A Dhangari Ovi or a Lavani: Fitting a Regional Item into the Practical
Omkar has 12 minutes in the practical: a bhajan, an abhang, a bhavgeet and one regional item. For the regional item he is torn between a lavani he has learned from a commercial recording, in which the dholki carries an addha-like theka and the refrain is repeated by a female chorus, and a Dhangari ovi his grandmother sings at shearing time, in her Dhangari dialect, with no percussion and a response line that the women sing back. His tabla player, a classmate, is solid in keherwa and dadra, approximate in addha, and has never played for a lavani. Omkar speaks some Dhangari but not fluently; he has his grandmother's recording on his phone. The marking scheme rewards 'regional authenticity and command of the form', and the examiner will ask one question about the item's tradition.
1. Choose between the lavani and the Dhangari ovi, and defend the choice against at least three criteria.
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Choose the Dhangari ovi.
Criterion one, whether the form survives the available forces. A lavani's identity is carried by the dholki's theka, the tempo and, in performance, the dancer. With a tabla player who is only approximate in addha and no dance, what survives is the tune, and an examiner is likely to hear a film lavani rather than a regional form. The ovi needs no percussion: it is unaccompanied with a response line, so the missing dholki player is not a gap.
Criterion two, authority over the source. His source for the lavani is a commercial recording, so if the examiner asks where he learned it and what its tradition is, he has little to say. For the ovi he has a named singer, his grandmother, a specific occasion, shearing time, and a dialect he can partly speak. That is exactly what 'command of the form' means in a viva.
Criterion three, risk and length. The ovi is short and unfamiliar, which is a real cost: he must extend it to about two to two and a half minutes with a second stanza and a spoken two-line introduction. The lavani is longer but riskier at every other point.
The flashier item is not the better item. In an exam, the piece he can defend under questioning is worth more than the piece he can only perform.
2. How should Omkar adapt the ovi without turning it into something else? Separate what must be preserved from what may be changed, and say what he should announce before singing.
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Preserve:
- The dialect words and vowels. He must not Sanskritise the text to make it sound 'respectable'; that is the commonest way a folk item is destroyed.
- The narrow range and the descending melodic contour, which are what make it sound like an ovi and not like a film song.
- The response pattern and the unaccompanied texture.
- Its function: it is a work song sung at shearing, not a concert piece addressed to an audience.
May change:
- A single drone may be added for pitch stability. This is the least intrusive change and should be declared.
- Length, by adding a second stanza.
- Pitch, so that the lowest note of the ovi sits comfortably for his voice.
Must not change: no addha or keherwa theka underneath, no interludes, no translation of the words, and no speed-up into a generic 'folk item' tempo.
Before singing, two sentences: what the song is, who sings it and on what occasion, and one line explaining that the second phrase is a response. If no second singer is permitted, he should sing the response in a different register and say plainly that this is a stand-in for the group. An examiner will credit the honest solution more than a concealed one.
3. The examiner asks, 'Which classical raga is this folk song based on?' How should he answer, and what is at stake in the answer?
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The question can trap him in both directions. Many folk tunes use scale material that resembles a raga, and the ovi probably uses a five-note scale with a familiar shape. But a shared scale is not a raga: raga requires a grammar of ascent and descent, a vadi, a pakad and a treatment. Claiming a raga name invites the examiner to test that grammar, and he would fail the test on a song that was never built on those rules. Flatly denying any relation would look uninformed, because the resemblance is audible.
The strong answer separates the two levels. He can say what the scale material is, if he is confident of it, and then say that the form is not raga-based: it is a work song with its own melodic grammar and its own occasion, and folk and raga traditions have borrowed from each other for centuries without one being a defective version of the other.
What is at stake is a central point of aesthetic judgement: folk forms are complete in themselves. Treating a lavani or an ovi as an incomplete raga is the same error as calling a bhavgeet a bad khayal. The examiner is testing whether he can place a form on its own terms, and this answer shows that he can.