AVTAR MOTA
In the Bhagwad Gita, ( Sloka 35 of Chapter 10) Sri Krishna tells Arjuna:-
“ Bhat-sāma tathā sāmnā
Gāyatrī chhandasām aham |
Māsānā mārgaśīrho ’ham
Rtūnā kusumākara ||
(Among the Sāma hymns, I am the Bhat Sāma;
Among poetic metres, I am the Gāyatrī.
Among months, I am Mārgaśīra,
And among seasons, I am spring, the source of flowers.)
‘Among the Sama hymns, I am the Bhat Sāma’
I will only refer to the first line of this great Sloka. Bhat Sāma is one of the most splendid and spread-out hymns of the Sāma Veda, sung during important Vedic rituals. It is a specific, highly elaborate chant of the Sāma Veda. It belongs to the Vedic Yajna tradition, sung by trained priests. It is scriptural, liturgical, and ritual-specific, with strict melodic structures (sāmans). Its purpose is cosmic alignment through sacred sound, not social or folk expression. So Bha-Sāma is: elite Vedic ritual music, preserved in textual and priestly lineages. It symbolises grandeur, spiritual resonance, and devotional depth. Sri Krishna means that wherever sacred sound reaches its highest elevation, that brilliance is His manifestation. The word “Sāma” means melody or song, and the Samaveda is revered as the Veda of Chants. It is the very soul of Indian music, the sacred foundation where Bhakti (devotion), Shraddha (faith), and Swara (melody) unite to create a profound spiritual experience. Sri Krishna elevates the Samaveda to the highest place when he tells Arjuna:
“Among the Vedas, I am the Samaveda; among the celestial gods, I am Indra. Among the senses, I am the mind; among living beings, I am consciousness.”— (Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 10, Verse 22)
Kashmiri Vānvun does not descend directly from the Bhat-Sāma of the Sāma Veda in a linear historical sense. However, both emerge from a shared and ancient Indian understanding of sacred sound as an operative, world-constituting force, rather than as aesthetic music. Vanvun is not just a poetic form; it is ritualised memory. Traditionally sung by women during rites of passage in Kashmir, such as birth, marriage, and seasonal change. It works as a living archive, carrying history, myth, and collective emotion through rhythm and repetition. This makes it a powerful bridge between cosmic myth and human experience.
In the Sāma Veda—especially in expansive chants such as Bhat-Sāma—sound is not composed for pleasure or artistic display. It is elongated, vowel-dominant, ritualised, and effective. The chant functions to align the human, cosmic, and divine orders through nāda. Meaning is secondary to resonance; grammar dissolves into vibration. Time is ritual time, not chronological time.
A strikingly similar sound logic governs Kashmiri Vānvun. Though situated in domestic and communal life rather than in yajña ritual, Vānvun is likewise non-entertainment sound. It is obligatory, performative, and efficacious. Sound does not describe auspiciousness; it produces it. Like Sāma chanting, Vānvun prioritises vowel elongation, cyclical unfolding, collective voicing, and suspension of ordinary temporal awareness.
The conceptual bridge between these two traditions becomes clearer when viewed through Kashmiri Śaiva metaphysics. Kashmir was not merely a recipient of Vedic culture, but a region where Vedic sound-ritual consciousness was reinterpreted through Tantric Śaivism. In Śaiva philosophy, particularly in the doctrines of Nāda and Spanda, sound is Śakti in motion, emerging from the silent luminosity (Prakāśa) of Śiva.
Vānvun embodies this metaphysics in lived ritual form. The silence preceding the chant corresponds to Śiva as unmoving awareness. The first elongated voice marks the awakening of Śakti as vibration. As voices gather and individual authorship dissolves into collective resonance, the chant enacts the Śaiva movement from pure consciousness to manifested communal form. Māyā is not negated but embraced, allowing metaphysics to enter human life through marriage, birth, and blessing.
In this sense, Vānvun may be understood as a domestic, feminised, vernacular enactment of an ancient nāda-centric worldview, one that also underlies the Sāma Veda. The connection is not musical genealogy, but ontological continuity—a shared civilizational intuition that sound, when ritually released, alters reality.
Kashmiri Vānvun may be better understood, within a Kashmiri Śaiva interpretive framework, as a domestic and communal enactment of the Śiva–Śakti tattva schema, in which sound emerges from stillness, assumes ritual form, and resolves into collective resonance. Typically, Vānvun begins with silence—the attentive stillness of the gathered women. In Śaiva philosophy, Śiva tattva is Prakāśa, pure and unmoving awareness, and this silence may be read as corresponding to that ground of consciousness. Vānvun consistently arises from silence rather than from ambient noise, indicating that sound is released deliberately as a ritual act.
The first vocal intonation, often initiated by an elder woman, introduces an elongated sound. In Śaiva doctrine, Śakti is vibration (Spanda), and the onset of sound may be interpreted as the activation of this vibratory principle. As the lead voice names the ritual context, such as the bride, groom, or blessing, sound acquires referential form while remaining expansive, corresponding to the Sadāśiva stage in which awareness begins to recognise itself through differentiation. With the emergence of a collective response, individual vocal identity dissolves into shared resonance, a movement that may be aligned with Īśvara tattva, wherein the relation between subject and object is reorganised, and the community itself becomes the locus of articulation.
Repetition, emotional inflexion, and human variation situate Vānvun within Śuddha-Vidyā and Māyā tattvas. Here, Māyā is not a defect but the principle that allows metaphysical sound consciousness to enter lived, domestic ritual life. In this sense, Vānvun may be seen as Śaiva metaphysics enacted through practice rather than articulated through formal doctrine.
In 2015, I visited Bali, Indonesia. I visited several temples during the evening, when the deity was being worshipped with both vocal and instrumental music. I could feel a strong resemblance to Sāma Veda chants. I was told the following by a Balinese scholar:
“Balinese temple music aligns strongly with Vedic sound logic, particularly that of the Sāma Veda, at the level of principle rather than melody. I mean sound as operative power. Like Vedic chant, Balinese temple music is not meant for entertainment but for ritual efficacy—to sanctify space, invoke presence, and regulate cosmic order. Much Balinese sacred music emphasises sustained sonority, cyclical repetition, and layered vibration rather than linear melodic development—an approach consistent with the aesthetics of Vedic chanting. Performances unfold according to ritual sequence, not concert duration, echoing Vedic yajña-time rather than aesthetic time. Some forms of Balinese temple chanting, such as kakawin recitation and priestly mantra intonation, show features comparable to Vedic chant: elongation of vowels, controlled pitch zones rather than melodic freedom, collective or antiphonal sound fields, and the dissolution of individual vocal identity into ritual sound. These features closely resemble Sāma-style sound behaviour, even though the musical languages differ.”
Every verse of the Vanvun may be understood as a generative seed (bīja), containing within it a latent cosmology that becomes actualised through sound. When articulated within the sonic discipline exemplified by the Sāmaveda and interpreted through the metaphysical framework of Shaiva Tattvas, these verses are not merely recited but brought into manifestation. Sound, in this tradition, is not a vehicle for meaning alone; it is a transformative force that unfolds concealed potential into audible and experiential form. Our ancestors did not approach these verses as static repositories of wisdom. Rather, they engaged them as living structures, animated through rhythm, pitch, and collective utterance. Chanting functioned as an act of ontological participation, wherein speech moved beyond symbolic reference to assume a world-creating role. Each Vanvun chant thus enacts a progression—from articulated word to embodied world, and from the manifested world toward the divine principle that underlies it. This movement reflects a Shaiva understanding of reality in which the sacred is not opposed to the worldly but revealed through it, and where sound serves as the mediating power that bridges human expression and transcendent order.
Thus, Kashmiri Vānvun stands not as “folk music” but as Śaiva metaphysics and Vedic sound consciousness lived through voice, preserved outside texts yet faithful to one of India’s oldest understandings of sacred sound.
Avtar Mota is a bloger and writes for local and national papers and magazines
