Two
The Ideology of Love in a Tamil Family

Margaret Trawick

Preliminary Thoughts

On the surface is consciousness. Underneath is the unconscious, the deep wellspring, the knower who is hard to know, who can never know himself. This is the way we think of it. The surface, having been crafted by the knower, is a face, a mask, an artifice, an obstacle, a lie. We have to get behind it, underneath it, to understand what is really going on. Because what is interesting is just what is hidden. If the surface interests us, it does so only because of its failures, because of the artfulness of its deception, which reveals the hand of the artist.

As anthropologists we are therefore simultaneously fascinated by and suspicious of everything the native tells us. Everything is significant, everything is revealing, everything is a lie. Our job is to lay bare the structure of the lies. In ethnology we seek to reveal to the world the nakedness of our informant, in its dazzling beauty, or in its ugliness, or in both. Somehow we convince ourselves, often enough, anyway, that this act of violence is an act of respect that benefits the native. At least we have shown the world that his nakedness is comparable to ours. At least we have shown the world what he really is, divested the world of its myths about him, even as we divest him of his own. But of course, we keep our own vestments on.

Let us try another metaphor. Let us not think of the person, the native, as a sphere, with a surface to be stripped off or gotten through to the real stuff, the contents. Let us think of consciousness, or better yet, culture (how do we distinguish between these two ethereal constructions of consciousness, or culture?) as an activity. Culture/consciousness as an activity not done by one person but done among people, leaving its traces in memory (which we shall admit is a mystery), which will be part of the matrix for the next cultural act,

the next interaction. Let us say that culture is in the interaction. After all, where else would it be?

Then, when we view things this way, we find that there is no surface or depth. Instead there is only the turbulence of confrontation, with ourselves as part of it, and this turbulence is the most interesting, because the most active, thing. It is where the rocks get carved. We can study the rocks later. Now let us consider the turbulence in which we together with others are swept up.

In all this churning, surface and depth are commingled. Now our aim is not to get to the bottom of things, but to stay afloat. Now what is most important is not what we or others are, but what happens between us—what others present to us, and how we receive it, and what we present, and how that is received by them, and what comes out of it all, continuously, what is being formed, the eddies, the patterns of waves.^[1]

Aims

In this chapter I wish to describe some ways in which members of one South Indian Tamil family attempted to demonstrate to me some of the principles that they regarded as important in the living of their day-to-day lives. I say "attempted to demonstrate" in order to stress the intentionality of their performances before me. One of the various things that they did, and that I believe they intended to do, as they ate their meals, swept their floors, recited their prayers, conversed with each other in my presence and with me directly was to convey to me certain information about themselves, about their relationship with me, and about their relationships with others.^[2] Sometimes these intentions were conveyed to me openly and explicitly, in so many words. Definitions of terms for my sake—explanations of and comments upon behavior, one's own and others', to me as an ignorant stranger wanting to know—were common. More often, the intentions behind actions were conveyed to me much more subtly.

I use the term "ideology" here to mean the articulable and at least sometimes articulated ideas people have about why they do what they do to each other—in this case, why they express or act out particular feelings or relationships in particular ways, or conversely, what the feeling behind a particular act is supposed to be. Ideology, then, is conscious formulation of motives and intentions. It is not "underlying" but in a sense "overlaid." This does not necessarily mean, however, that it is false.^[3]

My aim in living with this family had been to try to understand what love (as something that they thought about, or perhaps did not think about, but had "in their minds" in some way) was to them. They had the word anpu, which seemed to mean something very like English "love," and various related words, pacam ("attachment"), acai ("desire"), pattu^[*] ("devotion").

They had been exposed to many teachings expounding as well as extolling love, and they were surrounded, filled, and made into human beings by a culture that said in a thousand ways that love was the highest good.^[4] But how was I to grasp what love (as I called it, or anpu as they called it) meant to them, and how was I to put it down on paper in a believable way? Ill offer a woman ten rupees for an interview and she says to me, "Money is not important, people are important," to me that statement conveys more than a message about the relative value, in objective terms, of people and money.^[5] It is also a statement conveying information about the speaker: that she values people over money, and therefore (perhaps) she is a loving person. But how do I know that the intention to convey the latter message was there "in her mind"? How do I prove it?

Ultimately, I cannot, for no proof of another's intentions is possible. I can only assert that my interpretation of this woman's statement was one that would be accepted as a valid possibility by some Tamil speakers because those other speakers had explicitly linked such statements with feelings of love. It is important to recognize, however, that the indirectness of this woman's attribution of lovingness to herself, the nonexplicitness of it, was essential to conveying the message. In Tamil Nadu you cannot directly say, with any hope of credibility, "I am a loving person," for the loving are also humble. All you can do is show it.

In this essay, I have deliberately avoided trying to sort out my informants' "sincere" expressions of feelings and intentions from their "insincere" ones. The topic of love/anpu is too delicate, complex, and riven with illusions for me to presume an objective analysis of it. But the reader should beware, for this is also not a straight description of Tamil feelings as Tamils enact and describe them among themselves. I brought with me to Tamil Nadu my own, deeply ingrained, culturally developed feelings about what love is and should be. These feelings ran headlong into the enactments of anpu that my Tamil friends presented to me. My idea of love and their idea of anpu took deceptively similar forms. My Tamil friends and I were attracted to each other partly for that reason. I thought that they loved me; they thought that I felt anpu toward them. But just at those times when I thought that there was some fundamental something that all human beings shared and that I had found that something at last in Tamil Nadu, suddenly some small act would cast a deep shadow between us again, and once again they were strangers, whom I feared and mistrusted. I found myself thinking, time after time, "But this isn't love." Now, after years, I can answer myself with detached amusement, "Of course it isn't love, it's anpu." Somehow, back then, this relativistic answer never occurred to me.

This essay is not a description of anpu as seen "from the native's point of view." Nor is it a description of love as expressed in the Tamil context. It is an account of anpu as seen through the eyes of someone conditioned to look

for love. It is shot through with my values, biases, mistaken impressions. But it is not a 100 percent American product, either. I was strongly attached to this Tamil family; I cared what they thought about me; they changed me; now they are a little bit mixed in me. To whatever extent I have incorporated them into myself, this essay speaks their feelings.

About the Family and Others

In 1975-1976, when I was in Madras doing my dissertation research, I became dose friends with a Tamil scholar who made his living by lecturing to religious gatherings about Shaiva literature. In this chapter he is called Ayya.

There was one long poem Ayya loved, that he often urged me to read. It was a devotional poem to Shiva, allegorically framed as a love story. I decided finally to study it with his help, and to do this in the context of a general study of forms of ambiguity in spoken and written Tamil. In 1980 I returned to Tamil Nadu for that purpose. This time I lived not in Madras but in Ayya's village, the better to receive daily lessons from him. At first I stayed in a separate house, but members of Ayya's family cooked for me and looked after my five-year-old son and in other ways met all my needs. Ostensibly I was there to study the poem, but my attention was quickly drawn to Ayya's family. They were relatively relaxed in my presence, and their household was the easiest context for me to observe ordinary conversation on a day-to-day basis. As I watched them and became personally involved with them, unconsciously (as it seems to me now) the focus of my attention shifted. I came to see that Ayya's exegesis of the love poem was hooked into the everyday affairs of this family; his life in the family gave the poem its meaning for him. I also saw that for the members of this household, and especially for Ayya and Ayya's sister-in-law who formed its emotional center, anpu was a ruling principle. Many of their acts were explained by them, or could be understood by me, only in terms of this principle. And as I was trying to understand the uses of ambiguity in the poem and in the household, it struck me more and more that the most ambiguous thing of all was this anpu.

The members of this household were not Ayya's natal family. He had joined them when he married one of their members. Because he had run away in his childhood, he had no other home. The head of the family was a man whom Ayya called Annan^[*] (older brother). His wife was addressed by everyone as Anni^[*] (older brother's wife). Anni's father's sister, who was also Annan's mother, remained in the household but was old and crippled and no longer had any real power there. Anni's younger sister, Padmini, was Ayya's wife. Mohana, the cross-cousin of Anni and Padmini, also spent much time in this household; she was married to one of their brothers, who was rarely

there. Mohana and Padmini were very dose. Anni had an eighteen-year-old daughter, an eight-year-old daughter, and a six-year-old son. Padmini had an eight-year-old daughter, a six-year-old daughter, and a two-year-old-son. Mohana had a two-year-old son.

Although they were landlords, this family was poor, having barely enough money to keep their children nourished. I bought them a cow and helped them build a rice mill, and perhaps it was for the sake of money that they tolerated me as they did, though they themselves would deny this vehemently. As poverty-stricken landlords, they were not at all uncommon. The cost of rice was fixed, laborers demanded higher wages, crops often failed, and they faced litigation on all sides. Many middle-class families were better off than this one; many more were worse off. There were tensions within this family, as there are in virtually any large family.^[6] Disputes sometimes occurred over serious economic questions, but I never observed any quarrels over allocation of resources within the household, and I am inclined to think, as Anni did, that friction among people living together is inevitable.

How representative of Tamil families in general was Ayya's family? This question haunted me. I could see that in the view of Tamils themselves, there was nothing especially surprising about this family's behavior, certainly nothing pathological. They were actively involved in a wide social network, and they had many friends from the city and from villages who came into the house and participated in household affairs. None of the kinds of behavior I describe here were kept hidden from view. All of them, including the quarrels, were accepted as natural by people who dropped in. Still, I myself wondered, and many colleagues back home asked, whether Ayya and his family were not more idiosyncratic than most, as many things they did contradicted what earlier ethnographic reports from South India had led me, for one, to expect.

For this reason, in 1984 I went back to Tamil Nadu to observe other families as I had observed Ayya's. I worked this time in a village near Madurai, several hundred miles from where Ayya's family lived. But in this village I was not able to establish with anyone the degree of intimacy I had achieved with Ayya's family. So I contented myself with interviewing a relatively large number of people in the village and in the city for relatively brief periods (about one hour per person) on the topic of family relations. The interviews were open-ended. The content of these interviews supplements at some points in this essay what I learned from Ayya's family. Of the 150 interviewees, 100 were from the one village; the rest were from the cities of Madras and Madurai. The preponderance of interviewees were from the Paraiyar, Kallar, and Kavundar castes. The remainder were from the Acari, Chettiar, Vellalar, Nayakar, and Brahman castes, together with some Muslims. Although there was considerable variation among these different interviewees, for the most part they confirmed what I saw in Ayya's household.

Every basic expression of anpu that I saw in his family I also observed among many other families, and in those other families also these forms of behavior were called anpu. These kinds of behavior included the painful teasing of children, the deliberate sharing of bodily effluvia, the seeking after mixture and confusion, and the hiding of love. The assertions I make here about anpu would be considered by most Tamils to be banalities—too obvious to be worth writing an essay about. Only Americans seem to need convincing.

Characteristics of Anpu

Containment (adakkam^[*])

Discovering the meaning of love to Ayya's family was rendered difficult by their strongly held tenet that love was by nature and by right hidden. Ayya had much to say on this, as on many other topics. He was my richest source of Tamil understandings, and I was often tempted to let him do all my cultural analysis for me. This temptation was curbed by my ingrained refusal to let anybody tell me what to think. As regards feelings, verbalizations of them all flowed so easily from Ayya that I have had to clap my hand over his enchanting mouth at many points in this chapter in order to give others a chance to speak. However, I have included observations of his which were particularly revealing of his role in the family or which were strongly borne out by actions and statements of other family members. Of the hiddenness of love, he said, "Anpu adanki^[*] peruki ninrum^[*]" [sic], which could be translated "Love grows in hiding"; adanku^[*] means "be contained."

A mother's love for her child, tay pacam, the strongest of all loves and the most highly valued, had to be kept contained and hidden. Anni said that a mother should never gaze lovingly into her child's face, especially while the child was sleeping, because the loving gaze itself could harm the child. She told me this when she caught me gazing at my own sleeping child's face in just this dangerous way. When I told her it was an America custom to let people lead their own lives, she said simply, "Tappu" (That is a mistake). After some time I learned that if you cared about people, you would interfere.

A mother would avoid looking with love at her sleeping child because her look could produce kan^[*] tirusdi^[*], "the evil eye," although for Anni it was not an evil force so much as a merely harmful one. Anyone could gaze at anything with appreciation and without the slightest malice, and harm could come to that thing. But for a mother to gaze with love at her own child was the most dangerous gaze of all. "Tay kanne^[*] pullatatu" (The mother's gaze is the worst), said Anni and other mothers to me. Many women, like Anni, would show affection for others' children through affectionate words and looks, but they avoided such shows of love for their own children, especially in public. It was

not the existence of mother love but its concentration displayed through the eyes that was dangerous.^[7]

Mother love had to be contained, not only in the sense of being hidden but also in the sense of being kept within limits. Thus, almost all the many women with whom I spoke on this topic said that mother's milk should not be given to a child for more than ten months, just as a child should not stay in the womb for more than ten months.^[8] Mother's milk was a special substance because it was mixed with the feelings of the mother and transmitted them to the child. In particular, mother's milk contained the mother's love. After a child passed the age of ten months, mother's milk would become very sweet (inippu) to him, and he would be all the more difficult to wean. If he kept on nursing, women told me, he would get "too much love." Then he would become fat and proud (timir) and beat on his own mother. Thus, letting love overflow its bounds could be harmful not only to the recipient but to the giver as well.

Other kinds of love had to be concealed in other ways. There was, for instance, the convention of mutual avoidance in public between spouses, a convention that Anni and Annan scrupulously honored, rarely even looking at or talking with each other, while Padmini and Ayya exhibited before others a relationship of total mutual abrasion.

It was not that sexual display itself was considered dangerous, or the movie theatres would have been empty. Nor were physical expressions of love forbidden. In everyday life, adult males and females who were not spouses could show loving affection for one another with surprising freedom. But spouses, who were supposed to love each other most and to focus their sexual feelings entirely upon each other, were expected to keep both feelings hidden.

No one ever said that the sentiments of sexual love should not exist. Sexual pleasure (inpam, sweetness) was not an evil force. It was one of the four goals of life; any normal human being desired it. Sexual pleasure was supposed to be attained only through marriage. When people talked about "being like husband and wife" (purucan pondaddiyaka^[*] irukka), it meant specifically going to bed together. But any hint of the existence of such a relationship in public communications between husband and wife, or by one about the other, was avoided.

The custom of a woman avoiding mention of her husband's name was only part of a much larger set of conventions for hiding love. Not only was the personal name of the husband never used, but if possible he was never referred to at all. Only a very Westernized woman would refer to her husband as "my husband" (en kanavar^[*], en purucan). If a woman had to refer to her husband, she would do so through a relationship he had with some other person, as "the father of so-and-so" or "the teacher of so-and-so." Some women

would whisper and point when they wished to make reference to their husband. Others would refer to their husband by his caste name, as "my Reddiar." I asked Anni the reason for this convention, and she gave her usual enigmatic answer to questions of this sort: "habit" (parakkam^[*]). Other women cited a belief that if a woman uttered her husband's name, harm would befall him. One function of name avoidance, then, was to wrap the husband in a protective silence, whose nature and intent were nevertheless known to all.^[9]

The husband was not the only one to whom reference was avoided. Some men, avoiding reference to their wife's name, referred to her simply as aval^[*] (she). Ayya referred to his younger sister, with whom he had been especially dose in childhood, as "the teacher in the town of x," where she lived, and it took me some time to realize that he was speaking about his own sister. Sometimes long-term friends claimed not even to know each other's names.

The custom of avoiding direct reference to the loved one was fuzzy around the edges. Only in the case of reference to the husband was this custom more or less strictly adhered to by more or less all women. In other cases, the application of this custom appeared to be a matter of the speaker's own will. It was a tool, not a ritual.

Another way of hiding love was to openly downgrade the loved one. Thus, if a woman bore a series of children who died very young, when another child was born it would be given an ugly name such as Baldy, or Nosey, or Beggar's Bead, to protect it. A beautiful child would have its cheek smudged with ink. If a child was highly valued, to display directly one's high valuation of it brought it danger, and so one had to make a pretense, which everyone knew to be pretense, of not caring for it at all.^[10] The same attitude could also receive less conventional forms of expression. So a mother who had borne and lost seven children (by her own reckoning) dandled the eighth, whom she had adopted by the roadside, playfully asking it, "Arc you going to die? Are you going to die?" (cettuppoviya), tempting fate as though the child's life was of little concern to her.

It is possible that the custom among Paraiyar and other, mainly low-caste, women of singing and speaking of their husbands in the most critical, derogatory terms was motivated, at least for some women, by the desire to protect the mates to whom they were in reality strongly emotionally bonded or even, perhaps, by a desire to show that they loved their husbands and were protecting them (Egnor 1986). A similar motivation may have existed among the many men who made a habit of speaking harshly to their wives before others. "Don't reveal your treasure," said the poetess Auvaiyar. So a rich man, to protect his wealth, might dress in rags. If one regarded one's spouse as a treasure, one might best display one's regard by hiding it, as one kept a treasured wife confined. Thus, although the exterior of the relationship among spouses was almost universally mute, where not harsh, the interior of this relationship sometimes had an exactly opposite quality.

Gradual Habituation (parakkam^[*])

Love was often described as a force that was tender, gentle, and slow. A loving heart was a soft heart (menmaiyana manacu). A heart that was not moved by the feelings of others was like a stone ("Make your heart like a stone," a village man told me, when a drunkard came asking me for money).

Food metaphors for the tenderness of love were many. Of all the different kinds of food, sweet ripe fruit (param^[*]), whose coming into existence was a gentle and gradual process, was probably most symbolic of love. A mango (mamparam^[*]) was like a breast. You kneaded it between the palms of your hands until the pulp was a creamy juice, then you cut a small hole at the tip and sucked out the juice. In our village, it was a sin to cut down a fruit-bearing mango tree, just as it was a sin to kill a pregnant cow. I cannot help but think it significant that the mango tree was called ma.

Love, or attachment, or a sense of oneness with a person or thing or activity grew slowly, by habituation (parakkam). Unlike the term anpu, the term parakkam was used frequently in our household; it was an important and complex part of people's thinking and day-to-day theorizing about human behavior. Any addictive habit, such as coffee drinking or cigarette smoking, was a parakkam. Ayya was fond of saying that he had "no habits of any kind" (enta vitamana parakkame^[*] illai), a statement meaning that he had no physical addictions; but this statement also expressed for himself and for others in the family what they saw as a more general aspect of his personality, his lack of attachment (pacam) to any human being. He stood apart (otunki^[*] nitkiren^[*]) he said, and he self-deprecatingly claimed that he had no love (anpu) in his heart either.

According to popular theory, a person could become habituated to virtually any state of affairs, and once a situation became parakkam to a person, that person would not only feel comfortable with it but would also seek it out if deprived of it. The idea of parakkam explained and justified the differences between people. There was no point in trying to create a better way of life for others because people liked and wanted whatever it was they were used to having.

Once Anni and I were walking down a road in Madras when we saw a hovel built under a bridge. "Even here people live their lives," she said. "Like us, a man and a woman and children. They have a good life. They don't have to answer to anyone [yarukkum patil colla vendam^[*]]. We who are in the middle, neither rich nor poor, must suffer many burdens. But as for them, if one day they get two rupees, they live on two rupees. If they get one rupee, they live on one rupee. If they get nothing, they go hungry for a day."

"But isn't it hard to go hungry?" I asked.

"It is just parakkam," said Anni. "If I eat at a certain time today, I will want to eat at that same time tomorrow. For them, going hungry is a habit."

Most parakkams were acquired by exposure to and absorption of certain

elements in the environment, but a parakkam was not a superficial overlay upon a personality. It went deep in and at a certain undefined point became that personality. For instance, northern Madras was regarded as a dangerous place because its people were violent. "Why are they that way?" I asked Anni. "Because fighting is a habit they have practiced and practiced and that quality has grown in them" (ate paraki^[*] paraki^[*] anta kunam^[*] valarum^[*]), she answered. Through repeated practice, through parakkam, an action would become a quality (kunam^[*]) of the person.

So deeply embedded in the person was parakkam that it was not lost even at death. Babies brought certain parakkams with them into the world. That a child was born possessing certain knowledge (e.g., how to suckle) and, more importantly, that children of the same womb could have such different parakkams provided strong evidence for the reality of transmigration, of there having been previous lives. If a baby had habits, parakkams, resembling those of a recently deceased kinsperson, then people would surmise that that baby had that kinsperson's soul (uyir). Most babies were not assigned an ancestral identity in this way, and there were no apparent rules regulating this particular kind of rebirth: the soul of a male ancestor could turn up in a female baby, and vice versa, and it could be born to any woman in the kinship group. But this kind of rebirth was observed often enough for people to say that souls liked to be reborn among their previous kin if they had any choice in the matter.

Hence the idea of parakkam was in some ways like the idea of karma (vinai, pavam-punniyam). It was, and was created by, action; it was embedded in the person, and it was hard to get rid of; it was carried from birth to birth and could be passed on from generation to generation. But it differed from the idea of karma in at least one crucial way: without parakkam, love was impossible.

From one point of view, as I have tried to suggest, parakkam was love, or rather, it was the behavioral side of a reality that had also an emotional component, as weeping consists of both sorrow and tears. Parakkam was the reason for the growth of the feeling of love; love was the reason for the continuation of parakkam. To know somebody, to spend time with them, to be familiar or intimate with them, was to have parakkam with them. When you had parakkam with a person, just as when you had parakkam with a substance, that person became part of your system. This was why it was so important to avoid going near bad persons or Harijans, not even to talk to them, at least, not too much or in too friendly a way because they might become parakkam. And then, as one six-year-old child had told me, "you would become like them."

Parakkam implied friendliness, easiness, and grace because an action to which one is habituated can be accomplished smoothly, and people to whom one is habituated are not feared. Many people told me that villages were

easier than cities to live in because in a village people had parakkam with each other. As one agricultural worker put it, "in the villages they mingle lovingly" (anpaka parakuvarkal^[*]).

Cruelty and Harshness (kodumai^[*], kadumai^[*])

Parakkam was gentle and easy because its action was slow. Gradually it built the powerful bonds of love. And love itself, powerful as it was, was gentle and tender. Tender feelings (menmaiyana unarccikal^[*]) flowed (payum) most easily between people. Only feelings of love could melt the heart (manacai urukkum).

But equally as it was tender and slow, love was cruel and forceful. Cruelty was a characteristic of love acted out more often than spoken of. However, some people said outright, "Love is very cruel" (anpu mika kodumaiyanatu^[*]), or "Attachment is very cruel" (pacam mika kodumaiyanatu^[*]). I heard these two statements often enough to suspect that they, too, like the melting heart, were common formulas.

We in the United States consider love to be cruel in the sense that April is the cruelest month. Our highest flights are made in love, and we take our hardest falls there, too. Really, it is the disappointment of love that is cruel, but, because love is almost always disappointed, happy love songs are not the norm. All this is American common sense, I think.

But the cruelty of love had quite a different meaning to my Tamil family. Pacam, the bond of affection, was cruel, like American love, because when the bond was broken, as always it had to be, the newly unbound person suffered pain. When you become habituated to something, it becomes part of you, and, when you lose it, part of yourself is severed. Hence the adage, Peyyinodum^[*] pirital kasdam^[*] (Even from a demon, parting is painful). Pacam was called cruel by a person observing a child weep as her mother went out the door. But anpu, in its meaning of a higher and unselfish form of love, could be cruel in its very enactment, in and of itself.

Part of the reason for love's cruelty was that, because parakkam was hard to overcome, it was sometimes deemed necessary to violently force people to do what was in their own best interests. When times or situations changed, people had to change also. Hence Ayya's sister Porutcelvi^[*], in describing how lovingly he had raised her after their father died, said, "He beat me to make me study" (adittu^[*] padikkavaittarkal^[*]). Their father had not believed in female education, and Porutcelvi had become accustomed to avoiding books. Similarly, Anni, in attesting to the loving nature of an aunt who had helped raise her, said, "She beat me to make me eat" (adittu^[*] cappida^[*] vaittarkal^[*]), after she had become accustomed to denying herself food in another aunt's household. Beating children in the hope of getting them to study better was an everyday occurrence in this household, for small children's parakkam is to play; but as they grow, they have to change, and ripening (paruttal^[*]), as Ayya told me, is a

painful process. Beating children to make them eat did not appear necessary, except when they were sick. When people were ill and their appetites were off, it was especially important to force food down their throats, even if they gagged and vomited it up again. "At least the essence [cattu] of the food will be absorbed," said Anni. Sickness itself could too easily become parakkam.

Acts embodying the cruelty of love could also and simultaneously be acts hiding its tenderness. Thus, physical affection for children was expressed not through caresses but roughly in the form of painful pinches, slaps, and tweaks, which left marks or drew blood. Frightening a beloved child, like deceiving it, was also a favorite pastime. After my young son was stung on the arm by a scorpion, Padmini suggested that we buy a rubber scorpion and put it on his arm, "to see what he would do." Yet my son had been pampered and, for the most part, treated like a little king. In 1982, Mohana bore a second child, who in 1984 when I revisited the home was a rugged, bold, and healthy toddler. But she was for some reason terrified of a toy lion that someone had bought for her. Mohana and Padmini enjoyed showing the toy lion to the little girl and watching her scream. Yet the little girl was a family favorite, not a scapegoat or a runt. Why were the household darlings singled out for such exquisite torments? "It's a kind of love" (oru vakaiyana anpu), said Ayya in response to my puzzlement at such practices.

Among adults, this "kind of love" took the form of heated noisy quarrels, which, however, blew over quickly and often terminated in laughter. "You don't fight with those you don't love," said Ayya, and after some time it dawned upon me that, inasmuch as love was in large part a matter of mutual habituation, or, as we would say, interaction, then perhaps intense love required intense interaction (see also Kakar 1978). The true sign of love's absence might be the absence of any interaction at all.

That my guess was not entirely wrong was suggested by my observation of an argument that occurred between Anni and Ayya while I looked on. A cousin had come to the house to discuss a land dispute with Annan. In Anni's presence, the cousin had said an obscene word, and Anni had turned her back and walked away. After the cousin was gone, Ayya chastised Anni.

He told her, "When I say things that I should not say, you tell me, 'Don't speak that way in this house.' The meaning of those words is, 'This is my house and I make the rules in it,' whether or not that feeling is in your heart. In the same way, when Padmini or Vishvanathan speak wrongly, you say, 'Don't speak like that in front of me.' But today, when a person spoke wrong words on the front porch, you simply left. If you scold the people of the house for speaking wrongly, you should scold outsiders also."

After Ayya's lecture, which was much longer than my paraphrase of it here, Anni left, angry and hurt. Later I asked Anni how she felt about what Ayya had said. She answered, "In this world, money is everything. Those with money feel no need to respect those without it. When someone from

such a world brings ugliness like that inside, you can't chew it, and you can't swallow it [mennavum mudiyatu^[*] murunkavum^[*] mudiyatu^[*]]. You have to just walk away. But within the four walls of the house, we are all one [nalu cuvarile ellarum onru^[*] tan]. If someone does something wrong [tavaru^[*]], is it right or possible to hide it [maraikkalama^[*]]? We have a conscience [manacadci^[*]], and we must speak our minds." Thus to convey honestly one's disapproval of another's actions might be a sign of love for or closeness with that other, even though it could be misread by someone as close as Ayya was to Anni.

However, when mothers made their children cry, not in anger but in playful affection, it seemed to me that some force other than a need for mutual openness was at work. Or perhaps I should say, set of forces because child rearing is one area of life in which cultural, social, psychological, and biological patterns converge and find simultaneous expression in single acts.

We might count among biological forces acting upon the mothers in this family the omnipresent scarcity and hardship of their world. You had to be tough, you had to be able to endure a lot, you had to be able to absorb insults with equanimity, and you had to be able to bear without perturbation the sight of others getting what you knew you deserved, in order to survive with your mind intact in late twentieth-century India. Our family was better off than most, but food was still less than enough to go around. Toys, books, and store-bought clothes were all luxury items. So mothers in our family saw themselves as training their children to be tough and showed themselves in this light. Luxuries and soft treatment should not become parakkam, they said. When a small child learned to deprive itself, to say no (vendam^[*]) to a tempting sweet, this development was reported with glee to others as a significant advance (munnettam^[*]).

Related to scarcity was the necessity of sharing. The joint family was, in part, an adaptation to scarcity. One roof and one hearth were more economical than three roofs and three hearths. If you cooked for ten, as I was told, you would always have enough for eleven. But the great danger to a joint family was that it would fracture along the lines dividing nuclear units—each pair of spouses with their respective children. Love, which naturally (iyatkaiyaka^[*]) was given to one's own, had to be redirected across those lines. The stronger the love, the stronger the force that had to bc exerted against it to drive it outward. Consequently, in our family, mothers deliberately spurned or mistreated their own children, forcing their own and their children's affection outward. A mother might do likewise with a grown daughter, Ayya said, harshly scolding her so that she would desire to marry and so that when she did her heart would go to her husband and she would be happy.

One evening after dinner, Mohana, who was marginal to this family but dependent upon it, swept the two-year-old Sivamani^[*], her only child, onto her lap. Sivamani took her face into his small hands and kissed her on both cheeks and on the chin. I told Mohana that I thought Sivamani was not

looking very healthy. Mohana said that his belly had gotten very big, but his arms and legs were like matchsticks. She was smiling. When the children sat down to eat, Mohana fed all the other children while Sivamani, hungry, whimpered but said nothing. Finally Anuradha served Sivamani. After Sivamani had finished eating, he got up. Padmini affectionately thwacked him on the back. Sivamani lurched forward, before falling backward. Mohana laughed out loud. "He's like a little truck with a heavy load," she said, "a big heavy load up front." She laughed until tears came to her eyes.

Such surprising events were daily affairs in the lives of the children. If a child did something wrong, the child could never know if or when or even upon whom the punishment would fall for the mistake. One person would err, and another would be punished. Or punishment would fall long after a child had made a mistake and thought it forgotten. Or one caretaker would punish and another comfort; always in these cases the punisher was the child's own mother and the comforter somebody else. Or, the same person would punish and comfort, punish and comfort, until the child completely lost its bearings and began to weep. People would often tease small children in this way: they would offer a plaything and then withdraw it, offer and then withdraw, offer and then withdraw. When the child broke down and wept, it would either be cuddled and comforted or else whisked away to enjoy some other amusement.

Somehow, the tears of a child were entertaining; they brought forth laughter or at least smiles from onlookers. Children themselves, finally, learned to laugh when they were scolded, or at least some did. One mother (not of this family) told me that it was wrong to make a child laugh because for every moment of laughter that the child enjoyed now he would have to suffer a moment of tears in the future. As in the case of mother's milk, sweet pleasures had to be limited, balanced by bitterness. If hardship was a habit and had come to seem sweet, so much the better.

Dirtiness (arukku^[*])

Without question, to the members of our family, anpu was a good and powerful force. One who had love was in a very real sense higher (uyarnta) than one who did not. A loving heart was a pure (tuymaiyana) heart. But love was often at odds with the demands of physical cleanliness and purity (cuttam). It was not that love was intrinsically impure (acuttam) but rather that, in the presence of love, conventional purity did not matter. This was the ideal of the ancient Shaiva devotional texts, the ideal of bhakti, and the members of our family, especially the women, lived it to the fullest.

On a supraworldly level, love as pacam was a bond, and therefore it was an obstacle in the quest for purity, which meant the breaking of all bonds. Love as desire (acai) was even worse because it provoked restlessness (alaiccal),

which prevented the peacefulness necessary to maintaining a pure heart. Ayya had tried to teach me these principles in his lectures.

But in regular life, things were viewed rather differently. A person could be praised for having much affection (rompa pacam). A calf taking its first steps would be described as causing desire (acaiyay irukkum), that is to say, being attractive. The trait in the calf, the feeling, the person who could feel it, none of these was wrong to be as it was. Indeed, something was wrong when the trait and the feeling were not there. The calf who was sick and unable to walk, the man who had no affection for others, these were not as they should be.

The term anpu could mean lustful infatuation (as in the case of the smitten demon, described below); it could mean clinging possessiveness (an old woman who accused her octogenarian husband of having five women a day was said to have had too much anpu). But more often it referred to a certain generosity of spirit as well as of pocketbook. In this sense it was the opposite of acai, though in its broader sense it encompassed the latter meaning also.

What anpu never meant was extrication of oneself from others or from the processes of life. Indeed to our family, and most of all to its linchpin Anni, it meant just the opposite. It seemed that Anni was engaged in a constant campaign to combat the forces of purity and to promote the forces of love. She it was who allowed the lower-caste servants to help in cooking, defying the wishes of her mother-in-law. She herself engaged in food preparation even during her periods, mixing the tub of lemon rice with her bare hands. (Ayya had told me that if a woman during her period touched a growing plant, the plant would wither; if she touched a metal pot with her hand, the metal would corrode). When Anni served me dinner, she would set aside the serving spoon and ladle the rice onto my leaf with her hand. When we went to visit a great Shaiva temple and I carelessly forgot to remove my son's shoes from his feet before we went in, other people pointed and scowled, but Anni said, "It doesn't matter. Let him be."

One day, when I had finished eating and Anni as usual had rushed to pick up my leaf, I said to her, "You must like bodily effluvia (eccil)." Anni answered that picking up another's leaf was an act of merit (punniyam). I said that if that was the case, Modday^[*] the servant must have a lot of merit. Anni said that she did. More often, however, when I asked Anni to tell me why she broke the rules of purity that I had thought all good Hindus followed, she would say. "These are advanced times when all are one, and no one is alone."

Ayya commented that eccil shared in love would not cause disease but would cure it. People who love each other will eat from each other's plates or leaves without thought of sickness. He said that he himself had never loved anyone that much.

In this household, the sharing of eccil conveyed a message of love and was a way of teaching children and onlookers where love was. For instance, when Anuradha was eating rice with buttermilk, after she had eaten for a while and Jnana Oli^[*] (the two-year-old son of Padmini) and Sivamani (the two-year-old son of Mohana) appeared, she called Sivamani to drink some buttermilk: she fed him some rice from her plate with her hand and then had him drink some buttermilk from her plate. Then she had Jnana Oli drink some buttermilk from her plate, then Siva, then Oli, until both said "enough." Then she herself drank down the rest. Anuradha's feeding of the two little boys in this fashion accorded with the many deliberate attempts on the part of older people in the household to twin these children and foster love between them. Annan would often seat the two boys opposite each other on his two knees with a single toy between them, that he tried to make them share. When the boys went out with their mothers, each woman would carry the other's son. The mothers themselves shared the kind of love that they hoped their sons would share. Padmini and Mohana, who had grown up together, went everywhere together, shared everything, and claimed to be "like husband and wife," had a ritual of eating together which expressed their oneness.^[11] Ayya and I were watching this ritual when he made his comment about eccil. After everyone else had eaten, Padmini and Mohana would sit down facing each other, with the pot of remaining food between them. Padmini would mix all the leftovers together in the pot with her hand. Then she would put a ball of food, with her hand, into Mohana's mouth and a ball of food into her own; then Mohana would do the same. They would feed each other in this way, until the food in the pot was gone or until they had had enough; then each woman would lick the other's fingers and her own.

Servitude (adimai^[*])

Adakkam^[*] meant containment. It also meant control, both of oneself and of others. One contained one's love and so controlled oneself. One also contained one's beloved. Containment and protection (patukappu) were both forms of binding (kappu), which devolved from affection (pacam), itself a bond.

The reciprocal of adakkam was adimai^[*], servitude, the state of being controlled by another, of being bound. Becoming adimai, like exercising adakkam, could be a powerful expression of love. But if adakkam entailed pride, adimai entailed humility (panivu^[*]). If adakkam meant having something to hold on to, then adimai meant having nothing of one's own.

Love was complexly implicated in expressions of pride and humility, servitude and domination, possession and renunciation. Through love, all these opposites were overturned. In acts of love, the humble became proud, the servant became master, and the renouncer became possessed. Just as

through love, tenderness might be enacted as cruelty, so through love, hierarchy took ironic forms.

In a typical bhakti-like reversal of the symbols of high and low, Ayya had said in a lecture, "God is like a sandal, he is the foundation of all of us. God is like a broom, he makes the world clean."

But Anni had gone beyond him in the bhakti-inspired elaboration of broom symbolism. Ayya and Padmini had quarreled, and his anger with her had lingered. He had not spoken to her in days. The whole household was gloomy because of this. At the end of the third day, Anni came marching up to him, broom in hand.

"I thought she was going to beat me with it," Ayya said later. But she had not.

"What is this for?" Anni asked.

"For sweeping," said Ayya.

"How often do we use it?" asked Anni.

"Every day," said Ayya.

"What would happen if we didn't?" asked Anni.

"Dirt would pile up in the house," said Ayya.

"All right," said Anni, "Quarrels are like dirt. They come into the house every day. Every day we have to sweep them away and start over."

Anni had used the broom, symbol of humility, as a symbol of patience (porumai^[*], putting up with things, bearing things), purification, harmony in the household, and control.

Like the broom, sandals were a symbol of hierarchy, but their meaning as a symbol was reversible. To wear sandals was a sign of high status, wealth, pride, and, in some circumstances, arrogance. To be without sandals, conversely, was a sign of humility. To be called a sandal, or to be beaten by a sandal, was a grave insult. Harijans could not wear sandals in the high-caste part of the village; people could not wear sandals in temples where the gods lived. People should not wear sandals in a field of growing rice; it would hurt the rice. People could not enter a person's home or go where people were eating with their sandals on; to do so would be to show great contempt for the home or the food. The arrogance of the British was shown by their custom of going everywhere in their shoes.

Aside from such interactional considerations, there were attributional ones; in general people noticed whether you wore footgear and, if so, what kind. Yokels went without sandals; sophisticates did not. Laborers went without sandals; the educated did not. The poor went without sandals; the rich did not. Plastic or rubber sandals were much inferior to leather ones, but to go barefoot on the streets was lowest of all.

Yet wherever they went, Anni, Padmini, and Mohana never wore sandals. I offered to buy them sandals, but they refused. I tried to go barefoot like them. They mocked me and said that my feet would not be able to bear the

hot sand and gravel, and they were right. When Padmini waited for the bus, she sat down on the bare soil, as only village women would do, and she teased me for standing, "as though you're being punished," she said. Such behavior fit into the ethos that Padmini and her sister and cousin had worked out for themselves—they were simple (elimai^[*]) by choice; and they were protectors, not in need of protection. The spurning of sandals proved that they needed nothing between themselves and the sun-baked soil.

Ayya also often went barefoot. His clothing consisted of two rectangular strips of thin white cotton—one a waistcloth that hung to his feet, the other wrapped around his shoulders. His friends and followers all wore shirts, trousers, watches—signs of status, education, and urban ties. But on important religious holidays, their clothing imitated that of their guru, Ayya.

When I lived with them, the family was poor. Extra clothing and jewelry would have burdened the household budget severely. Their quasi-ascetic behavior might be dismissed as an attempt to make a virtue of necessity, a concession to reality. But as it related to the ideology of love, their attitude toward poverty had more aggressive meanings. For by defining themselves as beyond the hierarchy established by wealth, they negated the values legitimizing that hierarchy and so (at least temporarily and to their own satisfaction) turned it on its head.

Family members attributed their poverty to generosity, both public and private. Ayya said, "Our family is the poorest [among the landowning families in the village] because we give the most to others, and all the people know it."

The family as a unit displayed its poverty relative to others in the village as proof of its superior kindness. In the same way, individuals within the family established the superiority of their love through renunciation. Anni said, "Whatever Ayya does not need, we do not need." Because Ayya did not drink coffee, she would not drink coffee. If Ayya refused to go to the cinema, she would also stay home. If Ayya brought her nothing to wear, she would be content with her old clothes. There was something more than submission in her simplicity, for she undertook it in a spirit of hard-nosed boldness. Ayya called it nerve (tairiyam). It took some courage, he said, for Anni to maintain her practice of loving self-denial in public. When the women attended a wedding, barefoot and unadorned, Padmini escaped reproach. She was the wife of a man who had acquired the reputation of a renouncer, and it was only right (in the eyes of many) for her to become a renouncer also. But Anni was subject to scarcely concealed pity and scorn. A woman would glance at her, touch her own ears, nose, wrists, and throat, turn her palms upward, shrug, and project her lower lip, saying in the gesture language used for messages that should not be spoken aloud, "This pitiful woman has no jewelry." But Anni was not perturbed. To her luxuries and sins were both tevai illai, "not needed." Meanwhile, she indulged Ayya with yogurt and ghee, expenses he

had tried to give up but could not resist, although she herself never consumed them. Milk and its products were only for children, she said.

As love turned acts of humility into acts of pride, so it turned acts of servitude into acts of dominance.^[12] This reversal was particularly dramatic given the generally low esteem in which the family held servants as a class. Anni spoke scornfully of what she called the servant mind (velaikkara putti). Ayya and others would also speak of the slave mentality (adimai^[*] manappanmai—atermsaid to have been coined by C. N. Annadurai), of Indians as a cause of their current inability to rejuvenate their nation. Slaves and servants were the lowest of human beings and the most severely shackled.

But a slave of love was a different matter. A slave to the love of God possessed nearly unlimited power. In Tamil Nadu, and all over India, there are countless stories of devotees who, through their love of God, force God to do their bidding. And in human society, a servant of God was a recipient of the highest respect. Members of Shaiva sects in formal discourse would symbolically abase and elevate themselves by calling themselves not "I" (nan) but "this slave" (adiyen^[*]), and the guru who was nearly deified after his death would be called "the servant" (adikal^[*]).

Butthetransformation of servant into master was not dependent upon reference to God or any sentiment of religious devotion. There was in our family a pronounced feeling that servants could easily gain the upper hand, a feeling exacerbated by the current shaky status of the family in village politics and the intercaste conflicts in which they were embroiled. There was an intuitive recognition of Sartre's dictum that in reality the master is the slave. Thus when I said to Anni that I felt she was treating me like a queen, she replied, "A queen has no freedom."

However, the servitude of love, as it was practiced every day by Anni, was more than potentially dominating; it was actually so. Her absolute control as servant was epitomized in her role as family food dispenser. It was she who decided who ate what and when, and, if there were an order to eating, Anni ate last. There would sometimes be quantities of biscuits or fruit in the house, which Anni or one of the men would buy. No one would ever help themselves to them or ask for them; instead Anni would dole them out, one by one. The children of the family were absolutely under her governance with respect not only to what and when and how much they ate but also from whom they were allowed to accept food.

Like Padmini and Mohana, Ayya and Anni had a feeding game that they often played, but theirs was asymmetrical and more complex than that of the two women. Ayya said it was Anni's job (velai) to feed him. He often complained to Anni, to his friends, and to me that she did her job poorly. She would fix him buttermilk, and he would say he was sick and wanted only rice water. So she would fix him rice water, and then he would tell her that she was too lazy to fix decent meals. She would complain about how exacting he

was, but she always strove to cook to his taste. Daily she brought him his meals, and daily he refused them, saying that he didn't like that kind of food, that it was not good for him, that he had a stomach ache, or that he wasn't hungry. Anni would argue and coax for a while, insisting that the food was fine and good for him. If he still refused to eat, then she would force feed him as though he were a recalcitrant child, holding the back of his head with her left hand and bringing a ball of food to his mouth with her right. He would keep his lips tightly shut until the last second, when he would open his mouth and in went the food. Then he would chew and swallow it. In this way, Anni became his mother, servant, and controller.^[13]

Mixture and Confusion (kalattal, mayakkam)

Love, as defined and enacted by our family, brought about reversals of all kinds. The closest bonds were concealed by denial of bonds, tenderness was transformed into cruelty, humility could express pride, and servitude was a means toward mastery. All these reversals had their reasons, some of which were by no means culture-bound. Apparently reasonless reversals also took place. Nowhere could this activity of love be seen more clearly than in people's use of the word mother (amma), the one word in the Tamil language more imbued than any other with sentiments of love.

As a term of address, amma could be applied to the following people:

1. One's own mother, or someone in the category of mother, such as mother's sister. The children of the family called Anni "Annimma^[*]," and Padmini, "Pappimma."

2.Asuperior female. For such a person, amma was a term of respect and distance. Village adults wishing to show respect for me would call me amma, even when they were older than I was.

3. A female of approximately equal status to, or lower status than, the speaker. Often in this case the use of the term amma was part of hostile and sarcastic exchanges, as occurred between sisters-in-law or when a husband scolded his wife.

4. A male of equal or lower status than the speaker. When one addressed such a person as amma, one was showing affection for him. So Annan often called Ayya amma, and Anni addressed the male servants in her mother's home as amma, in both cases with obvious affection. But this usage of amma occurred all over Tamil Nadu. Conversely, father (appa) was used as a term of affection for a female of equal or lower status than the speaker.

When I searched for an explanation for these customs, family members said they did not know. Ayya suggested that the reason was, "Love does not know head or tail." This struck me as plausible, given other aspects of the ideology of love in Tamil culture that I had learned. To show affection for

someone, you demonstrated in a conventionalized way that you had forgotten what category they belonged to.

Love, then, mixed you up (mayakkum). A person who fell, as we would say, head-over-heels in love with another, was suffering, as it would be said in Tamil, from mayakkam, dizziness, confusion, intoxication, delusion. The same word was used to describe all these states. In all of them, one lost one's ability either to think clearly or even to think at all. Then one could not be blamed for acting strangely. And one could easily be misused by others. The intoxication of love was notoriously dangerous for just this reason. A servant in a Brahman household jokingly said that a Brahman girl learns to sing so that, when a potential suitor comes to visit and hears her voice in the other room, "he will become confused" (mayankuvan^[*]) and marry her.

Love, through mayakkam, could make a person see exactly the opposite of what was there. The story was told in our household of a Shaiva guru to whom an admirer, out of great love, offered a piece of raw meat. The guru saw only the love and ate the meat as though it were a ripe piece of fruit, much to his followers' disgust. In a play shown in our village, the goddess Adiparasakti was created to destroy a demon. This goddess was huge and green; she bit her bright red tongue angrily and stomped about the stage wielding a sharp trident. The demon in the play took one look at her and was smitten with desire. He went home to tell his sidekick of the beauty of his new heartthrob. The sidekick at first was baffled. Then sudden comprehension lit up his face, and he nodded and smiled like an eager puppy. "Aha, ampu, ampu!" he said, "Love, love!" (Ampu, the sidekick's dopey rendering of anpu, also means "arrow." In this play, the pun was certainly intentional).

Love, as understood by our family, not only reversed opposites but also erased distinctions completely. There will be nothing novel to Westerners in this idea; it is important only that we realize that, for the Tamil family also, mixture (kalattal) was a consciously recognized attribute of what for them also was the overarching ideal of love. This was what Anni meant by "we are all one," both here, "within these four walls," and now, "in these advanced times." People's presence with each other made them mix with each other, become used to each other, and become one.

It was impolite because unloving to treat oneself and one's own with more favor than one allowed others, at least within the four walls, in places where love should prevail. To discriminate was ora vañcakam (the deceitfulness of boundaries, that is, drawing lines). The politest, most loving pronoun was the first person plural inclusive nam, meaning "we (including you)." One used it, within the very innermost walls, when talking in one's mind to oneself. One used it when referring either to "my house" or to "your house"?; both were called, politely, "our house." Anni elevated me to the status of her equal by often referring to women of our age (nam vayacu) and laying out the rules that we both should follow. It caused members of our family distress

when I said "your children." All of them, including my own, were "our children," and, if I needed to distinguish between them, I should refer to them by name. In the extreme, this mixture of yours and mine into ours became reversal again—mine were called yours, and yours mine. So when I wrote to Ayya's sister Porutcelvi that my second child had been born, she wrote back, "I can't wait to see my new son."

This kind of total mixing—the sharing and trading of homes, of children, of selves—was necessary for the existence of love. So Ayya explained the Kannappan^[*] story, a story he returned to again and again, of a devotee so loving he tore out his eye to put as medicine on an image of Shiva when he saw that the eye of the image was bleeding. Then the second eye of the image started to bleed, and Kannappan reached for his own second eye to tear it out like the first, when Shiva stopped him. Ayya said, "This story proves that God has no love. Otherwise he would have recognized Kannappan's love from the first and saved both his eyes, not only one. It was only after Kannappan placed one of his eyes on the image that God, seeing through Kannappan's eye, understood Kannappan's pain.

"In order for you to understand my heart, you must see through my eyes. In order for me to understand your heart, I must see through yours."

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