The Bidesia Project

The Bidesia Project The Bidesia Project is a non-profit initiative that aims to conserve Bhojpuri folk culture by archiving, reviving and promoting oral music traditions.

Some died before reaching their destination. And the sea took them first.For many Hindu migrants crossing to Guyana, Sur...
08/09/2026

Some died before reaching their destination. And the sea took them first.

For many Hindu migrants crossing to Guyana, Suriname and Trinidad, the voyage already carried fears of ritual pollution, caste loss and separation from the sacred geography of home.

A death on board deepened that rupture: the person had crossed the Kaala Paani, and could not receive the cremation many families understood as a mandatory rite.

On the ships, death entered a bureaucratic regime. Surgeon-superintendents recorded the name, age, date and cause of death, then generally buried the body at sea.

What disappeared into the water was not only a life, but the possibility of cremation, ashes and the familiar sequence of mourning, the proper release of the soul that many Hindus understood as essential.

The sadness of the archive is that whole lives could collapse into one line entry. Research notes 35 deaths on the Leonidas before it reached Fiji, 31 on an early voyage to Suriname, and 98 aboard the Shand en route to British Guiana. Descendant work with Fiji ship passes has preserved records of infants who died on board too, children who disappeared into the ocean with no pyre, no ashes and no grave in India.

Writers like Gaiutra Bahadur help us understand what those lost lines conceal, showing how the colonial archive preserved only fragments of lives that were always larger than their paperwork.

At The Bidesia Project, we’re trying to hold on to what the archive left out.

07/09/2026

Longing becomes hardest to bear when you do not know if the person you love will return.

In Kahan Gaile Na, a woman is consumed by separation from the beloved who has left her behind.

Again and again, she asks the same question: where have you gone?

Her sorrow finds its way into everything around her.

A cuckoo calling in the garden echoes the ache in her heart. A fish struggling without water mirrors her own restlessness. A lamp burning inside a temple becomes an image for the pain that continues to burn within her.

Even the bed beside her remains empty.

Performed by Ajay Mishra from Chhapra, the song turns biraha, the pain of separation, into something almost physical.

Her beloved may be far away, but his absence is present everywhere: in the sounds she hears, the spaces she inhabits and the life that now feels uncertain without him.

Watch the full song here: https://youtu.be/DXKySjb-QVg?si=-cTz5snCKtdfw1k2

In 1916, a man taken from Bihar to British Guiana as indentured labour sat down and published a book of Bhojpuri Holi so...
06/09/2026

In 1916, a man taken from Bihar to British Guiana as indentured labour sat down and published a book of Bhojpuri Holi songs. Lalbihari Sharma just refused to let the music disappear with him.

He wasn’t alone in that instinct. Between 1845 and 1917, Indian indentured workers, many from Bhojpuri-speaking districts of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Awadh, were taken to Caribbean. What they carried was Holi songs, wedding verses, bhajans, birha, the Ramcharitmanas: music that had to survive without a script or a home to return to.

In each colony, these forms met new languages, instruments and musical neighbours, and changed shape.

In Guyana, Chowtal, a call-and-response Holi tradition, is still sung at Phagwa today, and chutney singer Nisha Benjamin’s “O Maninga” turns estate wages and food prices into song.

In Suriname, the language became known as Sarnami. Baithak gana grew around harmonium, dholak and dhantal, and Raj Mohan’s album “Dui Mutthi” later traced that migration story in music.

In Trinidad, Chutney took shape from wedding songs, bhajans, tassa and local classical music. Drupatee’s “Mr. Bissessar” later joined it with soca, carrying it to new audiences.

The recordings moved between Guyana, Suriname and Trinidad, then further out into the diaspora, holding on to Bhojpuri sound while recording labour, marriage, devotion and migration.

At The Bidesia Project, we’re tracing these songs back to where they began.

04/09/2026

“Jasoda ghare Krishna janamle,
teenahun lok sor bhaile ho.”

Krishna is born in Yashoda’s home, and the news resounds through all three worlds.

In the Bhojpuri folk tradition of Sohar, the story of Krishna’s birth moves from sacred narrative into the intimacy of the home.

Yashoda bathes little Kanhaiya, and they bring out his yellow pitambar.

The sakhis grind sandalwood and anoint Kanhaiya as they gather in celebration.

These small details capture the warmth and familiarity of an ordinary household welcoming a child.

This is what makes folk traditions so remarkable.

A story can travel across centuries, and each time it is sung, a community makes it its own.

Krishna becomes Kanhaiya, Yashoda becomes the mother at the centre of the celebration and an ancient story finds a home in the language and voices of the people singing it.

Today, we share with you a group performance from Deoria, Uttar Pradesh, offering one such glimpse into this living folk tradition.

For generations, folk songs have carried these stories through memory, from one voice to another.

And at the Bidesia Project, we continue to listen to and document these oral traditions and the many ways Bhojpuri folk music has held memory, belief and traditions together.

This Janmashtami, we celebrate the songs and voices that have kept these stories alive across generations.

From all of us, wishing you a very Happy Janmashtami.

03/09/2026

Some sorrows do not announce themselves. They stay buried inside the mind, like something ancient, sacred and too heavy to name.

In Mil Be Kari, our folk artist, Dilip Kumar Pandit from Bihar presents a really old Bhojpuri Ghazal by Anjan Kavi. Kavi compares his grief to the depth of Kashi and Lord Shiva’s presence.

What begins as a confession of pain slowly turns into a longing to be seen.

The unknown poet waits for the day when his words, once hidden in sorrow, may finally find light.

Listen to the full song on our archive on YouTube, where we document Bhojpuri folk songs to help conserve the art form.

The British didn’t go looking for labour just anywhere. They went looking for a specific kind and they found it in a ver...
02/09/2026

The British didn’t go looking for labour just anywhere. They went looking for a specific kind and they found it in a very specific place.

After slavery was abolished, sugar colonies from Mauritius to Fiji to British Guiana still needed workers who could be tied down by contract and worked under plantation discipline.

What they found in the Bhojpuri belt, the crowded agrarian districts of eastern Uttar Pradesh and western Bihar, wasn’t one reason but a whole stack of them: small plots that couldn’t support a family, debt to moneylenders that never really got paid off, caste pressure, failed harvests, and a region already tied by rail and river to the port city of Calcutta. None of that made the people there different from people anywhere else. It made them reachable.

They were also already used to leaving. Long before indenture, men from this region left home for jobs in towns, army cantonments, railway construction, the tea gardens of Assam.

That habit of leaving for work is exactly what the arkatiyas, the local recruiters of the indenture system, learned to use. They went to markets, fairs, railway stations, and pilgrimage routes, looking for people who were poor and indebted.

From there it was Calcutta: registration, a medical exam, a ship. On paper, everyone who boarded had agreed to go. In practice, many didn’t fully understand what they’d signed or where they were headed, and some who changed their minds found there was no way back once they’d reached the depot.

This is how an entire region became one of empire’s biggest labour-supply zones, not because its people were built for plantation work, but because colonial poverty had made them reachable, and the system knew exactly where to look.

What they carried with them wasn’t only labour. It was Bhojpuri words, songs, rituals, food memories, grief, and longing, which is exactly why this region isn’t just central to the history of indenture. It’s central to Girmitiya memory itself.

Follow The Bidesia Project to discover more such stories on our YouTube channel.

01/09/2026

Some losses leave behind a question no one can answer.

In Yeh Paar Ganga Baahe, a woman mourns a beloved who has died from a snakebite.

She turns to a friend in her grief, asking what she is supposed to do now that he is gone.

But there is no consolation waiting for her.

Instead, the song moves towards the unbearable weight of separation, as she says that she will grieve for him until she too dies.

Performed by Vijay Vishwakarma and his group from Ghazipur, Uttar Pradesh, this old Nirgun song gives sorrow a voice that is stark and immediate.

There are no elaborate descriptions of loss here.

Only a beloved who is gone, a woman left behind and the helplessness of having to imagine life after him.

31/08/2026

Today is Kajri Teej, also known as Kajli Teej or Badi Teej, a Hindu festival celebrated by women who worship Lord Shiva and Goddess Parvati for marital harmony and family well-being.

In 2017, writer Nandini Majumdar documented a Teej gathering in Nagwa, Varanasi.

She described how women gathered under a neem tree outside the home of Shanti, who was hosting the local Teej festival party, and sang Kajri together.

The songs spoke of Sawan, mehndi, marriage, longing and going to one’s sasural.

Many of these songs had never been formally written down or recorded, but had continued to survive through women singing them across generations.

Interestingly, Kajri also changes from region to region.

Mirzapuri, Benarasi and Ghazipuri Kajri differ in rhythm and style, with verses about separation, swings and everyday life.

The Kajri you hear here is Jhoola Dheere Se, performed by Dr Revati Sakalkar for The Bidesia Project.

In the song, Radha asks Krishna to push the swing gently, bringing together tenderness, devotion and the familiar monsoon imagery of the jhoola.

Just like this Kajri, many other folk songs carry regional histories, language and lived experiences.

Archiving them becomes especially important, as they may otherwise disappear over time.

So this Kajri Teej, take a few minutes to explore Kajri and other Bhojpuri folk traditions in our YouTube archive, and help keep them from being lost to time.

29/08/2026

In a country of hot summers, the arrival of black monsoon clouds brings relief and joy, expressed through the Bhojpuri folk form, Kajari.

Dark clouds gathered, paddy fields filled with water and Kajari returned with Sawan.

The word Kajari is possibly derived from ‘kajal’, meaning kohl and black.

This genre often depicts stories of Radha and Krishna – the iconic imagery of divine lovers. Other themes include the mango tree, the kadam tree, and the jhoolas or swings that are built on these trees.

The songs grew within the monsoon landscape of eastern Uttar Pradesh and western Bihar, especially around Mirzapur and Banaras.

But Kajari was never only about rain.

Its verses often carried viraha, the ache of separation from husbands and lovers who were away, turning the season into a space where longing could be sung aloud.

Women also performed Kajari together, whether while working in the fields or through traditions such as Dhunmuniya, where movement, rhythm and collective singing became part of the experience.

Later, Kajari travelled into Banaras’s semi-classical repertoire and concert stages, carried by celebrated voices such as Siddheshwari Devi.

Across these different settings, its emotional world remained rooted in everyday experience.

Perhaps that is why women’s folk songs have been described as “collective diaries of women”: they hold feelings and histories that may otherwise leave little written trace.

The Bidesia Project presents a Kajari song by Dr. Revati Sakalkar from Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh.

Listen to the full song on our YouTube channel.

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