Noted playwright Mohan Upreti was deeply concerned about Rajula-Malusahi, a medieval folk ballad, from the Kumaon region of Uttarakhand, where he was born and raised. The revivalist of Central Himalayan folk art, writes in his book Malushahi: The Ballad of Kumaon (1980): “The ballad seems to be breathing its last. The old generation of singers is vanishing fast and the new one is not prepared to take the pains to learn it.”
The story is of Rajula, a girl from the Shauka community — semi-nomadic pastoralists who speak a combination of Tibetan and Kumaoni and live in Johar valley — who falls in love with Malushahi, a native prince from the neighboring Katyuri dynasty.
Upreti would have never imagined the attention the ballad would get 40 years after he wrote about the piece he felt was on its last leg. The long poem, often performed at weddings and fairs, usually along a hurka, an hourglass drum, recently made an appearance on Coke Studio Bharat’s new season. In a presentation titled Sonchadi, it was sung by 50-year-old Kamala Devi, a folk singer from Uttarakhand’s Bageshwar, alongside playback singer Neha Kakkar and composer and singer Digvijay Singh Pariyar, both from Uttarakhand.
“I have been singing this piece since I was a young girl, I would hum it in the fields. I never imagined that city people would like it so much and it would get a platform as big as this,” says Kamala from her home in Lakhni village in Bageshwar, which lies on the confluence of rivers Saryu and Gomti and has been thronged by pilgrims for Bagnath, the 15th century Shiva temple and traders for being a major trade spot between Tibet and Kumaon, which closed after the Indo-China war of 1962.
Kamala grew up listening to her father sing Jagars, songs to invoke the gods, Hurkiya Baul, sung when paddy and maize are being sown, and the famous Rajula Malushahi. A daily-wage farmer with nine children, her father would sing while raking the soil and planting the crops. Kamala would listen and hum along as she helped him or while shepherding her herd of cattle.
Local singers like Kabootri Devi, too, would sing these folk songs on All India Radio, Almora, at the time. “But I wasn’t listening to the radio back then. We are people of the land. This music was not something that was learned and imbibed to be a professional. It was a way of life. I heard Kabootri Devi through YouTube much later,” says Kamala, who was married at 14, to a cook who worked in Haldwani. For many years Kamala looked after her four children and was burdened with domestic life. Music was relegated to the background.
A few years later, in the late 90s, she and her husband opened a small roadside food stall in Bhawali where a folk singer Shiromani Pant heard her sing Jhora Chancheri, another folk form from Uttarakhand, and asked her to sing in Nainital for about 200 people Ka
“That was my first stage. Everyone applauded and it felt good,” says Kamala, who then began to perform at village shows in Uttarakhand before becoming an A Grade artiste almost a decade ago. She’d manage four-five shows a month including some by the state culture department. Each gave her about Rs 2,000 earlier which has now increased to Rs 5,000. Her children helped her create a YouTube channel in 2021 and called it ‘Kamala Devi – Lok Gayika’, resulting in online attention and an invite to Uttarakhand Mahotsav in Lucknow in 2022.
Pariyar stumbled upon Kamala through her channel in December last year and asked her to come and record with him in a studio in Haldwani. After two sessions, almost two months later, she was called to Mumbai to shoot Sonchadi – a song that Kamala opens in her powerful nasal voice on a set that’s converted into a Kumaoni village, with terrace farming, women sowing crops, and birds chirping just. as a river flows by. Dressed in a red sari, a traditional Pahadi pichoda covering her head and adorning the traditional pahadi nathuli (nose ring), she lets her version of Rajula-Malusahi sore as Kakkar and Pariyar follow, turning the piece into a folk-rock mishmash.
Kamala believes that the older songs need to be saved and the spotlight on Kumaoni folk through Sonchadi, which has over 20 million views, will help people understand the culture of the remote regions.
“Ye hamare baap-dada ki dharohar hai (This is the heritage of our ancestors). And it’s languishing and fading away. It’s important to cherish and nurture it,” says Kamala, who recently received a grant from Patna to teach Kumaoni folk to students at home. She is also passing the art form to her granddaughter. “Many children, including my own, aren’t interested in this. It’s not a part of their lives like this music was for us. But there are few who are learning, which is better than absolutely nothing,” she says.