Abstract

This chapter reads Gurmeet Karyalvi’s short story “Sarangi di Maut” as a folk meditation on lok-dharmita—the moral vision alive in everyday art—and as a call to a “public of the otherwise,” where the disenfranchised voices seek dignity beyond market and state. The story of Piru, the sarangi player, turns personal suffering into collective remembrance, questioning dominant ideas of progress and value. Through its soundscape of sarangi and algoza, the story revives the ethical and emotional life of the folk as a counter-public grounded in devotion, resistance, and shared care. The first aim of the study is to show how singing preserves lived memory, witnessing histories of pain and endurance. The second is to explore how folk performance moves between sacred labor and commodified art, revealing the moral tension between ibādat and exchange. The third is to read Piru’s refusal as an image of ethical autonomy—the folk artist’s right to exist otherwise in a world dominated by money and commoditization. Karyalvi’s work thus reimagines folklore not as nostalgia but as a living ethics of being, where the sarangi’s death marks both an ending and an awakening—a moral sound rising for the silenced folk.