Page 231 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

206 Hema Rairkar

Woman, don’t call your husband ‘My Lord! My Lord!’
Men are dark serpents, you don’t know when they’ll bite you.
4. Sexual repression is a pervasive means of subjection, the most
effective way to enforce the ‘laws of their status’ on that ‘stupid
breed, these girls who know not their rank’:

Could one call this youth? Never! But rather iron fetters
No better than chains that bind the life of womankind.
Damn this youth! To blazes with this young bloom
This is the curse on Gandhari from her mother.

5. Permanent hard labour with no respite nor appreciation makes a
woman a mere ‘beast of burden’. Her young energy ‘burns away
like a patch of greenery at the heart of a great fire’:

A woman must never tire of grinding and pounding
The twelve bullocks keep ploughing the fields.

I went to work; but what is the value of my work?
Brother, I’m telling you, I’m as good as any man.

6. Despair eventually prompts a wish of self-annihilation and no-
existence:
No! No! God! I don’t want to be born a woman
I tell you, it’s a very hard lot to be one.

This brings home a few lessons. The tradition of yesterday is a
springboard for tomorrow. The literary vigour and perceptive insight
of the purely oral and feminine tradition of grindmill songs may help
social scientists to transcend economic, Western or feminist concepts
and lead them instead towards the genuine anthropological background
that Women’s Studies needs, to make progress. But this anthropol-
ogical understanding is still all the more required from anyone involved
in efforts of cultural action. Latent female potentialities, endogenous
processes and autonomous aspirations prove to be the most appropriate
grounds for effective cultural action, especially on the part of the same
womenfolk.
Our experience has convinced us that the second principle of
a valid pattern of cultural action is the anthropological insight of