‘Pound Her Well Turn by Turn’: Examining Female Agency in Select South-Indian Tulu Folk Songs

This piece will attempt to see beyond the romanticisation of the lives of hardship and instead portray the diverse facets of the experiences of a select folk group. Folk songs carry many traditions in them and have been composed, sung and passed on through generations orally by anonymous individuals. These individuals tend to belong to the lower socioeconomic strata of society. When Moonlight Is Very Hot (Rao and Gowda, 2018) is a collection of English translations of Tulu1 work songs or kabitas and dance songs, translated and compiled by B. Surendra Rao and K. Chinnappa Gowda. Moreover, the role of women here fits this idea of the ‘folk’. In particular, the women in the kabitas were commonly exploited and yet sometimes displayed outright sexuality (ibid., pp. 28, 47). These can be seen in the kabitas ‘Handsome Tawny Red Bull’ and ‘As I Was Going Along the Field’. Some songs like ‘Our Lady Darane’ and ‘Work! Work Only!’ reflect the experiences of migrant labourers who come looking for work in these fields. Songs like ‘Our Lady Darane’ showcase the resistance of the women in both visible and invisible forms, thereby defining their social realities. However, the song ‘Work! Work Only!’ illustrates the unwillingness of women to leave their homes presumably due to the poor working conditions or arguably because they have to tend to their husbands, which is of utmost priority as evident in the text (ibid., p. 27).