It was for two hours straight that singer Runki Goswami held the stage – her voice travelling from Jharkhand’s Sohrai percussion to Himachal’s Morni, from Bengal’s Baul to Rajasthan’s Gorband. She sang 20 songs in multiple languages, taking a pause only to explain to the audience about the song she was to sing next and the folk tradition of that particular state.
At the India International Centre in New Delhi, where ‘Lok Yatra: A Folk Music Journey’ was held, as a partnership between the Ministry of Culture, The National Centre for Cultural Resources and Training, Prayagraj, and partner cultural institutions, she didn’t stick to Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, as an audience member suggested, given her deep understanding of the region. Instead, she chose to sing folk songs from Kashmir to Kerala and from Gujarat to West Bengal.
The presentation showcased not only the diversity in terms of folk traditions and languages but also themes. The Himachali folk number ‘Morni’, for instance, becomes a gentle lesson in ecological coexistence.
“Here, a mother asks her daughter why she’s getting thin,” Goswami explains. “The girl replies it’s because of a peahen who makes noises during the night, because of which she cannot sleep, and asks whether they should kill it. Here, the mother tells her daughter that killing is not an option.”
On the other hand, a song from West Bengal told a deeply personal tale while also foregrounding a social ill. “It’s about a woman who is married to a man 30 years older than her, whom she doesn’t like. She instead develops feelings for her young brother-in-law. And through this song, she tries to have a conversation with herself,” the singer explains.
Through her presentation, she also underscored how regions in close proximity can nurture vastly different folk traditions. For instance, when she performed a song commemorating the harvest festival of Sohrai, celebrated in Jharkhand, percussion took centre stage. “This reflects the state’s strong tribal culture, which is distinct from that of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar,” she explains.
Which was her favourite part of the evening? “It was Bengali, because I got to sing Baul,” she says. And the toughest? “It was to get the correct phonetics, the dialects, especially when it came to singing in Malayalam and Telugu.”
While some segments of the performance were more powerful than the other, what Goswami managed to pull off remains commendable.
Putting the piece together, she says, was an enriching journey in itself. “You get to understand so much about the culture of the regions. Like, if you even think of Rajasthan, you hear about ‘Gorband,’ but what is ‘Gorband’? It is actually the string that is tied around the camels.”
On the popularity of folk music today, she says: “Even contemporary musicians are bringing up folk, especially with platforms like Coke Studio. It’s here to stay.”