Greg Urban (1988:393), in a comparative study of ritual wailing in Amerindian Brazil, reopened the question of how lament produces sociability by highlighting the way it regiments the expression of a powerful emotion such as grief. Lament was seen as a social duty imposed on the afflicted persons that expressed the need for social cohesion rather than a sincere feeling of personal pain. The first anthropological inquiries into lament, led by pioneering anthropologists Émile Durkheim (1961:442–49), Marcel Mauss (1921), and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (1922:239–46), focused on its socially determined nature. The analysis of three oppari songs gives some significant ideas about the different times of history. The analysis of the words of the content, context indicated and presentation of subject, period, and expression in lyrics of the oppari songs has been made in the paper.
This study attempts to understand the reflection of times in the lyrics of oppari songs by assiduously employing semiotic analysis. The content, context, and presentation of the oppari songs have been playing important roles to reflect the makeovers of times. The lyrics of the oppari songs have been blended with the essence of the periodical changes. This distinctively South Indian genre of weeping songs has evolved with time. Of late, professional oppari singers, including both female and male, have been invited to rural and urban Tamil Nadu on the death of a member in the well-off families to mourn for the deceased person. The women in the region express their grief over the death of their beloved with the lyrics of oppari songs. They form a circle, weep, beat their chest, wail and jump on the beats of Parai (single-sided drum) music on the death of a member of a family as reported by Srinivas (Oppari: An art of Weeping, Wailing and Lamenting, 2019).
The practice of women singing oppari is prevalent in the suburban and rural spaces of Tamil Nadu. Oppari-the folksong of Tamil Nadu and North-Eastern parts of Sri Lanka, is known as the Tamil song of mourning.
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