Thiruvalluvar, or just known as Valluvar, was a Tamil poet, philosopher and sage, a person who transformed a life from rags to riches. He lived during the Sangam age of the Tamil culture, or more specifically, the Sangam period. Even though born some two thousand years ago, his works, teachings and insights still hold grave value even today. Valluvar has talked extensively on subjective human topics and aspects like love, justice, life, good and evil, wisdom, etc. On Thiruvalluvar day, let’s have a look at the poet’s personal life and upbringing along with some of must read written words.

Valluvar: Personal Life And His Philosophy

The exact dates and particulars of Valluvar’s life remain unknown. According to historians, Valluvar was born in the 1st century CE in a village near modern-day Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, or also called the city of Madurai. The name ‘Thiruvalluvar’ translates to ‘the devotee of the Valluva caste’. He married at a young age to a woman named Vasuki, who was described as a “chaste and devoted lady, an ideal wife, who never disobeyed the orders of her husband, but always carried them out implicitly.” The couple had a daughter together.

As stated above, not much is known of Valluvar’s personal life, yet it is speculated that during his earlier years, he worked as a weaver, while other scholars speculate that he was most probably a government official in a district near Madurai. Later, he lived in recluse near Kanchipuram, where he penned his most prominent works ever, ‘Thirukkural‘.

Thiruvalluvar’s philosophy circled around living a divine life of sanctity. While major sages and philosophers suggested leaving the family behind and becoming a Sannyasin, Valluvar on the other hand, offered an alternative. He suggested and fostered the idea of attaining a balance between living a life of a householder and that of a sanctified divine and pure human being. He recorded these musings in his book, ‘Thirukkural‘.

Excerpts From Thirukkural And Other Writings Of Thiruvalluvar

In ‘Thirukkural‘, the poet preaches the goodness of honesty, humility and compassion. To lead a meaningful life, one must know the importance of self-discipline, education and economic independence. His central virtue, and according to him, the foundation of all lives, was love and compassion for others. He truly believed that our attitude and behaviour for others must always rest on kindness and goodwill. Such a tenets and virtues would promise a fulfilling life.

Some of the couples from ‘Thirukkural‘ are:

“The wound that’s made by fire will heal, But the wound that’s made by tongue will never heal.”

“Just as the alphabet ‘A’ is the beginning of all letters, so also, God is the beginning for this universe.”

“Learn the Shastras completely and then act according to their injunctions.”

“The Anicha flower will fade by smelling, but guests are more sensitive if the hosts turn their faces a bit.”

“There is no greater wealth than Virtue, and no greater loss than to forget it.”

“The lotus’ stem is as long as the depth of water, So men’s height is just as great as their inner strength.”

“Death is like sleeping in the burial ground; birth is like waking in the morning.”

‘Thirukkural‘ is still a prominent book in Tamil literature, read and taught in the state. It is considered as the universal Bible. For his wise words and universalistic and timeless knowledge, Thiruvalluvar is honoured everyday in Tamil Nadu on the 15th or 16th of January.

The thing about documentation is that it is privy to destruction. History, records, stories—their preservation is abundant in all societies, but in all societies there are running powers of manipulation as such that the narrative carried in them is blurred from wrong to right, truth to lies, and the reality is all but lost. It is here then that the importance of oral tales is recognised the most. Like a thread passed down from generation to generation, they bind people together and protect their truths. Because the things embedded in oral traditions—from language to the stories they tell, from memory to history—nurture connections within communities, affirming their identities against a backdrop of evolving social realities.

This realisation became the very essence of the conversation I had with a friend, Aiman. She grew up and lives in Kashmir, who too has listened to and relied on stories for purposes that have gone beyond the norm of entertainment alone. In Kashmir, this tradition called luk kath, the people’s talk, Aiman says, is as lively as ever, a breathing, relatable entity within which there’s a space to find belongingness. A token of remembrance that she, like many others, can cling to so as to never feel lost in their own home.

The Oral Tales Of Kashmir: Stories, Folk Ballads And More

Aftaab and Zoon, the sun and the moon; the mountains and rivers have all been part of the oral tales in
Kashmir, giving life to them and, in turn, rooting them to the things of the land. Like the legend of Nagrai and Heemal, which Aiman narrated for me in bits and pieces, a folk ballad with little similarity to Shakespearan Romeo and Juliet, or Laila Majnu. This tragic love story of the Serpent King, Nagrai and Princess Heemal, finds memorabilia in a river spring in a small park near the town Shopian. The tale used to be one of the many stories that comprised Aiman’s childhood, fond memories of chilly winter nights, where she would huddle together with her family and listen to her elders narrating the stories they too must have been similarly told.

These stories, like those made-up for children, come with a lot of animal imagery, ghosts and demons, scary wolf-like creatures called bram bram chok or wan mohniyu, a powerful, hairy human-like creature with long nails who is said to wander in forests. Female figures of witches, or daens, too are abundant, one of the kind being Rantas, a seductress witch with her feet turned backwards, known to eat the hearts of men. Of course, like all old things, they too have some problematic tropes running, misogyny and patriarchy being the one of many.

While there are also tales meant to teach obedience, and some others, morality. But like all interesting things, these folktales have served the primary purpose of nourishing imagination, the reason which perhaps for Aiman too fuelled her later fascination and reliance on literature—the lucky instance of interest that led to us becoming acquaintances in the first place. But there’s more to it, there’s also curiosity. In the narration of these stories, she found the space to learn the habit of questioning, the what and why of the way things are. She expressed how these questions, in time, became more important than they really seem, because learning to ask questions, of why did it happen and why is it happening, became specifically relevant to the social and political developments surrounding Kashmiris.

Dapaan: The Significance Of The Oral Tradition

Dapaan is the word for ‘it is said’ or ‘they say’ in Kashmiri, an expression with which all stories are begun, for myths or legends which have no identifiable source. In the present situations of constant uncertainties in the state fuelled by government regulated informational blockade, the word that invoked the idea of fiction has also taken a new form. Dapaan as a harbinger of fearful events and anxieties, plays its part, as news and rumours, said and heard beginning with the word ‘dapaan’, make their way into everyday lives.

In telling me stories from her childhood and those she heard in those days, Aiman stressed how for her, her home has always been the paradise on earth. Memories of the stories, for instance, cannot forget the contexts in which they were told. There are some stories that impress a metaphor for occupied Kashmir, like that of the man who travels on a donkey while carrying all the load on his own head. He does so to not burden the animal he is travelling on, but in his ignorance doesn’t realise how the weight is ultimately being put on the donkey while the man assumes he is being kind to the animal by keeping the load on himself. These little things of everyday life then become an expression that absorbs and speaks of the nature of things. In the same vein also run proverbs, like Garah wandai gara sasah, garah neraha ne zah, (‘O home, I would sacrifice a thousand houses on you and will never leave you’) or asav ne, te lasav kith paeth (‘How will we live, if we don’t laugh’). The connectedness drawn from these pieces of oral culture are owed to the way they have been passed through generations, where that which everybody has heard comes to hold the value of truth. It has stood the grounds of time, and so it comes to stand against erasure.

Bhand Pather And Ladi Shah: Other Forms Of Oral Tradition

And outside this household of folk stories, there lie other oral traditions which have played similar roles, like that of Bhand Pather and of Ladi Shah. Bhand Pather, which is now a declining art form of folk theatre, is based on satirical drama drawn from mythologies and social realities. The unwritten scripts of these dramas have been passed on in families, where their performances invoke cultural roots often infused with political commentaries and humour. Bhand Pather is a very old tradition of drama but has served newer purposes of educating and informing masses, spreading awareness of the many issues that people did not have an easy access to talk or know about. And so, the political representation made its way into folklore not directly, but through subtleness, wit, and sarcasm. In that what they did, and this is what Aiman believes, is not just help in shaping opinions of the people but also strengthening them, where the problems concerning entire communities could find a space to be conveyed and shared.

Another form bridging the accessibility of information like Bhand Pather is Ladi Shah, the Kashmiri song ballads full of melody and humour. The performer, also called the ladi shah, comes with an instrument called dhukar, singing songs that communicate and comment on socio-political matters of day-to-day life. It was only fairly recently that Kashmir got its first female ladi shah in fact, twenty-five year old Syed Areej Safvi. The oral culture, therefore, is still evolving into relatable entities; where people like herself, Aiman suggests, are also finding their own responsibility to know more about it and to carry it forward. This remembrance and recognition, through multiple traditions like Bhand Pather and Ladi Shah, are their own history, a way to protect their roots.

Aiman’s own understanding over the importance of folk stories has been this alone, also the reason she was willing to share it with me. Attempts at surviving and preserving the aspects of their culture are an important part of the community. Stories, the oral tradition of Kashmir and culture surrounding them come to form a language of their own in all societies like this then, with their own depths and necessity.

I was never much of a biryani person. I know. Preposterous and completely unacceptable. Whenever I am asked as to why exactly I would prefer having a regular dish over biryani, I revert back to blaming everything I can possibly attribute blame to. A lack of taste buds, tough parenting, a general sense of insanity, take your pick. That all changed three years ago. And, it was all because a certain friend of mine thought the world of his culinary aptitude. He wasn’t bad at whipping up new dishes from time to time. Not by any means. He just wasn’t as good as he thought himself to be.

That day, however, he completely outdid himself. And, the best part was the fact that the recipe he tried on that particular day, was something that he was completely alien to. I don’t know how you managed it, Tia. But, thank you for introducing me to ‘Bamboo Biryani’. Needless to say, I grilled him about the recipe and he pointed me in a general direction.

Soon enough, I realized that bamboo biryani was not just some kind of new-wave, culinary innovation. No. It is rooted in history, dating all the way back to Colonial India. It was, by all accounts, a part of this country’s identity for the longest time, the recipe only just rising to popularity recently.

Bongu Chicken: How Did Bamboo Biryani Come To Be?

Some 100 kilometres from Araku Valley, in the Visakhapatnam district of Andhra Pradesh, lies a humble village called Chaparai. The village, itself, is lined with makeshift stalls and huts, locally known as ‘Pakas’. Most of the vendors manning these stalls have only a few dishes for sale, chief among them being ‘Bongu Chicken’.

Bongu chicken, cooked in a manner similar to bamboo biryani, is essentially chicken that has been left to marinate in natural spices before being stuffed into a bamboo stem and roasted over an open flame. The spices used in the dish are all sourced locally, of course. It wouldn’t really be an authentic dish otherwise. Most recipes for Bongu chicken avoid dried spices, preferring freshly ground variants and aromatic herbs. Think freshly ground ginger-garlic paste, coriander, green chillies.

Once the meat has soaked up the marinade, it is stuffed in bits, with a patch of bamboo leaves separating each serving. A single bamboo stem can, effectively, hold up to a kilogram of chicken. Once the bamboo is stuffed with the meat, the cook places it over an open fire where they continuously tend to it, turning it over every ten minutes or so. While it cooks, the moisture and the natural oil, found inside the bamboo stem, seeps into the meat, giving it a very distinct flavour.

The actual reason I went off on that tangent is that you understand this is not a dish that has just come about. It has found popularity recently, yes. However, the recipes and the manner in which the dishes are cooked all rose out of a necessity.

The Araku Valley In Spotlight

Araku Valley is home to numerous indigenous tribes, communities of people with a rich history in culinary traditions. When India was still reeling under its colonial masters, communities such as the ones living in Araku Valley had to think of ways to feed themselves in a manner that was not reliant on anything outside of what they knew. Enter the humble bamboo. To be frank, bamboo, to a lot of rural and indigenous communities in India, is one of the most versatile tools at their disposal. Back then, considering the economic climate that the majority of India found itself in, bamboo was a lot more accessible than traditional utensils. It was practically free and grew almost anywhere. It stood to reason then that soon enough, some tribes living in Araku Valley employed it in their cooking techniques and habits. Bamboo biryani, then, was a natural evolution of those habits.

Consider what biryani actually is. At its basest definition, it’s just rice and meat. That is exactly how it began for the tribes in Araku Valley. Why waste time and resources cooking multiple dishes when a single dish would do? Of course, meat was often a luxury for most living there. However, there are multiple instances of smaller game being used as a substitute for the traditional meat that was being consumed at the time. From then on, the sole question regarding bamboo biryani was what exactly went into it.

They had the two primary ingredients and the utensil they would use to cook the dish in. All they needed to figure out was what they would use to flavour the dish with. The answer, again, came from necessity. Whatever was available around them. Whatever grew naturally. That is the sole reason why bamboo biryani will differ massively when it is served to you in a restaurant and when it is served to you in the home of a family living in Araku Valley.

In spite of their best intentions, once the bamboo biryani found its way into restaurants, chefs could not help but add to it. After all, it is biryani, they reasoned. It needs some colour. Still, in a manner of speaking, the idea of using what’s available still remains the same. Authentic bamboo biryani will be a lot milder in terms of any flavour profile for dried spices. However, it will be spicier than what you are used to when it comes to biryani, on account of green chillies being used in some renditions of it.

Sivaram Krishna Introduced The Unique Dish To Restaurants

Sometime back in 2016, Sivaram Krishna, a senior chef at a hotel management school that had ties to the Andhra Pradesh Tourism Department, stumbled upon bamboo biryani. At the time, Andhra Pradesh was just reeling from a political and geographical separation. When Telangana went on to take Hyderabad along with it, Andhra Pradesh had, essentially, lost its claim to biryani, as it was known traditionally. After all, you think biryani, you think Hyderabad.

As part of a push by the Andhra Pradesh Tourism Department, Sivaram Krishna went on to visit the tribes in Araku Valley, hoping to discover a dish that would put Andhra Pradesh back on the culinary map. What he learnt there, he brought back with him, proceeding to teach some eighty other chefs and students at his school. All those that Sivaram Krishna taught were encouraged to push the dish onto the menu in their own restaurants. That’s the actual story of how bamboo biryani came to be so popular. Andhra Pradesh, now, has its own biryani. And, personally speaking, I think it rivals any other biryani in the country.

Before I leave you, chew on this. In multiple regions in the North-Eastern part of India, bamboo is often used in cooking. In Assam, for example, there is a dish that closely resembles the Bongu chicken dish mentioned earlier. While some may consider the dish a direct adaptation by the Assamese, I can assure you that it’s not. In fact, it came about the same way that bongu chicken or bamboo biryani did. Just pure necessity.

There is a reason why you can travel around India and find things that make you think about home in the most unlikely places. There is a reason why, if I were to ever travel to Chaparai and eat from one of the ‘pakas’, I would think of something that I had back home. Some threads just tie us together, weaving a sense of identity no matter where we are from.

We tend to modify and improve the given form according to the convenience of the layman. Classics which endure the originality of the art form are tough for a layman to acquire. Folk culture, on the other hand is seen rather as an art form made for pleasure than as an art with aestheticism. To bridge this dichotomy here, the fusion of folk and classical emerged. In music, the genre of fusion gained immense popularity as well. Fusion songs borrow the element of ease from the folk songs and inherit the element of critical aestheticism from the classical songs. There are several prevalent forms of fusion of folk and classical music in India. We’ll be mentioning all the major ones.

The Rabindra Sangeet

Rabindra Sangeet is the form of music named after its composer, the noble laureate, composer, poet, writer and Bengali polymath, Rabindranath Tagore. He drew inspiration from the Thumri sub genre of Hindustani classical music and added variations to the strict raga system in his songs. Writings of Rabindranath Tagore were highly lyrical with the thematic undercurrent of love and devotion, mainly towards God. His songs have spiritualistic tranquility that bewitches one’s mind to experience calmness, and this is what Rabindra Sangeet encompasses too.

Sugam Sangeet

Sugam Sangeet is the music that has been made free of text-laden technicalities of classical music. That isn’t to say that it does not follow some of the technicalities, but it has been certainly made flexible to changes. The lexicon of the song is made easier by often containing words adopted from regional languages. Etymologically, since Sugam translates to ‘comforting’, Sugam Sangeet is the genre which is born out of the convenience of a layman who is destitute of deeper details dwelling in classical music.

Haveli Sangeet

Haveli Sangeet are devotional songs performed in temples, often as a part of ritual. India has conjectured the tradition of Haveli Sangeet since primitive times. These songs originated in the Mathura region of Uttar Pradesh. Reverentially, they’re majorly sung in the praise of or in devotion to Hindu deity Lord Krishna. Haveli Sangeet is popular even in the states of Rajasthan and Gujrat. They carry the regional alterations of dialect and that makes them a part of fusion. Although the songs are highly religious in their themes, they can be enjoyed by atheists for their cultural beauty.

Gana Sangeet

The British colonialism majorly annihilated India, but few good things came out of it. The patriotic fervor that the freedom drive created gave rise to many culturally important art forms. One such is Gana Sangeet, which was born out protests against the British rule in India and are generally sung in chorus to represent the strength of unity and contains a social message. Initial themes included patriotism, community strength on the front, but post-colonization, Gana Sangeet incorporated other socially important themes were also adapted in the genre.
There are plethora of categories and forms of songs made out of the fusion of classical and Folk music in India and it certainly isn’t possible briefing all of them. Other popular forms, however, include Qawwali, which is a Sufi form of devotional songs and has religious Islamic origins. Another fusion music form is Shabad. These are didactic songs generally sung by Sikh gurus and are believed to be originated in Punjab.

Lost in the woods of western influences, we often forget the soothing ground of our abode and its pacifying culture. The transcendental values exhibited by our culture should be envisioned in our memory if not reflected in our action.

Music is often treated as a go-to in every situation and mood. Music is undeniably a part of all our lives and it contributes as much as a real person does. It’s a companion in the life’s toughest and happiest situations. Some associate music with memories, some associate it with their emotions, and some with people. We are all aware of the music’s elfin charm and its magical ways of soothing our senses, but let’s today know about the forms of Modern Music prevalent in India.

Bollywood Music

Bollywood has impacted Indians deeply. Music is the soul of Bollywood and so its only relevant starting the list with the Movie Music. The movie music, be it of any Indian movie industry, makes an everlasting impact on the layman. Who hasn’t hummed a popular song from a movie all the day long? From the songs of Kishore Kumar to Arijit Singh, the tunes of Bollywood fill the vacant columns of the home with its shrills.

Pop Songs

The high energy pop songs are surely to be found in each playlist. They are characterized by a captivating rhythm and melody. Pop songs became existent in India in the 1980s and they continue to be popular even today, maintaining a constant relevancy in modern music. The popular songs of the 20th century ‘Bolo Tara Ra Ra’ and ‘Tum To Thehre Pardesi’ belong to the genre of pop songs. Ever since the emergence of digital media, the popularity of these songs has increased with a boom and Indian pop singers began releasing pop albums independent of Bollywood or other movie industries.

Jazz Music

Jazz was brought to India in the 1920s by the America-African singers who came here to perform. Later on, influenced by the performances, jazz was adopted by Indian singers as well and were initially performed in the metropolis Mumbai and Kolkata. With this, another modern music style called Indo-Jazz also emerged which combines the elements of Indian classical music and that of western Jazz.

Indian Rock Music

The Indian rock music enjoys a widespread following. It is a major part of the band performances. Indian rock music maintains the high-spirited zestful energy and makes one hit the floor with the beat. With TV channels like MTV, these types of music experienced a great hike.

EDM/Electronic Dance Music

EDM or Electronic Dance Music in an umbrella term for most pop culture music, including Hip-Hop, Trap Music, Trance amount others. It is a compilation of percussive sounds created using synthesizers and drum machines rather than core instruments. The music is largely based on repetition and maintaining rhythm, hence the name, Dance Music. In around the 90s with the increased use of drugs and rave-loving crowd, where the genre gained its reputation as “Drug Music”. The genre has caught public attention in around the mid and late 2000s, while it has been there in the world since 1970s.

Trance Music

Emerging from the jolly state, Goa, during the 1980s is the fun electronic music called the trance music. The repetitive beats and high rhythm popularized it in the parties and no wonder the trance music slowly gain a mainstream popularity in India. Psychedelic trance or simply psychedelic music emerged around the same time in India. It’s basically the representative of the psychedelic culture, which involves the sub-conscious experiences of people who take psychedelic drugs. Popular music festivals like Bangalore’s Storm, Mahindra Blues of Mumbai, Jaisalmer’s Ragasthan or NH7 weekender have brought about the realm of music into the lives.