Chronicling The Maya Of Folk Tunes

TNIE spotlights the Chandiroor Maya collective that has been documenting and popularising rustic songs rooted in the land's culture and history

- Aparna Nair

The tunes are earthy, sung skywards with the pathos of the soil, tamed, shaped, and made ready for the seeds to sprout. Music has always been there in the backdrop, supporting the farmers as they toiled on their land.

These tunes have been slowly fading into oblivion. Chandiroor Maya's tryst with music began here: the group wanted to learn, document, and preserve these songs so that the land and its people would never forget them as mere relics of the past.

"Maya or Mature and Abled Young's Association was formed in 1978 in an agricultural village named Chandiroor in Aroor panchayat on the Alappuzha-Ernakulam border. Those were times when green fields and verdant vegetation occupied swathes of land here," recalls Kamalasanan V A, a former government employee who was one of the founding members of the collective.

"All that has changed now, and so has our group. We began as a local recreation club where students and youngsters would get together to play badminton or some other games by the paddy fields and open grounds."

Except for Kamalasanan, all members of the original team have moved on in pursuit of jobs and livelihoods. "The team diverged from sports to the arts—first as a theatre group and then, from 1997 onwards, by incorporating folk tunes we gathered from across the state," he says.

The theatre plays staged by Chandiroor Maya reflected the 'son-of-the-soil' theme, focusing on stories from their own neighbourhood and the lives of people grappling with everyday struggles.