ABSTRACT
This chapter is an attempt to make sense of migration with the help of Bhojpuri women’s folksongs. Songs – the lifeblood of Bhojpuri everyday – are accessible, commonly-held epistemic resources of the people. They provide rare insights into the gendered social lives of migration. They also produce, somewhat fixed, cultural subjects out of the “migrant husband” and his “left-behind wife”. The “disproportionate” value assigned to oral cultural productions in the life of Bhojpuri women is often left unexplained by scholars. Hence, this chapter deals with three structural conditions which shape women’s folksongs on male out-migration, orality, literacy, and marriage migration. These reflections, based primarily on field-work notes, are followed by a few illustrations of Bhojpuri women’s folksongs on male out-migration. The chapter argues for a grounded analysis of folksongs – sensitive to their structural contexts and changing contents.
