Songs, Stories, Lives: Gendered Dialogues and Cultural Critique

The essays in this volume address theoretical and ethnographic issues concerning oral traditions and women’s speech in diverse South Asian Communities in North and South India and Nepal. Grounded in an awareness of the colonial, postcolonial and academic textualizations that so often have prevented women’s speech from being heard or their silences understood, the papers work towards an interpretation of women’s expressive genres as responding critically to dominant conventions and social practices, without reducing "resistance" to a simple or unequivocally oppositional voice, and without lapsing into a language that suggests a homogeneity that women’s speech does not possess, or an uncrossable boundary between the speech of men and that of women. In their ethnographic interpretations, the authors evoke some of the sites at which the oral traditions of South Asian men and women respond critically or ironically to one another, mirror one another, meld sympathetically with one another, or move to silence or subsume one another, while considering always the relations of power as well as community that frame each performance, each act of speaking.