As demonstrated in Chapter 3, references to musical scenes and musical instruments – huṙkīs, nagāṙās, flutes – are a regular feature of many pawāṙās in Uttarakhand. The analysis presented in Chapter 4 highlights the possibility that performance practices associated with oral tradition may well account for the recurrent references to such scenes. Perhaps the most ubiquitous of all such scenes are those with the muralī (flute). The iconic nature of the flute and its sound within a mountainous geography deserves closer attention. This chapter therefore focuses closely on these scenes in order to more fully explore the nature of oral tradition and also to more closely examine the role of the flute within the musical practice of the region.

The story of Jitu Bagadwal is the most well-known pawāṙā in Garhwal that is focused on the flute. In the central episode of the story, Jitu plays his muralī on a high mountain pasture and thereby attracts the mountain sprites that ultimately cause his downfall. The sound of the flute is thereby linked to the dangerous supernatural world of sprites and to the sonic realm of a mountainous geography.

A number of recording artists have released commercially available audio tapes of the story, including Uma Shankar Satish (1987) and Hukam Singh Yadav (n.d.). Though it is primarily a Garhwali story, Jitu Bagadwal is known in parts of Kumaun. The story has become somewhat iconic for the hill regions of Uttarakhand and is frequently interpreted through various artistic mediums including shorter songs, drama and dance.

When I first listened to Kulanand Juyal's cassette, Gaṙhwālī Jāgar (Rama 140, 1988), I concentrated on its sounds. It wasn't the sort of cassette I would play as background music – it doesn't suit that situation – or at least not for me. Without paying much attention to it, I listened to it as I had habitually done with other cassettes. I listened to the words. I concentrated on trying to follow the story of Bāṇāsur as best I could and this was not easy, given my modest linguistic skills. I found my mind wandering to the drumming, and I began comparing it to what I was familiar with from other performances. The drum dropped out for periods and these absences were longer than I was used to. The bhauṇ pitches at the end of each line were more stable than I expected – quite unlike those of Dilwar Singh with whose style I was making a comparison. I was trying to identify technicalities within the sounds of its original performance; somehow trying to imagine the world of its original recording as well as what I unconsciously assumed to be conventional for the location of this kind of performance. Habitually, I was creating an imagined world constructed from my past experiences – experiences of listening to jāgars and cassettes. Without thinking, I had moved into an imagined space, assuming myself to be somehow next to the performers – not in a specific location, but in a generic Garhwali space within my ‘mind's eye’.

A Himalayan Sound Space

The Himalayas are usually assumed to encompass a space in which the vertical dimension is emphatic. They ‘tower’; they ‘thrust’; they ‘perch.’ Climbers go to the Himalayas to move upwards and reach the peak. Tibet – ‘the roof of the world’ – lies somewhere high above the vantage point of the viewer from the plains. British surveyors like George Everest and Andrew Waugh could see the highest of these mountains sticking up in the distance, a natural border to their newly colonized subcontinent. Well before the British, the Pandavas – heroes of the Mahābhārata – were exiled for thirteen years into the mountains. Later, they ended their days moving upwards again towards that inaccessible high ground of eternal snow. Here, Shiva – carrying a drum – meditated in his mountain abode at Kailash.

Verticality pervades our human visual imagination of a Himalayan space. However, their sonic space is equally integral to the mountains – one that is less considered. It remains invisible and exists in dimensions that are different to the three visible dimensions. Mountains are characterized by mystic silence, yet their spatial dimension and magnitude seem to echo sounds of those who live amidst, or travel through them.

This book presents a number of stories about musical practice in specific regions in the central Himalayas. My words are descriptive of people and the sounds that define them. Those sounds are imagined in ways reflective of histories, conventional attitudes, geographical spaces and mythical worlds. The Himalayas being characterized by diversity of people and geographies are featured by different Himalayan spaces, for instance, urban environments with cosmopolitan populations different to rural settlements; high alpine geographies unlike the flat terai below the foothills; different countries, languages and religions.

This book is intended, not only for an academic readership, but also for those who simply want to discover something about the musical practices of musicians in the Himalayan region of Uttarakhand. Consequently, I have included some descriptive material that is widely available elsewhere. This is for the benefit of those who are less familiar with musicology and for those who may not have travelled to Uttarakhand before. Writing for two different audiences inevitably requires compromise regarding the tone of the language and the technically specific terminology that must be used. I hope these compromises do not alienate either readership. As with any book, it is limited in scope to those practitioners whom I have met and to those experiences that I have had. Nonetheless, I hope these stories will encourage the reader to reflect on the way sound and music are influenced by the geography in which they are made.

Some segments of this book have appeared in earlier journal publications. They are presented here either with significant modifications that take an account of recent field research, or with adaptations that create better coherence within the narrative of this book. They appear with permission of the editors.

Chapter 1 is a significantly revised version of an article published in the journal Asian Music in 1997/98. All the musical examples are new and are presented in a manner that is more inclined towards the South Asian context. The ideas in this earlier paper have been significantly expanded to provide more detailed citations as well as more coherent musical examples. In addition, further information related to military history and contemporary media has been included. Chapter 5 is an article originally published in 2012 in the European Bulletin of Himalayan Research titled ‘Flutes, Sprites and Mountainous Geographies’.

Bazaars in most towns throughout Uttarakhand offer the usual merchandise one would expect to find in a North Indian urban market. Street vendors compete for space in front of more permanent shops as crowds of pedestrians, motorcycles, cars and buses squeeze through the narrow streets. Most of the goods are brought up from the plains while some local merchandise may be found scattered among the imported items. Distribution networks of a capitalist economy ensure employment for wholesalers as well as truck drivers responsible for moving goods between markets and distribution points. Hill potatoes, cucumbers, pumpkins, beans and apples make an appearance in market displays beside spinach from Punjab, oranges from Nagpur, Guavas and Mangoes from UP and eggplants from Haryana. In other shops, household goods and readymade clothing arrive from production centres in the plains. Metalware shops display the standard steel plates, tumblers, cutlery and kitchen utensils that one would expect, while brass and copper banṭhās (water containers) are added for local residents wanting to purchase something from their own region. In the back of these same shops there might also be a brass barrel-shaped ḍhol or a copper bhaṅkorā (trumpet).

Frequently in these towns there is also a vendor selling compact discs, VCDs and DVDs. These have largely replaced the audio cassettes and VHS tapes that were once the dominant analogue formats of the 1980s and 1990s. Music vendors target a clientele who want to hear the most recent popular hits of the film industry or see the most recent compilation of dance ‘item numbers’ from Mumbai. Nonetheless, as with items for sale in other shops, Uttarakhandi products find space, albeit a more marginal space, next to the imports. Big name local singers provide a Garhwali nuance to the commodified sounds and VCDs on offer. Garhwali regional films use the voices of these stars as playback singers to express a local identity within a style clearly influenced by Mumbai’s dominant aesthetic.

The invention of the analog audio cassette was a critical moment in the history of music industries worldwide. Introduced in the mid-1960s, the technology spread rapidly in the 1970s until it was the dominant format for music sales throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s before it was replaced by the compact disk. As Manuel (1993) has documented, cassette technology was adopted in India somewhat later than in the rest of the world, but once it arrived, it had an overwhelming impact on the consumption and production of popular music. Similarly, the replacement of cassettes by compact disks occurred later in India than elsewhere. In regional music traditions, the arrival of digital formats and music downloads via the internet has now created a complex new environment for sales quite unlike the uniformity of the cassette industry.

Manuel traces the boom in cassette production throughout India to the mid-1980s:

Coincidentally the Garhwali film industry was also founded at this time. The first Garhwali language film, Jagwāl [The Vigil] was produced by Parasar Gaur in 1983. This was followed by three other Garhwali films during the decade: Kavī Sukh Kavī Dukh (1984), Ghar Jawaiṅ (1986) and Kauthīg (1987) (Uttarkhand Cinema). Meghā Ā was the first Kumauni film produced by S. S. Bisht in 1987 and this too contributed to a growing Uttarakhandi film industry. The two most popular Garhwali films were undoubtedly Ghar Jawaiṅ and Kauthīg, both of which featured the music and voice of Narendra Singh Negi.

The previous three chapters examined the epic repertoire of Uttarakhand in order to provide details of indoor musical practice. In addition, the stories that were discussed provided texts and themes that could be fruitfully mined for perspectives on caste hierarchy and ideologies associated with instruments. The huṙkī drum and the voice of the performer were the primary components of the aural phenomenon of story singing. An overarching framework for the discussion of the stories, as well as the creative practices undertaken in their construction, was appropriately provided by theories of oral tradition.

In contrast, this chapter shifts focus away from the huṙkī, and moves to a consideration of outdoor drums; namely the ḍhol and the damauṅ. Nonetheless, the discussion remains concerned with practices of oral tradition, particularly related to how ‘drum knowledge’ is vocalized in particular ways. Consequently, I seek to focus on the way drummers use syllabic recitation as a means to signify repertoire items and thereby oralize a practice of drumming. The implications of this oralization are considered within the broader context of drumming in other areas of South Asian practice.

I have always been somewhat uncomfortable in describing and notating the drum syllables used by village drummers in Garhwal. On the one hand, when I became aware that some drummers used syllables to describe repertoire, it appeared logical to use these syllables in some way to notate and visually represent the drum patterns that I was listening to. On the other hand – though syllables represented an emic approach to drum stroke conceptualization – they never quite provided the direct link between sound and physical action that I was looking and listening for. Identifying particular vocalized syllables in relation to specific striking points on the drumheads was always more problematic than I had imagined it should be.

In an old book on the history of Garhwal written by Harikrishna Raturi, the author presents extensive lists of the various caste names of families in Garhwal. The book was originally published in 1928 during the days of the Garhwali Raja and would seem to present a first-hand account of practices from that time. Within his list of untouchable castes, Raturi (1988 [1928]: 90) lists ‘aṭpahariyā’ and describes these as: ‘nakarāchīs [players of the naqqara drums] who used to sound out the eight times of day on the naubat in the naubatkhānā of the court', Very few present-day musicians play these kinds of drums though drummers regularly refer back to a shared memory of court drumming. Raturi's statement is significant because it is one of the few sources from the time that mentions musical activity in the Garhwali rājā's court.

As the previous chapter illustrates, musical instruments as well as their combinations within specific ensembles are frequently associated with political power and military conquest. While instruments may hold a variety of symbolic meanings in different contexts, their use as sonic expressions of power may be heard in numerous musical traditions throughout the world. The adoption of the bagpipe into village-level musical practice as well as that of the Garhwal and Gorkha Regiments of the Indian Army enmeshes a complex history of imperial power within local sonic expressions of regional identity.

With these words, Bhag Chand, a huṙkiyā (drummer) from the village of Naugaon in Pauri district of Uttarakhand, began to sing the pawāṙā (heroic epic) of ‘Bijula Naik’. I had organized a performance of this specific story in April of 2004 at my own house and a small group of about five people had joined us for the occasion. This chapter explores the dynamics of that performance by focusing on the story of Bijula Naik as well as the performative elements of Bhag Chand's singing and drumming. The sonic realm of a pawāṙā draws one into the world of the characters and transports one regularly between the natural world of the event and the supernatural world of the story.

Bijula Naik is the illicit son of Dhama Deb and Chhamuna Patra, he being the king of the Kanturis, and she being a low caste dancer. Though the story does not provide the details of the illicit affair, the disparity between their castes as well as Chhamuna Patra’s status as a dancer in the king’s court provides an underlying tension that continues throughout the story. To begin the story’s performance, it was essential for Bhag Chand to acknowledge the presence of the world of gods through naming them in advance of his story. His skills as a ritual specialist would be essential in controlling any devtās (deities) who might join us for the performance.

BEFORE plunging into the main theme of this chapter viz. the relative positions of fate and human endeavour as presented in the scriptures, we shall once again probe into the nature of fate itself. Life for the toiling masses in anciént India, as everywhere else, was hard and bitter. The Aryans came as a nomadic pastoral people; cattle was their base of subsistence, roots and fruits supplemented their food, as did hunting. When they had virtually subjugated an urban agricultural and trading people their ethos first clashed with, then was overwhelmed by it and finally it assimilated some part of the subjugated people. What was this ethos? We have no records of the indigenous non-or pre-Aryan peoples. Our sole source is first the Ṛgveda Saṃhitā and then the slow and steady changes ushered in the Yajurveda, the Brāhmanas and finally the Atharva Saṃhitā. These changes can to some extent be ascribed to the miscegenation and the cultural amalgamation of the two peoples. Whatever other differences they may have had, the fact that life was difficult and fraught with many dangers persists throughout. Even when the invaders had learned to cultivate and to make houses with kiln-burnt bricks, nature posed many problems for them—there were floods, droughts, locusts, bad feuds, harvests, plagues, epidemics among men and cattle, earthquakes, forestfires, tempests, etc. Many were the threats to life and property for these early settlers here. Chance, the unapprehended, was thus taken for fate which was behind such insecurity and was responsible for such accidents.

BOTH rebirth and karman stem from death, the trauma and uncertainty associated with death. The excavation of prehistoric burial sites bring to light man's worries and concerns regarding death, his attempts to offer comforts to the departed soul. Life can never accept death, the negation of life. “Man has always reacted to death. He did not accept it, convinced as he was that it did not belong to the original plan of human life. So we find several myths explaining how death came into the world.” One reaction to man's spiritual rejection of death was application of magic for prolonging life, necromancy, attempts at rejuvenation through pseudo-chemistry etc. Underneath such endeavours is the belief that death is extraneous to the schema of life. Man held that the ultimacy of the termination of life in death was unacceptable. Also the appearance of the departed in dreams assured him that the essential man i.e. the spirit lived on, despite the death of the body. Hence the universal belief in an existence of after-life: in heaven, paradise, purgatory, hell, an astral body or the spirit form. “The care taken over the disposal of the dead indicates a deeply held conviction that provided the appropriate steps are taken, death could be regarded as a transitional slate… The oldest astronomical texts now known are found on the lids of wooden coffins dating from the Ninth Dynasty (c 2150 B.C.). They are called ‘diagonal star clocks’ or diagonal calendars and they give the names of the stars associated with the respective decans.”

IT was in the middle of the first millennium B.C. that rebirth came to be associated with karman: a man was reborn according to what he did in his life on earth. This association had many facets. In the first phase rebirth had reference only to the future, but with karman it was a two-ended position: a man's past karman determines his present station and his present station decides how he will fare in the future. Now, with the Jātakas a man could be born as a God or as subhuman being, a sondergötter-a yakṣa, piśāca, gandharva, kinnara, rākṣasa, nāga, any animal, bird, serpent, insect, aquatic or atmospheric creature. “Sin and piety in this life result in birth in hateful or covetable stations (in the next).” As tree-spirits and river-spirits they could, to some extent, be identified with aspects of nature. The scope and possibility of rebirth thus widened to illimitability. Secondly, now there appeared a pseudological chain of causality: certain karmans yielded certain results. Thirdly, divine intervention and the role of the supernatural in controlling the course of a man's life was admitted. Fourthly, now fate became a myriad-named divinity. We shall deal with most of these aspects in the following chapters, but karman opened up a large vista which rebirth by itself could never do.

OF the two major formative ideas viz. rebirth and karman which constituted the core or basis of fatalism in India, the first to appear was rebirth. And, interestingly enough, at its inception it was not recurring births, but recurring deaths. And even more strangely, this conceptual chapter opens not for man but for the Gods and has an element of teleology inherent in the episode. The Śiatnpatha Brāhmana broaches the subject: “Now indeed the Gods were at first mortal, only when they gained the year did they become immortal.” “Through the sacrifices the Gods became immortal. Death was scared: ‘what shall be my share?’ They reassured him, ‘From now on none shall be immortal in the body… They who know this or do this holy work come to life again, when they have died; and coming to life, they come to immortal life. But those who do not perform this act come to life again and again.” “If one does not offer these oblations then one gets (i.e. meets) death in the different worlds.” More concretely this age knew one form of death, namely hunger. Hunger is a living death, “by death, by hunger was everything pervaded, hunger is death.”

So we have a few basic tenets regarding rebirth: (1) it first threatened the Gods and when Death was alarmed at the prospect of losing his share of food viz. the victims of death, (2) the Gods laid down two principles (a) the gaining of the year and (b) the performance of certain sacrifices, by which (3) they became immortal with a solemn assurance to death that ‘from now on none shall be immortal in the body.’ Needless to say, this applies to men alone because the Gods had already attained immortality. So men could perform sacrifices and gain immortality after they had died at least once.

AS the person concerned can himself attempt to deflect the verdicts of fate through vows, charity, meditation, pilgrimage etc. similarly others also can act on his behalf with the same end in view. Sacrifices in Vedic times were sometimes performed by an officiating priest on behalf of his client who wanted a son (putreṣṭi) or overlordship (aśvamedha or rājasūya) or the destruction of his enemies (various abhicāra performances). This trend continued even when sacrifices gradually went out of vogue and in their place came the pūjās. The Little Tradition which had occupied itself with such mundane needs of the society, resorted to sympathetic magic and sought to deflect the adverse moves of fate.

Among such vicarious or indirect deflective measures the ones of first importance were curse and boons. Boons could be awarded (1) by a God to a God, (2) by a God to men and by (3) men to men while curses belong to these three categories as also to a fourth (4) by a man to a God. Boons or blessings can be deserved and undeserved. In the Rāmāyaṇa, Vaiśravana received the boon of overlordship from Brahman. Rāvaṇa, the ten-headed monster received a boon, from the reluctant Brahman only after he had severed his ten heads one by one and offered them to the God; he was blessed with being invincible to birds, serpents, daityas, demons and monsters.