The Unraveling Heart - by Madhuri Deshmukh (Paperback)

About the Book

This groundbreaking book shows that women's songs of the grind mill played a foundational role in the vernacular turn to making literature in Marathi between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries.

Book Synopsis

Women's songs of the grind mill are among the oldest oral traditions in South Asia. They have been sung to accompany a daily household labor, making flour using a stone hand mill, for many centuries. Even today, grind mill songs are still well known in Maharashtra, testifying to the endurance of a remarkable genre. Yet these songs have long been understood through sociological or anthropological lenses, treated as entirely separate from literary culture.

This groundbreaking book shows that women's songs of the grind mill played a foundational role in the vernacular turn to making literature in Marathi between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries. Madhuri Deshmukh demonstrates that women's songs developed alongside and in intimate conversation with Marathi written literature, shaping the poetic structures and motifs of the bhakti tradition. Drawing on aesthetic categories from the songs themselves, she calls for understanding these artfully crafted compositions as oral poetry in a lyric mode, underscoring that women describe their songs as an "unraveling of the heart" while they compare written poetry to weaving. Deshmukh argues that women poets, Mahadaise and Janabai, were at the forefront of vernacularization, challenging common literary-historical narratives that neglect the role of communities excluded by elite regimes of writing. Considering what songs say about texts and what texts say about songs, The Unraveling Heart offers new insight into the importance of labor and gender to aesthetics and develops a novel approach to the concept of the literary.

Review Quotes

In centering the Marathi song tradition of women laboring at the flour grind mill, Deshmukh innovatively writes anew the history of Indian literature. The Unraveling Heart constructs a shared genealogy between elite South Asian vernacular literature and the oral compositions of women and non-elite castes traced over hundreds of years in India. This book has no parallel in South Asia Studies.--Christian Lee Novetzke, coauthor of The Yoga of Power: Yoga as Political Thought and Practice in India

About the Author

Madhuri Deshmukh is professor of English at Oakton College.