Is There Singing in the Time of Crisis? Sounding Flood Songs of Coastal and Riverine Malabar in the Indian Ocean

Abstract

This study examines the flood songs of Malabar written as performative literary texts in the Arabi-Malayalam language that were prevalent among the Muslim community of Malabar in the twentieth century. These songs were written as eyewitness accounts of the historical monsoon floods that afflicted the coastal regions and hinterlands of Malabar on the shores of the western Indian Ocean. Flood songs as a genre offer a combined understanding of ecology, religion and performance of the recurrent floods that occurred in twentieth-century Malabar. They also provide details about the importance of collective memorialisation and the commemoration strategies adopted to record the seasonal disastrous floods which still afflict the region. This paper puts forth two fundamental questions regarding flood songs: first, how did flood songs ideologically define and internalise the origins and causes of environmental disasters in an oceanic-riverine complex? Second, how did these songs aesthetically express the religious experience of the flood, adaptations to them, and ways of managing the risks they imposed? This study investigates the unique manifestations of spirituality, music/sound and nature and the environment in the flood songs of Malabar, topics which remain unexplored in academic literature.