Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Women’s folk rituals, oral narratives, and songs create a gendered counter-archive in riverine islands shaped by erosion and unhomeliness. Using hydrofeminism, folkloristics, and postcolonial archive theory, this paper claims how these voices form a memory system that resists erasure.

Paper long abstract

This paper reimagines how women’s ritualised folk practices, songs and oral traditions along the banks of rivers form a gendered ecological memory system in Adwaita Mallabarman’s Titash Ekti Nadir Naam (A River Called Titash), published in 1956. In Mallabarman’s novel, the river Titash is not simply a setting but an active agent in creating speech, narrative and kinship.

Before readers hear of climate change and erosion in riverine narratives, they hear the folk songs and stories sung by the riverside by women. The river continuously erodes and creates new “chars,” (riverine islands) and this, in turn, creates a condition of ‘unhomeliness’ (Homi K. Bhabha), a state where lives are continuously being uprooted, and there is no stability. In response, the women’s daily water-bound practices sustain a sense of identity and home in an unstable world. These daily practices become what Diana Taylor terms a “repertoire” of embodied memory. This paper contends that through these practices, the community vulnerable to ongoing destruction of their homes can sustain their ecological knowledge, preserve communal temporality and transmit feminine resilience across generations.

While the men try to institutionalise folk memory through writing, the women preserve local knowledge through water rituals, ululations and recipes. Moreover, since these practices are often not officially documented, their voices create a living counter-archive, enabling cultural survival. The paper utilises hydrofeminism, folkloristics and postcolonial archive theory to elaborate how rivers become spaces for gendered and sonic archives. Listening to these gendered contexts becomes essential in understanding how water holds memory.