One man’s lifelong quest to collect, preserve and promote the folk songs of Uttar Pradesh

On monsoon evenings in Lucknow of the 1950s, people on the streets would often gather around transistor sets at tea and paan shops to catch a singularly charming voice singing folk songs of the season, such as kajris, saavans, jhoola and malhars. Women at home would sit ready with pens and notebooks to jot down the words of those songs to present at the next family gathering. And in the villages of Uttar Pradesh, the few houses that boasted a radio turned into community listening centres.

Such was the magic of Radhavallabh Chaturvedi’s music and Panchayat Ghar, his radio programme on folk art on Akashvani, Lucknow. There were songs, nautanki, plays and easy banter in Awadhi. A dynamic charm could be found in the airwaves as Chaturvedi chatted with his on-air collaborator, the satirist and poet Chandrabhushan Trivedi, who was better known as Ramai Kaka.

A trained classical musician, Chaturvedi worked at Akashvani, Lucknow from 1942 to 1974 and died just a year before he was to retire. But in the short 57 years of his life, he collected, notated, archived and presented 5,000 folk songs of Uttar Pradesh with a rare passion. He sang them of course but he also spotlighted the folk singers he...

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