Try to find a sophisticated living or a boho-chic style lounge without a chakki.
You won’t.

This antique hand-crafted Indian table is a sort of current obsession: in their typical
jargon, interior design blogs and stores say it’s the perfect “bohemian vibe” you need
to “spice up your stylish home” blah-blah.

It’s true: in the last years, the chakkis turned into one of the most sought after
coffee/side/sofa tables (it depends on their variable size). If you have only a vague idea
about them, try a simple Google search: you will be amazed by the variety of their
shapes, colors, kind of woods, quality, and dating (many chakkis are contemporary
replicas of antique items).

If you’d like only to buy a chakki, download our Flipbook What you should know if you
want to buy a chakki to avoid throwing good money after bad.

If you’d like to listen to an unexpected story, please, sit down.

ON CHAKKIS AND WOMEN’S LIFE

The traditional Indian chakkis are round tables of Rajasthani origin, mainly in teak or oak
hardwood, used in the past centuries to hold up a hand-driven millstone for grinding
grain or spices. They were grinding tables, and in memory of their primary vocation,
many still retain a small door on a side to open and collect the flour.

Still today, Rajasthani older women know how to work on the traditional
stone grinder inside a wooden chakki.

The hand-carved grinder table is commonly called chakki or jate (in Marathi), but this name is not appropriate. Chakki is the name of the traditional ancient grinder, a handdriven millstone used by women for grinding the grain and getting the wholemeal wheat flour, called chakki atta, used to prepare the typical and traditional flatbreads such as chapati, roti, naan, paratha, and puri.

(by Adrienne Mountain licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0).

Here’s an old North Indian style grinder displayed at Amber Fort (Amer, Rajasthan). The
hand-driven chakki consists of two bulky disks of coarse stone, one fixed and one
rotating. The off-center hole was equipped with a wooden handle, while the central one
was used to insert the wheat grains.

(By Vssun, Wikimedia Commons)

(Source: British Library)

(By feanor0, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

The first picture portrays two “happy” women grinding grain in 1873; the second
depicts two Hindu women grinding flour in 1908, and the third two other women likely
in the first half of the 20th century.
As you probably noted, the women in the first and third pictures did not use a grinder
table: only the wealthy homes could place the chakki stone grinder inside a wooden
table (for servants’ use, of course). Poor people used a natural fiber mat or a simple
fabric cloth, stretched out on the floor.

This last picture portrays some Bheel women near a chakki inside its table in the 1880s
(the Bhils or Bheels are an Indo-Aryan speaking ethnic group in West India).

For centuries, the grain grinding, a hard and noisy work, was carried out by women
only. Every single day, of course, together with many other exhausting duties, like
carrying water and holding twigs on the head, as these 19th-century peasants. You will
understand why the Indian women in the pictures did not charmingly smile at the
camera.

AI-generated image.

For centuries, the flour for a household’s daily bread was ground by hand on a rotary stone mill, almost always by women. The mill is called chakki across much of North India and ghatti in Rajasthan. In rural Rajasthan, as throughout the Indian subcontinent, grinding was among the most constant and demanding domestic tasks.

1. The technology: how the mill works

The hand mill is simple and effective. It relies on the weight of the stone, friction, and human effort.

• Two stones: The mill consists of two heavy circular stones of equal diameter, one on top of the other. The lower stone is fixed, typically set into a low mud platform with a raised rim that catches the flour. The upper stone turns.

• Pivot, feed hole, and handle: An iron or wooden pin fixed in the lower stone passes through the center of the upper stone and keeps it aligned. Around the pin, an opening through the upper stone serves as the feed hole. Grain is dropped into it by hand: in Rajasthan usually pearl millet (bajra), but also wheat, barley, or sorghum. An upright wooden handle near the rim of the upper stone gives the leverage to turn it.

• Grinding: As the upper stone turns, grain works its way from the center between the two roughened stone faces, where it is crushed and sheared into flour. Fresh grain entering at the center pushes the ground flour outward until it spills from the gap between the stones onto the platform. The stone faces wore smooth with use and had to be re-roughened periodically.

2. The labor and the daily routine

• Before dawn: Grinding was usually done in the hours before daybreak, so that fresh flour was ready for the day’s rotis.

• The work: Seated on the floor beside the mill, a woman turned the handle with one hand in a steady circular motion and fed grain into the center with the other. Grinding enough flour for a household took time, stamina, and rhythm.

• Working in pairs, and singing: Larger mills were often worked by two women sitting opposite each other and sharing the handle. Women sang as they ground, keeping time with the turning stone. Grinding songs are one of the great bodies of women’s oral tradition in India. They include the jatsaar of Bhojpuri-speaking Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the Marathi grindmill songs of Maharashtra, and Rajasthan’s own songs of the ghatti. Their themes include the hardship of the work, life in the husband’s household, longing for the natal home, family relationships, and devotion.

3. Dress and ornaments

• Dress: Women in rural Rajasthan typically wore a ghaghra (a full, pleated skirt) and a fitted bodice (kanchli), often with a short tunic (kurti) over it. An odhni (a long veil) was drawn over the head, in keeping with norms of female modesty in many communities.

• Ornaments: Women kept their ornaments on during daily work, and many of them marked married status. Married women in several Rajasthani communities wore chooda, bangles traditionally made of ivory that ran up the arm. Other common pieces were neck ornaments such as the hasli (a rigid neck ring) and the borla, a rounded ornament worn on the forehead at the hair parting.

4. The domestic setting

• Earthen architecture: The walls and floors of rural houses were plastered with clay, straw, and cow dung, and the plaster was renewed regularly. Thick earthen walls absorb and release heat slowly, which keeps interiors cooler in the Rajasthani heat.

• Kitchen and storage: Cooking was done on a clay hearth (chulha) fueled by wood or dung cakes. Water was kept in earthen pots (matkas), grain in large mud bins (kothi), and smaller earthen and metal vessels in niches built into the walls.

In the mid-to-late 20th century, motorized village flour mills (atta chakki) spread across rural India and largely replaced hand grinding. The hand mill went from daily necessity to a symbol of rural heritage, and much of the singing that went with it faded too.

ON CHAKKIS AND SONGS OF FREEDOM

Indian women were not living on easy street. Not at all.
Until the mid-20th century, the condition of Indian women was a mix between the
torture of Tantalus (who wants something he cannot have) and the Sisyphus fatigue
(endless and unavailing labor). So miserable were these men, Sisyphus and Tantalus,
that they resembled Indian women.

In India, the status of women was firmly secured to a cross by three kinds of nails: the
caste system, the female lack of economic power, and gender inequality.

Indian women were under constant tutelage and trapped in their condition, but their
tongues and brains were free – to some extent, at least.
In many rural regions of Maharashtra, the women compelled to grind at the millstone
developed the ‘Gridmill Songs’, the jatyavarchi ovi (from the Marathi ovane, ‘stringing
together’), free expression of their voices, thoughts, and feelings on caste oppression,
childbirth, marriage, poverty, pain, life, death, and politics as wells. They were grinding
and singing, sometimes sitting close to each other to intone a choir, rarely alone, always
loudly.

«For thousands of women, these songs marked a creative space, a personal zone of free
expression», wrote Namita Waikar, Managing Editor of People’s Archive of Rural India,
head of The Grindmill Songs Project.
Which fool has given birth to

Which fool has given birth to a woman?
My body is toiling on rent in someone else’s house

Had I known it, I would have refused to be born a woman
I would have become a tulsi plant at god’s doorstep

«Kusum Sonawane of Nandgaon village from Mulshi taluka in Pune sang of the indignity
of being a woman, saying she would rather be a plant, perhaps the holy basil (the
Ayurvedic tulsi), more revered than the woman of the house. The ovi thus speaks of a
clear unequal status of women in society, something the women from the village
noticed, sang, and listened to» (Namita Waikar).

You were pampered so much as a darling daughter,
That your brother gave you a betel-leaf plantation

This ovi, transcripted from an old song sung by Konda Sangle of Nivanguni village, in
Velhe taluka of Pune district, «is a reminder of unequal land ownership. Women by
themselves owned nothing. Anything they have is in the form of gifts given by the
menfolk-father, husband, or brother, the singer says» (Namita Waikar).

One of the most moving songs of Maharashtra was recorded in the Nandgaon village
by The Grindmill Songs Project team:

We were beaten when we asked for our right to water
O woman, the Brahmin caste here is very orthodox

O woman, stones and pebbles were thrown at us when we staged a satyagraha,
We were fighting for our rights, protecting our children

R. Ambedkar on a 1991 Indian stamp

Bhimrao Ramji ‘Babasaheb’ Ambedkar (1891/1956) was an Indian jurist, economist,
politician, and social reformer, law minister of the government of India from 1947 to
1951. He was a Dalit and a Dalit leader who committed himself in campaigning against
any form of discrimination.
The grindmill song reminds the importance of his fight and the historical moment of the
1927 Chavdar Tale Mahad satyagraha (note that in the song Bhimrao Ramji ‘Babasaheb’
Ambedkar is called Ramji’s son Bhim).

The train with a steam engine roars through the forest
Announcing: Ramji’s son Bhim is standing at the Chavdar Tale

(…)

Dipping four fingers in the waters of Chavdar Tale,
gives joy and a feeling of being transformed
O woman, Ramji’s son has such enormous courage

At the Chavdar Tale, just for the right to a sip of water
A crowd has gathered for the sake of women and children

At the Chavdar Tale, there is a flower garden
Bhima’s son held a satyagraha there

This is not the only song on ‘Babasaheb’ Ambedkar; listen to another song performed in
the Majalgaon village (always in Maharashtra) by an old woman grinding the mill, and
recorded by The Grindmill Songs Project team.

There are no known photographs of the Mahad Satyagraha. This AI-generated image is only a reconstruction of the event.

The March 20, 1927 march is only the first act of a decade-long struggle.

Why the Chavdar tank

In Ambedkar’s own account, the Chavdar tank in Mahad (Kolaba District, Bombay Presidency) was handed over to the Municipality when it was established in 1869, and has been treated as a public tank ever since. It was the only public tank where an outsider could get water, and the only water source for the Untouchables was the well in their own quarter of the town. This mattered because Untouchables came into Mahad to shop and, as village servants, to deliver official correspondence or revenue to the taluka officer. They had business in the town and no water there. The contrast your song draws is documented: animals could drink from the tank, but untouchables could not.

The legal basis was already in place. On August 4, 1923, the reformer S.K. Bole moved a resolution in the Bombay Legislative Council to open public watering places, wells, publicly funded dharmashalas, schools, courts, offices and dispensaries to the untouchable classes. The Mahad Municipality then resolved on January 5, 1924 that it had no objection to Untouchables using the tank. But the resolution was never implemented, because of opposition from the dominant castes. The satyagraha was therefore not a demand for a new right. It enforced a right that already existed on paper.

March 19–20, 1927

The two-day conference was organized by the Kolaba District Depressed Classes, at the invitation of Ramachandra Babaji More. Surendranath Tipnis, president of the Mahad municipality, had also declared the town’s public spaces open to untouchables and invited Ambedkar. One detail shows the conditions well: water for the delegates had to be bought from caste Hindus for forty rupees, because untouchables had no access to it.

About 2,500 delegates, workers and leaders attended, aged from fifteen to seventy. PARI gives a higher figure: nearly 3,000 people followed Ambedkar in drinking from the tank.

The backlash

Two hours later, caste Hindus spread a false rumor that the “untouchables” also intended to enter the Vireshwar temple, and crowds armed with bamboo sticks gathered at street corners. The marchers were attacked on their way back from the tank. Caste Hindus then performed a purification ritual on the tank, which they considered defiled by the Untouchables’ touch, using cow urine and cow dung. Under their pressure, the Municipality revoked its 1924 resolution on August 4, 1927.

December 1927: the second conference

Caste Hindus went to the local court on December 12, 1927, seeking an interim injunction against Untouchables using the tank. The court granted it on December 14, barring Ambedkar, his colleagues and members of the Depressed Classes from the tank until further orders. Ambedkar went ahead with the conference but complied with the order. Most participants wanted to march, but on his advice the satyagraha was suspended and no water was drawn.

The defining act of that conference was something else. On the evening of December 25, Gangadhar Neelkanth Sahasrabuddhe, a Brahmin associate of Ambedkar, moved a resolution to burn the Manusmriti, seconded by the untouchable leader P.N. Rajbhoj. Ambedkar later compared it to Gandhi’s burning of foreign cloth. December 25 is now commemorated as Manusmriti Dahan Din.

Dress as a marker of caste

At Mahad, Ambedkar urged women to give up the customs that visibly marked them as untouchable and to wear their saris the way high-caste women did. The women adopted the upper-caste drape on the spot.

The legal outcome

The caste Hindu plaintiffs argued that the tank was private property. The trial court held that they had not proved a longstanding custom of excluding untouchables, and that such a custom would not amount to a legal right anyway. The High Court dismissed their appeal in 1937.

Sources disagree on the exact date. Forward Press gives March 17, 1937, while others say December 1937.

Why it matters

The point of Mahad was never the water. Ambedkar himself said, “We are not going to the Chavdar lake merely to drink its water.” One account of the case makes a precise distinction: drinking from the tank was social disobedience, not civil disobedience. The law was on the Untouchables’ side; what they defied was custom.

The struggle also shaped India’s Constitution, which Ambedkar later helped draft. Article 15(2) explicitly forbids restricting access to “wells, tanks, bathing ghats” maintained from public funds, and Article 17 abolishes untouchability. March 20 is observed in India as Social Empowerment Day.

The song

The song I quoted is from PARI’s Grindmill Songs Project, which links straight back to the grinding songs we discussed earlier. The collection was begun by Hema Rairkar and Guy Poitevin, whose team went from village to village in the 1980s and 1990s transcribing more than one hundred thousand ovi. PARI has looked after it since 2016.

The Mahad songs are 14 ovi sung by Kusum Sonawane and other women of Nandgaon village. In them, a steam engine roaring through the forest announces that Bhim stands at the Chavdar Tale, and Bhimrao is said to have “built a bungalow” there, an image of the equality the Dalits felt. Songs eight to thirteen describe the hardships of the satyagraha, including the beatings the marchers suffered from orthodox upper castes. The tradition is still alive: people go to Mahad each year to drink from the tank as Ambedkar did, although in 2018 Sonawane’s group was unable to reach it.

O woman, for the golden glass a scrubber of silver
Bhimraj drank water in the station of Aurangabad

Jasmine and chrysanthemum flowers in a glass
When at college in Aurangabad, Bhim came under an evil eye

O woman, there is a golden pen in the pocket of Bhīmrāja
In the pocket of Bhim, the country salutes with ‘Jay Bhim!’

The grindmill songs were invented by women and passed down from generation to
generation, and in this process, they changed and enriched.
«With the coming of motorized grinding in villages in the last couple of decades, this
mode of expression has almost ceased: it’s a loss for the women in villages, as their lives
may have improved over the years in material terms, but the problems and socio-
economic challenges they face in a patriarchal society have not gone away» (Namita
Waikar).

WHAT SINGING WOMEN CAN DO

In patriarchal cultures, women in a condition of legal and economic inferiority, whatever
their social status, have always conquered shreds of freedom of expression. The
illiterate and the poor chose to sing. How could they have dared to create poetry? And
what other way did they make their voices heard? Unsurprisingly, in many patriarchal
societies, women have often sung out loud. Very loud.

During their brutal regime, the Taliban banned all forms of music, allowing only the
singing of certain types of religious songs and chants. They knew that to turn women
off, you need to start turning off their voices.
(The sign you are facing a sexist? He loves to notice that women usually talk too much).

The jatyavarchi ovi of the Indian women, chained to the chakki or the jāte, call to mind
the Canti di monda, the songs of the Italian mondine, the female seasonal paddy
weeders of Northern Italy from the mid-19th century to the 1960s.

For over a century, the poorest countrywomen abandoned their homes to reach the
extended paddy fields of Lomellina, Novarese, and Vercellese during the flooding time,
from the end of April to the beginning of June. Many were 14-year-old girls, forced by
families or, to put it better, by misery, to earn a few lire; some were young pregnant
women, forced to toil up to the threshold of labor.
The work was very hard. The women had to carry out the monda, eradicating the weeds
and thinning out the rice seedlings that grew too close to transplant them where they
were missing.

Before the union riots imposed the mandatory eight hours of work (in 1906), the women
worked from sunrise to sunset, always folded in two under the sun, with hands and legs
in the water, that was too cold at dawn, and too hot at dusk.
The skin of the feet and hands macerated; the weeds were often sharp as blades; the
flooded fields were full of water shrews, snakes and leeches, the air of flies, horseflies,
and mosquitoes. To make matters worse, the tiracól – the male supervisor – screamed
whenever a woman put both hands on her kidneys and straightened up to find a second
of relief.

Like Indian women, Italians sang loudly: in India to overcome the noise of the millstone,
in Italy to prevail over the croaking of frogs and the chirping of crickets.

Mamma, papà non piangere se sono consumata
È stata la risaia che mi ha rovinata

Mom, dad: don’t cry if I’m worn out
It was the paddy that ruined me

One of the most popular songs was Sciur padrun da li béli braghi bianchi, born between
the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Sciur padrun da li béli braghi bianchi,
fora li palanchi, fora li palanchi,
sciur padrun da li béli braghi bianchi,
fora li palanchi ch’anduma a cà.

The paddy weeders around Novara and Vercelli sang it at the end of the season when,
after 40 days of suffering, they collected their poor wages and went back home. The
song urges the master, well described as a man with immaculate white trousers, never
soiled by fatigue or physical work, to bring out the agreed money.

The most famous verses, however, are the following:

Sebben che siamo donne
Paura non abbiamo

Although we are women
We are not afraid

An elderly Italian mondina said: «There were songs we sang only to make master and men nervous because we had no other way of protesting, and they could not shout all our mouth». But finally, they learned how to protest.

In February 1927, in the Fascist Era, due to a decrease in rice prices, the lobby of landowners, in agreement with representatives of the Fascist trade unions, decided a 30% reduction of the wages of the seasonal paddy weeders. On June 30, in the districts of Vercelli, Novara, and Biella, more than 10,000 women went on strike. It was satyagraha. The Italian way to satyagraha. A hundred women were arrested and about ten were sentenced to a few months in prison, but this female mobilization frightened the government and the landowners so much that the reduction was reduced. Today, their struggles are an integral part of the history of the Italian labor movement.

Old Dorm of the “mondine”, Colombara Estate,  village of Livorno Ferraris, Vercelli district (Northern Italy).

(Under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)

Ettore Tito, Mondine in Polesine, 1885. Oil on canvas, 110 x 196 cm. Private Collection

Angelo Morbelli (Alessandria 1853 / Milano 1919), Per ottanta centesimi!, 1895-1897. Oil on canvas, 69,3 x 123,3 cm. Museo Borgogna, Vercelli, Italy.

Felice Casorati, Le mondine (aka Il riposo delle mondine), Linoleum a colori (linocut), 1962.

Bent Backs, Raised Voices

In 1927, the condition of women in India and in Italy was not so different as you might expect. I do not want to minimize the historical differences or erase the peculiarities of those two conditions: I simply want to highlight the similarities. In India, universal suffrage granted voting rights to all women only in 1950. In Italy, in 1946.

Italian women were legally subordinate to their husbands until 1975. The family law in force under the Fascist dictatorship entailed the subordination of the wife to her husband under all points of view (property and inheritance rights included, and children education issues as well). During Fascism, the Italian women were placed in a state of subjection and inferiority, crushed under a patriarchal system made even more rigid by the aggressive demands of Mussolini, whose politics aimed to turn women into obedient wives, fertile mothers (for the salvation of the fatherland, of course) and docile subjects. The family as a site of male patrilinear privilege was a characteristic of the Colonial Property Law in India, as well (see, for example, Mytheli Sreenivas, Conjugality and Capital: Gender, Families, and Property under Colonial Law in India, in the Bibliography).

During the Fascist Era (1922-1943), women’s wages were fixed by law at half of the men’s corresponding wages. Ushering in a strategy that would later be revived for anti-Semitic politics, women were formally prohibited from teaching letters and philosophy in high schools and some other subjects in technical colleges and middle schools; they were also banned from being headmasters or principals, while school fees were doubled for all girls. In the civil service and in the public sector, the recruitment of women was severely restricted, excluding them from invitations to tender and granting them a limited number of posts (usually 10%). They were also banned from making a career whatsoever and precluded from many prestigious positions within the public administration.

The Italian Fascist regime lowered the minimum age of marriage for women to 14 years (in 1929, in India, the Child Marriage Restraint Act was passed, stipulating 14 as the minimum age of marriage for a girl). In the 1920s, the status of the mondine, the female seasonal paddy weeders of Northern Italy, and of the great majority of women coming from the lower, poorer, and marginalized strata of society was firmly secured to “another” cross by three kinds of nails (the first cross we met in India): the female lack of economic and political power, gender inequality and social discrimination.

Italian and Indian women were forbidden to have a public voice. However, both found a way to be heard. They sang out loud.

Like Indians and Italians, women living in many patriarchal societies had been toiling and singing at the same time. They sang to endure fatigue and put up with their destiny, to pass hours that seemed never to pass, and share something that was not pure pain.  And singing loudly, they discovered the unknown universe of solidarity and dignity; they took courage and learned to impose their voices; they learned to fight for themselves and their rights. Ours, today.

The moral of this story?
Never underestimate a singing woman!

Namita Waikar, Grinding grain, singing song, in The Indian Express, December 8, 2017,

Urmi Chanda-Vaz, Grindmill Songs: Listen to the world’s largest archive of folk songs,
Scroll.in, April 21, 2017
https://scroll.in/magazine/833884/grindmill-songs-listen-to-the-worlds-largest-archiveof-folk-songs

People’s Archive of Rural India
https://ruralindiaonline.org/
https://ruralindiaonline.org/articles/the-grindmill-songs-recording-a-national-treasure/

F. Castelli, E. Jona, A. Lovatto, Senti le rane che cantano. Canzoni e vissuti popolari
della risaia, Donzelli, 2005 (only in Italian).

Sassano, R., Camicette Nere: le donne nel Ventennio fascista, “El Futuro del Pasado”, 6, 253-280, 2015.

Mytheli Sreenivas, Conjugality and Capital: Gender, Families, and Property under Colonial Law in India, in “The Journal of Asian Studies”,  Vol. 63, No. 4 (Nov., 2004), pp. 937-960.

Alyx Becerra