THE VOICES OF THE DAY

Unearthing Gender: Folksongs
of Northern India
BY SMITA TEWARI JASSAL
PUBLISHED BY
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2012

 
Sometimes we absorb a book like pure and fresh air absorbs empty space, exploring all its possibilities. Reading this book is such an experience, because it uncovers the veils that wrap rural north Indian women in reticence. Every aspect of their lives is examined in a novel way – by analysing the songs they sing. These songs explore not psychology or philosophy, but everyday situations. Here is an unusual academic work where anthropology and poetry cohabit in congenial fellowship.
The trials of these women are the common aches of females everywhere. These are songs of joy and resignation, or quiet revenge, or humour at the oddities of hierarchic households, and any other challenge that the female gender faces in rural India. Singing against gender oppression becomes not just an aesthetic pursuit, but “one of the few spaces for resistance traditionally available to lower-caste women”. True because, in India, artistic pursuits, or the craftsman’s hands, have yielded power to the poor in a way that can be ennobling.
Singing has been a part of India’s great oral tradition of transmitting knowledge for millennia. Jassal deals with Hindi, Bhojpuri and Purbiya ballads: wedding songs, songs of the workplace, of celebrating festivals and the seasons. In the gari songs about weddings, “wife-givers” pelt ritual abuse. Other songs feature lovers’ separation, love of brother for sister, festivals like Holi (akin to Thailand’s Songkran), and the struggles of Sita (Thailand’s Sida), Rama’s virtuous wife.
Women sing jatsar songs when they work to affirm caste loyalties. Every caste challenge is met with a riposte. As lower-caste Dalit women sing a lewd song to embarrass upper-caste males, an upper-caste Brahmin woman protests that her own songs are “not like that”, that is, they are not “outspoken, challenging, or subversive”. Jassal says that the jatsar songs “weave together cautionary tales and dark, disturbing stories”.
We have protest at an unwanted marriage: “Dumped me here in Buxar. Handed me like a cow, to be tied up, why did you, O Father?”, or, a plea for a share of property: “In all you earn, Father, I stake a claim for half,” or, an unwanted pregnancy, or, elopement, or, kajli songs of female agricultural labourers in the workplace.
The household is where all the trials are. Consider the precarious position of a newly married daughter-in-law: “Mother-in-law demanded bread and sister-in-law just abused. All day long I search for some leftover crumbs.” Or infidelity: “Maybe for you, husband, she’s the moon and sun, but for me she is just the dust of the earth.”
Consider also the wife waiting for the return of her migrant husband: “No letters, not a four-liner did he send. About the state of his heart, he didn’t write.” But it is not as if the wife is just the lovelorn partner gently chiding an errant husband. Such can be her wrath that she is not above smashing her bangles. Ultimately, though, it is in the singing, not actions, that these women find their voice. These songs “hint at the need to cultivate nerves of steel, like Sita’s. In fact, Sita’s trial by fire is never far from the reality the women of these tales face.”
The work is suffused with the female’s interior world, and her experience of subjugation is told with an oceanic empathy. The only problem is that the quotations from the songs are far too many, and long too. From a scholar’s viewpoint the presentation of evidence is the proper way, but the exercise becomes too much like a scientific experiment. We get distracted by the songs, and lose the sense of the prose.
Yet it can be argued that, after all, the author is not a poet or novelist, able to let her imagination enter the souls of the women she writes about. She also has to maintain scholastic purity, and pursue a method based on observation.
These songs go beyond protest, and have left an imprint on popular entertainment as well. The exaggerated mocking tones of Hindi cinema’s song sequences owe something to this Indian way of telling a story. As Bollywood expands its reach, and literacy levels grow in India, will this tradition of singing disappear? The author says that upwardly mobile rural women have moved away to newer forms of empowerment.
In India’s democracy the allure of the vote makes millions queue in anticipation of their moment. But as Jassal demonstrates, democracy is not the only means to power – singing also is. Few social scientists studying India have written about songs in this way, and Jassal’s embrace of the poor, despite the grim subjects she deals with, is joyous and liberating. These sharp and muscular songs provide an alternate music, as well as challenging established social norms and hierarchies.

Jitendra Nath Misra is an Indian Foreign Service officer and, most recently, was India’s ambassador to Laos. The views expressed are his own and do not express the opinions of the government of India.