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Paper short abstract

Hai-i-Alun is a Ballad narrating the birth of the Weather Goddess among the Karbis, a community living in Assam, the northeastern state of India. Although the ballad is the story of common people in the historic past, it has become a sacred part of the Karbi belief system.

Paper long abstract

Hai-i-Alun: The Ballad Narrating the Birth of the Weather Goddess

This ballad Hai-i-Alun, narrates the birth of the weather goddess of the Karbi tribe, which lives mainly in the Karbi Anglong Autonomous District of Assam, in India. It is a mythical ballad as Hai-I, the mortal lady, is believed to have taken the form of the weather goddess after her death.

Hai-i was a housewife happily married to her husband Long Teron. Their mothers fixed their marriage while they were still in their mothers’ wombs. She displeases a vendor by not accepting a sensuous proposal. This enrages him, and he goes to the king and bids him to make Hai-i his queen, as a beautiful woman like her is suited only to the king. The king then forcibly brings her after she refuses to leave her husband. The path through which she was dragged to the king’s place is shown by people in the form of a long mark on a huge rock. The king could not subdue her to be his wife, and she finally breathed her last. The chief priest sings this ballad at the rock with the mark of dragging at the advent of Spring, resulting in the downpour of rain. The other people can sing this ballad only after the singing by the chief priest at the capital of the kingdom.

It has been attempted in this paper to analyze the Karbi collective consciousness from a functionalist's point of view, as expressed in this ballad.