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Madhuri Deshmukh, "The Unraveling Heart: Women's Oral Poetics and Literary Vernacularization in Marathi" (Columbia UP, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
It's time to hit Reset. Not the snooze button. Reset the Crank it up, start fresh, go big. Reset. Dave's Killer Bread believes greatness starts with killer taste, killer nutrition. And now a shot to rock your reset for real. Kick off the new year with an epic sweepstakes. Enter for a chance to win VIP concert prize packs with roundtrip airfare, luxury hotel stay, and much more. So reset your routine, reset your own soundtrack, reset your expectations. Enter and see full rules for the Rock youk reset sweepstakes@daveskillerbread.com reset. Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Hello and welcome back to the New Books and Religions Podcast, a podcast channel here on the New Books Network. I'm your host, Dr. Raj Balkran, and more importantly, I have the pleasure of welcoming to the podcast today Dr. Madhuri Deshmukh, who is a professor of English at Oakton College. We are talking about her brand new Columbia University Press publication, the Unraveling Women's Oral Poetics and Literary Vernacularization in Marathi. Mantini, welcome to the podcast.
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C
Hi Raj, thank you very much. Really happy to be here.
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B
I'm very happy to have you. Love all things South Asia, love narrative. I love what you're doing in this book. And so why don't you tell us a bit about the backstory of how you, how this topic grabbed you.
- [02:23]
C
Sure, sure. So I do chronicle this in the intro to the book, which is that it started out essentially first as a project on a specific poet named Zanabai, who is a Bhakti poet who is part of the well known sect in Maharashtra called the Varkari. They're focused on the God vital. And I started out planning a sort of project of recovery on Zanabai because I saw that there wasn't very much scholarship on her and, you know, very little in English language scholarship in particularly. So I had intended to do a basic literary study of Zanabai. There are about 350 poems extant that are attributed to Zanabai. And, you know, I started to work on her, but it was Zanabai herself, I feel, that pushed me away from a kind of singular focus on her. And she also pushed me away from many of the kind of literary assumptions I came to the project with about authorship and about what counts as poetry and things like that as well, by making me venture outside like my comfort zone of libraries and books and texts and stuff like that. Because her name, Zana, by Zannah, is based on the word Jana. And really true to her name, she's revered in Maharashtra even today as a poet of the people and specifically of working women, you know, of especially domestic workers. And so she's associated in particular with this grueling labor of grinding. And even in the book, I start off with an introduction to this because I realized sometimes when I talk about this that people had no idea what I was talking about when I said grinding. And it's that women mostly used to do. We used to grind grains and lentils and things like that at home on a hand mill. And this is the most well known kind of mill is this rotating mill of two heavy stones that are on top of each other. And the women move the top one to pulverize the grains between the two stones and flour is made. But the really amazing and unique thing about this particular labor is that it generated an enormous amount of songs. So women did this labor in the mornings and they sang these incredible songs as they worked. And by the time I came around to the, to the research in the early aughts, I, you know, I mean, the daily grinding had ended. The electric flour mills pretty much replaced that. Now nobody grinds at home for their daily bread anymore, but there's still lots of women who know the song. So since Dunbar is associated with this labor, I kind of got it in my head. Well, I'll go out and, you know, see if I can find some songs about Zanabai and talk to women about Zanabai and how they remember her and the focus still being on Zanabai. So I went and started doing these recordings in the rural areas of Maharashtra, mostly from my maternal uncle's village, starting there and then moving into nearby areas. And I ended up finding these lots of women still who knew the songs and started recording a whole bunch of songs. And I became completely enamored with these songs. And they are really a stunning archive of songs, really about so many different subjects and topics. And, you know, I became really overwhelmed with the song tradition. And for a long time, for, like, years, I almost didn't know what to do with all these songs because they're so incredible. And I didn't really feel up to the task as it wasn't my background. And there's a lot of scholarship, a lot of ethnography, a lot of collections of these songs that has been done in Maharashtra since the 1940s. The most I do want to mention, the biggest archive is was collected by Heman Eirker and Guy Van and the center for Cooperative Research, other scholars associated in the 1980s and 90s, which is being digitized so listeners can actually go and find recordings of these songs and lots of songs and translations on the Grind Mill Songs Project website, which is being put together by the People's Archive of rural India@grindmill.org. so that's there, but it's an enormous archive of over 100,000 songs. And so I don't know. I don't think there's a comparable archive of women's songs for, like, over a hundred years anywhere else. I haven't found anything like this. And the songs are, like, stunning in their poetic aspects. So I didn't. I didn't know quite how to approach them for a while. I didn't want to be glib and just, you know, say anything about them. You know, I felt a sense of responsibility to the songs and to the women who so generously shared the. Shared them with me. And so I don't. I don't know if I've, you know, been as. As, you know, fair to them as I. As I could. I was. I tried to be as fair to them as I could to try to treat them in the way that I saw them, which is that this was an enormous archive of oral poetry, you know, and it was as compelling and complex as any poetry that I have studied or read. And so that's how I pretty much approached them. And you know, there are lots of different subjects and a lot of them are secular subjects like family relationships and, you know, children and things like that. But I realized that very, a big, very big portion of the archive is really an oral bhakti, poetic archive. And it, you know, and I just couldn't help wondering why in the scholarship on bhakti we've neglected this archive so much. Because it is like the influence of the archives is so apparent, especially in Marathi bhakti, on the tropes and poetic structures and the speech genres and the imagery of the tradition. It's immeasurable, the influence it had. So I pretty much then set out to show that there are these distinct overlaps in motifs, tropes, aquatic structures between what was, what's recognized as the textual corpus of bhakti poetry and these songs, this oral archive of bhakti. And so I always say, like, if nobody took me to the Grind Mill Singers, the Grind Mill Singers led me back to the texts. And I realized I had to use this new methodology which I again was not hugely, immediately comfortable with, of going back and forth. Linda Hess actually talks about this in her book Bodies of Song. And she, she writes about it as a methodology where fieldwork and text work inform and change each other. And that's kind of, I think, where I came to on, on the, on the material. So that's, you know, I guess the long and short of it is I ended up broadening the topic away from one poet to really the structures of Marathi poetry and vernacular literature, like the founding of Marathi literature itself. And the relationship to these songs.
- [10:47]
B
Yeah, there are a number, a great many points, angles or themes in terms of South Asian studies or Indian religions that really come to the fore. You know, this work is at the intersection of, for example, the domestic sphere and its role in preserving, perpetuating, shaping, religiosity, the home of the world, kind of, you know, binary that clearly needs to be colored or the all too often conceived or stated big and little tradition in terms of, you know, you know, Sanskritic, you know, well known text versus local, you know, on the ground religiosity that this, this really plays with and this really beautiful dovetailing of text. I try to communicate this in so many different ways, mostly to adult learners, but to undergrads as well, that for much of the history of South Asia there was not the concept of a book that someone would go to and look at. Even when texts existed, they existed as crystallizations of, and props for embodied oral culture that you Know, they were. They were. They were like scripts in a sense, more than novels, if you will. And so I love the interplay. See, part of the intrigue of studying the Puranas now is that it's one of the things I sort of focus on my own work, but it allows me to. To posit or intuit sense, argue for, you know, what would one be doing with this text? We don't always have a living culture. In some cases we do. Right. We don't always have a real living culture. But it is clear that the Puranic texts are reverberating and resonating within a profound intercultural context that we don't always have access to. So you have on the ground sort of living Purana sense, or a living example of the interplay of the textual and the oral and the ways in which they inform each other. They dovetail. So imagine if we had what was happening on the ground surrounding a particular Upanishad, certainly surrounding anything within the Vedic corpus, even up to the Puranas. Imagine what we are missing. And monographs such as yours, they suggest by documenting the interplay on the ground happening now, they really point to all that we don't know about how these quote unquote texts were used within tradition. So there's lots of fascinating themes there. I would imagine that although you touched on it, just say a little bit more about the methodology of, like, what did you look at for this? Like, were you interviewing people? Like, what archive? What text? Like, what was your. What was your. Yeah, what sources? What was your. What was your method? And I'd love you to say more about the. How innovative it is, you know, for sort of. For sort of literature or something literary to be doing what you're doing.
- [13:54]
C
Yeah, thanks for literature. Yes. Because we're so text focused. And so what I think when I went out and into the rural areas and started to look for women who knew songs, I first approached them by just saying, I want your songs on Zanabai. So my main focus was like, I'm gonna get some songs on Zanabai. And that was a very limited approach, but I found that, you know, that the women often didn't stick to zanabai, and they started singing about a lot of other topics. And I found that they're singing all these hagiographical things about different poets, and they have songs about texts like the Nyaneshwari, which is a foundational Maraki text, and they're singing about that. They're singing about going to listen to that. They're singing about, you know, the. The Ramayan. Obviously, there's the. There's a. There is a sub genre within the women's songs called the Sitayan, which are songs on the Ramayan from the perspective of Sita, which are, you know, just truly incredible songs. So I, you know, I went. I collected songs, I transcribed them. And this is before the. The website for grindmail.org had come out. I looked at different volumes of collections. They'd been being collected since the 1940s. But it was the website really, that helped me to think of the songs in a broader sense as an archive. You know, I mean, it has a searchable database. I can look up zanabai and I can find songs. I can look up different tropes and I can find songs. And that really helped me to come to terms with it as. As this archive that I could turn to. To do analysis. So it is an oral archive, but obviously the written element of it is really key to being able to actually study it. But if I hadn't had the experience of meeting these women and asking them how, you know, how they thought about, like. I think they're very. They were very particular about what counts as an ovi. An OVI is what they would call their grindmill songs, and what counts, for example, as an albanga, which is the poetic form most common in the bhakti poetic corpus. And they had, like, pretty strict rules about which were, which was which, and things like that. So they had a poetic consciousness, I would say. And I actually, you know, in the book, what I try to do is I draw out what I think is a kind of meta understanding of things within the song archive about their own songs and about poetry, about. About the bhakti poetry in general. And I found the two main sort of metaphors that they use to talk about these. Like. And that's where the title actually of the book comes from, the Unraveling Heart is that they describe their songs. They describe what they're doing as unraveling their hearts to the. To the grind mill which they often figure. Or they, you know, they have apostrophes to the grind mill as a mother or as the Lord. And they are describing, unraveling their hearts to them, telling the. The grind mill their deepest, you know, thoughts and feelings and. And things like that. So that. That showed me they had a kind of understanding of their own songs as. As this. And they also have a number of songs where they describe the poetry and the text using the metaphors of sewing or threading or Weaving. And for example, some of the first songs that I wrote down from women, I was just stunned by them, were these songs where they were describing the choli, the blouse that women wear under saris, as being embroidered with abangas is full of the embroidery of obhangas. And it's just such a stunning image. But that showed a kind of awareness of the artistry of the poetry and not simply the content of what they're singing about, which is, you know, their bhakti. And I. So I use then these things because if you think about unraveling and weaving and sewing, these seem to be opposite activities. But really I look at them as two sides of an ongoing dynamic and ongoing kind of dialogical relationship between texts and songs of weaving and unraveling. And the way that. And two labors involved, because unraveling kind of suggests the labor of grinding, where you're taking apart, you're reducing, you're refining. And then the. The. The weaving, where you're ornamenting and you're embroidering, you're beautifying. And. And that I look at as literarization or the. The, you know, development of literature and unraveling as the kind of going back to the oral of. Going back to. Of colloquialization, what I call colloquialization as this ongoing battle. So using this framework, I looked at text, you know, and I could see that the same processes were also. You could find similar metaphors and similar processes being described in Marathi texts themselves. So I went back and moved, not only looking at Zanabai or even the Vittal Bhakti movement, but the other major bhakti movement in Maharashtra, which is the Mahana Bhavas. And this is an incredibly prolific bhakti sect that was founded in the 13th century by a wandering ascetic by the name of Jakaradhar. And he was believed to be an incarnation by the Mahanabadas of the supreme God. And I turned to the biography of Chakradhar, the Lirajadithara, because in that text we get the very first written transcriptions of grindmill songs. And the text itself is written in, is like an incredibly unique text. I don't think there's anything like it from the 13th century written in colloquial Marathi, describing everyday mundane things. And a lot of focus on women's activities during the day. Cooking, grinding, cleaning, husking, all the work that they're doing, taking care of this God. Because to the Mahanabhas being in the company of the incarnated Being the God that is the ultimate experience. That's, you know, Bhakti, they don't really think about non dualism or things in the way that the Vittal Bhakti poets think about it. I mean, to them that corporeal, you know, presence in the being, in the presence of the being is like primary. And the text is then full of just his corporeal life, you know, and women's lives and all the disciples lives written from entirely from the memories of the disciples of attending to him and interacting with him and things like that. So there are these songs in there by a woman named Mahaday who is considered the first woman poet in Maharashtra. And her OVs are transcribed in there. So I look at those transcriptions and you can see a lot of continuity in the oral structure and style and motifs of songs that were collected in the 20th century and the songs that she sang in the 13th century that are recorded in that text. And so you get a lot of sense of the stability of this tradition in terms of how it developed and the way these motifs were central to Bhakti, both of the Mahanubhavas and the, and the Victo Bhakti poets. So I look at the way then the Ovi women's songs really helped shape the writing of the Lira Charitra as well and other texts. So then I pivot to looking at the major texts like the Nyaneswari and then I go into the corpus of Bhakti poetry by figures like Tukaram and Zanabai and I trace out, I look at what's the interaction, this interplay, this back and forth, this dialogic relationship between the songs and, and these texts in the book.
- [23:23]
B
And what do you find?
- [23:25]
C
Oh, I find that the grindmills tradition is everywhere. It's, you know, really central to how poetry came to be theorized in Marathi and in how it came to be written and what aspects of poetry came to be valued in Marathi. And you know, it just like if you think about it, this, this grinding has been going on for 2000 years or so. I mean, the oldest grind mills were found 2,000 years ago. So they've been. The song tradition has been going on at least as long as the written tradition. And, and if you think about it, every poet had to have come across these songs in their households. I mean, there were women singing songs in the households of almost every poet in South Asia. You can, you can say. So to say that that, that had no impact or bearing on the literary world, I think would, would not really comport, you know, considering how widespread this was, and it didn't. Because then I saw, especially in the vernacular tradition, you know, in mariarchy, that it really was an important interlocutor. I called the grammar tradition a kind of interlocutor of the textual tradition, you know, that these engaged always in a conversation with each other.
- [24:54]
B
Fascinating. So I know you've mentioned much of this in passing, but one of the questions that I wanted to highlight was, you know, what would have been the difference had you looked at the archive, solely at the archive and texts for your. For your project? I mean, what. Clearly it was a very enriching experience, but what really shaped the argument differently about being there and meeting these folks in person rather than being a good old textualist?
- [25:26]
C
Well, I mean, I guess in one sense, if I just had the website. Do you mean in that sense or not looking at the songs at all?
- [25:35]
B
Either way. But if you just had the songs but not being immersed, not speaking to people about this, would you have. Say you just say you had the archive, you know, and say you had. You know, you're. The sex. You're looking at what added to your arguments or your journey in terms of interacting with individuals on the ground, engaging in the grind. Pun intended.
- [25:56]
C
Yeah. Well, I guess I might not have been entirely struck by the songs in the way that I was. I mean, just meeting the. I guess, meeting the diversity of women that I met, you know, from some of the most marginalized cast living in, you know, in these rural areas, not, you know, they were not educated, they didn't read or write. And seeing. And meeting them in person and then just seeing the wealth of knowledge they had in these songs and how much they remembered. You know, some of them were very old, but they. They just remembered these songs and knew so many. And I don't think I would have really understood this in that. In. In the way. In that way without this embodied experience of listening to women's songs. And, you know, I mean, I think I make the case in the. In the book that looking at them as oral poetry, that, you know, the words of the poem of these songs matter most. But I'm not. I'm not a musicologist, so, you know, I think an ethnomusicologist might perhaps have a different take on this. But, you know, it's not. When I. When I met these women, it's not that I was, like, struck by how musical they were or how beautiful the songs were. Some of them were. I mean, they were really talented musically, but many were Just regular women. And they sang maybe not. I can't sing at all. And they maybe sang slightly better than I could. And so it wasn't that aspect so much as the fact that they really spoke in song like they were. They thought in song. And, and that. That aspect of it, the poetic aspect of it, therefore, really stood out to me more. So. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, Linda Hess, who writes about the Kabir tradition, you know, she had a different experience of being really immersed in the musicality of the. Of the poems. And so I, I did too, but not in that same sense. I mean, I had it in the sense of just listening, just hearing the embodied voices of these women, remember, and sing. And you know, I as. And. And many of them did grind for me as well. I mean, it was performative because they don't. They don't really grind anymore. But I do think it had an effect. I don't think I would have immersed myself in just reading the words, for example, of.
- [28:56]
B
The effect of your own immersion was probably meta. In terms of you were witnessing, you know, the extent to which these women were immersed in the song or the song was immersed in them or however you want to think of that. It's sort of like. It's very participatory and it's embodied and it's sort of a grammar for meaning making and a. A grammar for communication. It's not that, you know, the song is something we do to entertain or the song is something that we do to perform, but the song and the motifs and the sort of culture around it is sort of the white noise of the way of life.
- [29:29]
C
I mean, and the other. The other thing I would say is that it was their. It was. It was their individual. Their individuality as they sang. Because the songs are a corpus. I mean, they are passed on from one to the other. So some of them are. I mean, they always have their, like, innovation in composition by the way they change the songs. But. But when they sing a song, even if it is a song they learned by hearing it, they make it their own. And I don't think I could have understood this play between, you know, this play between their. Their individual contribution to the songs and this more collective notion of the way the songs circulated. If I hadn't seen, with the way women did it in person, you know, because I, you know, people tend. Tend to think of folk song as, well, there's no author and it's just this. Just random collective. But I really don't think of it that way because I think of it more as each verse, as a woman sings that verse, it becomes hers. Just the way it's. That's why I connect it to the form of lyric poetry. Because when you. When you listen to lyric poetry or you recite lyric poetry, you become the I in the poem. And that is the way it is with the songs, is that when a woman sings it, she becomes that person, you know, even if she hadn't originally, quote, unquote, composed the song herself. So that complexity, I don't think I could have understood without actual engagement on the ground.
- [31:24]
B
Yeah, it sounds like just making sense of it. You know, it's interesting. As you know, you read the book, you glean certain things, but it's sort of like in speaking to you, I'm gleaning even more about the book and I'm reflecting back some ideas and I always ask these sort of silly questions to elicit just broad strokes questions. But so in speaking to you, understanding your experience more clearly than just reading the book, similarly, in you going and speaking to this woman, you're understanding something of the embodied experience. And for what I'm gleaning, it's really what's noteworthy. What strikes me as noteworthy, what you're saying is that you noticed a heightened level of embodiment that doesn't quite. It's not on par quite anywhere else. That from what I'm getting, from what you're saying, it's sort of a superlative level of embodiment during the performance and beyond. And then there is this sort of collective anonization of the folk repertoire. Right. It's interesting in that it is jazz, but there's a sort of a canonization of what belongs in this jazz category versus what's somewhere else. It's intriguing. What would you most hope folks would take away from this book?
- [32:40]
C
That's a good question.
- [32:43]
B
See, they're not as simple as they sound.
- [32:45]
C
And no, that actually is not because there's so many different layers and aspects to the. To the book. But I guess the main. I guess maybe one of the main things I would want is for people to understand that, you know, we. We tend to think of. Of like the literature as a very elite enterprise. And what I'm really trying to show in this book is the way that some of the most marginalized women in Maharashtra really contributed at the. Not just like on the fringes of it, but really contributed centrally to this enterprise. And. Yeah, and that, I think is really significant.
- [33:38]
B
You know, it's fascinating. It's so, so fascinating. All too often. And what sort of. Is what is considered sort of hierarchical hegemony often sort of starts at the sort of margins in some way, shape or form. And it's quite intriguing because as I said earlier, it really, on the 30,000 foot view level view, it's sort of. It really speaks to those who are thinking about the ways in which texts in the culture sort of are in constant conversation, particularly in the South Asian context. The ways in which, you know, what's happening in the home is anything but ancillary to the work of religion or the work of culture. It just really, it really wonderfully problematizes our distinctions of culture is and what, quote, unquote, literature is and the literary and the literate and this wonderful Latin word that we use for sort of, you know, this sort of demarcation, right. And to understand that this comes from a very grounded, embodied, visceral, marginal space of women's worlds and the unraveling of their heart. And they're spinning on this, the mill, as if sort of some sort of loom or spinning wheel to, to spin the cloth upon which, you know, into which they create these marvelous artifacts of culture. So it is genuinely fascinating. And while your book is obviously ancillary to my Tom, it strikes me as genuinely novel like. It's. You are sort of raps in yourself field tracing a bit of a novel methodology. Would that be fair to say?
- [35:30]
C
I think so, yes.
- [35:33]
B
Well, you would know better than I.
- [35:34]
C
Heard people who are doing some work in, you know, what's called literary ethnography and for example, reading texts as, as language in use and things like that. So there, there is that. But, but I find overall, especially in the Western literary conceptions we have, the oral is really never considered a very important factor. And so a lot of, even theories of language, for example, operate on a dichotomy between written or literary and speech, basically ordinary, everyday speech. But you know, in that they don't consider the oral, which is a really a space of artistry within the. Within ordinary speech, which is not quite the same as everyday speech. And so that, that I think is. Is the case like a lot of, for example, a lot of postmodern theories about language and writing and things like that. They. They don't really take the oral into consideration or oral art into consideration. And yeah, I think that's really problematic.
- [36:54]
B
Fascinating. Is there anything else about the book in particular or the project in general that you hope to be touched on before we close today?
- [37:02]
C
Well, I guess I didn't quite mention that. One of the chapters, the final chapter really looks at two women poets, Zanjanabai and Mahaday say as central to developing Marathi literature because most studies of the vernacular era, you know, the 13th, 14th centuries in Maharashtra focus on these big male figures like Chakradhar and Nyaneswar. But these women had a huge impact on how Marathi literature developed. So I think that's another thing I was able to get into through the songs because both of the women poets are so associated also with the song tradition. And that's a really important thing that came to light more as I went into the songs.
- [38:01]
B
Excellent. Well, thank you very much for putting on the podcast today.
- [38:05]
C
Thank you, Raj.
- [38:06]
B
For those listening, we have been speaking with Dr. Madhuri Deshmukh on the Unraveling Heart, women's oral poetics and literary vernacularization in Marathi. Until next time, keep listening, keep well and maybe keep contemplating the interplay between the written and the oral. Bye for now.