Impact Factor: 6.78 Journal Quality Score (JQS): 85.34
    Email Id: chiefeditor.ijeel@gmail.com
    Impact Factor: 6.78 Journal Quality Score (JQS): 85.34
    Email Id: chiefeditor.ijeel@gmail.com

    Concealment and Declaration in Selected Kangra and Haryanvi Folk Songs

    Journal Article
    Author(s)
    Niketa Malik
    Keywords
    cultural studies, Haryanvi folklore, Kangra folksong, women’s oral tradition, new historicism, gender and lamentation.
    Abstract
    Women’s folk songs in northern India have long carried experiences, desire, grief, and dissent that the dominant literary and religious discourse excludes, transmitted orally rather than written down. This paper compares two such songs: a Kangra Pahari song of concealed desire from Himachal Pradesh, and a Haryanvi alaahna, or lamentation, of grief. While scholars have studied North Indian women’s folksong extensively, few have compared Himalayan and Haryanvi traditions directly, and Haryanvi folksong in particular remains under-studied. This paper addresses that gap through a Cultural Studies reading grounded in New Historicism, Raymond Williams’s Cultural Materialism, and Stuart Hall’s theory of encoding and representation. Using close textual and comparative analysis, it argues that the Kangra song manages desire through metaphor and double encoding, while the Haryanvi lamentation licenses grief through direct address sanctioned by ritual mourning. The comparison shows that folk song is not a single, uniform tradition but a range of regionally distinct strategies through which women’s suppressed emotional lives survive within patriarchal culture.
    References

    Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, 1983.

    Assmann, Jan. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” New German Critique, no. 65, 1995, pp. 125–133.

    Bauman, Richard. Verbal Art as Performance. Waveland Press, 1977.

    Blackburn, Stuart, and A. K. Ramanujan, editors. Another Harmony: New Essays on the Folklore of India. University of California Press, 1986.

    Greenblatt, Stephen. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. University of California Press, 1988.

    Hall, Stuart. “Encoding/Decoding.” Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79, edited by Stuart Hall et al., Hutchinson, 1980, pp. 128–138.

    ---, editor. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. Sage Publications, 1997.

    Jassal, Smita Tewari. Unearthing Gender: Folksongs of North India. Duke University Press, 2012.

    Narayan, Kirin. “Birds on a Branch: Girlfriends and Wedding Songs in Kangra.” Ethos, vol. 14, no. 1, 1986, pp. 47–75.

    ---. “Singing from Separation: Women’s Voices in and about Kangra Folksongs.” Oral Tradition, vol. 12, no. 1, 1997, pp. 23–53.

    ---. Everyday Creativity: Singing Goddesses in the Himalayan Foothills. University of Chicago Press, 2016.

    Raheja, Gloria Goodwin, and Ann Grodzins Gold. Listen to the Heron’s Words: Reimagining Gender and Kinship in North India. University of California Press, 1994.

    Ramanujan, A. K. “Toward a Counter-System: Women’s Tales.” Gender, Genre, and Power in South Asian Expressive Traditions, edited by Arjun Appadurai, Frank J. Korom, and Margaret A. Mills, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991, pp. 33–55.

    Srivastava, I. “Woman as Portrayed in Women’s Folk Songs of North India.” Asian Folklore Studies, vol. 50, no. 2, 1991, pp. 269–310.

    Vansina, Jan. Oral Tradition as History. University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.

    Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution. Chatto and Windus, 1961.

    ---. Marxism and Literature. Oxford University Press, 1977.

    How to Cite
    Loading APA citation...
    Article Details
    Published 18 Jul 2026
    DOI 10.22161/ijeel.5.4.2
    Pages 7-14
    Views 71
    Downloads 1
    Full Text Access