Appendix A
Interview Background
As noted, I conducted the interviews in Hindi or occasionally in English; most women in noble households speak both languages. Those who have been educated formally speak a more or less standard Hindi when in public. Most of the older women speak only one of the various Hindi-related dialects (Mewari, Marwari, Gujarati, etc.). When these women married they brought into their husbands' households their native dialects. Any standardization has been the eventual consequence of conversations between brides and the men, children, and servants in the family, all of whom have a common dialect. In Udaipur, this dialect is Mewari.
Interviewing was an extremely time-consuming process. The vast majority of interviews took more than an hour and many lasted three or four hours. I usually met a variety of relatives and spent extra time—hours, even days—conversing informally with them. To avoid overemphasizing the traditions of individual families, I interviewed no more than two women living in the same household. The noblewomen I interviewed in Mewar represented all three strata of the local aristocracy.[1]
My interview strategy was essentially fourfold. First, I wanted to elicit factual information about major Rajput religious traditions. As the interview schedule indicates, I sought to find out what I could about the major religious traditions practiced by the families of respondents' husbands, fathers, and mothers. The data revealed discrete patterns of similarity and difference. For example, as one might expect, women know much about the traditions of their husbands' families and their fathers' families but know comparatively little about their mothers' families. Not having lived in their mothers' natal households, they know
[1] From my initial focus on Mewar's Solah Thikana families (the sixteen most prominent families of Mewar's aristocracy), I quickly expanded the interview schedule outside this circle, which in any case included women from natal families belonging to lesser Mewar circles. I interviewed women from these other Mewar thikanas and from various strata of the nobility in Rajasthan, and occasionally other parts of India, where some women's natal families reside.
about these households only what they managed to observe during brief childhood visits and what they happened to hear from their mothers.
My second purpose was to discover the various presuppositions that condition and structure the religious traditions I was researching. These presuppositions emerged not from the factual information women gave but from the exegesis they volunteered. For instance, frequently when women did not know the names of various deities worshiped in their mothers' households, they remarked that the worship of the deities must have been the same as the worship conducted in their fathers' or husbands' households. Very common comments were "I really don't remember, but it must have been the same as we do here" or "It's always the same in Rajput households." Such remarks were particularly characteristic of older women. Younger women, having married recently, naturally recalled more ritual differences between their husbands' and fathers' families.
Women's commentary revealed not only factual but also normative presuppositions. Thus, for example, women repeatedly voiced the conviction that the only traditions with which a woman should concern herself are those of her husband's family. In short, while providing information about the three families, women evaluated and rated the importance of much of the information they offered.
My third intention was to gather religious myths and stories that women felt were relevant to the traditions I was investigating. The narratives I collected elaborate and substantiate the presuppositions women expressed either clearly or incompletely in their voluntary exegesis. Except for vrat katha stories (those accompanying ritual fasts), the stories women narrated in answering interview questions have no fixed ritual context. Perhaps in the remote past some of the stories were associated with mardana or zanana rituals. Those women interviewed, however, said that the tales they knew were recited to them informally. Mothers, aunts, grandmothers, grandaunts, sisters-in-law, and maids used to tell such stories regularly in the hours before bedtime. As one would expect, women rarely recall the specific circumstances under which they first heard specific stories. Rather, they know that in growing up with such stories, they came to know many of them.
As the Rajput community continues to adapt to contemporary circumstances, traditional storytelling is slowly but surely losing its prominent place among household activities. Homework and television usurp a significant amount of children's leisure time, more of which in times past they would have spent learning traditional Rajput lore. Many women in Rajput households remarked that not only children but also daughters-in-law are less interested in learning family traditions, including stories, than they themselves were at the same age. The circumstances I enumerated certainly explain their perception, and yet women of various ages make this observation about their juniors. It seems a universal fact that each generation conceives itself as more pious than its successors. Hence one can only speculate how much of the apparent apathy of younger generations is institutional and how much derives from recent social change.
The last major aim of the interview was to correlate factual and narrative information about religious traditions with contemporary social circumstances. The interview contains a number of questions about identity and lifestyle. Some
of the questions in this vein are intentionally broad because to narrow them would create leading questions. Thus my question, "What does it mean to be a Rajput woman?" is not intended to elicit information on specific elements of identity; it is rather intended to discern which if any elements of identity recur throughout the interview sample. Given the looseness of this question, I find it significant that almost without exception Rajput women define themselves with primary reference to the institution of parda , the seclusion of women within the household. Thus, as I have mentioned, I heard Rajput women stress as the most significant aspect of their character the fact that, in their words, "Rajput women don't go out." The emphasis on parda and elaboration of other customary features of Rajput women's lives from the first part of the interview helped me contextualize many recurrent themes in the narratives women recited in response to later questions.