Villu Pattu

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Musicians of the Shanar (Channaar), a rural ethnic group in Tamil Nadu who used to be toddy collectors, perform Villu Pattu . Illustration from the 19th century

Villu Pattu , also Villu Paatu, Villuppattu , is a genre of folk songs in South Indian music that is performed by members of the middle castes at temple festivals in some areas of Tamil Nadu and Kerala . The term is made up of vil or villu , Tamil வில்லு Telugu విల్లు "bow" and pāṭṭu , "song". The characteristic accompanying instrument of the old storytelling tradition is a two to four meter long musical bow , which is called villadi vadyam . To amplify the sound, the bow is placed over a clay pot a little outside the center.

Origin and distribution of the musical bow

The name viladi vadyam is made up of vil ("bow"), adi ("to strike") and vadyam ("musical instrument"). This describes the functionality of a musical bow, one string of which is struck rhythmically with a stick. Single-string musical bows were the oldest Indian stringed instruments, collectively referred to as vina in the Vedas . From this developed multi-string bow harps , as they are documented in India up to the 7th century AD, and staff zithers or musical sticks with one or more strings stretched over a straight string carrier. From the latter came today's group of Indian lute instruments called vina or sitar .

The oldest Indian string instrument is the ravanahattha ( ravanastran ), originally a musical bow or stick made of bamboo, the horsehair string of which was passed over two bridges. Today's spike violin, named after the mythical King Ravana , with a fur-covered half coconut shell as a resonator is said to be the forerunner of the Indian rabab (forerunner of the sursingar ) and the sarangi , according to Indian tradition .

Simple musical arcs have only survived in a few niches in regional folk music from certain social groups in India. Very similar to the villadi vadyam has the two-meter-long hunting bow dhankul dandi , who at the Adivasi in a remote mountainous region in the south of the state of Chhattisgarh ( Bastar district ) and in western Orissa belongs to accompany the epic singing tradition. It is also placed over a clay pot on the floor.

Buang is a single-string stab zither used exclusively rhythmically in the Santal in Odisha . The string support made from a bamboo tube measures about one meter, with elastic pieces of branch stuck in both ends, which are bent by the tensioned string. In the middle is a sound box made of a paper-covered bamboo basket. Dancers use it to create rasping noises during group dances. The rod zither tuila with calabash resonator, played in Odisha to accompany the song, has a pitch range of one octave. In other Adivasi ethnic groups in central India, the similar but smaller kuranrajan with a carved bird's head ( peacock heads among the Saora in Orissa) fulfills a magical function in religious ceremonies.

One of the rhythm instruments with an elastically attached string is the ektara plucked drum, especially played by the religious singers of the Bauls in Bengal . In Kerala this corresponds to the pulluvan kudam , a membrane-covered clay pot ( kudam , also ghatam ) with a string, which the community of the Pulluvan, together with the single-stringed Fidel pulluvan vina and the hand cymbals elathalam, use in music for the snake cult Nagakalam , which is part of the Nagamandala ritual theater is similar. Sitting on the floor, the musician stretches the string going out from the middle of the skin of the pulluvan kudam by tucking the end under his leg or fixing it with his toes. Plucking is done with a wooden pick in the right hand.

In the north of Kerala called ona Villu a musical bow from the leaf stalk of a Palmyra palm with a string of coir, which at one Kummattikkali mentioned mask dance is played. A group of eight to ten costumed dancers with wooden masks perform in the street in honor of the goddess Devi . Ona villu is also the name of a non-playable "bow", actually a painted wooden board which is ceremonially used at the Onam festival in the month of Chingam (August / September) in Kerala and is finally sacrificed in the Padmanabhaswamy temple of Trivandrum . The most traditional form of Villu Pattu songs is cultivated on the southern tip of India, in the Kanyakumari district .

Shape of the bow and style of play

Nightly Villu Pattu performance in Ponkunnam near Kottayam

The villadi vadyam is a slightly curved wooden stick (made from a branch of the palmyra palm), between the ends of which a thick twisted cord made of hemp or animal skin is stretched. In the middle area, the string carrier lies on a clay pot ( kudam ), which functions as a resonance body and is also struck as an idiophone with a stick. The whole length of the stick, which is thickly wrapped in strips of colored paper or fabric, is attached to bells that sound when the string is struck.

The music group consists of seven or eight members. The cantor ( Pullavar , corresponds to the pundit ) or the cantor usually strikes the strings while sitting on the floor with two wooden sticks ( vicukol ) and presents mythological themes from the local tradition in ballad form or draws from the stories of the Mahabharata , Ramayana or the Puranas . Up to five accompanists also hit the rhythm with sticks on the string, the clay pot and the other instruments. A woman can act as a lead singer even if the other musicians are male. A female assistant is at the side of a lead singer.

Usually a musician begins with a virtuoso solo on the hourglass drum idakka . The musical bow is in the center of attention, but its meaning is musically limited by the rhythmic accompanying instruments. The two-headed hourglass drum udukkai , the wooden rattle daru talam or kattai and the small cymbals talam or jalra can be heard loudly . The rattling, cymbals and the musical bow keep the basic beats of the beat. Where the narrative increases to a special emotional expression, there is a rushing rhythm ( tutukku ): the clay pot and udukkai propel the music forward with a polyrhythmic pattern over the basic beats of rattles and cymbals. In modernized performances, some of the percussion instruments are replaced by the Indian harmonium or the shrutibox to make the text easier to understand .

The text is performed by the singer and repeated by a choir ( itampati ) antiphon . Occasionally, the musicians split up into a main group ( vilampati ) around the singer and a choir across from the udukkai player. The choir does not repeat the entire lines of verse, only the refrain, so that an echo effect is created. In terms of content, the two sides can play a question-and-answer game. With grand gestures and facial contortions, the musicians enter into a relationship with the audience, which is to be entertained for several hours during the lively temple festivals ( kotai , literally “gift”, the believers sacrifice to the gods). The melodies are simple, and the stories told in the local dialect are largely familiar to the audience. By repeating the refrain, the uneducated listener should also be able to understand the text better.

The South Indian folk dance theater Lavani , which is performed by graceful dancers for a whole night in April / May, offers a similar battle of words . Lavani with a main distribution in Maharashtra , the ballads of Gee-Gee in Karnataka , Kavigan from Bengal , Villu Pattu and other popular narrative traditions were able to adapt their themes to the needs of the time. During British rule they served as a means of spreading the anti-colonial uprising.

Most of the Villu Pattu musicians belong to the middle cast , in contrast to most of the other epic singing traditions that are cultivated by the lower classes. The small group of Brahmins in the extreme south does not participate in the singing tradition. Some ensembles move around as traveling musicians. There are also recognized Villu Pattu masters who teach students in this folk tradition. The most famous living Villu Pattu musician is Subbu Arumugam , who was born in 1928 in the Tirunelveli district of Tamil Nadu.

Song genres

Panguni uththiram festival in the temple of the Tamil patron god Aiyanar near Tirunelveli

The folk songs in Kerala are geographically divided into a southern genre Tekkan Pattukal and songs from the north, Vatakan Pattukal . A thematic sorting results in religious songs, heroic epics, workers' songs, songs for certain celebrations such as weddings and those with educational content. According to another classification, there are songs for demons in southern Kerala, songs for regional history and for the worship of the gods. The tradition of Villu Pattu and other songs was cultivated for the welfare of society, at the same time stories about the ancestors and ways of life of the past have been preserved in memory.

The "bow songs" can be divided into two groups: One group contains stories about the birth of the gods ( teyva piravi ) and the holy mountain Kailash from general Indian mythology. The second group focuses on regional historical figures. It's about their death and how they became gods in the other world. The narrative structure is different in each case. The texts are on average 5000 parts long, the shortest text consists of about 500 lines, the longest is a version of the Ramayana with 13,000 lines. The text presentation is more sung ( pattu ) or more spoken ( vacanam ). In general, it is about the fight between evil and good spirits, and the hostile environment, which wants to rule people, but is ultimately fought successfully. At the end of moral stories, the good always wins. For example, the well-known Tamil story Maruthanayakam Pillai is about an evil man who deceitfully tries to seduce his older brother's wife and has to pay for it.

These epic stories, accompanied by a musical arc, are common in the south of Kerala under the name Villu Kotti Pattu or Villatichan Pattu , they have their origins in simple folk poets in the 9th or 15th century. The area extends to Kanyakumari at the southern tip of India. In the area of ​​the former princely state of Travancore, predominantly Tamil is spoken and not the Malayalam which is otherwise common in Kerala .

Pazhanoor Nili

The most popular of the Villu Pattu stories is about the beautiful Pazhanoor Nili, who was murdered by her husband. In the hereafter, Nili turned into a ghost and after her rebirth, in unfulfilled love, pursued her former spouse. The story runs in two acts. In the first, a man from the merchant caste marries young Nili, but leaves her after a short time because of another woman. She wants to visit Nili in her house, but is turned down by her. Angry, the new woman plans to take revenge. She asks her lover to return to Nili and teach her jeweled wedding band , tali ("key"), the sign of mutual bond. So the man returns to his first wife. After a few months, Nili accepts her husband's suggestion to move to another city with him because he pretends to be far away from his lover. During their trip they spend the night in the middle of a forest. On this moonlit night, Nili embraces her husband full of love, but he steals her tali , plunges her down into a deep well and returns to his lover.

In the second part the story is continued after the rebirth of the protagonists. As before, the man is a trader and stops at the well where he murdered his wife on a trip under the full moon. Nili's ghost rises from the well and appears to him as a seductively beautiful woman. He considers her a Mohini , the only female avatar of Vishnu and a divine being who enchants men, which is why he rejects her desire. After much back and forth, the council of elders of the next village takes on the matter, complies with Nili's request and declares both of them married. The couple are housed in an uninhabited house in the village. At night, Nili falls passionately on her husband and sucks his soul out. The next morning he is found dead in the house, Nili has disappeared.

literature

  • Stuart H. Blackburn: Oral Performance: Narrative and Ritual in a Tamil Tradition. In: The Journal of American Folklore , Volume 94, No. 372, April-June 1981, pp. 207-227
  • Stuart H. Blackburn: Singing of Birth and Death: Texts in Performance. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 1988.
  • Amaresh Datta: The Encyclopaedia Of Indian Literature. Volume One (A To Devo). Sahitya Akademi, 2006, ISBN 978-81-260-1803-1 , p. 347.
  • Bigamudre Chaitanya Deva: Musical Instruments. National Book Trust, New Delhi 1977, p. 78, ill. P. 33
  • Maria Lord: India, § VII. Local traditions. 2. South India. (i) Vocal performance. (b) Epic and narrative traditions. In: Stanley Sadie (Ed.): The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians . Volume 12. Macmillan Publishers, London 2001, p. 246
  • Robert Strasser: South India. Land of the Dravidas and a thousand temples. Volume 1: Regional Studies of South India. 2nd Edition. Indoculture, Stuttgart 1988, pp. 105-107
  • Manohar Laxman Varadpande: History of Indian Theater. Loka Ranga. Panorama of Indian Folk Theater. Volume 2. Abhinav Publications, New Delhi 1992, ISBN 978-81-7017-278-9 , p. 125

Web links

Villu Pattu in Kollam

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Shanar , from Shānān . In: Edgar Thurston: Castes and Tribes of Southern India. Volume VI, P-S. Government Press, Madras 1909, p. 370 ( archive.org )
  2. ^ Ramesh Kumar: The Traditional Music of Kashmir. Kashmiri Overseas Association
  3. ↑ Chris A. Gregory: The Oral Epics of the Women of the Dandakaranya Plateau: A Preliminary Mapping. (PDF; 101 kB) In: Journal of Social Sciences , 8 (2), 2004, pp. 93-104
  4. ^ BC Deva, p. 75
  5. ^ A. Sreedhara Menon: Social and cultural history of Kerala. Sterling, New York 1979, p. 147
  6. ↑ Kummattikkali folk art form Kerala. keralatourism.org (with video)
  7. ↑ Devayani Medhekar: A Royal Tradition . In: The Hindu , September 9, 2005
  8. ↑ Stuart H. Blackburn, 1981, p. 209
  9. ↑ a b New Grove , p. 247
  10. ↑ Manohar Laxman Varadpande: History of Indian Theater. Loka Ranga. Panorama of Indian Folk Theater. Volume 2. Abhinav Publications, New Delhi 1992, ISBN 978-81-7017-278-9 , p. 125. Alison Arnold (Ed.): The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. Volume 5: South Asia. The Indian Subcontinent. Garland, New York / London 2000, p. 367 f.
  11. ↑ Vani Doraisamy: Learn VILLU PAATU from master musician . In: The Hindu , November 17, 2005
  12. ↑ Suganthy Krishnamachari: Statement with a bow . In: The Hindu , May 15, 2009
  13. ↑ Amaresh Datta, p. 347
  14. ↑ Stuart H Blackburn, 1981, p. 211
  15. ↑ Amaresh Datta, p. 347
  16. ↑ a b Manohar Laxman Varadpande: History of Indian Theater. Loka Ranga. Panorama of Indian Folk Theater. Volume 2. Abhinav Publications, New Delhi 1992, ISBN 978-81-7017-278-9 , p. 125
  17. ↑ Robert Strasser, p. 105f
  18. ^ Paula S. Richman: Book Review (PDF)