EVERY GENRE PROJECT - April 14 - Assamese Folk Music
Genre of the Day - Assamese Folk Music
Album of the Day - Assamese Folk Songs by Rameshwar Pathak & Dhanada Pathak (1982)
April 14, 2024
Today’s column marks, somehow, the first time that we’re covering an Indian music subgenre. I want to think this is an unfortunate result of RYM’s categorization–its coverage of Brazilian subgenres, for example, is astoundingly robust—rather than a condemnation of the musical breadth of India. It’s a staggeringly populous country that constitutes almost 18% of the world’s population. To only be touching it after over one hundred days feels like a particularly unfortunate statistical anomaly. But finally we land shore, in one of the country’s most far-flung mountainous corners.
Assam is a state nestled away in India’s barely-geographically-connected northeast. Green, rainy, and a hotspot for tea plantations, Assam has its own language with its own script and distinctive syncretic culture influenced by Tibetan, Chinese, Austronesian cultures alongside the culture of the local Ahom people who centralized Assamese culture under their kingdom. This range of influences makes Assam particularly musically unique among Indian states.
Assamese folk music is largely defined by its wide range of native instruments. Given its geographic isolation, a lot of its instruments are home-grown, with names I’ve never heard of. There’s the potently blaring buffalo-derived wind instrument pepa, the clicking toka, beautifully birdlike xutuli, the conveniently double-sided khol drum, lute-like tukari and dotora, and the long kali flute. This only scratches the surface of the Assamese instruments I came across. This wide range of instruments offers ample opportunity for different arrangements for various occasions, especially the uniquely Assamese festival of bihu. Another marker of Assamese folk music that differentiates it from the rest of India is its use of the pentatonic scale more common in East Asian musical traditions.
While today’s set of songs was a lovely experience, sometimes in researching these genres you set unrealistic expectations of what the music will sound like by knowing all the potential instruments ahead of time. The instrumentation used in these traditional songs is sparer than some of the range of fascinating instruments I read about. However, the synergy of the two vocalists featured is beautiful, and the pentatonic scale’s use is particularly notable. The album mostly sails on mellow moments. The songs match the setting of their titles well: for example, “Aji Baular Biha” translates to a wedding song and feels appropriately celebratory. Similar drum beats, hints of the xutuli and kali, and use of the lute-like local instruments dominate instrumentally, but occasionally more unfamiliar instruments pop in, such as the plasticky-sounding gogona subtly played on “Bahoba Agloi.” At the end of “Hari Hey Ahare”, there’s an energetic buildup that ends the album with a bang in contrast to the more plaintive ballads that dominate the A-side. While I feel that this was only a small cross-section into the instrumentally rich section, it’s a great place to start our journey into Indian music as a whole.