The Unraveling Heart
Women's Oral Poetics and Literary Vernacularization in Marathi
Seiten
2025
Columbia University Press (Verlag)
9780231217927 (ISBN)
Columbia University Press (Verlag)
9780231217927 (ISBN)
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.
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.
Madhuri Deshmukh is professor of English at Oakton College.
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
Introduction and Underview: In the Footsteps of Janabai
1. The Unraveling Heart: A Poetics of the Grind Mill
2. Colloquial Turns: Unraveling Vernacular Beginnings
3. The Ovī: A Poetics of Work in the Work of Poetics
4. Bhakti as Poiesis: A Dialogue in Verse
5. Women and Vernacularization: The Founding Poetics of Mahadaise and Janabai
Postscript: Contra Conclusions
Notes
Bibliography
Index
| Erscheinungsdatum | 20.10.2025 |
|---|---|
| Zusatzinfo | 28 b&w illustrations |
| Verlagsort | New York |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 152 x 229 mm |
| Themenwelt | Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte |
| Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie ► Hinduismus | |
| Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik | |
| Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft | |
| Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Gender Studies | |
| ISBN-13 | 9780231217927 / 9780231217927 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
| Informationen gemäß Produktsicherheitsverordnung (GPSR) | |
| Haben Sie eine Frage zum Produkt? |
Mehr entdecken
aus dem Bereich
aus dem Bereich
die Geschichte meiner Urgroßmutter
Buch | Hardcover (2025)
C.H.Beck (Verlag)
CHF 32,15
Träume und Macht : eine Biografie
Buch | Hardcover (2025)
C.H.Beck (Verlag)
CHF 61,60
