Bana (lute instrument)

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Bana , also kikri, vana , is a three-stringed, bow- struck bowl lute that is played by male musicians of the Pardhan caste in the Mandla area in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh to accompany epic songs. The Pardhans make music for their clients, the Gonds , with whom they have a social and mythical relationship. Outside the folk music tradition in this rural area, the fiddle is practically unknown. For the Pardhans it was formerly the residence of their main god Bara Pen and had a magical protective function.

The epic song tradition of the Pardhans is a very old dramatic form, the content of which comes from the regional Gondawani tradition or from the Indian national epic Mahabharata . The bana provides a musical accentuation of the half-sung, half-spoken story and makes the mythical characters and events imaginable for the audience. Outside of Mandla the fiddle is called the Pardhans kingri .

Origin and Distribution

A three-string string lute called “pena or bana”, which, according to its location in Amber in Rajasthan, could be a simple execution of a ravanahattha . In the Timple Museum of the Palacio Spínola on Lanzarote .

In ancient Indian times, vina was a comprehensive term for string instruments. They were played in honor of the gods according to the Vedic scriptures. The instruments mentioned as vina or vipanci in the most important early work on music, the Natyashastra , written around the turn of the ages , were very likely bow harps that had developed from the older musical arcs . In this form they are depicted around this time on stone reliefs at Buddhist cult sites and from the middle of the 1st millennium as staff zither on the walls of Hindu temples in the hands of Gandharvas and Kinnaras , mythical figures accompanying the gods. The stick zithers replaced the bow harps, which were used outside India in the form of the Burmese saung gauk and - less known - at least until recently in eastern Afghanistan as waji . The only bow harp left in India is the bin-baja played by the Pardhans , which is also incorrectly called Gogia bana ("Gogia fiddle"). After the 9th century, the images of stick zithers, which consisted of a string and a support rod with an attached resonator from a calabash half-shell, became rarer. Today only the tuila played by Odisha in folk music in a rural region reminds of these simplest plucked instruments .

Old epithets of the vinas refer to the relationship with gods. In the 12th century the term kinnari vina for a plucked instrument of unknown design appears for the first time in the Kathasaritsagara in a story about a man-eating demon ( yakshini ). According to Arabic sources, an instrument called kinnara seems to have existed much earlier. Ibn Chordadhbeh (820–912) reports on the Indian string instrument kankala , one string of which was stretched over a calabash . It was either a single-stringed zither ( ekatantri vina ) or a single-stringed lute instrument ( ektara ). The Persian-speaking poet Amir Chosrau (1253–1325) called this instrument, which was very popular at the time, kingri. For Abu 'l-Fazl (1551-1602), the court chronicler of the Mughal ruler Akbar I , the kingara was a two-stringed zither with two calabashes and different from the kinnara with three calabashes. In sum, kingri and kinnara in the Middle Ages denoted a number of stringed instruments that were plucked or bowed.

The Indian musicologist BC Deva claims to have recognized string instruments on some temple reliefs from the 10th century . However, such representations cannot be clearly identified. The ravanahattha is the oldest Indian string instrument , the name of which has been handed down since the 7th century, regardless of the type of instrument at that time, and is derived from the mythical demon king Ravana . Today a long-necked spit lute with two melody and several sympathetic strings is called this in Rajasthan and Gujarat . In the 11th and 12th centuries, a saranga vina was a popular stringed instrument that Jains used to accompany their religious chants. The name of the saranga vina could have been bowed, because the sarangi with a box-shaped body is the most widespread string instrument in northern India today. Sarangi is also a popular name for differently constructed Indian fiddles such as the ravanahattha . The term sarangi appears frequently in the Middle Ages in epic stories written in the vernacular Prakrit , which speaks for a continuous tradition of sarangi in popular and religious music. Especially in the religious singing tradition of the Sikhs , string instruments play an important role from the 16th century until today (in connection with the snare drum dhadd ). Since then, the sarangi has been a string lute that is also known in street music and adopted into classical music in the 20th century .

The three-string sarinda with a sweeping anchor-shaped body is related to similar stringed sounds, such as the ghichak in the Persian-Central Asian Islamic region. The mayuri vina , whose bulbous body ends in a peacock's head, can be derived from the medieval vinas in the form of a lute or rod zither. The slimmer string lute dilruba , which is related to it, may have originated in the Mughal period and the esraj in the 19th century.

The sarinda embodies a type of Indian stringed instrument that occurs in a special long rectangular shape in the East Indian Adivasi group of the Santal as dhodro banam . In the same region there are also the spiked fiddles banam, which are not related to the sarindas . The latter are called pena in northeast India , koka in Maharashtra and pulluvan vina in Kerala in southern India .

Design

The mentioned spiked fiddles have a hemispherical body made of a coconut shell or a calabash covered with an animal skin and a thin straight string carrier over which a string runs. Such to the ektaras belonging string instrument is among the Gonds as kindri kingri or kingari known. A distinction is made between the three-string bana with a rectangular body, which can also be called kingri or kikri . In the Bastar district the same fiddle is called kikir . Two variants of the bana are named after their size : The smaller kaneha , which is considered female, is the most popular . There is also the somewhat larger, “male” sagara .

The bana consists of a resonance box ( khol ), which is rectangular in plan view, with the approximate dimensions of 21 × 15 centimeters and which was cut out of a block of wood. The wood used comes from the Gutel tree ( Trewia nudiflora , hindi khamar ) or teak tree ( Tectonia grandis , hindi sagon ). At the bottom, the body tapers like a truncated pyramid, so that the base measures only 15 × 4 centimeters. The resulting shallow tub is 6 inches high. The length of the underside is reinforced in the middle by a wide bead. As a ceiling, the body, after it has been painted white on the inside, is covered with a transparent membrane made from a cattle or goat stomach sack, which is called poor in Gondi . The membrane is glued to the edge with a resin that the Pardhan keep as a powder, mix with water and apply hot. The bottom of the instrument lying on the ceiling reminds the Pardhan of the turtle shell with which, according to legend, the first leader of the Gond crossed a river. A 34 centimeter long string support ( siwa ) made of bamboo ( bhans ) with a diameter of 3 centimeters protrudes clearly beyond the opposite side of the body.

At the end of the neck, three wooden pegs ( birra ) on the side take up the strings, which run over a flat bridge ( ghori , "mare" because the strings ride on it), which is loosely in the upper area on the membrane, to the bamboo stick protruding below. At the lower end, the bamboo stick turns into a wider piece of wood ( khandi ). At the end of the game, the musician pushes the bridge onto the edge of the body in order to relieve the membrane. In order for the strings, which are tightly wound on the sides of the vertebrae, to reach their position above the neck, they have to cross each other on a small wooden pin ( bhodri , "navel") that stands upwards on the first vertebra. In order to fix the vertebrae in their position, they are wrapped with fabric. The length of the strings is limited by a cotton cord ( kardhan , "belt") wound around the neck directly on the bhodri . An inserted wooden stick stabilizes the bamboo tube in the area of ​​the vertebrae. The strings ( chundi , "hair") are made of non-twisted horse hair. The pegs are not perforated to accommodate the string. Instead, cotton cords are braided into the hair strands at the ends. This allows them to be wound onto the vertebrae without slipping. The strings are differentiated according to their position when playing : upar ("above", actually the strongest and lowest sounding string), manjha ("middle") and niche ("below"). Another division according to strength is: tinme (“weak”) with 30–37 horse hair, manjha with 38–40 hair and dhodha (“loud”) with 45–52 hair.

The bows ( hathora , "somewhat hand-held") is about 44 centimeters long in slightly concavely curved shape from Woodfordia floribunda (a loosestrife greenhouse , surteli ) carved or consists of a deer antler ( shamar ). The bow stick is covered with 30–60 horse hair ( chundi ). At the upper end, the hair is held by a cotton cord wrapped around the rod, at the end of the handle it is wrapped in a cotton fabric that is wrapped around several times. The cover hangs loosely on the non-elastic bow rod. The player draws the bow by grasping the cover and pulling it inwards. Several bells ( ghungru ), which create a rhythmic sound, are attached to the outside of the bow stick. The hair is rubbed with resin ( lobhan ).

Style of play

The player presses the bana with the thickened lower end against his left shoulder (hence the name khandi , "shoulder" for this component) and holds it with the left hand on the neck at an angle downwards in front of the upper body. This corresponds roughly to the playing position of the violin in southern India and is otherwise only common with a few Indian fiddles, such as the northeast Indian pena . In contrast, the ravanahattha is played the other way around with the neck pointing upwards. The bana player tilts his head slightly in the direction of his instrument, but without fixing it with his chin. The first three fingers of the left hand press the strings down on the fingerboard, the little finger is used for the fifth note above the root note of the highest string and only touches the string. Since the strings are close together and the bridge is not curved, the bow inevitably strikes two or three strings at the same time. The strings are tuned every fourth. As with the violin, the fast upstroke sounds stronger than the downstroke. The bells are stimulated with abrupt rhythmic changes of direction.

With the usual alternation of fourths and octaves , which are played over two and three strings, it is difficult to hear a tonal order. The empty middle string represents a fixed point that forms a fundamental tone for the singing voice, above which it moves within an octave. With one tone, the bana roughly follows the singing voice, while the second tone is a fourth below. Apart from the parallel fourths, there is no harmonic structure in the tone sequence. The bana also does not provide for the drone tone commonly used in Indian music , such as that produced by the long-necked tanpura . Melody and rhythm have nothing to do with the ragas and talas on which classical Indian music is based . Regardless of which strings are bowed, the fingers always lie across all three strings in the positions major second , third and fourth to the open string.

An epic chant usually begins with an instrumental piece ( bana par ) of short duration (about a minute), followed by further instrumental units after a verbal contribution. During an examined chant, the actual narrative singing style ( artha batana , also tika or samjana ) with bana accompaniment ( ganaka par ) began after about 15 minutes. The content is partly sung, partly spoken. Each new text unit is preceded by an instrumental attunement to the root note lasting 20 to 30 seconds. The bana is always played solo by the singer ( banadhari ); without an accompanying musician, he uses an individual scope within the musical limits. The instrumental interludes can have several functions: They announce the appearance of a new mythological figure, they attempt a musical translation of the plot (the hero rides through the forest or the woman complains about the departure of her husband) or certain feelings or activities are to be displayed . This includes expressing happiness, contentment, sadness, fighting scenes or the implied blowing of a snail's horn .

Special stylistic features are trills , grinders and double strikes . The ornamentation of the notes with vibrato is dispensed with, instead there is the method known in the guitar as hammer-on , where a finger of the gripping hand is repeatedly placed briefly on the string. The arching ensures the rhythmic design. The musician indicates the end of the story by returning to the keynote.

Socio-cultural environment

The upper reaches of the Narmada , which is venerated as a sacred river in India , runs through the Mandla district in a wide valley . The Mogul rulers called the remote area, which was divided into several small kingdoms in the Middle Ages, as Gondwana . In this "home of the Gonds", which was largely independent until the 18th century, the own narrative tradition ( Gondawani stories ) and stories from the Mahabharata ( Pandawani stories) were passed on orally.

A story passed down by the Pardhans from the Mahabharata is about the invention of the bana . The hero Bhima, who is considered the youngest of the five Pandava brothers by the Pardhans, used a trick to kill a rakshasa (demon). His daughter Manko was crying when her parrot Toti came by and asked for food. She explained to the bird that she was poor and that she could not give him anything. She gave the parrot a piece of firewood and instructed him to make a fiddle out of it. He was supposed to play for the Gonds and then he would receive cattle, clothes and grain from them.

The Pardhans, whose name is derived from Sanskrit pradhan , “minister”, “prime minister”, represent a small ethnic group who serve the Gonds as musicians and otherwise, like the Gonds, mainly grow wheat. They live scattered in Madhya Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh. Today both ethnic groups are largely Hindu in their beliefs and rituals . The anthropologist Verrier Elwin collected folk tales of the Gonds, which also speak of their mythical origins. Accordingly, there was an ancestor who had a special relationship with the gods and was able to pass on the gods' wishes through his music. With this ability, he became the priest of the chief god of the Gond, Bara Deo, and a chronicler of their history. The new role he was released from the Gond to perform gave him an identity as Pardhan. Bara Deo (or Bara Pen), the supreme god of the ancient Gond religion surrounded by thousands of other gods, resided in the bana and protected the Pardhan on its journey.

Another origin myth is about a man and his wife who fathered a child in a rice field. After the boy was born in the same rice field, his six brothers said: We were born in the house and we have received the name of the house. This boy was born outside, so he should get an outside name. They named him "Pardhan". Here the word is made up of para , "other" and dhan , "rice": " someone who eats other people's rice". The brothers decided to only recognize the boy as a half-brother. He shouldn't be allowed to eat with them or come into the house. After the birth, the father buried the placenta in the field and lit a fire over it. The brothers made the first bana from a half-burned piece of wood that was left over from the fire, and made the first arch from a creeper. One of the brothers took the boy on his shoulders, put a bow and instrument in his hands, and taught him to play. This explains why Gonds and Pardhans have the same ancestors.

The age of this cultural tradition is unknown. The Gond kingdoms had no written record. The Gonds are mentioned for the first time in two stone inscriptions from the Gupta Empire (beginning of the 4th to the middle of the 6th century). An inscription dated around the year 1000 contains a list of princes of the Gonds dating back to the Gupta period. Four centuries then passed before the Gonds reappeared in the Akbar-nama court chronicle by Abu 'l-Fazl , the historian at Akbar's court at the end of the 16th century.

The Akbar-nama says nothing about the relationship between Pardhans and Gonds in the Mughal period . It was not until the 19th century that British authors described the Gonds as farmers and the Pardhans as dependent on them with a generally very low social position. The Pardhans were partially involved in criminal activities. In contrast, Shamrao Hivale (1946) certified the Pardhans in Mandla a comparatively respected social position as priest-musicians of the Gonds. A Pardhan musician describes his client as thakur (“master”) or jajman (“patron”), he himself is neutrally addressed by the Gonds as banadhari (“ bana bearer”) or with the nickname dasondi . The recognition of the Pardhans in Mandla is clear from the donations they received from the thakurs . In the first place there was suk dan , a gift in the form of money and wheat, which the Pardhan received in a ceremony at the end of a performance. On special occasions, the Pardhans received other gifts ( dan ), such as household items, gold and silver or cattle. When a thakur died, his pardhan could inherit a large part of the legacy as a muwar dan .

In contrast to Shamrao Hivale, who described the Pardhans in the first half of the 20th century as being dependent on the Gonds and threatened by hunger, the Pardhans today earn their main income from agriculture, so that they no longer depend on financial support from their patrons are. Marriages between Pardhans and Gonds are still ruled out, while other social boundaries have been relaxed. In the 1980s, some bana players said they worked for several hundred Gond clients ( jajman ); so many that they could only visit each one every three years. The main season for the epic chants of the Pardhans is from February to May. The musicians go on tour ( mangteri ) and visit the Gonds in their homes. It is the time after the wheat harvest. The grain has been dried, processed and stored so that the farmers now have a quiet time to listen to the old stories. According to an earlier superstition, the Pardhans were not allowed to perform for the rest of the year until after the next harvest, because otherwise evil spirits ( bhutas ) would be attracted by the music and could destroy the harvest.

In addition to the epic songs, the Pardhans know a number of other instrumental and vocal styles that belong to certain social occasions: songs for weddings ( dadarya ), songs for the spring festival Holi ( phaag ) and other Hindu festivals . These styles are also cultivated by other castes and adivasi groups, only the epic solo singing accompanied by a bana or a bow harp ( bin-baja ) is characteristic of the Pardhans. The other musical instruments of the Pardhans include the barrel drum dholak and the double reed instrument sahinai (related to the shehnai ).

The bana has a similar symbolic meaning as that for the Gonds dhak , an hourglass , embodying a god in possession rituals in Mina-caste in southern Rajasthan. The external difference is that the rituals of the Mina are staged with great effort with the involvement of the entire village community, while the banadhara, at the invitation of a family, can captivate a small group of listeners with its lecture in a quiet nighttime atmosphere and make them laugh.

literature

  • Geneviève Dournon: Bana . In: Stanley Sadie (Ed.): The New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments. Volume 1. Macmillan Press, London 1984, p. 119
  • Bigamudre Chaitanya Deva: Musical Instruments . National Book Trust, New Delhi 1977, pp. 101-105
  • Joep Bor: The Voice of the Sarangi. An illustrated history of bowing in India. In: National Center for the Performing Arts, Quarterly Journal , Vol. 15 & 16, Nos. 3, 4 & 1, September – December 1986, March 1987
  • Shamrao Hivale: The Pardhans of the Upper Narmada Valley . Oxford University Press, Oxford 1946
  • Roderic Knight: The bana of Bachargaon and beyond . In: Oberlin Alumni Magazine, Volume 79, No. 3, Summer 1983, pp. 30-39
  • Roderic Knight: The "Bana". Epic Fiddle of Central India . In: Asian Music , Volume 32, No. 1 (Tribal Music of India) Fall 2000 - Winter 2001, pp 101-140
  • Monika Zin : The ancient Indian vīṇās. In: Ellen Hickmann, Ricardo Eichmann (Hrsg.): Studies on music archeology IV. Music archaeological source groups: soil documents, oral tradition, record. Lectures of the 3rd symposium of the International Study Group Music Archeology in the Michaelstein Monastery, 9. – 16. June 2002, pp. 321-362

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Roderic Knight: The Harp in India Today. In: Ethnomusicology , Vol. 29, No. 1, Winter 1985, pp. 9-28, here pp. 16f
  2. ↑ Monika Zin, p. 335
  3. ↑ Monika Zin, p. 338
  4. ↑ Joep Bor, pp. 51f
  5. ↑ Bigamudre Chaitanya Deva, pp. 101, 103
  6. ↑ Joep Bor, pp. 51, 60
  7. ↑ Bengt Fosshag : The Sārindā and their relatives. Forms and distribution of a family of string instruments in the countries of Islam and neighboring regions. (PDF; 6.2 MB) Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Sciences, Frankfurt / Main 1997, pp. 281–306, here p. 282
  8. ↑ Carol M. Babiracki: Banam . In: Stanley Sadie (Ed.): The New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments. Vol. 1. Macmillan Press, London 1984, pp. 119f
  9. ↑ Shashidhar Ramchandra Murkute: Socio-Cultural Study of Scheduled Tribes. (Castes and Tribes of India 2) Ashok Kumar Mittal, New Delhi 1990, p. 36
  10. ↑ Geneviève Dournon: Kikir . In: Stanley Sadie (Ed.): The New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments. Vol. 2. Macmillan Press, London 1984, p. 428
  11. ↑ Roderic Knight: Epic Fiddle of Central India , pp. 117-121
  12. ^ Roderic Knight: Epic Fiddle of Central India , pp. 122-124
  13. ^ Roderic Knight: Epic Fiddle of Central India, pp. 126-129
  14. ↑ Bigamudre Chaitanya Deva, p. 103
  15. ↑ Verrier Elwin , Shamrao Hivale: Songs of the Forest. The Folk Poetry of the Gonds. Allen & Unwin, London 1935
  16. ↑ Shamrao Hivale, 1946, p. 105
  17. ↑ Shashidhar Ramchandra Murkute: Socio-Cultural Study of Scheduled Tribes . (Castes and Tribes of India 2) Ashok Kumar Mittal, New Delhi 1990, p. 25
  18. ↑ Per Juliusson: The Gonds and their Religion. A study of the integrative function of religion in a present, preliterary, and preindustrial culture in Madhya Pradesh, India.  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (Dissertation) Stockholm University 1974, p. 133@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / su.diva-portal.org  
  19. ^ Roderic Knight: Epic Fiddle of Central India , pp. 102-104
  20. ^ Roderic Knight: Epic Fiddle of Central India, pp. 108f
  21. ^ Roderic Knight: Epic Fiddle of Central India, p. 137