દુલા ભાયા કાગ

Dula Bhaya Kag — known across Saurashtra simply as Kag Bapu — was a Charan bard who turned five years of village schooling into one of the great bodies of Gujarati folk verse. He herded cattle at thirteen in the countryside near Mahuva, absorbed the duha and chhand metres of his community’s oral tradition, and went on to fill the multi-volume કાગવાણી with bhajans, prayers, duhas, and geets in a voice so rooted that much of it circulates as anonymous folk song. His concerns were a villager’s ethics writ large: hospitality, the dignity of the poor, devotion without ritual pomp — and when the Bhoodan movement came to Saurashtra he gave away his own land to match his verse. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1962, and his songs remain staples of the Gujarati school curriculum and the santvani stage alike.