Lullaby

                                                                                             Prafulla Kumar Mohanty

Years ago there was no electricity; kerosene or castor oil was at a premium for the poor village folk , life was slow and the rhythms of reality were tuneless. Those days rearing children was also a challenge for the rural poor. When night came like a wave of murk enveloping the contours of visible reality the mothers wanted the little ones to sleep away the night. Feeding them early and taking them to bed was otherwise necessitated to give the womenfolk especially the young mothers some rest and respite to attend to other chores in the family. To lull the young ones to sleep the mothers usually sang lullabies using the backs of the children for caressing rhythms. Music has a soporific effect not only on children but also on men and women of all ages. Music soothes the frayed nerves. For the children the lyric was not important as they were too young to understand but the rhythms,the tune and particularly the mother’s reassuring love sent them to sleep. Poets in the villages and towns wrote lyrics for lori or lullabies. In Odia lullaby is called ‘Nanabaya Gita’. Baya is not suggestive of madness, baya was used by the poets and mothers to mean innocence. The small child was taken through the lyric and the tune to a fairyland of celestial joy. In my childhood, I remember my mother sing a sister of mine to sleep. The lyric was ‘Dho re baya dho, jeyun kiari re gahala mandia sei kiare re so.’Although this is a lullaby it has a deeper interior of human truth. Surface realism and mysticism have been intertwined to create melodic charm and a hallowed kind of mystic joy for the child. Often the moon is invoked by mothers to fall in the hand of a child –O uncle moon of heaven/descend on the palm of my kanhu- as if Yasodha is singing Krishna to sleep. The mother’s elevation to an epical height and the child’s identification with Krishna make the lyric exotic.

In the Bollywood films lori continued almost to the eighties. In poetry it was seldom used even during the last quarter of the last century .The Lullaby, grandma tales and story telling to induce sleep in  a child have vanished from the urban scene altogether. In the villages too the joys of electricity have brought in their train ,the Radio, TV and after the mobile phone came,the video games and other electronic games. The modern society in the name of cultural evolution and sophisticated living has left behind the relics of the past. Life is so fast paced today that little boys and girls sleep alone, without their parents,whiling away the lonely hours with gadgets which bring glaciated mountains and Stone Age horrors to their gleeful imagination. Human beings at every stage of history are born into social groups behaving in a particular manner in response to the challenges of their times.When living eases the imitable patterns of cultural inheritance change. Fear, fatalism and existential crisis have now been overcome to a large extent. Naturally the mystic rhythms of the lullaby have now been given a go by. Parents compel their sleepy children, at times even forcefully, to study, learn so as to compete for survival.

The lullaby is now needed more by adults than children to snatch a few hours of sleep for the call of the morn. And the lullaby is replaced by sleeping pills or Patiala pegs.