Such is the power of hilsa fish that the cook goes crazy just seeing it: “Randhani pagal maachh, ilisha re.” But that does not mean she can eat the best piece.
Women’s songs are sung for generations. Many in Bengali are about the mouth-watering hilsa, says Chandra Mukhopadhyay, who has been collecting women’s songs from rural Bengal for more than 30 years. But the mother-in-law and sister-in-law may stand in between the cook and the peti, the fat-lined, less bony piece and much-longed-for piece that is cut from the belly, says a song from Barisal (in Bangladesh). Other songs echo this.
Some things do not change. It is a truth universally acknowledged that the woman cooking the hilsa has the least chance of getting the peti.
However, they are not alone. You hear the humour, and the irony, of the song, as Mukhopadhyay renders it on her YouTube channel Geedali (a folk word for singer), and also a longing that comes from deep within, but the original would not have been sung solo.
“The songs were always sung together, and for no audience,” says Mukhopadhyay, who has collected the songs, or what remains of them, travelling extensively to villages in Bengal. She has visited almost every West Bengal district and refugee settlements of Bengalis from across the border. Initially she learnt them; now she also records them.
“What we generally understand by music is that someone is singing and others are listening. The music is meant to be entertaining.” But women’s songs, with their few, simple notes, are not meant to entertain, not in the usual sense. Often about food, they are like a tool, perhaps a weapon, to survive everyday life.
They are also an affirmation of the self, experienced collectively, as often happens with women, and about work. And what is not women’s work?
“Even making rain fall is women’s work,” says Mukhopadhyay. Songs of rain abound, across communities, religious, ethnic or otherwise. The words and the tunes may vary from place to place, but not the subjects, not the feeling.
Women invite the clouds in many ways. The cloud is often imagined as a beloved princess-daughter (Megharani), and asked to spare some water. In a song from Faridpur (in Bangladesh), which is very rich in songs, says Mukhopadhyay, women ask Megharani to relent so that they can have paddy-rice (dhaaner bhaat): “Megharani jol dile dhaaner bhaat khai.” Dhaaner bhaat is not always available. During hard times one had to make do with jonai or some other tough grain, or worse, just the water in which these were boiled.
In Mymensingh, the cloud-king is being hailed as a brother. Parts of north Bengal have given us the “hudum” ritual, which imagines the cloud as a desirable man and the women are required to seduce him with their charms. They go out together in the night and sing to him naked, and no mortal men are allowed to step out then.
“The singing is the work,” says Mukhopadhyay.
Women discovered agriculture, but through the invention of the plough, and capital and patriarchy, ownership of land was always men’s, says Mukhopadhyay. But the onus to feed remains on the woman. The songs connect us to this past, among other things, says Mukhopadhyay. “Our habitations change, our technology changes, but the music does not, as Curt Sachs says in The Rise of Music in the Ancient World, because it has to do with our well-being. Women hold on to it.”
The songs can place the sacred outside the religious and the women outside narrow domesticity.
Because a major part of contemporary scholarship, about the Bengali bhadramahila, says Mukhopadhyay, locates her within domesticity and sexuality (and textuality), it prompts us to think of women as confined within homes. But it leaves out the vast majority of women, who, unlike the bhadramahila, was not lettered, and was out there, literally speaking.
“The songs that we hear is Bengal date back to a time when the Bengali language was yet to be born,” says Mukhopadhyay. “Kalidasa in Raghuvansham says that when Raghu is coming to conquer Bengal, women are singing his praises as they are guarding their sugarcane plantations.” The Bengali translation by Jahnavi Kumar Chakraborty of Arya Saptashati by Govardhanacharya, a 12th century collection of Sanskrit verses, states simply: “Halik romonira swadhin (women farmers are free)”.
Privilege can protect, but also damage.
Rural women had livelihoods, incomes and lives of their own. “They were farmers, katuni (thread-makers), goalni (milk sellers) and dhopani (washerwomen).” They were no prudes. The ritual “pushpamangal”, featuring in women’s songs, was a celebration of a girl’s first menstruation. Her fertility was imagined as “flowering”, pushpa meaning flower. Women took second husbands. A woman from Goalpara, a katuni, married for the second time just for a good meal of, again, dhaaner bhaat, though she did not get it. A second husband was often described differently from the first.
And it took a Vidyasagar in the 19th century to push through the Widow Remarriage Act, to end the inhuman treatment of young widows of the upper classes. “A vast section of the society always lived outside the influence of Brahminical culture,” says Mukhopadhyay.
Colonial morality, too. The songs are the oral records of that continuity.
Mukhopadhyay remembers being stunned by her experience of attending a Tusu festival at Dihar in Bankura in the 1970s, with her classical music teacher Niharranjan Bandyopadhyay. “It was amazing to see so many women and girls, from six to 60, singing together,” she says. Tusu is an important figure in rural Bengal; imagined as a daughter-figure, she personifies the coming crop, or an aspect of nature. Later, Lokayata Darshan, a book by Debiprasad Chattopadhyay, prodded her further towards finding connections to the past.
She came into contact with remarkable personalities. Artist and theatre personality Khaled Chowdhury led her to Mrinal Barua, mental health specialist and musician, who led her to Nihar Barua, his mother, who belonged to the Gauripur royal family. She was a living archive of Goalpara. Mukhopadhyay was also guided by Bina Majumdar, Ranen Roychowdhury and Binapani Roychowdhury. After Nihar Barua left Kolkata, Mukhopadhyay did not pursue her interest for awhile.
In the 1990s, when she was teaching at Khalisakota Adarsha Vidyalaya for Girls, a school near the airport, she heard the sound of dhaak and songs coming from the Khalisakota Pally, a residential area. The original Khalisakota is in Barisal; refugees from there had settled here.
Mukhopadhyay was back on track. She went to the wedding with her students, and spoke to women, then to nearby localities where she found settlements of refugees from Sylhet and Faridpur. She found settlers from Faridpur in Katwa in West Bengal. There she came across a 92-year-old singer. “It is difficult to find singers. They don’t want to sing alone.”
She has collected about 6,000 songs so far. She feels that there is very little support from institutions in such research. “If there was, 60,000 such songs could be collected,” she says.
Many memorable experiences haunt her. She remembers a cold January evening at a Cooch Behar village, when the singer, Dhouli Barman, lit up a fire with dry leaves and began to sing. She could not stop. Finally she sang a song of the dhai (midwife), who invokes all nature before she helps with the birth. “No god was mentioned, but only the earth, and animal nature. Hearing her song, in the cold and against the fire of the leaves, I felt I had gone back a thousand years and was witnessing the first human birth.”
She also remembers the song she heard in Katwa, from Sabitri Majumdar, who was from Faridpur. She sang of a mango tree laden with fruit. The just-married daughter, who was leaving for her husband’s home, reminds her mother that she had scolded her harshly for plucking a mango. But now that she was leaving, why was her mother crying so much holding on to the very same tree? Sabitri Majumdar suddenly broke down singing the song. She had remembered everything together — her home that she had left behind, her mother, her entire world. She was working as a maid when Mukhopadhyay had met her.