I was introduced to this song-poem by Shilpa Mudbi, a folk-artist who – through her Urban Folk Project – has been doing her best to keep alive the folk traditions of (her ancestral part of) Karnataka; generally North Karnataka (and, more specifically, the village of Mudbi). This particular song was bequeathed to Shilpa by her ajji, her grandmother; who, Shilpa tells me, is a treasure trove of such songs.
The song-poem I’m offering here is a distillation of Shilpa’s own presentation (where she intersperses the song with her commentary). You can find Shilpa’s presentation here. It is important to note that a song-poem like this is necessarily fluid; its lyrics are not fixed in the way the lyrics of today’s poems and songs are fixed. The lyrics I’ve given right below may be considered “formal”. Having never been written down (until quite recently), it should be not surprising if different inheritors of this oral tradition sing the song in different ways with different pronunciations.
It is worth noting that this fluidity is an essential part of the oral tradition — and offers the inheritor of the tradition a chance to make the song her own. You will note, if you watch Shilpa’s presentation, that she has “added” an extra stanza to the poem. I believe that is Shilpa’s way of continuing the tradition even as she inserts herself into it. (As I understand it, Shilpa has recently relocated to the Gulbarga area of North Karnataka with the intention of “returning home [to Mudbi]”, as it were, and immersing herself in the sounds and scents of the soil and the people who nourished those songs that now offer her nourishment.)
Note: Here is the Facebook page of ‘The Urban Folk Project’. Here is their Youtube channel. And here is their Instagram profile.
Finally, before I offer up the song-poem, here’s what Da Ra Bendre, 20th-century Kannada’s genius poet and one of the greatest lyric poets to have lived, had to say about song-poems like this one and the women who created them. It is an excerpt from my English translation of the ಪರಿಚಯ (paricaya: ~ introduction) Bendre wrote for “ಗರತಿಯ ಹಾಡು (garatiya haaḍu: ~ songs of our womenfolk)”, a collection of traditional Kannada “folksongs”. A great portion of these folksongs were gathered by Bendre’s ಗೆಳೆಯರು (friends-colleagues) from women living in the villages of the ತದ್ದೆವಾಡ (taddevāḍa) area of Bijapur and brought out in book form in 1932.
For those who worship living itself, the rishis of the spontaneous three-line verses of these ‘Songs of our Womenfolk’ are women: our mothers and our sisters, our aunts and our nieces, our wives and our children. If we were to properly think about it, theirs is the real poetry. Everything else is just a shade of that poetry. Our tradition tells that poetry is ಕಾಂತಾಸಮ್ಮಿತಿ (kāntāsammiti: ~ like the talk of the beloved). But if poetry is that which is like the talk of the beloved, is not the actual talk of the beloved the mother of our poetry? What we proudly call poetry is really one of her children. The words of the ‘beloved’ is the true poetry; it was upon seeing how those who stubbornly refused to follow the vedas, who refused to cede authority to the shastras could be softened by the words of the ‘beloved’ that the essence of the vedas and the shastras took on the winsome form of poetry. (Here, it is important to not restrict the ‘beloved’ simply to the ‘wife’ but to think of her as representative of all womankind.)
(Edited) audio of Shilpa singing the poem:
My Mother’s Place
Bending I’m drawing rangolis
outside the door – such varieties;
the same dream it pláys and plays,
how to escape to mother’s place;
I’ve now come to my mother’s place,
I remémber her – tears wet my face.
Brother’s wife so full of cunning,
her glances – they’re piércing things.
I went to the river with brother
to tell him to talk sternly to her;
I’ve now come to my mother’s place,
I remémber her – tears wet my face.
Vasudeva, lord of this land,
make my mother’s place abundant;
make my mother’s place abundant,
goddess, I bring karpūra to your temple
I’ve now come to my mother’s place,
I remémber her – tears wet my face.
(Translated by Madhav Ajjampur)
P.S: The idea was to create an English translation that could be sung in (more or less) the same tune as the original. I think you should try it and let me know if you were able to. Also, for those interested, here’s a write-up from three months ago, part of my informal collaboration with Shilpa. What you see in the afterword is part of the write-up.
Afterword:
This song speaks to a village woman’s idea of her mother’s home or mother’s place as her (only) sanctuary. While not irrelevant to other cultures and countries, this idea is particularly Indian in its scope. The reason is simple: the longstanding (patriarchal) notion of a woman as a chattel or property who is passed on – at the time of her wedding – from her father’s custody to her husband’s custody; in other words, kanyādāna. With dāna (~almsgiving; charity) accorded such high status in Indian (Hindu) culture, the dāna of one’s daughter becomes an act of merit (or puṇya) for the father. The recepient of the dāna is the husband. Caught between the giver and the taker is the woman, an independent being wholly deprived of her agency. (This short, no-dialogue film offers a take on this transaction.)
What then makes a woman look on her mother’s home as a sanctuary (if that is where her father is too)? I reckon it is solely the presence of her mother, perhaps the only person in this world who can and does sympathize with her predicament. Given the legendary atté-sosé (or saas-bahu; mother-in-law–daughter-in-law) relationship, it is expected that the woman will be treated poorly in her husband’s home – where she will serve, variously, as a washing machine, cook, sweeper, and child-bearer. Given these circumstances, returning to her mother’s home or place is the only respite a woman can look forward to; a short time when she can “put her feet up” and be taken care of, be her mother’s child again. But with the passing of her mother, the mother’s home too becomes a different place; bereft, less comforting, and ‘ruled’ by a different woman – usually, her brother’s wife.
(A real irony of the whole situation is the role of the woman in her own subjugation. By her unthinking propagation of patriarchal norms, she ensures her bondage within the ‘system’. For example, even her ‘mother’s place’ that the woman speaks of so fondly was once her mother’s mother-in-law’s place; a place her mother once bore suffering that she wished to escape from by going to her mother’s place. Here’s some more on the matter.)
A final word. It is important to understand that this song is not contemporary. That is to say, it does not (like it may have a hundred years ago when this song was put together by women as they ground flour in the early morning) represent the reality of nearly all women within India. Yes, the patriarchy persists (and not just in India), but things – from a woman’s perspective at least – seem to be changing for the better. Anti-discrimination laws together with increasing urbanization have changed society in untold ways.
On the other hand, it is just as important to understand that attitudes of this sort persist – and not just in India’s villages. Countless dowry deaths and domestic violence testify to its persistence. So too does the inclusion of this attitude within a language itself. For instance, it is normal in Kannada to speak of ‘ಹೆಣ್ಣನ್ನು [ಒಂದು] ಊರಿಗೆ ಕೊಡೋದು’ or ‘heṇṇannu [ondu] ūrige koḍōdu’, i.e., ‘give a female to a [certain] town’ in the context of her being married off to a man who lives in that town. I don’t know what the situation’s like in other Indian languages, but I reckon it isn’t too different.
All in all, though, I see no reason to not be optimistic. After all, the idea of dharma (~morality) that underlies Hindu tradition is the opposite of stagnant in that it allows, encourages, and even advocates for change to suit the times.
Kannada To English 