This happened a few days ago. My elder brother\u2019s youngest brother-in-law was getting married at his in-laws\u2019 home. The wedding procession arrived and the guests were welcomed. But no \u2018gaari\u2019 was sung. Instead, a DJ played throughout the ceremony. One of the women who had gone with the wedding procession said, \u201cWhat kind of welcome is this? They aren\u2019t singing any gaari.\u201d Since \u2018gaari\u2019 is sung for the wedding party, it was the people in the procession who noticed its absence first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I kept thinking about when something once considered essential had quietly disappeared. In our part of the country, a wedding was not considered complete without \u2018gaari\u2019. But gaari was never merely a ritual for me. It was the first place where I heard women say things in their own voices. So this is not simply about a ritual being lost. It is about a voice disappearing with it. To understand that loss, I have to return to my childhood, to the banks of the Sindoori.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2018Gaari\u2019 is a traditional wedding song sung by women, often full of playful teasing, ribaldry, and mock abuse directed at the groom, his relatives and the wedding party. In this part of Mahakoshal and Bundelkhand, no one takes offence because \u2018gaari\u2019 is understood as part of the wedding ritual. What is interesting is that things women were not permitted to say at other times could, during a wedding, be sung openly in front of the entire village.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The first time I heard a woman say something like that was on the banks of the Sindoori. It was the kind of thing she could never have said within the walls of her own home. It was not even a wedding day. Perhaps the women were rehearsing for an upcoming wedding, or perhaps they were simply having fun. I no longer remember the occasion clearly. But I remember the riverbank, the overlapping voices of the women, and the laughter rising among them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Sindoori, which flows near my village of Madanpur, is a tributary of the Narmada. Women went there to fetch water, bathe and wash clothes. We children played nearby, and they paid little attention to us. We were small, and they felt free around us. In their eyes, perhaps, we were not yet old enough to understand. For us children, they were not the women of domestic restraint we knew from inside our homes. In that freedom, I heard things that I might not have heard as an adult.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I do not remember a complete line of those songs today, but I still remember their manner. They often began with a relationship or the body, turned into a taunt directed at a man, and dissolved into the women\u2019s collective laughter. As a child, I simply found it funny. Later I understood that this was one of the few spaces in the village where women could speak openly about marriage, husbands and their own bodies. Things that might have been considered obscene or improper in another context acquired a different meaning inside \u2018gaari\u2019. The song gave them a space in which to speak, and everyone listening understood that this was a time when such things could be said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There was never just one leader of the wedding \u2018gaari\u2019. Whether it was Barethan Bau or Pujaran Kaki, the women would sit together and keep adding lines. One would begin a line, another would add something to it, and a third would carry it further. The song was not written beforehand. It was created in the moment and became everyone\u2019s at once. For that while, social hierarchies seemed to fall away. But at the Sindoori ghat, it was often the newly married women whose voices rose the loudest. I had rarely heard them speak so freely at home. As a child, I found this difference strange without understanding why. I could not yet understand how the same woman could become so different in different places.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Why was this freedom allowed?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One reason was laughter. Something that might turn into an argument if said directly could pass as a joke when sung. Another was that \u2018gaari\u2019 did not belong to any one woman. Everyone sang, so no one person carried the responsibility for what was said. But it would be wrong to call this complete freedom. The same women who sang without restraint at the riverbank returned home to their everyday silences. There were still rules about how much one could say, in front of whom, what one could laugh about and what had to remain unspoken. Society had opened a narrow window for women to speak, so that the door could remain shut.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the same village, women were less often called by their names than by the villages they came from. \u201cThe one from Peeperpani.\u201d It was also common to identify a woman through her husband or household, as in \u201cKhunta\u2019s wife.\u201d Marriage changed the household she belonged to, but her identity remained tied to a place or a relationship. At home she was someone\u2019s daughter-in-law; in the village she was someone from a particular place. Gradually, her name became less a marker of the person she was than of the relationship through which others knew her. Before asking who she was, it was already decided whose she was. Perhaps at the riverbank, inside \u2018gaari\u2019, she became, for the first time, simply a woman with a voice of her own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I later tried to preserve some of these voices and names in my book Nadi Sindoori. Some names had remained so deeply embedded in my childhood memory that, while writing them, I felt I was not inventing the name of a character but writing back into existence the way the village had once called her. Even after the book was published, the question stayed with me: if a village has already given a woman her name, where does her own voice go?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
With girls, the process happened more quietly. When I was a child, girls could be seen everywhere, walking along the roads, going to school with their friends, heading towards the river. They knew the roads just as the boys did. Then they began to grow up. The village remained the same, but their routes changed. \u201cWhere are you going?\u201d \u201cWho are you going with?\u201d \u201cWhat time will you be back?\u201d No one announced one day that a girl\u2019s world had suddenly become smaller. It happened the way the Sindoori receded in summer. At first, you hardly noticed. Then one day, where there had been water, there was only sand. Where they would go, whom they would meet, whom they would marry: one question after another, these decisions slipped out of their hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then time changed. Machines arrived, collective work declined, people began leaving for other places, mobile phones and DJs entered village life, and there were fewer reasons for people to gather along the river. The space for \u2018gaari\u2019 also shrank. I saw one version of that change at the wedding I mentioned. The procession arrived, the guests were welcomed, food and drink were served, but there was no collective voice of women. In its place was a loud DJ.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I cannot say whether this is good or bad. Times change, and rituals change with them. The younger generation has its own preferences and its own forms of entertainment. Some of the things expressed through \u2018gaari\u2019 might also feel uncomfortable today. But when even this narrow window begins to close, where are women left to speak in their own way? I do not have an easy answer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How much a society allows women to speak about their bodies, desires and relationships can also be glimpsed in its songs. In the \u2018gaari\u2019 sung beside the Sindoori, I first heard how willing a society was to listen to women, and where it drew the line.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I did not write my book to save these women. I simply understood, much later, that their voices had already been written into my memory. That day at the wedding, the DJ was playing and a woman said, \u201cThey aren\u2019t singing any gaari.\u201d I felt that she was not merely complaining about a ritual being left out. Perhaps she was remembering that small space where women could, for a little while, step outside the confines of the household and speak in their own way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And I remembered the Sindoori again. Its water. The women sitting at the ghat. And that laughter that had no place inside the walls of their homes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n