Maithil Women's Tales

Storytelling on the Nepal-India Border

Coralynn V. Davis

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780252096303
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

Constrained by traditions restricting their movements and speech, the Maithil women of Nepal and India have long explored individual and collective life experiences by sharing stories with one another. Sometimes fantastical, sometimes including a kind of magical realism, these tales allow women to build community through a deeply personal and always evolving storytelling form.In Maithil Women's Tales, Coralynn V. Davis examines how these storytellers weave together their own life experiences--the hardships and the pleasures--with age-old themes. In so doing, Davis demonstrates, they harness folk traditions to grapple personally as well as collectively with social values, behavioral mores, relationships, and cosmological questions.Each chapter includes stories and excerpts that reveal Maithil women's gift for rich language, layered plots, and stunning allegory. In addition, Davis provides ethnographic and personal information that reveal the complexity of women's own lives, and includes works painted by Maithil storytellers to illustrate their tales. The result is a fascinating study of being and becoming that will resonate for readers in women's and Hindu studies, folklore, and anthropology.

THe KING WITH TWo Ho RNS TALe: painting shows a barber cutting the king’s hair, thereby revealing the king’s two horns.

Chapter 1

Homo narrans AND THE IRREPRESSIBILITY OF STORIES

“There once was a king who had two horns growing out of his head.”

A king with two horns? Preposterous! Scandalous! If ever a king would not want a story told about him, this would be it. However, as a close reading and analysis of the King’s Two Horns Tale make unmistakably clear, stories have their own agendas. Not only will they be told, but they will to be told.

This chapter establishes a series of theoretical premises about storytelling. Moving among several concerns, from the existential to the political, and from the personal to the collective or “folk,” the chapter addresses differently localized and yet universal humanistic claims, weighing the ruminations of an interdisciplinary set of narratologists against Maithil women’s own storied understandings. This exploration demonstrates that Maithil women weave theories of storytelling into their tales; moreover, some of these theories resonate with those developed in multidisciplinary literatures that consider the role of narrative in human life. Three specific contentions are examined. The first is Maithil women’s implicit argument that stories themselves carry a form of agency that renders them irrepressible. This irrepressibility of tales takes on a particularly gendered significance in the context of Maithil gender order, in which women’s speech is often socioculturally constrained within the patrilineal frame of purdah (described in the introduction). The second narratological point is that stories move and morph. When stories travel across space, genre, context, and teller, as they inevitably do, they change in meaning and content. In striking fashion, the theories embedded in Maithil women’s tales about the movement and transformation of stories appear to mirror the particularities of the movement and transformation of Maithil women themselves. Finally, Maithil women’s tales intimate a theory about the political nature of stories and storytelling: that insights and viewpoints on the social configurations of power are embedded in tales, and therefore their telling is a form of discursive political engagement. Addressing diverse scholarships from multiple fields of study and putting them into conversation with Maithil women’s theoretical insights embedded in their tales, this chapter constitutes an extended argument that the circulation of stories is an activity fundamental to humanity, that we humans are, in fact, aptly characterized as Homo narrans.

To illustrate the embedded theoretical nature of Maithil women’s tales, we will begin with the King’s Two Horns Tale (Rājāke Du Go Singh) as told by Pukari Mallik, a woman of the dalit Halākhōr (Ḍōm) caste whose family members work as field laborers and also sell the varieties of bamboo baskets that their people have woven for generations.¹

THE KING’S TWO HORNS TALE

There once was a king who had two horns growing out of his head. He kept his hair very long, so that no one would notice. One day, however, it came to pass that someone in the king’s family died, and he was consequently expected [as is the mourning custom] to shave off his hair. So he summoned the barber, who set about shaving the king’s head. [See the illustration on page 22.] When the barber noticed the horns, the king warned him not to tell anyone about them, unless he wished to be skinned and stuffed as punishment for having done so! The barber tried mightily not to tell anyone about the horns, but he just could not digest the matter [bāt], and it swelled in his stomach. Thinking, “The king will skin me alive if I divulge this matter to any other person,” the barber told it instead to a drum [ḍhol] that happened to be hanging nearby. Later, a cobbler [chamār] went to beat the drum, and the drum itself rang out: “The king has two horns on his head! The king has two horns on his head!”

Well, upon hearing this pronouncement, the infuriated king smashed the drum to pieces and tossed it away, inadvertently throwing it into a tree. The drum told the story to the tree. Later a carpenter made a door out of the wood of the tree, and the door, in turn, proclaimed, “The king has two horns on his head!” As news spread of the king’s horns, a great commotion ensued, and people started repeating the story person to person throughout the kingdom.

Enraged, the king thought to himself, “This story is surely being spread by the barber, the only person who knew about my horns.” He called the village council [panchayat] together to try the case, hoping that the barber would be sentenced to a beating. The council members interrogated the barber, who explained to them, “I did not tell anyone. I only divulged this information to the drum, and next thing I knew there was this big commotion.” The story had swollen in the barber’s stomach. “My stomach could not digest the matter. I would have contracted a disease in my stomach; that is why I told the drum.” After deliberating, the village council concluded that blame for the spread of the story could not be placed on the barber. They found it understandable that he had not been able to digest the matter and was, rather, compelled to divulge it. The council declared the king and the barber friends again. And that is the end of the story.

Theory in the Story

The scholarly field of folklore studies, with its development of grand theories of folklore, has a long and contentious history. By the twenty-first century, folklore scholars in the U.S. context started to examine their own contributions to “grand” folklore theory.² Some began to question the very coherence of the idea of “folklore,” unpacking its historical—classed, gendered, and nationalistic—formation and indicating a preference for forms of “low” over “high” (or “grand”) theory. One of these interlocutors, Margaret Mills, has proposed that a main criterion for evaluating interpretive theory should not be its power to exclude or preclude the application of other theories to particular data but rather its “aptness.” “Whose questions does it answer, generated by what dialogic process?” (Mills 2008, 20, emphasis in original). Kirin Narayan, like Mills, has recognized that those whom folklorists meet in the course of fieldwork themselves engage in theory (2008, 85). Narayan has advised that folklorists take seriously informants’ interpretive authority, engaging with expressive practitioners as intellectual collaborators and mentors, while also drawing on their own disciplinary training and scholarly interdisciplinary conversations (87).

Just as have folklorists, anthropologists, literary theorists, theologians, philosophers, cognitive scientists, and psychologists, Maithil women through their stories have theorized the functions and qualities of storytelling as manifest in the lives of individuals, societies, and more encompassing worlds. While Maithil women do not generally expound directly on these matters, the tales they tell espouse a number of theoretical points that resonate remarkably well with those made in more “erudite” conversation among scholars of various stripes.

What narratological insights might we gain from an exploration of Maithil women’s taleworlds? Let us take the King’s Two Horns Tale as an example. First, stories are irrepressible, an inherent part of human life. The circulation of stories is deemed as natural and inevitable as the circulation of matter into and out of the body, the stoppage of stories in the social body considered akin to a blocked digestive tract. Thus, despite the best efforts of even the most powerful (as in the king) or most threatened and powerless (as in the barber) people, stories do indeed get told. In fact, in cases where people appear absolutely unable to tell them, stories seem to take on their own agency, almost telling themselves through the vehicle of those we might not otherwise think of as capable of speech—things such as doors, or in the case of various other Maithil women’s tales, fruits, boxes, household tools, snakes, trees, and perhaps less surprisingly, parrots and drums (the last of which are, after all, storied as a means to broadcast the royal news throughout the kingdom).³

How can we understand the communications across different types of “being” in Maithil women’s narratives? Maithil women understand the contemporary world, the one in which they live, to be temporally situated in Kalyug (literally “dark era”), a “fallen” period when human access to the divine has become limited. This era is frequently contrasted with Satyug (literally “era of truth”), when the gods and all sentient beings are much more in communication and cosubstantiation, and such beings all understand one another’s communications. The events recounted in many of the tales in this study are understood to take place in Satyug. One consequence is that stories told in the taleworld (that is, stories told by characters in the tales) may be transmitted by a surprisingly wide range of narrators, not all of which are easily recognizable to the cultural outsider as “sentient,” let alone human.

Another example of “trans-species” voicing resulting from the suppression of women’s speech paired with the irrepressibility of stories may be found in the Witch Tale (Ḍāin), a story that takes on the common subject of two women pitted against each other through their relations with the same man. In this tale, one woman is the man’s sister and one his wife: the first is selflessly devoted to her brother; the second is selfish and is actually a witch. The two women struggle over the rightful possession of an article of clothing, a sari. The man ends up killing his sister at his wife’s behest because his wife has tricked him into thinking she herself will die if he does not do her bidding. A bael tree (Aegle marmelos) grows where the man’s sister has been slain, and it proceeds to tell the story of her innocence. It reveals her truth, although she herself has been silenced (through murder). As a result of the revelation about the events leading up to her death, the man’s sister eventually is brought back to life. In yet another story, the Four Castes Tale (Chāir Jāit), four men of four different occupational castes respectively build, clothe, bejewel, and mark as married (with vermillion powder in the part of her hair) a wooden statue. The wife of the bird of destiny (Bidh) counsels her mate to provide the statue with speech (by using an elixir of blood drawn from his finger), at which point the statue is brought to life. Despite all her other human accoutrements, she is not fully alive, not fully a person, until she is endowed with the capacity for storytelling. The capacity and will for storytelling appear in Maithil women’s tales as part of the cosmological and metaphysical nature of things.

Existential Qualities of Storytelling

In his introduction to Folktales from India: A Selection of Oral Tales from Twenty-Two Languages, A. K. Ramanujan examines a class of “stories about stories” “where the tellers reflect on tales and tellings in the form of tales” (1991b, xxx). Through the telling of such tales, Ramanujan concludes, storytellers express the view, evident also in the King’s Two Horns Tale, that stories have their own wills and employ humans (and others) as vehicles for transmission. This proposition finds a counterpoint in the writings of a range of prominent narratologists who argue that the telling of stories is a fundamental human capacity and need. Here it is the person (rather than the story itself as agent) who by nature is compelled to tell stories, to form words into different shapes and release them into the world. Such compulsion is described as a strategy for coping with the present and facing the future (Nicolaisen 1993, 61), “changing one’s experience of the world” (Jackson 2002, 18, italics in original), and imposing order and meaning on events (Shuman 2005, 13). Put in philosophical terms, storytelling functions to satisfy the human existential need to participate in the transcendent or, more particularly, the divine. Such existential exigencies are linked with a fundamental human need for meaning. In this sense, it is not so much that stories are a form of tradition as that they construct tradition (Shuman 1993), moving us, in Walter Benjamin’s terms, from Erfahrung to Erlebnis (Shuman 2005, 256–57) and thereby into subjectivity (Steedly 1993, 20).

While such global generalizations about storytelling transcend some of the more particular functions of narration in specific cultures, Maithil women’s own storied reflections on women’s storytelling make a similar assertion; for them, control over storytelling and the ability of others to hear with comprehension and empathy one’s own story, on the one hand, and social and cosmological inclusion and agency, on the other, are two sides of the same coin (Davis 2009a).⁴ Although some scholarship emphasizes the construction of collective memory in storytelling, other studies point to individual self-construction in “personal” stories. Explaining the role of female characters’ storytelling in Indian women’s stories, Ramanujan expresses it this way: “The whole tale is the tale of her acquiring her story, making a person of her, making a silent woman a speaking person. This may be why it is crucial that stories should be told, and why there are stories about not telling stories and why they should be told” (1991b, 42, emphasis in original).

In fact, the existential argument for Homo narrans (Fisher 1987; Niles 1999) is further supported by research taking place at the intersection of religious studies and human neurobiology (D’Aquili and Newberg 1998). It is striking that the theoretical developments in divergent fields are presently tending in similar directions, each proposing the existential necessity of storytelling for humans, whether on the basis of psychological, sociological, or neurobiological imperatives. While a grasping for meaning and control seems inherent in each of these existential explanations for Homo narrans, the salient irony highlighted in Maithil women’s tales is that the least controllable factor in the mix is the story itself, which is always finding a way to slip out of its container and into circulation. That the Maithil women featured in this volume highlight this “truth” in their tales makes sense in light of the often extreme physical, social, and economic constraints of their own lives. These same configurations of restriction literally create a separate space for women to tell their tales and a vehicle for them spread their truths.

Moving and Morphing

As mentioned, the second point that the King’s Two Horns Tale illustrates is that stories move and morph. In the King’s Two Horns Tale, we see the story literally moving among beings that become its spokespersons, rather like mediums through which the story passes to tell itself, the story here functioning as agent, or at least as unstoppable, causal force. In storyrealms, as in taleworlds, stories are carried across space by people who tell tales as they migrate for work, engage in trade, are married into distant villages, gather at the local tea stall or pub, or even send text over the internet. (The storytellers who took part in this study do not send anything over the internet, but they have sent their stories off with at least one ethnographer!) In the case of storytellers in the storyrealm, however, an added element of choice (however constrained) is apparent, regarding when, to whom, and how the story will be told.

Ramanujan has described the relationship between the movements of stories and their changing or morphing—both in worded content and in interpretation—as they take up and are taken up by culturally and linguistically diverse audiences. He writes: “Folklore items, like many other sorts of items in cultural exchange, are autotelic: that is, they travel by themselves without (often) any movement of populations. A proverb, a riddle, a joke, a story, a remedy, or a recipe travels every time it is told. It crosses linguistic boundaries any time a bilingual person tells it or hears it” (1991b, xix). While Ramanujan neglects to mention that it is often women, through marriage, who are the carriers of the stories across space and language, he does note an important parallel between women and stories in Indian folktales: like daughters, stories are dānas, or gifts (like food, wealth, and knowledge) that must circulate. Given such cultural resonances between the “traffic” in women through marriage (Rubin 1975) and the exchange of stories, one might well expect to find significant differences according to gender in the functions of storytelling in South Asia. From the perspective of women in such societies, populations of people, in addition to their stories, are continually on the move, insofar as for generation upon generation women have been relocating upon marriage.

In the gendered world of Mithila, women and men are, in fact, subject to very different compulsions and restrictions in regard to movement across space. For women of all castes, marriage matches based in the norm of village exogamy are the main outward-moving impulse and purdah the primary inward-moving pull; for men, it is something of the reverse. Indeed, the ...