Womanhood In The Making

Domestic Ritual And Public Culture In Urban South India

Mary Hancock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367314002
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429982668
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

Womanhood in the Making is an ethnographic study of Brahman women's ritual practice that focuses on relations between religious practice, class and caste inequalities, and nationalist discourses. Using analyses of both domestic ritual and women's personal narratives, the author investigates the spaces of female agency that ritual practice affords,

PART ONE

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Introduction

Prologue: Making and Unmaking the “Great Tradition”

My first visit to the city of Chennai,¹ in southern India (Figure I.1), was in the autumn of 1985, just in time for Navarāttiri, a nine-night festival honoring the goddess.² Known also as Mahānavami or Dasara, it was described in the Devipurana. It became renowned in southern India during the Vijayanagar period (thirteenth through sixteenth centuries C.E.) as a ritual of kingship and was performed annually as a renewal of sovereignty (Stein 1980, 384–392; Dirks 1993, 39–44). Presently, the stage for Navarāttiri has shifted. Though observed in some goddess temples, it is largely a domestic affair celebrated by upper-caste families who perform nightly rituals and display collections of miniatures, as seen in Figure I.2.³ In one home, small painted figures of the god Rama and his wife Sita stood next to a set of porcelain cats purchased in Singapore. Another family’s display included an elaborate village scene, complete with a tiny train station and Hindu temple. The collections, whatever they included, were the centers of attention. People proudly showed off new pieces and experimented with arrangements, and they compared displays. Some families boasted collections that had been assembled over several generations. Nowadays, the objects are mostly mass-produced. When I arrived in October, the open-air markets near the temples overflowed with hundreds of items destined for these displays.

Each evening of the festival, the women of the household worshiped⁴ the goddess, whose icon was normally included in the collection, and families opened their homes to their friends and neighbors. Visitors were served snacks, sang devotional songs with their hosts, gossiped and joked, and received small gifts. Indeed, women were expected to distribute gifts to their female visitors. Combs, mirrors, cups, and bowls were given; all were considered emblems of feminine beauty and domesticity. I was told that Navarāttiri was done for the pleasure of women and children, and, for the most part, it was women and children who acted as hosts and guests. The responsibility for accumulating and caring for the collections also fell to women.

FIGURE I.1 Map of India

This festival thus had strong associations with women and with normative representations of femininity. The moral value of feminine beauty and adornments, domesticity, hospitality, and fecundity were underscored through association with the goddess. Not surprisingly, it, like other festivals associated with goddesses, was a time when women’s devotional groups, some of long standing, met at temples for prayer and song.

I decided then that I wanted to know more about women’s devotionalism and the domestic focus of women’s ritual. When I returned to Chennai a little more than a year later, I intended to make women’s devotional groups the subject of my fieldwork. I was intrigued by the role of ritual in urban women’s day-to-day interactions, and I was curious about the different kinds of social spaces that ritual practice created. Homes were periodically transformed into meeting halls while street corners and small shrines were claimed by devotional groups—suggesting that conventional Euro-Western distinctions between “public” and “private” domains needed to be rethought in these settings. Finally, I wished to better understand the place of consumption in ritual contexts and thus map the ways that gender ideologies informed and were informed by both caste-and class-based forms of distinction and status production.

FIGURE 1.2 An Assemblage (Kolu) of Figures Displayed During the Festival of Navarāttiri, 1996. Photograph By Author.

I sought to understand these issues in light of previous work. In the 1950s and 1960s, Milton Singer had found in Chennai a generalizable case of the modernization of tradition, and he considered public ritual practices of the sort I had encountered to be important vehicles for these changes (Singer 1972, 62–64, 70–80). He used the phrase “cultural performances” to designate expressive activities, like music, dance, theater, and ritual, that represented the concerns and identities of performers. He argued that they could be treated as the primary units of analysis in the study of civilizations undergoing modernization.

Singer’s work on predominantly male and upper-caste⁵ devotional groups had established that such groups and the cultural performances they authored were constituent features in south India’s urban landscape. They typified the networks thought to characterize modern social worlds, and they illustrated a pan-Indic model of modernization: one that drew on an indigenous Great Tradition rooted in Sanskritic Hinduism.⁶ By Great Tradition, he meant the body of historically sedimented, textually inscribed ideas and practices. He stressed that the Great Tradition was synthesizing rather than orthogenetic, and he considered Smārta Brahmans important exponents of it. Smārtas, also known as Aiyars, are a community with roots in Tamil-, Telugu-, and Kannada-speaking areas of peninsular South Asia. He argued that they were among the culture brokers who had disseminated Sanskritic Hinduism regionally and transregionally and thereby incorporated localized, orally transmitted, Little Traditions into a composite Great Tradition. This process helped Smārtas broker alliances among different castes and classes in urban south India. Simultaneously, caste and class distinctions and inequalities (and presumably those of gender, though Singer did not explicitly state this) were also actuated.

I initially viewed women’s devotional groups through the lens of Singer’s work, seeing them as sites for cultural brokerage and for the modernization of tradition. I wanted to know, first, how upper-caste women’s groups differed from those that Singer had studied and what the consequences of those differences were. Second, I wanted to understand how their emergence and ongoing practice derived from Singer called “compartmentalization”: the adaptive process whereby upper-caste, professional men bifurcated their lives into a modernized sphere of the workplace and a traditional domestic domain.

I did explore these questions in my fieldwork and subsequent dissertation. In the course of my work, however, I came to understand the significance of these questions differently. Instead of presuming the objective existence of tradition and modernity (and the contrast between private and public they implied), I began to ask what those categories signified, how and why they had been objectified, and how and by whom they were created, deployed, and debated.⁷ These are the questions that I explore in this book.

When discussing my interests with Indian academics, many of them Smārtas, I discovered that Singer’s text—a gatekeeping work on urban India—continued to be invoked by some Indians in the course of framing their identities for Indian and non-Indian audiences. Some of my acquaintances, conscious of being both subjects and readers of his text, represented Singer’s ethnography to me. On one occasion, when I was outlining my project to some anthropology graduate students from Madras University, one woman offered, “So, it’s the relationship between the Great and Little Traditions that you want to learn about?” A more portentous “meeting” of text and context took place a couple of months after my arrival as I spoke with a senior scholar—a Sanskritist and Smārta Brahman affiliated with a college in Andhra Pradesh, the state immediately north of Tamil Nadu. “L.G.” listened thoughtfully as I explained my research interests and then suggested that I work under her direction. She indicated that she would assign appropriate readings (translations of Sanskrit works), introduce me to priests and other “reliable” informants, and arrange for me to view examples of “correctly” performed domestic rituals. She then lent me a book, Festivals, Sports and Pastimes of India (1979), as my first assignment, adding that its author, V. Raghavan, the Smārta intellectual with whom Singer had collaborated while doing fieldwork in Chennai, had been one of her teachers.

I was grateful for her guidance but found myself caught in an uncomfortable bind. I did not agree with her methodological prescription, although I respected her intellect, her independence, and her professional accomplishments. And I was acutely aware of the limits of my own knowledge and abilities. In not welcoming her guidance, I risked insulting a senior colleague. If I became her student, I would gain rapid access to domestic ritual arenas, but I would in effect be transcribing her sophisticated notions of orthopraxy as generalized principles of religious belief and practice. Although I knew that ethnography was always a matter of situated knowledge, I resisted the scenario she described, mainly because I wanted to work out methodologies as my personal relationships with people in Chennai developed.

Finally, instead of apprenticing myself to her, I continued in the open-ended fashion in which I had started, soon settling into several overlapping networks of religious practice. Minakshi, a married Smārta woman who became my assistant and close friend, initiated me into these networks. She was a devout Hindu, though her tastes and practices were more eclectic than L.G.’s. My concerns in this book have been shaped to a large extent by Minakshi’s enthusiasms, desires, and interests. It was in the course of my work with her that I perceived the contradictions embedded in Brahman women’s devotional experience and the complexity of its relation to caste, class, and nationhood. This was the wedge that shifted my work away from an account based implicitly on the assumptions of modernization theory. I became skeptical of narratives about the “displacement” and “fragmentation” of “indigenous traditions” by the external (Western) forces of modernization, curious about how the paradigm that framed the tradition-modernity dichotomy had become authoritative. Throughout my stay in Chennai, L.G. remained cordial, though she rebuked me more than once about my “haphazard” approach to research, which she feared would publicize “unauthentic” versions of Hindu practice including, no doubt, some of the activities to which Minakshi introduced me. L.G. will certainly find this book flawed, and I concede that it is flawed from her stance. However, the nature of the contestation implied in her judgment is what interests me.

In many respects, L.G. exemplified the sort of person anthropologists consider an ideal informant. As interlocutors in the space-time of the “field,” such persons are recognized as fountains of information and exegesis, issuing the oral narratives (and in some cases, writing the books and articles) that anthropologists absorb. When textualized, these women and men are remade as spokespersons for holistic and wholly Other cultures (Appadurai 1988b).

Interrupting this image, however, was L.G.’s objectification of Indian culture and her concerns about authenticity. She was vexed with me because I remained unwilling to transcribe her vision of Hindu India, despite the fact that she had offered her accomplishments and professional status as guarantees of the authority of that vision. Another interruption was L.G.’s refusal of the form of womanhood idealized in Brahman orthodoxy. She undermined the image of the docile, husband-worshiping wife, the cumaṅkali, by being unmarried and by pursuing a successful career in a setting that was dominated by men. She did not, however, exhibit any of the trappings of the career woman depicted in India’s mass media: a person who appears alternately in saris and jeans and who has two children, a husband who helps with housework, and a fiercely traditional mother-in-law. L.G. was conservative in matters of dress, grooming, and everyday etiquette, and she regarded herself as deeply orthodox. These aspects of self-presentation, coupled with her program for directing my work, amounted to a refusal to be a token in cultural feminist baggage that I carried, unwittingly, into the field. She did not wish to make common cause with me as a woman; she neither sought approval for what might be seen as a westernized challenge to local gender roles, nor was she caught in a discourse of essentialized feminine virtues. Instead, she spoke as an elite gatekeeper of Indian tradition, defined in terms of a textualized and self-consciously modern Hindu orthodoxy.

Both her claims and her refusals invite a postmodern interpretation of society and cultural forms. This approach recognizes that historical and cultural truths are always partial and that ethnographic work is enmeshed and implicated in a world of enduring but always changing power relations. It advocates a dialogical understanding of culture as an “inscription of communicative processes that exist, historically, between subjects in relations of power” (Clifford 1986, 9). L.G. had slipped out of (and in fact rejected) the unidimensionality of the “informant” role. Her stance was strategic and harbored contradictions stemming from her negotiation of both gender and caste identity, as well as her experience of class privilege.

For her, the provision of ethnographic information was an act of self-representation. It actuated her identity (and status) as an intellectual and as a Smārta Brahman even as it placed her outside the orthodox images of womanhood. In fact, though she refused to conform to canonical representations of womanhood, she endorsed the ideology that buttressed them. Finally, and on a purely practical level, she depended on other women’s consenting to these norms, for she lived in a joint household in which her brother’s wife was responsible for most of the domestic labor—cooking, cleaning, marketing, child care, and domestic ritual.

These contradictions emerged at the moment of our interaction, and they introduce the matters that I probe in this book. I take seriously Lila Abu-Lughod’s challenge to anthropologists to write “against culture” (1991; see also Abu-Lughod 1992; Fox 1989, 1990, 1991), that is, to write against the vision of culture as the anchor of authenticity, homogeneity, and synchronicity among bounded social groups.⁸ With this in mind, I concentrate on the specific, immediate circumstances of people’s action: their life history and personal experience narratives, ritual practices, and aesthetic sensibilities. In this way, I intend to draw forth the disjunctions and improvisations that are parts of the everyday invention of culture.

In the chapters that follow, I look at the stake that Smārta elites have in the official nationalism of the Indian state and at the practices of self-representation with which they transmit their vision of India’s “national” culture. I find normative images of womanhood, domesticity, and tradition at the heart of these domains. In an effort to understand how these hegemonic discourses are reproduced and ruptured, I ask how Smārta Brahman women in urban Chennai created, used, manipulated, and contested womanhood and tradition through ritual practices and in the personal narratives that framed and were framed by their ritual activities. Moreover, the location of these practices in domestic space, as well as their functions as social and spatial signifiers of domesticity, reveal the ways that domesticity itself comes to be defined through cultural debates on tradition and womanhood. This book thus considers women’s ritual and the domestic realm as interpenetrating zones of cultural production and contestation, and it explores the contexts and consequences of these practices.

Notes

1. Chennai is the capital of Tamil Nadu state in southern India. With a population of over 5 million, it is the fourth largest city in India. During the colonial period, it was known as Madras. In 1996, its name was changed to Chennai by the state government. This, along with contemporaneous changes in other place-names, was undertaken to make place-names consistent with Tamil vernacular usage.

2. Navarāttiri is a Sanskritic term that literally means “nine nights.” It refers here to a festival period of nine nights during which rituals honoring the goddess in the forms of Lakshmi, Durga, and Saraswati are performed. There are two Navarāttiri periods during the Tamil year, one during the lunar month of Paṅkuṉi (mid-March to mid-April) and the other during the lunar month of Puraṭṭāci (mid-September to mid-October).

3. Among lower castes, it is observed as a solemn ceremony honoring deceased ancestors.

4. Pūja (Tamil, pūcai or pūjai) is a paradigmatic form of Hindu worship, in which the deity is praised, anointed, and honored with offerings that include food, incense, camphor, flowers, money, and jewelry. The ritual is concluded with the redistribution of the food offerings among worshipers. Pūja is performed in temples as well as in homes, and it can be done with varying degrees of elaboration.

5. Caste, glossed as jāti in Tamil and other Indic languages, is used in scholarly literature to refer to the system of ritually ranked, occupational groups that has been described throughout South Asia. The principles of ranking have been identified as relative purity or pollution (Dumont 1970), styles of transaction and exchange (Marriott 1976), and/or differential access to valued resources (Bailey 1957; Mencher 1974). Caste can also refer to the individual, named groups that are in principle, and at times in practice, endogamous. It should be noted, though, that the term jāti has a broader set of usages than caste, for jāti is used colloquially to mean kind, category, or type.

6. See Hannerz (1980) and Sanjek (1990) for reviews of social anthropological literature on urban sociology, networks and voluntary associations. Studies of urban networks and social organization in India include, besides Singer (1972), L. Caplan (1987), P. Caplan (1985), Cohn and Marriott (1958), Khare (1970), Lewandowski (1980), Sharma (1986), and Singh (1976).

7. I have found Talal Asad’s criticisms of anthropological treatments of religion and ritual, especially Chapters 1–2 of Genealogies of Religion (1993), to be extremely ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Guide to Pronunciation
• Credits
• Part 1 Introduction
• Part 2 Elite Cultures and Hybrid Modernities
• Part 3 The World in the Home
• Part 4 The Home in the World
• Glossary
• References
• Index