Folk Music, Dance and Saang of Haryana: Forms and Facts

Haryana's performing arts belong to the village courtyard and the open ground rather than to any royal court. There is no classical dance of the state and no court gharana of its own, and that absence is the point: what Haryana has instead is a dense folk tradition organised by occasion. A dance is tied to a season, a ritual or a stage of family life, the songs follow the same calendar, and the one large theatrical form, Saang, grew out of village poets who sang their own compositions all night to a standing crowd. For an examination the safest way to hold the chapter is to learn each form with its occasion, its performers and its instrument.

The folk dances

Saang, the folk theatre

Saang, also written Swang, is the folk opera of Haryana and of the neighbouring Hindi belt. It is played at night on an open platform of cots and planks with no curtain, no scenery and no admission charge, the audience sitting on three or four sides. The troupe is small: the poet who leads it, two or three singers, and players of the dholak, nagara, sarangi, harmonium and khartal. All the roles, including the women's, were traditionally taken by men. The play moves in sung verse broken by spoken prose, and a single story can run through the whole night, with the audience calling for a favourite ragini to be repeated.

The form was shaped in the eighteenth century by Pandit Deepchand of Bahmanwas country, the first great name of Saang, who gave it the structure of a sung play. Its best known master is Pandit Lakhmi Chand, honoured as the Surya Kavi, the sun poet, and often called the Shakespeare of Haryana; his Saangs on Padmavat, Chapsingh and Somvati, Satyavan and Savitri, Heer and Ranjha and the woodcutter who became a king are still performed and sung. Baje Bhagat, Pandit Mange Ram and Dhanpat Singh belong to the same line. The state's highest honour for folk art carries the name of Pandit Lakhmi Chand.

Ragini and the song forms

The Ragini is the characteristic verse-song of Haryana, a stanza form with a fixed refrain that can carry philosophy, devotion, satire or a passage of a story. It lives inside Saang but is also sung on its own at fairs and in competitions between poets. Beside it the household songs mark the year and the life cycle: mangal geet and banna and banni at a wedding, jachcha at the birth of a child, Teej songs on the swings of Sawan, phag at Holi, and bhajan and nirgun in the devotional sittings. The bhat and the mirasi, hereditary singers, carried genealogies and praise songs from door to door, and the ballad of a local hero or of Alha and Udal was the staple of a fair.

Instruments and institutions

The instruments are plain and loud: the dholak and the deep nagara for rhythm, the sarangi and later the harmonium for melody, the been or snake charmer's pipe, the bansuri, and the metal time keepers, khartal, manjira, chimta and ghungroo, which give two dances their names. In classical music the Mewat region on the Haryana and Rajasthan border gave the Mewati gharana, to which Pandit Jasraj, born in a village of Haryana, belonged. The Haryana Kala Parishad and the Haryana Sahitya Akademi support the folk arts today, and the Surajkund crafts mela gives them a national stage every February.