Overview

Women's songs of the grind mill are among the oldest oral traditions in South Asia. They have been sung to accompany a daily household labor, making flour using a stone hand mill, for many centuries. Even today, grind mill songs are still well known in Maharashtra, testifying to the endurance of a remarkable genre. Yet these songs have long been understood through sociological or anthropological lenses, treated as entirely separate from literary culture. This groundbreaking book shows that women's songs of the grind mill played a foundational role in the vernacular turn to making literature in Marathi between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries. Madhuri Deshmukh demonstrates that women's songs developed alongside and in intimate conversation with Marathi written literature, shaping the poetic structures and motifs of the bhakti tradition. Drawing on aesthetic categories from the songs themselves, she calls for understanding these artfully crafted compositions as oral poetry in a lyric mode, underscoring that women describe their songs as an ""unraveling of the heart"" while they compare written poetry to weaving. Deshmukh argues that women poets, Mahadaise and Janabai, were at the forefront of vernacularization, challenging common literary-historical narratives that neglect the role of communities excluded by elite regimes of writing. Considering what songs say about texts and what texts say about songs, The Unraveling Heart offers new insight into the importance of labor and gender to aesthetics and develops a novel approach to the concept of the literary.

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9780231217927

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Reviews

In centering the Marathi song tradition of women laboring at the flour grind mill, Deshmukh innovatively writes anew the history of Indian literature. The Unraveling Heart constructs a shared genealogy between elite South Asian vernacular literature and the oral compositions of women and non-elite castes traced over hundreds of years in India. This book has no parallel in South Asia Studies. -- Christian Lee Novetzke, coauthor of <i>The Yoga of Power: Yoga as Political Thought and Practice in India</i>

Madhuri Deshmukh sheds a brilliant light on the lives and songs of women enslaved, marginalized, and forgotten over centuries. She follows the verses and poetics of the thirteenth-century Janabai down to contemporary grind-mill working women songs in the Godavari River Valley in Maharashtra. An argument about language, about persisting, and about the solo voice of the woman in history and memory, The Unraveling Heart is a major literary achievement. -- Manan Ahmed Asif, author of <i>The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India</i> This is a groundbreaking exploration of the relationship between oral and written literature in one of the major languages of India. Showing how songs that women sing while grinding grain are tightly interwoven with other kinds of poetry considered “high” literature, Deshmukh provides a striking new perspective that will be of enduring value. -- Anne Feldhaus, Distinguished Foundation Professor of Religious Studies, Arizona State University In this authoritative and beautifully reasoned work, Madhuri Deshmukh takes us to the grindstone labor of millions of Indian women. She shows us how Mahadaise and Janabai in their early grindstone ovīs laid the groundwork for some of the most influential aspects of Marathi bhakti expression. In doing so, Deshmukh questions the confines of “literature” established by men, not just in India but elsewhere. Don’t be surprised if you meet Howard Thurman and Bob Dylan along with Wordsworth and Virginia Woolf. This is a book not just for India but for the world. -- John Stratton Hawley, Claire Tow Professor of Religion, Barnard College, Columbia University In centering the Marathi song tradition of women laboring at the flour grind mill, Deshmukh innovatively writes anew the history of Indian literature. The Unraveling Heart constructs a shared genealogy between elite South Asian vernacular literature and the oral compositions of women and nonelite castes traced over hundreds of years in India. This book has no parallel in South Asian studies. -- Christian Lee Novetzke, coauthor of <i>The Yoga of Power: Yoga as Political Thought and Practice in India</i>

In centering the Marathi song tradition of women laboring at the flour grind mill, Deshmukh innovatively writes anew the history of Indian literature. The Unraveling Heart constructs a shared genealogy between elite South Asian vernacular literature and the oral compositions of women and non-elite castes traced over hundreds of years in India. This book has no parallel in South Asia Studies. -- Christian Lee Novetzke, coauthor of <i>The Yoga of Power: Yoga as Political Thought and Practice in India</i> Madhuri Deshmukh sheds a brilliant light on the lives and songs of women enslaved, marginalized and forgotten over centuries. Deshmukh follows the verses and poetics of the thirteenth century Janabai down to contemporary grind-mill working women songs in the Godavari River Valley in Maharashtra. An argument about language, about persisting, and about the solo voice of the woman in history and memory, The Unraveling Heart is a major literary achievement -- Manan Ahmed Asif, author of <i>The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India</i>

Author Information

Madhuri Deshmukh is professor of English at Oakton College.

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