I had loved how the music allowed me to wander. I spent many contented hours exploring the Fireside Book of Folksongs that Nani, my adored American grandmother, had left us. Picking out notes, mouthing words, I found clues through some songs to “the States,” Nani’s home that I had never seen. She’ll be coming ’round the mountain . . . I imagined the stylish woman in a chariot arriving whenever she pleased, six white horses galloping forward. I dreamed I saw Joe Hill . . . I tried to puzzle out just why that ghost in the dream insisted he wasn’t dead. I learned geography: the Red River Valley where people were devoted to their friends; the Range where deer, antelope, and cowboys frolicked; the Old Smokey mountain where lovers vanished under snow avalanches. I hadn’t been oblivious to other images of the United States from family stories, visitors, records, movies, magazines. But through the late 1960s and into the early 1970s, something about playing and humming folk songs into presence gave me a misguided sense of direct access to the manners and customs of Nani’s America. Now in Kangra, songs again promised a doorway.

Women were still singing as the final course of startling orange, cardamom-flavored, and ghee-slick sweet rice was served. Then we all rose in a great flock to throw away our leaf plates and wash our turmeric-stained greasy hands. We used the water still left in steel glasses, and servers were also available with jugs to pour more water if needed. I remember looking up, over my shoulder, away from the singing as I washed my hands. A group of people had gathered, carrying dishes and pots. They watched and didn’t move. Later, I was distressed to learn that these people at the courtyard’s edge were from the lower castes; they would not be served sitting along with the others but could take feast food away in their own containers.

The next seating for the feast started up, and I followed after Sardar Sahib, Mummy, and Maw as they moved toward the door where women had been singing. Maybe they were even still singing when we came in, but in the soundtrack of my memory, we shift to conversation. A lanky middle-aged man with a kind craggy face, wearing glasses and a white kurtā-pajāmā, appeared from some other part of the house to greet us. Sardar Sahib introduced him as Shastriji, the Sanskrit teacher, but there were too many women present for them all to be introduced. The women who sat pressed close on the floor drew aside their knees to make a path for us. We might have found space beside them, but as guests we apparently needed to be honored with proper seats.

Sardar Sahib was directed to the only chair. The women already sharing a single rope cot crushed in closer to make space for Mummy, Maw, and me. Mummy perched, I found a spare corner of cot, and then Maw lowered herself down.

The cot snapped. We spilled to the floor in a tumble of limbs. Women shrieked, clutching at one another; everyone laughed helplessly as we struggled to our feet.

“Don’t worry, it was already old,” assured Shastriji, speaking courteous Hindi, and masterfully maintaining a straight face.

“Didi, I didn’t know that you were such a bed breaker!” Sardar Saheb teased Maw in English, white beard lifting off his chest as he laughed. (“Didi,” short for “Delia,” is Maw’s first name; also, softening the d, it means “sister” in Hindi.)

“It was already overcrowded,” Maw insisted as she adjusted her sari, laughing too. “It wasn’t just my weight.”

A tall, lean teenage girl whom I guessed might be around my age helped prop the cot against the wall and spread the thin mattress on the floor. Her laughter glinted from every feature; she could not stop finding this funny, but then neither could I. Any kind of conversation had become impossible. Some women wiped their eyes, clutching their foreheads, giving in to the belly-aching hilarity. Even Shastriji allowed himself a smile. All around us, laughter kept reigniting—one stray giggle and everyone would start up again.

We laughed as we went out the door and along the cobbled village thoroughfare that soon turned into the unpaved road opening again to views of the mountains. Sardar Sahib offered to take the bus to the nearby town of Palampur and buy Maw some of the soft, caramelized milk sweet called palang toṛ, “bed smasher,” rumored to be an aphrodisiac. For many days and then in subsequent years, we retold this story of the broken bed.

This was how Maw and I came to join the cast of characters, who like Sardar Saheb and Mummy visited the village in connection with an artists’ colony that had been founded by Norah Richards, a feisty Irish Gandhian who had been active in theater in Lahore before moving to Kangra. (Though Norah Richards had died at a grand old age a few years before ...