Gender, Genre, and Power in South Asian Expressive Traditions

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

Introduction

This introduction is being written in the midst of the worldwide furor over the publication and sale of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988). Battles are being fought over censorship and freedom of speech, politics and fantasy, blasphemy and terrorism, individual authorial rights and collective readings, as well as riots in remote corners of the world. The volume we present appears at first glance to be far from the blood and passion of the Rushdie issue. But this book explores powers and processes of expression in the very part of the world where riots first broke out over the sale of The Satanic Verses, where Salman Rushdie spent the crucial years of his childhood, and where a major nation-state (India) first banned The Satanic Verses. If there is one lesson we learn from all this, it is the following: we had all better understand the ways complex civilizational traditions, like those of South Asia, have engaged the problems of fiction and of fantasy, of the authority of writers and audiences, of the connection between affect and expression, of the aesthetic prerogatives of men and women, and of the problems of irony and satire within a complex set of performance traditions.

In short, this volume is ultimately about the pragmatics of folk sensibility in a rapidly changing world. Its authors engage many topics, but through all of the chapters there runs a series of crucial intra-civilizational debates: about the past and its uses, about the multiplicity of canons which performers may invoke (or subvert), about the varieties of magic realism in South Asia, and about the politics involved in the resilience of oral forms in a society where literacy is highly valued. The authors engage these topics in rich and context-sensitive case studies, and draw the reader into the dense and heteroglossic world of South Asian aesthetic expressions. Readers will be directed to textual, historical, and interpretive minutiae that do not make for light reading, but for those who genuinely wish to engage the otherness of other worlds of folk knowledge, expression, and performativity, the essays offer an uncompromisingly unsentimental overture. If we wish to be intelligent citizens and critics in the world after The Satanic Verses, we need to take the folksiness out of our perception of folk traditions. This entails engagement with dense historical materials, complex aesthetic issues, and subtle problems of textuality and history. The essays in this collection are an invitation to such an engagement.

The Context

This book stands at the confluence of two important streams of scholarship, and though not all the authors are equally self-conscious about the background against which they are working, there are two major bodies of literature that this volume presupposes.

The first is the scholarship, produced largely in the last two decades, during which folklore has become transformed from a rather conservationist exercise in collecting traditions to a radical enterprise which explores the dynamics of folk reproduction in the study of a variety of expressive forms. In this revitalized form of folkloristics, key terms such as the folk, genre, text, performance, and tradition itself, have become problematized. Perhaps as a consequence, folklore has become more than ever a field in which contestation between disciplines can and does occur: in the topos of folklore, the questions of authenticity and invention in regard to tradition have become problematized (Abrahams 1986; Handler 1988; Handler and Linnekin 1984; Herzfeld 1982; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1988; Korom 1989a; Whisnant 1983); the question of text and textuality has become, once again, a topic of contestation (Bauman and Abrahams 1981), as sociolinguists, folklorists, ethnopoeticists, anthropologists, and historians of religions seek to negotiate over what texts are, how much they can and must be read as parts of lived experience, and so forth (Ricoeur 1971a, b; Hanks 1989). Finally, performance as a term has come to be richly multivalent, and a new dialogue is emerging between earlier meanings of performance (which simply stressed the activity of producting folk expressions rather than the static products of such activity) and newer meanings, which stress sensitivity not only to situated language use but also to the problems of dialogue, voice, heteroglossia, and the like, which emerge once a text is itself seen as a constructed experience and social experience is reconceived dialogically (Bauman 1986; Briggs 1988; Schieffelin 1985). Clearly, the study of performances, however we construe them and whatever approaches we utilize, must be envisioned as a multidisciplinary hermeneutic process (Malbon 1983; Sullivan 1986). The point is not that everything is up for grabs in the current situation of folklore, but rather that folklore has become the locus and critical nexus of important interdisciplinary debates and contests pertaining to the expressive dimension of social life. The authors in this volume could not have produced their essays, whatever their topics, without the benefit of these ongoing debates, some of which are explicitly programmatic, others of which are more embedded in interpretive specifics. But suffice it to say that, taken as a whole, these essays are produced in an era when terms such as genre, performance, tradition, and text are no longer markers of terminological common sense but point, rather, to large areas of intense debate. The field of folklore is host to these debates and, moreover, has participated in opening them up to even larger debates in the fields of critical theory, media studies, and cultural studies.

There is yet a second stream of work that has nourished the chapters in this volume, and it has come out of South Asia. In the last decade, South Asia has seen an unprecedented flowering of work in folklore, construed broadly. There have been two major collections produced in the United States (Blackburn and Ramanujan 1986; Blackburn et al. 1989) and two significant edited volumes in India (Claus et al. 1987; Das 1986); they reveal a generation of scholars who have brought together folkloristics, anthropology, history of religions, and Indology in dramatic new ways. This has been a quiet revolution, but its results are dramatic: women have moved to the center stage of this work, Dravidian India has moved out of the shadow of the ever-hungry classicizing North, nonverbal genres have begun to edge into the privileged territory of verbal material, and oral materials have begun to compete for attention with written ones. These inversions of our conventional thinking, and of others’, did not, of course, descend on the scholarly world ex nihilo. They built on earlier debates about great and little traditions, about Sanskritization and its variants, about the role of classical models and meanings in a polyglot, vernacular world, about bhakti as a counter-system to orthodox Hinduism, and about the hidden alternative discourses of Untouchables, poet-saints, and women in the subcontinent. Still, though it is tempting to see history as necessity, there would have been no way to predict, say in 1980, that this past decade would have seen an immense flowering of scholarship in South Asia folkloristics. Here it must be acknowledged that the sociology of this development involves, at least in part, a kind of internal disciplinary restlessness, which led many of the finest minds in anthropology, linguistics, comparative religion, and Indology to become renegades in their own disciplines and look to folkloric materials for new energies to bring to their areal concerns.

Here the two streams come together, for this move to the margins within several disciplinary fields in the South Asian area converged with a rich period in the ongoing dialogue of folkloristics, discussed above, creating a juncture between a series of classic problems in an areal field and a series of new debates and discoveries in a disciplinary field. Many of the contributors to this volume have been part of this happy circumstance, and their work builds on problems and issues from both streams of scholarship. But like all original scholarship, the essays in this volume are not simply mechanical products of the encounter between folkloristics and South Asian studies in the late 1970s and 1980s. These essays also extend our understanding of key issues and problems, both for South Asianists and for folklore at large. Of course, it might be noted at this point that disciplinary concepts, especially in the human sciences, never represent the view from nowhere, and always represent the crystallization of empirical work in particular places, which by a mixture of quality, serendipity, and academic politics, become seen as theory-at-large, for a while (Appadurai 1986). Then, theory-at-large moves on, because work done in new areas creates new configurations of theory and method to which scholars working in yet other areas will have to respond.

We believe that this volume and the recent ones that precede it represent such a moment in the spatial politics of disciplinary development. It is not that these essays turn the study of folklore, or any part of it, on its head. Rather, they are invitations to those who work on general theory to take note of the twists that attend their concerns in this locality. Not all work can issue such a challenge. But work that is carefully contextualized, and is aware of developments elsewhere, invites the folklorist at large to rethink the politics of citation. Building on the major volumes in South Asian folklore that have preceded them, these essays should help in a radical reconfiguration of the master terms of folklore scholarship, terms that otherwise tend to become quickly normalized, as if they had become part of everyone’s common sense, and contained the strange epistemological privilege of the view from nowhere. On matters of gender, of genre, and of the dynamics of long-term cultural reproduction, South Asian work in folklore studies needs to be seen not as more data to be digested, but as potentially interrogating existing disciplinary understandings framed around data from other major cultural areas.

Thus, these essays stand at an interesting conjuncture of place and theory in folkloristics, a conjuncture which can be savored only in its specifics. In this introduction, we point to a few major themes that run through the essays and provide a brief guide to the contents of the volume. Far be it from us to claim that the way we have organized the essays is the only possible way. Yet, some essays do speak more forcefully to one another than others. So we have divided the contributions into three sections, each consisting of five chapters: one on gender, one on genre, and one on tradition. These sections are followed by an afterword. What follows is a brief discussion of each of the sections.

Gender

The essays on gender (by Ramanujan, Mills, Grima, Gold, and Claus) are about men and women, and also about gender, taken as a problem of relating, of contrast, and of relationships between ethnobiological categories. Each of the essays spins gender out in a different direction, yet they resonate with one another in interesting ways, while filling a geographical gap in the growing literature on gender studies.

The last decade and a half have seen the U.S. publication of one major bibliography and several collections of feminist folklore scholarship, endeavoring to integrate the subject of gender with folkloristics (de Caro 1983; Farrer 1975; Jordan and Kalčik 1985; special issues of Journal of American Folklore [100], Journal of Folklore Research [25]), but almost none of this work cast its gaze east of Suez. De Caro’s bibliography, listing 1,664 items, identifies only 19 which deal directly with either India or Nepal, one of which is a general bibliography on Indian women, and three others being general works on women dedicated to some geographic region. Certainly there is a great deal more published work pertinent to women and folklore in South Asia, but it has remained relatively obscure to American folklorists who are not South Asianists. No doubt much older material concerned with the portrayal of women and/or women as folk artists and performers exists in collections that are not indexed in such a way as to make that content obvious to a nonspecialist. Even Marta Weigle’s far-reaching comparative studies on women and mythology (1982, 1989) make only passing mention of Indie mythology, despite such recent provocative comparatist work as that of O’Flaherty (1980).

South Asian folklorists and textually oriented anthropologists have nonetheless produced a number of recent studies of fundamental interest to Western folklorists concerned with gender. In Another Harmony (Blackburn and Ramanujan 1986) alone, seven out of nine contributions substantively and innovatively address gender issues. Of particular interest in juxtaposition to Western theoretical developments (e.g., Stoeltje 1988) is the consideration that patriarchal structure in South Asia is not the product of colonial presence, yet colonial and postcolonial experience is crucial to current developments in gender roles and the expressive systems which both reflect and partly constitute the gendered nature of social life. The female aspect of deity is abundantly represented in South Asian traditions and for this reason, among others, the current study of gender issues in South Asian folklore has no trouble, pace French feminism, turning up examples of women as gazing and enunciating subjects, not just as gazed-upon objects (cf. Ramanujan, Wadley, Claus, and Egnor in Another Harmony; Ramanujan, Trawick, Grima, Mills, Claus, Flueckiger, this volume). It is to be hoped both that South Asianists can turn their attention more systematically to an assessment of Eurocentric feminist theory apropos of folk (and now public) culture and that the present volume, together with work already in print, will make South Asian expressive traditions and scholarly activities more accessible for the enlargement of American and European folklorists’ perspectives on gender issues.

The division of social roles along gender lines is, of course, nothing new to the social sciences. But the role that gender plays in performance is still a fertile area of exploration. Limon and Young (1986) predicted, accurately, with regard to the essays anthologized here, that gender should and would become a central focus for future folklore studies. Gender ideology is such a basic resource in the making of all kinds of cultural meanings that virtually no chapter in this collection can proceed without reference to it. Besides the chapters gathered in Part I of this volume, explicitly entitled Gender: Voices and Lives, several others in the anthology take gender as a central issue, including those of Hiltebeitel, Salomon, and Flueckiger.

The role of gender in cultural expression is so basic and pervasive as to defy generalization beyond an observation of its pervasiveness, but a rough topical division might be made between scholarly considerations of gender in the act of performance (including not only performers, but also audience composition and differential response) and representations of gender roles in the texts as performed. Clearly, neither of these areas of interest can be addressed without addressing the other; in particular, attention to gender in the organization of performances may help to reveal, as it does in several of these essays, alternative voices and points of view in verbal art productions (the texts) and in their indigenous interpretations. Alternative voices are a topic never far from the center of attention throughout this volume; gender is one of the basic parameters of alterity.

As Ramanujan reminds us in his essay on south Indian folktales in Part I, the predominance of a theme in the expressive culture of one subgroup does not preclude its popularity in other groups, but interpretations of narrative themes and images may vary widely between subgroups. Ramanujan defines women’s tales as tales told by and centered around women, which does not preclude male exposure to and interest in them. A general theme such as fate, worked out in a fictional woman’s life in his first example, has relevance for both women and men. In the example he presents, the theme of separation and suffering, dramatically rendered, ascribes the heroine’s suffering not to character or karma, but to Mother Fate. The untangling of a fated life is often accomplished by the heroine recounting her misfortunes within the tale, a recounting which makes her a person, according to Ramanujan’s interpretation. In this regard, whether Tamil (Trawick), Kannada (Ramanujan), or Paxto (Grima), women’s personal narratives may be seen to share the general function of recapitulation in fictional narratives: the construction of a self. Referring to a story about an old widow whose mental and bodily functions deteriorate precisely because she is not able to tell anyone her story, Ramanujan points out that "the whole tale is the tale of her acquiring her story, making a person of her, making a silent person a speaking woman" (p. 42, our emphasis). Benedicte Grima, whose essay is included in this section, suggests the same about the function of tapos narratives. Fictional tales and narratives grounded in concrete personal experiences overlap in these examples, suggesting that fantasy and reality often address similar concerns. Thus, normative biological categories such as gender and culturally constructed ones such as genre, are not as taxonomically distinct as one might presume, for as Ramanujan reminds us in his contribution, genders are genres. Finding a personal voice in male-dominated galaxies of possibilities seems to be at the center of female-related gender issues in the general study of folklore (cf. also Mills, this volume), as well as in the description and analysis of the emergent production of genres.

Margaret Trawick (whose chapter in Part II is discussed at greater length in the following section), also bridges the gap between emotionally laden accounts of individual experience and genre production. She detects a tangible transformation between life and song: song clarifies and strengthens certain life events, in this case fragmentation and suffering in human relationships. The song of an Untouchable Tamil woman (analyzed by Trawick), and the gham performances of Paxtun women discussed by Grima, reconfigure the relations between social margins and centers, superiors and subordinates. The thematic congruences among these essays challenge us to seek a fine-grained comparativism that can take simultaneous account of gender with caste, class, or ethnicity as conjoined determinants of women’s lived experience and self-representations. Along parallel thematic lines, Heston (discussed in the next section) notes the pervasively tragic themes of separation peculiar to Paxto chapbook romances, composed and performed by men, in contrast to the happy endings popular in Persian, for instance.

Three of the chapters in Part I cohere around this point, the construction of an experiential or moral self, or both, through autobiographical narrative; the particularities of the selves so constructed remain grounded in local cultural preoccupations which, as Ramanujan points out in distinguishing the causal role of fate (in stories) from the invocation of karma (in other types of daily verbal exchanges), may actually encompass rather divergent world views (cf. Abu-Lughod 1986). These counter-systems may operate in different spheres of one person’s expressive life, or differentially among different subgroups, including male and female. Ramanujan’s observation that marriage is often the concluding point of male-centered adventure tales, and the starting point of female-centered ones, can be extended to other traditions (cf. Mills, this volume, 1983, 1985 for similar patterns in a corpus of oral tales from western Afghanistan).

Mills addresses issues raised by Ramanujan concerning the gendered distribution of folktale themes, but also points out that the gendered division of access to expressive media (in this case, reading and writing, cassette tape recorders) must be taken into account to assess differences in men’s and women’s oral performances, the stylistics, genesis, and distribution of oral genres and subgenres. Technological transformations can be expected to change women’s exposure to different types of performative speech, even within the functioning institution of pardah. The effect of this new exposure on the gendered differentiation of speech styles, however, cannot be expected to be a mechanical one, since gendered differentiation of speech styles is part of a larger system of gendered cultural distinctions, and is not simply driven by technology.

Themes of gender roles and the ambivalence of power, rather differently handled, are also evident in the Rajasthani Gopi Chand narrative explored by Ann Grodzins Gold. It is not clear to King Gopi Chand, as hero, whether remaining a householder or becoming a renunciant is the appropriate path (cf. also Blackburn, this volume, on the discussion of transcendence and balance in a Tamil folk Rāmāyaṇa). Gopi Chand is compelled by the terms of his birth to become a yogi, but, unlike his guru, he has experienced both the attached and the detached life, and for him the choice remains real. Attachment is evoked by women, especially beloved women (wife and sister) who cause him, weeping, to cling to the world he must leave—a world of mortality in which love is illusion but no less potent for being so (Gold, p. 102).

These attachments, and the episode of a contest between the yogis and a group of malevolent female magicians, provide a dual vision of māyā, illusion which is also creative power in ways that are distinctly female. Gold presents these facets of illusion or māyā as an inherent property of women (viewed from a male perspective) and put into motion by them. The creations of female māyā are tangibly real, with enduring consequences, countered only by superior male creative forces.

Peter Claus’s chapter extends the discussion of indigenous interpretation by exploring the relevance of certain genres of traditional fictional narratives from Tulu-speaking south Karnataka to local conceptualizations of kinship and gender relations. But these are not the timeless, architectonic conceptualizations of kinship which predominated in the older analytic ethnographies. In Claus’s observation of the relationship between story and history, oral narrative often draws on the conflicts experienced by people in their day-to-day lives. The Tulu pāḍdana describes and comments upon the explosively real tension that exists between podderü groups, consisting of brother-sister siblings sets, which remind us that gender is not just a matter of conjugal relations, though a conjugal power struggle figures largely in the pāḍdana examples that Claus examines. Authorial voice is also at issue here, as in several of the chapters in this volume. Although the performer is a woman, the story, according to the female audience’s evaluation of the female main character’s actions, warns against female defiance of male dominance in Tulu society. Women’s performances cannot be mechanically assumed to stand in counterposition to male-dominated ideologies. As Ramanujan suggests, system and counter-system may be expressed in different domains of speech performance.

Claus invites us to pay close attention to the context of pāḍdana performance in order to interpret its multiple meanings. The pāḍdana is a cross-gender genre that has the intertextual sense and force of a ballad in some situations, an epic in others, or a tale in still others. The generic designation, pāḍdana, encompasses a number of distinct song forms, which allows the story structure and content to vary as the situation demands. Claus’s identification of genre, subgenre, and sub-subgenre relies upon a detailed exploration of the diversity of performance contexts.

Genre

As Claus’s chapter in Part I demonstrated, genre is a taxonomic problem, but not merely classification is at stake (Abrahams 1976; Gossen 1971; Voigt 1980). As a problem of ethnopoetics (Hymes 1971, 1981; Tedlock 1986), genre analysis is also a metafolkloristic problem (Dundes 1966), because central to the study of narrative expressions is the understanding of what system of expressions they fit into locally (Ben-Amos 1976). Without such an understanding, we misclassify. And when we misclassify, we misunderstand and distort.

With a few major exceptions (e.g., Boas 1914; Malinowski 1926), genre analysis, however critical it may be to a holistic understanding of expressive culture, was not a pressing issue in the anthropological and folkloristic study of verbal art until fairly recently, owing to ongoing spurious assumptions concerning the unified nature of tradition (cf. Honko 1968, Ben-Amos 1976). Such misunderstandings led to homogeneous, static, and cross-cultural models of genres based on Eurocentric literary notions of aesthetic form and sociologically construed ideal types. But the essays in Part II, by Flueckiger, Wadley, Trawick, Salomon, and Heston, address the problematics of genre in context in a variety of ways and contribute important South Asian generic information to the further comparative refinement of this elusive problem that has preoccupied folkloristics at-large for the past few decades.

Joyce Flueckiger’s discussion of genre and community in Chhattisgarh points out ways in which the claiming of different forms of folk verbal art is a part of self-perceived regional identity, and the ways in which genres so claimed then form systems. The we in common statements, such as "We dance the suā nāc or we sing songs at our weddings," becomes problematical. Proprietary claims to traditional verbal arts cannot be taken as transparent identifications of actual practitioners: they are actually much more than that, operating, with actual performance, across boundaries of gender and caste to articulate regional and other forms of community identity. Flueckiger’s perspective yields not only a refreshingly flexible approach to genre but also an equally supple model for community identification. For instance, she captures differences in male and female tendencies to claim genres which they do not in fact perform, and reflects on the possible grounds for those differences in concepts of community inflected by gender, including caste membership.

The performance forms themselves are changing as the settings for performance and the region’s economic and demographic picture change. Genre designations are also problematical: genres are seen to be clustered not by similarities of form but by social categories of practitioners (unmarried girls, married women, men) in indigenous thought. As these groups’ expectations for themselves transform under changing social and economic conditions, their claims to particular genres also shift. Nontraditional performances and performance settings are emerging, sometimes more evidently in action than in folk reflection. Increasing school-based literacy, with its concomitant expectations for appropriate status behavior, and the emergence of mass media (video halls, All-India Radio performances of suā nāc) compete with older traditions of public performance. Performance forms related to ritual, such as suā nāc, are being simultaneously privatized (as newly literate ādīvāsī girls decline to perform outside their own neighborhoods) and commodified (through decontextualized radio performance). The Candainī epic, claimed as a distinctively Chhattisgarhi form, is also undergoing changes in caste of performers, preferred forms of performances (from dual-voice sung recitation to nācā dance dramas), language of performance, musical style, and perhaps story line (though the latter is hard to trace in a tradition with no literate modality). Audience composition is becoming more inclusive, as the epic is claimed as a regional property.

Flueckiger’s concept of regional isogenres helps organize a systematic discussion of variation within complex multigenre systems. It might be scaled up, and its limits tested, in application to discussions of transregional phenomena such as qawwālī or classically derived epic performance (Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa; cf. Brenneis, Blackburn, Hiltebeitel, this volume). The flexibility of her model responds to the fluidity of tradition in Chhattisgarh, a fluidity which no portrayal of South Asian expressive culture can afford to ignore.

Susan Wadley’s chapter, while not primarily concerned with historical change, opens up the question of the simultaneous presence of multiple genres within an established (in this case, epic) performance form, and poses basic questions about the differential impact on listeners of distinct modalities of performance. Whereas Peter Claus demonstrated (Part I) the interrelationships between genre and social ideology determining the message of the text, Wadley observes how the dialectic among the prose narrative and the melody, sung text and instrumentation, operates in the audience’s multichanneled reception of a coherent communicative event. In this light, she explores the dynamics of genre shifts during ḍholā epic performance. The ḍholā (a chanted couplet) is skillfully manipulated by the singer to focus attention on critical points in the story. The singer has a number of alternative paths that he might take in constructing his performance, which he creatively utilizes to convey certain essential truths about the content of the narrative. Drawing on the work of Bloch (1974) and Wheelock (1982) on ritual language, Wadley seeks to tease out the logic of genre shifts, especially movements between song and prose. Wadley sees prose as more explanatory or information-oriented, song as more situating and contextual, but she is cautious not to overemphasize the distinction, recognizing that formal language can inform and well as perform (Gill 1987). She concurs with Wheelock that the intention of the speaker ultimately determines a crucial distinction in the making of meaning.

Wadley’s attention to musical texture as well as prosody in sung ḍholā invites us to reflect on possible extensions of this investigation to, for example, the examination of Tulu pāḍdanas (see Claus, this volume) with regard to musical texture, along with the relationship of verbal content and social structural ideology. Wadley’s vision of epic as characterized by the constant shifting and manipulation of genres might help us understand why the overarching category of pāḍdana can be understood in so many ways. Her complex view of meaning-making in epic offers a general perspective on the openness of traditional texts, an important element to be taken into consideration in case studies of social change and concomitant changes in emotionally laden expressive systems.

The rise of mass media and popular culture challenges our understandings of the role of the individual in cultural production and reproduction, at the same time that postcolonial energies are being invested in the empowerment of previously unheard voices. At the ethnographic level, life history (especially in its traditional forms) stands revealed as a powerful genre for communicating personal experience and points of view, as well as for delineating generic cultural configurations. Given the history of biography in the modern era in the West, Western readers might normally expect an individual’s life story to reflect feelings and attitudes of an individual (as defined in our culture) relating the events. Margaret Trawick’s paper points out some limitations in our received notions of autobiography. As she tells us, her informant Cevi’s life history speaks more about other people than about herself. Nevertheless, Trawick argues that we can learn much about Cevi’s own life as an Untouchable Tamil Paraiyar through her relationships to other actors in the narrative. Trawick observes that artistic performance might be understood as an intensified expression of the performer’s experienced life (pp. 224, 242). In Trawick’s case, reality and fiction converge in interesting ways, not unlike the concerns expressed by Ramanujan and Grima in Part I. Items of a performer’s repertoire may also reflect personal experience through the choice of specific items to sing.

By focusing on the artistic composition and sociolinguistic texture of the life history text, Trawick discovers an interesting set of parallels between Cevi’s delivery style and her life. The core around which the narrative revolves is the problem of hopelessness related to Untouchable status. Trawick suggests that in Cevi’s life story, to be in the house means to be stable and secure (p. 237), a theme that both Grima and Gold also uncover in their discussions of departures and separations as undesirable experiences in women’s self-portrayals. While Van Gennep (1960 [1909]) and Turner (1969, 1974a, 1974b) have treated transitory ritual status of separation as conditions defying definition with (at least putatively) uncertain consequences, Cevi’s uncertainty is chronic, her future not just periodically liminal or even liminoid (in Turner’s terminology; cf. Bynum 1984), but incontrovertibly marginal and insecure as she moves about from place to place, trying to secure a place of her own.

Uncertainty takes the form of ambivalence and illusion in the Bengali Baul songs of Lalan Fakir that Carol Salomon examines in her essay. Like qawwālī (cf. Qureshi 1986), the aims of Baul songs are, variously, religious instruction and the inducement of mystical experience (the mix of the two depending on the degree of initiation of the hearer; cf. Wadley’s discussion of representational and relational meanings, this volume). But many of the present hearers of Baul songs, now claimed as a national poetry, appreciate them aesthetically, as clusters of poetic images, without grasping their propositional content to any degree, or subscribing to the particular devotional path which they enigmatically map (Capwell 1986). The pithy song lyrics themselves quite often mock religious authority and learning as illusory. At most, bāul saṅgīt ambivalently presents a path to follow toward enlightenment through the use of paradox. The musical poetry of the Bauls acts as a vehicle for paradoxical and elliptical statements that refer not only to cosmological doctrines but also to practices meant to embody those doctrines, some of which are highly repugnant to the noninitiated appreciators of Baul songs. As in Cevi’s songs of complaint, points of view unacceptable to some powerful sectors of the audience are presented in veiled or enigmatic form (cf. Radner and Lanser 1987).

Baul songs, transmission, and singing practices also aid in maintaining the canonical status of the texts themselves. As Salomon points out, performers of Lalan’s songs strive to adhere as closely as possible to the original texts in order to present Lalan’s message accurately (and paradoxically?) as the tradition allows. The intentional ambiguity of Lalan’s songs stems ultimately from the difficulty of achieving mystical awareness, the Baul path appearing ineffable to its adherents (but all too physical to its detractors). Lalan depicts this ineffability by employing a symbolic medium of word play, presenting paradoxical riddles which nonetheless, in Salomon’s analysis, yield to specific (though often multiple) symbolic interpretation. For the genres, or subgenres (to follow Claus’s lead), of dh dhā and hēyāli, conveniently translated in English as riddle, are more like Zen koāns (Zug 1967), rhetorical questions that do not necessarily require an answer. One of the aims of Lalan’s songs is didactic, it seems: the listener must struggle to work out his or her own answer to the enigmatic proposition without aid from the questioner. As Salomon demonstrates, such answers become possible only with intimate and specific knowledge of doctrines that are themselves paradoxical. Salomon relates the possible dual meanings of the often contrary words and concepts employed to the philosophical ideals which most likely motivated Lalan to use them. She keeps in mind the eclectic origins of these concepts in Hindu, Sufi, and Buddhist thought, a key to their ambiguity and paradox. Lalan’s choice of homely metaphors—images of fishing, farming, and sailing—brings the project of synthesis into the daily, concrete world of his audience without diminishing its complexity. The resulting literature brings together and reinterprets different levels of tradition so that its appeal is broad and sustained, among people of different religious beliefs, over a hundred years of dramatic social change.

Wilma Heston’s chapter, Footpath Poets of Peshawar, provides another case study regarding the transmission of verse. As she points out, studies of such literature to date have concentrated on thematic analysis rather than on creation, transmission, production, and distribution (and by inference, audience reception) of South Asian traditions (pp. 305–6). Heston focuses on the historically identified Bazaar of the Storytellers in Peshawar as the still-current center of Paxto language popular literature publishing. From it she traces patterns of marketing and secondary centers of production of cassette and chapbook romances. Heston found a continuous interaction between oral and written song and print in Peshawar (cf. also Mills, this volume). Additionally, some forms of Paxto poetry sold on the footpaths are not indebted to classical Persian models, whereas others, such as cārbaytī, differ substantially from Persian prototypes. The dynamics of Paxto poetic genres disseminated in print and sound recording cannot be understood as simply the peripheral derivatives of a classical tradition.

As Heston observes, music is as integral to the performance of qiṣṣa narratives as it is to ḍholā, qawwālī, and ghazal, but the specifics of that musical dimension remain to be explored. The data that Heston provides offer insights into the cottage industry of cassette production and the changing nature of the authorial claims of poets and the charisma of performers. Heston observes that, prior to the cassette boom, transmission was predominantly oral in an overwhelmingly nonliterate community. Now, as a result of the onslaught of cassettes, we are confronted with a blurred line between personal/direct and impersonal/mass media transmission. On the basis of interviews with poets recorded in recent years, we know that certain singers and poets learned their craft from records, cassettes, and films, or were at least motivated by these models. Such singer-poets themselves may later become researchers, valuing the felt historicity of their subject matter enough to seek out the location where a story is said to have taken place in order to get the facts straight from local (oral) authorities.

The advent of the cassette, as Heston and Manuel (in the next section) show, has had a powerful impact not only on the dissemination of sung material but also on the styles of individual performers. Cassette marketing and packaging can be seen as a continuation of the chapbook tradition in one sense, since packaging has a problematical relationship to contents. Apart from entertainment genres, Roy Mottahedeh (1985) has shown how cassettes can serve as a powerful force in mobilizing people during times of crisis in another Islamic context; David Edwards (1987a, b) traces similar uses of cassettes in the Afghan revolution. It seems likely that mass media, especially cassettes, will emerge elsewhere in South Asia as media for engaging individuals in political discourse; their cheapness of production and ease of amateur duplication provide for fluid communication from grassroots to mass-audience arenas and back.

Tradition

Tradition is a term which has now become fashionable to deconstruct. The Hobsbawm and Ranger volume The Invention of Tradition (1983) is perhaps the strongest push in this direction. But tradition has been generally studied and problematized elsewhere (Shils 1981; Ben-Amos 1984), while the excesses of the Hobsbawm and Ranger argument have recently been tempered by Abrahams (1986). The critique of tradition as a fixed and natural bedrock or backdrop against which change unfolds has rightly been criticized, along with such related concepts as authenticity (cf. Adorno 1964; Appadurai, this volume; Handler and Saxton 1988). Yet societies do manifest certain configurations because they have come to be shaped in certain ways, not just by values and beliefs but by styles and genre conventions. The chapters in Part III all concern the landscape against which the problem of tradition, especially in a complex civilization, must be understood. This landscape consists of widespread and more local forms, the longue durée and the brief performance, the certainties of histories and the illusions of narrative. The chapters by Manuel, Brenneis, Blackburn, Hiltebeitel, and Narayana Rao and Shulman all concern tradition, loosely imagined, but in very diferent ways.

Peter Manuel’s research addresses quite specifically the relationship between changing social structure and changes in musical genres, in this case, the Urdu ghazal. Manuel argues that, along with the decline of Indian feudal society and its patronage system and the emergence of capitalism, the advent of industrial technology, especially mass media (radio and recordings), has affected virtually every aspect of the development of urban Indian music. He takes ghazal as a special case for historical examination, because it is as popular now as it was in the nineteenth century. The transition from concert to cassette, from salon to concert hall, demonstrates the plasticity of the ghazal, its ability to expand and adapt over time to meet the aesthetic demands of the growing urban audience. One reason for the genre’s adaptability might be the fact that a canonical aesthetic code for its performance never developed; yet the audience has always had expectations which were utilized in the past, as in the present, to evaluate performances.

As audience aesthetics change, performers must meet new demands or fade from popularity. At the same time, new technologies (such as amplification) facilitate new styles of performance (reflective, crooning intimacy at 95 decibels). The ghazal succeeded in bridging the gap between the tastes of the educated urban elite and those of the mostly illiterate working class. The Urdu ghazal, like the Paxto and Urdu narrative romances called qiṣṣa (Heston, this volume; Pritchett 1985), may owe part of its cachet to its Perso-Arabic roots. Drawing on literary, religious, and oral sources, the genres were able to generate an appeal cutting across social divisions and historical periods.

Manuel shows how the ghazal diversified into a continuum of styles after the initial impact of commercial gramophone recordings, but then became more generic as producers began to grasp its broad-based appeal. Yet while the ghazal may have become more homogeneous as it became mass-produced in films and recordings, there was a concomitant development of levels of complexity. Especially as cassettes, cheap to produce and easier to duplicate and listen to in a variety of settings, began to take over the music market from gramophone recordings, greater diversification appeared in sales and production because cottage cassette industries could address diverse needs of subgroups of consumers. Compared with the qiṣṣa romance narrative, which also has a double life in cassette recordings and popular print (Heston, this volume), the ghazal is a compact form with an emphasis on oral performance and highly personal emotive impact; yet the ghazal itself enters the realm of the fantastic in its important role in Hindi film. The filmī ghazal, in its elaborately visual frame, invites temporary entrance into a world that is enchanted and posed as unique and alien to the everyday lives and commonsense experiences familiar to its mass audience. But film, expensively mass-produced, is a primary factor in the homogenization of modern ghazal.

Donald Brenneis’s essay considers diachronicity and spatial movement in an analysis of cultural diversity and the stories a community tells itself. With regard to east Indians in Fiji, he asks, how does knowledge get transmitted in a community far removed from its self-perceived origins? Does tradition in such a community disintegrate or innovate? Brenneis’s model emphasizes not cultural loss of tradition, as many of Fiji’s indigenous east Indian population would express it, but an exploration of the discourse which leads to conceptualizing culture. Brenneis examines innovation rather than simple continuity in order to highlight the active role people play in the social construction of tradition (cf. Handler and Linnekin 1984). Brenneis reiterates that in performance, it is not just the performers who are actively engaged as interpreters, critics, and respondents, but the audience as well. All parties contribute to the shaping of successful performance events.

Brenneis describes the total configuration of Fiji Indian aesthetics as a complex of factors in three dimensions: performance, emotion, and experience, linked by the indigenous concept of bhāv, which has an Indian philosophical precedent and is itself a conjunction of feeling and display (Gerow 1977). In exploring the concept of bhāv and the performance forms known as kavvālī and gālī in Fiji, Brenneis reveals that even though Fiji Indians place great emphasis on the canonical status of printed texts used in performance and the historically Indian origin of expressive modes, their understandings of such texts and performances and their interpretive goals and performance settings, differ markedly from the corresponding Indo-Pakistani understandings of the parent institutions and concepts, not to mention the expectations for emotional and intellectual engagement with them. Differences in performance context, in particular, are critical to understanding the nexus of text, performer, and audience.

Stuart Blackburn, drawing on one of the most variegated and pervasive of Hindu India’s religious storytelling traditions, the Rāmāyaṇa, undertakes to understand how classical religious tenets are incorporated into the quite different world view of a local or folk tradition. His thesis is that the classical devotional theology of perfection gives way to a principle of balance, which results in the construction of powerful ironies over and around the philosophical structure of the classical source text, Kampaṉ’s Tamil Rāmāyaṇa. The local interpretation of rāmāvatār (the Rāma incarnation) does not merge the classical ideal of perfection with the folk conception of balance, but accentuates their difference. This equilibrium, and its interruptions, are expressed both by subtle adjustments in the narrative plot and by the visual array of puppets on the performance stage. According to Blackburn, the classical concept of the avatār as presented by Kampan violates the basic principles of the local world view. The reworking of the classical conception of the avatār into a balanced world view results in a creative tension between bhakti and folk streams of Indian culture. Such creative tension amounts to what Jonathan Z. Smith (1982) has termed situational incongruity in religion, a context in which a preexisting set of beliefs no longer makes sense. When this happens, the incongruity in question must be creatively altered to flourish and expand. Blackburn presents an elegantly expanded example of the alternation of folk and classical value systems, a topic previously invoked by Ramanujan (Section I). Blackburn’s example, like Ramanujan’s discussion here and elsewhere (1986), points out the central importance of shifts in the portrayal of gender relations and roles in the articulation of folk versus classical cosmological views.

Alf Hiltebeitel likewise draws on one of Hindu India’s most pervasive themes, the veneration of Draupadī, to examine the folk-classical relationship in India with particular reference to her cult in Tamilnadu. Ultimately he raises the issue of the need for a pan-Indian perspective (an admittedly huge undertaking) for the fullest understanding of the genesis and integrity of local forms. While Hiltebeitel feels that certain themes, such as Draupadī’s hair and sarees, link regional epics, he concludes that if there is a "folk Mahābhārata," it cannot be monolithic because it has no prototype. Hiltebeitel thus asks how the classical Mahābhārata is transmitted and performed, and how themes diffuse from the pan-Indian tradition into the vernaculars and vice versa (cf. Blackburn and Ramanujan 1986, Introduction; Ramanujan 1986).

Hiltebeitel concurs with Blackburn and Ramanujan in recognizing the potential in local folk traditions for autonomous and even opposing interpretations of the vision of a parallel classical text. The akam/puṟam distinction explored by Ramanujan (1986) serves Hiltebeitel in his analysis of local Mahābhārata performances as fittingly located at the puṟam (public spectacle) end of the private/public schema: if read in the home, the Mahābhārata is said to cause domestic conflict, whereas the Rāmāyaṇa conduces to family harmony. (Claus’s argument might, however, place some limits on the applicability of Ramanujan’s schema; see Claus, this volume.) Hiltebeitel, like Claus and Wadley, presents material that confounds any mechanical approach to folklore genres. As he shows, epics are intertextual, especially conducive to incorporating such other genres as riddles, tales, proverbs, and songs (cf. also Korom 1989b). The study of multiple lines of transmission must therefore be multigeneric, as Hiltebeitel suggests. Furthermore, multigeneric performance formally accommodates within itself a diversity, and perhaps contestation, among the voices used in what Ramanujan calls the construction of consciousness. The exploration of the polysemy of epic performances will be served by systematic attention to their complexities (cf. Lutgendorf 1986; Wadley, this volume).

In their contribution, Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman also address the folk-classical relationship, in the most literary-historical offering in the volume. They find a strong, albeit ambivalent, relationship between south Indian folk stories and the courtly literature of the Nāyaka period in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Tamilnadu. They suggest that a folk counter-system with its own autonomous logic comments upon the courtly literature and functions not simply as a derivative foil to the classic tradition, or in dismissive satirical fashion, but as parody, which simultaneously sustains and critiques courtly values. Historically, the authors see the parodic commentary as part of a cultural trend associated with a bundle of other social changes occurring during the Nāyaka period. Nāyaka-period folk literature, suggest Narayana Rao and Shulman, presents a well-known theme in Indian tales, namely, the unforetellable future of kingship through role reversal, and also a counter-vision of power informed by ambivalence and sustained by its own illusions, whereas the Nāyaka literature demonstrates a gradual disintegration of illusion, which only briefly becomes reality to make a point. Illusion in Nāyaka literature recreates itself as only temporarily real, articulated through male manipulations of caste differences in the illustrative texts given, within which gender relations are a basic but secondary resource. The Nāyaka farce takes illusion apart and puts it back together again.

*   *   *

In the end, these essays recommend that tradition is an ever-receding point of social reference. Tradition is about pastness (Halbwachs 1980 [1950]) and not just about the past. It is not a positive discourse but a reflective and reflexive one. In it, and through it, societies explore the limits of their histories, and replay the points of tension in these histories. It is a metadiscourse, which allows the past to cease to be a scarce resource (Appadurai 1981) and allows it to become, to borrow an adjective from ecologists, a renewable resource. Tradition is another zone of contestation, though not about selves (as with gender) or about forms (as with genre), but about temporal boundaries themselves.

The problem of pastness itself changes as the modes of cultural reproduction change. As traditions become mass-produced, as cultural artifacts become commodified, as intimate performances become available to large audiences, the pastness of the present becomes itself a plastic relationship, bendable by the forces of singularization (Kopytoff 1986) and commodification. The deep, creative force that now drives the reproduction of cultural forms in South Asia, and elsewhere, is the friction between singularization and commodification, as the culture industries seek to commodify and domesticate local voices, and local voices seek to incorporate the very commodified forms they are forced to consume. This global cannibalization of sameness and difference constitutes a complex dynamic which cannot fully be explored here (but see Appadurai 1990). What is worth noting is that tradition, heritage, and authenticity are all now terms proper to a landscape of heteroglossia and one of intense contestation. Such controversy in this volume, is seen in discussions of the ontological construction of the self, of genre fluidity, and of the internal politics of pastness.

This volume marks several developments: a further step in the new-found vigor of South Asian folkloristics; an invitation to savor more of the multiplicities of South Asia’s folk voices; and a recognition that these readerly pleasures must co-exist with the fact that such folkloric production is inevitably political. This politics is not the politics of blood and glory, but it is no less political for being about selves, about narrative strategies, and about the fictional realities and the realities engendered by fiction. For the study of South Asia, this is an important step, because earlier conventions of scholarship had striven to keep the heat of politics out of the cool world of Indic texts and the gentle warmth of folk expressions. This comforting compact between Indology, folklore, and anthropology has come unglued as fieldworkers begin to see the fissures and fractures that characterize the links of text to social life, past to present, gender to genre.

We began this introduction with a reference to the controversy over The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie. We then conducted the reader through some of the terrain covered by this volume. The voices and expressions of many South Asian traditions are evoked here, as are the voices and styles of analysts who represent a wide variety of disciplines and interpretive stances. No introduction ought to simplify such a heteroglossic collection and to draw from it any simple moral or model. Yet there is a lesson in such a volume, a lesson that is elementary and valuable in a world where literature has become an occasion for xenophobia and terror on a worldwide scale. The traditions that have developed outside the Euro-American aesthetic orbit are extraordinarily diverse and complex, and they do not succumb easily to preconceived ideas of genre, readership, or style. From the materials in this volume, we are reminded that resistance can be silent or subtextual; that sorrow can be the occasion for entertainment; that some stories cannot exist if their tellers have not lived certain kinds of lives; that some tales and songs can subvert the common sense of their audiences and their performers; that history and illusion can be linked in many ironic ways; that mechanical reproduction changes but does not erase the politics of voice and genre; that life stories need not be about the self. These may not all be startling observations, and this volume contains many others. But they are a reminder that long-standing traditions of singing and storytelling outside the West constitute another world of textuality, in which the complicities of text, performer, occasion, and audience can be as subtle as they are diverse, and can be deeply different from our own. In the afterword, Arjun Appadurai reflects on where such considerations might lead, in future studies of folk expression in South Asia.

Arjun Appadurai

Frank J. Korom

Margaret A. Mills

REFERENCES