Singing Gangaur: Women's Folk Narratives, Gendered Spaces, and Cultural Transformation in Rajasthan

Abstract

Rajasthan has a very rich tradition of folk singing. The repertoire of women’s songs showcases different stages of human life, from conception to death. These songs preserve cultural traditions and pass collective memories and stories from one generation to the next. The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork and analyses the narrative of folk songs sung during Gangaur festival. Group discussions during the study led to an understanding of how the festival of Gangaur is viewed by the women celebrating it. In India, marriage is still a prominent concern for families and Gangaur is also a means by which women are initiated into the out marrying patriarchal system. It normalises marriage for each individual woman by making marriage a collective celebration and combining it with the narratives of folk gods, giving the institution of marriage a cultural and religious legitimacy. The paper studies how ritual folk songs performed by women articulate gendered experience of emotion and social constraint within the domestic spaces showcasing the relationship between ritual performance and class privilege within women spaces as well. At the same time, it studies the ways divine and popular folk figures are used as narrative mediators to express women’s lived realities. The paper illustrates how ritual singing functions as a space for emotional catharsis for women, particularly in articulating grief related to daughters leaving homes after marriage, while attempting to read how women’s agency functions within the domestic sphere.