Women’s songs of the grind mill are among the oldest oral traditions in South Asia, sung for centuries to accompany the daily labor of making flour with a stone hand mill. Even today, these songs remain well-known in Maharashtra, a testament to their enduring power. However, they have often been viewed through sociological or anthropological perspectives, separate from literary culture.

This groundbreaking book reveals the foundational role of women’s grind mill songs in shaping Marathi literature between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries. Madhuri Deshmukh demonstrates that these songs evolved alongside and in close dialogue with written Marathi literature, influencing the poetic structures and motifs of the bhakti tradition. By drawing on aesthetic categories from the songs themselves, she argues for understanding these artfully crafted compositions as oral poetry in a lyric mode, emphasizing that women describe their songs as an “unraveling of the heart” and compare written poetry to weaving.

Deshmukh posits that women poets like Mahadaise and Janabai were pioneers of vernacularization, challenging literary-historical narratives that overlook the contributions of marginalized communities. By considering the interplay between songs and texts, The Unraveling Heart provides new insights into the significance of labor and gender in aesthetics and proposes a fresh approach to the concept of the literary.