Vanishing cultures of Himachal

Changing values and practices are threatening Pahari language, music, dance and lifestyle. Unless the authorities wake up to document the unique heritage, it may pass into oblivion without a trace, writes Vijay K. Stokes

Guests being given a traditional welcome at a Himachali wedding.

Human beings, a naturally curious species, normally expend enormous efforts on the origins of mankind and how they have evolved. This curiosity even extends to the origins of the universe. The world, for many years now, has been worrying about vanishing species. Yet, we do not seem to be concerned about vanishing cultures and languages in our own backyard.

Himachal Pradesh is endowed with a slew of rich, diverse cultures that have distinct societal mores, languages, music, painting styles, and architecture. Except for some ‘coffee table’ books on temple architecture and Kangra paintings, not much has been written about this diversity. Mapping of these diverse cultures, and interpreting and determining their origins and interrelationships, offers a fascinating challenge to academia for topics for many Ph.D theses.

Centuries-old cultures in the hills of Himachal Pradesh are vanishing at an alarming rate. While much of this rich heritage has been lost, there is still time to document the unique language, music, and social fabric of these diverse societies. The details have not been documented largely because the richness and diversity of these cultures have not been recognised as they are considered primitive and not worthy of serious study.

Traditional dress of women comprising the rezta (long dress), the dhatu (head scarf) and the saluka (waist coat)

Take the example of the local language. The dialects can vary markedly over short distances. The local language has all elements of a modern language, including well-structured grammar and rich vocabulary, to describe the fabric of society, aphorisms, idioms, metaphors, poetry and story telling. But describing it as merely western Pahari or Sadochi indicates how poorly the language structures have been mapped.

The local cultures also have several well-developed genres of folk music, with strong traditions of dance. The upper hills have a unique cooperative societal structure which bears testimony to the fact that how difficult it was to survive here without help from others.

Winds of change

This loss of culture can be studied through changes experienced over the past 50 years in ilaqa Kotgarh, a small area located 80 km from Shimla, 18 km beyond Narkanda, on the old Hindustan-Tibet mule track to Shipki pass. The area was under the British administration since the early 1800s. It was surrounded by small princely states, the largest of which was Rampur Bushahr.

The original natives of this ilaqa were disaffected migrants from the surrounding states. They were an independent, proud and a confident community having little interaction with the surrounding areas. They did not venture beyond the ilaqa until motorable roads were built in the late 1940s. This isolation resulted in a homogeneous culture with a common language, musical tradition, and societal mores, which changed quite slowly over the years.

The increasing contact with the burgeoning post-Independence Indian bureaucracy shattered the self-confidence of the local people who, for the first time, were intimidated by the more educated and better dressed outsiders, who treated them as uneducated country bumpkins. This resulted in the natives blindly wanting to emulate the cultural values of these outsiders. Although the commercial success of apple crops in the late 1950s brought riches to the locals, some of whom were then able to educate their children in sophisticated schools, the lack of confidence continued. Having acquired some western cultural values, these ‘better’ educated people tended to look down even more on the local culture, which they thought was backward.

Until the 1940s, life in the hills was very hard; the waking hours were mainly devoted to procuring and producing food. Forests were an important source of wood for fuel, pine needles for cowsheds, and for grazing of cattle and sheep. In the cold, damp environment it was not unusual for people to light small fires around which they warmed themselves.

Discordant notes

Elders say that after observing humans, langoors, too, would gather wood into a pile and then sit around it going through the motions of warming their hands. This behaviour of langoors is a good metaphor for societal trends — the blind copying of perceived ‘model’ behaviour — with the cold ‘wood fire’ replaced by images propagated by media. Television programmes now beam very different cultural values, mode of dressing, dancing, and socialising. Especially insidious is the effect of locally produced videos and their broadcast over local TV channels, which portray suggestive dances, of the kinds that would not be tolerated in villages. These dances were set to distorted versions of Pahari music. These external influences are changing cultural values at a very rapid rate, especially among the younger generation.

While there is nothing wrong with social changes, inevitable with exposure to increasing education, financial prosperity and technological advances, but the loss of language, music, and dance traditions is disquieting as the consequential homogenisation could result in a loss of diversity, which is the very essence of this hill state.

The language spoken in ilaqa Kotgarh has a rich phonology. In addition to almost all consonants and vowels of Sanskrit, it has vowels and aspirated nasals that are not present in any of the larger Indian language groups that have descended from Sanskrit. Outsiders cannot pronounce Pahari words because their ears have not been able to differentiate these sounds.

Although most villagers older than 25 years can both understand and speak Pahari, schoolchildren prefer to speak in Hindi, the language of their peers at school. Albeit their Hindi is heavily accented with the phonology and intonation of Pahari. If this trend continues, we can expect Pahari to become extinct within a generation.

Pahari culture has three highly developed genres of folk music: geet, or songs, set to a four-beat rhythm; laane, a chant form in which women accompany various marriage functions; and laman, a free-form recitation of thoughts, expressing sorrow, or about life and death, or about romance. This is set to several haunting melodies. While doing chores in forests, people would spontaneously sing lamans, which would elicit fitting ‘replies’ in lamans.

In the four-beat Nati rhythm, each beat is unevenly matched, making it sound unlike any other four-beat rhythm. While the Nati can be played on a two-sided drum such as the dholak, or even on the tabla, it is best played on a full complement of percussions instruments, called a baja. It consists of two large base drums called dhols, each of which is struck on one side with a curved stick held in the right hand, with the other side is struck and muted by the left hand, resulting in a loud, lower-frequency sound than cannot be produced by dholaks or tables. Other instruments include a higher frequency half drum, called a nagara, played with two straight sticks; and a metal plate, called a bhana, that on being struck with a stick, produces a high-frequency metallic sound. Besides these percussion instruments, the baja also has three pairs of horns: the karnal, a flared lower-frequency horn; the kaori, a bulbous, higher frequency horn; and the harnshinga, an S-shaped high-frequency horn. When played in the hills, these horns produce haunting, echoing sounds. The baja can be accompanied by a sarnai (a shehnai) that plays the notes of the song’s melody.

Out of step

The Nati rhythm forms the basis for the eight-step Nati dance, in which the four-beat baja is repeated twice. For uninitiated outsiders, the Nati dance is a quaint spectator event. External "experts" have even suggested that the dance would look better with uniform dresses. However, the Nati is not something to be watched — rather it is to be danced. Just like a runner’s high, after dancing for about 30 minutes, one can go into a trance in which every muscle participates in reinforcing the state of trance, in which one can dance for hours.

Besides the Nati, which is played in several slow to fast beat forms, the baja is used to play different orchestrated forms: one to welcome guests, two to accompany people walking uphill and downhill, another for level walks, and so on. Traditionally, the baja was played by the local Harijans. But now the younger generation of these Harijans want nothing to do with this activity because of the associated stigma. Unless efforts are made to change this perception by teaching Pahari music in local schools, this sophisticated music form may become extinct.

Surprisingly, the corruption of this complex music genre began with AIR (All-India Radio). Trained in Hindustani classical music, AIR programmers wanted Pahari artistes to have their instruments in ‘tune’, even though an acceptable polyphonic effect could be produced otherwise. AIR also introduced the tabla for the Nati beat, thereby losing the authentic Nati sound. Intimidated by the sahibs, the uneducated artistes produced constrained, ‘regimented’ music that did not have the spontaneity of the real Pahari Nati sound. Inexpensive recording studios made the matters worse by using low-quality electronic synthesisers to generate background music and tabla beats to produce Pahari music cassettes in which the lyrics are sung in non-Pahari accents and intonation. These songs were interspersed with instrumental music a la film music. So when most people talk about Pahari music, they mostly refer to this hybrid khichri far different from the authentic version.

Social ties

Because life in the upper hills was very hard before the horticultural revolution, a unique cooperative societal structure evolved there. For example composted cow dung would be transported to the fields cooperatively by the villagers.

During weddings, to reduce the burden on families, guests would bring flour, rice, and ghee for the food. Even for cremating the dead, one member from each family in the village would help in cutting the wood in the forest and carry it to the cremation ground.

A positive outcome of this societal pattern is that it has developed a sense of caring for each other. While this societal structure is no longer relevant, and may disappear, hopefully, the sense of caring will survive. The state government should have taken active steps to document this heritage. As also Himachal Pradesh University, which, too, should have instituted academic programmes, focused on this diversity that would make original contributions to anthropological literature.

Unfortunately, while the university does offer courses on English language in the time of Chaucer or on Hindustani classical music, it does not have programmes that address Pahari languages and music. Perhaps, the state government and the premier state university are both suffering from the langoor-heating-hands syndrome.