VANITY FAIR

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 74, Issue 142, 18 June 1931, Page 2

VANITY FAIR

INDIAN SINGING A spontaneous outlet for every villager and for all the moods of the village was music. I can still hear the vibrant song of a carlman I never saw to my knowledge, who used to drive his lumbering cart along the road past my house al night. His voice had a strangely moving quality, it made no difference that I could not understand the words. Another cartman's song heard m the district I was fortunate enough to have translated. The Tahsildar and the Pcshl(ar and the Station Master, as a mailer of fact, all helped me collect the songs of the village folk, but they constantly pointed out that the illiterate villagers misused words and as often as not made an unintelligible jumble of their songs. . . Song wove itself in and out of the daily life of the village in an ever recurring pattern. Ihe brick makers al Haweli Singh's factory, in their huts of loosely stacked bricks, entertained themselves at night by singing. Asgar announced his return from supper by lustily carolling. . . In the hot nights before the rain, when the popiyas called intermittently from the mango trees, and none of us could sleep much, I listened to the tahsil peons singing hour upon hour—strains that came plaintively through the darkness, broken into . . . small fragments of sound.—Gertrude Emerson, in "Voiceless India."