Page 241 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

216 Hema Rairkar

their message. They generally performed their drama in bus stations,
marketplaces and public squares, where people naturally gather.
Sometimes women from the audience spontaneously join the actors in
singing with them the grindmill songs. Once only a performance was
given in Pune as an opportunity for the women actors to project in
their own words the peasant woman’s condition to an urban audience
from a higher caste and class. It was a matter of surprise and pleasure
for the latter to realize in particular the advantage the group took of
traditional folk songs to carry modern messages. Some women from
among the audience remembered that their grandmothers were singing
the same type of grindmill songs.

Visual Documentation
A one-and-a-half hour documentary video film Living Memory has
been prepared with the cooperation of the women singers, which is
shown in villages. With the process and method of collection, it visu-
ally displays women’s lives that the songs project. The screening in
villages contributes to maintain the dialogue among women that the
songs carried.
As a significant instance of people’s reactions to the screening
I would like to mention the experience of Chandrakant Kokate who
showed the video film in a village of Shrirampur taluka, Ahmednagar
district. A large number of grindmill songs were included. When they
started viewing the film, the women from that village were amazed to
discover that the songs recorded in the video document were exactly
the same as their own songs. They then accused Kokate of having stolen
their songs and given them to the women in Mawal. As a rule, poor
peasant women rarely travel and visit areas located far away from their
own villages; they are acquainted only with the immediate surround-
ing villages. Therefore, they could not imagine or believe that other
women residing in villages 500 km away could ever sing the same
songs. The video document served at least one purpose that day: it es-
tablished the obvious fact of the universality of oral tradition and led to
a strong feeling of togetherness. Some of the women requested Kokate
to include them in the ‘cinema’ as they could also sing the same songs
as the other women seen on the screen, who did not differ from them
at all. Only one old woman explicitly refused to ‘go into the cinema’.