The manmade 1866 famine of Orissa in eastern India, stemming from British colonial rule and poor administration, killed a million people and gravely inspired the oral literature of the survivors. Two generations later, Musamoni Panigrahi never received schooling, and her early marriage brought her early widowhood. Women of her generation who bore the burden of systemic patriarchy never saw their stories being recorded and shared as is. Only in 2014, three years before her death, her own renditions of folklore and folk songs were recorded, becoming the first documentary in the Baleswari dialect of the Odia language. Soaked in her personal suffering and worldview, her narratives constantly navigate the great divide of gender, caste and class in coastal Odisha (formerly Orissa).