Professor Paramjeet Singh performs "Maye Ni Maye," a Punjabi kirtan in raag Jait that recounts a woman's love affair with a hawk—a richly metaphorical exploration of desire, passion, and abandonment. Through intensely sensory imagery drawn from nature (plumage, fragrance, color, movement), the poem traces the trajectory of infatuation and the devastating rupture when the beloved departs. The performance demonstrates how classical Indian music and folk poetics can render invisible emotional pain into a tangible, embodied experience.
The hawk operates on multiple registers in "Maye Ni Maye." On its surface, it is a literal bird—adorned with a plume on his head and bells on his feet, arriving to peck grain. But as the poem unfolds, the hawk becomes the beloved, the lover, the object of desire whose beauty is so overwhelming that the narrator loses all rational restraint. The hawk's arrival ("o chog chuginda aaya"—he came pecking for grain) is both mundane and charged with significance. What begins as a casual encounter ripens into erotic obsession.
The hawk's external beauty is catalogued with stunning specificity: his form is "as sharp as perfume," his color "the color of rose, born from a fair mother." These are not incidental details. In Punjabi poetic tradition, to describe a beloved's appearance in such detail is to construct a fantasy—to layer projection onto presence. The hawk becomes less a creature and more a screen for the narrator's own longing. When he finally leaves, the poem suggests, he was never truly present in the way the narrator imagined.
One of the most striking features of "Maye Ni Maye" is its refusal to speak about emotion directly. Instead, Professor Paramjeet Singh's performance of the text floods the listener with sensory snapshots that cumulatively create the texture of desire and despair. The poem does not say "I was in love"; it shows: "I laid a bed of love in the moonlight / my body sheet was stained / the instant he laid his foot on my bed."
This move from preparation (laying the bed) to violation (the stain) is instantaneous and irreversible. The body's sheet becomes marked—not by shared intimacy, but by the imprint of the beloved's presence alone. The physical becomes the proof of loss.
Later, the sensory inventory continues: his eyes were "an evening in spring," his hair "a dark cloud," his lips "a rising autumn dawn." These are not metaphors in the conventional sense; they are acts of translation, converting human features into the only language capacious enough to contain their effect: the language of seasons, weather, and light. To encounter such a beloved is to lose the distinction between self and world.
The poem's turning point arrives when pain becomes bodily: "Corners of my eyes hurt / a flood of tears engulfed me." The narrator spends all night thinking about "what he did to me." The shift is crucial. The beloved has become an agent of harm. His beauty, once the object of worship, is now implicated in cruelty. The poem never resolves this paradox: how can something so beautiful inflict such damage?
The body in "Maye Ni Maye" is not a vessel for abstract emotion—it is the primary text. The narrator attempts to cleanse herself of the beloved's imprint through ritual washing ("vattna"—a paste used for skin cleansing). But her hands flag with exhaustion, and "embers kept bursting out." Even as she tries to purify herself, the body refuses to cooperate. It retains the mark, the heat, the memory.
The poem then catalogs acts of domestic devotion: preparing choorma (a traditional sweet dish), offering "the flesh of my heart" to the hawk. These are offerings, sacrifices, attempts to bind the beloved through nourishment and care. But the hawk does not eat. He accepts nothing. The act of giving becomes a form of self-annihilation—the narrator has given so much of herself that there is nothing left to withstand his departure.
The final devastation arrives quietly: "He took such a takeoff / never came back home." The body, exhausted from its attempts to please and purify, is left alone with its knowledge. The poem does not offer consolation or transcendence. It sits in the sharp reality of abandonment: the beloved has flown away, and the narrator remains earthbound.
Raag Jait is not a raga that delivers easy resolution. It is a morning raga, associated with energy and assertion, yet in Professor Paramjeet Singh's hands—through the Punjab folk content and the minor emotional register of the text—it becomes a container for intensity that refuses to settle. The melodic structure allows the human voice to stretch, to dwell on certain frequencies, to repeat phrases in ways that embed them in the listener's nervous system.
The performance demonstrates a key principle of classical Indian music: the raga is not a fixed sequence of notes but a way of organizing emotional and temporal space. By setting this Punjabi folk poem to raag Jait, Professor Paramjeet Singh elevates the vernacular to the classical, suggesting that the pain of abandonment is not a private sorrow but a universal register—one worthy of the attention and technical precision of the classical tradition.
The phrase "Maye Ni Maye" (Mother, O Mother) frames the entire poem. It is an invocation, a call to the divine mother, to the witness, to compassion itself. Yet the poem never tells us what the narrator is asking for. Is she calling for intervention? Forgiveness? Simple acknowledgment of her pain? The ambiguity is essential. The refrain holds the poem's contradictions: the beloved is a hawk, a lover, a thief, an agent of destruction. The mother-invocation suggests that only a force outside the realm of human relations—a transcendent, unconditional presence—could possibly comprehend what has occurred.
To engage more deeply with this work, listen to the full performance multiple times, paying attention to how Professor Paramjeet Singh's voice moves through the raag, which syllables he elongates, where he introduces silence. Consult translations of classical Punjabi poetry, particularly from the Bhakti tradition, to understand how devotional language often borrows the vocabulary of earthly love. Consider how other South Asian classical traditions (Hindustani, Carnatic) use similar devices—the metaphorical beloved, the raga as emotional architecture—to contain and transmit experiences that ordinary speech cannot hold. Finally, explore the relationship between folk and classical traditions in Indian music: how folk poems enter the repertoire of trained musicians, how the vernacular and the canonical inform each other.
