When a Village Chooses Folk Over DJs

Heard, Unheard: Stories from the Roots

Gopal Singh Chouhan I gopalpostbox@gmail.com

It was a hot afternoon in Bikaner, and Mir Basu Barkat Khan had dropped by the office as he often does whenever he's in town. There was no agenda to the visit. He settled into the chair across from mine, and we did what we usually do: caught up. How's the family, how's the harvest been, who's getting married this season, are his village kids still practising. The kind of conversation you have with someone you've known a while, not the kind you plan.

Somewhere in between the small talk, almost as an aside, he mentioned something that made me put my chai down.

A few neighbouring villages, he said, have collectively decided not to use DJs at weddings and community celebrations anymore. Instead, they've started inviting local folk musicians to perform.

He wasn't announcing it like it was big news. For him, it was simply what had been happening in his own life lately and the result of it had been remarkable enough that he'd naturally brought it up while telling me how things were going.

After years of struggling to find performances, he told me, he's now getting regular invitations to sing at weddings again. For him, this isn't just more work, it's the return of dignity to his art and a dependable source of income, at a time in his life when that matters more than ever.

I asked him why he thought this shift was happening now. He said the elders behind this decision felt that celebrations had gradually become louder but not necessarily richer. They also felt that the culture around high-volume DJ nights was influencing young people in unhealthy ways. Some of the older folks, he said, also spoke of it the way their parents used to, the sense that a family's celebration was somehow incomplete without "their" musicians present, the way it always used to be. Whether everyone would agree with that assessment or not, what came through clearly was this: the community wanted celebrations that felt more rooted, more participatory, and more their own.

I've known Mir Basu for a while now, his family's music, his lineage, the weight of what he carries every time he sings. He is a hereditary Mirasi musician from Khanarwala, a village about 25 kilometres from Pugal in the Bikaner region, part of a centuries-old line that has kept the oral traditions of the Thar Desert alive. He sings the verses of Khwaja Ghulam Farid, Kabir, Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai, Bulleh Shah, moving between Saraiki, Punjabi, Sindhi, Rajasthani, and Hindi as easily as he moves between subjects in a conversation, carrying poetry of love, longing, and spiritual awakening to audiences who may not share his language but somehow still feel what he's singing.

There is a small, quiet sadness in even saying his village's name out loud. Khanarwala doesn't officially exist on paper anymore. After the Indira Gandhi Canal reached the area, the village was renamed 3 DKD, a distributary code, a coordinate on an irrigation map. A place that carried a name, a history, a memory, reduced to letters and numbers because a canal needed to be labelled. It's hard not to notice the quiet parallel: an identity erased by a system that had no room for what came before it, not unlike what a decade of DJ nights nearly did to the very tradition Mir Basu carries. Perhaps that's part of why this story matters so much, some things we lose to convenience and infrastructure can be sung back into memory, even if they can never be written back onto a map.

A place that carried a name, a history, a memory, reduced to letters and numbers because a canal needed to be labelled.

Hearing him talk about these wedding invitations so casually, almost in passing, is what made the moment stay with me. This wasn't a press release or a policy win. It was a friend telling me, over chai, that people were choosing to hear him again.

That afternoon made me pause and think about something we've asked for years: how do folk traditions survive in the modern world? We look to policies, grants, institutions, and festivals for answers. All of that matters. But maybe one of the most powerful solutions has been sitting right in front of us the whole time, and it isn't even new.

For centuries, musician communities across Rajasthan like Mir Basu's have survived through the Jajmani system, a relationship of patronage where families of musicians, artisans, and service providers were attached to specific patron families, performing at their weddings, births, and festivals in exchange for support that was as much social as it was economic. It wasn't charity. It was an understood, reciprocal bond passed down through generations on both sides, the patron family and the musician family growing up knowing they belonged to each other's celebrations.

That system has weakened over the decades, pulled apart by migration, changing economies, and, yes, the convenience of a DJ and a speaker system. So when these villages near Pugal chose to invite folk musicians back to their weddings, they weren't discovering something new. They were returning to something that had always been theirs, reviving a jajmani-like bond between the families who celebrate and the families who have sung at those celebrations for generations.

Communities themselves.

Every wedding that chooses a local singer instead of a playlist creates employment. Every village that celebrates with its own musicians keeps centuries-old traditions alive. Every child who grows up listening to a Manganiyar, a Langa, a Bhopa, or someone like Mir Basu inherits something no speaker system can ever reproduce, a living cultural memory.

Mir Basu understands this inheritance better than most, and he doesn't just perform it, he passes it on. As a Folk Music Fellow with Malang Folk Foundation, he leads village-based music learning initiatives in western Rajasthan, mentoring children and young musicians in traditional singing styles, repertoire, and the philosophy underneath it all. He's also been a regular artist with the Rajasthan Kabir Yatra, introducing audiences across India to the lesser-known Saraiki traditions of the Thar Desert. But that afternoon in my office, none of those titles came up. He was just Mir Basu, telling me his phone had been ringing more than usual lately.

This is not a campaign against DJs. There will always be a place for contemporary music and technology. But there should also be a place for the voices that have carried our stories across generations.

Imagine if every village reserved even one part of every wedding, festival, or celebration for local musicians. Imagine what that would mean, not just for artists like Mir Basu, but for culture itself.

Perhaps preserving folk traditions isn't as complicated as we often think.

Perhaps it begins with a simple invitation, the kind a few villages near Pugal have already extended.

"Come, sing at our celebration."

If you know of similar initiatives anywhere in India, please share them with us. We'd love to document and celebrate these stories.

Folk First. Always.