Songs of Desire and Defiance

Explore the desires and defiance of women through the haunting lyrics of Bhawaiya folk songs, a music tradition of Bengal.

Bhawaiya and other Bangla folk traditions endure without conforming to dominant expectations, and they sustain deviant, defiant voices that resist cultural homogenization. By weaving together history, performance, emotion, and politics, this book highlights the transformative power of folk music to unsettle identity and create new possibilities of sexual subjectivity in South Asia. It explores how cultural forms embody, negotiate, and subvert constructions of identity, looking at lyrics and performances that historically embody female sexual subjectivity and defiant emotions while considering the debate around authenticity between nationalist, corporate, and Islamist interests. With in-depth ethnographic storytelling that connects colonial and postcolonial histories and contemporary politics, it traces how Bhawaiya creates spaces for alternative voices that resist dominant narratives of national, religious and gender identities.