Jassal translates the song, sung just before the Women's Reservation Bill was passed, ushering in more representation for women in village councils across India: "When the women of our village become pradhans/ That's when we'll know progress has reached our village." For me, it brought back a clear memory of women in Himachal teasing each other just after the Bill had been passed. As they collected firewood safely beyond the hearing of the village men, they asked who wanted to stand for the post of sarpanch and escape doing some of the heavier chores.
Smita Tewari Jassal's book, Unearthing Gender: Folksongs of North India (Duke University Press), is far more than a collection of folk songs, as funny, poignant and thought-provoking as these songs - most sung by women - can be. In the years that she spent in northern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, with an emphasis on Jaunpur, Misraulia, Benares, Mirzapur and Chhapra, the songs she gathered bring to life the dry data of the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) and International Labour Organisation surveys of Indian women and their work.
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Women's histories in India, she writes, bear an unconscious emphasis on the lives of "bhadramahilas" or upper-caste women. Jassal's research focuses far more on the generations of women who were "deprived of access to the written word". They were often silenced, as with Dalit women, because what they had to say was not of interest to the privileged.
But these are the women whose work runs both the households and often a large part of the agricultural activity of rural India. One of the NSSO's wide-ranging surveys across the country measures the number of women engaged in domestic activities - 89 per cent of girls aged five and above, rising to 92-93 per cent for women between the ages of 30 and 44 years. It was confirmation that domestic activities take up most of the daily lives of Indian women, regardless of whether they are officially part of the workforce or not. (NSSO surveys of working women in India estimate that agriculture is the biggest employer, with an estimated 68.5 per cent of working women in farming. There's a lot of overlap between women engaged in domestic activities and those in farming.)
The numbers expose a simple truth: except for 7-11 per cent of Indian women who either cannot work because of advanced age/disabilities or who can afford full-time help, most Indian women grow up knowing that their time belongs to the household, one way or another.
Many of the grinding-songs or jatsar that Jassal records are dark odes, some with grim and bloody endings that reflect the reality of "honour killings". One, recorded by Bhagirathi Devi and Urmila in Chachakpur, speaks of the familiar hardships faced by the daughter-in-law: "Mother-in-law, when my brother comes visiting, you know/Mother-in-law, what shall I cook for the meal?/There's plenty of spoilt kodon grain in the loft/Daughter-in-law, some salad leaves in the sandy field/… O Rama, brother's tears started to roll/Sister, dear, such hardship has befallen you…"
Another song, sung by Shanti Tewari and friends, depicts the daughter-in-law's predicament: "Sixteen men, there are here, seventeen women/ Twenty children there are, and dogs and cats,/ There are the village ploughmen…" And they all have to be fed with the miserly rations doled out by the mother-in-law, in a time of scarcity: "A spoonful of rice, a spoonful of lentils, a spoonful of flour, just a pinch of salt…"
Work occupies most of the day. The photographer Arati Kumar Rao, travelling in Rajasthan among remote village communities, recorded the response to the work of water collecting. Though it took up much of their day, women often embraced the opportunity to be out in the open, exchanging banter and, as always, songs. In her fieldwork in Jaunpur, Smita Tewari Jassal confirms the many surveys of women's work in rural India: "Women of peasant households rise two hours before the men and go to bed at least one or even two hours after the men had retired."
It is not easy recording the direct voices of women in rural India. Aside from barriers of purdah, there are the problems of time and privacy, both luxuries for women across many castes. Many women are unlikely to want to discuss their personal lives, too, with interviewers who have nothing in common with them.
The voices of rural women are often missing, their experiences recorded only in the abstract. Even when it comes to songs, the ones available in the mainstream - T-series' highly successful Bhojpuri recordings (Bodyguard Holi, Lalkarta Lehenga), recordings of mela folk singers - often foreground male folk singers or feature songs meant for more masculine audiences.
But Jassal's collection brings back women's experiences: there are richly sensual songs celebrating illicit affairs conducted in the arhar fields, cautionary tales warning women of the dangers they might face from predatory in-laws, contemplative songs that speak directly to the loneliness of women far from home, waiting for their migrant husbands to come back.
The surveys can only tell us the kind of domestic and agricultural work women in rural India do. These songs, and other folk tales, speak far more directly about how this work shapes and controls their lives - and how they find small and large escapes despite the relentless busy-ness of their days.