Wanwun: What a Guest Should Know About Kashmiri Wedding Songs

Visitors who are invited to a Kashmiri wedding usually prepare for the food. They read about the thirty-odd courses of a wazwan, they practise eating rice with the right hand, and they wonder what to wear. Then they walk into a courtyard after dark and find two rows of women singing to each other, line by line, for hours, and nobody has told them what is going on.

That singing is wanwun, and for many families it is the real centre of the celebration. It is also one of the easiest parts of a Kashmiri wedding to misread as a guest. People talk over it, film it without asking, or leave early because it sounds repetitive to an untrained ear. A little context changes the whole evening.

What wanwun is, and why it sounds the way it does

Wanwun (you will also see it written as wanvun or vanvun) is a form of sung verse performed by women at weddings and other family ceremonies. The singers sit or stand in two groups. One group sings a line, the second group answers or repeats it, and the song moves forward in that call and response for as long as the occasion needs. There is usually no instrument at all. The rhythm comes from the voices and from the steady exchange between the two sides.

The slow, almost chanted delivery is deliberate. The songs are meant to be joined, not performed for an audience. An aunt who cannot hold a tune can still follow the line from the woman next to her, and a teenager who has heard the same verses at every family wedding since childhood knows exactly when to come in. That is part of why the form has lasted: it is built for participation rather than for skill.

Both Muslim and Kashmiri Pandit families sing wanwun, and the words reflect their own traditions. Muslim songs often call blessings in the name of the Prophet and local saints, while Pandit songs name deities and Hindu rites. The structure, the two answering groups and the unhurried melody, is shared across the valley.

What the songs are actually about

If you do not understand Kashmiri, it helps to know that the content is far from solemn throughout. A single evening can move through several moods:

• Blessings for the couple and prayers for a good marriage.
• Praise of the bride's or groom's family, their house, their ancestors and their generosity.
• Descriptions of the bride herself: her henna, her jewellery, the way she will look on the day.
• Teasing aimed at the other family, which can be pointed and very funny if you catch it.
• Lines that name places in Kashmir, rivers, gardens and shrines, tying the wedding to the land.

The teasing verses are where you will hear laughter break out among the singers. If someone near you translates, those are the lines worth asking about. They tell you a great deal about how families see each other, and about what counts as a fair joke at a wedding.

Wanwun is less a performance than a conversation between the women of two families, held in verse.

When you will hear it during a wedding

Kashmiri weddings stretch over several days, and wanwun appears at more than one stage. The best known is maenzraat, the henna night, when the bride's hands and feet are decorated and the women of the house gather around her. Many guests describe this as the evening when wanwun is at its fullest, often running late into the night.

You may also hear it during preparations in the days before, while relatives arrive, and when the bride leaves her parents' home. That departure is the moment when the songs turn tender, and it is common to see singers and listeners in tears. Practice differs a great deal from family to family and between towns and villages, so do not be surprised if the order you see does not match what someone else describes.

Sometimes the singing gives way to rouf, where women link arms in rows and step slowly forward and back as they sing. A tumbaknari, the long-necked clay drum found in many Kashmiri homes, may come out at this point. If you want to place these instruments in a wider frame, our guide to Kashmiri music and its instruments covers the santoor, the rabab and the sufiana tradition that sits alongside these domestic forms.

The advice I would push back on

A common tip for wedding guests is to record everything, because "you will never see this again". I would gently argue against it. Wanwun happens in a private, mostly female space, and many of the women singing have not agreed to appear in a stranger's video, let alone online. Some families are entirely relaxed about phones. Others are not, and they may not tell a guest directly.

Ask the bride's mother or an older woman of the house before you lift a camera, and accept the answer without bargaining. If you are allowed to record, keep it short and keep faces out of anything you share. The memory you take away from sitting through an hour of it, listening for the moment the laughter starts, is worth more than a shaky clip anyway.

The other piece of advice I disagree with is that wanwun is dying out. It has certainly changed. Some families now invite a group of experienced singers to lead the evening, and you will hear newer verses that mention phones, cars or a groom working in another city. But change is not the same as disappearance, and in my experience younger women still know a remarkable number of the older lines.

How to be a good guest during the singing

Sit where your hosts place you. At many weddings women and men gather separately for parts of the evening, and as a guest you follow that arrangement rather than question it. If you are a woman and the singers wave you into the circle, it is fine to sit with them and clap quietly or hum along with the answering group once you have the shape of a line.

Keep conversations low or step outside for them. Dress modestly and warmly, since henna nights often run late and courtyards cool quickly; our notes on dressing for Kashmir's seasons apply here too. And eat when you are offered food, because the kitchen will be running all night, a subject we cover properly in the piece on the wazwan feast.

If you are invited to a wedding in Kashmir, or to a Kashmiri family's wedding anywhere else, ask your host this week whether there will be a henna night and whether you may attend it. Then ask one older relative to explain a single verse to you after you hear it. You will understand the rest of the evening differently.