17. Blessing Song

Sarah Cohen, Ruby S. Hallegua. Recorded by Barbara Johnson, Kochi, January 2, 1977. CD track 28; I-17.

Vāḻuvanna vāḻuvuṃ ninakkāyirikka
Makkaḷuṃ śāloṃ pěrutāyirikka

1. Blessings upon you; may blessings abound— 
Blessings of children and also shalom. 
May your offspring increase and inhabit the earth— 
Possess it, divide it, and thereby survive.
Be blessed with strength and perform mighty deeds.
May all your possessions increase without loss.
May tongue after tongue sing out your praise—
Praises to you for arranging this feast.

2. Oh highest One, exalted God,
Offspring come by Your command;
By your favor birth takes place.       
For this childbirth let us praise, 
Praise the One who gives us food 
So our lives may be fulfilled.  
Majestic One, may it be Your will 
To guide our steps along Your path. 

3. Blessed are You for not making us slaves;
Blessed for taking our sufferings away;
For filling our needs again and again;
Blessed for crowning us with glory;
For giving us even more than we need;
For lifting us up again and again,
For raising us even more than before.
For all this we bless You, more and more!

4. Sing praise for the treasure that they received.
More than ever, they are raised up.
All they desire, He knows in His heart.
For the sake of His servants, all this He gave.
Before our God, the only One,
Let no one falter or delay.
Come, let us stand before the Lord,
Stand in the presence of Tamburan.

5. As Tamburan promised to those who obey,
All has come true—all that He said.
Protection He gives to all who believe: 
Shelter above us, in front and behind.
Always He guides us on our way; 
Before Him let us bow down and pray.

6. Surely, by God’s command you went
And thus you heard the word proclaimed.
From the mouth of the girl, he heard the song:
“Without a doubt Yoseph is alive!”
Delightedly hearing her voice, he sat up
And called out, “Oh my dear child, come here!
By God's command you never shall die!”
Like this, she was blessed, never to die. 

This blessing song is found in twenty-five variants among the thirty-eight catalogued notebooks, representing all six communities from which notebooks were collected. It was widely used as a multi-purpose blessing, with different phrases or verses selected, depending on the occasion. Despite its popularity and frequent use, it has been one of the most enigmatic of all the songs. Though many women were familiar with it, none claimed to understand well what they were singing, and Ruby Daniel herself despaired of translating it. When she urged me go to Kerala and “find a professor,” it was at least partly in the hope of finding someone who could understand and interpret this particular song. When she finally met Scaria Zacharia in Israel and he asked for her blessing, she placed her hand on his head and sang the song for him, in the form she knew.

This translation is based on a composite version created by Zacharia (2005, 91–92). He explained his process as “not really a textual translation, but an interpretation of emic units” which he discovered in many of the sixteen variants then available to him. In his analysis it is “a genuine folk song,” rephrased and written down by different performers according to the occasion, and evolving through different time periods. Based on his experience as a Malayalam linguist, he assumed that while singing verses in an old Malayalam which they did not understand, women may have split or transformed words in an effort to make sense of them (personal communication, May 2000).^[1]

Judging by references to childbirth in the first two stanzas, this composite version is for a brit milah, with thanks given to the father of the child “for arranging this feast.” The final two lines of stanza 2 and all of stanza 3 are a striking adaptation of phrases from the Hebrew “Morning Blessings” with which devout Jews begin each day (De Sola Poole 1977, 1–3). It is interesting to note that Zacharia elicited these meanings (through the process of consulting each Malayalam variant) without knowing their Hebrew source—whereas Ruby Daniel (who certainly knew the blessings well) did not recognize them in their garbled Malayalam form. The fourth stanza in this version may perhaps be seen as a blessing for the family of the brit milah child (or the wedding couple), whereas the fifth stanza asks blessings for all assembled, including further familiar phrases from the Hebrew prayer book.

The final stanza is just one occurrence of a popular refrain that “wanders” through the corpus of Malayalam Jewish songs; it refers to the midrash about the young girl, Seraḥ bat Asher, who gently—by singing a song—broke the news to the elderly patriarch Jacob that his beloved son Joseph had not died, but was still living in Egypt (Ginzberg 1969, 2:115; 1968, 5:356). Though neither Seraḥ nor Jacob is named in the verse, it is likely that all hearing it would have been familiar with the reference. Presumably it is attached to this all-purpose blessing song as a wishful transfer of the ultimate blessing of eternal life, which was granted to Jacob's innocent granddaughter Seraḥ.^[2]

This Jewish song shares the first line and a few other lines and phrases with a blessing song in the repertoire of Knanaya Christians, who traditionally claim to be descended from early Kerala Jews (Lukose 1910, 1992, 12–13; Swiderski 1988a, 42-43; Jussay 2005, 122). Jussay cites the similarity as evidence of a shared history, and Swiderski mentions the Christian song’s similarity to passages from “a long tradition of (wedding songs) in Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic poetry.”

When the Blessing Song was recorded in 1977 by Sarah Cohen and Ruby Hallegua in Kochi, they used the same chanting melody that they had used for song 26, “After the Bath.”

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^[1] See Gamliel (2009, 228–230) for a textual discussion of this song as a “conglomerate” of song fragments.
^[2] See Gamliel (2009, 224–225) for a discussion and analysis of this detached or "wandering" verse as originating in the song indexed as III-55, which she titled “Joseph Meets His Brothers.”