Women sing Kajari songs in Lucknow. File picture

Lucknow, Aug. 5: Erratic monsoon in India’s food bowl isn’t just hitting harvests. A 200-year-old rain song tradition is wilting, too.

Kajari, sung mainly by eastern Uttar Pradesh women who also sway to folk tunes at the onset of rain, is falling silent, say folk music researchers who believe the wayward monsoon of the past few years is the main reason.

Shruti Sadolikar Katkar put it down to climate change. “We have to learn to cope with climate change after all,” said the head of the Bhatkhande Music Institute in Lucknow and an expert on Indian classical and folk music.

This season, the rain is better but not enough to revive Kajari. “No new singers are emerging, village girls don’t go out in the rain to enjoy a dance. The rich folk tradition of Kajari is dying in the villages,” Katkar said.

The songs are sung at the beginning of the month of Shravan, coinciding with the start of the monsoon.

Folk music researcher Indra Srivastava, who has studied the way north Indian women are portrayed in such songs, wrote in one his papers: “The portrait of women in songs like Kajari is often at variance with the conventional stereotype of an obedient, conformist woman. The songs gave them an outlet to express their desires.”

Popular lore has it that Kajari was the name of a woman in Mirzapur whose husband was away on work. Assailed by pangs of separation, she used to sob and sing in a goddess’s temple. The cries took the form of Kajari songs.

The songs spread beyond Mirzapur in the 19th century to Sonbhadra, Jaunpur, Allahabad and Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh, and to Rohtas and Ara in neighbouring Bihar.

Kajari is even mentioned in a survey of the area by Francis Buchanan (1762-1829), a Scottish physician who was also a geographer, zoologist and botanist. In the survey, Buchanan wrote that wives of British officers organised Kajari dances.

Rohitnandnan Shastri, a researcher in the music department of Banaras Hindu University, echoed other experts on the importance of rain for the tradition to thrive. “Rains used to be the inspiration for Kajari. When the black clouds come hovering over you, you break into a song of kajari, a song of love, separation and longing.”

Not anymore, though.

According to him, a team of folk singers from Varanasi that visited some villages in Mirzapur — the cradle of Kajari — last month were surprised to find that the tradition was alive in only two of the six villages where they performed. The song’s living exponents are Girja Devi, Ravi Kichlu, Malini Awasthi — all a big draw with music lovers in cities.

But Katkar, the Bhatkhande institute chief, suggested urban popularity wasn’t helping the revival. “Poor rains have pushed the tradition to urban centres where established singers regale the audience with the rain songs.”

Besides poor monsoon arising from climate change, she offers another reason: invasion of technology in villages and other socio-economic changes that have killed interest in folk music. “Times are changing,” she said.