The Siri Paddana: Tulunadu's Longest Oral Epic

Most of the songs a coast farmer knows are short. A few are enormous. The story of Siri, her daughter and her granddaughters is the largest of them: a single poem of more than 16,000 verses, handed on by singing in the villages of the coast.

This page is about the Siri epic as literature: how it is sung, what it has in common with other Tulu epics, and how one performance was recorded whole. The story itself, and the festival, are told on Siri, the Princess Who Walked Away.

A long epic among paddanas

The Tulu word for its oral epics is paddana. Rai, of Mangalore University, says that most paddanas are short, and tell where a bhuta came from and how it came to be worshipped. A few, such as the Panjurli paddanas, form cycles of many tales. Set apart from them are two narratives that he calls long epics: Siri and Koti-Chennaya. He says that these are unique in length, content, performance tradition, and their link to cultural identity.¹

Rai gives the Siri epic as about 25 hours long, and Koti-Chennaya as about 14.¹ The page on Koti-Chennaya tells that epic as literature in the same way.

Where it is sung

Rai says that the Siri epic is sung chiefly at the Siri festival and in its rite, the paliyo daliyo, and also while plucking paddy seedlings.¹ A review of the Honko edition adds that this is a work song. Women collect the rice plants and move them to new fields, and a singer accompanies the work while the women sing the refrains or repeat his lines in chorus. The reviewer suggests that this humble setting may matter more to the epic’s growth than the religious festivals, because the field gives time for long, uninterrupted singing, while at a cult event the epic has to compete with other happenings.² Gopala Naika learned his first songs in the paddy field, and Honko even called it a “high school” of epics.²

The festival does not use the whole text. Rai says that what is sung there is mostly the opening: salutations to different gods, the installing of the idols, and the places where the festival is performed. These parts are not in the performed epic text at all. Gopala Naika, who leads the troupe of women, sings them to prepare the women to take on a group identity. The birth of Siri, some important events, and the game of chenne are narrated in a dramatic style.¹

A woman’s story

Rai writes that the epic’s characters are actualised at the festival, as men (Kumaras) and women (Siris), and that the play is limited to the dialogue between Siri and her children. At one moment the twin sisters Abbaya and Daraya play chenne, and the epic text becomes a run of dialogues.¹ He says that local women have accepted the narrative as a symbol of their social identity, and that the festivals have kept the epic going and spread it across Tulunadu.¹

The reviewer of the Honko edition, a classicist, was struck by how female-centred the poem is. Apart from Kumara’s role, it is dominated by women engaged in typical women’s affairs such as pregnancy and childbirth, and its minor male characters are more impressive as fathers than as warriors. Where men and women are in conflict, the narrator most often sides with the women. He links this to the fact that the poem is meant for a female audience.² That is one scholar’s reading.

Singing it whole

For a long time no one had heard it all. Rai says that Gopala Naika, who sang the epic for the project, had never before performed it in its entirety, and that this is the case with most oral epics in Tulunadu, since singers had no occasion to perform them as wholes.¹

The review describes how it came about. In 1985 and 1986 Naika dictated the epic to the scholar Chinnappa Gowda, in a version of 8,538 verses. It was his own idea to have it written, because he wanted it to be read in schools. Lauri Honko first saw him perform at a house daliya in February 1989, and later asked him to sing a full version.²

The recording took place in December 1990, in the garden of a private house, with two tape recorders and a video camera. Naika uses no instrument, and simply sat on a bench and sang. He sang the invocations on 20 December and the narrative from the 21st to the 28th, with a two-day pause. The net singing time for the whole epic was 26 hours.² The text has 563 verses of invocation and 15,683 of narrative, and Honko noted that it is only five lines shorter than the Iliad.²

The team had five members, the singer, two “outsiders” and two “aliens”: Naika, the Tulu-speaking scholars Chinnappa Gowda and Viveka Rai, and the Finnish folklorists Lauri and Anneli Honko. The Honkos handled the recording machinery, and Anneli Honko later analysed the text closely.²

A “mental text”

Honko used the term “mental text” for what Naika carried in his mind. According to the review, different performances of the same passage varied a good deal, even a few days apart, while the basic story line changed little over the four years in which he was recorded. Honko’s idea was that songs exist in a singer’s mind as separate wholes, which he “edits” before and during a performance. In this sense “textualisation” need not mean writing something down. It can also mean the work a singer does when he composes a long, coherent narrative, as Naika did at the scholars’ request.²

In print

The results came out in two works in the FF Communications series: Honko’s Textualising the Siri Epic (no. 264, 695 pages) and The Siri Epic as Performed by Gopala Naika (nos. 265 and 266, two volumes).² The edition prints the Tulu on the left page and an English translation on the right, much like a volume of the Loeb classics. It transcribes what the tapes contain as exactly as possible, divides the text into verses at the singer’s breath breaks, and uses no capitals or punctuation in the Tulu. The translators aimed to be “as verbatim as possible and as readable as necessary”.²

Related

• Siri, the Princess Who Walked Away, the story of Siri and her family, and the festival
• The Siri Jatre: A Night of Possession and Healing, the festival where the epic is sung as ritual
• The Koti-Chennaya Paddana: A Fourteen-Hour Epic, the other long epic
• Written Tulu Literature: The Palm-Leaf Manuscripts, on the few Tulu works that were written, not sung

Sources & further reading

The books and articles behind the numbered notes on this page.

1. B. A. Viveka Rai, “Epics in the Oral Genre System of Tulunadu”, Oral Tradition 11/1 (1996): 163–172 (read in full): the long epics, the 25-hour figure, the settings, the festival and its dramatic parts.
2. Bryn Mawr Classical Review, review of Lauri Honko, Textualising the Siri Epic, and The Siri Epic as Performed by Gopala Naika (2002; checked 9 October 2026): the recording, the verse counts, the “mental text”, the team and the edition.

Rai gives about 25 hours and the review gives a net singing time of 26 hours for the same epic. We have not opened the Honko volumes themselves. The recording was made in 1990, and both sources describe the tradition as of then.