Religious environmentalism and Magahi folk songs: An ecocritical study

Abstract

At the overlap of indigenous oral/religious tradition, ethnomusicology and Ecocriticism, the thesis proposes a detailed thematic analysis of Magahi folk songs. It is an indigenous oral tradition of Hinduism practiced in the Magadh region of Eastern India. Focusing on the theme of harmony between Nature and human beings, the study argues that Magahi folk culture provides a unique perspective in modern ecocritical thoughts by answering the recurrent queries asked by the discipline. Throughout its three decades of history, Ecocriticism has repeatedly questioned whether Nature can be perceived in non-anthropocentric terms by removing the human being as the sole purveyor and savior of ecology. The research argues that—despite the vast geo-political difference between Western Ecocriticism and Indian ethnic culturalism-- the Magahi song-texts can be read as a non-anthropocentric philosophy that regards Nature as an irreducible, agential deity that should be feared/revered, avoided/pleaded to, collaborated with/worshipped by the human beings. Divided into two parts, this thesis first talks about the aforementioned discourse of ‘perceiving’ Nature while avoiding the homocentric interest, then posits the archived and translated samples of Magahi song-texts as a possible embodiment of that, providing an intersection of ‘academic theory and pragmatic, indigenous eco-activism’.