‘Thumrī’: A Discussion of the Female Voice of Hindustani Music

Abstract

Can we find different levels of meaning in the term ‘the female voice’? From a straightforwardly narratological perspective, a female voice indicates that the narrator in the art form under discussion is a woman. Could it also suggest a female perspective, and is a female perspective distinguishable from female narration: do we assume the former is built on language that is feminized, using a different vocabulary and a different expression? Does it matter whether a female voice is created by men or by women? When a woman creates art that has a female narrator, and yet through that narrator expresses woman's experience as constructed by an overarching patriarchal ideology, is the voice nevertheless female? Is the voice of a genre contingent upon its real-life audience, or upon the implied audience within the narrative itself? These are some of the issues that I want to tease out in the present paper. As is often the case in academic enquiry, more questions may be raised than answered. At this juncture it is my aim to establish a dialogue between the study of text and the study of performance, not only to add to a well-established discussion of how text is used in performance but to incorporate into that existing discourse the relevance of the contextual dimension.