|
The spring festival we celebrate ritualistically today expressed through folk dances and songs has deep roots in the fertility cult in the ancient agrarian society, discovers Ranjita Biswas
Spring is in the air, literally, and you can feel it in the quickening breeze, in the new shoots peeping from winter-dry branches and in the frenzied nest-building of the birds. T S Eliot may have penned: “April is the cruellest month…” for rudely waking up the “dull roots’ but it is a time of rejuvenation for the earth as well as people, lending them, literally, a spring in their walk.
Celebrating the advent of spring is prevalent among all communities across the world in various forms of festivals or rituals. Whether it is Bihu in Assam, Baisakhi in Punjab or May-Queen celebrations in the West, their central focus is the awakening of the earth from the slumber and fruitlessness of the winter.
This is also the beginning of the season for the farmer community to plough the land and prepare for planting the crops. The folk dances and songs that accompany celebration of spring-coming are reminiscent of times immemorial when for the primarily agrarian society it was the most important time of the year. A good crop meant, as it still does, escape from hunger and surviving as a community against hostile elements of nature and predatory animals. Living in close proximity with nature, for the primitive man, the earth was like a woman, a mother - Vasundhara- giving birth to crops for his sustenance.
Songs and mudras of dances in folk tradition accompanying the spring festival thus reflect sexual overtones, symbolising the desire for union between man and woman, as if to propitiate the earth mother in this season of creation and mating. In short, they are a homage to fertility.
Folk songs and dances of the spring festival, from eastern states like Assam (Bihu), Tripura (Biju), West Bengal (Santhali), Orissa (Sambalpuri), Chattisgarh(Karma) to the west- in Punjab (Giddha and Bhangra), Gujarat (Garba) and even down south - Kerala (Kaikottakali) show-case that though geographically apart, they were all strung together with the commonality of the same concerns- invoking and praying for the fertility of the earth so that she bears fruits abundantly.
The preoccupation with fertility and its symbolic presentation in rituals as integral to folk traditions have amply been illustrated by the anthropologists and folklorists. Renowned anthropologist R. Briffault had observed: “...the beliefs that sexual act assists the promotion of abundant harvest of the earth’s fruits and is indeed indispensable to secure it, is universal in the lower of culture.” In India, the ritual of worshipping Mother Nature, the Great Mother, by pre-Aryan agricultural communities was later taken into the fold by the Hindus to osmosise into an inspiration behind the Shakti cult .
These beliefs slowly became symbolically presented in the folksongs and dances. One of the best examples of this is in the vigorous and beautiful Bihu dance performed during Rongali Bihu (also known as Bohag Bihu), the biggest festival of Assam held at the advent of ‘Bohag’ (Baisakh) or spring, at the end of chaitra month known as Chaitra Samkranti in other regions too. To make the earth ‘pregnant’ with crops was the main theme of these ritualistic dances and symbolised by the piriti (love) of man and woman. Thus the woman sings, “How do I swing my body and mind/ How do I swing my slim waist/ O’ my dear lover/ how do we dance “bihu” / so that young shoots sprout again” and the man counters, “ Bohag breeze is blowing/ Bohag breeze is blowing/ Hasn’t Bihu touched your body yet?” a verbal flirtation that acts as a foreplay, so to say. Then again the man sings, “The tingling sunrays with the smile in your face/ intoxicate me, make me restless” and promises, “The way the rice field sways in the breeze/ You’ll sway in my embrace in the same way.”
Pundits also point out in the traditional two-piece mekhela-chadar Assamese women wear when they dance, red colour in the motifs- as the symbol of menstruation or fertility, takes precedence. The planting of the rice saplings is done only by women in Assam because she is the one who can bear a child, like mother earth who bears the crops. But they never plough as the plough is symbolic of the male phallic organ.
Scholar Sivanath Barman of Assam in his book , Lokokrishtir Utsha (root of folk culture) points out that all the tribes of the North East celebrate the Spring festival in their own way but free mixing between male and female, choosing the life partner, and dancing together are some of the common themes. The Bodos (tribe) call their festival Baisakhu and the Rabhas’ “Baikhu”, both of which etymologically translate into Vasundhara. In these festivals too young men and women sing and dance with erotic overtones.
The essence of the Bihu songs from the east find an echo far in the west, in Punjab’s Giddah, the words being full of sexual innuendo : “Take my charkha to the field where you work/ Do not get tired, my love/ Do plough the whole night” and the woman invites, “When it’s time to sow seeds/ Do it with your own hands/ Do not take help of others/ Fruit of hard work is always sweet.”
In Orissa too, the Sambalpuri dance song during Spring festival refers to Mother Earth dancing and at the same time giving shelter and solace to her children, “The Queen Earth is dancing../.. with the whistling wind/ Heavenly bliss we in her lap/ We live and lie in her lap/ She cares for us from life to death.”
In the primitive society untouched by the mores of later-day Sanskritisation, free mixing in the season of mating as spring symbolized even for the animal world, was not castigated, Barman writes. In fact, some communities encouraged it in the belief that it could augment fertility of the earth. A girl’s first experience of love-making or losing her virginity can be assessed from this symbolic Santhali song, “I had a dream in the night/ that I went to Dulduli stream/ to collect water. / A storm set in/ The bunch of palm leaves fell from my head/ The new earthen pot/ Also fell to the ground/ And broke to pieces and mingled in the earth.”
And listen to this Karama song from Chattisgarh where the woman sings invitingly, “The time for sowing is approaching/ The paddy in the granary are for eating/ The seeds are hidden in an inside room (that only I know of)”.
These folk performances are now a part of the ethnic cultural revue and often witnessed only as a stage performance for the urban folk. So quite likely that often the inner meanings escape them, not the least because urbanites have little scope to smell the earth or observe the change of season in its many hues from close proximity. Be that as it may, ‘looking back’, not as a fashion, but genuinely as a desire to re-discover the roots, can literally open up another world. And perhaps this fertility drama that nature plays every spring can also be symbolic of the fertility of the mind -of imagination, where ideas germinate. |
){kind=link}