Performing the ‘Maternal’ Body:

Unearthing Desire and Sexuality in the Folksongs of the New Mother

Abstract

This paper looks at women’s folk singing tradition of Haryana to unearth the images of the new mother, as constructed in the folksongs called Jachcha, sung in the context of childbirth. The attempt is to foreground the embodied voices of women as they emerge in the context of motherhood, in order to recognise and augment the voices as much as the silences, that abundantly “speak” and subvert the dominant patriarchal notions of the docile, chaste body of the mother that are constructed to manage the potentially threatening aspect of the fertile female body. As we hear women’s voices and self-imaging, we find neither the tender, nurturing “motherly” body nor the modesty, embarrassment or voicelessness so often identified as appropriate female behaviour. What remains at the centre of these female genres is the potency and the legitimacy of female desires along with placing a strong positive value on their fulfilment. A reading  of women’s cultural forms reveals these to be discourses that carry a very different understanding of “maternal” body and sexuality, disrupting the prevailing dominant polarised conceptualisations of the female body wherein the maternal body is often desexualised, assuming an incongruity between active sexuality and motherhood in a good wife. My contention is that such resignifications and alternative self-figurations of the maternal body by women serve to challenge dominant ontological claims, thereby revealing ontology to be a contested field as well as enhancing the field of possibilities for (re)imagining the “maternal” body.