Outspoken Women: Representations of Female Voices in a Rajasthani Folklore Community

The most superficial hearing of women’s speech in Rajasthani oral performance traditions counters some prevailing gender stereotypes.1 In these traditions we find neither the modesty and “embarrassment ” (lj, arm) prescribed as appropriate, ornamental female behavior within the culture, nor the voicelessness and submissiveness depicted in many outsider views of South Asian women from orientalist to feminist.2 I lived in a single village in Rajasthan, North India, for almost two years, and I recorded Rajasthani women’s songs on many and varied 1 Many heartfelt thanks to Joyce Flueckiger, Peter Hook, and Jyotsna Kapur for especially helpful and thoughtful readings of this essay in earlier drafts. Once again I must express my substantial debts and enormous gratitude to Joseph C. Miller, Jr., Bhoju Ram Gujar, and the women of Ghatiyali for generosities beyond reckoning. 2 See Chandra Mohanty’s original, acute critique of Western feminist authors who construct “third world women ” as a “homogeneous ‘powerless ’ group often located as implicit victims of particular socioeconomic systems ” (Mohanty 1991:57). See also Stephens 1989 and Visweswaran 1994 for further insights into problems and limitations within the prevailing scholarship on Indian women’s powers and voices. For testimony to South Asian women’s expressive oral performances as commentary, subversion, an