Stonemill and Bhakti: No 3 (Contemporary Researches in Hindu Philosophy) - Hardcover

Poitevin, G.; Rairrakara, Hemalata

9788124600597: Stonemill and Bhakti: No 3 (Contemporary Researches in Hindu Philosophy)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 8124600597 ISBN 13: 9788124600597

Publisher: D.K. Print World Ltd, 1996

Tangible patrimony usually attracts atten-tion and efforts of preservation. Intangible cultural traditions do often go with the winds of history when their social and material setting disappears. Such is the case with the songs that women in India, while grinding before dawn, have kept singing for ages on their hand-mill. Aside from the male society, they hoarded up for themselves a non-material matrimony. Today, though, motor driven flour-mills have put to rest these voices of silence, their legacy remains with them: immense and immemorial, purely feminine and oral, anonymous and personal, collective and intimate. Words from the heart, they glitter like flames in the domestic hearth. This book is the first attempt of systematic cultural-anthropological study of that unique tradition. It offers keys to apprehend it. Why should this tradition, first of all, originate from a shared compulsion to "open up one's heart"? This differentiates the women singers' intentionality from the didactic treatment of pundits and sants who make grinding and grindmill the allegory of an advaitic bhakti. For women Lakshmis dedicated to serve the Fortune of their family and its lineage life in plenty is their raison d' etre. When preachers and swamis advocate a holy insensibility to earthly things and fellow human beings, the work of grinding epitome of woman's office carries worldly utopias of abundance and reveals a quest for salvation through bonds of affective attachment. Eventually, the study raises radical questions on such crucial concepts as those of bhakti, tradition, the status of popular traditions versus elaborate constructs of literati. The symbolism of the stonemill in religious Marathi literature is constrasted with the experience of grinding of peasant women as the latter articulated it in their work-songs. What is sought is an epistemological insight into the cognitive processes which result in the dialectic blend of affinity and glaring inconsistency that one observes between those two levels of cultural creativity. AUTHOR DETAILS: Guy Poitevin, born in France in 1934, and an Indian citizen by naturalization, settled in Pune in 1972. He obtained his Ph. D. in social sciences from Paris University, with a research on attitudes and aspirations of Indian students from lower social sections. In 1982, he established the Center for Cooperative Research in Social Sciences, Pune, devoted to researches on those social agents and communities whose socio-historical plight, struggle for survival, internal representations and cultural potentialities happen to be overlooked by academic research methodologies. Alternative ways are explored, based on the active cooperation and self-investigation of all those concerned, and geared in one way or the other to social agency Hema Rairkar, born in Maharashtra in 1939, graduated in Economics. She is actively associated with action-groups of peasant women in villages of Pune district. She follows and facilitates their attempts of self-learning in study-groups concerned with current gender issues. She organises, in particular on the grindmill songs, seminars which bring together social animators, school teachers, professors of Marathi and social sciences, and those peasant women themselves who reappropriate their tradition. cover: Lord K]rshna grinds with Janabai, a fourteenth century saint from Maharashtra a prevalent symbol of bhakti among peasant women in Maharashtra.

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Synopsis:

This book is the first attempt at a systematic cutltural anthropogical studies of the stonemill tradition. The grinding of the peasant women who singing for ages on their hand mills have articulated tradition in their work songs.

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