Page 215 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

190 Bel et al.

akin to pitch rises and falls in speech prosody. Furthermore, intensity,
spectral characteristics (such as variants of vowels) and the timing
parameters (both segmental and supra-segmental) should be taken
into account. These events may be correlated with words or phrases
that they might be stressing or unstressing and specific meanings they
might convey in support to, or in contradiction with, the lyrics.
Since the syntactic structure is an almost negligible feature of
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performed ovı, it is realistic to look at the order and positions of words
as constituents of the time structure itself.

An Essay in the Interpretation of a Performance

These phenomena will now be illustrated in a real performance. The
song represented in Table 6.1 was performed on 5 March 1997 by
Janire Shahu, a woman from the Mahadev Koli (tribal) community
4
in Rajmachi, a village in the vicinity of the Pune/Mumbai highway.
An indication of the expertise of this performer is that the regular
text displays a great continuity in the sequence of images and ideas.

Suggestive Expression
According to insiders’ comments, the second verse, ‘Lakshmibai has
come through man’s left leg’, refers to the ritual way a couple enters
the bridegroom’s house, with the bride standing on the left side of
her husband. Thus the figure of woman–Lakshmi, which in peasant
women’s imagination is associated with the evening, and the presence
of cows in the stable as a marker of wealth in the farm, naturally triggers
the evocation of a successful marriage. Here, the evocation is not a
plain metaphor or metonym; it belongs to the category of suggestive
projection (vyañjana) if we follow the rasa-dhvani classification of
expressive forms (Ingalls 1990). With a sequence of only three words,
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purusacya davya payı, repeated twice in the actual performance,
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the singer unveils a tiny fragment of a vast semantic framework that
only experienced listeners are able to reconstruct with their own
imagination (kalpana). This is a typical instance of a suggestive pro-
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cess extensively at work in ovı as a poetical form.