LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 12 : 6 June 2012
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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Bhojpuri Folksongs and Culture

Neelam Yadav, M.A., NET, Ph.D. (Linguistics)

Folk Songs and Literature

Through literature, a community speaks its mind and shares its heart freely, fully and beautifully. It is a rich and reliable source to study its life. Across the world, all communities, major or minor, have asserted their nativity in literary form. This paper is a humble effort to analyze the culture of Bhojpuri society through one of its literary forms, i.e. ‘Folk-Song’. India portrays ‘unity in diversity’ in its great panorama of myriad cultures. Living in one country, Indians are blessed with diverse cultures; and Bhojpuri culture is one of them and it also contributes to the diversity of the country.

Folk songs reveal especially the individual views and customs of a particular society. Alan Lomax argues in his The Good and the Beautiful in Folk Song that “Since a folk song is transmitted orally by all or most members of a culture, generation after generation, it represents an extremely high consensus about patterns of meaning and behavior of cultural rather than individual significance.” Further, in his Folk Song Style and Culture, he says, “Expressive behavior may be one of the most sensitive and reliable indicators of culture patterns and social structure. Apparently as people live, they do sing.” Thus, folk songs represent the culture and customs of a society significantly. In the present paper, it is illustrated how Bhojpuri folk songs are tinged with varied facets of Bhojpuri culture and customs, even from gender point of view.

Bhojpuri Language and Literature

Bhojpuri serves as a regional language, spoken in sections of north-central and eastern India. It is spoken in the in neighboring region of the southern plains of Nepal. Bhojpuri as a language is also spoken in Guyana, Suriname, Fiji, Trinidad and Tobago and Mauritius. As for the decision of the government of India, during the enumeration of census, they had disagreed and estimated Bhojpuri to be a dialect of Hindi. However, presently, the government of India has contrived to grant Bhojpuri a `statutory` status as a national scheduled language. Bhojpuri is being split when sharing vocabulary with Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu and other Indo-Aryan languages of northern India.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Neelam Yadav, M.A., NET, Ph.D. (Linguistics)
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Lovely Professional University
Jalandhar Delhi G.T. Road (NH-1)
Phagwara 144402
Punjab
India
neelam_ydv@rediffmail.com
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