Are Sansar Sansar - Bahinabai Chaudhari - Suman Kalyanpur

Folk songs writer Bahinabai Choudhari (1879-1951), lived in rural India. She composed poems in a dialect of Marathi called Ahirani, spoken in Khandesh region of Maharastra. She could not read or write and never had formal education. She would orally compose poems with spontaneity while doing her daily chores in house-hold and farm, and sing to herself. Her poems reflected her innate wisdom and simple philosophy of life. She expressed her thoughts using similes of rural farm life that surrounded her. Written in early 1900s, Bahinabai uses to fine effect repetitious, hypnotic meter found in lullabies and in folk songs that accompany women's heavy work of grinding grain. The poems were truly one woman's dialogue with herself with no thought of ever publishing them. Sopandev Chaudhari, the son of Bahinabai, a well-respected Marathi poet in his own right, handwrote some of his mother's poems on a scrap pieces of paper and took it to Mr. PK (Acharya) Atre, a multifaceted colorful personality. Mr. Atre writes in his foreword to Bahinabai Chaudhari's poems, "I literally jumped to extract all the pages of the manuscript. They were so enchanting it left me breathless. I said, this is gold, Sopandev! Don't keep it away from the people of Maharastra !" Some of her poems were published in a book called "Bahinabaichi Gaani".