Meanwhile, I laid my hands on Musalman Samajer Biyer Geet, a book by Prof. All I had was an overwhelming urge to overhear the hopes and despair, the pains and happiness of a typical Muslim housewife confined within the inner chambers of home to see the society around her through her eyes to eavesdrop on songs giving expression in her own words to unarticulated feelings.

I had done no archival work, nor had any experience of listening to these songs. My primary attempt at working on Muslim wedding songs was, as the saying goes, like counting chickens before they are hatched. Within the boundaries of family and community, and in the backdrop of a social ritual, fragmentary pictures of society have been chiseled over a long time: the wedding songs of Bengali Muslim women not only depict marriage and post-marital family life, but also represent the pulse of folkways and society. While the structure and rendering of these songs are in the form of entertainment, their content and performance have expressed socio-political consciousness. Through these songs, they have expressed their hopes and little pleasures, emotions and feelings, talked about social discrimination, oppressive customs like child marriage and dowry and voiced their protest behind tongue-in-cheek humour. Improvising on the tune or words of these songs, she has often stolen the show at the weddings in the immediate family or among relatives in an exclusively female space hidden from the male gaze. A housewife in a typical household has inherited these songs from her mother, grandmother and aunts. They have been written, composed and rendered by women. Traditional Bengali Muslim wedding songs belong to women.

Bangali islamic wedding song