Grounded in fieldwork spread across five years, Smita Tewari Jassal's Unearthing Gender presents a rich living archive of women's songs from the Purabiya- and Bhojpuri-speaking areas of eastern Uttar Pradesh and western Bihar. Although Jassal states that she is an “outsider” to the region, she provides an empathetic and well-researched analysis of women's songs, a project that, she relates in the acknowledgments, has been inspired by a personal journey to honor her father's memory and reengage the language of her ancestors. This in-depth exploration of songs in rural environments is enriched by Jassal's earlier study of systemic land-based marginalization of women.10
The overarching thesis of Unearthing Gender is that songs and their sung environments illuminate the “organization of maleness and femaleness in relations to a particular society” (p. 2): that is, they shed light on the social construction and transmission of gender and caste ideologies, domestic power relations, kinship,...