Teejan Bai claimed her right to sing
One will probably remember the remarkable talent of Chhattisgarhi folk musician Teejan Bai , who died in Raipur on Sunday at 69, as an innate gift. But what was often admired as genius was her extraordinary resolve. In Ganiyari village, where singing on any public platform was forbidden for women, people didn’t want their daughters to become like Teejan, the 10-year-old, who under the pretext of collecting cow dung for the hearth would escape to the ponds, fields and naalas to belt out the verses of Pandavani — an oral storytelling tradition from Chhattisgarh, where a lone performer combines music and narration to bring a story from the Mahabharata to life. The sun would go down and Teejan would return home, only to be shunned by family and community because she dared to sing a form that was a preserve of men. Married at 12, she would run away from her husband’s home at 13 to live alone in a neighbouring village to become Teejan Bai, the first woman to perform Pandavani professionally from the Pardhi community. For decades, one saw Teejan become the Pandavas, Kauravas, Krishna, Bhishma and Karna, shifting effortlessly between characters, conjuring kingdoms and battlefields, with just her voice and an ektara. In the 1970s, Urdu playwright Habib Tanvir, struck by her talent, brought her into Naya Theatre, introducing her to a national audience. She later appeared in Shyam Benegal’s Bharat Ek Khoj and received the Padma Vibhushan and the Sangeet Natak Akademi award. But perhaps her greatest achievement lay in winning the hardest battle to begin with: Claiming her right to sing.
- 1Teejan Bai's life illustrates how Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution, which protects freedom of speech and expression, extends to artistic and cultural expression, while Article 15(1) prohibits discrimination on grounds of sex. Her exclusion from a male-only performing tradition shows how social custom can suppress constitutional freedoms long before the state does. Institutions such as the Sangeet Natak Akademi, set up in 1953 as India's national academy for music, dance and drama, exist to recognise and preserve such folk traditions.
- 2Her story is inseparable from the cultural identity of Chhattisgarh, which was carved out of Madhya Pradesh in November 2000 under the Madhya Pradesh Reorganisation Act as India's twenty-sixth state. Pandavani, based on the Mahabharata, is among the state's most recognised cultural exports, and Teejan Bai carried it to global stages decades before statehood. Her journey from a village that barred women from public singing to international acclaim tracks the wider struggle of women performers across Indian folk traditions.
- 3On the legal significance of national honours, the Supreme Court in Balaji Raghavan v. Union of India (1996) upheld the constitutional validity of the Padma awards, ruling that they are not 'titles' prohibited by Article 18, though they cannot be used as prefixes or suffixes to names. The Padma awards, instituted in 1954, are announced each Republic Day under three categories. Teejan Bai's Padma Vibhushan places her among the rare folk artists honoured at the second-highest civilian level.
- 4Teejan Bai received the Padma Shri in 1988, the Padma Bhushan in 2003 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2019, a three-decade arc of official recognition that very few folk performers have matched. She began performing professionally as a teenager after being married at twelve and leaving her husband's home at thirteen, and she died at sixty-nine in Raipur. Her career demonstrates the economic and social mobility that mastery of a single oral tradition, performed with one ektara, could create.