A requiem for Tamil lullaby

“Aaraaro aariraro,Aaradichcha nee azhuva,Adithavarai solli azhu”.Thalattu , the Tamil lullaby, has quietly been put to sleep. The unique Tamil folk genre nurtured family bonding and faith in divinity; it infused good qualities like compassion, altruism, respect and valour in the young and, above all, taught them the phonetic variants of ‘ra’ and ‘la,’ besides the unique ‘zha.’

It is one of the 119 varieties of folk songs identified in the Madurai region. But children today do not have the privilege of listening to the thalattu sung by their mother, grandmother or aunt.

In an attempt to rediscover the oral literature composed by unlettered women and handed down to their children and grandchildren, the Madurai station of All India Radio (AIR) has embarked on ‘Thalattum Thalattu,’ under Sansar Geeth project.

Armed with a microphone and recorder, a team consisting of B. Rajaram, Programme Executive, and S. Karthikai Deepan, Transmission Executive has travelled to 31 villages in six southern districts from March 13 and identified 113 lullaby singers and recorded 131 songs. “We could identify singers only in rural areas. In Madurai city, only a few were found in four pockets,” says Mr. Rajaram. The most interesting finding of the project is that the present generation of mothers is not even aware of thalattu . The mothers know the lullaby but do not sing it. But grandmothers, with all their disabilities, sing the cradle songs with full-throated ease.

The songs, with expert comments, are relayed by the Madurai station of AIR on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 8 p.m. The second set of songs will go on air from June 21.

How do mothers put their children to sleep now? Guess what most of them said? “We beat them!”

Published - June 12, 2016 08:02 am IST