In the course of researching gender and land rights in North India, Smita Tiwari Jassal’s discussions with groups of village women often devolved into long, energetic song sessions. When singing together, even women otherwise reluctant to speak were able to express the complexities of their relation to land ownership and to their employers in the fields. Through poetic narratives, they also sang about a range of women’s experiences across castes: of patrilineal inheritance, village exogamy, male migration, and the temptations of itinerant men. These songs provided the impetus for this book. Through the next five years, between 1997 and 2003, Jassal returned for multiple visits to the countryside between northeast Uttar Pradesh and western Bihar. Her book on women and land was published in 2001 but she continued to document musical life in these villages, extending her inquiry to male genres too. Since her father was from this region Jassal’s informants perceived her research as a way of honoring her father’s memory and reclaiming her own heritage.

With empathy and insight, Jassal shows in Unearthing Gender how songs must be understood in light of gender constructions framed by agricultural relations between castes, forms of labor, and rights to land. Her close attention to work and economic relations extends prior writing on songs in North Indian villages (particularly relevant are Edward Henry’s 1988 Chant the Names of God and Gloria Raheja and Ann Grodzins Gold’s 1994 Listen to the Heron’s Words). The book carries a valuable and extensive bibliography surveying writings on gender and songs in India, and the early chapters have some marvelous photographs documenting the rapt intensity of women’s engagement with songs. The book is organized around roughly 100 songs in a range of genres: mostly women’s, but some men’s songs too. These are largely in Bhojpuri, but also the Purabiya and Awadhi dialects of Hindi. Jassal supplements the songs she recorded with songs published in local anthologies and songs circulating through cassette recordings. The changing focus and mode of approach to different genres and performers in different chapters can give the sense of various essays and talks having been stitched together but the advantage is that readers are reminded of the ubiquity of music, the circulation of songs across media, and the range of ways that gender can be addressed.

For each song, the transcribed text in the original language precedes an English translation, allowing speakers of these languages direct access and appreciation of the poetic contours in the songs—poetry that is challenging to convey through translation. In the first part of the book, which highlights her field recordings, Jassal sometimes draws on singers’ oral literary criticism. The richness of singers’ commentaries on some aspects of some songs made me wish that the symbolic associations and narrative logic could have been more closely elucidated for each of the reproduced songs. Jassal also offers moving contextual commentaries that convey the emotional and imaginative hold of these songs in the lives of singers. She provides a few quick but memorable portraits of singers like Munraji, blinded by chicken pox at seven, who remembers songs for the whole village, and Munraji’s younger friend the vegetable seller who suffers from periodic bouts of possession. As Jassal points out, such companionable duos of singers often encourage and support each other in performance. The same kind of musical appreciation, though with a hierarchical aspect, is apparent in upper-caste women sometimes inviting lower-caste women to sing for them just for the pleasure of listening.

In her introduction, “The Unsung Sing,” Jassal lays out her argument of how a study of songs shows how “dominant ideologies are not merely complied with, accommodated and reinforced but also resisted and interrogated” (2). She goes on to outline the shifting terrain of songs, with songs tied to manual labor disappearing and Bollywood songs on the rise. Chapter 1, “The Daily Grind,” focuses on jats?r ballads associated with the labor of grinding grains and spices; the deep embodiment of song, at a time when grinding stones have been replaced by machines, at least one woman could only recall the songs by mimicking the movements and rhythms of grinding. These ballads described difficulties after marriage, conflicts within the family, and, fascinatingly, the temptations posed by liaisons with low-caste and itinerant men. Such songs, Jassal speculates, showed women ways out of adversity. Chapter 2, “Singing Bargains,” draws on the playful kajjali songs sung in the fields that often protest male migration from the region. Chapter 3, “Biyah/Biraha Emotions in a Rite of Passage,” describes the series of transitions emerging through arranged marriages, village exogamy, and relationships with in-laws that women emotionally navigate through song. Chapter 4, “Sita’s Trials,” looks at a genre of weddng song known as Sita mangal that describes the life of Sita in the Ramayana epic.

While these first four chapters address women’s songs, and would have formed a coherent book, the next two turn to men’s genres. Chapter 5, “When Marriage is War,” plunges into the world of a folk epic that another scholar taped in a forty-eight-hour sequence of retellings, and that is known as the Lorik?yan g?th? folk epic particularly associated with Yadava caste identity. Jassal describes occasions when male teams compete in performing portions of the epic, and in addition to summarizing the complex plot, she discusses the strong, resourceful women and agonistic gender relations within the epic frame. Chapter 6, “Taking Liberties,” is about popular, racy Holi songs available on cassette that Jassal argues form a lower-caste male appropriation of a women’s genre, cultivating sexually demeaning portrayals of women. The conclusion, “Community Harmonies,” summarizes the book’s main themes and speculates on the future of these songs that are declining with literacy but may be preserved in notebooks and other media. Jassal ends by asking, “what creative ways of remembering will the changing, transforming communities of the future adopt?” Recalling Smita Tiwari Jassal’s own ancestral roots in this rural region, I see this lovingly researched book as embodying one such way of remembering, reframing, and transmitting songs into the future.

Works Cited

Henry, Edward O. 1998. Chant the Names of God: Music and Culture in Bhojpuri-Speaking India. San Diego: San Diego University Press.

Raheja, Gloria Goodwin, and Ann Grodzins Gold. 1994. Listen to the Heron's Words: Reimagining Gender and Kinship in North India. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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[Review length: 1060 words • Review posted on March 1, 2015]