Organizer: Ann Grodzins Gold, Syracuse University
Chair: Gloria Goodwin Raheja, University of Minnesota
Discussant: Veena T. Oldenburg, City University of New York
While women's songs and other performative genres in India, from the nineteenth century through the late twentieth century, typically critique the micropolitics of identity in the arenas of kinship and family, these commentaries are constructed in relation to the larger economic and political contexts in which kinship and gender are always embedded. In this panel, Gold, Narayan, Raheja, and Trawick consider the interplay of women's poetic commentaries on gender ideologies, domestic hierarchies, and local economies with the specific historical settings in which these commentaries tunefully emerge.
Some women's speech genres articulate trenchant critiques of the political and economic circumstances of colonial and postcolonial India, and they do so from an implicit or explicit awareness of the highly gendered effects, within the family, of these circumstances. Others more playfully ponder, fantasize, or demand new possibilities for women's lives-transformations contingent on the ways external conditions are experienced, understood, manipulated. All our papers deal with songs that creatively address the immediacy of particular historical circumstances for the singers' lives: whether famine (Raheja), the changing rural economy in North India (Gold; Narayan) or the presence of foreigners and the ways this presence suggests new evaluations both of tradition and of women (Trawick). With a discussant (Oldenburg) whose work has addressed historical and economic realities of South Asian gender hierarchies, we hope our panel will collectively explore the dynamic, mutual infusions of oral performance, politics, and material conditions in India's past and present.
Gloria Goodwin Raheja, University of Minnesota
Although women's speech genres are so heavily edited and annotated in nineteenth century folklore collections that women's critical perspectives on kinship ideologies and on wider economic and political conditions are often obscured, several songs about famine have been recorded in these collections, with original Hindi texts and without obvious editing. In 1908, C.E. Luard published the text of a long and moving song about the famine of 1899 1900 in Central India; the song comments on the causes and gendered consequences of famine and traces these consequences to everyday kinship practices that subordinate women to natal and conjugal kin. The song also critiques the economic conditions that result in an unequal distribution of wealth between urban and rural areas, and it also comments ironically on religious practices that pretend to drive famine away but do not in fact relieve the women's hunger.
The poetic structure of this song locates the famine and its consequences in a very specific historical milieu; the famine itself, for example, is termed chhapaniya, or "56" for the samvat year 1956, and this term is reiterated several times in each of the eighteen stanzas of the song.
This song, and others like it, provide a vantage point on two aspects of women's expressive traditions: first, they allow us to conceptualize the critiques of gender ideologies and kinship practices often embedded in these traditions and to see that such poetic resistance is not a recent phenomenon; secondly, they allow us to conceptualize the historicity of these forms, and the degree to which they respond to changing historical circumstances and construct gendered understandings of those historical transformations.
Kirin Narayan, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Songs, like other collective expressive forms, are often viewed by anthropologists as windows into social relations: "autobiographical ethnography" enacted from the natives' point of view. Yet doing research on women's songs in Kangra, I found that songs diverged from contemporary realities in complex ways. While most genres mixed past and present, two genres stood opposed. At one extreme were pakharu ballads which conjured up vanished worlds of men on steeds, child marriages, evenings lit by flickering oil lamps. At the other extreme were nach git, boisterous dance songs which described husbands riding in jeeps, uppity daughters in law who sported nail polish, pukka cement houses. In this paper, I examine these two genres to argue that the discrepancies between songs and contemporary realities can be profitably explored through women's commentaries on the times (jamane) described in song texts. In Kangra, it appears that representations of the imagined past are also strategic statements about familial authority and regional identity. Representations of the anticipated present, by contrast, emphasize the married couple as a self contained unit and assert linkages with an aspiring middle class that spills beyond regional boundaries.
Ann Grodzins Gold, Syracuse University
While randomly but steadily recording rural Rajasthani women's songs from 1979 through 1981, I found most kinds of songs attached to occasions-whether festival days, life cycle rites, or in laws' visits. Although I made no exhaustive genre survey at that time, I did spend many hours in the company of singing women without encountering the genre younger women today readily refer to as khyal. Khyal is an evocative word; its meanings include "feeling," "belief," and "fancy." It designates a major type of emotion laden song, involving variations on a short phrase, in classical North Indian vocal music. In Rajasthan it is also the common name for popular folk drama (similar to Svang and Nautanki traditions in Uttar Pradesh).
In 1993 I found young wives gathering occasionally to sing songs sometimes called khyal, and also labeled "new songs"-songs neither of devotion nor festival. New songs are associated with another modern genre-filmi songs from the soundtracks of Hindi movies. But whereas filmi songs are learned from radio and cassette, khyal are women's own creations and give voice lightly to their feelings and fancies. Most khyal I recorded in 1993 are about family life-a content they share with many other women's songs. But khyal reveal and comment on changing worlds, expressing sentiments influenced by new economic and social realities: desires for husbands with jobs, for educational opportunities, for consumer goods from the city, for a household independent of the joint family. Khyal are more wistful and playful than strident and challenging. Yet they do not only challenge traditional gender hierarchies as many old songs did, but critique reactionary critiques of the new opportunities today's young women hope to seize. My paper explores these new songs' words, attempting to use this form of women's collective poetry, as women themselves do, to reflect on the changing conditions of their lives.
Margaret Trawick, Massey University
When an event is recounted from one human being to others, the manner in which the event is recounted is likely to vary widely according to context, animator, and audience. For instance, in communication among longtime intimates, much shared prior knowledge will be assumed, and the information so conveyed will appear elliptical to an outsider. By contrast, a song performed by an Indian village woman specifically for an American visitor may reasonably be expected to take culture differentials into account, and perhaps even to address those culture differentials specifically, with a view to opening them up to examination and renegotiation.
In this paper, a range of direct communications from Tamil women to the author of the paper, an American woman, will be described. It will be argued that in these direct communications-some songs, some narratives, some conversations-a deliberate effort is being undertaken to educate the female American interlocutor, to defend "traditional" Tamil culture against anticipated "modern" Anglo American challenges, and at the same time to establish collusive critiques of male dominant caste and kinship structures, so as to win the alliance of the interlocutor in the struggles of these women to transform the social organizations in which their own lives are enmeshed. Rather than rejecting the American woman as alien outsider, Tamil women enlist her as sister, daughter, fellow subversive, spokesperson, defender, and benefactress. Thus the foreign interlocutor is simultaneously "encompassed" and "dividualized."
If time permits, some examples of male to male Tamil discourse will be described, in which similar collusive strategies are demonstrably employed.
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