Phaag aur Holi

In the days leading up to Holi, my mother starts listening to the Phaag songs she can find on YouTube. Phaag is a genre of folk music in North India that is sung in Phaagun, the month of spring in Hindi. There isn’t much of this music on YouTube though so she listens to what she can find and sings along. A couple of times when I was around while she was humming, she told me about the Phaag she used to hear as a girl in Kanpur in the compound adjacent to her house.

It was called a Koele ki Taal in Hindi, a space where coal was sold. My Nana, who belonged to the last generation of kanjoos hookah smokers, would send his kids across to the taal to fill up his chillum with free embers. My mother, being the youngest, was everyone’s gofer girl. She was also shit scared of her father and ended up going most often. She would skip across in her frock and chappals with the empty chillum and carry back the flaming thing as though it was an olympic torch meant to light a sacred fire.

The Taal consisted of men who had come from the hinterland of UP to the city in search of work. There they would sell the different kinds of coal that households used. Since she couldn’t hang around, they communicated with my mother in limited words: ‘Ao bitiya’ when they saw her come and ‘Lo bitiya’ when they handed her the filled chillum. But in the days approaching Holi when they sang Phaag songs, she would wish she could tarry. Since she couldn’t, she would climb up the staircase in her house beside the wall that separated the two compounds and strain her neck to watch and hear them sing. Apart from the main singer and the chorus, one of them played the dholak and another clashed the cymbals of the manjira. One of them in the chorus would sing falsetto.

My mother struggles to tell me why she would listen to them for hours hoping they would sing the rest of the year as well. There is nothing on YouTube that can quite relate. A few videos are in the vicinity though. The video that comes closest in capturing the scenes of the koele ki taal fifty years ago is a famous Bollywood song called ‘chalat musafir moh liya re’ which was released around that time.

It was a song in the 1966 film Teesri Kasam that was produced by the lyricist Shailendra and it was he who wrote the song. Today, Shailendra is remembered as one of the greatest lyricists in Bollywood’s history who penned some of its most memorable songs. But with a song like chalat musafir, it is hard to say how much of it was Shailendra writing fresh lyrics in a dialect of the rural Gangetic heartland and how much of it was him using words from folk songs sung in his native Bihar to adapt them for the film. He chose the dialect because it was a time when Bollywood often sought to represent a different class of North Indians.

I say dialect only because that is what Braj and Awadhi are referred to as today; as dialects of Hindi. But if we think of dialects as distributaries of a parent language, then Hindi, Braj and Awadhi have the same parents and are close siblings. There was a time only a little over a century ago when Braj and Awadhi had more literary prestige than Hindi or Khariboli, the language of the Delhi region. The political currents of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries changed that, as Khariboli written in the Nagri script was made to challenge Urdu in the Nastaliq script even though Urdu and Hindi are only different registers of the same language if you ask a linguist. They did have different political identities however and were wielded as tools in order to mobilize a politics based on faith. Hindi written in Nagri was used to push out Urdu written in Nastaliq which was the legacy of urban North India’s Persianate Age. In post-independence India, the State adopted the most Sanskritized register of Hindi to maintain elite capture and although the Nastaliq script has withered, Bollywood continues to use the Urdu register for its music.

So the biggest victims ended up being the so-called dialects of Hindi – Awadhi, Braj, Bhojpuri etc and their speakers. Since the early twentieth century, they have lost literary prestige as well as state patronage. While the Mughal court functioned in Persian, it patronized literature in Braj and Awadhi apart from Sanskrit. Muhammad Jayasi wrote Padmavat in Awadhi before Tulsidas wrote the Ramcharitmanas in it. However since independence, having lost prestige, these languages are now dying. Native speakers across the Gangetic belt – struggling to access state services and jobs in their mother tongues while being ashamed of them – have been abandoning them for the more aspirational Hindi. While many Persian words persist in spoken Hindi, the State’s Sanskritized Hindi is most severe on Hindi’s native tadbhav words which are derived from Prakrit and Apabhramsha, the parent languages of the modern Indo-Aryan languages spoken in most of UP. Awadhi and Braj on the other hand have a much higher percentage of native tadbhav words and few if any of the new Sanskrit loan words that the State’s Hindi possesses. I have heard jokes made on speakers of these dialects by urban folk who speak standard Hindi at home. The butt of these jokes is usually tadbhav words and their pronunciations that have either been phased out of spoken Hindi today or were never a part of it to begin with.

There appear to be only a few exceptions to the prestige of some of these dialects that I can think of. Tulsi’s Ramcharitmanas and Hanuman Chalisa continue to be popular among urban Hindus even though most don’t understand the words. Women across North India in particular recite the Sundarkand - a chapter of the Ramcharitmanas - in Awadhi during prayer. Bhajans sung in Bollywood will often invoke these dialects. UP also has folk music genres named for different months of the year like Kajri which is sung in the monsoon and Chaiti sung during the first month of the Hindu calendar in around April. Some of these genres have acquired a semi-classical status since courtesans infused them into Hindustani classical music and artists like Begum Akhtar added them to their repertoire. Phaag is one of them and since it is sung during Holi it has become synonymous with the festival. So while Diwali is the biggest festival in the North, Holi is the only major festival that has a genre of music associated with it. But Phaag, like other forms of folk music, has deep roots that extend to a time when Braj and Awadhi were prestige languages of composition. Most urban UP folk have heard Phaag being sung in the days leading up to Holi in these dialects even though they speak standard Hindi at home.

So what does Bollywood do when it needs to depict a Holi celebration? It reaches out for the dialects that people in the North associate with Holi music that are replete with old tadbhav words from Prakrit. The most famous Holi song is Amitabh Bachchan’s Rang Barse from the film Silsila. I used to wonder why it sounded different. According to Wikipedia, the song’s lyricist is Amitabh’s poet father Harivansh Rai Bachchan. Further reading reveals that it was an older Marwari/Haryanvi folk song that Bachchan rewrote in Awadhi for the film. But why Awadhi? Harivansh Rai Bachchan was not an Awadhi poet. But I am guessing like my mother, he grew up listening to Phaag music in these dialects, not in standard Hindi. As did his son, who has been the only major hero of Bollywood from UP. Silsila was a huge hit and its music remains popular but in other songs, Amitabh’s urban character sings in Bollywood’s preferred Urdu register to express his deepest emotions. It is only during Holi that he switches as though a long-lost twin who grew up in the hinterland has taken his place. So while Javed Akhtar has written most of Silsila’s songs in Urdu, they needed a Harivansh Rai for giving Holi an Awadhi touch.

Decades later Amitabh would sing another popular Holi song ‘Hori khele Raghuveera Awadh mein’ and this time the reference to Awadh and Awadhi would be even more explicit. As in Silsila, none of the other songs sung in Baghbaan use this dialect. In any other context, a song in this dialect would be out of place in Bollywood today because it no longer represents the people that it frequently did in the 50s and 60s. In those decades while it made sense for the Hindko actor Dilip Kumar to sing ‘Nain Lad Jainhe To Manva’ or for the Punjabi actor Raj Kapoor to sing ‘Chalat Musafir Moh Liya Re’, it didn’t make sense for Bollywood’s UP superstar to sing in those dialects outside specific contexts like Holi in the following decades. An exception I can think of is Amitabh’s character singing ‘Khaike Paan Banaras Wala’ in the film Don. But even here the language is used specifically to depict a paan-chewing bumpkin who has been recruited to replace a suave urban villain. For Bollywood after the 60s, these dialects were islands which were submerged for most of the year and became visible only for bhajans or during Holi.

To return to the Koele ki Taal, the language my mother heard there lacked prestige. It's words were strung together by a long line of unknown composers. She also heard falsetto singing which doesn’t find a place in classical music. In folk songs, the falsetto singer is usually an unassuming part of the chorus who can can nonetheless make all the difference while the lead singer takes the spotlight. We may never know who sang in falsetto for ‘Chalat musafir’. The dholak doesn’t find a place on hallowed stages either. It is a more earthy instrument that is best placed on the ground in maidans, under trees and in wedding halls where women hammer it with a spoon while singing bridal folk songs. It invites all to come over and give it a whack. It isn’t an instrument of fame, its purpose is unbridled joy. Unlike other classical instruments it doesn’t seem likely that a dholak master will win the Padma Vibhushan or Bharat Ratna. And yet the dholak, the falsetto and those tadbhav words are powerfully linked with the memory of Holi for many people who grew up in the Hindi heartlands.

This is why popular music of these languages on YouTube is tied to Holi as well. Last year, after years of silence, Coke Studio India released a Holi Song ‘Aaj Biraj mein Hori Re Rasiya’. It is a folk song my mother knows well. I want her to listen to the last two lines. After the rap segment, at 3 minutes 10 seconds, a singer enters the fray and sings in a baritone. His words are all tadbhav - Hori, not Holi; Biraj, not Braj. He is paired with a chorus and an unknown falsetto singer harmonizes with him. As she listens to the lines her eyes grow wide and she says, “Haan yeh!”.