EN / বাংলা

আগডুম বাগডুম (Agadom Bagadom). You clapped hands to it as a child. You probably had a partner — your palms meeting theirs in an alternating rhythm, faster and faster until someone lost the beat. The words themselves meant nothing. That was the point. They were just sounds, just the pleasure of a galloping pattern, just noise.

They aren’t noise.

This post is about what Bengali children’s rhymes — ছড়া (chhora) — are actually doing. About why a community that could no longer celebrate its martial history publicly hid it inside a hand-clapping game. About how the 1740s Maratha raids on Bengal got compressed into a lullaby. About the oldest layer of all: rain-calling chants that may be the most direct line we have to pre-Indo-Aryan ritual speech.

The “nonsense” in Bengali nursery rhymes is load-bearing. The meter is a container. And when keeping explicit records becomes politically dangerous, the most resilient container available turns out to be: what children chant while playing.

---

Agadom Bagadom: The Cavalry in the Game

Here is the full rhyme, the way it is usually transmitted:

আগডুম বাগডুম ঘোড়াডুম সাজে ঢাক ঢোল ঝাঁঝর বাজে বাজতে বাজতে চলল ঘোড়া গড়ের মাঠে করল ভোরা।

Agadom bagadom ghoradom saje Dhak dhol jhaanjhor baje Bajte bajte cholo ghora Gorer mathe korlo bhora.

“Agadom bagadom, the horses parade / Drums and cymbals and gongs are played / The horses march onward to drumbeat’s call / They fill the parade ground, one and all.”

Now stop treating the first word as nonsense and look at it: Agadom Bagadom. The -dom suffix. Bāg-dom. Dom.

Dom (ডোম, Dom) is the name of a real community — the Dom people, with deep roots across the Austroasiatic and Dravidian substrate of eastern India. Closely related are the Bagdi (বাগদী, Bagdi) — traditional fishermen and cultivators of the Bengal delta who claimed Barga Kshatriya (warrior-caste) status and whose men were renowned as lathials (bamboo-staff martial artists). Both communities served as elite infantry and cavalry under the Pala and Sena empires — the dynasties that ruled Bengal from the eighth to the twelfth centuries CE. They were the people who filled the parade ground. The Gorer math (গড়ের মাঠ, gorer math, “the fort’s field”) is a specific place: the maidan around a military garrison.

The hand-clapping rhythm of Agadom Bagadom is not arbitrary. The alternating-palm pattern, accelerating, mimics cavalry drill — hooves on packed earth, the rhythmic percussion of a mounted unit moving at speed. The ঢাক ঢোল ঝাঁঝর (dhak dhol jhaanjhor, “drum, drum, and cymbal”) are the percussion instruments of a military column on the march. This is acoustic mimicry. The children playing this game are, unknowingly, rehearsing the sound of an army.

Why It Had to Be Hidden

The Dom and Bagdi communities lost their military status and land base not through battlefield defeat but through an administrative act: the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871.

Under this colonial legislation, the British government designated entire communities as “hereditary criminals” — people whose criminality was not individual but biological, a birth trait rather than a choice. The Dom, Bagdi, and dozens of other communities whose pre-British occupation had been martial or nomadic were placed on this list. The consequences were immediate and severe: adult males were required to register with local police, report for roll calls, and obtain passes before traveling. Children between six and eighteen could be removed from their families and placed in government “reform institutions.” Families could be relocated to penal colonies.

In a single generation, a community that had served as royal cavalry became a community whose every movement was tracked by the colonial state. They could not gather. They could not celebrate their martial heritage. Any public display of the traditions that had made them militarily valuable — the lathi fighting, the horse culture, the drum-centered ritual life — invited legal action.

So they hid it in a game.

The hand-clapping rhyme was socially invisible. No one interrogates what children do at play. No magistrate can arrest a group of children for playing Agadom Bagadom. The meter protected the phonology; the playground protected the practitioners; and the “nonsense” of agadom bagadom — sounding close enough to meaninglessness that it would not attract attention — protected the content.

The Agadom Bagadom we clapped as children was at least partly a memory of people who were no longer legally permitted to remember who they were.

---

Khoka Ghumolo: The Lullaby of the Invasion

Here is a second rhyme, this one a lullaby — something sung to put a child to sleep:

খোকা ঘুমলো পাড়া জুড়লো বর্গী এলো দেশে বুলবুলিতে ধান খেয়েছে খাজনা দেবো কিসে। ধান ফুরলো পান ফুরলো খাজনার উপায় কি আর কটা দিন সবুর করো রসুন বুনেছি।

Khoka ghumolo para jurolo Bargi elo deshe Bulbulite dhan kheyeche khajona debo kise. Dhan phurolo pan phurolo khajonar upay ki Ar kota din shobur koro roshun bunechhi.

“The child sleeps, the neighbourhood hushes, the Bargis have come to the land — The bulbul birds ate the rice, with what shall we pay our tax? The rice is gone, the betel is gone — what hope of paying now? Wait a few more days, I planted garlic.”

Bārgi (বর্গী, bārgi): from Marathi bārgīr, a mounted soldier paid wages rather than given land. In Bengal, the word became specific to Maratha raiders — the forces of Raghoji Bhonsle, who launched devastating cavalry raids across western and central Bengal repeatedly through the 1740s and into the 1750s. Villages were looted. Crops were burned. People fled. The raids became a generational trauma encoded in the Bengali phrase Maratha danga — “the Maratha terror.”

The lullaby is a document of that terror. The rice is gone — the raidershave taken or burned the harvest. The betel is gone — even the domestic perennial is depleted. The tax is still due (the Nawab of Bengal, under whose jurisdiction this was all happening, continued collecting revenue regardless of the raids). The mother planting garlic at the end of the poem is the punchline and the gut-punch: in the ruins of the harvest, she is buying time with a root crop that takes months to mature. Wait a few more days. I planted garlic.

What makes Khoka Ghumolo remarkable is the bitter irony of its framing. It is a lullaby. Its function is to soothe a child to sleep. Its content is a description of complete material ruin, invasion, the impossibility of paying taxes, and the desperate optimism of planting garlic when everything else is gone. Historical violence compressed into a bedtime rhythm. The child falls asleep to the cadence of their own community’s catastrophe.

This is the eighteenth-century layer of Bengali folk memory. Agadom Bagadom is potentially medieval or ancient — encoded in the pre-colonial martial culture of the Dom and Bagdi communities that stretch back through the Pala and Sena empires. Khoka Ghumolo is precisely dated: the Bargi raids were 1741–1751. Two rhymes, two depths in the same archive.

---

Ay Brishti Jhepe: The Oldest Layer

Now the third rhyme, and the one that may go deepest:

আয় বৃষ্টি ঝেঁপে ধান দেবো মেপে আয় বৃষ্টি ঝেঁপে।

Ay brishti jhepe, dhan debo mepe Ay brishti jhepe.

“Come, rain, pour down — I’ll give you rice by measure Come, rain, pour down.”

This is the simplest of the three, and possibly the oldest. Ay brishti jhepe is a rain-calling chant — sung by children running outside during the first rains of the monsoon, a practice still found in rural Bengal. The child offers rice in exchange for rain. The rain is addressed directly, as a presence that can be bargained with.

The word jhepe (ঝেঁপে) is important: it is onomatopoeic, describing the sound and weight of heavy rainfall. It has no clean Sanskrit etymology. It is a deshi word — one of those “of-the-land” words that Bengali uses without being able to trace the path home. Its jh- onset puts it in the phonological neighborhood we explored in the first post: the cluster of words (jhol, jhal, jhar, jhinge) that may be Munda substrate inheritances.

But what matters here is not just the word. It is the practice. The ritualized addressing of rain, the offer of grain in exchange for weather, the participation of children as ritual agents — this is a form of agricultural propitiation that has parallels in Munda and Santal ritual life. Santal communities have detailed rain-making ceremonies: the rain-calling is a community act, led by designated ritual specialists, involving song, offering, and invocation of specific deities or forces.

The Bengali children’s rhyme is the vestige — attenuated, playful, decontextualized — of something that was once a serious collective ritual. The content traveled; the context was lost. What remained was a children’s game. The practice of ritually invoking rain through rhymed chant is almost certainly much older than the Bengali text. It may be one of the most direct lines we have to pre-Indo-Aryan agricultural ritual speech.

---

Why Rhymes Survive When Records Don’t

I want to step back and name the mechanism, because it appears across cultures and deserves a name.

Fixed-form oral compositions survive where open-form records do not. There are four reasons specific to children’s rhymes:

They are memorized before critical awareness. A child learning Agadom Bagadom is not evaluating it. They are absorbing it through repetition, rhythm, and the pleasure of the game. By the time they might critically examine the words, the words are already inside them, along with the rhythmic groove that carries them.

They are transmitted by repetition, not comprehension. The meaning can erode completely — and often does — while the phonological form stays intact. Agadom bagadom means nothing recognizable to most Bengali children today. The meaning has been forgotten. The sounds remain. The meter remains. The hand-clapping pattern remains. The transmission continued not because anyone understood what was being transmitted but because the form was pleasurable.

They are socially unmarked. No colonial magistrate looked at children playing Agadom Bagadom and saw a problem. No reformist pande worried about what the children were saying. Children’s games are invisible to power in a way that adult speech acts are not. This invisibility is protective.

The meter is armor. Metrically constrained text resists change at every transmission. If the syllable count is wrong, the rhyme breaks; if the rhyme breaks, the game doesn’t work; if the game doesn’t work, the child corrects it. The music is conservative. The meter holds the phonology in place even as meaning dissolves. This is why prayers and liturgy survive: fixed form resists drift. The same mechanism works in children’s games, but without the prestige that might attract reformist attention — which makes the game more resilient in some ways than scripture, because nobody tries to “improve” it.

---

The Maithili Thread

A brief note on a parallel tradition that shows the Bengali ছড়া (chhora) is not an isolated phenomenon but part of a broader eastern Indian folk-literary ecology.

Maithili — the language of Mithila, in what is now northern Bihar — has a folk poetry tradition that is strikingly parallel to Bengali’s. The Barahmasi (বারমাসি, baramasi, “twelve months”) form: poems or songs that move through the agricultural calendar month by month, recording the changing work, the changing emotions, the changing weather. You find it in Maithili. You find it in Bengali. You find it in Odia. The form is eastern Indo-Aryan, not specifically Bengali — it is the literary expression of a rice-farming civilization that lives by the monsoon calendar.

The great Maithili poet Vidyapati — who wrote in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries — composed devotional lyrics (padāvalī) in his native Maithili that are today sung in Bengali homes during Durga Puja. These songs were adopted into Bengali devotional practice so completely that most people who sing them do not know they are singing Maithili, not Bengali. Linguistically, the two languages are close enough — both descended from Māgadhī Prākrit, both in the eastern Indo-Aryan family — that the songs travel between them with minimal friction.

This is not cultural appropriation in any invidious sense. It is the natural porosity of languages that share a root, spoken by communities that share a climate, an agricultural cycle, and a deep history. The eastern Indo-Aryan zone — Bengali, Assamese, Maithili, Magahi, Odia — was never a collection of sealed national cultures. It was a dialect continuum, a shared literary ecosystem, a region in the deep-time sense that no modern state boundary accurately captures.

Agadom Bagadom and Khoka Ghumolo and Ay Brishti Jhepe are Bengali in the sense that they are transmitted in Bengali. They are eastern in the deeper sense that their logic — of encoding, of memory, of agricultural propitiation — belongs to the whole plateau.

---

What We Are Carrying

I want to end with something simple.

The next time you clap through Agadom Bagadom with a child — or remember doing so — consider what is actually happening in the transmission. The rhythm in your palms is the acoustic memory of cavalry on a parade ground, from a community whose martial identity was administratively destroyed in 1871. The children who first played this game probably understood what Bāgdom meant. Their grandchildren were less sure. Their great-grandchildren had forgotten entirely. But the rhythm stayed. The form stayed. The game stayed.

Memory is strange. It does not always know it is remembering. It carries things forward in containers that have been emptied of their original contents — and then fills those containers with new meaning, or no meaning, or just sound.

But the thing being carried is still there. In the palm-clap. In the lullaby. In the rain-calling chant with the non-Sanskrit word for downpour.

The most resilient archive in Bengal is not in the British Library. It is in the playground.

Next in this series: What the River Remembers