Folk Forms, Field Songs and the Music of Ordinary Work

Much of Punjabi folk music began as something people sang while doing something else entirely.

Before it was entertainment, Punjabi song was a technology for getting through repetitive labour and marking the passage of a life. There are songs for grinding grain, for spinning, for the walk to the fields and the walk back. There are songs sung by women at weddings that tease the visiting family with a precision that would be unforgivable in ordinary speech, and songs of separation sung about a person who has gone away, which acquired a second and sharper meaning once migration became common. The verse forms are short, repeatable and built to be improvised on.

Two features make this repertoire unusually durable. First, much of it is call and response, so a group of people who half know a song can still perform it, because the leader carries the new material and everyone else carries the refrain. Second, the couplet form is compact enough to be adapted on the spot, which is why the same tune can carry a lament, a joke about a neighbour or a comment on this year's rain. It is a living format rather than a fixed repertoire.

Alongside the secular folk tradition sits a devotional one. Sikh practice includes a tradition of sung sacred verse performed with instruments and voice, and it is central to that community's religious life. Muslim and Hindu communities of the region each have their own devotional musical traditions as well. These are religious practices belonging to particular communities, and we describe them only in outline here, which is the appropriate level of detail for a magazine that is not speaking on any tradition's behalf.