Manganiyar women are stepping onto a stage long closed to them by men

Dariya Bai has a crushing response for anyone who tells her that women Manganiyars should not sing in public: “Bhad mein jaao.” The aggravation is not unwarranted. She is one of just three women in her community of roughly 1,000 performers to have stepped onto public concert platforms. Her defiance is a rare crack in a social structure that has otherwise remained as immutable as the landscape it inhabits.

Set deep in the arid expanses of rural western Rajasthan, the Muslim families of Manganiyars and Langas form a singularly talented lineage of hereditary musicians with a vast repertoire of folk music governed by a raga and tala system all their own. Since 1976, thanks largely to the efforts of legendary folk archivist Komal Kothari and his Jodhpur-based institution, Rupayan Sansthan, many of these musicians have become frequent invitees to world music festivals not just in India but also across the globe.

Yet, for all their metropolitan and international exposure, the communities remain culturally and socially anchored to their home turf. They may hold dozens of passport books, but home is still a remote, tight-knit village where resources and facilities are scant. In this world, social mores are unyielding and orthodox gender structures are stubbornly unbending.

While the men travel the globe as cultural ambassadors, the women have traditionally been confined to performing in the inner courtyards of their patrons, or jajmans. Scholars say these strictures actually tightened over the last century, inspired by newfound rules of morality and respectability. The family’s honour came to be tied to women’s invisibility and singing for the outer world became a bigger taboo.

“The biradari does not like us to sing, except in the homes of jajmans,” said Dariya Bai, her voice edged with a throaty laugh. “Bas, zabardasti aa gaye (we forced our way in).”

It was the legendary Rukma Bai who first broke the rule in the early 2000s. She died in 2011 but in the years since, only two other women have joined her as professional artistes at public venues – her cousin Dariya Bai and her daughter-in-law Hanifa Bai.

The rarity of their position was highlighted at the recent Lok Utsav, an annual festival hosted by Barefoot College in Tilonia, Rajasthan. There, the theme “Women in the Musical Tradition” served as a tribute to Rukma’s pioneering spirit, grit and prodigious talent. Leading the tribute were Dariya Bai and Hanifa Bai.

“Bas inke yahan ki auratein gaati hain (only the women of this one clan sing),” said a Manganiyar percussionist at the festival. “Hamare yahan aisa nahin hota (this doesn’t happen elsewhere).” In the Langa community, no woman has taken the stage till today.

Learning by osmosis

In a hall just off the stage at the campus, Dariya Bai and Hanifa Bai are forging a collaboration with Carnatic vocalist Sangeetha Sivakumar and her accompanying musicians that is to be presented later that evening. To an outsider, the lack of Manganiyars’ formal, structured training might seem like an intimidating disadvantage when paired with the rigours of the Carnatic style, but that assumption is misplaced. Like all Manganiyars, Dariya Bai and Hanifa Bai’s confidence in their musicality is unshakeable. For good reasons.

Manganiyars are trained from early childhood in homes filled with music, learning to sing with open throats and tremendous projection so that they can be heard without amplification. Much of this tradition is sustained by women, who also manage households while men crisscross the globe.

“The women in Manganiyar families are the primary teachers of the traditions,” said Kuldeep Kothari, who heads Rupayan Sansthan. “At least for the first 10 years of a child’s life, it is the women who impart the training. Almost every other song they learn, they pick up from their mothers, aunts and grandmothers.”

While they are not “sat down” for formal lessons, women imbibe the music through daily life, while at chores and listening to it being taught or sung. They are not only custodians but also fabulous composers, performers and repositories of songs that reflect their intimate worlds: of weddings, birth, domestic labour, adornment and everyday intimacies between men and women, as Komal Kothari points out in his conversations with scholar Rustom Bharucha, collected in The Oral History of Rajasthan (2003).

To understand the space Dariya Bai and Hanifa Bai now occupy, one must begin with Rukma Bai, the trailblazer from Ramsar in Barmer who inspired them to sing and stick to their paths.

Social rebellion

“I stand tall on my knees,” Rukma Bai jokes about being crippled by childhood polio as she faces the camera for an interview with journalist Radhika Bordia for the 2005 TV feature The Story of Rukma Bai. In the footage, you see her dragging herself across the floor on her knees or being carried to venues on her son’s back, but that was not the least of her challenges.

Like other Manganiyars, she grew up learning music by living it. It became a profession after her husband abandoned her, leaving her to raise three children in severe poverty. There was no money at home. A drought hit hard, leeching away even the income from the employment guarantee scheme MNREGA.

“I started singing to feed my children,” she said.

Komal Kothari happened to hear her perform at a temple and was struck by the grandeur of her music. “He told me, ‘I want you to sing across five continents.’”

She began from Jaipur, but her voice soon soared across the world. Supported by Rupayan, she travelled internationally, recorded for the BBC, and sang Kesariya Balam for Man ke Manjeere, an album curated by Shubha Mudgal celebrating women’s voices.

But the glory came at a cost. She was ostracised by her community, labelled a “loose woman”, and threatened with false charges – until Kothari intervened and her brother stood by her. “I was the sole breadwinner for four generations of my family,” she said. “There was no way I was going to stop. I survived because of my voice.”

Activist Aruna Roy recalls first meeting her in the 1980s at an informal concert at Rupayan. “She came armed with courage and confidence which sought no approvals from the men in her community,” Roy said. “She was original in her choice of the ‘dhol’ as her accompaniment, which replaced the dholak. She played and sang. Her revolutionary position was for her a quiet success, taken with nonchalance and equanimity. And she was more eager to discuss the songs, her repertoire than her problems.”

The association with Rupayan lasted decades. Rukma Bai and the Manganiyar community became a regular at Lok Utsav. The Barefoot College, which helped musician families in Barmer and Jaisalmer with development work, even built a western commode for her since she found it difficult to use rural conveniences.

Rukma Bai later trained at least 20 girls in her village but none was allowed to perform publicly. “Who will marry our daughters if they sing in public?” families would ask. What she did change, though, was the fate of two women – her daughter-in-law and niece.

Rich repertoire

From their stories, it becomes clear that women who are driven to the edge of distress by poverty or abandonment are allowed some latitude to take their music beyond jajmans to public platforms. This was true of Rukma Bai and it is true of Dariya Bai and Hanifa Bai.

Dariya Bai, daughter of khamaicha player Deem Mohammed, grew up in Bishala in Barmer. She remembers travelling with her father and family as a child to the “homes of jajman, singing and simply absorbed the music”. “There was nothing like rehearsal or practise time,” she said. “Hamare rehearsal ka time yahi hai – khana banate banate, safai karte karte. Later I had no one to support me when I started singing outside. No husband or parents to back me. I had no choice but to sing for money.”

Hanifa Bai, born in Sihani near the Pakistan border, inherited a rich repertoire that includes Sindhi songs learned from her mother, who was born in Pakistan.

“We women Manganiyars may not get opportunities to sing in public, but we sing, hear, teach all the time at home,” said Hanifa Bai. “We are as exposed to this tradition as the men. I started travelling to the homes of jajmans and to temples and singing with my parents and grandmother as a small child.”

She was married to Rukma Bai’s son at age 11. In an act that defied all notions of orthodoxy, Rukma Bai encouraged her daughter-in-law, who also cared for her, to sing publicly.

Coached by her mother-in-law in how to sing at concerts, Hanifa Bai now refuses to sing for small money. “I say no to anything under Rs 40,000 to sing at a wedding or festival. As a widow, I have no husband or family to support me or my nine children. How do I bring food home, how do we live otherwise?”

Divergent styles

At the Archives and Research Center for Ethnomusicology in Gurugram, there are hours of recordings of women Manganiyars, collected as part of an effort to conserve Rajasthan’s folk music. Shubha Chaudhuri, who collated these archives, says women do not quite put a price on their music as men do.

“When I asked the amazing young women singers ‘How do you sing so well?’, they would say: ‘God puts music in our throats. How else would we sing?’ They are not taught like boys but that does not mean they do not learn,” she said. “When we were recording songs for the katha gatha (rare ballad) project, many of the men told us that they heard them first and learned them from their mothers.”

Manganiyar music, historically performed only in the homes of jajmans, entered urban public spaces in the 1960s through Komal Kothari’s efforts. In his interview to Bharucha, he talks about the remarkable swiftness with which the community adapted to the needs of its new audiences, reworking the content and styles of their songs, picking up mannerisms and skills that kept them relevant in the urban world.

Over four decades, their music, with its buoyant rhythms and robust singing, became one of India’s most celebrated folk traditions. Women, however, never benefited from this surge because, as Kothari put it, their “social shell” remained impenetrable. Allowing women to perform could have increased family incomes, but notions of honour prevailed.

Komal Kothari was wary of disrupting social structures, so he did not intervene to shift the gender skew. Still, he was keen to tap the women’s repertoire, which he feared would die without exposure. He encouraged the men to learn these songs from the women of their family. “So these songs then came into the male repertoire,” said Chaudhuri.

In the archival recordings, Rukma Bai answers the question: what marks women’s songs apart? “Our singing style itself is different,” she says. “We sing inside homes and kothis and to the accompaniment of the dhols that we ourselves play so the music goes rain raike, raun raike [imitating more gentle, rounded sounds] while the men play with the dholak and harmonium and they sound more tagda [muscular] going dha kirthe dheem dha [more forceful]. We don’t do so much gale ka kaam [vocal acrobatics] that men do or play with murkis [embellishments], our singing is seedha [plain] because we keep up the parampara.”

When Kothari asked male musicians to sing women’s songs to save them from extinction, the famous Ghazi Khan salvaged Nimbuda. So wildly popular was his recording that it caught the attention of film composers. A song of a pregnant woman’s yearning for a tart lime turned into a song of seduction in Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam. Ghazi Khan was not acknowledged, and as for the unnamed women whose interior life it lyricised, they were nowhere in the picture.

Malini Nair is a culture writer and senior editor based in New Delhi. She can be reached at writermalini@gmail.com.