Organizer and Chair: Suchismita Sen, Pennsylvania State University
Discussant: Gloria Raheja, University of Minnesota
The Indian social and political scene is currently going through a serious phase of transition and self examination. How are Indians in various spheres dealing with the current change? The papers in the present panel provide four different perspectives from which the transition may be examined in detail.
Many of the political, social, and ethical assumptions of the earlier generation are being increasingly questioned by the first generation of Indians born after Indian independence in 1947. These people, Indians born free from colonialism, have acquired sufficient emotional security to start questioning the values and norms of the earlier generation. For example, the socialistic world view, which dominated India's social policies, is under attack from a more free market oriented value system. With the shift from a closed and inward looking economy to a more market oriented one, many of the social mores and norms of the earlier generation are under severe stress. The bipolar world view of the older generation, which broadly divided the world into eastern and western civilizations with a strongly hierarchical ruler-subject reality, is being questioned by the new trade oriented relationships between India and the countries of the west. As a result, many traditional ideas about Indianness are being thoroughly reexamined and new priorities and value systems are replacing the older ones. Indian social values have shown remarkable resiliency and adaptability in the past to fit with the changing social situations. How will the current social changes affect the traditional values and identity of the Indian people? The current panel will attempt some answers.
Susan Wadley examines the performance traditions of the north Indian oral epic Dhola from an anthropologist's vantage point and reflects on the changing attitude on caste identities and loyalties in the community. Suchismita Sen examines the narrative tradition of vratakathas and explores the changing attitudes of Bengali Hindu women in modern urban surroundings. Frank Korom studies the behavioral patterns of Indian diaspora by analyzing the way Indian communities in Trinidad have been negotiating their sense of Indianness through the medium of various ritual and secular public performances in a poly ethnic society. Finally, Rose DeNeve explores the problematics of defining the Indian identity as projected through the contemporary discourse in tourism brochures on India to arrive at an image of India and its people.
Frank J. Korom, Museum of International Folk Art
The concept of tradition, once thought to be static, has been problematized by a number of critics who have drawn attention to the fact that "tradition" does not seem to carry a single meaning, even though many scholars use the term in a reified sense. Others have suggested that we eliminate the term from academic vocabulary altogether. But is it really necessary to throw the baby out with the bath water?
Many communities do, in fact, use the term when referring to items of their own culture, linking it further to their own identities. My discussion will focus on ethnographic data pertaining to the heavily nuanced culture of East Indians living in Trinidad. More specifically, I wish to show how the rhetoric of tradition is used to justify certain public displays and performances that cross cut a number of different types of communities and "traditions."
Indo Trinidadians have been struggling for nearly 150 years with the negotiation of their identities in the poly ethnic environment of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. One subtle and non discursive method by which Indo Trinidadians give voice to their social selves is through the medium of ritual, both private and public. These, coupled with secular performances provide a multivocalic arena for identity construction. Identity is, of course. layered in this case because of the complex religious, political and social affiliations that bind Indo Trinidadians to various groups on this island nation.
Through looking at the emerging rhetorics that surround the performative milieu of Indo Trinidadians, I wish to show how the trope of tradition is used to justify certain public displays that meet opposition from other sectors of Trinidadian society. Linking tradition and display provides not only a justification for the assertion of Indo Trinidadian culture, but also an explanation for the various identities East Indians must assume on a regular basis.
Rose M. DeNeve, Syracuse University
Advertisements promoting travel to India for Euro Americans incorporate a sophisticated marketing strategy. However, far from being an entirely contemporary enterprise, many of the images used in official Indian tourist advertising derive from paintings, drawings, and photographs made by the British during India's colonial period. Like written works of the same epoch, these early artworks pictured India as exotic, romantic, and totally 'Other,' creating within the European imagination of the time certain ideas and expectations about the nature of the 'real' India. Meeting these expectations is a prime factor in tourism-and tourist advertising-in India today.
Using historical illustrations and photography from published sources along with images culled from contemporary tourist advertisements, this paper theorizes the continuation of a colonialist mentality within the modern Indian state, which itself promulgates a tourist discourse rooted in the commoditization of difference. It draws upon several disparate literatures bearing on the creation of an India of the imagination and its meaning for modern times; these include ethnography, historiography, advertising design theory, and critiques of colonialism, tourism, and the post colonial Indian state.
Susan S. Wadley, Syracuse University
The north Indian oral epic Dhola portrays a world of many castes, kings, magicians, as well as of husbands and wives who quarrel and complex father son relationships. In this, it presents the world view of the lower caste male singers who are its chief performers for rural elite patrons. It is an epic firmly embedded in the multi caste reality of the Braj region of western Uttar Pradesh, its primary locale.
Since the late 1980s, Dhola has blossomed as a performance mode popular in the rural tape cassette market, where it often forms a large portion of the listings of small cassette companies. Perhaps in response to the popularity of the major Indian epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, on television, it is now called "our Mahabharata." For its singers and patrons, it is indeed an epic that presents a world different from the divine world of kings and sages found in the Ramayana and the complex battles and internecine wars of the Mahabharata. Rather, it presents the complexity of intercaste relationships in a region of multicaste farming communities. There is indeed a king, but he wins no kingdoms and is more involved in acting out the roles of other castes (for the hero, Raja Nal, is often in disguise) and dealing with his two queens and marrying his son than with conquering of either other humans or powerful demons. I argue that this is the reality for the modern identities of its rural audiences. Many of these audiences are struggling with the meaning of caste and caste stereotypes in a world where the role of caste is rapidly changing. Dhola remains popular for it captures the stereotypical portraits of the members of the communities it represents. Some hearers reject its message, claiming that these caste views are pejorative and inappropriate in these times, while others find the story to be an affirmation of a life style rapidly disappearing.
Dhola has also been changing and adapting in its two hundred plus years of known history. But much of this adaptation is through performance styles. Its singers have modernized it in large part by adopting the latest song styles for which new verses with different meters are composed, while continuing to portray a land of kings who often lose (at least initially) and heroes who are oilpressers.
Seen in the wider context of other Indian textual traditions, Dhola's king who often stumbles and his lower caste helpmates suggest a tradition that continues to be relevant to its rural audiences, for whom an affirmation of divine moral authority must be balanced by an affirmation of caste identities and loyalties.
Suchismita Sen, Pennsylvania State University
This paper examines the gradual shift in the value system of the Bengali middle class women in the city of Calcutta as reflected through a story commonly narrated by senior female members to younger women in the family. The author examines seven variants of the "vratakatha of Itu", the story of two sisters Umno and Jhumno, recited during the ritual day for Itu, and explores how the variants reflect the changing priorities in the lives of urban Bengali women.
The author grew up listening to this story in her adolescent days in Calcutta. Upon her return to the city in 1989, she collected the tale from older female members of her family. The oral variants thus collected are contrasted with older published versions. Although the "vratakatha" mode of the stories is still retained, the contemporary variants show a clear shift away from a complete dependence on the deity of the ritual to an increased emphasis on conscious mastery and manipulation of the social power structure by the members of the narrative community to gain the desired end.
This project poses a methodological problem that researchers in anthropology and folklore are increasingly facing these days. In attempting to collect data from her own family members, the fieldworker placed herself in a situation where she operated not only as a past member of the narrative community to which she is emotionally and socially bound, but also as a detatched observer questioning the accepted norms. Thus her ethnographic analysis provides an in depth look at the process by which previously implicit and unconscious behavioral patterns of both the researcher and her subjects are reexamined and analyzed in a new light. The author's commitment to the model of western academic tradition in examining Indian traditional practices reflects a broad pattern of self examination and self questioning which the Indian society is currently grappling with in all spheres of social activity.
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