Exploring the Influence of Hindi Language on Folk

Subject: Exploring the Influence of Hindi Language on Folk
From: GUEST,MarhtaAloma
Date: 20 May 25 - 08:21 AM

How has the Hindi language influenced the lyrics, melody, and overall composition of traditional folk music in India? Are there any specific examples of folk songs that showcase this influence, and what role does language play in preserving and disseminating these musical traditions?

Subject: RE: Exploring the Influence of Hindi Language on Folk
From: Gibb Sahib
Date: 22 May 25 - 08:22 PM

I have some perspective on this, as a scholar of some Indian folk musics. Apologies if some of this is obvious or repeats what you already know!

First, "Hindi."

"Hindi" can refer to a few different things: a written language, a spoken lingua franca, an umbrella for regional dialects.

Written "Hindi" is highly Sanskritized. It's what pandits and school marms will insist upon as being "correct." It may be correct for academic writing, but Hindi has diglossia (significant difference between written and spoken language). Written Hindi is not particularly helpful for vernacular, spoken Hindi. I think we can fairly leave it out of this discussion of music, though one has to be careful if one references book on Hindi which may (unhelpfully) neglect to acknowledge that the difference in writing vs spoken is real.

Spoken/vernacular "Hindi" has a form based on the Delhi (capital) dialect (Kha?i boli) that serves as a lingua franca across North India. It is essentially the continuation, re-named, of what was called "Hindustani" in colonial times. The same Hindustani is the basis of the language called Urdu. People don't favor the term "Hindustani" nowadays (I think part of that is that they think it sounds archaic and, well, "colonial"). In my humble opinion however, that is really the best term. Because in the vacuum of that term we have "Hindi" and "Urdu" which people misperceive as being very different AND connect to Hindu and Muslim speakers respectively. They are really only different if you look at writing system (irrelevant to speech) AND you add in their WRITTEN forms. Just as written Hindi and written Urdu depart from spoken Hindi and spoken Urdu, written Hindi and Urdu therefore differ notably from one another. Yet the spoken form of the two is practically the same. Put someone who thinks their speaking "Urdu" in conversation with someone who thinks they're hearing "Hindi" and neither will know the difference. They are both speaking one language—Hindustani.

Finally, "Hindi" describes a range of regional "dialects" or languages across a part of northern India. Other regions of India have distinctly named languages, e.g. Punjabi of Punjab (the language I know best), whereas some other states/regions will just say they speak Hindi but it's not the "standard" Hindi of Delhi.

The "standard" spoken Delhi Hindi is the language of most Bollywood films.

"Folk."

The notion of "folk" music was imported from the West and its folklore movement. It has currency in contexts like Mudcat where we assuming we're talking about similar things and where there is a tacit assumption that most (not all, I know) of the music being discussed belongs to an Anglo-European paradigm. Go beyond that discursive context, and utility is lost. (Few people talk about "African folk music," for instance. Or "African classical music" for that matter. More often they just talk "African music" because the "folk" thing doesn't match the subject, being itself an outgrowth of Europeans coming to terms with how they value musical expressions in their society.)

In the West, I see "folk" as referring to a category that is defined as much by what people say it is as much as it is defined against what it isn't: "classical," "popular." There's a construct of these three big categories (folk, classical, popular) that emerged by the early 20th century to connote or imply certain essential concepts.

That construct was imported into India, but since Indian music is too different from European music, it could not line up with the same sets of connotations and implications. For instance, "folk" in Europe might imply untutored, amateur performance, whereas "folk" musicians in India might be the most rigorously and formally trained anywhere. "Folk" music is often tagged with the term "traditional," as if that was part of it's distinction, but I can't see how India's "classical" music is any less traditional—plus it's all oral transmission.

The hybrid (West-East) construct of "folk" music in India retains an aspect that existed before the importation of Western ideas: regionality. Folk music is expect to come from, be found in, and represent the people of a geographic region.

As in the West, it's possible to distinguish in India a difference between "traditional" music (not always folk!) and "folk revival" music. However, no one that I know of ever speaks of Indian music in terms of a folk revival. So—as also can happen in the West—the category of "folk" often confounds the two categories. To be clear, the "traditional" music is that of appreciable age (typically at least as old as the late 18th century) that pre-dates a sort of self-consciousness and mediated distribution. It's the music "of the common people" that they've "just done" for a long time. Keep in mind however, that this is, again, situated by region. Such traditional music is not known across regions, it's not the music of cosmopolitan centers. That distinguishes it, on one metric, from "classical" (also traditional!) music which, although region-based "schools" exist, is something that might be shared across cosmopolitan centers.

In contrast, there is "folk" music that, whether based on "traditional" music or is of newer creation, seems to call attention to itself as "folk," and calls attention to the region / regional identity to which it belongs. People engage it consciously as "heritage" as opposed to just kind of doing it as a living continuation of old custom.

What this all means is that music that evokes a *region* strongly inspired people to label it as "folk," no matter whether a geeky historian/musicologist would say it's "traditional" or "folk revival." Importantly, there's no clearer way to evoke region than singing in a regional language/dialect.

I'm not sure why you used the phrase "traditional folk music." Is it to distinguish from nontraditional folk music or traditional non-folk music, or is it just a reduplication of two terms (traditional, folk) that you think are basically the same, for emphasis? If so, you might agree from the perspective I've shared that the phrase hides more than it reveals.

I mentioned that I'm most familiar with Punjabi language. (I know Hindi as well.) Punjabi is a "regional" language. As one of the aforementioned geeky musicologists, I can hear music with Punjabi language and, by case, classify it as popular (or pop), folk, or even classical. But Indians with whom I interact tend to hear Punjabi and default to calling it all "folk"—unless there is something really influential to push it into another category. (For example, if the song in Punjabi had a prominent electronic drum track and the performer was in a video accompanied by scantily clad women, those signifiers might influence someone to call it "pop" since "pop" has connotations of Western/foreign, things which depart from the "region" concept.)

In conclusion: "Folk" music in Indian concept, when it has singing/words, should be in the language/dialect of its assigned region.

Therefore, the question of what effect Hindi language has on folk music doesn't really make sense. Assuming one means Hindi as the non-regional language, the lingua franca, it makes no sense for a "folk" song to be in that form of Hindi—unless that form of Hindi is already the language of said region, in which case there is no question of Hindi being an influence (it's already the language).

I really don't know how one could say how language influences the "melody and overall composition" of music in another (but closely related) language. It may be theoretically possible, but that's cutting things very close. I mean, there have been studies of how linguistic tone influences melody in songs sung in tonal languages. And, for example, Punjabi is a tonal language (one of few in India) whereas Hindi is not a tonal language, so I guess the lack of tones in Hindi *could* affect the melody of a Punjabi song if you translated it into Hindi. But still, Punjabi and Hindi are quite similar to begin with. It's not like we're jumping from, say, taking an English song and changing the words to Vietnamese.

Perhaps you could explain more about why you have this question. Rather than ask "How has Hindi influenced..." which entails an assumption, rephrase it as "Has Hindi influenced...?" and accompany it with an explanation of why you have reason to believe this question is worth pursuing.

Subject: Exploring Cultural Exchange: Say Brothers Will You
From: GUEST,MarhtaAloma
Date: 24 May 25 - 10:19 AM

How would the traditional American spiritual, 'Say Brothers Will You Meet Us?,' be interpreted and performed within the context of Hindi folk music? Can we draw parallels between the themes and musical styles of these two distinct cultural expressions?

Subject: RE: Exploring the Influence of Hindi Language on Folk
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 24 May 25 - 10:36 AM

Rather than scatter these questions about the context of Hindi folk music in threads about English language/cultural songs around Mudcat, you might do better asking about various songs in the one thread that will attract people with knowledge of or interest in Hindi language and folk because it is mentioned in the title. The above post was moved from ADD: Say Brothers Will You Meet Us?.

Subject: RE: Exploring the Influence of Hindi Language on Folk
From: cnd
Date: 24 May 25 - 12:09 PM

Marhta, perhaps it would help if you explained *why* you were interested in these questions. Based on Gibb's response, and as an outsider myself, the genres seem rather disparate in both practice and interpretation. Could you elaborate on what your intent is?