1. Persons and Families

1. Personhoods

Entering a Net of Maya in Mangaldihi

I arrived in Mangaldihi quite by chance. I had landed in India at the end of December 1988, anxious to begin research. I had thought I would focus on a rural community or village, where it might be easier for me to get to know a wider variety of people, since villagers would tend to be less enclosed than city dwellers within the walls of their own homes and workplaces. Several restless weeks slipped by in Calcutta and then in the sophisticated university town of Santiniketan while I sought suggestions about a specific location. To most of the Bengali city and town people I met, villages (grām) were distant, almost foreign places that elicited nostalgia.^[1] Ancestral connections might lie there or the roots of one’s identity (Calcutta schoolchildren reportedly had to compose an annual essay on “My Village”). But many times I was told that I could not possibly live in one. I could perhaps visit a village on a bicycle, but if I were to live there—I would certainly get sick, perhaps even die, and definitely suffer. I finally met a few people who still had family or ancestral homes in villages that they visited regularly. One of these was Manik Banerji, who worked as a schoolteacher near Santiniketan and whose mother’s brother lived in a large village called Mangaldihi about thirty kilometers away.

The relationship with a mother’s brother (māmā) is a very special one for Bengalis, full of pampering and sweetness. One can ask one’s mother’s brother for almost anything, and he is expected to indulge the request. So when Manik Banerji wrote a letter of introduction for me to his mother’s brother in Mangaldihi asking this man to help me out in any way he could, Manik Banerji assured me (with a glint in his eye) that his māmā would surely oblige. He gave me directions to the village and house: a crowded bus ride to the town of Parui and then a long cycle rickshaw ride past rice fields and small villages to the sizable village of Mangaldihi, where I could not miss his uncle’s three-story brick home, the largest house in the village. And sure enough, the mother’s brother, Dulal Mukherjee, generously agreed to let me live in his compound, on the second floor of his family’s old and little-used mud house, above a dark and little-used doctor’s office, where my landlord kept a store of various medicines.

And so I was introduced to Mangaldihi, where I was to become caught up in what I would later learn to call the “net of maya,” or web of attachments, affections, jealousies, and love that in Bengalis’ eyes make up social relations. It began on my first night in Mangaldihi when a young woman from the neighborhood, Hena, came to sleep with me and be my companion. Or perhaps it began earlier that day, when I visited Mangaldihi briefly, accepted a glass of sugar water (śarbat) in Dulal Mukherjee’s home, and agreed to live in his neighborhood. Bengalis regard maya as being formed through the everyday activities of sharing food, touching, sleeping in the same bed, having sexual relations, exchanging words, and living in the same home, in the same neighborhood, or on the same village soil. These attachments link people (family, friends, neighbors), as well as people and the places, animals, and objects that make up their worlds. And once bonds of maya are formed, Bengalis often say, they are very difficult to loosen.

I learned this first through my relationship with Hena, the person with whom I developed the most intimate ties. My landlord and neighbors decided that I should have a companion to sleep with at night and to show me around, so they sent me an unmarried young woman in her early twenties from a poor Brahman family in the neighborhood. At once a younger sister and companion, she soon became a research assistant, a confidante, and a dear friend. After a few weeks went by, however, I decided that I needed to have at least a little time and space to myself (separation being valued by Americans), and I suggested to Hena that she let me sleep alone at night, that I needed the time to study and was not afraid of the village ghosts. Hena burst out weeping, “You’re trying to ‘cut’ (kāṭā) the maya! How will I live without you? I won’t be able to bear it.” So she remained my daily and nightly companion, as we cooked together and shared food, my single pillow, and confidences.

The people in the Mukherjee household and neighborhood also protested vehemently when, after about six months, I attempted to move into a larger, more comfortable home to prepare for my husband’s arrival. My neighbors and my landlord’s family would not have me moving into what was technically a different neighborhood, although the house was literally only a stone’s throw away: “How can you just cut the maya like that and move? You’ll become an ‘other person’ (parer lok).” And I was deluged with milk, fish, sweets, visits, and pleas to persuade me and strengthen our bonds, so that I could not leave.

From the very beginning of my stay in Mangaldihi up until the end, I heard a continual refrain—even after just one shared cup of tea, or a brief conversation on the roadside—“Oh, it is so sad that you have come, for you will have to leave again. How will we cut this maya when you leave? Maya cannot be cut.” And one day Sankar, a well-educated young Brahman man from Mangaldihi, sat down next to me on the bus as I was on my way to shop at the market in a nearby town and said: “There is one ‘tragedy’ [he used the English word] about your coming here. That is that you will have to leave. You must be hearing a lot about this. Bengalis hate separations. They feel so much maya for everything. You know maya? Once there is a relationship (samparka), they want to keep it strong (śakta). They want everyone to be together always.” People would also chide me, “You’ve just come here to cause maya to grow and then go away.”

Human relationships for Mangaldihians involved not only bonds of maya, attachment or affection, but also hiṃsā, jealousy. On one of my first expeditions to Mangaldihi I sat behind a Muslim rickshaw driver pedaling along the narrow paved road past fallow winter rice fields. As he gazed at the landscape he said to me, “Birbhum [the district Mangaldihi lies in] is the best place in the world. Everyone here knows each other and everyone loves each other.” His words made me feel exceedingly lucky to have happened on such a place: I looked around, with the winter sun warm on my face and arms, and admired the gentle hills undulating into the distance. Now his statement seems even more striking, because it was the only one of its kind that I heard. Much more frequently, I heard about and experienced the pervasive hiṃsā in the region’s villages. People would tell me, “Bengalis are a very jealous people (bāngālīrā khub hiṃsute jāt).” And the people of Mangaldihi thought that they were even more jealous than other Bengalis.

I certainly experienced jealousy in Mangaldihi, which seeped into almost everything I and other people did—as people (especially women) bickered and argued about who gave more tea, rice, sugar, snacks, money, fish, land, photos, saris (on loan), attention, and so on to whom; who was favored, who was not; who was loved most, who was not. I often wondered to myself, near despair, if they could be right about the general disposition of Mangaldihians; and if so, why had I chosen this village? But it takes a certain amount of intimacy to be involved in such struggles, and so I finally realized that the intense jealousies I often encountered were due in part to my privileged position. Being in some ways one of their own people (nijer lok), I was inevitably embroiled in the tangles (jaṭ) of jealousy and wants and givings and receivings and affection and love that Bengali relationships entail.

By the end of my stay in Mangaldihi, the people of the village had indeed finally begun to view me as one of them—for they worried less about their pain and tugs of maya than about mine. People would say with compassion, again and again over the weeks before my departure, “We have maya for only one person—you—who will leave and cause us pain. But how much more pain will you suffer! For you have maya for all of us, and will have to leave all of us.” They viewed me as in the center of a “net” (jāl) of maya, holding multiple strands that I had gathered during my eighteen months there—bonds of affection and attachment for all of the people of the village, and also for all of my things: the household items I had collected and lived with over a year and a half, my saris, my conch shell bangles (a sign of a married woman), my taste for Bengali food (how was I going to get by without eating ālu posta, potatoes with poppy seed paste, a regional favorite?), the village deities, the village land. How would I be able to cut the maya for all of these people, places, and objects and leave?

I came to view the ways people reacted to and interpreted my relatively brief and inconsequential stay in Mangaldihi as an avenue toward understanding how Bengalis think about and experience the forming and loosening of social-substantial relations in their own daily lives. Indeed, I found my coming and going to be particularly relevant for understanding practices and attitudes that surround aging and dying. For if the people I knew felt that it would be so exceedingly difficult for a person like me to leave Mangaldihi after residing there for only a number of months, what happens when a person who has lived for years and years with a family, in a village, on a piece of land, with all of his or her possessions, has to take leave of them all and die? Over and over again, this was a worry I heard expressed by older people, and by younger people contemplating their own future.

Open Persons and Substantial Exchanges

Such concerns about maya and aging—the forming and loosening of emotional relations over a lifetime—speak also to Bengali notions of what it is to be a person. A principal theme in sociocultural studies of South Asia over the past several decades has been the investigation of South Asian notions of what a “person” or “self” is.^[2]

Several of these studies have focused on the fluid and open nature of persons in India. This insight was first voiced by McKim Marriott (1976), who with Ronald Inden (Marriott and Inden 1977) pointed to everyday Indian practices reflecting the assumption that persons have more or less open boundaries and may therefore affect one another’s natures through transactions of food, services, words, bodily substances, and the like. Marriott and Inden, who described the Indian social and cultural world as one of particulate “flowing substances,” suggested that Indians view persons in such a world as “composite” and hence “dividual” or divisible in nature. By contrast, Europeans and Americans view persons as relatively closed, contained and solid “ individuals” (see also Marriott 1990).

E. Valentine Daniel (1984) similarly emphasized that among Tamils, all things are constituted of fluid substances. In perpetual flux, these substances have an inherent capacity to separate and mix with other substances. Thus it is possible—indeed, inevitable—for persons to establish intersubstantial relationships with other people (sexual partners, household and village members) and with the places (land, village, houses) in and with which they live. Such substantial mixings point to what Daniel has called “the cultural reality of the nonindividual person.” They reveal the “fluidity of enclosures” in Tamil conceptual thought, whether those be the boundaries of a village, the walls of a house, or the skin of a person (1984:9, his italics).

Ronald Inden and Ralph Nicholas (1977) described similar personally transformative transactions among Bengalis, who to form kinship relations partly share and exchange their bodies by means of acts such as birth, marriage, sharing food, and living together (e.g., pp. 13, 17–18). Francis Zimmermann (1979, 1980) and Sudhir Kakar (1982:233–34), too, found notions of the fluid and substantially interpenetrative nature of persons, gods, places, and things in Ayurvedic texts and practices. Zimmermann in particular emphasized that the body in Ayurveda exists in a state of fluidity or snehatvā. The body is composed of a network of channels and fluids, which flow not only within the body but also among persons and their environments (Zimmermann 1979).

In Mangaldihi, I first encountered a notion of persons as relatively open and unbounded as manifest in what is called “mutual touching” (chõyāchũyi). The people I knew were concerned about whom and what they touched because touching involves a mutual transfer of substantial qualities from one person or thing to the next. Initially, I saw their concern most clearly in the management of “impurity” (aśuddhatā) in daily life.^[3] High-caste Hindus avoided touching low-caste Hindus; Hindus avoided touching Muslims or tribal Santals; people of all castes frequently avoided touching those who were in states of “impurity” because of recent activities (e.g., defecating, visiting a hospital, or handling a dead body); persons about to make a ritual offering to a deity avoided touching any other person at all. To be sure, people often touched one another in the course of their daily affairs. But when they did, each considered that substantial properties from the other had permeated his or her own body, and the person who was in the “higher” or more “pure” position would often feel it necessary to bathe to rid him- or herself from the effects of the contact.

There are many forms of chõyāchũyi. Touching can take the form of simple bodily contact, as when a person touches another’s arm with her hand or brushes into another on a crowded bus. It also occurs when two people touch an object at the same time, such as when a person hands a pen or a photo or a cup of tea to someone else, or when two people sit on the same bench or mat at the same time. The objects in such cases conduct substantial qualities between the two people. Mangaldihi villagers told me that the only material that does not act as a conductor in this way is the earth (māṭi), including, as a kind of extension of the earth, the mud or cement floors of houses and courtyards. Thus, to avoid touching and the exchanges of substance that touching entails, people often refrained from handing objects to each other directly; instead, one placed an object on the ground for the other to pick up, or dropped an object into another’s outstretched hands. People themselves, like objects, act as conveyors or conductors of contact—so that two people who touch another person at the same time also touch each other. Furthermore, unlike objects, people generally retain the effects of touch: if someone touches one person and then (without bathing) another, this second person is considered to have been touched as well by the first.

It took many confused days and awkward experiences for me to learn about how touching was conceived as part of social interaction in Mangaldihi. People were constantly telling me that I had touched someone “low” (nicu) or “impure” (aśuddha) and therefore needed to bathe when I, with my definition of what constitutes touching, failed to see how I had touched anyone at all (and felt no need to bathe in any case). I have a particularly vivid memory of visiting Mangaldihi’s Muslim neighborhood for the first time, accompanied by my companion, Hena. On our way back to the Brahman neighborhood where we lived, Hena told me that we would both have to bathe. “Why?” I asked. “Because we touched Muslims.” “No we didn’t,” I protested, “We didn’t touch anyone while we were there.” “Yes we did,” she insisted, “We were sitting on the same mat with them, weren’t we.” “ That’s not touching!” I exclaimed. “Yes it is; of course it is!” “Well, we don’t consider that touching in my country,” I retorted. A little fed up after a long, hot day, and particularly disturbed by the implied prejudice that the act of bathing entailed, I let slip my usual anthropological stance of attempting to soak in information without challenge. “Well, here,” she said as she reached out and touched my upper arm, “ I touched them and now I touched you, so now you have touched them too, and you have to bathe.”

I also experienced, especially during my first few months in Mangaldihi, many people who avoided touching me—a non-Hindu and therefore in their eyes potentially very polluting indeed. I visited the home of an elderly Brahman widow several weeks after I had moved into the village in order to give her a photo that I had taken of her grandson. She stretched out her palms to receive it, in a gesture whose meaning would have been obvious to any villager: she did not want to be touched by me. She was requesting that I drop the photo into her open palms without making contact with her. But I only later understood the gesture; at the time, I naively placed the photo directly into her hands, thereby unwittingly contaminating the woman by my touch and making it necessary for her to go again to the pond to bathe.

Some forms of interpersonal exchanges have much more lasting and extensive effects than the relatively brief forms of bodily contact or touching described above, effects that cannot be removed simply by bathing. According to rural Bengalis, when a person cooks, for instance, his or her qualities and bodily substance permeate the cooked food and are therefore absorbed by those who eat it. People who eat the same food together at the same time and in the same location (as in persons served in the same row at a feast) also share substantial qualities with each other. It becomes obvious why people in most parts of India, including Mangaldihi, are so concerned about whose food and with whom they eat: in sharing food, they also share the substance, nature, and qualities of those who prepare, serve, and partake in it.

The people I knew viewed food leavings—food that had been touched with the saliva (lālā) of the eater—as also highly permeated with the eater’s substance. Leftovers, along with boiled rice, are considered to be ẽto, a term that refers specifically to food items that have become very highly permeated with the substances of those who have cooked, handled, and eaten them. People were very careful and selective about whose ẽto they would touch or ingest. Wives would eat their husbands’ ẽto (but often not vice versa), servants would eat their employers’ ẽto foods and wash their ẽto dishes (but definitely not vice versa), and close sisters or mothers and daughters would often share and trade ẽto food with each other.

The condition of being ẽto also spreads easily from a hand that has touched the mouth (either directly or via an object, such as a cup or eating utensil) to other persons and objects. When I drink a cup of tea, for instance, my mouth touches the tea cup, which touches my hand; and thus my hand becomes ẽto. If I wish to prevent the ẽto from spreading to other objects and persons, I must quickly wash it. I tried hard to regulate such practices, washing my hand after any eating or drinking, but in the eyes of my neighbors I was clearly not fastidious enough. They would tease me that my whole house and everything in it had become ẽto, that people concerned with purity and maintaining separateness from others (such as Brahman widows) should not even set foot into my home.

But a more serious breach in my conduct, a more reckless spreading of bodily substances, came much earlier, before people were comfortable enough with me to tease and criticize me about my ways—on my second visit to Mangaldihi, before I had moved to the village. Hena had taken me to her home, where she and her younger sister were eating their noon meal alone; their parents were away. Hena offered me a little bit of their rice and egg curry, and I accepted. When she stood up to clear away the dishes, I thought I would be helpful (in the American style) and I picked up my dish and placed it on the stack that she was holding. Without saying anything at the time, she went down to the pond to wash them. But when I returned to Mangaldihi the next day, she burst into tears and told me that several neighbors had seen her handle my ẽto dish and told her that they would not be able to touch her. I felt horrible for her. It was of course entirely my fault, for I had carelessly placed my dirty, saliva-covered dish in her hands without going to wash it myself (or at least leaving it on the ground, where she could have inconspicuously later called for a low-caste person to take it away). And her generosity and open-heartedness toward me had caused her to be slandered and ostracized by her neighbors. At the same time, I was also surprised by how uncomfortable, embarrassing, and even stingingly painful it felt to learn that other people found me literally untouchable.

After I left Mangaldihi that day I went to speak with Jamphul, an older Santal tribal woman who worked in my landlady’s home in the town of Santiniketan. She was at first indignant when I told her about the incident, saying “Why? Why didn’t you just ask them—’Am I poor like you?’”—an interesting response, revealing how she (like many in Mangaldihi) perceived real status and power to come from possession of money, which can in some ways even transform jāti or caste hierarchies. Then she added compassionately, “It makes you feel bad (khārāp), doesn’t it? It makes you feel ill at ease (aśānti).” She herself experienced untouchability all the time as a Santal, and like many lower-caste and Santal people in the region she found upper-caste concerns with rank ordering and impurity unjust and hurtful.

Marriott (1976), Daniel (1984), and others who have looked at such interactions have termed the properties that are felt to be transferred among people “substance,” translating an inclusive Sanskrit term (dravya) for something that is treated as material, though it is not necessarily visible. For want of a better word, I too sometimes use this broad term. But the Bengalis I knew did not use any specific equivalent word or phrase. When they discussed the effects of touching, it was simply clear that something was transferred between persons—that persons, after touching, shared something (parts of themselves, their qualities, their bodily substance) with each other. This transfer formed part of their taken-for-granted, commonsense world, and in our conversations about how touching works, what constitutes touching, and the effects of touching, they could not believe that I did not view touching in the same way. “Touching” (or chõyā) simply means a mutual contact that has a lasting effect on persons involved, so that the substance of each is changed by the other. Only the most insignificant kinds of touching (i.e., brief external bodily contacts) have effects that can be ended with bathing. Others, such as eating together, handling another’s ẽto, living in the same house, sexual intercourse, and marriage, have more permanent effects. They forge real bonds of relation—samparka, “relation,” “bodily connections”; or māyā, “attachment,” “affection”—among persons, who come to share something fundamental.

Ranking in general, particularly the ranking of jātis, or castes, has long been taken (particularly by European observers, as summarized by Dumont 1980a) as the most distinctive dimension of Indian society. Thus ethnographies such as those by Adrian Mayer (1960) and Marriott (1968), as well as analyses such as Marriott and Inden’s (1974, 1977), focused on asymmetrical transfers of food, water, and bodily substances (hair, saliva in food leavings, feces, menstrual blood, etc.) among castes. Louis Dumont (1980a) treated such transfers as reflecting an otherwise fixed vertical hierarchy of “pure” and “impure” castes, while Marriott (1968) and Marriott and Inden (1974) viewed transactions as continually creative of caste ranks. Marriott (1976) later analyzed intercaste transactions as also creating a second, horizontal dimension of “mixing” or alliance, and Gloria Raheja (1988) a third one of “auspiciousness” or centrality; but all earlier views of transactions had stressed only the differentiation of caste ranks.

I, too, initially found that the most striking and obvious dimension of the exchanges practiced by people in Mangaldihi pertained to jāti or caste hierarchy and particularly the managing of “impurity” (aśuddhatā) through avoidance. But as the days and months went by, I came to realize that an even more important and pervasive dimension of the open and unbound nature of persons in Mangaldihi had to do with seeking, cultivating, and intensifying mixings with kin, loved ones, friends, neighbors, things, and places. Hena was the first to seek such mixings with me. After I had been in Mangaldihi for several weeks, she began regularly to come over to my home to trade and mix some of her food with some of mine. Hena’s mother would often make ruṭi (flat bread) for me and I would cook rice for Hena. Then we would trade vegetables with each other and eat side by side. My landlord’s young daughter, Chaitali, would frequently do the same, rushing over after their family’s meal was prepared with a plate of rice and cooked vegetables to trade and mix with some of mine. And after two young sisters from the neighborhood became my cooks, they would eat all their meals with me and often rush to clear away my ẽto dish or wipe the place where I had been eating. I saw also how in their own homes, women in particular would trade rice and food, eat off others’ plates, finish one another’s ẽto leftovers, and eagerly call children to them to feed them food from their own plates with their own hands.

Parents, too, would clean away their children’s urine, excrement, and mucus without worrying about suffering any kind of bodily impurity. And as I will discuss in chapter 2, Bengalis defined the relations of children with their aged parents in important part by describing how children clean up parents’ urine and excrement lovingly and without complaint when they have become incontinent in old age and again after death.

Family and kinship ties in Mangaldihi (as throughout Bengal) were perceived as created and sustained through various kinds of bodily and other mixings, sharings, and exchanges (see also Inden and Nicholas 1977). People of the same “family” were said to “share the same body,” as sapiṇḍas: a word formed from piṇḍa, “body particle” or “ball of rice,” and sa, “shared” or “same.” Sapiṇḍas are people who share the same piṇḍas, or body particles, passed down from common ancestors, as well as people who offer together the same rice balls to the same ancestors. Families were also constituted by exchanging, sharing, and mixing via all sorts of other media, such as food (especially rice), houses, and blood (rakta). Mangaldihi villagers often referred to their families as those who “eat rice from the same pot” (eki hā̃rite khāi). They also called the members of their families gharer lok or “house’s people.” They spoke of the “pull of blood” (raktar ṭān) that they share with parents and siblings, and of the “pull” (ṭān) they have for their mother because they drank her breast milk (buker dudh) and were carried in her womb (nāṛī).

Thus social relations of kinship and friendship, as well as of jāti, relied on daily givings and receivings. I found that people in Mangaldihi built boundaries and avoided contact less often than they sought to become parts of each other—through sharing and exchanging their bodily substances, food, possessions, words, affections, and places of residence. This resonates with what Margaret Trawick writes of Tamil households, where mixing (kalattal,mayakkam) was viewed as a goal and pleasure in and of itself—one to be celebrated and renewed daily, and taught and learned as a value (1990b, esp. pp. 83–87). These kinds of exchanges result in what rural Bengalis often refer to as maya, the “net” (jāl) of bodily-emotional “ties” (bandhan), “pulls” (ṭān), or “connections” (samparka) that make up people and their lived-in worlds.

Such a vision of persons as open and partly constituted by what comes and goes also informed people’s conceptions of gender differences over the life course. Many spoke of women as being even more “open” (kholā) than men, especially during their married and reproductive years. This not only made women vulnerable to impurities or unwanted substances from outside (as were also the lower castes, several explained, comparing women to Sudras); it also gave women the highly valued capacities to receive a husband’s seed and produce a child; to mix with, nurture, and sustain a family (see chapter 6).

People in Mangaldihi likewise expressed the ambivalences and transitions of aging by referring to changes in the fluid and open nature of their bodies and personhoods. Aging was thought to involve simultaneous, contrary pulls in the kinds of ties that make up persons. On the one hand, these ties were felt to grow more numerous and intense as life goes on. On the other hand, aging was thought to involve the difficult work of taking apart the self or unraveling ties, in preparation for the many leave-takings of death (see chapter 4).

Studying Persons Cross-Culturally

Melford E. Spiro (1993) takes exception to the findings of several anthropologists, including notable South Asianists (Shweder, Bourne, Dumont, and Marriott),^[4] who have suggested that while many non-Westerners de-emphasize individuality, Westerners view persons largely as bounded or autonomous individuals. Spiro’s article was stimulated by another article on the self by two social psychologists, expert on Japan (Markus and Kitayama 1991), who approvingly cite Clifford Geertz’s celebrated characterization of this Western conception as “a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world cultures” (Geertz 1983:59, qtd. in Spiro 1993:107).

According to Geertz, Westerners see the person as a “bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively against other such wholes and against its social and natural background” (1983:59). If such a conception of the person as bounded is cross-culturally “peculiar,” then other (“non-Western”) people must view persons to be relatively not bounded. This premise—which is precisely what Geertz, and after him Hazel Markus and Shinobu Kitayama, does imply—is challenged by Spiro.

I will briefly take up Spiro’s key arguments here, because I believe that Bengali ethno-theories of persons can effectively resolve some of Spiro’s conundrums. Focusing his argument on the supposed bounded-unbounded (Western–non-Western) dichotomy, he begins by wondering what it could mean to be relatively unbounded as a person. Markus and Kitayama (1991:245) observe that in the case of many “non-Western” selves, “others are included within the boundaries of the self” (qtd. in Spiro 1993:108). Spiro responds, “This proposition…struck me as strange, because it seemed incomprehensible—what could it mean to say that others are included within the boundaries of myself?” (pp. 108–9).

The answer to this question rests in large part on what Spiro, Markus and Kitayama, and other scholars mean by the terms “self” or “person.” Spiro entertains briefly the notion that Markus and Kitayama could be referring to the self as the psychobiological organism, bounded by the skin. Such a self could be permeable to “others”—for example, microorganisms or germs that penetrate the body to cause disease, or spirits that possess an individual. However, such boundary crossings entail only impermanent and abnormal conditions, and Spiro therefore concludes that ethnographers who describe notions of unbounded selves could not be using the term “self” (or “person”) to denote the psychobiological organism. The more likely referent, he believes, is some psychological entity: an ego, a soul, or an “I.” But we still have a problem, Spiro insists, because all those who believe that others are included within the boundaries of their psychological self would have little, if any, “self-other differentiation.” That is, they would lack “the sense that one’s self, or one’s own person, is bounded, or separate from all other persons” (1993:110). Since all people must be able to differentiate themselves from others, they must think of themselves as bounded and separate from all other persons. This, he argues, is a “distinguishing feature of the very notion of human nature” (p. 110).^[5]

These arguments give rise to several interesting questions. First, consider the self as a psychobiological organism. Clearly an unbounded psychobiological self might entail a broader range of possibilities than invading germs or possessing spirits. Even in the scant material from rural West Bengal that I have presented so far, it is evident that the Bengalis I knew viewed the sharing and exchanging of bodily and other substances—not only with other people but also with the places in which they live and the things that they own and use—as vital to the ways they think about and define themselves and social relations. Parts of other people, places, and things become part of one’s own body and person, just as parts of oneself enter into the bodies and thus the persons of others. Bengalis viewed such exchanges as neither abnormal nor temporary (though some are more or less desired, more or less lasting), but rather as an elemental part of everyday life and practice.

This does not mean that the Bengalis I knew could not differentiate themselves psychologically from others—they, like all people, perceptually perform self-other differentiation. But I see no reason for Spiro’s assumption that the ability to differentiate one’s consciousness from others is dependent on a notion of the self as “bounded, or separate from all other persons.” He conflates a sense of personal identity with that of personal boundaries: either people view themselves as perfectly bounded and separate, or they lose all capacity to differentiate themselves from others. One can, like the Bengalis I knew, have a clear sense of a differentiable self that includes bodily and emotional ties with others. Indeed, these ties make up the very stuff of who and what a (distinct and differentiable) person is.

Furthermore, Spiro’s added argument that Hindu and Buddhist theories of karma prove that there can be no “unbounded” Hindu or Buddhist selves seems equally misguided. As Spiro describes it, the Hindu and Buddhist theory of karma holds that every living person is the reincarnation of myriad past selves and that any person’s current and future incarnations are the karmic consequences of the actions of “his or her, and only his or her, own person” (1993:112–13, 1982). In short, he argues, “even if it were the case that other selves are included within the boundary of the Burmese [or any Buddhist or Hindu] conception of the self,…how then would we explain the fact that the Burmese explicitly affirm that no actor bears any responsibility for the action of others, even though the latter are allegedly included within the boundary of the actor’s own self?” (1993:113).

Here Spiro provides only one of the multiple theories of karma held by Hindu Indians, if not Burmese Buddhists. Several anthropological studies of different regions in India, as well as my Bengali informants, recount how karma may be shared among members of a family or community, making it not always simply an individual affair.^[6] Susan Wadley and Bruce Derr (1990), for instance, tell of how a devastating fire in the north Indian village of Karimpur spurred a debate among villagers over the extent that karma is shared—the extent that the deeds of one person affect the lives of others. It became clear that “Karimpur residents viewed the fire as a community punishment, not merely an individual one” (p. 142).

The people I knew in West Bengal also offered theories of shared karma to explain a person’s or group’s misfortune. One respected Brahman priest and his wife were entering into old age with no children; the priest’s brother also had none. The family line (baṃśa) would be extinguished, and there would be no one to care for the two brothers and their wives in old age. The common village explanation was that they were suffering the karmic fruits of the misdeeds that their dishonest father had performed in his lifetime. As one woman told me, “When a father does sin, his sons have to eat the fruits.” Although Hindu South Asians also offer individual theories of karma to explain a single person’s own life circumstances, they frequently view karma as something that is shared by whole families or communities.^[7]

This brings me to my next point, and here I agree with Spiro: dichotomies between Western and non-Western, individual and nonindividual, bounded and nonbounded conceptions of self or person should not be overdrawn (Spiro 1993:116). Thus, though the ethnographic literature on South Asia shows a long tradition of research holding that Indians (in various ways) de-emphasize individuality,^[8] anthropologists have also examined ways in which South Asians view persons in terms that we might consider “individual.” ^[9]

Americans, too, may not always consider themselves to be as neatly bound, closed, and individual as many scholars have presumed. A study by Carol Nemeroff and Paul Rozin (1994), for instance, examines the so-called contagion concept among adult Philadelphians, the majority of whom, it turns out, believe that some kinds of essences (“vibes,” “cooties,” germs, moral qualities, etc.) are transferred from person to person through everyday exchanges such as sharing a sweater. Some feminist theorists have suggested further that models of the self emphasizing individual autonomy do not adequately describe the self-conceptions of American women, who are more likely than American men to focus more on connectedness to others. Multiple perspectives exist in any society or culture (e.g., Chodorow 1978; Gilligan 1982; Lykes 1985). What are often taken as the mutually exclusive values of “individuality” and “relatedness” may in fact interpenetrate within the same culture. And obviously persons steeped in South Asian culture live in the West and vice versa, making it even more difficult to draw any meaningful boundaries between “Western” and “non-Western” conceptions.

While I believe that it is possible to explore what people believe a “person” or “self” to be, I do not intend to investigate Bengali notions of personhood as a means of contrasting them to a putative generalized “Western” conception of the person. Rather, I use the rural Bengali material to examine views about personhood in a particular society, and then bring these views or ethno-theories into the arena of Western theoretical discussion about persons, selves, and genders.^[10] More specifically, I explore how Bengali notions of persons as relatively open and composed of relationships (a notion I will continue to elaborate on) are tied to their perceptions about aging, dying, gender, and the forming and taking apart of social relations over the life course.

Notes

2. Family Moral Systems

The most common Bengali term used to refer to what we in English might call a “family” is saṃsār. It literally means “that which flows together,” from the roots saṃ, “together, with,” and sṛ, “to flow, move.” In its most comprehensive sense, saṃsār refers to the whole material world (pṛthibī or jagat) and to the flux of births and deaths that all living beings and things go through together. More commonly, the term designates one’s own family or household (which is in some ways viewed as a microcosm of the wider world’s processes). Thus saṃsār not only refers to the people of a family or household, but also includes any household animals, such as cows, goats, or ducks; any family deities; the space of the house itself; and the material goods of a household—cooking utensils, bedding, wall hangings, and the like. All of this collectively makes up what Bengalis call their saṃsār, the assembly of people and things that “flow with” persons as they move through their lives. The SamsadBengali-English Dictionary, like some of my human informants, also lists “the bindings of maya” (māyābandhan) as one of the overlapping meanings of saṃsār—that is, the bodily and emotional attachments or “bindings” that connect people with the persons and things that make up their households and wider inhabited worlds. It was within saṃsārs, or families, in Mangaldihi that much of what constituted age and gender relations was played out. In this and the following chapter, I focus on people’s visions of the workings of families.

These visions entailed both consensus—what were often presented to me as shared “Bengali” values—and dissension or conflicting perspectives (for instance, between generations or genders). In today’s theoretical climate, it is often dissension or contestation that is highlighted (as I discussed in the introduction). Indeed, contestation—or the absolute heterogeneity of culture—has somehow become an overpowering trope, almost silencing what it was meant to allow for: that is, a heeding of the full range of diverse perspectives, visions, and experiences of those we are seeking to understand.^[1] For it is not only anthropologists who have often (perhaps more often in the past) sought generalized or essentialized features of “cultures”; very often people essentialize themselves. For instance, those I knew in Mangaldihi commonly spoke to me of “Bengali culture,” or “Bengali people”—especially when describing to me (admittedly an outsider, for whom this kind of language might have been thought particularly appropriate) how families work and how aging is constituted within families. Scholars such as Partha Chatterjee (1993) and Pradip Kumar Bose (1995) have examined elite middle-class discourses on the family in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Bengal, in which the family was often presented as the inner domain of a national culture, a refuge from external colonial society. Such an awareness of cultural difference also underlay many Mangaldihi villagers’ discourses of Bengali family values (a point I discuss further in chapter 3). The workings of intergenerational family relations were presented as key parts of a Bengali local morality, a Bengali world.

The material in this chapter, as the label “family moral systems ” would suggest, concentrates on such discourses of a shared project. Some readers may be uncomfortable with the level of apparent agreement or systematicity they find. But I have stayed close to the visions and language of many of my informants; and if I had omitted this material, I would not have done justice to the ways they often wished to represent themselves. I will then turn in chapter 3, “Conflicting Generations,” to other, equally vital perspectives on age and gender relations within family life. Both chapters explore crucial components of the ways those I knew in Mangaldihi experienced and envisioned processes of aging, gender, and personhood within the arena of family life, an arena informed by specific politics and history.

Defining Age

When I began research in India, I did not decide in advance whom I would consider “old” (although my advisor in Calcutta, troubled by the lack of specificity in my research proposal, advised me to do so: “But whom will you be calling ‘old’ in your study? Will it be people above age fifty-five? or age sixty-five?”). Instead, I wished to find out how the people I lived with defined aging. Once in Mangaldihi, when I searched for ways to speak about what I would call “old age,” I necessarily had to begin by using Bengali words that approximated the topic. I asked what it is to be “grown” or “increased” (bṛiddha) or relatively “senior” or “advanced” (buṛo) in life and social importance.^[2] I soon also heard the term bayas, referring to life’s “prime stage,” or an advanced “age” or “phase” of life.

I was virtually never told directly about age in absolute measures. Most people in Mangaldihi, in fact, did not know their age in years and placed little importance on such information. Although people of course sensed the repetitive cycles of seasons and celestial events as well as the accumulation of changes in their bodies, families, communities, and nation, few counted the particular number of years passed in their lives as markers of identity or of life stage, or kept track of and celebrated their birthdays.

Some of the more elite and literate families, especially among the Brahmans, did keep accounts of birth dates and such in record books, particularly so that they might cast horoscopes when arranging marriages. Some of those in Mangaldihi with salaried jobs also noted their seniority in years for bureaucratic purposes. But such knowledge was generally considered to be elite or technical information, a kind of “symbolic capital” (Bourdieu 1977:171–83) that demonstrated the possession of education, record books, salaried jobs, and the wealth that these goods entailed. One elderly Kora widow answered sharply when I asked her age, “How would I know that kind of thing? That’s a matter of paper and pencils. Where would we get things like that? Knowing your age (bayas) is for boṛo (‘big’ or ‘rich’) people like you or Brahmans.”

Much as Sylvia Vatuk (1990) had observed in Delhi, in Mangaldihi family criteria, and particularly the marriages of children, were held above all to constitute the beginnings of the senior phase (buṛo bayas). The family heads initiated their transition to being “senior” by gradually—often with years of ambivalence, arguing, and competition—handing over their duties of reproduction, cooking, and feeding to “junior” successors, usually sons and sons’ wives. When their children married, women would also start to wear white saris, which signified their increasing seniority and asexuality.^[3] Since such successions and retirements might occur when members of the ascendant generation were of any age between about thirty-five and sixty, the Bengali senior stage corresponded roughly to the second halves of most villagers’ lives and to what today’s Americans might call “middle” and “old” age.

People defined aging physically as well, describing the old body as “weak” (durbal), “cool” (ṭhāṇḍā), “dry” (śukna), and sometimes “decrepit” (jārā). Lawrence Cohen (1998) scrutinizes the “hot” and “weak” minds of the senile whom he searched out amid the neighborhoods of Varanasi, but in Mangaldihi such changes in the mind—though noted at times—were not commonly stressed as constitutive of old age.

Well-educated Brahmans in Mangaldihi would also sometimes discuss aging in terms of the āśrama dharma schema: the idealized four-stage life cycle of the dharmaśāstras, the classical Hindu ethical-legal texts.^[4] In this schema, men move through a series of four life stages or “shelters” (āśramas)—as a student, a married householder, a disengaged forest dweller (vānaprastha), and finally a wandering renouncer (sannyāsī).^[5] When a man sees the sons of his sons and white hair on his head he knows it is time to enter the forest-dweller phase—departing from his home to live as a hermit, or remaining in the household but with a mind focused on God. The final life stage is conceptualized as a time of complete abnegation of the phenomenal world and its pleasures and ties. Some in Mangaldihi compared spiritually minded elders (especially Brahman men) to the forest dwellers or renunciants of the āśrama dharma schema, a comparison I scrutinize further in chapter 4.

The people I knew in Mangaldihi often explained the workings, meanings of, and values behind the transitions of aging by referring to transactions—who gives what to whom, and when, and why. In the previous chapter, I described how substantial-emotional connections of maya were created between kin and close companions through sharing and exchanging substances, such as food, material goods, a house’s space, breast milk, body particles, words, and the like. But people did more than share goods with one another (a relationship I will call “mutuality,” following Raheja 1988, esp. p. 243). They also defined and created relatedness in terms of three other distinct modes of transacting, which I will call long-term (deferred) reciprocity (e.g., a parent provides food for a child, expecting the grown child to provide food for the parent years later in return), centrality and peripherality (e.g., an adult is positioned in the donative center of a household, distributing goods and services to peripheral children and elders), and hierarchy (seniors, the “increased” and “grown” folk, give out blessings and guidance to, and receive services and respect from, juniors and little ones).

Gloria Raheja (1988), in her analysis of the prestations or gifts given and received by people in the northern Indian village of Pahansu, has also found it useful to think of configurations of castes and kinsmen in Pahansu in a tripartite set of transactional dimensions—“mutuality,” “centrality,” and “hierarchy.” Her study focuses on the prestations that move between households of different castes and kinsmen. In this chapter and the next, I focus on the kinds of givings and receivings that went on within households in Mangaldihi. And though an important part of Raheja’s study of interhousehold prestations surrounds the dispersal of “inauspiciousness,” I encountered no similar transfers within Mangaldihi households. By examining household transactions, I shed light on the internal dynamics of families and on how relations of aging and gender were constituted, thought about, and valued.

Long-term Relations: Reciprocity and Indebtedness

People in Mangaldihi described Bengali family relations as entailing long-term bonds of reciprocal indebtedness extending throughout life and even after death; focusing on this transactional relationship provided one of their main ways of speaking about the connections binding the generations. Juniors provided care for their elderly parents, reconstructed relations with parents as ancestors after death, and ritually nourished these ancestors as a means of repaying the tremendous debts (ṛṇ) owed for producing and caring for them in infancy and childhood. According to my informants, this—the moral obligation to repay the vast debts incurred—was the primary reason adult children cared for their aged parents and nurtured their parents as ancestors after death.^[6]

The process of producing and raising children was described by Mangaldihians as a series of givings. Parents give their newborn children a body, made up of their own blood—from the father’s seed or semen (śukra, a distilled form of blood) and the mother’s uterine blood (rakta,ārtab), which nourishes the fetus in the womb (garbha).^[7] Parents then nourish their children with food: a mother’s breast milk (buker dudh), rice, and treats of sweets and fruit. They also provide their children with material necessities—clothing, bedding, money, and the like. They clean up their infants’ urine and feces. They are responsible for their children’s having the whole series of life or family cycle rituals (saṃskārs), from birth through marriage. And finally, through all of these givings, they endure tremendous suffering (kaṣṭa). In the end, after giving to and constructing their children, the parents have largely depleted their own resources and thus they advance to a “senior” (buṛo) life phase.

But this series of givings from adult parents to younger children is only one phase of a much longer story. According to Mangaldihians, by giving to and raising their children, parents create in their offspring a tremendous moral debt, or ṛṇ, that can never be entirely repaid. Yet children are obligated to strive as best they can to pay it off by returning in kind the gifts once given to them, principally by providing for their parents when they become old and by ritually nourishing their parents as ancestors after death. As Gurusaday Mukherjee, Khudi Thakrun’s eldest son, explained:

Looking after parents is the children’s (cheleder)^[8] duty (kartabya). Sons pay back (śodh kare) the debt (ṛṇ) to their parents of childbirth and being raised by them. The mother and father suffer so much (khubi kaṣṭa kare) to raise their children. They can’t sleep; they wake up in the middle of the night. They clean up their children’s] bowel movements. They worry terribly when the children are sick. And the mother especially suffers (māyer beśi kaṣṭa hae). She carries the child in her womb for ten [lunar] months, and she raises him from the blood and milk from her breasts. So if you don’t care for your parents, then great sin (khubi pāp) and injustice (anyāe) happens.

Another Brahman man and family ritual priest serving Mangaldihi, Nimai Bhattcharj, provided a similar explanation:

Caring for parents is the children’s duty (kartabya); it is dharma. As parents raised their children, children will also care for their parents during their sick years, when they get old (bṛiddha). For example, if I am old and I have a bowel movement, my son will clean it and he won’t ask, “Why did you do it there?” This is what we did for him when he was young. When I am old and dying, who will take me to go pee and defecate? My children will have to do it.

Women also spoke to me of the long-term relations of reciprocal interdependence and indebtedness they had as daughters-in-law and mothers-in-law. As I will describe below, daughters largely cleared their debts toward their own parents when they married, inheriting at the same time new obligations toward their husbands’ parents. These new relations between daughters-in-law and parents-in-law were in part conceived of as reciprocal—for daughters-in-law were often married as young girls. This was especially true of the older women of Mangaldihi, whose marriages took place before child marriage regulations were implemented in India, when brides often were girls as young as eight, five, or even two. Many of these women described how they were cared for, raised, and nurtured by their mothers-in-law as new brides, sleeping with their mothers-in-law at night, and even—one woman told me—nursing from a mother-in-law’s breasts. Choto Ma explained the relations of reciprocal interdependence that she, as an older woman, now had with her daughters-in-law: “If our [daughters-in-law] didn’t care for us, then who would? At this age? We took these daughters-in-law in. And in our time, our mothers-in-law took us in and cared for us.…Now we are dependent on our sons and on our daughters-in-law. It has to be done this way.”

The attempt to pay back parents (or parents-in-law) the debts of birth and rearing does not end with care in old age, people said, but continues after death—as children suffer a period of death-separation impurity (aśauc) for their parents, perform funeral rites, reconstruct their parents as ancestors, and ritually nourish them. As Subal Gorai put it as he approached the end of the rigorous month of death-separation impurity for his deceased mother: “We must do the observances [of death-separation impurity] for our parents. In doing observances for our mother, we pay her back (śodh karā hae) for raising us. She suffered very much for us, so we will now suffer for her also.…But our suffering cannot equal hers. We are trying to pay [her] back but we cannot ever do it.” When villagers reasoned about such issues with me—about what children give to and owe their aged and deceased parents—I was struck by the near-identity of what parents once gave to their children and what children are later obligated to return. These reciprocated gifts included the gift of a body (after death), food, material necessities, the cleaning of urine and excrement, the final saṃskār or funeral rites, and the suffering and toil (kaṣṭa) that all of these acts of giving and supporting entailed (table 4).

Some of these forms of reciprocal transaction have already been illustrated by villagers quoted above. For instance, villagers often described their own and others’ relations with aged parents by relating how they as adult children clean up the urine and excrement of their parents without complaining, just as their parents once tended to them when they were infants. As we have seen, Nimai Bhattcharj reasoned, “For example, if I am old and I have a bowel movement, my son will clean it and he won’t ask, ‘Why did you do it there?’ This is what we did for him when he was young.” Mangaldihi villagers frequently praised the way one Brahman man, Syam Thakur, cared for his very aged father with unfailing devotion until the day he died; Syam Thakur, I was told repeatedly, would himself take the excrement-covered sheets from his father’s bed to the pond to be washed, three or four times a day if necessary, never complaining and never (several remarked) tempted to feed his father less so that there would be less waste produced. Although not all old people become incontinent, dealing with a parent’s urine and feces was often held up as a paradigmatic component of the relation between an adult child and an elderly parent.

Moreover, people said, just as parents construct their children’s bodies by giving birth to them and nourishing them with food, so children (particularly sons) must provide new bodies for their parents after death. I will later explain in detail (chapter 5) the elaborate series of Hindu funeral rituals by which juniors construct new subtle, ancestral bodies for their deceased seniors, and then carefully nourish these bodies through ongoing ritual feedings. In fact, the ten-day (or sometimes longer) period of death-separation impurity that survivors endure when an elder dies was sometimes compared by villagers to the ten-month period of gestation during which an infant is produced in the womb (cf. Parry 1982:85). And several of my informants stated that by giving birth to their own children, they are also fulfilling a debt (ṛṇ) to their parents to produce children to carry on the family line, just as their parents had produced them.^[9] By performing the last funeral rites for their parents, children also reciprocate the gift of a saṃskār to them. Parents construct their children by giving them the series of saṃskārs from birth through marriage, and in turn children give their parents the final saṃskār, the “last rites” (antyeṣṭi) and “faithful offerings” (śrāddha), after death.

Providing parents with food in late life and after death was regarded by villagers as perhaps the most fundamental of all filial obligations. People providing care for their parents in old age often spoke of “giving [them] rice” (bhāt dāoyā). They especially stressed the effort mothers expend in nourishing their children, feeding them milk from their own breasts, and the children’s obligation to reciprocate this nurturing. Subal Gorai said with emotion as he ministered to his mother during her last days, “[My mother] fed me with milk from her own breasts; how could I not feed her now?” If families could afford it, they often tried to provide their elders, as they do young children, special treats such as fruit and sweets made from milk. Villagers explained that as people grow older, their desire (lobh) for special kinds of food increases; if possible this desire should be indulged a bit. After a death occurred, too, junior survivors spent a great deal of effort feeding rice, water, and treats (milk, honey, yogurt, fruit, sweets) to the departed spirit and the ancestors.

Finally, villagers said that adult children have an obligation to provide their aged and deceased parents with the material goods needed to live comfortably. Living parents should receive clothing, a place to sleep, perhaps a little spending money, their medications, and the like; once deceased, in the funeral rites they receive clothing, shoes, a bed, eating utensils, an umbrella, money, and so forth. In this way, just as parents once provided their children with the substance of household life, the children years later reciprocate with these same kinds of goods.

All of these “gifts” to aged and deceased parents—performing the final saṃskār, constructing new bodies for them, cleaning them of urine and feces, feeding them, and providing them with material necessities—were spoken of as acts entailing considerable effort (jatna) and suffering (kaṣṭa). But no matter how much effort the children exert, I was told, they can never equal their parents in suffering and expense.

By engaging in this series of reciprocal transactions, people in Mangaldihi worked to construct long-term bonds of interdependence that connected people across the fluctuations of family life. Crucial to these reciprocations was the dimension of time. Those who engaged in a transaction (of food, a body, material goods) at one particular time (as a gift from parent to child) potentially gained something beyond that time—in future material returns and desired acts provided by their children much later, when they were old. Other anthropologists, such as Marcel Mauss (1967 [1925]) and Nancy Munn (1986), have looked at the kinds of transactions or gift exchanges practiced by people in various parts of the world that similarly aim to create debts in the receiver and thereby possibly win later benefits for the giver. In Mangaldihi, the dynamic applied within intergenerational transactions. The reciprocated transaction was deferred to a later family phase, when the parents had become old and the children were adult householders (figure 1). Thus, a major concern here was the durability of family relations over time, and not simply the equivalence of reciprocated exchanges.

This kind of thinking—investing now for future family phases and reciprocated returns—was explicit in villagers’ reasoning about why they provided care for their elders. At the same time that adult householders were providing for their elders, they were also raising their own children—and looking ahead to the time when they would be in the position of the elder receivers, and their own children would (they hoped) be doing the providing. As one woman told me: “If we don’t serve and respect our elders, then…my own sons and daughters-in-law will not serve me when I get old. If I don’t serve my śāśuṛī (mother-in-law) now, when I get old, my son will ask me, ‘Did you serve your śāśuṛī? Why should I serve you?’”

Such long-term reciprocal transactions also served in large part to maintain the “bindings” of a saṃsār, or family. A child may cry out in hunger, causing a “pull” (ṭān) in his mother—and the mother will give him or her a breast to nurse, or supply a plate of food. So an aging mother can also “pull” in hunger on the bindings that tie her to her child when her breasts are empty of milk in late life—and expect her grown child to provide food in return. These gifts of food, material goods, and bodies back and forth over several family phases and even in death played a major role in sustaining households and family lines, as well as the people who made them up.

Sylvia Vatuk (1990:66 and passim) also writes of relations of “long-term intergenerational reciprocity” within Indian families living near Delhi. She suggests that this conception of parent-child reciprocity as a “life-span relationship” sharply distinguishes Indian from American views of dependence in old age. Studies such as those by Margaret Clark (1972), Margaret Clark and Barbara Anderson (1967), and Maria Vesperi (1985) reveal that many Americans find the need to depend on younger relatives for support in old age destructive to their sense of self-esteem and value as a responsible person. They are distressed primarily because the relationship between an aged parent and younger caregiver is generally not perceived by these Americans—either the older person or the caregiver—as reciprocal, but rather as a one-way flow of benefits from the caretaker to the “dependent” (S. Vatuk 1990:65). Furthermore, most Americans expect the benefits in parent-child transactions to flow “down,” not “up” from children to parents. It is proper for parents to give to children (even, through gifts of money or inheritances, when their children are adults); but if an adult child gives to an aged parent, then the parent is seen as childlike. Vesperi studied growing old in a Florida city, where these old people “find themselves in life situations where they are defined a priori as dependent and child-like. They exist as supplicants, not as partners in reciprocal exchange. The supplicant is a shadowy form, an empty coffer; he or she receives but is not expected to give in return” (1985:71).

Of course, the degree of dependence in old age varies according to class and ethnicity; the problem is particularly acute for poorer people, who late in their lives have no accrued estate to draw from and potentially pass on to children. In Discipline and Punish (1979), Michel Foucault raises issues that pertain to this negative construction of dependence in old age. In a modern industrial society, he points out, people have been defined in terms of their ability to produce wealth and the means of their own subsistence; anything less is disciplined or despised.

As I will explore in greater depth in the following chapter, many people in and around Mangaldihi did indeed wonder and worry whether their children would feed them rice in old age; others lived in such poverty that they were unable to support aged family members, however much they might wish to; and still others were left with no children even to hope to depend on. Nonetheless, most continued to think of parent-child relations as long-term reciprocal ones, and those who knew something of the United States reflected on the care, or what they had heard to be the noncare, of the American elderly with horror. In Mangaldihi, even as many perceived faults and flaws in their relationships, the majority of “senior” people were cared for by sons and their wives in households crowded with cooking fires and descendants (table 5, page 54).

The Marriage of Daughters: Repaying Parental Debts with Mouse’s Earth

It was at the marriages of their children that parents instigated the new phase in which the direction of giving would be reversed and begin to flow from children to parents. Specific portions of the marriage rituals performed for both sons and daughters dealt with the issue of repaying debts to parents, though to quite different effect. Women and men in Mangaldihi told me how daughters, like sons, incur vast debts toward their parents by virtue of being produced and raised by them; but unlike a son, a daughter ritually clears away these debts when she marries by performing a ritual of “giving mouse’s earth” (ĩdurer māṭi dāoyā) as she leaves her father’s home for her father-in-law’s home. The morning after the nightlong marriage ceremonies have been performed at the bride’s father’s home, the bride, groom, and the bride’s mother perform a ritual of parting (bidāe), one of whose functions is to enable the departing daughter to “pay back” (śodh karā) her parents, and especially her mother, for the debts (ṛṇ) she has incurred growing up. The mother, daughter, and groom come together next to the vehicle that will carry the daughter and her husband away—usually a rented car (“taxi”) if the family is fairly wealthy, a cycle rickshaw or oxcart if poor. Neighbors and relatives crowd around to watch the poignant event, often with tears streaming.

The mother blesses the bride and groom, imbuing them with auspicious substances by first washing their feet with turmeric paste and milk, and then touching their feet with whole rice grains (dhān) and sacred grass (kuśa). Next she wipes their feet with her unbound hair. Villagers explained that by this act a mother maintains connections with her daughter, even as she sends her away. Hair, especially in its unbound or “open” (kholā) condition (i.e., not braided or tied up in a knot), is thought to have properties very conducive to mixing or connecting. A mother also wipes the navel of her newborn child with unbound hair after the umbilical cord has been cut, to mitigate the separative effects of severing this physical bond. So, villagers explained, a mother wipes her departing daughter with her unbound hair to keep the mother and daughter “one” (ek). If she were to wipe her daughter’s feet (or her newborn child’s navel) with her hand, which is colder and more contained, the child would become “other” (par).^[10] Finally, the mother wipes dry the feet of the bride and groom with a cotton towel, or gāmchā.

The critical point of the ritual comes next: the bride’s mother stands, opens the blouse under her sari, and has her daughter gesture toward nursing at her breast. Up until now, villagers explained, the mother has nurtured her daughter, and she offers her daughter her breast for the last time, before she turns her over to be fed and supported by her husband and his family. The daughter then takes from a handkerchief a handful of earth dug from a mouse hole (ĩdurer māṭi, “the earth of a mouse”) and places it into a fold in her mother’s sari; she repeats the act three times, as her mother hands the earth back to her. With each offering, the daughter repeats, “Ma, all that I have eaten from you for so many days, I pay back today with this mouse’s earth” (Mā, eto din tomār jā kheyechilām, āj ei ĩdurer māṭi diye tā śodh karlām). Mother and daughter usually weep as they perform this final act. The mother hands the bride a brass tray or cup filled with rice and sweets that the bride is to give to her mother-in-law when she arrives at her new home. The mother then turns away in tears and usually does not watch her daughter depart.

I heard several theories on the ritual significance of mouse’s earth. Some thought that because mice live in the house and eat rice grains, the staple food of a household, they are in some ways like the goddess Laksmi, the goddess of wealth and prosperity who is associated with rice. Mouse’s earth can therefore be regarded as a form of wealth, like rice, and can be given to a mother in compensation for her considerable expenditures. Alternatively, Lina Fruzzetti (1982:55–56), who describes a similar ritual among other Bengali women, suggests that the earth of a mouse represents the life of a married woman, who shifts wealth from house to house as the mouse shifts earth. The explanation that seemed most convincing to me, however, derived from the ritual’s triviality. Several village women told me emphatically that of course a daughter’s debts to her parents can never be truly repaid. That is why the daughter gives such a worthless item to her mother before she leaves, making it plain that she has not matched the value of the debt. One mother of four as yet unmarried daughters said to me, “Can the debt [to one’s parents] be paid back with the earth of a mouse? No! That debt will not be repaid.”

Nonetheless, because she had gone through the ritual motions of paying back her mother with mouse’s earth, a married daughter’s debts toward her parents were regarded as formally erased. With the clearing of this debt, the bride also weakened her bonds with her parents, for indebtedness entails a connection between two parties. Not understanding the positive local function of indebtedness, I unwittingly insulted several neighborhood women early on in my stay in Mangaldihi by attempting to pay off debts, returning a borrowed cup of sugar, or paying a few rupees in exchange for having a sari’s hem sewn. They would say to me, hurt, “What are you trying to do? Pay back [the debt] and cut off all ties?” For this reason, many mothers told me that they found the ritual of being paid back by their daughters almost impossible to endure. “To hear a daughter say, ‘I have paid off my debts to you’ (tomār ṛṇ śodh karlām),” one woman said, “gives so much pain.” Some mused that they would try to find others to perform the ritual in their stead, a husband’s brother’s wife or the like, but I never saw this happen.

By clearing her parental debts and moving on to her husband’s and father-in-law’s home, a daughter thus removes herself from the cycle of long-term reciprocal transactions that tie her natal family together. A daughter receives from her parents for years but repays these debts in a ritual instant only, which ends her most vital transactions with them. On rare occasions, especially if there were no sons in the family, a daughter would support her aged parents (see table 5); but doing so was not regarded as her obligation (dāyitva). Married daughters also usually continued to visit their natal homes, several times a year and even for weeks at a time, especially over the first few years of marriage. On such visits, they often secretly gave their mothers gifts of money, sari blouses, petticoats, and the like, especially if their husbands’ households were better off than their parents’. However, people believed that it did not look good if a married daughter gave too much to her natal parents. Married daughters are transformed from nijer lok, “own people,” to kuṭumbs, relatives by marriage,^[11] and thus no longer rightfully had the role of looking after and providing for their parents.

A married daughter does, however, inherit new debts toward her parents-in-law, just as her husband and parents-in-law take on the responsibility of supporting her. The newly married bride brings to her father-in-law’s home a brass tray of rice and sweets that she gives to her mother-in-law upon arrival, and this initial gift demonstrates that she has now taken on the obligation to serve and give to them (see also Fruzzetti 1982:55). A daughter-in-law (bou) not only provides much of the labor of serving her husband’s parents while they are alive, she also must join her husband in observing death-separation impurity, performing funeral rites, and ritually nourishing her parents-in-law as ancestors after their deaths. The daughter-in-law’s position as caretaker and server of her husband’s parents will become clearer as we examine the marriage rituals of a son.

The Marriage of Sons, the Bringing of Daughters-in-Law, and the Repaying of Parental Debts

Before a son leaves to be married, he performs a ritual that in some respects parallels the daughter’s ritual of giving mouse’s earth to her mother. As this marriage constitutes the beginning of the parents’ “senior” or “increased” age and the end in many ways of the son’s childhood dependence on them, the son must mark the shift in direction of the reciprocal relationship with his parents, instigating a new family phase in which he (and his wife) will begin to give to and pay back his parents in exchange for all that they have given to him.

The groom is accompanied on his journey to the bride’s home, where the marriage ceremonies will take place, by a group of relatives and friends known as the bar jātrī, or “groom’s procession,” but he leaves his parents behind at home. Immediately before the groom departs, his mother performs a series of ritual acts similar to those for a departing bride-daughter. She washes her son’s feet with turmeric paste, milk, and water and wipes them first with her unbound hair and then with a cotton towel. She next stands and is supposed to have her son symbolically nurse at her breast one last time. In practice, many mothers and sons skip this part of the ritual, out of “embarrassment” (lajjā). But everyone I spoke with agreed that the offering of the breast or the “feeding of milk” (dudh khāoyāno) should be done. It signifies, I was told, that the mother’s “work” (kāj) toward her son is now finished. For his whole life, the mother has fed and cared for her son through offerings of breast milk, food, and love; but from now on his wife will look after him instead.

At this point, the ritual diverges significantly from that performed for a departing daughter-bride. The mother asks her son three times, “Oh, son, where are you going?” And the son responds three times, “Ma, I’m going to bring you a servant” (Mā, tomār dāsī ānte jābo). Instead of clearing his debts to his mother by giving her mouse’s earth, he announces—with the same number of repetitions as in the bride’s ritual—that he will be bringing home a wife, who will be a “servant,” or dāsī, to her. This daughter-in-law or servant is thus in some ways equivalent to the mouse’s earth that a daughter gives her mother—both are offered to a mother in exchange for what she has previously given her child. The son brings home a wife and daughter-in-law to take on with him the obligation of serving his parents and bearing sons to continue the family line. In this way, a son begins the phase of reciprocating his tremendous debts toward his parents, and a daughter-in-law inherits the burden of providing much of the labor that goes into this reciprocation.

Centrality and Peripherality

The shift to a new phase in family relations of deferred reciprocity, as sons and their wives begin to give to their aging parents, also brings about a repositioning of family members. The principal married couple of a house whose sons were not yet married were felt to be at the warm, reproductive, and redistributive human “center” (mājhkhāne) of life in a Bengali household: they gave food, knowledge, and services to and made decisions for all the others around them, including retirees and the young children who were located on the household’s peripheries (figure 2).

Their removal to the outer peripheries of a household brought significant changes for the elders. Although peripherality granted senior men and especially women increased freedoms—to give up burdensome work, wander outside of the household, visit friends or married daughters—it also usually entailed forfeitures of power. Indeed, becoming peripheral within a household was accompanied by losses along many of the same dimensions—of space, transactions, and power—involved in being low caste in Mangaldihi. Much as Brahmans were regarded as being at the “center of the village” (grāmer mājhkhāne), with the other, lower castes on “all four sides” (cārdike), married adults were viewed as occupying the spatial centers of their households. Brahmans also had more control than any other group over transactions and distributions concerning village resources, such as land, rice, and money, for they owned the largest amount of land, held by far the greatest number of salaried jobs, and hired many of the lower castes as employees and sharecroppers. The lower castes were thus largely supported—albeit often inadequately, many asserted—by the Brahmans, just as the old (and young) were supported by the adults in their families. As a result, Brahmans tended to have the most political and economic power within the village (although the lower jātis in Mangaldihi were increasingly gaining local powers, in part because of land reforms and in part because of the panchāyat system of local self-government, which now ensured that there would always be a Bagdi representative). Likewise, it was adult householders who tended to have the most domestic power or authority. Although some wealthier, stronger-willed, or more revered seniors, like Khudi Thakrun, often retained quite a lot of domestic authority and centrality until their deaths, their voices were also frequently dismissed by juniors as empty bak bak words—just so much hot air and chatter.

Hierarchies: Serving and Blessing

At the same time that elders moved out to the relatively powerless peripheries of their households, they also moved “up” on a hierarchical scale of junior-senior relations. Juniors in Mangaldihi gave to and served their elders not only because they were morally obligated to reciprocate their parents’ earlier gifts but also because an elder person had a superior position in this hierarchy. Old people were considered to be “big” (boṛo), “increased” (bṛiddha), “venerable people” (gurujan), “over others” (laker apar), and even “similar to gods” (ṭhākurer moto). Villagers frequently commented that the relationship older parents have with their children is like that of a god and devotee (see also Inden and Nicholas 1977:27).

My landlord’s sister Saraswati expounded their society’s attitudes toward the aged: “We think of our elders like God (bhagavān).…We call our grandparents ṭhākur-mā (literally, ‘god-mother’) and ṭhākur-dādā (literally, ‘god–elder brother’) because they are like ṭhākurs (visible gods) to us.” ^[12] People in Mangaldihi also often compared Khudi Thakrun to a ṭhākur or god. My companion Hena said, “We respect Khudi Thakrun very much, because of her age (bayas). Once they get to be that increased (bṛiddha), they are ṭhākurs (visible gods).” Another young girl exclaimed to me as we roamed through the village lanes past Khudi Thakrun’s house: “Khudi Thakrun is the biggest [or ‘oldest,’ sab ceye boṛo] of the whole village. And such a large village as Mangaldihi! That means that she is equal to a god (ṭhākurer samān)!” In this hierarchical sense, old persons could be compared to the higher castes and classes in Mangaldihi. “Big” (boṛo) is a multivalent term with overlapping meanings: a person could be “big” as an elder by having increased his or her seniority, knowledge, and connections over a long life; “big” as a rich person who has accumulated much material wealth; or “big” as a person of a high (ucca) caste.

Providing sevā, or “service,” was one of the major ways that juniors in Mangaldihi brought the hierarchical dimension of their relations with their elders to the fore. This term, like sevā karā, “to serve,” has implications of rank in Bengali, just as it does in English. In Mangaldihi, sevā was something performed for temple deities as well as for elders, and also sometimes for employers.^[13] When performed for deities, sevā included keeping the temple clean, providing the deity (ṭhākur) with daily food and water, offering the deity respectful devotion or bhaktī, and often giving the deity daily baths, fanning it in the summer to provide cool relief, and laying it down to sleep for an afternoon rest and at night.

Providing sevā for an elder involved similar practices. First, it entailed satisfying the elder’s bodily needs and comforts. Aged men and women who praised the service they received from their adult sons and daughters-in-law detailed their ministrations with great specificity: they were fed several times a day, with care and before all others; their legs and feet were massaged; their backs were oiled; their hair was combed and braided; their bodies were fanned in the summer heat; their clothes were washed and their bedrolls were laid out at night. Rendering service to elders also included providing medical care if needed, and the dark-rimmed eyeglasses displayed prominently on the faces of many of Mangaldihi’s better-off elders signified the sevā of their sons.

Within the first few days of marriage, a daughter-in-law (bou or boumā) was also expected to begin to perform acts of sevā toward her parents-in-law. A new bou may shyly and submissively approach her father-in-law to begin massaging his feet as he rests, or she may go to her mother-in-law to pluck out her gray hairs. If a bou did not herself initiate such service, a mother-in-law or other senior relative would often gently direct the new bou to do so, as serving her in-laws was regarded as one of her most important duties as a wife.

Within the first several weeks following a wedding, it was common for a mother-in-law to travel with her new bou, with or without the son, to the homes of relatives to show her off and introduce her to the wider family. One such mother-in-law, my landlord’s older sister Saraswati, arrived one day in Mangaldihi with her first daughter-in-law just a week or so after the wedding. Saraswati spent several hours in my home with her bou, talking to me about how young people care for their elders in Bengali society. As she spoke, she seemed to gloat with pleasure and pride as she had her gray hairs plucked and her feet massaged by her bou. Receiving this service as a mother-in-law was new to her, just as providing it was new to her daughter-in-law, who was about seventeen. This young woman, quiet and submissive, also appeared proud of her novel role of dutifully serving her mother-in-law. Not all bous were so eager to serve, but her demeanor was not uncommon. She blushed with pride and embarrassment as the neighbors and relatives praised her service, and as her mother-in-law proclaimed, “Our bou is very good. She knows how to work. She rubs oil on our feet. She respects and serves us (bhaktī-sevā kare).”

Sevā also included acts of deference. Elders expected their juniors to comply with (mānā) their requests, to refrain from talking back and arguing, and to ask their advice (upadeś) when making decisions. The young people were also expected to feel “respectful devotion” or bhaktī for their elders, a hierarchical form of love also felt for a deity. To display this devotion, as well as inferior status, a junior would often bow down before an elder and would place the dust from the elder’s feet on his or her head; this act, called praṇām, is performed by devotees for a deity and by servants at times for their employers. To show deference, Bengalis also generally avoid using any senior person’s personal name, using instead an appropriate kin term, such as grandmother (ṭhākurmā,didimā), father’s sister (pisi), elder brother (dādā), and so forth. Taken together, these acts of deference and respectful devotion manifested sevā; if they were not performed, an elder would feel that he or she was not being served well.

Many, however, felt that the obligations of sevā could never be satisfied. According to many elders, juniors can never give enough, in the right way, at the right times. According to many juniors, elders make impossible, unjust, unreasonable demands—insisting on a mango months past mango season, demanding a cup of tea after the cooking fire has already been put out, urinating and defecating in bed so many times that no other household work can be done except keep them clean.

Providing sevā is ironically also a form of power. At the same time that sevā overtly signifies the superiority of the elder being served, more covertly it reveals the elder’s declining domestic power and bodily strength. Many of the acts that constitute sevā embody this double meaning. As a new, young daughter-in-law submissively plucks the gray hairs from her mother-in-law’s head, she displays at the same time the weakening and aging of her mother-in-law’s body. The massage also has a double signification: the subservience and inferiority of the junior who provides it, and the worn limbs and weakened body of the senior being massaged. The act of cleaning up an elder’s urine and excrement marks a junior’s hierarchically inferior position, as someone who will accept even the impure (aśuddha) feces of a superior; but it points sharply as well to the elder’s incontinence, loss of control over even basic bodily functions, and infantility. Similarly, sons often asked their aged fathers for advice about decisions that both knew the elder really had no control over. As sevā demonstrates the aged moving “up” in a hierarchy of older and superior over younger and inferior, it is also part of their movement “out” to the peripheries of household life, where domestic power and bodily strength have diminished.

Blessings, Curses, and Affection: Hierarchical Gifts from Seniors to Juniors

Sevā does not constitute simply a one-way transaction, a flow of services, goods, and benefits from junior to senior. According to Mangaldihi villagers, elders also provided a series of what I call “hierarchical gifts” to their juniors—blessings in exchange for sevā and praṇām, affection in exchange for respectful devotion, but also curses and complaints to retaliate against neglect. These kinds of gifts were not the same as what parents gave to children as adults and then ceased to give in late life (food, bodies, material goods, etc.); rather parents, as seniors and superiors to their children, provided them throughout their lives. These transactions, we will see, were crucial in constituting relations of junior-senior hierarchy within Mangaldihi families (see table 6 and figure 3).

First, it is important to note that although elders may lose much of their previous physical power—for example, control over acquiring and distributing material goods; centrality amid the material exchanges (of food, money, goods, and the like) within households—they were thought to gain other kinds of powers, particularly verbal ones of cursing and blessing, and also of requesting, demanding, and complaining. According to Mangaldihians, old people could use these verbal powers (often subtly) to exert leverage over their juniors—providing a stream of blessings in exchange for acts of sevā and praṇām, and meting out curses when sevā was flagrantly withheld. Mangaldihi villagers said that the blessings (āśīrbād) of old people bring great rewards, and that their curses (abhiśāp) always “stick” (lege jāe). Fear of these curses and anticipation of blessings motivated many villagers, on their own account, to serve their elders well.

One twelve-year-old Mangaldihi girl, Chaitali, told me a story about these powers of old people; she spoke in hushed tones as she hung on my chair while I typed:

Did you know that old people (buṛo lok) can give out curses and blessings, and that they always come to be? My grandfather gave my jeṭhā (father’s older brother) a curse before he died. He said that my jeṭhā’s daughter would die. This was because my jeṭhā did not look after him. He didn’t clean up his urine and excrement, and he didn’t even send him money home from where he worked in Bihar. The curse came to pass [her tone was low and serious]. My jeṭhā’s daughter did die a few years ago. She was burned to death in a fire. But my grandfather gave my father [the younger son] blessings. My father cared for my grandfather until his death. He fed him and gave him a special chair to sit in, and he cleaned up all of his urine and excrement. So my grandfather gave my father a blessing that he would become rich. And he did.

Indeed, Chaitali’s father had become one of the richest men in the village over the past decade or two, thanks to all sorts of profitable business deals involving his land and crops. I heard many other stories like this one in Mangaldihi—stories in which an old person heaps curses on a negligent son, or even in which a whole family line becomes extinct because of the angry curses of a vengeful, neglected elder. The damaging power of old people’s curses was often invoked, sometimes after the fact, in explaining the extreme misfortunes befalling a family, such as the early death of a child or the extinction of a lineage.

Even more pervasive were the blessings (āśīrbād) that old people bestowed, often in generously flowing streams, in exchange for service, praṇām, and loving respect offered to them by their juniors. The most common way that juniors sought blessings and that elders gave them out was through acts of praṇām.Praṇām does not merely entail a junior’s demonstration of respectful devotion to a superior but involves a two-way exchange: the junior or inferior bows down before an elder, and the elder places his or her hands on the junior’s bowed head and offers blessings. Especially during ritual gatherings, when relatives assembled from near and far, older people tended to sit and receive endless acts of praṇām as they continuously gave gentle blessings: “May you be happy, may you live long, may you have a son, may you get a job, may your health be good, may you have well-being.”

It was common to do praṇām to household elders each morning on rising, to demonstrate respect and receive blessings; and juniors in Mangaldihi almost always did praṇām to their elders before embarking on any sort of journey, to receive blessings to help them on their way. Many families also saved photographs or prints of their deceased elders’ feet for the purpose of doing praṇām and receiving ancestral blessings. Elders also gave blessings when their juniors offered them acts of sevā by massaging their feet, plucking their gray hairs, providing them food or special treats, and the like. If the service or favor was particularly large and appreciated, such as a gift of a sweet ripe mango, then the string of blessings was longer and more enthusiastic.

We might well wonder how old people, who were in many ways thought to be “dry” (śukna) and depleted, had the ability to bless and curse. Villagers most frequently explained these verbal powers by pointing out the similarity of old people to gods or ṭhākurs, as “above” (apar) others, “big” (boṛo), “increased” (bṛiddha), and “venerable” (gurujan). Just as gods have the power to bestow blessings and curses, so do old people with their godlike qualities.

Older people were also thought to be like ascetics in lifestyle and in their largely white clothing; and some noted that both matched the final, sannyāsa stage of the āśrama dharma schema. Peter van der Veer (1989) states that ascetics gain powers to curse and bless largely through practicing austerities that transform sexual heat into stored creative heat, or tāpas, which can in turn be transformed into potent blessings and curses. Like ascetics, senior people in Mangaldihi were largely celibate and removed from many of the heat-producing exchanges at the center of household life. And many told me that as the bodies of old people cooled (as sexual heat cooled), their heads or minds (māthā) could remain hot, which often led to anger or excesses of words. Curses and blessings may be a manifestation of such mental or verbal heat, one remaining source of potency that enabled elders to gift their juniors, for good or ill. Some described old people as also having increased quantities of “wind” (vāta) in their bodies, a humor that is often associated with troublesome speech. So it may be a combination of factors that gave the verbal emissions of the elderly such destructive or beneficial potency.

In addition to the ability to curse and bless, old people possessed other verbal capacities: they could demand loudly that they be served, and they could complain publicly—causing much embarrassment for their families—that they are not being served well. Through case studies of several older people and their families in chapter 3, I provide illustrations of these kinds of verbal powers, wielded very effectively. As Sylvia Vatuk (1990:73) notes, however, many old people choose not to complain too publicly about the inadequate treatment they receive from juniors, for such complaints make themselves and their entire families, not only the negligent juniors, look bad.

Finally, Bengalis commonly view “affection” (sneha) as another gift that flows down from seniors to juniors, moving parallel to the “respectful devotion” (bhaktī) that their juniors offer up to them. Affection and respectful devotion are both considered to be forms of “love” (bhālobāsā) of the type given and received in hierarchical relationships, as between parents and children and between older and younger siblings (see also Inden and Nicholas 1977:25–29).

Thus, many of the daily transactions practiced by juniors and seniors within Mangaldihi families enforced hierarchical relations of the superior and older over the inferior and younger. What juniors gave to seniors (e.g., sevā,praṇām,bhaktī) and what seniors gave to juniors (e.g., blessings, curses, affection) were necessarily different—not equivalent, as in transactions of long-term or deferred reciprocity discussed above—because of each party’s different statuses and capacities within the hierarchy. Even as the givers and receivers within relations of deferred reciprocity reversed when elders moved to the peripheries of the household and gave up many of their domestic powers, elders maintained their hierarchical position as superiors. This status would never be reversed and in fact only seemed to increase, as persons grew older and older (and thus more “increased” and godlike), and were then transformed into even more godlike ancestors.

Reciprocity, Centrality, Hierarchy, and Mutuality: Aspects of Family Relations in Mangaldihi

I have been describing the ways in which family relations were ordered and sustained by parents and children, parents-in-law and daughters-in-law, or seniors and juniors in Mangaldihi by means of different transactions—of bodies, blood, breast milk, food, material goods, services, blessings, complaints—that in various contexts helped establish reciprocity, centrality, and hierarchy (see diagrams A, B, and C of figure 4). These three forms of ordering intergenerational relations were crucial, I have argued, to how Bengalis in Mangaldihi conceived of the nature of families, family moral systems, gender differences, and what it is to be old.

I began the chapter with another important dimension of family relations, however, which I called “mutuality” (see diagram D of figure 4). Relations of mutuality were also basic to constituting and sustaining families in Mangaldihi. They included acts that were repeated daily, were completed immediately, were nonhierarchical, and involved a mutual exchange of goods and substances—food, a house, love, touching, words—so that members of a household or family came to be mutual parts of each other. Such mutual transactions included “eating rice from the same pot” (eki hā̃rite khāoyā); being part of a “one rice household” (ekannabarti paribār); living in the same house (bā̃ari or ghar) and mutually partaking in its air, soil, wealth, and spaces; giving and receiving a mutual, egalitarian form of “love” (bhālobāsā); touching; and exchanging words (see table 7).

Seniors and juniors within households—even while engaging in any of the other transactions not considered directly mutual—also participated in mutual givings and receivings. Parents, especially mothers, were thought to exchange mutual egalitarian love (bhālobāsā) with their children, just as they gave and received forms of hierarchical love, sneha (affection) and bhaktī (respectful devotion). Likewise, seniors did not merely give their juniors blessings, curses, requests, commands, and complaints but engaged them in verbal exchanges of a mutual nature, such as conversation, gossip and storytelling, pleasantries, and the like. Children’s touch of their aged parents was not limited to acts of praṇām and the taking of dust from their feet, nor aged parents’ touch of their children to placing their hands on their children’s heads to bless them; but aged parents and younger children and grandchildren also touched one another as equals, by sitting side by side, embracing, and often (especially grandparents and grandchildren) sleeping together.

Furthermore, the giving and receiving of food and material goods within families was not perceived only in terms of relations of deferred reciprocity and centrality, with adult householders (as those in the “center”) the givers and all others (elders, children, guests) the peripheral receivers. The food and wealth of a family or household was also thought to be shared. Even if one set of people acquired, cooked, and served the food and others received it, both the givers and receivers were “eating food from the same pot.” Such mutual exchanges of love, words, body contact, food, and so on played a significant role in how people in Mangaldihi defined what it was to be a family or saṃsār.

But these kinds of relations of mutuality were irrelevant to the positioning of older people within families. All household members, regardless of their phase within a family cycle or degree of centrality or hierarchy, were thought to participate equally in them. To understand how relations between the older and the younger were constructed, perceived, and valued within Mangaldihi families, we must look beyond synchronic relations of mutuality to the kinds of diachronic orderings on which I have focused in this chapter: those of deferred or long-term reciprocity, of centrality, and of hierarchy. These were the orderings that people in Mangaldihi stressed when they spoke of intergenerational relations and when they practiced, in their everyday and ritual lives, transactions that bound together persons across generations within their families.

Notes

3. Conflicting Generations

Unreciprocated Houseflows in a Modern Society

At the same time that the people in West Bengal spoke to me of family moral systems that bound persons together across generations, they also worried that the ties connecting persons within families were becoming increasingly loose. I asked one old man, Rabilal, a Mangaldihi beggar of the Muci (leatherworking) caste, what happens when someone gets old, and he replied pessimistically, “When you get old, your sons don’t feed you rice.” The young girl who cleaned my home, Beli Bagdi, responded when I asked her what would happen to her when she became old: “Either my sons will feed me rice or they won’t; there’s no certainty.” In Bengal’s villages and cities, wandering beggars, mostly aged, drift from house to house in search of rice, a cup of hot tea, or a few coins. Old widows dressed in white crowd around the temples in pilgrimage spots waiting for a handful of rice doled out once a day. The opening scenes of the popular Bengali novel and film Pather Panchali feature a stooped, toothless old woman who, with no close living relatives, must wander from house to house in her village, constantly moving on after the initial welcome fades (Bandyopadhyay 1968). The powerful 1993 documentary Moksha (Salvation), directed by Pankaj Butalia, portrays destitute Bengali widows at a Brindaban ashram; they recall poignantly the fights and rejections they experienced in the homes of their sons and daughters-in-law, and their utter loneliness in their separation from kin.

In this chapter, I explore family moral systems from the perspective of the problems and conflicts built into family relations, and in the process I also look at constructions of modernity. For Bengali narratives of modernity center on images of loose, unconnected, uncared-for old persons, who become paradigmatic signs of a wider problem of a disintegrating “modern” (ādhunik) society.

Contrary Pulls

According to the Bengalis I knew, family conflicts were the most common source of affliction facing people in old age. Four kinds of intergenerational relations seemed to generate the most problems: relations between mothers-in-law (śāśuṛī) and daughters-in-law (bou), between mothers and married sons, between fathers and sons, and between mothers and married daughters. Mangaldihians viewed these four dyadic bonds as particularly prone to attenuation, partly because of their tendency to conflict with other family bonds. As Margaret Trawick (1990b:157) writes about Tamil families: “At certain times in his or her life, [the] different kinds of bonds [between generations, between siblings, and between spouses] are likely to pull an individual in different directions. As one bond grows closer, another may stretch and break, and someone may be left out in the cold.” I was told that bonds between generations were especially vulnerable, as members of each generation moved on to new phases of life and the “pulls” (ṭān) of the relationships that these life phases entail. When a son turns toward his wife, he may turn away from his mother. When a daughter-in-law turns toward her own children, she may neglect her parents-in-law. When a daughter moves to her husband’s home, she becomes largely “other” to her parents. If a father turns toward God and death, he abandons his mourning sons.

In addition, there are fundamental problems in how relations of intergenerational reciprocity, and family (re)production and exchange systems, are structured in West Bengal. The whole system—as I began to explore in the previous chapter, and as will become more clear below—pivots on a kind of contradiction, as families send their “own” (nijer) daughters away to become “other” (par) and bring “other” women into their houses to become “own.” The women on whom families depend to produce sons and provide much of the labor of caring for elders are thus perceived—by both themselves and others—to be partly “own” and yet at the same time still “other.” This ambiguity in the position of women within households, we will see, was the source of many of the conflicts and ruptures within Bengali families.

Mothers-in-Law and Daughters-in-Law
(The problem of bringing in women from “other” houses)

The family relationship perhaps most fraught with tension and contrary pulls, and the one most often blamed by Mangaldihians for the neglect of elders, was that between mother-in-law (śāśuṛī) and daughter-in-law (bou or boumā).^[1] Mothers realize when they bring a new wife into the household that they will be largely dependent on her for their well-being in old age. Daughters-in-law cook, serve food, clean clothing, lay out beds for sleeping, massage cramped legs, and comb hair. It is they who will eventually control most of the household affairs, and decide either to provide or not to provide the day-to-day service (sevā) to fulfill their mothers-in-law’s needs and desires. A daughter-in-law may also have the power to take a son’s loyalties away from his parents and even to persuade the son to begin a separate household of his own. Mothers are thus nervous when they arrange their sons’ marriages. They search carefully for a bou who will be deferential, who will be loyal to her elders, and who knows how to work and to serve well. But they never know for sure. “After all,” one woman explained, “my son’s wife is not my own belly’s daughter (āmār nijer peṭer meye nae); she is the daughter of another house (anya gharer meye).”

During the first years after a woman’s marriage, however, it is the daughter-in-law (bou) who lives under the authority of her mother-in-law (śāśuṛī). A mother-in-law generally maintains control over domestic affairs for several years after a son’s marriage, and she therefore determines which household chores the bou performs, whether and where the bou can come and go from the household, and when and if she may spend time alone with her husband. During this time, the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law relationship can be very loving and tender. Many women told me stories of how good their śāśuṛīs had been to them when they were young and first married, and several compared their śāśuṛīs to their own mothers. Some, who had been married before adolescence, spoke of sleeping at night with their śāśuṛīs for several years, until they were grown enough to sleep with their husbands; and one, as I noted earlier, told me that she had even nursed at her śāśuṛī’s breasts when she had been married years ago at only five.

But the śāśuṛī-bou relationship can also be a very difficult and bitter one for a young daughter-in-law. Many complained that their mothers-in-law ordered them around unfairly, treated them like servants (dāsīs), and prevented them from getting close to their new husbands. Indeed, a young husband and wife generally will not spend much time at all together during the day, and when they are in the presence of others they may not exchange more than a word or two. Such reticence demonstrates the young couple’s modesty, as well as ensuring that the new bou will form strong relationships with other household members and not an exclusive one with her husband. Usually the new husband and wife will have a separate room to share at night, but a śāśuṛī will often keep her new bou up later than anyone else in the household and have her rise the earliest, thereby minimizing the time she can spend alone with her husband. Older women told me stories about how their śāśuṛīs used to guard their activities outside of the house as well, following them to the bathing ghāṭ (bank of a river or pond) and back with a stick to make sure that they did not loiter or talk to any men along the way.

Several local tales illustrate this vision of the śāśuṛī as a dominant near-tyrant ruling over her submissive and fearful bous. A group of married and unmarried women of my neighborhood told me one such story one afternoon as we sat casually talking over tea. It was ostensibly about how musurḍā>l, a favorite Bengali pulse, came to be red-orange in color and a “nonvegetarian” (ā̃aṣ) food, but it also conveys a great deal about śāśuṛī-bou relations. The story went like this:

One day a śāśuṛī told her boumā to husk some musurḍā>l. She told her to bring at least one kilogram to her when she was done. So the bou went off to do her task. She soon realized with dismay, though, that the husked ḍā>l would not come out to be a full kilogram. What would her śāśuṛī do? Out of fear of her śāśuṛī the boumā took her little son and cut him up into bits to mix with the ḍā>l. The blood from her son mixed with the ḍā>l, and this is how it became ā̃ṣ [or āmiṣ, “nonvegetarian”] and how it got its reddish color.

“You see,” one woman interrupted, “how fearful boumās used to be of their śāśuṛīs? That she would even kill her son out of fear of not complying with her śāśuṛī’s request?”

The teller went on:

The next morning a bird called out, as it still does today, “ Pāye paṛa uṭh putu! Pāye paṛa uṭh putu! ” which means, “Get up, little boy! Get up, little boy!” ^[2] But how could he get up? He was dead. The śāśuṛī then found out what had happened, and she was even more enraged with her bou.

“So, you see,” she ended, “It’s bad if you don’t obey your śāśuṛī and it’s even worse if you do.” Gloria Raheja and Ann Gold (1994) have also compiled many vivid stories of this sort, depicting young daughters-in-law’s ambivalent attitudes toward their senior marital kin.

But gradually the tides change. Eventually it is the bou who has control over household affairs, who makes decisions about who will do what when and who will eat what when. The years of transition, while the mother-in-law slowly gives up control and the eldest daughter- or daughters-in-law take over, can be full of tumultuous struggle and competition. During this phase, the daughters-in-law are no longer so new and meek that they cannot fight back, and the mothers-in-law are not yet so feeble that their words and wills have no power. The result was some of the fiercest arguments in Mangaldihi households. I would often hear from nearby houses and courtyards the attendant screaming, pan throwing, and wailing. Women and children from neighboring households would crowd around to watch; but others would shrug their shoulders and say, “Mother-in-law and daughter-in-law are quarreling again” (śāśuṛī-bou jhagra karche), as if to imply, “What else is new?”

When a mother-in-law finally ceases to control household affairs, she becomes dependent on her bou or bous for her well-being, just as her bous were once dependent on her. Some mothers-in-law tenderly praise the loving, selfless care their bous provide for them. But, more than anyone else, it is the bou whom mothers-in-law blame for their unhappy, neglected old age. Two old women of Mangaldihi used to get together almost daily at the bathing ghat to commiserate about their bous and argue over whose bou was worse. People would tell me to go listen to them to learn about how bous mistreat their śāśuṛīs, and how śāśuṛīs never cease to criticize their bous.

Houses thus give each other women from whom they demand the most selfless devotion and exact the most onerous household labor, thereby extracting value from those who are in many ways “other” than their own. It is a little like taking a servant and, as we saw in chapter 2, the process of bringing a wife into the home is ritually referred to as just that: a groom tells his mother three times, “I’m going to bring you a servant” (tomār dāsī ānte jābo). Just as Mangaldihi villagers were never quite sure whether they could trust their servants to be honest, hardworking, loyal, and devoted, many felt that they could not really trust their daughters-in-law. (As one woman explained, “Daughters don’t even look after their own parents; how can we expect a daughter-in-law to look after her parents-in-law?”) And just as servants themselves often feel exploited, young wives frequently complain of being forced to labor too hard. It is not until a woman has lived through the period as a young daughter-in-law, has produced and raised sons of her own, and has finally brought her own daughters-in-law into the home that she fully becomes one of the “own people” (nijer lok) of a household. It is then that she herself must contend with bringing “other” wives into her house for her sons.

Mothers and Married Sons
(The problem of unreciprocated houseflows)

According to the family moral systems just described, women are expected first to serve others in their households as young wives and daughters-in-law, and then to be served as older mothers and mothers-in-law. This shift from serving to being served takes place after the wife produces a son, the hoped-for outcome of the movement of women from house to house. The bond between mother and son, according to many of the village men and women I spoke with, is stronger than all other human bonds. Sons come from deepest within their mother’s body, from her womb or nāṛī, and thus experience a tremendous “pull of the womb” (nāṛīr ṭān) for her. A mother’s milk is also a special substance, mixed with the mother’s love (bhālobāsā) and distilled from her body’s blood (rakta), which creates a great pull (ṭān) of affection and attachment (māyā) between her and her children. Moreover, a son often does not move away from his mother at marriage as a daughter does, but lives in the same home with her for the rest of her life.

Nonetheless, older women in Bengal told me many personal and folkloric narratives that pointed not to the durability of the mother-son bond but to its potential to be loosened or broken. This breaking was framed most commonly as a failure of reciprocity: the houseflows—gifts of goods, services, and love that sustain homes and relationships—are blocked before they can flow back up to the mother. Mothers told of how they poured out their breast milk, love, material wealth, and service to their sons and to others for their entire lives, but in the end they received nothing in return. Even village men often spoke to me of the service (sevā) women give throughout their lives, a service unequaled by what they receive.

Older women in Mangaldihi usually blamed such failures of reciprocation on their sons’ wives. At the center of the complicated relationship between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law is the man who is the mother’s son and the wife’s husband. A wife is brought into the house in order to serve her mother-in-law and bear children to continue the family line; but she also often replaces her mother-in-law as the primary nurturer and most intimate partner of the son. The mother and wife may compete for years for the son’s and husband’s attention and loyalty. Sometimes the mother wins: I knew one son who was so devoted to his widowed mother that his wife ended up leaving them, returning to her father’s house with their young daughter. Many told me that the bond between husband and wife is much more fragile than that between mother and son.

From a mother’s perspective, however, it is more often the daughter-in-law who triumphs in the struggle to gain her son’s affections. Thakurma was a Kayastha (high-caste) widow, nearly one hundred years old, who lived in Batikar, a large village near Mangaldihi. She enjoyed talking about the problems of old mothers, their sons, and their daughters-in-law. She herself was proud to live in a large ancestral home with four generations of descendants still eating rice together from the same pot; but she said with sadness that she had seen during her long life the way so many other sons and bous forgot their mothers when they grew old: “Mothers raise their children with such effort and pain. But the children don’t even recognize their parents when they grow up. Children are created from their father’s blood, and they come from their mother’s deepest insides within the womb. The mother feeds them her breast milk and cleans up their urine and excrement. But does the son now remember those days? No. The mother uses all of her wealth to raise and educate her son, but at the end he gives nothing back to her.”She then began telling a story to illustrate these ways of mothers and sons, and the role bous play in tearing sons away from their mothers:^[3]

There was once a mother who raised her only son with much effort and suffering. She used all of her wealth to feed him when he was young and to give him a good education; but in the end he gave nothing back to her. When he grew up and she gave his marriage, he and his wife left her alone and went to spend all of their time traveling around here and there. So what could the mother do? She ended up as a beggar. After a while she made her way to Bakresbar [a local Saivite pilgrimage spot] and there she lined up every day with all of the other old beggars with her begging bowl in front of her.

One day it happened that her son and his wife went on a trip to Bakresbar. There the son’s mother was sitting as usual in a line with all of the other beggars along the path to the bathing area. Can a mother ever forget her son? Never. But the son did not recognize his mother. He dropped a coin into her begging dish, and at this moment, his mother called him by his name, the name she had called him when he was a child. He was startled; he knew that no one knew this name but his mother. He was about to stop and say something to her, but his wife would not let him stand there. She pulled on his arm and said, “You don’t have to talk with that old woman,” and she led him away.

“So, you see,” the old widow closed with a sigh, “mothers raise their sons with such tremendous effort and pain, but the sons forget (mārā cheleder bahut kaṣṭa kare mānuṣ kare, kintu chelerā mane rākhe nā).”

Another woman—Billo’s Ma, a Bagdi widow with four married sons—spoke to me bitterly of how her sons had turned from her now that they had families of their own. She lived in a compound with three of her sons and their wives, but she had a small hut of her own where she slept and cooked separately, supporting herself meagerly by making cow dung patties for fuel for wealthier Brahman households. She told me first, with great emotion and at times breaking into tears, of raising her four sons and two daughters all alone after her husband had died. In order to get food and clothing for her children, she had labored every day in wealthy people’s homes and fields, and sold the few ornaments she had brought with her from her parents’ house as a bride. But then, she said with chagrin,

My sons all grew up, and I gave all their weddings. All of them have their own families, and now to whose do I belong? Now whose am I (ei bār āmi kothākār ke)? I am no longer anyone (ār to āmi keu nay). Now one son is saying, “I came from a hole in the ground.” Another is saying, “I fell from the sky.” Another is saying, “I came from God.” And yet another is saying, “My hands and feet came on their own; I grew up on my own.” Who am I now? I’m speaking the truth. What kind of thing is a mother?…

Listen. I have four sons. If they had all lived in one place, that would have been good, wouldn’t it? If they would all come to eat [together]. If they would take the money they earned, put it into my hand and say, “Ma, will you handle this for me?” Then my heart would have been happy. But now, whatever your brothers [i.e., her sons] bring home—who do they give it to? their mother? or their wives? Huh?

I asked, “You mean your sons give everything to their wives?” Billo’s Ma answered, “Yes. They have their own families and their own work. How will I take anything from them?”

In these two stories, a mother yearns for intimacy with her son or sons, but her sons abandon and forget her. They present a sequence of events familiar in others I heard told by and about old mothers: A mother sacrifices everything for her son, but ultimately there is a failure of reciprocity. When the son grows up, he gives nothing back to her. The son turns from his mother to his wife, and in the end he forgets her altogether. Being abandoned and forgotten by her son in this way, the mother is stripped not only of material support but also of her identity as a mother. She is left with no option other than to become one in an indistinguishable line of old beggars, literally or metaphorically. Moreover, the blame in such stories usually falls more on the son’s wife than on the son. For although the son abandons and forgets his mother, it is often the son’s wife who plays the active role in leading him away.

The theme of the immense self-sacrifice of women as mothers, coupled with the failure of reciprocity and betrayal by sons, surfaces powerfully as well in a modern Bengali short story called “Stanadayini” (“Breast-Giver”) by Mahasweta Devi (1988). It centers on Jashoda, a poor rural Brahman woman, mother of twenty and nursemaid of thirty more, who spends her life pouring out her body’s milk to nourish her own and her master’s children. But in the end she is abandoned by them all. When she becomes old and can no longer reproduce or nurse, her almost fifty sons all forget her, and her breasts—the distinguishing organ of the woman as mother—become the site of ugly, festering, cancerous sores. Jashoda cries, “Must I finally sit by the roadside with a tin cup?” (p. 234), and then moans spiritlessly, “If you suckle you’re a mother, all lies! Nepal and Gopal [two of her sons] don’t look at me, and the Master’s boys don’t spare a peek to ask how I’m doing.” We are told, “The sores on her breast kept mocking her with a hundred mouths, a hundred eyes” (p. 236). In the end, Jashoda dies alone and without identity, save a tag marking her as “Hindu female,” and she is cremated by an untouchable.

The author views the narrative as a parable of India—seen as mother-by-hire—after decolonization. If nothing is given back to India as mother, then she like Jashoda will die of a consuming cancer (Spivak 1988:244). But I also hear in this story of the breast-giver the voices of older mothers in Bengal, who lament in their own oral tales: how fickle and short-lived are the joys of motherhood! how women as mothers give of themselves their whole lives and receive nothing in return!

We must remember, however, that most older women in Mangaldihi, even those who told stories of beggared and forgotten mothers, were not forgotten or neglected (at least in any blatant way) by their sons and sons’ wives. The image of the mother as beggar works more here as a metaphor conveying a loss of love. Mothers will always love and give to their children more than they are loved and given to in return. Women as wives and mothers give all of their lives, never receiving as much as they have given.

Fathers and Sons
(The problem of a son who is more loyal to his wife than to his father)

The Bengali people I knew did not generally perceive fathers to be widely threatened by neglect in old age. Only a few older men complained to me of inadequate treatment by their children, compared to the countless mothers and mothers-in-law I heard. Furthermore, the two homes for the aged in Calcutta called Navanir (New Nest)—in 1990, the only such homes in Calcutta for non-Christians—were filled with women. Of their 120 residents in 1990, only 7 were men. The residents of the institutions as well as the directors told me that there is no great need for old age homes for men in West Bengal, for most old men are taken care of by their families within their own households.

One of the reasons for this disparity is that most men retain at least nominal control over a household’s property and money until they die. By contrast, women in Bengal rarely own or control property in their own right, although some do inherit property from their fathers, especially if their fathers had no sons. Some, too, have influence over their husbands’ property while their husbands are alive. But even though Bengal has laws requiring that widows inherit a portion of their husbands’ property, virtually no one, in Mangaldihi at least, follows them. Older widows almost uniformly turn over any property (either by verbal agreement or legal transfer) to their sons when their husbands die, if their husbands have not already done so directly. In 1990, out of a total of 335 households in Mangaldihi, only 17 were considered to be headed by women (that is, with women in control of the household property). These included eleven Bagdi, two Santal, two Muslim, one Kulu, and one Muci household (note the total absence of high-caste Hindu households), all of which were headed by widows, most of whom either had no sons or whose sons were not yet grown and married.^[4]

Many villagers told me, with some regret and cynicism, that only those who have their own financial resources can expect good treatment in old age;^[5] by this logic, more men can be expected to be treated well than women. Possession of property, like the capacity to bless, can be used as a form of leverage; the holder can promise a future inheritance to those who serve him well in old age. Older people with property may also contribute economic resources to the household funds to help defray the cost of caring for them.

Furthermore, men much less often than women are left without a spouse or descendants to perform the actual labor of providing care in old age. Because men are usually several years older than their wives, the majority of Bengali women outlive their husbands to become widows; most men live through their old age still married. Additionally, if a man’s first wife dies at a young age or is barren he may easily remarry in the hopes of producing sons, but the majority of Bengali women (especially if upper caste), once married, never again remarry, even if their husbands die or abandon them childless (see chapter 7).

And the village men with whom I spoke seemed to view the father-son bond as uniquely enduring and almost sacred. According to dominant patrilineal discourse in Mangaldihi, father and son are both central, structural parts of the same continuing lineage or baṃśa (literally, “bamboo”). Like bamboo, which is a series of continuously linked and growing nodes, the baṃśa was regarded as a continuing succession of linked fathers, sons, and wives. A baṃśa includes the male line of descendants from a common “seed” ancestor (bīj-puruṣ), together with their inmarrying wives and unmarried daughters.^[6] Women thus come and go to and from this line, but fathers and sons extend it.

The bond between fathers and sons also lasts after death, as fathers (and then later their sons) are transformed into ancestors and nourished by sons and sons’ sons. Women, in contrast, become enduring ancestors not in their own right, but only as parts of their husbands (see chapter 5). Thus by supporting and remembering particularly fathers, as old men and then as ancestors (pitṛ, literally “father”), sons sustain their own selves, for both fathers and sons make up the same baṃśa. All of these factors—a man’s greater chances of having control over property, a living wife, sons, and a lasting place in the family line—contributed to local perceptions that older men tend to be served and remembered by their sons, both in old age and after death.

To be sure, there are exceptions: fathers and sons may quarrel and break their ties; sons may cease to feed their fathers rice. Sometimes these ruptures and omitted transactions are caused by poverty. In several households in Mangaldihi, sons may have wished to feed their aged fathers but simply lacked the resources to do so. Rabilal, a beggar of the Muci (leatherworking) caste, was one such neglected father. He himself had become too old and blind to work; his wife struggled in the fields as a day laborer to earn a meager bit of money for both of them, but it was usually not enough. Rabilal would moan, “Even now that I am old, my sons don’t feed me rice,” and he wandered through the village every day begging for rice and leftovers from cooked meals.

I also witnessed a few serious fights in Mangaldihi households between fathers and sons, though unlike frays between mothers-in-law and bous, these were not regarded as everyday occurrences. Discord most commonly arose over money and sons’ wives. The most serious father-son altercation that took place while I was in Mangaldihi turned into a major village event because of its unusual severity. People dropped their work, crowded around to watch, and talked about it for days afterward.

The fight took place in a Brahman household in a neighborhood bordering the one I lived in. One morning the household’s only bou, a woman I will call Purnima, was cooking in a room with a tin roof. Her father-in-law, Satyabrata Chatterjee, came into the room and complained that the smoke from the cooking fire was ruining the roof. Purnima and her father-in-law began to argue angrily, and Purnima became so enraged that she jumped up and struck her father-in-law on the head with the blunt end of a large iron kitchen knife. Her father-in-law began to beat her. At this point, Purnima’s husband, Benu, stepped in to defend his wife; he repeatedly hit his father with a wooden pole, and the old man’s head was soon bleeding heavily.

From where I was standing, on a neighbor’s roof, I could hear what sounded like the thudding sounds of flesh being beaten, along with terrible shouting. Several other women were watching with me on the roof, but most of the neighborhood’s young men and children had rushed up to the household where the fight was taking place. My young work girl, Beli, ran back to report excitedly to us that the son, Benu, had cracked his father’s head open, and that the father would most certainly die; but we found out shortly afterward that the man had suffered only a few, relatively minor, cuts on his head. Finally, after the father’s youngest son, Bapi, had jumped in to defend his father and beat his older brother’s wife, neighbors pulled the family apart, and the eldest son Benu fled with his wife to a neighboring relative’s house.

Almost immediately, representative men from all of the neighborhood households (most of whom were from the same bhāiyat, or male lineage group) gathered together on the veranda of another house to discuss what should be done with Purnima and her husband. This sort of gathering periodically occurred in Mangaldihi when family or neighborhood problems arose. I listened from the sidelines with several other women, including Purnima herself, who was still distraught and sweating profusely from her exertions. I soon learned that Purnima had never gotten along with her parents-in-law, and particularly her father-in-law, during the ten years of her marriage. Recently things had grown even worse. Her father-in-law had taken out a loan of three thousand rupees (about one hundred dollars) from the bank and he had asked his son Benu to co-sign the loan with him. But the father had not been able to make the loan payments, so recently the bank had been after Benu for the money. Benu himself was without a job and had no income of his own, save the pittance he earned from folding pieces of newspaper into small paper sacks to be used as grocery bags at local stores. This arrangement between Benu and his father thus in itself constituted an inappropriate reversal of father-son relations: even though the father was still the recognized head of the household (kartā), he was seeking to secure money from his still unemployed and unpropertied son.

So the burden had fallen on Benu’s wife Purnima to get money from her own father to help support them, and to pay back the loan. In this way, daughters-in-law in the region often continued to act as conduits between families, as they drew on wealth from their fathers’ homes to bring to their fathers-in-law. But her position angered and embarrassed Purnima, who suffered an unending stream of insults about her in-laws from her father’s family. Tensions between the daughter-in-law and the rest of her in-laws (aside from her husband, who was very devoted to her) had therefore heightened considerably.

The men who gathered primarily blamed the “troublemaking” (badmāiś) bou, Purnima, for the conflict, and several (including her father-in-law) suggested that she no longer be allowed to live in the village. Others proposed a more moderate course of action, which finally prevailed: the young couple, with their one son, would separate completely from the father-in-law’s household. Several of the neighborhood men went over to the family’s house and removed all of Benu and Purnima’s things. They put the couple’s possessions in a small, one-room hut adjoining the main house and rummaged up a lock for the new place. They then told the members of the separate households to stay away from each other.

And so the conflict was settled, but not without causing a household to break up and providing days of discussion. Although the village people did insist that the father, Satyabrata, shared in the blame or fault (doṣ) for the fight, they mostly condemned Purnima, calling her a “troublemaker” by nature. They would say, “Isn’t it horrible that a bou could hit her own śvaśur (father-in-law)? that she could cause her husband to hit his own father on the head? Chi! Chi! This is a great sin (mahāpāp)!” Purnima’s husband Benu generally was found to be largely innocent, a naive and simple (saral) type caught up in a mess between his wife and father; villagers felt compassion and tenderness (māyā) for him. It is very sad to see a father and son become separate (pṛthak), they said, over a wife.

Rabindranath Tagore’s “Sampatti-Samarpaṇ” (“The Surrendering of Wealth”; 1926:48–54) also deals with the theme of tensions that rupture the ties between fathers and sons. The story, set in late-nineteenth-century rural Bengal, portrays a son who abandons his father over a disagreement about his wife. The father lives with his son, boumā, and grandson. The father is old, but he maintains a firm position as head of the household and manages all of the household funds with a miserly strictness. One day his boumā becomes very ill, and the son tries to persuade his father to spend the money to take her to an allopathic doctor. But the father insists that such expenses are not necessary, and he instead brings a traditional Ayurvedic doctor, or kabirāj, with inexpensive herbal medicines to heal her. After this treatment, the wife dies. The son, deeply pained at the loss, blames his father: he leaves, taking his only son with him.

The villagers who watch these events unfold provide a running commentary. As with similar dramatic family events in Mangaldihi, all the entertaining commotion gives the villagers some pleasure; but after the younger man leaves, they sympathize with the abandoned father about the “sorrow of separating from a son” (putrabicched dukha). They cluck their tongues with amazement and disapproval that the son could have valued his relationship with his wife more than that with his father. The villagers exclaim: “A son taking leave of his father over such a trivial thing like a wife! This could only happen in these [i.e., modern] times.” They add: “If one wife dies, another wife can be collected before long. But if a father goes, no matter how much one tears out one’s hair, another father can never be obtained” (Tagore 1926:49). The story’s plot is quite complicated, but in essence things go from bad to worse. The grandfather, who spends a lonely old age worrying about the destruction of his baṃśa (family line), becomes quite deranged, and his only grandson is killed. At the end, only the single son is left alive; the baṃśa is threatened with extinction.

By his tone, Tagore implies that the grandfather is largely to blame for the disintegration of his family: he is stingy and insists on tightly controlling his money, even when his son is grown and has desires and a family of his own. The story touches also on the effects of global change, here represented by the spread of allopathic medicine, on local intergenerational relations. The son wishes to “modernize” in order to save his wife, while his father clings, perhaps unwisely, to more traditional and less costly ways. But from the villagers’ perspective, the son, not the father, is responsible for the rupture. How could a son value his wife more than the bond with his father? A rupture in the father-son bond leads not only to the disintegration of the immediate household but to the end of the whole lineage—and thus denies the enduring meaning of, and reason for, the father-son bond.

Mothers and Married Daughters
(The problem of sending one’s own away to become “other”)

A daughter has a more fragile relationship with her aging parents than does a son, for a daughter’s bonds with her parents are in effect broken when she is given away in marriage. I often heard mothers say of their daughters: “You just keep them with you for a few days and then give them away to an other’s house.” The bond is precious, but fleeting and ephemeral.

Precisely because married daughters become “other” in this way, most Bengalis state that parents cannot be cared for by daughters when they grow old, even if they have no sons. Several sonless older women I encountered insisted that they would rather live alone, or even in an old age home in Calcutta, than with a married daughter. One woman, Pratima-masi (Auntie Pratima), a resident of a Calcutta old age home, explained her reasoning:

Masi:

I have no sons, only three daughters. If I did have a son, I would have certainly lived with him. But we Bengalis hate very much to live with daughters.

SL:

Why?

Masi:

Because when we give our daughter’s marriage she becomes other (par). I have given my daughter into an other’s hand (meye to parer hāte diechi). My son-in-law is not my belly’s issue (peṭer santān nae).

SL:

But a daughter-in-law? She is not your belly’s issue either, is she? [I was seeking to understand why elders felt so much more comfortable living with their sons’ wives than with their married daughters.]

Masi:

No, that’s different. Even if my boumā (daughter-in-law) hit me with a cane, that would be all right. I could still live with her. Because she is my son’s wife. But living with a jāmāi (daughter’s husband), that’s impossible. We Bengalis hate it. If there’s a son, then the baṃśa (family line) remains, and the boumā becomes part of the baṃśa. But a daughter’s baṃśa is different than ours. We don’t hold a daughter’s baṃśa (meyer baṃśa āmrā to dhari na).

So a boumā, who is not one’s belly’s issue but comes into one’s own house and becomes part of one’s own baṃśa, becomes closer in many ways than a daughter, who is a mother’s own belly’s issue but marries away to become part of an unrelated person’s household and lineage.

Parents also incur a considerable loss of respect (asammān) if they live with or are cared for by a married daughter. Many I spoke with stressed that Bengalis believe that married daughters and sons-in-law should be given to and not taken from. Another woman in an old age home explained: “It’s not right to live with daughters. Bengalis feel a disrespect (asammān) if they live with their daughters. They live with their sons. But I have no son.…I visit my daughter’s house sometimes, but I never stay longer than two or three days. Even if they tell me to stay I don’t. Because it’s my daughter’s and jāmāi’s house. And among Bengalis we must give to daughters and jāmāis, but we can’t take from them. In taking from them a disrespect happens.”

The proper direction of the flow of gifts is from a woman’s natal to her marital household (Fruzzetti 1982:60). The major gift that instigates this pattern is the father’s offering of his daughter—kanyādān, or “gift of a virgin”—to his son-in-law (jāmā̃i) at marriage. Throughout the daughter’s married lifetime, dowry and other gifts are expected to flow predominantly from her natal to her marital home. Thus in Mangaldihi, Purnima, a daughter-in-law, received money from her father’s home to give to her father-in-law (though not, as we saw, without considerable resistance on her own and on her natal family’s part because the demand was seen as excessive). Husbands and wife-takers are regarded as superior to wives and wife-givers; the proper flow of gifts upward reflects this hierarchical ordering. A married daughter’s parents, then, incur a significant loss of respect if they cannot continue to make occasional gifts to their married daughter’s household, or if they are required to ask their daughter’s husband for monetary assistance or other goods. Presumably, this concern with “respect” (sammān) was even more important to some than having a family to live with, for many of the women in the Navanir old age home had daughters but no sons.

Finally, many sonless older women explained that if they went to live in their married daughters’ homes, there would be a considerable amount of trouble, discomfort, and uneasiness, especially if the daughter’s own parents-in-law were living there. Arguing and overcrowding would result. And the daughter’s mother would have no power (śakti) or real place in the household. She would be simply “dependent” (parādhīn): that is, someone who is supported without giving anything in return. I rarely heard this term applied to a mother in her son’s home, for a mother’s earlier years of giving to the household and its junior members were taken into account, ensuring her rightful place when she no longer worked in the household.

Nonetheless, some sonless mothers who had no other options did end up seeking to live with their married daughters. Two elderly sonless women came to Mangaldihi while I was there. One was a Brahman woman whom most of the village’s young women called Bukun’s Didima (Bukun’s maternal grandmother), after her daughter’s daughter, Bukun. One winter day I noticed a thin and stooped woman dressed in a plain white widow’s sari descend from the noon bus: this was Bukun’s Didima. She made it to their home and announced that her health and eyesight had deteriorated so much that she could no longer live alone. She came with a few meager possessions and the considerable sum of six thousand rupees, all of her savings, which she bequeathed to her daughter’s household to offset the expense of feeding and caring for her until she died.

Several months later, though, after she had returned from a visit to her other married daughter’s home, Bukun’s Didima requested that her first daughter return the six thousand rupees. She had decided that she could no longer tolerate living in her daughters’ homes and wanted to try again to live alone in her own house. But by that point, her daughter’s household was decidedly not eager to return the money. For the rest of the afternoon, Bukun’s Didima argued and pleaded with them, especially with her three granddaughters. The granddaughters shouted at her, “How dare you come now to take away your money?! You came when you were sick, and we served you, fed you, rubbed oil on your body, and made you well. We said you could stay here with us for the rest of your life. But now that you’re well, you want to take your money back and go. What kind of gratitude is that? That’s not right! You’re a small, low person (choṭolok)!” They called her all sorts of derogatory names (most of which I could not understand) and spitefully mimicked her when she cried, “I’m going to die, I’m going to die right here!” They said they would not feed her any rice until she changed her mind, and finally she left, wailing, to eat at a neighbor’s house. Many people crowded around to watch. They said that this is what happens when an old woman goes to live in her daughter’s home.

Several months later, Bukun’s grandmother was still with her married daughter in Mangaldihi. One sultry summer afternoon, she spoke to me of her predicament in low tones: “This [my daughter’s house] is an other’s house (parer ghar). When I gave my daughter’s marriage she became other (par). That’s why I don’t like it here.…But first I’m going to take my six thousand rupees and then only will I go. They’ve eaten up my six thousand rupees and they aren’t giving it back. But I’m going to take it back.” When I left Mangaldihi, Bukun’s Didima was still there with her daughter. They argued continually, and the older woman preferred to spend most of her time in neighboring households.

Another woman, called by most villagers “Khudi Thakrun’s daughter” (after her mother, whom she continued to visit frequently), was also compelled to live with her married daughter in her old age. She had been widowed much earlier in her life when she was nineteen and her only daughter was a toddler. Like Bukun’s grandmother, Khudi Thakrun’s daughter had felt obligated to give her married daughter and son-in-law her wealth in exchange for being cared for in old age. But she lamented that ever since she had transferred her property to them, they no longer cared for her as they once did. She came to my home one afternoon to tell me the tale of her suffering:

I have given everything that I had to my daughter. Now I have nothing at all. I am now sitting dressed as a beggar (bhikhāri). I have nothing at all. I’ve given everything to my daughter and jāmāi. I had a house in my name, and even that I gave to them. Everything.…And now I live there [with my daughter] and eat there. I have no more power (śakti), no more strength (kshamatā), no more material wealth (artha), no more money. I have become old (buṛo); I can’t do anything. So now I have to sit and be fed. But now they no longer look after me like they used to.…Three days later [after I gave them my property] and they no longer love me like they did. I gave everything to them and now they don’t really care about what’s left. I’ve become old, without strength; I can’t do anything any longer, and can’t give anything more. And they no longer look after me. This is my life of sadness.

Old women feel that they are expected to “pay” their daughters and jāmāis, who are “other” (par) rather than “own” (nijer) people, for care and service provided in old age. Such a property-based relationship is not one of ease, and it is apt to wither once the elder’s property is gone.

Installing a ghar jāmāi, or “house son-in-law,” is one final way that some parents of daughters plan to be cared for in their old age: they acquire an inmarrying son-in-law to settle with their daughter in their own home. The son-in-law and daughter both receive a kind of “payment” for doing this, for they stand to inherit the parents’ home and most or all of their property when they die (and they are also able to live on the property until then). A ghar jāmāi is generally from a poor family, or a younger son in a family of several sons—someone who would have had difficulty supporting a wife and family on his own. He agrees to move into his wife’s household in exchange for the property he will live on and inherit.

This arrangement was generally considered to be difficult for all concerned, and particularly embarrassing for the jāmāi (and, to a lesser extent, for the married daughter). Here the jāmāi becomes in some ways like a wife: he shifts from house to house and is contained in the house of another, rather than practicing the more prestigious male pattern of developing and refining himself in a continuous, straight line, in the home and on the land of his fathers’ fathers (see also Sax 1991:82–83). Daughters were sometimes embarrassed to marry such a feminine-seeming man. They also expressed reluctance to miss the opportunity of being honored as a new bride in a new home, intimating that the new bou status, however difficult to endure, was valued as well. Many parents of only daughters therefore did not choose this arrangement. One mother of three daughters and no sons, Subra-di, told me firmly: “We don’t want to place a ghar jāmāi in our house. Our daughters wouldn’t like it, and neither would we. It would make us all feel uneasy (aśānti). We will just live alone.”

Thus as daughters become “other” (par) to their parents when they are married, parents cannot count on them for care in old age. Yet a mother’s bonds with sons and their wives are not as inescapable and enduring as those without sons might imagine. I heard many old mothers of sons say the same things about the “otherness” of their bous, their sons’ wives, that mothers of daughters say of their married daughters. One woman explained why she did not wish to live with her son and his wife: “My son’s wife is actually not my own child. She’s a daughter of another house (parer gharer meye).” And another woman, a Calcutta old age home resident, told me regretfully that she had come to the home because she had only sons and no daughters: “I have no daughter who could look after me. Daughters are more ‘loving’ [she used the English word] than sons.”

All old people, both those with sons and those with daughters, must grapple with depending on juniors—women—who are in many ways “other” to them. It is necessary to the family cycle and continuity that parents bring daughters-in-law into their homes for their sons and send their own daughters out to the homes of others. But in so doing they cause their sons and daughters to become enmeshed in bonds that will, to some degree, inevitably distance them from their peripheralized parents. Those I knew often blamed this distancing for the neglect and unreciprocated houseflows afflicting older people.

The Degenerate Ways of Modern Society

The kinds of conflicts and problems Bengalis perceived to be built into family relations cannot be understood without considering as well Bengali constructions of modernity. Dominant discourses in the 1980s and 1990s—in Mangaldihi and Calcutta, and in Indian newspapers, magazines, and gerontological texts—assert that social problems have burgeoned in modern times. In these discussions, images of a bad old age are often invoked as paradigmatic signs of a disintegrating “modern” (ādhunik) society. Lawrence Cohen (1998) offers a penetrating, detailed analysis of discourses of old age, senility, and modernity in Indian gerontological literature and among the urban middle class in Varanasi and other north Indian cities. After looking briefly at some of the same cosmopolitan discourses (encountered mainly during my many visits to Calcutta), I will relate these to Mangaldihi perspectives on modernity and the modern afflictions of old age.

Since the early 1980s, a profusion of literature on aging has appeared in Indian gerontological and sociological texts, journal articles, and popular magazines.^[7] Most of it is organized around the strikingly uniform theme of a looming “problem of aging,” framed as an increasing number of old people and a decreasing social desire to take care of them. The cover story of the 30 September 1991 issue of India Today exemplifies this trend. It is titled “The Greying of India,” and its cover blurb reads: “With life expectancy going up, the number of people above 60 has risen past 50 million. Coupled with this, rapid urbanization is disrupting traditional relationships, leaving Indian society struggling to cope with a new dimension of alienation and despair” (M. Jain and Menon 1991).

Sarita Ravindranath’s story “ Sans Everything…But Not Sans Rights” (Statesmen, 1 February 1997) covers the recent passing of the Himachal Pradesh Maintenance of Parents and Dependents Bill, which requires children in the state of Himachal Pradesh to provide for their aged parents. This bill was necessary, Ravindranath and local public officials contend, because of the sharp decline in family bonds in today’s India. “[A]ged and infirm parents are now left beggared and destitute on the scrap heap of society. It has become necessary to provide compassionate and speedy remedy to alleviate their sufferings,” the Himachal Pradesh minister, Vidya Dhar, states in the bill’s preface (qtd. in Ravindranath 1997). But Chittatosh Mukherjee (retired chief justice and chairman of the state Human Rights Commission) comments that legislation can only do so much to remedy a family’s and society’s ills. “A man might get enough money to sustain himself, but where will he go for love and affection?” he asks. “As long as there were strong family bonds, there was no need for written law to dictate that you have to care for your parents.” The article concludes:

Whatever its merits or defects, it is unlikely that the joint family system, with its insistence on caring for the elderly, will make a comeback to Indian society. As more and more people leave home in search of a better life, the neglected ones are parents, who most often invest their life savings in their child’s education and growth. And while it is impractical to tie children to their parents’ strings for life, it is as important to ensure the rights of the elderly to lead a dignified life.…Only the law…can reach out and help bent, sad people stand up straight with pride.

One of the primary forces of change and modern affliction in these narratives is Westernization. The “joint family,” a multigenerational household in which elders make up an intrinsic part, is often described as something “uniquely Indian” or “characteristic of Indian culture.” For example, in his preface (1975:ii) to J. D. Pathak’s Inquiry into Disorders of the Old, S. P. Jain professes: “The old were well looked after in the joint family system, so characteristic of the Indian Culture.” Madhu Jain and Ramesh Menon (1991:26) declare that “Age was synonymous with wisdom, values and a host of things that made Indian society so unique.” In contrast, the “West” is associated with old age homes, negative images of aging, independence (that is, small or nonexistent families), and individualism. In fact, the first old age homes in India were products of colonial penetration, constructed by Christian groups such as the Little Sisters of the Poor from the late nineteenth century onward and inhabited (until very recently) almost exclusively by Anglo-Indians. The cover story of the 7 January 1983 issue of Femina—“Old Age: Are We Heading the Way of the West?”—focuses on the rapid growth of India’s old age homes, negative media images of the elderly, and modern youth’s reluctance to care for the aged. British colonial rule, comments Ashis Nandy (1988:16–17), also played a decisive role in “delegitimizing” old age in India by importing Europe’s “modern” ideology, which casts the adult male as the perfect, socially productive, physically fit human being and the elderly (as well as the effeminate) as relatively socially inconsequential.^[8]

Urbanization also figures in urban middle-class narratives of the problems of aging in contemporary society. Indian gerontological literature blames what it calls the breakup of the joint family at least as much on the growth of India’s cities, bolstered by an increasing stream of new inhabitants from the countryside, as on the forces of colonialism and Westernization. The argument goes that urban houses (and thus families) tend to be smaller than those in villages, and their walls more divisive and isolating; they are less likely to include old people, who are commonly left behind on village lands. The chaos and separations brought about with the emergence of the postcolonial order in South Asia, and the partition of India from Pakistan and Bangladesh, are featured in these modernity narratives as well. People I knew—especially those in the newer neighborhoods of southern Calcutta, which are replete with middle-class refugees from what was formerly East Pakistan, now Bangladesh—often spoke poignantly of postindependence and postpartition as overly independent (svādhīn) and maya-reduced times. People torn away from their ancestral lands and homes live now in compact urban apartments, making multigenerational family relationships ever harder to sustain.

People in Mangaldihi also talked continually about how things had gone awry in current times: families were breaking up, old people were being left alone, and (partly as a consequence, partly as a cause) the society (samāj) as a whole was deteriorating. Cohen finds that (unlike his urban middle-class informants) those living in the low-caste Nagwa slum of Varanasi where he did comparative fieldwork did not invoke the modern or the West to ground a rhetoric of the weaknesses of old age or the collapse of families. Rather, the afflictions of old age were blamed on poverty, the caste order, oldness itself, and frictions between brothers (which broke families into small units). Bad families were not spoken of as a recent or unusual phenomenon (1988:223–48). In Mangaldihi, however, there was a pervasive sense that the “modern” (ādhunik) was at the root of many social ills. This sentiment, though expressed across caste and class lines, was most pronounced in upper-caste neighborhoods.

The three main villains of modern affliction in Mangaldihi were Westernization, urbanization, and women. Many of the less literate in Mangaldihi were not quite certain where the “West” (or bilāt—England, America, foreign places) was located or just what it entailed. People asked, Was bilāt—or my country, America—near Darjeeling? Delhi? Was Hindi spoken there? Others were acutely interested in and informed about India’s longtime engagement with the West via British colonialism, the increasing globalization of the media and the national economy, and the out-migration of Indians to places such as the United States. A good proportion of Mangaldihi’s Brahman men commuted to nearby cities for work, read English language newspapers daily, and watched international television programs in their or their neighbors’ homes. It was in these Brahman neighborhoods that people most often invoked the West, bilāt, or “foreign winds” as a key source of the travails of modernity. Gurusaday Mukherjee commented that popular American television programs and British-style education systems were in part responsible for the failure of young people to respect and fear their elders as they once had. Subal, an older Bagdi man, concurred. He said that the school education of his sons and grandsons had led to a new lack of respect and loss of authority for old people: “The old people’s words are not mixing with the young people’s any more. Now the young people’s intelligence has become very [or ‘too,’ beśi] great.” Some people in Mangaldihi had heard of old age homes in Europe and America, and compared them disparagingly to their ashrams or shelters for dying cows. And they noted with dismay that this system was penetrating their own society. Many Mangaldihi women were fascinated by the tape-recorded interviews I brought back from the two Navanir old age homes in Calcutta; they crowded around my tape recorder to listen to the residents’ stories, then would often analyze these women’s predicaments in terms of the Westernized modern era in which they all were finding themselves.

Some in Mangaldihi also linked the general decline in the quality of village life, and the increasing precariousness of the condition of old people within their families, to urban migration. Large numbers of residents have left the Mangaldihi region over the past several decades—especially the better educated and the higher castes, who can find salaried jobs in the cities. In 1990, about 14 percent (or 243 out of a total population of 1,700) of those whom Mangaldihians themselves considered to be Mangaldihi residents actually lived most of the time away from “home,” returning from the city only periodically to attend major festivals, at harvest times to sell crops that had been cultivated by their sharecroppers, or to visit relatives remaining in the village. Although I knew of no families that abandoned their older members completely, in several cases sons left their parents alone for some years, usually until one spouse died.^[9] When that happened, the sons and their families would return to Mangaldihi for the elaborate funeral rituals and, after the funeral was over, take away the surviving parent, often arranging to have him or her shift from house to house among the various sons living in different cities. Such urban migration not only left some old people alone for long intervals but also left houses disturbingly empty. Friends and I would walk down village lanes and see homes boarded up, to be vitalized only once or twice a year by voices and the warmth of cooking fires. People would say, “How great our village used to be! Crowded with people at all times…” They did not like passing by those lonely homes.

Although women do not play much of a role in the largely de-gendered gerontological texts focused on the urban middle class, they figure prominently as agents of change in the rural men’s and women’s narratives I heard. Modern-day daughters-in-law, I was told, are better educated; they go out and get jobs, they are interested in makeup and movies, they desire their independence, and they are not willing to serve their husbands’ parents as daughters-in-law once did. The tellers of such stories are mainly old women (young women, of course, might applaud such changes), who are also portrayed as suffering the most from neglect by young women—and thus women become both the agents and victims of modernity. One middle-aged Mangaldihi woman, Bani, told me: “Our ‘joint families’ are becoming ruined (naṣṭa) and separate (pṛthak), because women have learned how to go out. They are irritated by all the household hassles.” An elderly widowed Kayastha woman similarly spoke of the role young women play in the decline of traditional values: “Back then, saṃsār (family life) was very pure (pabitra). Daughters-in-law kept their saris pulled up over their heads [a sign of modesty and deference to elders], and the young were devoted to and served the old.…In this age,” she went on, “daughters-in-law want their independence. They want to live separately (pṛthak).”

Susan Wadley finds that residents of the village of Karimpur, north India, express similar concerns about new household authority patterns and family separations in modern times, also blaming these in part on the daughter-in-law’s new demands (1994:236). This song was sung by a group of Brahman girls at a wedding, presumably with a degree of irony (p. 238):

	Mother-in-law, gone, gone is your rule,
	The age of the daughter-in-law has come.
	The mother-in-law spreads a bed,
	The daughter-in-law lies down.
	“Mother-in-law, please massage my feet.”
	The age of the daughter-in-law has come.

Patricia and Roger Jeffery (1996:161–62) hear similar voices: “Daughters-in-law used to be afraid of their mothers-in-law. We used to tremble with fear…These days, it’s the mother-in-law who fears the daughter-in-law.”

These contemporary rural critiques of modernity both recall and provide a revealing contrast with late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Bengali anticolonial nationalist discourses, which were gendered in parallel ways.^[10] In those earlier debates, Partha Chatterjee shows, women (and the home, family, religion) were represented as upholding a “traditional,” Indian spiritual inner domain, distinct from an increasingly “Western” material outer world. Nationalists asserted that although European power had relied on superior material culture in subjugating non-European peoples, it could not colonize the inner, essential identity of the East, which must be preserved in the home. He observes: “In the world, imitation of and adaptation to Western norms was a necessity; at home, they were tantamount to annihilation of one’s very identity” (1993:121). But a striking proportion of the literature on Bengali women in the nineteenth century concerned their threatened Westernization. Contemporary writers suggested that the “Westernized woman was fond of useless luxury and cared little for the well-being of the home” (p. 122). Even more damning, “A woman identified as Westernized…would invite the ascription of all that the ‘normal’ woman (mother/sister/wife/daughter) is not—brazen, avaricious, irreligious, sexually promiscuous” (p. 131). In Mangaldihi, remarkably similar discourses, though not as explicitly wrapped up with nationalist and countercolonial sentiments, still formed part of an overall narrative deploring recent changes and yearning for a more “traditional” Bengali past. In this past, women (young women)—as submissive and caring daughters-in-law, mothers, and wives—guaranteed close multigenerational families, the social-moral order, a good old age.

To be sure, we have little or no evidence that the past really was more perfect, harmonious, and filled with joint families, submissive young women, and venerated elders than the present is. In the abundant gerontological and sociological literature on the contemporary “problem” of aging in India, no baseline or longitudinal data have been presented to support the assertions of rampant joint-family decline (see Cohen 1992:132–35; L. Martin 1990:104–10; S. Vatuk 1991:263). In fact, one of the few longitudinal studies of family structure in India that we do have (Kolenda 1987b) shows that contrary to popular belief, the proportion of joint families in the village of Lonikand near Poona, at least, did not dwindle over the years but has increased from 29 percent in 1819 to 45.6 percent in 1967 (Reddy 1988:63). Data from another study of thirteen villages in Bihar (Biswas 1985:246) show that the proportion of men and women aged sixty and over living with sons remained relatively constant between 1960 and 1982, at about 80 percent (L. Martin 1990:107). As suggestive as they may be, neither of these small studies provides conclusive evidence about how the family in India either has or has not changed over time. It is therefore impossible to tell precisely if or how quickly the joint family is declining, or to what extent it ever did exist in the past as the “self-sufficient unit,…centre of universe for the whole family” (Gangrade 1988:27).

In addition, alarmist statements in the media about the increasing numbers of old people in India (and the subsequent inability of families and society to care for them) fail to take into account that most census studies show no dramatic change in the proportion of persons sixty and over in the Indian population, because fertility remains high (Cohen 1992:133; S. Vatuk 1991:264). Based on numbers alone, we cannot easily predict that there will be ever more old people in India with ever fewer young people available to care for them.

Yet despite their apparent lack of grounding in fact, such narratives of aging and modernity are pervasive and widely felt as persuasive. Arguably one must consider discourse about the degenerate ways of a modern society in the context of a general devolutionary outlook that permeates the thinking of many in West Bengal, and in India more widely. According to the well-known theory of the four yugas or ages, things get progressively worse rather than better as time passes. When this world first came into being many thousands of years ago, people lived in the Satya Yuga, the age of truth and goodness in which dharma or moral-religious order flourished. But ever since then, the social and material world has gradually deteriorated until, according to my informants, about five thousand years ago we entered the fourth and most degenerate of all ages, the Kali Yuga. In addition to stories about the worsening of family ties and the mistreatment of old people, I constantly heard tales of regret about other deteriorations: mangoes are not as large and sweet, cow’s milk does not flow as abundantly, trees do not provide as much shade, villagers do not share the same fellow feeling, people are no longer trustworthy and honest.

Such narratives of modern decline must also be placed in the historical context of colonialism, nationalism, and postcolonialism in Bengal. Partha Chatterjee scrutinizes Bengali narratives of modern decline and likewise asks: “Why is it the case that for more than a hundred years the foremost proponents of our modernity have been so vocal about the signs of social decline rather than progress?” (1997:203). To answer, he suggests, we must look at the interpenetration of modernity with the history of colonialism. He points out (p. 194) that the word ādhunik, in its modern Bengali sense of “modern,” was not in use in the nineteenth century. The term then employed was nabya (new)—the new that was explicitly linked to Western education and thought, the civilization inaugurated under English rule. Because of the way that the history of Bengali modernity has been intertwined with the history of colonialism, Chatterjee argues, Bengali attitudes toward modernity “cannot but be deeply ambiguous” (p. 204). He proposes that “At the opposite end from ‘these days’ marked by incompleteness and lack of fulfillment, we construct a picture of ‘those days’ when there was beauty, prosperity and a healthy sociability, and which was, above all, our own creation” (p. 210). These narratives of modernity impart a sense of a more true and beautiful, a morally superior, an “own” Indian or Bengali past, at the same time that they frame current social problems (some of which may also have existed long before today) as part of historically specific processes of change in a postcolonial and global era.

I will close this section with two narratives portraying visions of the deterioration of modern society, the changing constitution of persons and social relations, and the concomitant afflictions plaguing old people. The first is the story of a resident of one of the Navanir homes for the aged in Calcutta. This māsimā (or “maternal aunt,” as the home’s residents are called) was a woman who had never married, and whose numerous nephews and nieces born of her ten brothers and sisters refused to care for her. She said that people used to consider pisis, paternal aunts, close relatives but that they now treat pisis as par, “other,” and send them to old age homes. She blamed much of the change in her society on the introduction of Western-style “family planning” or birth control policies, which have reduced the size of families and contributed to a general decline in “family love” (saṃsārik bhālobāsā):

You in your country have “family planning” so there are only one or two children per family. But not us. Now, which system is better? I think our system is better. Because I heard that in your country old people become asahāy (helpless, solitary). But not so in our country, at least not before. The old people lived on their land in the villages. They would do pūjās (religious rituals), read the Gita, Mahabharata, and Ramayana. Their sons would serve them. But now with “family planning,” disaster has come. There’s no binding (bandhan) any more in the family. The sons become educated, get jobs, and take their wives with them to live. Who will look after the old people? That’s why I came here. No one thinks of anyone else any more. I’m still embarrassed to say that I live in a “home.” But what can I do? Who will look after me?…I’m saying that family planning is not good. Our hearts have become small. We used to feel a sense of duty toward our kākās, jeṭhās, ṭhākurdās (uncles and grandfathers). But we don’t even know the names of our relatives any more. One person is building a big house and another is going to an home. Affection and compassion (māyā-dayā) no longer exist like they did.

This woman failed to note the irony in her account: though she had ten brothers and sisters, reflecting a family before “family planning,” she still had no one to care for her in her old age. The culprits in her tale are not her family, however, but modernity and Westernization—penetrating into the inner sanctum of families through government-sponsored birth control programs.

My second example is a song that richly portrays a view of the manifold deteriorations of society in modern times, with particular attention to the disregard of elders and a general disintegration of family life. The song, titled “Modern Society” (“Ādhunik Samāj”), was composed in the 1980s by Ranjit Chitrakar, a paṭuyā singer and scroll painter of Medinipur District, West Bengal. Patuas were previously very popular in Bengal; they traveled from village to village singing narrative songs illustrated by their scrolls, called paṭs, and they sold these scrolls in the markets around Calcutta’s famous Kali temple at Kalighat.^[11] Their stories were traditionally drawn from Hindu mythology, but in the late nineteenth century they began also to provide critical and satirical commentary on features of contemporary society, like the newfangled English-educated bābu, or Bengali gentleman—or, as in this tale, the maltreatment of old people, the brazenness of women, and the misguided laws of the government in modern times. I heard and recorded this song in Calcutta in 1989; two of the paṭ illustrations that go with it appear below, on pages 98–99 (figures 5 and 6).

Figure 5. “Father and son's fight”. Paṭat illustration by Ranjit Chitrakar. A son and wife beat up his parents. Note how the senior couple is dressed in white. The daughter-in-law's eyeglasses are a sign of her “modernity”.

figure 6. “Get out of the road, sir! I'm going to the cinema!”. Paṭat illustration by Ranjit Chitrakar. A “modern” daughter-in-law, wearing slacks, eyeglasses, and a watch, embakrks brazenly on a motor scooter.

modern society

Listen, listen everyone carefully. Listen carefully to a song about Kali Yuga. When Kali is spoken of, the head is filled with embarrassment. It is only about people going to the cinema day and night.

When a groom goes to get married he looks for the best-looking bride. If her color is dirty or if she has squinty eyes, Snow-white powder is spread all over her dark body And kājal (eyeliner) is painted on her eyes to make them long and wide.

In the Satya Yuga people got married when they were over thirty. But in the dark Kali Yuga people are marrying before age sixteen. And when brides go to their husbands, they go with their heads uncovered and smiling.[12] They tell their husbands, “I want to go to the cinema with you.”

A twelve-year-old girl runs away with a little boy and has two children, And all the while the government is making laws about taking medicine [i.e., birth control pills]. And then there are old women of sixty years still wearing conch shell bracelets and vermilion,[13] Who leave their old husbands to find themselves a young groom.

Seeing the events of Kali Yuga, everyone’s head spins. The people of Kali Yuga don’t tell the truth, but only lies. The age is afflicted with the sins of going to cinemas. All of the practices of our land have become depraved. .….….….…. . .

The daughter-in-law rubs so many kinds of oil on her hair. But the old mother-in-law is left only to use the kerosene oil from the lamp. The daughter-in-law’s combed hair shines with oil in the mirror, While the old lady’s hair is tangled and bedraggled. The daughter-in-law sleeps on a high bed with three pillows, While the old lady lies on a board with a torn bedsheet. .….….….…. . .

In the Satya Yuga there used to be wealth in the fields, But in the dark Kali age the crops are ruined by sins. Seeing all these events, Laksmi is leaving people’s houses.[14] In the Kali Yuga everyone is eating rice separately out of separate cooking pots. And they steal from their fathers without feeding them rice.

There is a law from the government about abolishing low castes, And there is nothing to eat except wheat and flour.[15] As much as people sell and buy, that much prices are rising. And taxes are increasing steadily in each house.

There came a law from the government that widows can remarry. So now a mother of three or four sons says she must get married. She says, “I won’t live with my sons—what happiness do I have from them?” She dresses up again, with snow-white powder, soap, and shoes, and says, “I will go to my father’s house to look for a new groom.” And if the new husband has a sister or mother, they are just thorns in the road. .…. .

This song is over, but there is a lot more to say. I will write more, older brother, if I live. My name is Ranjit Chitrakar. My address is Medinipur.

This song captures the sense that prevails among rural and urban middle-class Bengalis of the incoherence and degeneration of modern society and the postcolonial state. This degeneration is manifest most starkly in the separations and reversals in intergenerational family relationships: new brides go boldly to their husbands and in-laws with their heads immodestly uncovered; old married women leave their husbands to find new, younger grooms; daughters-in-law treat themselves to luxuries while abandoning their mothers-in-law to torn sheets and unkempt hair; sons steal from their fathers without feeding them rice; and old widows leave their own sons to remarry, while throwing their new mothers-in-law into the road. Here again, women are painted as the primary agents, as well as the primary victims, of the present evils. The government is also held to account for fashioning laws that ostensibly aim to remedy social ills (abolishing caste, permitting widow remarriage) but that in fact result in increased poverty, chaos, and distress.

Three Lives

Though I have discussed consensus and contest in separate chapters, in the real exchanges of everyday life they do not exist in neat isolation. The very people who strove to sustain long-term relations across generations, and who stressed to me the “Bengali-ness” of their family ties (see chapter 2), also experienced distressing intergenerational conflicts and saw the modern postcolonial age as rife with such conflict. The following description of the ambiguities and nuances of the family lives of three elderly people in Mangaldihi provides a fitting conclusion for both aspects of my examination.

Khudi Thakrun

Khudi Thakrun was proud to be the oldest or most “increased” (bṛiddha) person in Mangaldihi. Nearing one hundred years old, her face was made of an intricate design of wrinkles, her white hair was cropped short in the style of old widows, and she roamed the village covered sparsely with a man’s white dhoti, with her loose breasts hanging low.^[16] She had one of the strongest, most willful characters in the village, which was perhaps intensified by her advanced age. She lived alternately in the separate homes of her three sons and bous, who cared for her attentively. She continued (unusually for someone of her age and sex) to maintain substantial control over her own money and land, and she still lent money and collected interest to increase her wealth, and to buy extra mangoes and sweets to satisfy her palate.

Khudi Thakrun was the only surviving and much-beloved child of her very wealthy Brahman father. Before she was born, her parents had had four sons and four daughters, all of whom died in infancy. So upon her birth, her mother had a Bagdi woman come to the birth room to buy her for a piece of broken puffed rice called khud; that is how she got her name Khudi (“little broken piece of puffed rice”). This act, she explains, enabled her to live.^[17] As an only child, she was greatly adored, and abundant good food and expensive clothing were lavished on her throughout her girlhood.

When Khudi was just eleven and it was time for her to marry, she told her parents that she refused to move away from them by marrying into another village. So her parents married her to a seventeen-year-old boy from Mangaldihi. Mukherjee, to whom she referred by his last name, was also from one of the larger and wealthier families in Mangaldihi. After Khudi Thakrun’s father died and she inherited all of his wealth (including acres of land, thirty ponds, a large house, and thousands of rupees), she became probably the wealthiest person in Mangaldihi, as well as a senior member of one of Mangaldihi’s largest and oldest families.

She and her husband themselves had several children who died in infancy before her first son, Gurusaday, survived. When he was born, she promised Syamcand, the dominant Krishna deity in the village, that she would give him a pure gold belt if her son lived. Gurusaday did survive, and the icon of Syamcand still wears that gold belt today. She later bore two more sons and three daughters, who all survived past infancy. After Khudi Thakrun and her husband gave their youngest daughter’s marriage when she was ten, Khudi Thakrun would not go near her husband or even speak to him out of fear that she would become pregnant again. But several years later she did become pregnant with another son; and when he was only ten days old, her husband died. Khudi Thakrun said that she herself was over fifty at the time.

When I met her over forty years later, she was being cared for by her three sons and their wives. Her daughters-in-law told me that she used to rule firmly over them, controlling every aspect of their household affairs. She would argue and even fight with them, and they were afraid of her. For several years after her husband died, she substantially controlled the family’s property and financial affairs. This is unusual for a widow in Mangaldihi, but Khudi Thakrun had grown up in many ways as her father’s son, and much of the family property was in her name. Her wealth to some extent transformed her gender.

But more recently she had lost a considerable amount of her power. Several years earlier, her three sons had become separate (pṛthak) and she transferred almost all of her property to them, keeping just a small bit of land in her name so that she could have some money to use for her own interests and thus maintain some independence. She still asked her sons about their financial matters—how the crops did every year, how many fish were in the ponds—but by and large she let them run things themselves. Her bous explained to me that she could no longer dominate their household affairs. The middle bou remarked: “She used to have so much power (śakti). But now what can she do? Even if she shouts at us, we don’t heed her too much. She can’t tell what we’re doing anyway, she has become so blind and deaf.” After the sons became separate, they decided to divide up the care of their strong-willed mother, as none of them wanted to be solely responsible for her. So Khudi Thakrun began a regimen of moving from house to house, spending four months out of the year with each son. All three houses were within a stone’s throw of each other.

I talked frequently with Khudi Thakrun, her sons, bous, and neighbors about her and her relationships with her family members. Khudi Thakrun never complained about the treatment she received from her juniors. She said that all of her sons and bous looked after and served her well, and she especially praised her middle bou for her excellent cooking and attentiveness, and her youngest grandson for his unusual devotion to her.

The juniors themselves, however, complained about her considerably. They seemed almost to dread the months that she would spend in their homes, for she was so demanding. She insisted on eating the best foods—particularly fruit, which is difficult to obtain and very expensive, and abundant quantities of milk. When she was at the house of her oldest son, Gurusaday, who was the poorest of the three brothers (the only one without a salaried job), her juniors complained that none of the other household members could have any milk, because she drank all that their two cows could supply. When she wanted something, such as tea, a snack, or mustard oil to put on her body, she demanded in her deep, raspy voice that it be brought instantly. Her middle bou threw up her hands in exasperation one day when I was visiting and exclaimed, “I can’t stand it any more! She’s so hard of hearing, she can’t even hear me when I tell her, ‘I’m coming, I’m coming!’” One aggravated bou told me once when Khudi Thakrun was staying at their house, “It’s not necessary to live as long as Ma. It’s past time for her to die.” Her oldest son would chastise and criticize his mother as well. When she would see me at his house talking with him, she sometimes tried to come over to sit by me, but her son would jump up, wave his walking stick at her, and yell, “Get away! Get away! This is no place for you!” and then turn to me and say, “What a difficult person! My mother is such a difficult person!”

But they were all concerned with dharma and believed strongly that serving Khudi Thakrun was an integral part of living correctly and upholding the moral-religious order of the world. Gurusaday would lecture me for hours on end about the importance of giving service and respectful devotion to elders as a preeminent form of Hindu dharma. Her middle bou added quickly after one critical outburst: “But we still feed her and give her respect. Otherwise our great sin (mahāpāp) would happen. It is our dharma to care for her.” The sons, wives, and grandchildren all did praṇām to her daily, demonstrating their respectful devotion and seeking her blessings.

It was perhaps their strong concern with fulfilling their duties to their elders, as well as their concern for the family reputation or “name” (nām), that caused Khudi Thakrun’s sons and bous such great irritation at her habit of roaming the village almost daily to seek out fruit and sweets from other people’s households. Whenever she got news that someone had come back from a trip or that some family’s relatives had arrived from another village, she would immediately pick up her walking stick and walk over to see what kind of delicious fruit or sweets had arrived. When local fruit began to ripen, she made regular visits to anyone who had trees—such as mango, banana, and kul (sour plum)—in their yards. She would commission people who worked in or visited cities to bring back treats for her, either giving them some of her own money to do so or simply asking them to give the treats to her. No one felt comfortable refusing her: because of her age, such refusal would be an act of disrespect, an act of adharma, which might result in a curse or slander. I myself quickly became one of her most favored sources of bananas and mangoes.

All of these requests for food made her sons look bad. A neighboring woman said to me once, “Such an old woman with three capable sons is still going around pestering others for food! Chi! Chi! An old woman with three sons like that is not supposed to ask others for things; her sons are supposed to give them to her.” The sons and their wives in fact did try to curtail her activities, but to little effect. When two of her grandsons and her middle daughter-in-law found out that she had asked me to bring her back a cotton bedsheet from Calcutta, they were furious at her. They called me over to find out if it was true and then scolded her: “Why are you asking some girl who has come here from a foreign country to give things to you? You have three sons. They can give things to you. You also have plenty of money of your own.”

In this case, an old woman’s sons and daughters-in-law strove sincerely to serve their aged mother attentively and to fulfill all her needs. They saw service to their mother as a moral and religious obligation, as well as important to maintaining their prestige in the community. But the mother herself had been very strong-willed and independent her whole life, and she was unwilling to become passive and peripheral, like most elders receiving care. Her wealth and determination both gave her a considerable amount of power over her children and allowed her to maintain independent ties with the world—neighbors, friends, debtors—that were not channeled through her kin, as people expected at her age and as her children would have liked. The family struggles over curtailing her transactions did not seem to bother her much, however; they primarily irritated and worried her sons and daughters-in-law.

Bhogi Bagdi

Bhogi Bagdi was an elderly Bagdi widow who had two sons but lived alone. The first time I met her, she was sitting at the edge of the path that ran in front of her small mud house, holding her head in her hands and moaning loudly. My companion Hena and I asked her what was wrong, and she answered plaintively, “My daughter died.” Hena countered, “That happened several months ago. Why are you crying now?” Bhogi answered that her bous had just been arguing with her, that she had no one who would feed her or look after her, and that she might as well just die right there on the path.

I soon learned that the path in front of her house was one of Bhogi’s favorite places to sit; I often found her there, moaning about her inconsiderate sons or chatting with and watching the various people go by. She was a short, sturdy woman who had grown quite stooped over the years. She kept her thin, white hair pulled back in a loose knot, and she dressed in old, plain white saris. She had very large, deep eyes that seemed to spill over with self-pity.

Her two sons lived with their wives and children in houses a few yards away from hers. They had become separate (pṛthak) several years earlier when her husband died and his meager landholdings were divided among them. The house that she lived in was still hers, and in another village she owned a bit of land that she had inherited from her father. Her daughter’s daughter looked after that land, and Bhogi was able to support herself—though just barely, she insisted—off its rice.

Bhogi’s constant lament was that her sons and bous did not look after her. Sometimes she blamed this neglect on her own bad fate, saying that she must now be suffering the fruits of her bad karma from previous births. But at other times she blamed her sons. Once, when I asked her why her sons did not look after her, she replied, “They want to have sex all the time with their wives and other girls. If I’m there, it’s inconvenient for them.” She also said that although her older son gave her a cup of tea every once in a while, her younger son gave her nothing, not even a drop of tea or a few kind words. “He’s even saying now that he’s not from my stomach, that he came up from the earth or something,” she added bitterly. She saw herself as someone who had no one. Tears would well in her eyes as she hung her head and said, “I have no one of my own.” One day when I asked if I could take her photo, she answered sarcastically: “Why do you want to take my photo? My sons won’t look at it. What would I do with it? Stuff it up my crotch?”

Bhogi’s daughters-in-law had a different story to tell. They told me that they tried every day to care for her; that they brought her cooked food, tea, and even an occasional sari; but she would only slander them, curse at them, and say that the food was no good. They explained that their śāśuṛī Bhogi, actually had a whole storehouse of rice, dal, tea, sugar, and salt that she had accumulated over the years from people’s donations to her and from her land, but she did not like to draw on her supplies. (Bhogi had also told me about her store of goods, which she said she was saving for the future when she may need them even more.) But that was one reason, her younger bou explained, that many people did not want to help Bhogi out: they knew she had so much, even more than they did. Furthermore, hoarding food instead of giving it away was considered to be inappropriate, greedy behavior, particularly at Bhogi’s age.

The bous claimed as well that Bhogi’s unruly personality, and her tendency to swear and scold, made her a very unpleasant person to care for. The younger bou said that sometimes her older sister-in-law chided her for continuing to try to feed their mother-in-law, saying, “You should just leave her alone. If she’s acting like this, then she doesn’t need us to care for her.” “But what can I do?” the younger bou asked, “I still feed her. She is my śāśuṛīi after all.”

Yet Bhogi seemed to find it important to deny that her sons and daughters-in-law wished to care for her. I once asked her if they ever brought her food and she admitted that sometimes they did, but added scornfully, “It’s just because they’re eyeing my house. They each have a greedy desire (lobh) for this house, and they think that if they feed me now, I’ll give it to them.” She insisted, though, that she would not leave the house to them: “I’ve already written that I will give it to my daughter’s daughter. She’s the only one who’s good to me. She’s the only one who loves me.” Many people like Bhogi seemed to consider daughters and granddaughters more “loving” than sons and daughters-in-law, perhaps because daughters were not thought to be acting out of obligation—they had none, as we have seen—but out of affection. This pattern reveals intriguing reversals surrounding daughters and their attachments to natal families: sentiments like Bhogi’s focused not on lineage (baṃśa) but on maya, affection.

On another occasion, Bhogi denied that her sons and bous tried to care for her at all. The following is an excerpt from our conversation:

Bhogi:

Ever since my daughter died, my life has been full of suffering (kaṣṭa). Even after my husband died, it wasn’t so bad, because I had my daughter to look after me. She fed me good things and loved me. But now I don’t have any-one. Ask anyone, and they’ll tell you that I have no one.

SL:

What about your two sons and bous?

Bhogi:

Oh, them. They don’t look after me at all, not a bit. They don’t even feed me a cup of tea.

SL:

Your younger bou told me that she does feed you, that she wants to feed you.

Bhogi:

No, they don’t do anything at all.

SL:

Where did you get this sari? [I continued to probe, noticing that she was wearing an unusually clean, new-looking sari that day.]

Bhogi:

This? Well, my older son and bou gave it to me at pūjā (festival) time. But I didn’t ask for it or anything. They just gave it—left it at my house. They didn’t hand it to me, they just left it there. What will I do? They left it, so I’ll wear it.

Just as villagers criticized Khudi Thakrun for asking other people for food when she had sons of her own, so neighbors would chastise Bhogi Bagdi for crying in front of others, trying to get their pity, when she had two sons. A neighboring Brahman woman, Bani, scolded her one day: “Don’t whine so much in front of others! Why should they give you tea and muṛi (parched rice) when you have two sons and bous of your own to feed you?”

Bhogi Bagdi was a woman who had almost cut off all transactions with others. She did not easily accept what was offered to her by her sons, nor did she give out her store of goods to them. She had no real relations of exchange with either her kin or with others, and her self-isolation on the extreme peripheries of family and village life complicated her old age. Although she had two sons and bous who lived right next to her, in many ways she was, as she claimed, a person with no one of her own.

Sekh Abdul Gani

Sekh Abdul Gani was a senior Muslim man who lived with his wife, four sons, two daughters-in-law, and several grandchildren. He had become blind several years before I met him, and he spent most of his time simply sitting in a clearing in front of his house, near where children played or men threshed rice, or within the inner courtyard of his home with his wife, daughters-in-law, and grandchildren. He lived in the one large Muslim neighborhood of Mangaldihi, at the northern end of the village.

When I first came upon him, he was sitting in the morning winter sun, leaning against a haystack in the clearing in front of his home. He had the long gray beard typical of older Muslim men, and his blank eyes gazed upward and outward beyond all the passersby, the earthen homes, and the tall, golden haystacks. I went over to talk with him, and he began to tell me a tale of woe, of how his fate was bad, his body had deteriorated, and his sons did not care for him. He said that he lived with his wife and that she gave him a little bit of rice, but that without her he would surely die. He moaned and struck his forehead with his hand, saying: “My fate is very bad. I have four sons but they don’t look after me. Neither do my bous. I can’t see with my eyes, and I have such problems with my feet and arms that I can hardly walk. When I get up, I keep falling down. But my sons, they don’t help me. They just say, ‘Tu more jā! (You die!).’ And their kids don’t help me either.”

In this retelling of his sons’ dismissal of him, he used the tui or tu form of “you.” This form of the Bengali second-person pronoun is usually reserved for addressing inferiors such as young children or servants, or for addressing intimate childhood friends. It is gravely insulting to address a parent, especially a father, as tui. Children usually call their fathers tumi (second-person equal) or occasionally, if their relationship is a formal one, āpni (second-person superior).

He then turned his head to face the small crowd of neighborhood children who had gathered behind me, and said, “You! You, Najrul’s daughter! Speak up! I know you’re there.” One girl sheepishly and reluctantly replied. The old man said to her, “See, here you are and I’m sitting here dying in the sun and you won’t even bring me a glass of water.” She squirmed a bit but did not say anything. He turned to me and said, “That’s my middle son’s daughter. See, no one looks after me. Only my wife gives me a little bit of rice.” He added that his sons argued with him all the time and did not listen to what he said. Such disrespect (asammān), he insisted, was possible only in these modern times. “I used to respect and be devoted to my parents so much,” he said. “But these days sons no longer pay attention to who is their guru (superior, respected person). They don’t have any respect for superiors. They don’t fear their elders. They don’t listen to their words. They used to listen. But not any more.”

The next time I went back to visit I was expecting to hear more of the old man’s complaints. But to my surprise, he seemed to be in an entirely different mood and portrayed his family relationships in an altogether new light. I asked him if his fate (bhāgya) was good or bad, and this time he answered: “Some good and some bad. From my second marriage [his first wife had left him without bearing any children], I had four sons and two daughters. This is my good luck. Now I am sick, but my sons are able to do the farming for me. If I didn’t have sons, I would have had to sell everything and just sit here. My luck is very good that I have four sons. And because of the sons, my baṃśa (family line) will remain. There will be a lot of baṃśa. We are all of one baṃśa, and my sons will be four parts.”

He proudly told me that his four sons all still lived and ate together with him and his wife, and that the responsibility for running the household was now in his oldest son’s hands. The old man himself had willingly passed on the responsibility of being head of the household (kartā) to his son many years earlier. He explained: “All the responsibility has been in my oldest son’s hands for about the past twenty to twenty-five years. That was after my son grew up and we gave his marriage. At that time my health wasn’t good. I had [high blood] ‘pressure’ [he used the English word] and I would make all sorts of mistakes. From then on, I told my son to look after everything.” When I asked him if his sons still argued with him a lot, he answered, “We both argue with each other, it’s not just that they argue with me. Arguing doesn’t happen alone. Just like clapping doesn’t take place with just one hand.” He seemed no longer to wish to blame his condition on his sons.

The old man alternated between complaining about and praising his juniors in this way for the rest of the time that I knew him. But during the few days before he died, he seemed pleased to have all of his needs attentively cared for by his juniors. I watched as his two daughters-in-law took turns by his side, massaging his feet and legs, changing his soiled bedsheets, and patiently spoon-feeding him water, tea, and small bits of cooked food. His wife, sons, and grandchildren stood and sat respectfully in the room around him. He told me the day before his death that he was happy to die surrounded by his family. He said, “Let my children be happy, and I will die.”

The structure of Sekh Abdul Gani’s family was exactly what most Bengalis believe families properly should be. He lived together with his sons, daughters-in-law, and grandchildren in the same household, eating the same food. He had already passed control over the household’s financial affairs to his oldest son, so he could rest without worry in his old age while his son pursued his own aims and supported the family as a householder. The old man died surrounded by his younger relatives, who could both care for him in his death and carry on his family line.

But these relationships were also accompanied by ongoing struggles and dissatisfaction. The old man saw himself at times as extended and cared for by his sons, and at times as neglected by them. The four sons for their part often complained, neighbors told me, of their irritation in having to listen to their decrepit father. But they were saddened by the loss when he died; and they also had to face the separation from each other as four fatherless brothers moved into separate households.

Notes