Page 255 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

230 Kusum Sonavne

The following song refers to the husband who rejects his wife after
marriage as if he had never been married and takes another woman.
The song warns him and suggests a course of action to the potential
victim:

Oh! you sinner, a villain, I’ll remember your sin
I keep on record in my memory the date of wedding.

The next examples threaten with two sorts of firm counter-actions:
You have filled up seven jars with sins
In one day, I’ll hold them all upside-down.
Oh! you sinner! a villain, with whom are you playing fool?
I am not a gentle woman, I’ll hang you at the village wall.
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The second word candal, villain, was also extensively used with
. .
the same connotations that it had in the tradition of songs. It occurs
in six songs, including three of those quoted earlier. It means vile,
depraved, debased, perverted, corrupted, and so on, with reference
to sexual abuse and aggression. It could be rendered by the word
‘debauchee’. The expression in the gardener’s garden, very common
in the oral tradition, is a cliché that usually sets up an erotic semantic
environment, a place of enjoyment, green and cool. In contrast to this
is the calumnious gossiping and slander, moral and physical hardships,
and eventually murder:

In the gardener’s garden, this is not a flower but a colocynth
A man kills for dowry, this is not a man but a villain.
Mother and father say: ‘My sweet pretty daughter
Who is the villain who plays with your destiny?’
The noble woman came to existence in the womb of her mother
and father
The villain has gossiped against her without her committing any
fault.
The third word of a wide occurrence is kapatī, deceitful, treacher-
.
ous. It occurs in six songs. Men are unfaithful, deceptive, unreliable;
society lets them loose at the cost of women: ‘Do hatch your stratagems,
we shall bear the grief of your treachery,’ quips a song sarcastically.