Ram in Everyday Life

A Qualitative Coding of Oral Performance, Devotion, and Mnemonic Landscapes in Haryanvi Women’s Folksongs

Abstract

This paper completes a trilogy examining the presence and evolving interpretations of Ram within Haryanvi folk culture. The earlier studies traced the processes through which epic narratives enter the vernacular domain and how digital media reshape the circulation of folk memory. Building on that foundation, the present study turns to Ram as an everyday, lived presence, with particular attention to women’s oral traditions. It investigates how these
traditions preserve cultural memory through vernacular forms of devotion, ritualized expression, and the intergenerational transfer of narrative knowledge, while also employing digital coding techniques to support long-term preservation. Across the selected songs, the utterance of “Ram” resonates far beyond its theological or epic genealogy. It mediates affective, ethical, and ritual dimensions of rural experience, allowing singers to articulate moral authority,
emotional endurance, and the structuring rhythms of domestic life. To analyse this complexity, the study undertakes qualitative coding of field-based transcriptions and regionally circulated recordings. This method enables a systematic engagement with the textual, performative, and situational nuances of major women’s genres—Kartik Snan, Pathwari, Suhag, Bhaat, Vidaai, and Saas-Bahu—each of which is represented through demonstrative written exemplars. The coding process illuminates recurring thematic patterns: Ram appears as a moral witness to domestic negotiations, as an interlocutor in the labour of kinship, and as a symbolic marker of seasonal, ritual, and familial cycles. Refrains and invocatory phrases operate as repositories of emotional charge and temporal pacing, while material imagery—gardens, ritual implements, sensory cues—anchors devotional expression within embodied, ecological, and household environments. Together, these coded performances form a vernacular archive that safeguards oral knowledge, emotional praxis, and cultural continuity. By foregrounding the interplay of text, texture, and context, the study demonstrates that Haryanvi women’s folk songs can be preserved through a rigorous qualitative coding framework capable of capturing regionspecific cultural forms. This methodological approach not only contributes to the documentation of oral traditions but also advances wider scholarly conversations on regional religiosity, gendered labour, and the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage.