Stonemill and Bhakti-Guy Joseph Poitevin, Hema Rairkar-DKPD-9788124600597
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| Tangible patrimony
usually attracts attention and efforts of preservation. Intangible cultural
traditions do often go with the winds of history when their social and
material setting disappears. Such is the case with the songs that women in
India, while grinding before dawn, have kept singing for ages on their
hand-mill. Aside from the male society, they hoarded up for themselves a
non-material matrimony. Today, though, motor driven flour-mills have put to
rest these voices of silence, their legacy remains with them: immense and
immemorial, purely feminine and oral, anonymous and personal, collective and
intimate. Words from the heart, they glitter like flames in the domestic
hearth. This book is the first attempt of systematic cultural-anthropological
study of that unique tradition. It offers keys to apprehend it. Why should
this tradition, first of all, originate from a shared compulsion to “open up
one’s heart”? This differentiates the women singers’ intentionality from the
didactic treatment of pundits and sants who make grinding and grindmill the
allegory of an advaitic bhakti. For women — Lakshmis dedicated to serve the
Fortune of their family and its lineage — life in plenty is their raison
d’etre. When preachers and swamis advocate a holy insensibility to earthly
things and fellow human beings, the work of grinding — epitome of woman’s
office — carries worldly utopias of abundance and reveals a quest for
salvation through bonds of affective attachment. Eventually, the study raises
radical questions on such crucial concepts as those of bhakti, tradition, the
status of popular traditions versus elaborate constructs of literati. The
symbolism of the stonemill in religious Marathi literature is constrasted
with the experience of grinding of peasant women as the latter articulated it
in their work-songs. What is sought is an epistemological insight into the
cognitive processes which result in the dialectic blend of affinity and
glaring inconsistency that one observes between those two levels of cultural
creativity. |
| Book |
| ISBN |
9788124600597
|
| PUBLISHER |
DKPD |
| Binding |
HARDCOVER |
| Edition |
1996 |
| Language |
ENGLISH |
Tags:
Stonemill and Bhakti-Guy Joseph Poitevin,
Hema Rairkar-DKPD-9788124600597
