Women’s folk songs in northern India have long carried experiences, desire, grief, and dissent that the dominant literary and religious discourse excludes, transmitted orally rather than written down. This paper compares two such songs: a Kangra Pahari song of concealed desire from Himachal Pradesh, and a Haryanvi alaahna, or lamentation, of grief. While scholars have studied North Indian women’s folksong extensively, few have compared Himalayan and Haryanvi traditions directly, and Haryanvi folksong in particular remains under-studied. This paper addresses that gap through a Cultural Studies reading grounded in New Historicism, Raymond Williams’s Cultural Materialism, and Stuart Hall’s theory of encoding and representation. Using close textual and comparative analysis, it argues that the Kangra song manages desire through metaphor and double encoding, while the Haryanvi lamentation licenses grief through direct address sanctioned by ritual mourning. The comparison shows that folk song is not a single, uniform tradition but a range of regionally distinct strategies through which women’s suppressed emotional lives survive within patriarchal culture.
