The Unraveling Heart : Women's Oral Poetics and Literary Vernacularization in Marathi

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 m