Pain, Loneliness, Death: Women's Songs from the Himalayan Foothills, Unpublished Manuscrip
Jul 16, 2024
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Mahesharma
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https://www.academia.edu/122062327/Pain_Loneliness_Death_Womens_Songs_from_Himalayn_Foothills
Pain, Loneliness, Death: Women's Songs from the Himalayan Foothills
by Mahesh Sharma
Chandigarh: Unpublished Manuscript (copyright Mahesh Sharma), 2024
This collection of women’s songs nuances the culture of submission and obedience, shame and honour. The songs are about pain in every-day life: drudgery, violence, despair, desolation, reproach, abuse; and rare songs about death: the walling-up-live, murder, beating-to-death, poisoning, drowning, and suicides. These songs are as much a collective voice of feminine protest as they are the voice of injustice. By singing these songs, women express the bitterness of unfulfilled lives, of emotional void, a seething protest, and self-assertion.
By presenting the lesser known and often obscure women’s songs, along with the voices of the singers, we draw attention to the neglected inner-world of women, their perspectives about life. The significance of these songs cannot be emphasised more except by observing that quite a few women started singing these songs instead of narrating their personal hardships. The songs provided words and feelings to the overwhelming emotions within them that they, otherwise, found difficult to articulate.
In the larger context of the north-Indian rural setting, these songs also help us conceive not only the gendered roles and labour division, but also the constitution of households, families, kinship structures; interpersonal relations; about space, interactions, and control; notions of honour, sexualities, violence; about authority, power equations, and the gendered layers of the society and culture. Since the traditional sources do not discuss the matters of feminine lives and oppression openly, or represent the extent to which masculine attitudes affected their lives, the women's-songs, therefore, provide an alternative voice. The songs in this collection thus open a broad window into the past that we know little about. They illuminate the hitherto hidden life. They articulate an altogether different perspective: a women’s perspective.