________________
The Dhavala Songs
Quite obviously these songs were Sanskrit versions of some actual marriage songs current in the contemporary popular dialect. The refrain of this Kautuka-dhavala is a tell-tale evidence for this. This kautuka-dhavala is the earliest precursor of the phaṭāṇa songs sung currently during traditional wedding in Gujarat. Women on the side of the bride's and the bridegroom's party compete in humorous lampooning of the opposite side by means of traditional and improvised songs, which sometimes do not shun even coarse or bawdy expressions.
91
The account of the Dhavala in the literatures of the Indian regional languages is a vast subject and I can do here little more than touching a few broad points and features. Further, my observations are confined to the Gujarati and Rajasthani literatures. The rich tradition of the Marathi Dhavalas deserves a separate treatment.
The Dhavala in the traditional Gujarati and Rajasthani literatures is a song, a panegyric, in praise of a person for whom some ceremonial occasion is being celebrated. Wedding songs constitute a special class of Dhavalas, and the Dhols sung in the Vallabhaite Vaiṣṇava sect make up another class. Frequently the Dhavalas occur as wedding songs within a narrative poem, but there are independent compositions also called Dhavala. The type of poems known as Vivahalo in Old Gujarati describes the wedding of the hero, and either these poems contain a Dhavala song or they are synonymous with the latter. At times the marriage described is not real but allegorical: a hero going to the battle front or someone to be initiated as a monk in the Jain order is praised in terms of a bridegroom in the Dhavala song10. The Vaisnava Dhos are in praise of Kṛṣṇa, or of some Vallabhaite Acarya, or even of a sacred place personified e.g. the Yamuna river. In the later tradition, which continues till today, the term Dhol came to be loosely used even for poems about some episode in the life-account of a Puranic character or for those preaching worldly renunciation.
In his paper referred to earlier (see n. 6), Agarchand Nahta has given information about the general characteristics and function
