Session 6: Nupur Choudhary
Songs of Separation: Gendered Dialogues, Movement and Singing Worlds of the Women of Mithila
Chair: Pranav Prakash
Respondent: Mallika Shakya
- Wednesday 2026-07-08 11:00-12:30
- Location: Seminar Room
- Type: session
This paper examines samdaun geet, a repertoire of Maithil women’s songs performed at the moment when a bride leaves her natal home for her husband’s household. Sung collectively at the close of wedding rituals, samdaun geet give voice to narratives of separation, longing, and displacement articulated through both the mother’s and the daughter’s perspectives. Rather than treating these songs as symbolic or sentimental expressions of tradition, I argue that they directly speak to the social and political realities of marital mobility imposed on women. Through these performances, women openly articulate the emotional costs of leaving the natal home and the structural conditions that shape their movement across households.
Based on ethnographic conversations and observations, I show how individual experiences shape the emotional force of particular verses. Even within collective performances, certain lines “settle” differently in the hearts and memories of different women, producing distinct emotional and interpretive resonances. These variations complicate the assumption that collective singing necessarily reflects consensus. In doing so, the paper questions ethnographic generalizations about “women’s songs” that conflate collectivity with shared meaning, thereby overlooking the differentiated and sometimes divergent perspectives embedded in these performances.
By foregrounding both the collective frame of ritual singing and the individual inflections that animate it, the paper argues that samdaun geet function as dialogical interpretive sites through which gendered experience, affect, and social critique are continually negotiated and reworked. Passed down across generations and often in the relative absence of men, these songs illuminate the lived tensions of women’s mobility while offering subtle, embodied commentaries on the social worlds that shape their lives.