Page 248 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

From Grindmill Songs to Cultural Action 223

popular literature, oral social history, subaltern studies, cultural an-
thropology, and so on. Songs are an asset for common women to es-
tablish communication with the academic intelligentsia—two worlds
that stand totally apart from one another to the detriment of genuine
anthropological knowledge.
As an example, the following list is from a presentation that we
made at Nanded (Maharashtra) on 3 January 1995 in the course of a
seminar on the ‘Collection and Study of Grindmill Songs: A Perspective’
organized by the Centre for Cooperative Research in Social Sciences
(CCRSS) with the departments of sociology and Marathi literature of
the People’s College. For a hint of the rhetoric and style of expression
characteristics of the grindmill songs as a symbolic system of commu-
nication, we presented words that cross the mind when a girl-child is
born. They are all related to expressing disgust and helplessness. The
following keywords testify to the impressive cognitive and communi-
cative power of most common words, images and literary similes:

1. Body/being: God finally decides upon the form that takes
the body (pin . d . a) of a girl. Nothing can be done about it. A song
says:
The hope was to have a boy, a daughter broke it
Why to blame her? God has created her being.

2. Lineage: The word is usually associated either with light or
darkness. The son should maintain the lineage. He is the light
of the lineage. A daughter spells darkness.

Our hope was to have a boy, the myna came, a daughter
Mother-in-law says: ‘The lamp is blown off from my bed.’

3. May she die: The birth of a girl is so resented that one wishes
her death as soon as she is born.

Mother-in-law says: ‘That girl has come, isn’t it?
Now, woman, when shall her palanquin go?’

The word palanquin here stands for the stretcher that carries the corpse
in a procession towards the funeral ground. The assumption is the