Gender, Genre, and Power in South Asian Expressive Traditions

Arjun Appadurai, Frank J. Korom, Margaret A. Mills, Arjun Appadurai, Frank J. Korom, Margaret A. Mills, Arjun Appadurai, Frank J. Korom, Margaret A, Mills

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780812213379
• eBook ISBN: 9781512821321
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The authors cross the boundaries between anthropology, folklore, and history to cast new light on the relation between songs and stories, reality and realism, and rhythm and rhetoric in the expressive traditions of South Asia.

Part I

Gender: Voices and Lives

A. K. Ramanujan

1. Toward a Counter-System: Women’s Tales

Although educated in the Indian “classics” like the Mahābhārata, the Rāmāyaṇa, the paurāṇik mythologies, and so forth, Indians are also exposed to customs, tales, and beliefs that may be quite contrary to what they find in the classics. These alternative forms embody ways that together encompass the possibilities envisaged by the culture. They may present different selections, viewpoints, and solutions, expressing “finite provinces of reality” (in Alfred Schutz’s phrase) which bracket off temporarily other such provinces and forms. In each of the following examples, I shall explicitly contrast a well-known classical or Sanskritic story or point of view with forms I found among women, peasants, illiterate workers, and others in Karnataka. This does not mean that these different kinds of materials are exclusively the property of one class or another. It is not useful to work with terms such as “classical” and “folk” as terms in simple opposition, but instead they should be seen as parts of a cline, a continuum of forms, the endpoints of which may look like two terms in opposition.

Many of these tales (from my field notes) are women’s tales. By “women’s tales,” I mean two things: (1) tales told by women and (2) tales that are centered around women. Sometimes the tales that are told by women are also told by men, but a single inquiry makes it clear that, invariably, the men had heard them first from a woman in a domestic setting, usually in childhood. Young boys and girls are told such tales by older women who feed them in the evening, in the kitchen—which is exclusively the realm of women. Boys, as they grow older (often no older than six or seven), may drop out of these tale-telling sessions, while girls continue until adolescence. Thus, these nonprofessional tellers of tales tend to be predominantly women. There are tales I have heard exclusively from men in a public setting: often long, romantic ones or more intimately bawdy tales. Even among these there are some that are women-centered. The focus of this chapter is on the nature of such tales whose protagonists are women—tales about mothers and daughters, mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law, wives and concubines, fathers and daughters. To these should be added village myths about goddesses, the lives of women saints, oral epics with heroines, women’s retellings of the epics.¹ I shall speak here only about a small number of domestic oral tales and explore three themes: karma and its alternatives, stories about stories, and chastity.

Karma and Its Alternatives

Much attention has recently been paid to the technical category of karma (O’Flaherty 1980b). The term is used and discussed widely in epic, didactic, and philosophic texts in Sanskrit as well as in Tamil and other regional languages. It is often chosen as a, if not the, representative pan-Hindu, even pan-Indian, concept. Let us see how it appears in the light of Kannada folktales. But first let us consider the components of this cluster called karma. I suggest that karma can be usefully analyzed into at least three independent variables:

(1) Causality: Any human (or other) action is nonrandom; it is motivated and explained by previous actions of the actors themselves.

(2) Ethics: Acts are divided into “good, virtuous” and “bad, sinful”; the former accrue puṇya (“merit”), the latter pāpa (“sin [?], demerit”).

(3) Rebirth or re-death (punarjanma or punarmṛtyu): Souls transmigrate and have many lives in which to clear their ethical accounts. Past lives contain motives and explanations for the present, and the present initiates the future. The chain or wheel of lives is called saṃsāra, and release from it is mokṣa (salvation, liberation), nirvāṇa (“blowing out”), or kaivalya (“isolation”), in different systems.

Each of these three elements may, and often does, appear in India and elsewhere in different combinations. For instance, Freudian psychoanalysis depends on causality, a version of ethics (e.g., a punitive superego), and no rebirth. Utilitarian ethics depends on element 1 and a version of 2 in its “calculus of consequences.” Biblical sayings such as, “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap,” depend on elements 1 and 2, without 3. Certain theories of rebirth may or may not involve (1) and (2), as in ideas as varied as the phoenix rising from its own ashes, or Śaṅkara’s conception that “the Lord is the only transmigrant” (Zaehner 1969).

It seems to me that the combination of all these three elements (considerations of causality, ethics, and rebirth) makes for the special force of the karma doctrines of India. The following is a report on my search for this explicit category, as defined above, in Kannada folktales. Here is a folktale with variants recorded for six different districts, told by different castes:

THE LAMPSTAND WOMAN [dīpada malli]

A king had an only daughter. He had brought her up lovingly. He had spread three great loads [khaṇḍuga] of flowers to lie on and covered her in three more, as they say. He was looking for a proper bridegroom for her.

In another city, another king had a son and a daughter. He was looking for a proper bride for the prince. The search was on. Both the kings’ parties set out, pictures in hand. On the way, they came to a river, which was flowing rather full and fast, and it was evening already. “Let the river calm down a bit. We can go at sunrise,” they said, and pitched tents on either side of the river for the night.

It was morning. When they came to the river to wash their faces, the two parties met. This one said, “We need a bridegroom.” That one said, “We need a bride.” They exchanged pictures, looked them over, and both parties liked them. The bride’s party said, “We spread three great big measure of flowers for our girl to lie on and cover her in three more. That shows how tenderly we’ve brought up our girl. If anybody promises us that they’ll look after her better than that, we’ll give the girl to that house.”

To that, the boy’s party replied, “If you spread three great measures of flowers for her, we’ll spread six.” They made an agreement right there.

When they were getting the town ready for the wedding, the rain god gave them a sprinkle, the wind god dusted and swept the floors. They put up wedding canopies large as the sky, drew sacred designs on the wedding floor as wide as the earth, and they celebrated the wedding. It was rich, it was splendid. And soon after, the princess came to her husband’s palace.

The couple were happy. They spent their time happily—between a spread of six great measures of flowers, and a cover of six more.

Just when everything was fine, Mother Fate appeared in the princess’s dream and said, “You’ve all this wealth. No one has as much. But who’s going to eat the three great measures of bran and husk?” So saying, she took away all the jasmine and spread green thorn instead. The girl who used to sleep on jasmine now had to sleep on thorns. Every day Mother Fate would come, change the flowers, make her bed a bed of thorns, and disappear. No one could see this except the princess. The princess suffered daily. She suffered and suffered, got thinner and thinner till she was as thin as a little finger. She didn’t tell anyone about Mother Fate’s comings and goings, or about the bed of thorns she spread every night. “My fate written on my brow is like this. Nobody can understand what’s happening to me,” she said to herself, and pined away.

The husband wondered why his wife was getting thinner by the day. Once he asked: “You eat very well. We look after you here better than they do at your mother’s house. Yet you’re pining away, you’re getting thin as a reed. What’s the matter? The father-in-law, the mother-in-law, and the servant maids all asked her the same question. When Mother Fate herself is giving her the kind of trouble that no one should ever suffer, what’s the use of telling it to ordinary humans? “It’s better to die,” she thought, and asked for a crater of fire. She insisted on it.

She was stubborn. What could they do? They finally did what she asked. They robed her in a new sari. They put turmeric and vermillion on her face. They decked her hair in jasmine. They piled up sandalwood logs for the pyre, sat her down in the middle of it, and set fire to it. Then, a most astonishing thing happened. Out of nowhere, a great wind sprang up, picked her out of the burning log-fire, raised her unseen by others’ eyes into the sky, and left her in a forest.

“O God, I wanted to die in the crater of fire, and even that wasn’t possible,” she said, in utter sorrow.

When the wind died down, she looked around. She was in a forest. There was a cave nearby. “Let a lion or tiger eat me, I can at least die that way,” she thought, and entered the cave. But there was no lion or tiger in there. There were three great measures of bran and husk heaped up—and on the ground were a pestle and a pot. She wondered if this is what Mother Fate meant when she had asked in her dream: “Who’s going to eat three measures of bran and husk?”

What could she do? She pounded the bran each day, made it into a kind of flour, and lived on it. Three or four years passed that way. All the stock of bran and husk disappeared.

One day she said to herself, “Look here, it’s three or four years since I’ve seen a human face. Let’s at least go and look.” She came out of the cave, and climbed the hill. Down below, woodcutters were splitting wood. She thought, “If I followed these people, I can get to a town somewhere,” and came down. The woodcutters bundled their firewood and started walking toward a nearby market-town, like Bangalore. As they walked on, she walked behind them, without being seen.

As the men walked, the sun set in the woods. They stayed the night under a tree. She hid herself behind a bush. Then she saw a tiger coming toward her. “At least this tiger will eat me up, let it,” she thought, and lay still. The tiger came near. But he just sniffed at her and passed on. She felt miserable, and she moaned aloud, “Even tigers don’t want to eat me.” The woodcutters heard her words.

They got up and looked around. They saw a tiger walking away from where she was. They were stunned, terrified. When they could find words, they came close and talked to her. They said, “You must be a woman of great virtue. Because of you, the tiger spared us also. But you are crying! What’s your trouble? Why do you cry?”

She begged of them: “I’ve no troubles. Just get me to somebody’s house. I’ll work there. It’s enough if they give me a mouthful of food, and a twist of cloth. Please do that much, and earn merit for yourself.”

They said, “All right,” and took her with them.

Nearby was a town, like Bangalore. The woodcutters went to the big house where they regularly delivered firewood, and talked to the mistress there. “Please take in this poor woman as a servant here,” they said. She said, “All right,” and took her in. The woodcutters went their way. She started work in the big house, doing whatever they asked her to do.

One day the mistress’s little son threw a tantrum. The mistress said to her, “Take this child out. Show him the palace. Quiet him down.” So she carried him out and, as she was showing him this and that to distract him, a peacock pecked at the child’s necklace, took it in its beak, and swallowed it. She came running to the mistress and told her what happened. The mistress didn’t believe her.

She screamed at her, “You thief, you shaven widow, you’re lying! You’ve hidden it somewhere. Go, bring it at once, or else I’ll make you!”

The poor woman didn’t know what to do. She cried piteously. “No, no, I swear by...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Note on Transliteration
• Introduction
• Part I: Gender: Voices and Lives
• Part II: Genres: Identification and Identity
• Part III: Tradition: Persistence and Divergence
• Afterword
• Contributors
• Index