Page 227 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

202 Hema Rairkar

O Lord mill, I try to set you in motion
Sita, my mother, she sang to me the history.

Womenfolk all over the Indian subcontinent abide by a rule (ap-
parently followed since the sixth century if we go by documentary
evidence) that they have set for themselves of not ‘giving the mill its
feed in silence’. The rule in fact is not a rule but a compulsion to ‘open
up one’s heart’. Singing while grinding is a frenzy.
‘I do the grinding. Why should I do it?
To tell you the sorrows of my heart.’
‘I sang songs, pouring out my feelings.’
‘While grinding at dawn, my mind is filled with exhilaration.’
While grinding and pounding, I opened out what was in my heart
By dint of pulling the millstone, my throat has become dry.
This is not a mill but my hermit of yesteryear
I confide to you fortune and misfortune of my heart.
The motor-driven flour mill puts an end to the grindmill. It extin-
guishes altogether the source of the living tradition of the songs of the
millstone; the latter are doomed to sink into oblivion. Nothing can be
envisaged to protect against this effect of modernity. The tradition
cannot be kept in a state of artificial survival at the cost of housewives
whose labour is happily alleviated:

By dint of grinding, one’s skin hardened at the bottom
In this day and age, the mill is fitted out with a belt.

Yet it is still time to collect and preserve that immense feminine
memory of the songs as long as they continue to live deep inside the
peasant womenfolk. Since 1983 we have embarked on a project of
comprehensive archiving and study of those songs (text and context,
musical and visual expressivity, content analysis and critical re-
appropriation, and so on) in the Marathi linguistic area. As rural
social interventionists we concern ourselves with appropriately in-
serting this rich input medium into the present channels and forms
of communication, whether ancient or modern. There is still time
to draw upon these songs and feed with them our own memory and
information systems. This is our perspective at the confluence of
women’s power, cultural matrimony and communicative creativity.