Custodian of Folk Songs

For close to 50 years, Prof. Nahar Singh, who retired from Panjab University’s Punjabi Department in 2012, quietly carried out the monumental work of preserving the cultural soul of a Panjab in transition through its folk songs. Over the years, he and his students have journeyed from village to village in the Malwa region, listening to the voices of rural men and women, and carefully recording their songs, stories, and traditions. Studying at Chandigarh’s DAV College in 1975, Nahar Singh had little interest in folk songs. Coming from the radical left Punjab Students Union, growing up in those heady times, he was more inclined towards literature—criticism and theory. His teacher Kesar Singh wanted him to go and work among ‘people’, real people who dwelled away from the world of books. He wanted him to explore the songs they sang. Still not much interested in fieldwork, he decided to undertake a formal study of Malwa’s folk forms. The field trip uncorked his mind, demolished preconceived notions. In a Panjab rapidly changing under the blitzkrieg of the Green Revolution, the penetration of capital was redefining social relations. The village which had a certain tribal instinct, a value system, an interdependence, was exploding at an unprecedented pace. 'As you move away from the traditional cultural pattern of the traditional life of a traditional village, you call it development, but it haunts us,' he says. Nahar realized he was in the midst of studying and documenting this cultural transformation of Panjab through its songs. He was hearing the rhythm ebb, perhaps listening to some songs one last time before they were to be lost in modernity. People sang songs of love, separation, toil, happiness, sadness, playfulness, harvest, rivers, wars, weddings, funerals. This is when he began to explore the deeper meanings in folk songs, churning out volume after volume of folk songs and analyzing these songs to give a cultural anthropological view of the Panjab of those times. That is what makes his contribution to Panjabi folklore immeasurable and invaluable (earlier coverage).