Chai, Aata & the Quiet Cost of Village Music

Heard, Unheard: Stories from the Roots

Gopal Singh Chouhan I gopalpostbox@gmail.com

Folk artist Mir basu from Pugal, teaching music in his courtyard

Two photographs (See image 1 & 2 below), taken minutes apart in the same courtyard, tell a story that no interview could fully capture.

In the first, an older man sits cross-legged on a tiled floor, both hands wrapped around a wide steel bowl (Pyala) of chai. His head is bowed slightly towards the warmth. Beside him, an empty cup sits on the mat.

The connection between tea and music is not something I discovered through these photographs. I have known it since childhood. In the town where I grew up, an all-night gathering of music was never complete without tea. We called these nights jagran or satsang-long hours of singing, listening, conversation and simply sitting together until morning. And through all those hours, one thing was constant: chai.

Someone would make a large pot. Cups would keep appearing. As the night grew deeper, the tea would return again and again. Musicians would drink it between songs, while tuning their instruments, while talking and sometimes even while performing. Ten cups in a day would not be unusual; fifteen would not surprise anyone either.

In the second photograph, a musician's fingers press wet wheat flour- plain atta, the same flour used for the household's daily roti - onto the taut skin of his Tabla. He works it in with a small metal blade, spreading it carefully across the centre of the drumhead. It is an old solution to a familiar problem. When the drum loses its pitch, a little flour and water can bring the sound back into shape. It costs almost nothing. Except that the flour comes from the same grain that feeds the family.

Looking back, I realise that chai was not merely something we drank during these gatherings. It was part of the gathering itself. It helped hold the night together. Even today, in many rural communities, a whole-night jagran or satsang is unthinkable without tea. You can perhaps manage without many things, but somehow the chai has to keep coming.

There is a rishta between chai and our folk music tradition - something closer to kinship than habit—that is difficult to separate. The tea accompanies the music, but it also accompanies the relationships around the music: the sitting together, the waiting, the conversations between songs, the passing of stories from one person to another.

Which is why the price of sugar, or the cost of a cup of tea, is not quite as insignificant as it might appear.

When sugar becomes a luxury

Image 1 : A man holding Chai-Pyala during the music session.

For a household with a regular income, a rise in the price of sugar may be an irritation. For a folk musician whose earnings are seasonal and uncertain- dependent on festivals, weddings, community gatherings, or the occasional patron - it becomes another calculation in a day already full of them.

How much sugar goes into the next pot of tea? Who gets a cup? Is it still possible to offer tea to everyone who has come to sit and sing?

These decisions may never appear in any account book. Yet they are part of the economics of music. In many of these communities, tea is not simply something to drink. It creates the space in which music happens. It keeps people sitting together, through rehearsals, conversations, stories, long evenings of singing.

When something as ordinary as tea becomes harder to afford, one small part of that social world begins to contract.

Image 2 : Musician applying wet Aata onto the taut skin of his Tabla

When the instrument needs what the family needs

The flour on the Tabla tells a similar story, perhaps a harder one.

A musician needs an instrument that can hold its pitch. That requires maintenance, materials, and sometimes money to repair or replace what is worn out. But when money is scarce, the solution is often whatever is already within reach. In this case, it is wheat flour - the same handful that could have gone into the family's next meal, used instead to make the drum speak again.

It is tempting to look at such practices as examples of ingenuity - and they are. But there is another story folded into them: the household is absorbing some of the cost of keeping the music alive. That cost is rarely listed on an invoice. It shows up instead as the musician's time, the upkeep of the instrument, the tea offered to fellow players, the grain used to tune a drum. The boundary between sustaining the family and sustaining the music is not always clear.

"There is no work left for them"

While I sat in the artist's room, an elderly villager who had joined us put it more plainly than I could. He told me that many of the musicians in the area have quietly stopped playing altogether. Not because the songs have been forgotten, or because a younger generation has lost interest, but because there is no longer enough paid work to survive on. One by one, he said, these artists have gone to work as labourers instead - on farms, on construction sites, wherever a day's wage is on offer.

It reframes both photographs. The flour on the drumhead is not simply a clever workaround; it is what a musician does when he still has an instrument and a reason, however slim, to keep it playable. Somewhere nearby, other musicians no longer have even that. Their drums sit unplayed while they carry bricks or work someone else's field, because a family cannot eat on the promise of a wedding booking that may or may not come.

The cost that isn't written down

Neither photograph is dramatic. There is no visible crisis, no one asking for help. And yet, sitting with them, and with what that old man said, a pattern comes into focus.

The erosion of a musician's world rarely arrives as a single crisis. It arrives as a smaller cup of tea. A little less sugar. A repair postponed, then abandoned. A handful of flour is used for the drum instead of the kitchen. And, eventually, for some, a drum set down for good in favour of a labourer's wage.

We often speak of preserving folk music through performances, festivals, recordings and audiences. All of that matters. But behind every performance is a far more ordinary economy- the cost of the musician's time, the instrument, the journey, the food, the tea, and the household that makes it possible for someone to keep showing up at all.

I think back to those nights from my childhood, when the singing would continue until the first light and the tea never stopped coming. Today, when I see a musician tuning his Tabla with the same flour meant for his family's roti, or hear that his neighbour has traded his instrument for a labourer's tools, I see the same story from a different angle.

The music was never separate from everyday life. Its costs have always been carried quietly by the household and the community. What has changed is how much less that household and that community are able to carry.