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Introduction
The term purvi ("eastern"-it may also be spelled purbi or purabi) has three musical references. One is to a rag (e.g., Bor 1999,136). The second is the eastern style of the classical thumrl, sung in Lucknow and Varanasi. (This information was provided by a degreed teacher of Hindustani vocal music in Patna, Smt. Reena Sahay, and is corroborated by Slawek 1986, 201.) The third purvi, the focus of this article, is an entertainment genre that was sung at village weddings and other venues in the twentieth century and issued on 45-rpm records in the 1970s. Its melodic style and lyrical content provide the raw material for beautiful and highly emotive performances such as those by Ram Chandra Harijan (Henry 1981, Side B, #3), Usha Bhatt, and Vyas Vyas. (The latter two may be heard at http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/edhenry/index.html). The purvi melodic form is used in some ktrtan hymns, and the tunes and some of the lyrics have become incorporated to some degree in one of purvi's successors-lok git. (Appendix 1 presents five examples of lok git that utilize the main purvi melody.)
In previous analyses I have examined other kinds of Indian folk music with respect to intra-genre homogeneity and found that many genres-nirgun bhajan, kajali, qawwali, biraha and even some of the domestic women's song genres-are stylistically heterogeneous. (See Henry 1991, 221-42; Henry 2000, 90-92.) Purvi melodies stand in contradistinction to those: purvi displays more unity in melodic style than any other of the entertainment genres from this region. The theme of purvis lyrics is also considered homogeneous in the indigenous discourse. Some of the texts presented here fly in the face of that idea, but this can be explained as a terminal development in conformance with the entropic pattern commonly seen in Indian entertainment genres (see Henry 2000, 101-102). What follows is a brief history of the genre and its social contexts and a comparison of purvis from collected live performances, 45-rpm records, and printed sources to show their common, and shifting, features.
Performance and Social Contexts
In the 1970s villagers living in the Bhojpuri-speaking region (eastern Uttar Pradesh and western Bihar) enjoyed much more live music than they do today. Phonographs playing 45-rpm records (now extinct) encroached on live music in the...