Capturing the week-long song

An ancient Indian song that takes up to 11 days to perform has been transcribed for the first time – and is now being used to help local people learn to read.

Often it was hot. Usually it was wet — feet sucking in and out of rice paddies. And always it felt long — like the song he was studying. Very, very long.

In 2000, ANU anthropologist Chris Gregory spent an entire wet season watching rice grow in the relatively isolated Bastar District in central India to get to the heart of one of the longest songs the world has known.

The 20-year path that Dr Gregory has spent unravelling the epic central Indian song Lachmi Jagar presents a tale of almost epic proportions in itself. Long hours writing research grant applications; then, when the money came, even longer hours studying the epic; and after that, devoting years to the analysis of community life in Bastar. All to ensure that the ancient song could be accurately recorded for the first time in history.

The Halbi language, a dialect spoken by the people of Bastar, has more than 500 words for varietiesof rice alone. There are thousands more to describe the minutiae of every possible nuance of a rice plant’s life — as you would expect, from a people who have spent centuries cultivating the crop using labour-intensive methods of production.

Armed with a notebook and camera, Dr Gregory painstakingly recorded the many Halbi words used to describe the various stages in the life cycle of a rice plant and used this knowledge to translate the epic Lachmi Jagar — the song about the Bastar Rice Goddess.

Dr Gregory first heard the song in 1982, when he spent a year on a field trip analysing the social dynamics of village markets.

“I heard the song and I had no idea what it was about, but I found it fascinating. Here was a song which ran behind a religious ritual performed forup to 11 days,” Dr Gregory says.

“The singers perform for three to four hours each day and then sing for 24 hours straight on the final, climactic day, with hundreds of villagers attending and acting out a traditional wedding ceremony. Many often fall into trances during the ceremonies that unfold.”

Ten years later, Dr Gregory obtained funding to return to the region to unravel the story of the song.

After years of research, the epic song has been written down for the first time in a project led by Dr Gregory, working in collaboration with Mr Harihar Vaishnav, an India-based folklorist, and a singer, Ms Gurumai Sukdai.

Generations of Indian women singers from the central Indian region of Bastar have memorised the epic 30,939-line song of the rice goddess, performingit in religious ceremonies.

Speakers of the Halbi language have one of the richest oral traditions in India, but virtually none of it has been transcribed or published in theirown language.

It is a type of harvest ritual and has been handed down from generation to generation. Lachmi Jagar is a religious ceremony aimed at ensuring prosperity and is almost always performed by women, known as Gurumai, who have key community roles as singers. The ritual is hosted by either a household or a community.

Read the Story of Lachmi Jagar

After eleven days of singing, the women are not paid for their song, but the host is obliged to present them with gifts for their performance.

Lachmi Jagar can start on any day of the week but must always finish on a Thursday (known as Lakhimbar or Lachmi’s day). 

“The Bastar people have a very rich oral tradition in their Halbi dialect and because India’s national language, Hindi, is becoming increasingly dominant in the area, we wanted to record the song,” Dr Gregory says.

“I worked with Mr Vaishnav to record the song as it was sung by Ms Gurumai Sukdai. It took more than 1,000 pages to transcribe.

“Lachmi — or, Lakshmi as she is known in other areas — is a rice goddess and is worshipped all over India in different ways. This is one of the most elaborate accounts of her story that I have heard.

“The song is performed as a religious ceremony, telling the story of the birth, marriage and domestic lifeand even domestic violence of the rice goddess. It tells a story which is really about prosperity and ultimate happiness.

“It is particularly interesting because the singers are just ordinary women from lower castes and unlike many myths which we know of from India, it is very down-to-earth and is presented from a low-status point of view. In contrast, myths popularised by men from higher castes are very hierarchical.”

The song is sung three years in a row, for seven days the first year, nine days the second year and 11 days the third, with rituals accompanying each stage of the song’s story. 

It is an astonishing feat of memory to be able to recite such an epic song and Ms Sukdai knows not just one, but two epic songs, as well as hundreds of other shorter songs.

“Because the Halbi oral tradition is so rich, and few people read, I think the Bastar people exercise their memory muscle in a different way to us,” Dr Gregory says. “I asked Ms Sukdai ‘How do you remember so much?’ She answered ‘How do you forget so much?’”

Despite the commitment to their great oral traditions, the Halbi-speaking people also have a great desire to learn to read.

Dr Gregory and Mr Vaishnav have produced a trilingual summary of the song in Halbi, Hindi and English. This text has been published to help school children and illiterate adults in the area learn to read.

“The ANU provided funding to enable a summary version of the epic, translated into three languages, to be printed and 500 copies have been distributed to schools and adults who wish to learn to read in the Bastar region — including Ms Sukdai,” Dr Gregory says.

“We are also producing a multi-volume scholarly transcription and analysis of the epic with explanatory footnotes, ethnographic data and references, which has already attracted interestacross India and internationally.”

The scholarly transcription of Lachmi Jagar will be published in a few years time, but beyond that, there is scope for an even more ambitious work. The Bastar people sing a far longer song — surely one of the longest in existence — over three months through the wet season. In Bastar, long-term cultural success does not seem to depend on brevity.

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