3
On the Uses of Irony and Ambiguity: Shifting Perspectives on Patriliny and Women's Ties to Natal Kin

In rural Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, ideas about sexuality are linked in important ways to kinship ideologies and relations of power within the family. Women's sexuality may be viewed as dangerous and destructive in male expressive traditions and in many ordinary conversations partly because of the perceived threat that sexual bonds between men and women pose to the solidarity of males within the patrilineal household. Throughout her life in her husband's home, a woman may continue to be viewed as an outsider who poses a potent threat to the unity of that household. The same devaluations of female sexuality that are found in so many textual traditions may be used, in everyday speech, to limit the effects that strong conjugal bonds would have on the power of senior over junior men, the power of men over women, and the power of older women over younger brides. As women sing, as they do both in Rajasthan and in Uttar Pradesh, of the powers and pleasures of sexuality, and of a felicitous merging of eroticism and fertility, they are at least implicitly challenging those lines of power within North Indian kinship.

Powerful sexual and conjugal bonds may be viewed as dangerous, and wives may be seen as potentially disruptive of male solidarity, yet women are also said to become irrevocably "other" and "alien" (parayi ) to their natal kin as they marry and move, often at a great distance, to the villages of their husbands. The words of women's songs frequently reflect on this fact, that there may be no place that women may truly call "one's own home" (apna ghar ). But as they speak of this conundrum, they do so not in a unified, monolithic, or homogeneous female voice, but from the varied positionings of sister, daughter, and wife. Women speaking as

sisters and daughters construct the relationship between natal place and conjugal place very differently from women speaking as wives, yet both perspectives are compelling and critical commentaries on some of the dominant conventions of the North Indian patrilineal discourse on marriage, gender, and authority.

This chapter focuses primarily on women's ties to their natal kin and on women's perspectives as daughters and sisters; the words of women speaking as wives and as daughters-in-law will be heard in chapter 4. I present here ethnographic observations on three interrelated sets of phenomena. First, I discuss gift giving between a woman and her natal kin, and the varying ways in which gifts and intentions are read by the recipients and the donors (a woman's brothers and her parents), and by women as sisters and women as wives. Second, I examine the ways in which several genres of women's ritual songs constitute a reflexive and often ironic commentary on pervasive cultural assumptions about a woman's natal ties, and the contradictory perspectives on natal ties voiced by daughters and sisters, on the one hand, and wives, on the other. I suggest that these songs constitute a powerful example of what Hayden White might call a "metatropological" form in which we find self-conscious and reflexive attempts to evaluate the experiential adequacy of a set of cultural tropes, of cultural frames of reference for interpreting social relationships, specifically, here, women's ties to their natal kin. Third, I discuss a number of cases of "double relationships," in which ties within a village can be traced in more than one way, through alternate genealogical links, and I examine the uses women make of the ambiguities embedded in the variant readings of these relationships, and the strategies through which a woman is able to use these genealogical ambiguities to redefine her position in her conjugal village, her sasural .

Daughters as "Other," Daughters as "One's Own": on the Ambiguities of the Gift

Throughout northern India, marriage is spoken of as a kanya dan (gift of a virgin), the unreciprocated gifting away of a daughter along with lavish gifts for herself and for the people of her sasural , her husband's house. She is given away in the course of a com-

plex set of ritual actions that are in part designed to effect her transformation from "one's own" (apni ) to her natal kin to "other" (dusri ) and "alien" (parayi ) to them. The woman is often said to undergo a transformation at the wedding, in which she becomes the "half-body" of her husband, of one substance with him. His kinsmen become her own kinsmen, and her ties with her own natal kin are transformed as well; people in Pahansu say that unmarried girls share a "bodily connection" (sarir ka sambandh ) with their natal kin, but that after marriage there is only a "relationship" (rista ).^[1] Thomas Trautmann has summarized this aspect of the North Indian ideology of marriage:

Kanyadana entails several consequences. . . . The bride is . . . by gift marriage conceptually assimilated to her husband, constituting his other half (aparardha ) and so rendering him complete and capable of rendering sacrifice. From her natal kinsmen's point of view she is given away (pratta ). The conception is inextricably patrilineal; all junior female kin may be classed either as born in the lineage (gotraja, kulaja ), subclassified into those who have or have not yet been given away in marriage (pratta/apratta ), or as in-marrying "brides of the lineage" (kulavadhu ). The bride acquires the gotra of her husband upon marriage, and upon death is offered the pinda by his kinsmen. The idiom of kanyadana is the patrilineal idiom of complete dissimilation of the bride from her family of birth and her complete assimilation to that of her husband.
(Trautmann 1981:291)

This particular set of cultural propositions about patriliny, gift giving, and marriage has played a critical role in anthropological understandings of kinship and social life in South Asia. Ronald Inden and Ralph Nicholas (1977), for example, write that the bodily transformation of the Bengali wife is such that the people with whom her husband has a "shared body" relationship (jnati ) become her jnati , and the people with whom her husband has a relationship defined by the gifting appropriate to relatives through marriage (his kutumba relations) become her kutumba relatives. This includes her own natal family; after her marriage, she is said to have only a "residual jnati " or a kutumba relationship

[1] This term rista , "relationship," is not used in connection with relationships within a "lineage" (kunba ); it is used to characterize only relationships through marriage. Thus a woman's relationship with her own natal kin is characterized, from this perspective, in the same way as a relationship through marriage.

with them, just as in Pahansu a woman's natal kin may say that they have only a rista connection with a married daughter or sister.

The analyses set forth by Trautmann, Inden and Nicholas, and others (e.g., Gough 1956: 841-42; Madan 1962) concerning the transfer of a woman from one kin group to another are seemingly predicated upon an understanding of culture as univocally rather than multiply voiced. Discerning a discourse concerned with women's transformed identities, they proceed with their analyses as though this discourse exhausts North Indian representational possibilities concerning kinship, marriage, and exchange, and as though the perspectives of both men and women may be interpreted in terms of this single set of cultural propositions.

The arguments of Trautmann and Inden and Nicholas are grounded largely in textual analyses, yet ideas about the alienation of the bride from her natal kin are not confined to Sanskrit texts or esoteric ritual. In their study based on fieldwork in rural Bijnor district in Uttar Pradesh, Jeffery, Jeffery, and Lyon stress the importance of a woman's continuing ties to natal kin in her resistance to the authority of her husband's kin, and the ways in which the ideology of a bride's necessary alienation from her brothers and parents and her incorporation into her husband's kin group may be invoked in order to limit her contacts with natal kin and to curtail such resistance (1989: 31-36). Men in Bijnor say, for example, that there will be too much "interference" if a woman visits her natal village too frequently or if marriages are arranged at too close a distance in the first place. The ideology of alienation from natal kin thus moves from the realm of a purely textual discourse to the realm of power relations in the conjugal village. Similarly, in the Uttarakhand region of northern India, men are apt to reject the idea of a woman's continuing relationship with natal kin because to acknowledge it would be to weaken their own power over their wives (Sax 1991: 77-78). And so, women's ironic commentaries on this discourse of alienation, voiced in song, are also commentaries on the power relations that frame their lives.

The discussion in this chapter builds on the observations of Jacobson (1977a), Sylvia Vatuk (1975), and Leela Dube (1988) on women's ties to natal kin and follows their analyses of the limits

of "partiliny" in rural North India.^[2] Jacobson argues that structural analyses of the patrilineal and patrilocal aspects of North Indian kinship, and interpretations that stress the completeness of the transfer of a woman from natal to conjugal kin, overlook the complexity of a woman's kinship relations. Though, she maintains, much of the ritual and ideology of rural North India does indeed stress patrilineality and the priority of a woman's ties to her husband's kin, many less formalized though no less important ideas and practices, such as extended visiting at the natal village, demonstrate the permanence of a woman's ties to parents and brothers. Vatuk's explicit critique of the emphasis on the lineal, corporate nature of North Indian kinship includes the argument that the "unbreakable bond" between a woman and her natal kin is related to the latter's obligation to supply her with gifts that ensure her security in her husband's home. Dube, in her discussion of the production of women as gendered subjects in the Indian patrilineal milieu, points out that certain contradictions within the kinship system produce an ambiguity surrounding women's transferal from natal home to conjugal home. While the lifelong tie between brothers and sisters is emphasized in ritual and everyday talk, young girls are nonetheless prepared for life in the husband's home by being told that a woman should be like water, which, having no shape of its own, can take the shape of the vessel into which it is poured, or that she should be like soft and malleable clay, which has no form until it is worked into shape by the potter. Thus, on the one hand, ritual perpetuates ties with natal kin, while, on the other, women are in some ways expected, as Dube notes, to discard their loyalties to natal kin, to be formed and shaped anew in the husband's family. It is women's experience of just this sort of ambiguity, their own reconstructions of it, and the uses to which these are put in women's everyday lives that is the focus of the present chapter.^[3]

[2] Jack Goody (1990:222-28) has also cautioned against the assumption that a woman's ties to her natal kin in North India are eclipsed by her being "gifted" to her husband and his kin group, citing as evidence the importance of ritual celebrations of the brother-sister tie, and Maharashtrian marriage songs published by Karve (1965). He also discusses the dowry as a female endowment of parental property. I do not follow him, however, in viewing the dowry as primarily a "gift to her [the bride], to the conjugal estate and to its heirs" (see Raheja n.d. [forthcoming]).

[3] Sax (1991) has recently examined the way in which women's ties to their natal villages are represented in a major Himalayan pilgrimage. He persuasively argues that the rituals associated with the pilgrimage to Nandadevi affirm, for women at least, the persistence of their links to their natal place. Yet he concludes that "by participating in the rituals of Nandadevi, women in Uttarakhand help to reproduce the system of social relations that keep them in a subordinate position. They do so because the rituals offer something to them, a partial remedy for their frustration at being forcibly separated from, and public affirmation of their enduring links to, their natal places" (206). Sax sees in ritual and song women's complicity, and little possibility of actual resistance to structures of power in North Indian kinship relations.

Much of this ambiguity is lodged in concerns about the gifts given by natal kin to daughters and sisters. A woman's life, beginning with her birth, is permeated by concerns about this gift giving and the valuation of kinship ties that is communicated therein. When a son is born in rural North India, for six consecutive nights women gather in the courtyard of the house in which the birth has taken place to sing byai git , songs celebrating the auspicious birth of a son and the happiness of the new mother. When a daughter is born, the courtyards are dark and silent at night, and when they learn of the birth of a girl, women inevitably murmur sorrowfully that "it is a matter of fate," or they signal their acceptance of the fortune that has been meted out by saying simply, "Whatever God has given has been given."

There are many reasons why sons are desired in North India, reasons connected with both land inheritance and soteriological goals. But the chief reason that the birth of a daughter brings sorrow to a house, and the reason why, according to village women, songs are not sung at the birth of a daughter, is the anticipation that "it will be necessary to give much in dowry." Such apprehension is voiced in a number of Hindi proverbs. When, for example, a family is straining its resources or perhaps going into debt to provide an adequate dowry, a neighbor or kinsman may comment, "Without a daughter, without a daughter's husband, one enjoys what one earns" (dhi na dhiyana ap hi kamana ap hi khana ). Yet, at the same time, kanya dan , the unreciprocated gifting away of a daughter along with substantial amounts of jewelry, cloth, brass cooking vessels, cash, and other items, has such significant ritual and social consequences that most people say it is important that each married couple have at least one daughter to be given in marriage. And though there may be little joy at the

birth of a daughter, there is also a recognition of the irony that though a daughter's birth may bring sorrow, her departure from her parent's home when she marries is equally sorrowful. This double-edged grief and its ironies are expressed in another Hindi proverb: "One has to fulfill one's responsibilities toward a valued daughter; there is sorrow at her birth and sorrow when she goes away" (beti ka dhan nibhana hai ate bhi rulaye jate bhi rulaye ). Women's concerns about gift giving frequently center on their experiences of these seemingly contradictory perspectives on marriage prestations, and on their experiences of the shifting emotional valences of ties with daughters and sisters, to whom gifts must be given. In addition, because married women assume the gift-giving obligations of their husbands, and because they almost always arrange for the gift giving to their husbands' sisters, their concerns center also on women's experiences as givers, as well as recipients, of such gifts. I will suggest that women's understandings of the persistence of natal ties are multiple and shifting, and that their polyphonic discourse on relations to natal kin and conjugal kin are voiced largely in talk about giving and receiving, from their double positioning as both sisters and wives.

Though there are numerous ritually prescribed occasions on which gifts to daughters and sisters must be given, and numerous culturally elaborated rights and obligations implicated in acts of giving and receiving, the pattern of exchange in rural North India is not understandable simply as the rule-governed unfolding of a systematic code or the enactment of unambiguous cultural premises. Each potential act of giving is always subject to multiple strategic possibilities concerning, for example, the quality and quantity of items to be given, whether the gift is presented through an intermediary or by the donor himself, whether the donor gives freely or only after much expedient calculation of his own interests and prerogatives, and the relationship of the gift in question to the whole history of gift giving engaged in by the parties to the exchange.

As daughters and sisters, women are the primary recipients of many kinds of prestations, and they are the conduits of prestations flowing between affinally related households. Preparations for this gift giving begin long before the search for a groom is even thought of, as mothers begin to purchase cloth that will be

given in their daughter's dowry, as girls begin to sew quilts and items of clothing they will take with them to their conjugal village, and as fathers begin to amass the cash and jewelry that must accompany the bride when she is given in kanya dan . The Hindi term dahej , meaning "dowry," refers not just to the gifts given at the marriage ritual but also to the many prestations that are given to the bride and her husband's kin for many years thereafter. Apart from these ritually significant gifts, daughters also have the "right" (hak ), throughout their lives, to expect numerous other prestations whenever they visit their natal village or whenever a brother or other man from their natal village visits their conjugal village, and it is often in terms of the quantity and quality of these latter gifts that daughters and sisters gauge the degree of love, affection, and "unity" (mel ) with which they are regarded by their natal kin. Because kinship relations in northern India are so frequently defined in terms of the kind of giving and receiving appropriate to them (Eglar 1960; Inden and Nicholas 1977; Raheja 1988b), and because all of these gifts are subject to strategic manipulation and multiple interpretation as to purpose and motive, women see their relationships with their natal kin as always shifting and fluid, and they are poignantly aware that the tie they regard as being closer than any other may at times represent, for the brother, only one among many onerous obligations.

Many of the gifts given to daughters and sisters at marriage and on other ritual occasions are referred to as dan . This term is used to refer to prestations given to many kinds of recipients and in many different ritual contexts. Such gifts are given, villagers say, "to move away inauspiciousness" (nasubh hatane ke lie ) from the donor and transfer it to the recipient, who is thought of as a "receptacle" (patra ) for the inauspiciousness contained within the gift.^[4]Nasubh is the most inclusive term used in Pahansu to refer to a range of negative qualities and substances that may take the form of "hindrances" (badha ), "faults" (dos ), "afflictions" (kast ), "disease" (rog ), "danger" (sankat ), or "evil" (pap ). Such inauspi-

[4] Gujars in Pahansu, concerned as they are with their image of themselves as givers of dan and as guardians of the well-being of the village, frequently said to me that "all dan " is given to remove inauspiciousness, as if to assert that they were unconcerned with issues of prestige that are connected with such gift giving. They do concede, however, that some dan , like that given to the local Gujar college or to religious institutions, does not have this ritual function.

ciousness may afflict persons, houses, and villages at many times in the yearly cycle and at many times in the course of one's life, and each time it must be "moved away" by being gifted to an appropriate recipient if well-being is to be achieved. The recipient of such gifts is said to "take the afflictions" (kast lena ) of the donor upon himself. If the gift is given to an appropriate recipient in the course of proper ritual actions, the inauspiciousness will be "digested" (pachna ) by the recipient, with the consequence that his tej , his internal "fiery energy," will be diminished. But if it is not properly digested, more overtly deleterious consequences will follow: disease will afflict him, he may become "mad" (pagal ), his family and lineage will decline, his intellect will be ruined, and "sin" and "evil" (pap ) will beset him.

The acceptance of such gifts is obviously dangerous and problematic. Why then would anyone be willing to accept a role as "receptacle" for such inauspiciousness? While one may in fact occasionally encounter cases in which a potential recipient refuses to be involved in such a perilous undertaking, a person is usually able to refuse to accept only if he is prepared to disavow other aspects of giving and receiving in village life and is prepared to isolate himself from his kinsmen or his fellow villagers. It is said to be the "right" (hak ) of the donor to give, and the "appropriate obligation" (pharmaya ) of the recipient to accept dan and the inauspiciousness it contains; because such obligations are part of the very fabric of village ritual and social life, they cannot be circumvented without unraveling other aspects of kinship and intercaste relationships that involve not "obligations" but rights to receive, and rights to give in turn to yet other recipients. In addition, because dan prestations generally consist of cloth, foodstuffs, jewelry, or quantities of agricultural produce of considerable value, it is also often economically difficult to refuse to accept. Finally, while the greatest "prestige" (izzat ) accrues to one who gives munificently, one's prestige is also augmented when the items received in dan are of such quantity and quality that they elicit favorable comment from one's kinsmen and neighbors.

The giving of kanya dan , then, removes "evil" (pap ) and "danger" (sankat ) from the family of the donor. It brings the greatest danger, villagers say, if a daughter remains in her father's house after she attains marriageable age. She must be given in dan be-

remain in her natal home would generate inauspiciousness and misfortune, and of course because of the ever-present fear of sexual transgressions that would adversely affect the izzat (honor) of her natal family. Inauspiciousness is transferred to the groom and his family through their acceptance of the kanya dan and the many prestations that follow. This idea appears to have a very long history in Indic texts. In a hymn from tile Rig Veda describing the marriage of Surya, the daughter of the sun, and Soma (verses of which are used in marriage rituals even today), there is a similar inauspiciousness attached to the blood of defloration. The marriage gown on which the stain of blood appears causes the bride's own family to prosper, but her husband's family is "bound in the bonds," and her husband himself may become "ugly and sinisterly pale" if he comes into contact with it. "It [the blood] burns, it bites, it has claws, as dangerous as poison is to eat." Some of the inauspiciousness involved in the acceptance of the kanya dan is, in Pahansu, passed on to the groom's family Brahman priest, and this is the case in the Vedic hymn as well: "Throw away the gown, and distribute wealth to the priests. It becomes a magic spirit walking on feet, and like the wife it draws near the husband. . . . Only the priest who knows the Surya hymn is able to receive the marriage gown."^[5]

This notion that the acceptance of a bride involves the acceptance of evil as well is unambiguously articulated in the Sanskrit verses that are recited at every wedding ritual, and much of the ritual is, in Pahansu, structured around this central concern. The first ritual act in the long sequence of marriage rites, for example, is the sagai , the betrothal ceremony at which a "letter" (chitthi ) formally opening the sequence of dan prestations and formally announcing the astrologically auspicious date for the kanya dan is given by the bride's family to the groom. This chitthi embodies both the auspicious and life-affirming aspects of the marriage gifts as well as the inauspiciousness that is transferred to the groom. The letter, which has been prepared by the Brahman priest who serves the bride's family, and which may be opened only by the groom's priest, is daubed with auspicious turmeric and rice, and it is marked with other auspicious signs. But it also

[5] These quotations from the Rig Veda are from the translation by O'Flaherty (1981).

contains 1¼ rupees, a ritually significant sum that is often utilized in transferals of inauspiciousness. Before the groom may safely accept this initial gift, he must be seated just outside his house upon a ritual design called takkarpurat (protection from harm), which absorbs some of the inauspiciousness and transfers it onward to the family Barber who accepts the flour from which the design was made as dan . The Barber also receives coins that are circled over the groom's head by the men of his family, and these coins too remove some of the harmful qualities that accompany the chitthi . But still the letter may not be opened. The Barber's wife has meanwhile drawn another takkarpurat design in the courtyard of the groom's house. Carrying the letter in the end of his shawl, the groom stands over this design while the women of his house and his neighborhood circle dishes of grain over his head. This grain, along with the flour from this second takkarpurat , is then given to the Barber's wife as dan , again for the protection of the groom. It is only after these two sets of protective actions have been performed that the letter may be opened. The 1¼ rupees are taken out of the letter and kept in the groom's house. Because of the inauspiciousness that it contains, the money may not be spent or otherwise used by the family. It is kept in a large clay pot for four or five years, after which it is usually given again in the chitthi of a sister of the groom, or if it is a silver rupee, it may be melted down and fashioned into an ornament to be given in dan at the time of her wedding. Inauspiciousness is thus dislodged from the house in which the silver had been kept, and "given onward" (age dena ) to the people who in turn receive a bride.

This theme of the dangers inherent in the acceptance of dan from the bride's natal family recurs throughout the course of the many rituals connected with marriage and a woman's first years in her conjugal home. The most important rite in this protracted series of performances and giftings is the phera , the "circling" of the fire by the bride and groom that definitively transfers the bride from natal to conjugal kin. The phera takes place in the courtyard of the bride's house. The priests of the bride's family and of the groom's, men from both sides, and the groom himself are seated around the place where the sacrificial fire will be lit. After some preliminary worship of the deifies established at the

site, and the ceremonial welcome of the groom by the bride's father, dan is offered to the groom: a small sum of money that in fact signifies all of the gifts that will later be bestowed upon him is given as gau dan (the gift of a cow). Immediately upon receiving this gift from the bride's father, the groom gives a portion of this money onward as dan to his own Brahman purohit (family priest). The Sanskrit verse spoken by the groom at this time indicates that this dan is given to the priest "to remove the faults caused by the acceptance of a cow" (gau pratigraha dosa nivaranartham ). The sacrificial fire is then lit, and the bride's mother's brother leads the bride herself, very heavily veiled, into the courtyard and seats her at the side of the groom. The bride's father or the oldest man of her family recites the Sanskrit "resolution" (sankalp ) for the giving of kanya dan . In this resolution the groom is addressed as sarmanne var (protecting groom) because of his role as recipient of dan from the bride's family. The groom pronounces that the gift has been received, and he says to the bride's father, in Hindi, "May auspiciousness be yours" (tumhara kalyan ho ), thus indicating that the giving of kanya dan assures the well-being of the donor. Immediately following his acceptance of the kanya dan , the groom himself makes a resolution for the giving of a gau dan to his Brahman purohit . The resolution pronounces that this dan is given "to remove the faults caused by the acceptance of a wife" (bharyya pratigraha dosa nivaranartham ). A sum of money is given as dan to the priest, and he is said to be one who "protects" the groom from some of the dangers involved, just as the priest in the Rig Vedic hymn receives the bloodstained bridal gown in order to protect the husband from its evil.

The phera rite not only confers this dan upon the groom; in the course of the ritual the bride's relationship with her natal kin is also transformed. Before she is gifted away, she is "one's own" (apni ) to her natal kin, and she has a "bodily connection" (sarir ka sambandh ) with them. Just after the groom accepts the kanya dan , the bride's mother's brother provides a piece of white cloth called a kanjol , measuring 1¼ gaj . The end of the bride's shawl is tied to the clothes of the groom with this cloth, and small stalks of grass, a few grains of rice, and a coin are tied in the knot of the kanjol . This cloth remains tied to the bride's clothing for several days. It may not be kept in the house after that, because of the

inauspiciousness it contains; it is given to the purohit of the groom's family, in order to transfer the danger to him. The Sanskrit verses recited by the bride's family priest as the kanjol is tied affirm that this action is done "to protect the two masters" (i.e., the bride and the groom) from any inauspiciousness that would affect their future offspring, their wealth, or longevity, inauspiciousness that is generated because of the joining together of the bride and the groom. The tying of the kanjol both unites them and contains the negative qualities thereby set loose. After this tying together of the bride and the groom, and the circling of the sacrificial fire that follows, the bride is no longer "one's own" to her natal kin. People say that she is now "alien" (parayi ) to them and "of another house" (begane ghar ki ), and though she will always have a "relationship" (rista ), she no longer shares a "bodily connection" with them.

Because she is "alien" to her natal kin, the bride is now deemed to be an appropriate recipient herself of dan prestations from them, for only one who "goes away to another house" can take away the inauspiciousness conveyed in the gift. She will return frequently to her pihar , her natal village, throughout the course of her life, and on many of these occasions, she will be the "appropriate recipient" of prestations that ensure the well-being and auspiciousness of her brothers and their children. It will be her "obligation" to accept these gifts when sons are born to her brother, when his sons marry, and at certain times in her own life when inauspiciousness may afflict her brother (such as the death of her husband or when the first tooth of one of her own children appears in the upper rather than the lower jaw), and at a number of calendrical rituals observed by married women for the protection of their brothers.^[6]

Such then are the meanings of dan as they are inscribed in the marriage ritual itself. This set of meanings enters explicitly into actors' intentionality as gifts are given to married daughters and sisters and their husbands; when they are asked why they give dan , people inevitably reply that it is given "for one's own well-being achieved through gift giving" (apne khair-khairat ke maro ) or

[6] See Raheja 1988b:176-78, Peterson 1988, and Reynolds 1988 for descriptions of these rituals for brothers. Raheja (1988, 1989) provides detailed analyses of many kinds of dan prestations in Pahansu.

"to move away inauspiciousness" (nasubh hatane ke lie ). In such contexts, villagers always point out that it is the "right" of the donor to give dan , and the "obligation" of the recipient to accept. When speaking of these gifts, they frequently comment on the aptness of the proverb "Daughter, daughter's husband, and daughter's son, these three are not one's own" (dhi jamai bhanja ye tinon nahin apna ); only one who is not "one's own" is a fit recipient of dan and the inauspiciousness it conveys.

The "obligation" of the recipient to accept dan is sometimes represented as begging, because it is said that those who accept dan must take whatever is offered, and this dependency is viewed in the same light as beggary. When the groom is given the cash, jewelry, brass vessels, bedding, and other items of the dahej , he must accept them in the palla , the end of his shawl. When he spreads it out to receive dan , this gesture is called "spreading out the begging bag" (jholi pasarna ). People in Pahansu often comment that it is for this reason too that though they may want to receive the many items given in the dowry, there is nonetheless a certain hesitancy, a certain ambivalence, about its acceptance; "Dan should go from the house," they say.

Giving generously without regard to what one receives is also crucial in maintaining and augmenting one's izzat (prestige) in the village and among one's kinsmen.^[7] Several days before a wedding or other gift-giving occasion, the items to be given (especially the pieces of cloth) are laid out on cots in the courtyard of the donor so that kinswomen and neighbors may inspect and evaluate them. The donor's prestige is enhanced if the quality and the quantity of the cloth to be given are viewed favorably. The procedure is repeated in the village of the recipient. When a married woman returns to her conjugal village after a trip to her natal village, the sets of cloth she has brought will be examined and appraised by the women of the village, and criticism and abuse will not be spared if the gifts are judged inferior.

Reluctance to give and niggardliness in giving open one to serious moral reproach. When I went to Pahansu for my second period of field research, accompanied by my two children, a number of women proposed with mock seriousness to find a potential

[7] For an extensive discussion of izzat and gift giving in a South Asian Muslim community, much of which is relevant to Hindu practice, see Eglar 1960.

groom for my eighteen-month-old daughter among their own relations. In one such situation, I took up their bantering tone and replied that I would certainly avoid such a marriage in India, in order to circumvent the necessity of providing the large dowry that would be expected. At this remark, the whole tenor of our conversation changed abruptly. The levity and merriment subsided immediately, and I was severely chastised for exhibiting such a disinclination to give to my own daughter and her future husband. One woman said to me in all seriousness, with horrified bewilderment in her voice, that she hadn't known before that I was so greedy for money. My protestation that I was "only joking" was not, I'm afraid, terribly persuasive in the face of my overtly mercenary and grudging asseveration.

Though it provokes gossip and moral censure, there are nonetheless instances in which reluctance to give or begrudging calculations are evident in a person's attitudes and behavior. And though one gives for one's own well-being and auspiciousness, though unstinting and munificent giving enhances one's izzat and social position in the village, men and women may sometimes judge carefully and weigh the izzat to be gained against the costs of giving. Late one morning I was squatting at the threshold of her house with Asikaur, a village woman of a prominent and prosperous family, scrutinizing the wares of an itinerant cloth seller as she prepared to purchase cloth that would be given in dan prestations to two of her married daughters, Premo and Santosh. Asikaur finally made her purchases and took the cloth into the courtyard of the house, where her son Jabar Singh was eating his lunch. An argument instantly broke out between them and lasted nearly an hour. Jabar Singh was shouting that all of this giving and receiving was a custom of the "old times" and should be curtailed. Just as vehemently, Asikaur declared that "there are four brothers and four sisters [Asi had eight children, by then all married], and so there is the right to take and give" (char bhai hain aur char bahanen to lene dene ka hak hai ), and that one "must maintain one's prestige" (izzat rakhna parega ) by giving to one's daughters and sisters and to their children. At that, Jabar Singh stood up, threw the remains of his lunch on the floor, and with all the magisterial authority of a man pronouncing a hoary and apodictic proverb composed the following utterance:

If it weren't for daughters, you would enjoy your life;
if it weren't for us [the four brothers], you would be destroyed.

betiyan nahin hotin to tera mauj ;
ham nahin hote to tera nas .

With that he stormed out of the courtyard. Premo, one of the sisters to whom the cloth in question was to be given, was visiting Pahansu, and she was sitting in the courtyard in tears as Jabar Singh and his mother wrangled over the prerogatives and responsibilities of brothers and sisters. Asikaur too was visibly shaken at the harsh words spoken by Jabar Singh concerning the gifts to be given to his sisters. But eight days later, Asikaur's younger son delivered five sets of cloth to Santosh in her conjugal village; and two months later, returning to her husband's house, Premo took twenty sets of cloth, including those purchased from the cloth seller that day.^[8]

Premo is not a woman given easily to tears, but her distress at hearing her brother's words was intense. While men most often invoke issues of izzat , the dependency of recipients and the economic responsibilities of donors, and the ritual efficacies of giving dan , women, speaking as sisters, tend more frequently to speak of ritual efficacies, on the one hand, and of the "love" (mohabbat ), "affection" (mamta ), and unity or "mixture" (mel ) between brother and sister, on the other, as the primary considerations in gift giving. Thus, while Jabar Singh spoke of the money that he saw as being squandered on cloth that was destined, in all likelihood, to be "given onward" in further cycles of gift giving, from Premo's perspective his outburst represented a repudiation of the emotional tie with his sisters, a tie that sisters often value above all others.

The overwhelming significance of a woman's ties to her brothers is evident in numerous ways in North India. In contrast to the image of alienation from brothers entailed in the notion

[8] I have recounted this anecdote elsewhere (Raheja 1988b:238-39), in. a discussion of the connection between concerns about izzat and the giving and receiving of gifts. At the time that account was written, I was little concerned with women's reimaginings of kinship relations, and so I wrote nothing there of how women might respond critically to the sort of denial of the importance of women's continuing ties to their natal kin that Jabar Singh so eloquently made. The sets of cloth that Premo and Santosh took with them included both dan prestations and those given in vada , to be described below.

that married women do not share a "bodily connection" with their natal kin, married women frequently bear tattoos of their brothers' names upon their arms. Those names are thus irrevocably inscribed upon their bodies, though the substances of those bodies, from one perspective, are said to intermingle no longer with those of the brothers and other natal kin.

The importance of ties to brothers is also evident in the blessing recited by senior women of the conjugal village when junior daughters-in-law of the village perform the deferential act of massaging the senior women's legs. The senior women murmur, "May your husband live long, may your brother live long, and may God give you a son" (sai jite raho bhai jite raho beta de bhagvan ). The importance of all three of these relationships—with the husband, with the brother, with the son—is thus voiced in that blessing.

Women are generally inconsolable upon the death of a brother, and I have observed cases in which women took off all emblems of their marital auspiciousness—their glass bangles, toe rings, and so forth—in token of their extreme sorrow. The removal of these emblems and embodiments of suhag , good fortune, is prescribed only upon the death of a husband. When these women "take off good fortune" upon the death of a brother, they perhaps are indicating in a subtly ironic and indeed subversive fashion that they consider the tie with the brother as important as that with the husband, insofar as their well-being, auspiciousness, and security are concerned. It is particularly significant that sorrow at the death of a brother is here semiotically conjoined with sorrow at the death of a husband; though the relationship with the brother is defined, in terms of the overt structure of North Indian kinship and its dominant discourse, as dramatically different from and less enduring than the relationship with the husband, in their actions these women comment on and interrogate the dominant discourse that represents them as "other" to their natal kin.

The link between gift giving and the emotional attachment of brothers and sisters is less overtly evident in dan prestations than in gifts of another sort that explicitly point up not the "otherness" of married daughters and sisters but their enduring ties with their natal kin. One such prestation is milai . Translated literally, this

term means "meeting," "joining," or "mixing," and milai is given, people say, "to increase unity" (mel barhane ke lie ) between brothers and sisters. The most common situation in which milai is given is when a brother visits the conjugal village of one of his "sisters" (his own sister, a woman of his own clan, or a woman from his own village). He is then expected to visit her home and give her a small gift, usually one or two rupees. Sisters, however distantly they may in fact be related, complain bitterly if a brother fails to pay such a visit and thus fails to exhibit in her conjugal village the degree to which he holds his sister in regard. When he does give milai , every possible degree of intimacy and affection is carefully considered. Did the brother give the milai and then leave hastily, or did he drink a cup of tea and talk with his sister? Did he stay for a meal in his sister's house? Did he make the appropriate inquiries about her welfare and that of her children? If he had other affairs to attend to in the village, did he visit his sister first and stay longest in her courtyard, or did his actions imply that his other concerns there took precedence? Thus, while a brother might be in compliance with the "rule" that milai should be given to one's sister, it is altogether possible that the style in which it is given might partly subvert, in the eyes of his sister, the formal meaning of the gift. In any event, the sister experiences the event not simply as the fulfillment of a cultural expectation that the brother is obliged to give milai ; she experiences it largely in terms of the strategies and improvisations that contextualize the act and reveal the intentionality of the donor, her brother.

A prestation that evokes a similar set of considerations is that given to a woman by her mother, her brothers, and their wives as she is about to return to her conjugal home after visiting her natal village. When dan is given, there is very often a fixed number of sets of cloth or a fixed quantity of grain or a certain number of brass vessels that should be given. In the case of these vada prestations, as they are called, while there are certain factors that should be taken into account (such as how long the woman has stayed in her natal village, and how long it has been since her previous visit, for example), there are no ritually specified quantifies that must be given; and so it is all the more likely that women will interpret the amounts that are given in terms of the closeness of their tie with their natal kin. It is also important to women that

they be able to demonstrate to their husband's kin that their natal kinsmen esteem them enough to give generously. When, for example, Atri, a woman married in Pahansu, returned there to her husband's house after visiting her pihar , her stepmother and her half brothers sent only six sets of cloth: five for the woman herself and one for her husband. These were judged to be of poor quality, and the fact that no sets of cloth were sent for Atri's husband's younger brother or for her husband's mother prompted some disparaging and caustic comment in the village. Upon heating what had been sent, one of the most senior women of the village scorned the donor by saying, "What did she give, that co-wife prostitute [a potent abuse used by one woman for another]? She gave very little, and several months have passed [since the last visit]" (kya diya sauk-rand ne thora diya uski mausi ne aur kai mahine ho gaye ).^[9]

For married daughters and sisters, the primary significance of toilet and vada prestations is that they signify their continuing identity as "one's own" to their brothers. In contexts in which dan is given, women are described as "other" (dusri ) and "alien" (parayi ) to their natal kin, and they are referred to as dhiyani , a word that has the referential meaning of "married daughter" or "mar-tied sister," and the pragmatic effect of creating distance and otherness, because it is used, in Pahansu and Hathchoya, only in contexts in which the giving of dan to those who are "alien" is at issue. But in contexts in which milai and vada are given, the term dhiyani never occurs. The more usual terms beti (daughter), larki (girl), and bahan (sister) are always used, and on these occasions, married women are never described as "other" or "alien" but as "one's own" to their natal kin. This shift in perspective is de-

[9] Women underscore the significance of these vada prestations as they celebrate the annual festival for the goddess Sanjhi Devi, during the first nine days of the bright half of the month of Asauj. The goddess is said to travel between her conjugal village and her natal home during this time. Women and young girls form elaborate images of Sanjhi (made with cow dung and various pigments) on their courtyard walls, and it is important that she be decked in the ornaments that are significant for a woman's "marital auspiciousness" (suhag ); in fact her body is composed almost entirely of jewelry. Appropriate vada gifts are also represented around her. Jayakar (n.d.:262-63) provides several illustrations of such images from Haryana, but her description of Sanjhi Devi's identity as a "dread mother" does not correspond to the goddess's significance for women in western Uttar Pradesh. See Entwistle 1984 for an extended description of this ritual as it is celebrated in the Braj area of Uttar Pradesh.

scribed in a proverb that women use in conversations about milai and vada prestations: "Daughters and sons are one's own, but the daughter-in-law is other" (dhi put to apne bahu begani ). The pragmatic and emotional force of this proverb contrasts with that of the proverb "Daughter, daughter's husband, and daughter's son, these three are not one's own" that is invoked in talk: about the giving of dan . The former proverb is clearly inappropriate as a commentary on aspects of relationships involved in the giving of dan and its ritual efficacy, since in that context the married daughter, the dhiyani , is explicitly conceived of as alien and other. The existence of these two contradictory proverbs indicates the nature of the ambiguity surrounding women's relationships to their natal kin, and the divergent meanings attached to the gifts given to women.

Though I have argued in other contexts (Raheja 1988b, 1989) that this distinction between the two kinds of prestations is a critical one in rural North India, there is nonetheless a sense in which the contrast is blurred in everyday experience. Though the ritual meanings of the dan that brothers give to their sisters stress the "otherness" of the sister and her "obligation" to accept the gift to ensure her brother's auspiciousness and well-being, the degree of attachment and regard that a brother feels for his sister is often gauged by the quantity and quality of the gifts that he gives in dan , as well as those he gives in milai and vada . Thus all gift giving takes on affective significance for sisters and implicates them in considerations of the emotional valences of their relationships with their natal kin and in reconsiderations of the cultural definitions of their status as "other" to their natal kin.

Ironic Juxtapositions in Women's Songs

The representations of women as both "one's own" and "other" to their natal kin that are encoded in these two kinds of prestations are contextually distinct perspectives, and although women tend to reflect on both kinds of gift giving as indicative of their natal kinsmen's regard for them, the existence of the two perspectives nonetheless indicates a contradiction at the heart of North Indian kinship ideology.

The words of women's songs in western Uttar Pradesh configure a purposefully ironic commentary on this contradiction. As both Burke (1969: 511-17) and James Fernandez (1986) have pointed out, an intentional juxtaposition of two contradictory perspectives is the discursive prerequisite of an ironic stance. A recurrent theme of many of these songs centers on a reflexive awareness of the divergent images of women's ties to natal kin in North Indian culture. Taken together, the songs do not reject one or the other of these images in order to eliminate the ambiguity inherent in kinship relationships. Rather, a reflexively ironic awareness of the discrepancy between the two sets of representations is the predominant characteristic of the songs.

Women's songs in Pahansu and Hathchoya frequently enact a drama of competing voices and competing perspectives, thus tangibly and concretely displaying the ironic content expressed in the words of the songs. The performance context of these songs sometimes makes this particularly evident. Groups of women sing primarily at the births of sons, at weddings, and at various annual festivals. Songs are sung at two different kinds of occasions. Women sing as the ritual events of a wedding unfold, usually in close proximity to the male-dominated formal ceremony. At these times, women quite literally have to compete to let their voices be heard. At the phera , the central core of the wedding ritual, at which the bride is formally transferred from her natal kin to her husband's family amid ritual acts of deference to the groom's side, women of the bride's side sit just a few feet away in the same courtyard and sing galis , songs abusing the groom's family in which obscene joking about the sexual proclivities of the groom's mother is the most common theme. It is not unusual for the men of the groom's family to become angry at this, to call for a halt, only to be rebuffed and assailed by yet more bawdy abuse. When the bride's mother's brothers come to give gifts just before the wedding is to take place, they stand just at the threshold of their sister's husband's house, and behind her the Women of the neighborhood sing "songs of the mother's brother's gifts" in which their generosity, and thus their izzat (prestige) as well, is denigrated. Just outside the door, behind the mother's brothers, men of both sides have gathered, and there

is among them, inevitably, a raucous band, playing loudly and cacophonously as if to drown out the female voices, stopping only when the women's songs are finished.

At the birth of a son, while the marriage party is away at the bride's village, and at the festivals of Holi and Tij, singing and dancing sessions called khoriyas are held, usually at night in courtyards from which males have been barred. "Dancing songs" (nachne ke git ) or "sitting songs" (baithne ke git ) are sung on these occasions. Unlike other genres of women's songs, both of these almost always take the form of long verse narratives in which the tragic consequences of a husband's failure to transfer his loyalties from his mother and sisters to his new wife is the most frequent theme. At the very time that the groom is accepting a bride in kanya dan , according to which ideology the wife should be assimilated to and defer to the kin of her husband, his own mothers and aunts and sisters are singing of the morally problematic aspects of such a transformation.

The internal patterning and the formal structure of the songs likewise highlight the competing voices and multiple perspectives. As in Rajasthan, the verses of many songs from Pahansu and Hathchoya are "chorused conversations" in which conflicts and opposed perspectives are enacted in alternating question-and-answer exchanges among kin. Thus one song may articulate as many as five or six different points of view on a situation or relationship. These songs typically depict conversations in which the voices and differing perspectives of husband and wife, the husband's mother, his sister, and the wives of his brothers may all be heard.

The representations of women's ties to their natal villages in these songs reflexively highlight the incongruities among the possible perspectives on these ties and in doing so comment on the contradictions, emotional dissonances, and unresolvable aspects of women's experiences of these relationships. Perhaps the most powerful of these ironic evocations is a "song of the mother's brothers' gifts" that I recorded in Pahansu.^[10]

[10] The texts for all Hindi songs are given in the Appendix. The translations for these songs are somewhat more literally rendered than the translations from the Rajasthani, largely because I lack Ann's enviable ability to transport the poetry of women's songs into rhythmic English verse.

1. Song of the Mother's Brothers' Gifts
[Sister speaking to her brother]
A little pebble over a big one.^[11
] Born from one mother,
I've come, now respect me,
I've come as your guest (pahuni ).
Born from one mother,
You too have a daughter.^[12
] Born from one mother,
Sell your orchards [in order to buy the gifts].
Born from one mother,
Then come to the wedding rites.

[Brother speaking]
I won't sell the orchards.
Born from one mother,

The splendor of the orchards would be lost.

[The sister who is receiving the bhat then speaks in the same way in the following verses, asking her brothers to sell their ponds, their wells, their streets, their cattle, their horses, their wives' ornaments, and their houses. The brother responds in the same way to each request, refusing to sell anything in order to give the bhat . In each case he gives the same reason for his refusal, saying that the "splendor" (sobha ) of each would be lost. But in the case of his wife's ornament, her hansla (a heavy silver choker), he says that he can't sell it, because it came from his wife's father, and so he has no fight to take it away from his wife. Following this lengthy exchange, the brother speaks again.]

[Brother speaking]
Your brother's wife (bhabhi ) was sulking.
I was making her happy, and so I came late to you.
A little pebble over a big one.
Your brothers' sons (bhatijas ) took time getting dressed, and so I came late to you.

[Sister speaking]
Why are you making so many excuses?
Was the rain pouring down too hard?
Was your bullock cart too far away?
Were your bullocks too feeble to walk?
Rampal's [bride's father's name] great givers of gifts,
Sister Kanta's [bride's mother] givers of gifts.

[11] For an explanation of this line, see p. 190.

[12] The sister is here reminding her brother that just as he has obligations to his own daughter when she marries, he also has obligations to his sister who has come to ask for the bhat .

The first verses of this song represent the speech of a sister who is visiting her natal home for bhat nyautna , the "invitation for giving bhat ." On this occasion, a sister gives her brothers a lump of unrefined sugar, a set of cloth, and five rupees. She informs them that the marriage of her child has been arranged, and invites them to come to her sasural , her conjugal village, to give the substantial set of gifts called bhat just before the wedding is to take place. A brother is always expected to give generously at this time, but the expectations for gifts of cloth, jewelry, and brass vessels will be especially great at the marriage of a sister's daughter, because these will be given onward in the dowry. The second part of the song, beginning with the brother's reference to his own wife, depicts the conversation that takes place when the brother arrives at his sister's sasural .

It is the ironic juxtaposition of the sister's identity as "guest" (pahuni ) to her brother, on the one hand, and as one who was "born from one mother," on the other, that gives this song its power and emotional resonance. The masculine form of the word "guest" (pahuna ) is in this part of North India used almost exclusively for visiting kinsmen related through marital ties, one's ristedars , and the feminine form pahuni refers generally to out-married kinswomen who are visiting their natal kin. The use of the term pahuni then underlines the "otherness" of the daughter or sister, her status as one who has become only a "guest" in her natal place. But just after the sister is identified as pahuni in the song, she utters the phrase meri re maiyya jaye (born from the same mother), which recurs forty times in the course of the performance I recorded in Pahansu. Sung in an almost hypnotic melodic line, this refrain is the most insistent phrase of the song. The text of the sister's request acknowledges the cultural logic that bhat (a dan prestation) is to be given precisely because she is a "guest" and has become "other" to her brothers. Yet that logic is passed over, in favor of a stress on the most intimate of bonds, "born from the same mother." The brother's responses, however, indicate that for him at least, this relationship does not take first priority; he must first fulfill his own wife's needs, before he can be generous to his sister.^[13] The sister knows that her brother has

[13] The words that are used here are rusni manata. Rusni (from the verb rusna or, in standard Hindi, ruthna ) refers to a woman (rusni is the feminine form, rusna the masculine) who habitually sulks in order to press her claims on a kinsman or close friend. To engage in rusni manana is to pacify that person, to assiduously reassure her that she is regarded with affection and esteem.

been making excuses, selfishly whining (gin min gin min ) about the reasons why he cannot give as she asks. Yet for her the central irony is that one who is "born from the same mother" can, according to a different cultural logic, place other ties, other calculations, above that common birth.

The same situation is represented in another women's song, one sung at the time of the bhat nyautna . This "song of the bhat invitation" is sung by the women who have married into the sister's natal village, those who are in the relation of brothers' wives to her. This song voices their perspective on the giving of bhat, a perspective that is quite different from that of the sister herself.

2. Song of the bhat Invitation
The husband's sister comes for bhat nyautna .
On the girl's head is a lump of sugar.
Girl, if you want some cloth,
Then go and live with a cloth seller, girl.
On the girl's head is a lump of sugar.
Girl, if you want some gold,
Then go and live with the goldsmiths, girl.
On the girl's head is a lump of sugar.
Girl, if you want some pots,
Then go and live with the tinkers, girl.

In this song, the brothers' wives rebuff the husband's sister's request for cloth and pots and jewelry by telling her that if she wants these things, she should go and marry someone whose business it is to provide them. In each line, the Hindi text reads "enter into" (bar ja ) the house of the cloth seller, the goldsmith, and the tinker. The clear implication is that the sister should go and live as a wife there. These contemptuous insinuations stand in contrast to the sister's request, in the bhat song, that she be "respected" in her brothers' house.

Many songs explicitly contrast the burdens of a woman's gift-giving obligations to husband's kin with her desire to give freely to her own natal kin. A song sung at the birth of sons in Pahansu

is typical in this respect. A new mother is expected to give gifts called neg to her husband's sister, after she provides various ritual services on the sixth day after birth. In this song, the voice of the new mother is heard refusing to give the ornaments requested by her husband's sister, precisely because of her desire to favor her own sister instead. Though the mother's sister would never in fact be the recipient of gifts at this time, what is significant is the emotional priority placed on the wife's, rather than the husband's, natal tie.

3. Birth Song
Fair fair cheeks and curly hair,
The newborn boy is beautiful, in his embroidered shirt.
My brother is a policeman, my brother's wife is very dear.
Ask for your gifts, Husband's Sister, today is a wonderful day.

I won't give my forehead pendant, Husband's Sister, it's an ornament for my forehead.
I won't give my forehead jewel, Husband's Sister, I've promised it to my sister.
I won't give my earring, Husband's Sister, it's an ornament for my ear.
I won't give my nose pin, Husband's Sister, I've promised it to my sister.

[The verses of this song continue in this way, naming such ornaments as the silver belt, ankle bracelets, and toe rings.]

In this song, an image of harmony and felicity is set up in the first verse, when the new mother invites her husband's sister to ask for the gift she wants, as she is customarily expected to do. But this image is undermined in the second verse, when she refuses to give the neg . The obligations to give bhat and neg , however, are so well defined, the ritual reasons for giving these gifts are so compelling (Raheja 1988b), and one's izzat (prestige) is so much at stake that actually refusing outright to give the bhat and neg is almost unimaginable. What is at issue in these songs, I suggest, is not so much whether to give or not to give but the particular valence to be placed on a relationship. The sister's voice in the first song asserts the priority of the brother-sister tie, the "birth from one mother," while the brother's wife in the second and third songs minimizes the importance of the husband's sis-

ter's continuing ties to her brother.^[14] The "Birth Song" makes it clear that the wife's reluctance to give stems from her desire to emphasize her own natal ties rather than those of her husband. Both of these contrasting claims are set forth in the idiom of giving and receiving, and both point to an inherent contradiction in a woman's position in kinship relations: she becomes "other" to her natal kin in many respects yet longs to remain "one's own" to them. And while she longs to become "one's own" to her husband as well, his own sister may see this as threatening her tie to her brother. The women portrayed in these songs seem always to be at odds with one another, and yet groups of women, neighbors and kin of many kinds, sing these songs in unison, as if in ironic acknowledgment of their common plight.

The poignancy of women's separation from natal kin is most vividly dramatized in North India at the moment of bidai (departure), when a newly married girl first leaves her natal home in the company of her husband and his male kin. Both men and women present at this time are apt to shed tears at the sight of the heavily veiled young woman being carried to a waiting automobile, tractor-trolley, or water-buffalo cart, and the women of the bride's natal village sing "departure songs" (bidai git ) at the doorway. Many of these songs are commentaries upon the ironies of a woman's relationships with natal and conjugal kin.

4. Song of the Bride's Departure
Refrain [Bride's natal kin speaking]
Dear girl, today you've left your father's house, today you've become "other" (parayi ).
The streets in which you spent your childhood have today become "other" (parayi ).

[Bride speaking]
My grandfather cries, my grandmother cries, the whole family cries.
My younger brother cries, your sister born from the same mother (ma jai ) has left and gone away.

[Verses in which the bride speaks are repeated, using kin terms for FeB, FeBW, FyB, FyBW, and so on.]

[14] Commenting on marriage songs translated by Karve, Goody notes that in Maharashtra too a brother's generosity to his sister is seen as restrained by his wife (1990:224).

The second line of the refrain ends with the words parayi re . (Re is a vocative particle that commonly appears in these songs.) The second line of the bride's verses ends with the words ma jai re . The replication of the same sound pattern, the rhyme, in these two verses ironically highlights the dissimilarity in the meanings of the relationship enunciated by the bride's kin and by the bride herself. Irony is voiced in this song in this juxtaposition of the two different interpretations. Parayi re and ma jai re share the same sounds, but this aural similarity only serves to heighten the irony that the two perspectives on the relationship of the departing bride to her natal kin, both available in the cultural discourse, are so radically different.

5. Song of the Bride's Departure
Refrain [Bride speaking]
Don't let your mind be filled with sadness.
Mother, I'll meet you again.

I'll call my dadas (HFM) dadi (FM),
I'll call my tayas (HFeBW) tai (FeBW).
I won't remember my dadi ,
Mother, I'll meet you again.
I won't remember my tai .
Mother, I'll meet you again.

[In the following verses of this song, the bride says that she will call her husband's mother "Mother," her husband's sister "Sister," and so on.]

This second song of departure expresses an ironic perspective on cultural discourses about women in kinship not by explicitly juxtaposing two contradictory interpretations but by making an utterance whose actual intended meaning is precisely the opposite of its conventional and literal meaning. The poignant irony of a bride saying, "I won't remember my dadi , I won't remember my tai " lies precisely in the fact that all of the women singing this song know that she will never forget, and though she may call her husband's father's mother dadi , as the patrilineal ideology of kanya dan enjoins her to do, her experience as she utters that word in her conjugal village is worlds apart from the experience of saying it in her natal home.

These sentiments are given more direct expression, though, in a byai git , a birth song, from Pahansu.

6. Birth Song
I yearned to call the midwife;
How should I know that a doctor would come running.
Give the birth gifts, it is a pleasure to give.

I yearned to call my mother;
How should I know that my mother-in-law would come running.
Give the birth gifts, it is a pleasure to give.

I yearned to call my grandmother;
How should I know that my husband's grandmother would come running.
Give the birth gifts, it is a pleasure to give.

I yearned to call my sister;
How should I know that my husband's sister would come running.
Give the birth gifts, it is a pleasure to give.

I yearned to call my elder brother's wife;
How should I know that my husband's elder brother's wife would come running.
Give the birth gifts, it is a pleasure to give.

I yearned to call my younger brother's wife;
How should I know that my husband's younger brother's wife would come running.
Give the birth gifts, it is a pleasure to give.

I wanted very much to call my father's sister;
How should I know that my husband's father's sister would come running.
Give the birth gifts, it is a pleasure to give.

In Pahansu and Hathchoya, as in Ghatiyali, women give birth in their husband's home, never in their pihars . This birth song speaks of a woman's thoughts as her child is born, and as she looks to other women for help and encouragement, and for the various ritual services she requires. Though she may expect to have only her husband's kin around her, she still yearns to have her own mother, her grandmother, her sister around her. She has not forgotten them or learned to call her dadas, dadi . Her husband's kin do not replace her own.

A third song of departure and a Holi song draw on a wider set of associations to evoke a sense of irony and to portray the emotions of a bride in a foreign place.

7. Song of the Bride's Departure
Two water pots are on my head.

A beautiful golden pendant is on my forehead.
Call me back quickly, Mother,
Beg with folded hands.
My heart is not here in my husband's mother's house,
My heart is not here with this foreign man.
Call me back quickly, Mother.
Beg with folded hands.
My friends still played with dolls together,
But I went off to my sasural .
Call me back quickly, Mother
Beg with folded hands.

[The first verse is repeated a number of times, changed only by the substitution of the names of other ornaments worn by married women.]

8. Song for the Festival of Holi
My forehead mark, the pendant there, and the wrap that covers my head, all are colored yellow.
Brother, take me away from here.
My husband's father's land is bad.
Brother, take me away from here.
For me this land is empty, there's no one to call one's own.
Brother, take me away from here.
I'm fending off the black crows.
Brother, take me away from here.

[This entire verse is repeated many times, substituting for the forehead pendant and the wrap the names of other ornaments worn by married women.]

The first two lines of the departure song invoke conventional and recurring images of desire and fulfillment, and the pleasure of attracting and pleasing one's husband. An image of a woman gracefully drawing water at a village well often, in women's songs, precedes a happy flirtatious encounter, and songs of conjugal happiness frequently include long lists of the ornaments; worn by a married woman that enchant her husband and entice him to give her even more articles of adornment, the ornaments that embody her marital auspiciousness, her suhag . The song of departure opens with this set of propitious images, but the desires and expectations are evoked but not fulfilled: the husband is a "foreign man," and the bride cannot bear to stay. She has become parayi , foreign, to her own natal kin at the time of her mar-

riage, but the man to whose house she has gone is a foreigner to her.

The song for the festival of Holi is patterned in the same way. The woman's wrap and ornaments have been colored yellow because she has played Holi (holi khelna ) in her husband's house. Holi is the North Indian festival in which hierarchies are temporarily overturned, and the norms for women prescribing deference and silence are momentarily relaxed. Nowadays, "playing Holi" involves exuberantly throwing multicolored powders and dyes— purchased from the bazaars—on friends, kinsmen, and fellow villagers, and a general sense of merriment as one's visage and one's clothes become progressively transformed as the day wears on. Before the advent of commercially prepared colors and dyes, tesu flowers from the dhak tree were boiled to produce a yellow liquid that was used in the same way as the powders and dyes now purchased in the market. When the woman in the Holi song says that her ornaments are yellow, she is telling the listeners that she has played Holi with the tesu flower dye. The fact that it is her ornaments, the emblems of her "marital auspiciousness" (her suhag ), that have been yellowed suggests in a covert way that she has played Holi with her husband, a situation that suggests, if the signs are read by the husband's family, conjugal intimacy and mutuality. But as in the previous song, this image of intimacy is followed immediately by a plea addressed to the brother to take her away from a land in which there is no one she can call "one's own." And the song ends not with auspicious images of ornaments that embody a woman's suhag but with the inauspicious image of the circling black crows, harbingers of death.

Both Pauline Kolenda (1990: 139) and Susan Wadley (1983: 54, 69-70) speak of an association between pleasurable erotic encounters and the throwing of colored dyes at Holi. Wadley translates several North Indian barahmasa in which the pain of separation from a husband at Holi is especially acute. These barahmasa (songs of the twelve months) are representative of a very popular poetic genre in North India, and in the examples Wadley translates a particularly poignant sorrow arises from the pain of separation from one's husband at the time of Holi because of the powerful emotional association between sexuality and the throwing of the Holi dyes. The ironic commentary evident in the Holi song from

Pahansu is emotionally charged precisely because of the very evident intertextual awareness of the barahmasa's focus on this association and on the pain of separation a woman is conventionally represented as experiencing when her husband is away. In the Pahansu song, she has thrown the colored dyes, but she yearns, nonetheless, not for her husband but for her natal kin. It is the tension between these two textual representations that produces a sense of irony in this song.

I spoke about this particular song in 1988 with Simla, a woman who had been married into Pahansu, to Jabar Singh, about twenty years before, and who had given birth to four children, one of whom was already married and about to give birth to Simla's first grandchild. We talked about why so many women felt the poignancy of such songs, and she said to me, very slowly and deliberately as she looked around the house in which she had spent more than half her life, "You know, we never call our sasural 'one's own house' (apna ghar ). We only call our pihar 'one's own house.'"^[15] Simla's ironic tone speaks here to the fissure she seems to experience between the patrilineal convention that married women become "one's own" to their husband's family and women's continual feelings of "foreignness" in their sasurals , and their feelings of longing for their natal homes. In Simla's case, her longing was particularly poignant, to me and to the other women who knew her, because her own mother had died before she could give birth to a brother for Simla. Though Simla's father had remarried, and his second wife had borne a son, neither Simla nor anyone else regarded him as a "true brother" (saga bhai ), because the two were not born from the same mother. So it seemed that Simla, perhaps more than many other women, sometimes felt that there was no place she could truly call "one's own house."

In South Asia, as in most societies, kinship and gender are

[15] . When speaking of a married woman, other people may certainly refer to her sasural as "her own home" (apna ghar ). But I never heard a woman refer to her own conjugal home as "one's own home." When women use the phrase with reference to themselves, as Simla did, they almost always are speaking of their natal home. But certainly there are issues of pragmatic intent to be considered in understanding women's use of these words. If, for example, a woman wanted to make a particular statement about her authority or her status in her conjugal home, she might use the word apna to reinforce her point pragmatically.

generally represented as grounded in the natural world, as the unalterable and commonsensical givens of social life. But irony, as White (1978: 6) points out, is a linguistic strategy of skepticism, and as a mode of consciousness, it attempts to explore the degree to which such given taxonomic systems are as much products of one's own need to organize reality in this way rather than some other way as they are of the objective reality of the elements placed in the taxonomy. From this perspective, irony is "metatropological" in that it signals a self-conscious, reflexive attitude toward the tropes and linguistic conventions that organize our worlds, and it signals a skepticism toward the notion that these particular tropes, conventions, and taxonomies adequately represent one's experience. Irony may play, as Michael Herzfeld (1991) points out, on the tension between an apparent social consensus and an inwardly experienced dissent.

For Fernandez, irony is indeed the "ultimate trope," in its deliberate though perhaps oblique voicing of an awareness of incongruities between cultural conventions and everyday experience. "To point out incongruities," he writes, "is to suggest [the possibility of] their transcendence, to suggest the passing beyond the necessarily pretentious claims of our roles in particular social organizations and institutions" (1986: 291).

In his discussion of irony as a dialectical strategy, Burke implicitly draws out a distinction between an ironic stance and a stance of subversion that would directly contest aspects of conventional discourse. He emphasizes his perception that irony generally involves a recognition of multiple voices and multiple perspectives. When one speaks in an ironic mode, he suggests, one tries to construct a dialectical perspective upon this multiplicity, "with a recognition that none of the participating 'sub-perspectives' can be treated as either precisely right or precisely wrong" (1969: 512).

These characteristics of an ironic discourse all seem to be present in the women's songs about natal kin I have translated here, and this ironic perspective constitutes an interrogation of some of the central propositions of the discourse of patriliny, and a critical awareness of its contradictions. The irony in these songs does not seek to displace that discourse entirely but to question its claim to exclusive moral authority.

Irony is one possible stance vis-à-vis these contradictions, but it is not the only one articulated by women in Pahansu and Hathchoya. A more potent form of interrogation, with greater possibilities of effecting transformations in women's everyday lives, is evidenced in women's talk about alternative readings of genealogically ambiguous relationships, talk that I heard daily, in nearly every courtyard in Pahansu and Hathchoya.

"Double Relationships": Reading Genealogically Ambiguous Ties in Pahansu and Hathchoya

Marriage in rural North India nearly always follows a pattern of village exogamy, and because marriages at a distance are generally preferred over marriages in nearby villages, a woman usually goes many miles away to her husband's house and theoretically has no natal kinsmen there. Such preferences for marriage at a distance are more frequently voiced by men than by women. Jeffery, Jeffery, and Lyon (1989: 34-36) translate a number of Bijnor residents' responses to the question of whether marriage at a distance is preferred to marriage in a nearby village. Women say that distant marriage is bad because news cannot be easily conveyed from the husband's village to the natal village and back again. Men are far more likely to remark that if a married woman lives too close to her natal kin, she is too easily able to turn to them when disputes arise in her husband's home. There would be too much interference from them, too many disagreements, and too much of a threat to the husband's rule.

At least two genres of male expressive traditions—folk dramas and proverbs—record husbands' suspicions of wives who maintain close ties to their brothers and their natal homes. In the folk dramas in the sang or nautanki popular theater of northern India, a central core of many dramatic plots is a husband's hostility to a wife's brother, and his fear and suspicion that she may harbor powerful loyalties to her natal kin that could jeopardize his own power and authority over her. But if a husband cannot fully trust his wife in these plays, brothers also frequently distrust their sisters because they have married into other families and have allegiances there (Hansen 1992: 184-88). Two Hindi proverbs, used predominantly by men, attest to the suspicions harbored by hus-

bands about wives' brothers: "As niches weaken walls, so wives' brothers weaken the house" (divar khai alon ne, ghar khaya salon ne ); and "The wife's brother eats special fried breads, and a brother's brothers eats only peas" (bahu ka bhaiyya puri khaye, bhaiyya ka bhaiyya matar chabaye )—that is, a wife will favor her own brothers over her husband's kin.

Despite these views of the danger that women's natal kin pose to the husband's authority, in Pahansu and Hathchoya women very frequently have natal kinsmen close at hand, though there too, just as in the nearby district of Bijnor, it is deemed appropriate if a woman is sent to a distant village at marriage. But women actively and intentionally construct these relationships for themselves, when their own brothers are far away. Most of the women I know in Pahansu and Hathchoya are related to a number of men and women in their conjugal village in two ways: through the marital relationship, of course, but also through previous ties they are able to trace through natal village connections, "from the direction of the natal village" (pihar ki taraf se ), as they always put it. These relationships traced through a woman's natal village are often quite distant in the genealogical sense—frequently there is no traceable genealogical link at all—and such relationships may also be recognized and acted upon among persons of different castes, for whom the link is simply that each has a tie, through women, to a common village. Yet any of these natal village relationships are, according to the local reckoning, "closer" (zyada nazdik , as opposed to "distant," dur ) than the relevant marital tie in the conjugal village, even though the latter may be genealogically quite near indeed and would otherwise be of fundamental importance according to the prevailing "patrilineal" ideology. These "closer" natal village relationships within a woman's conjugal village reorder previously existing relationships among and through men, by restructuring patterns of gift giving, deference behavior, and kin term usage among both men and women. Women's strategic invocation of these natal village ties rewrites the script of patriliny and its ideology of kanya dan , in which the preservation of women's dose ties to natal kin is viewed as dangerous to their undisruptive incorporation into the kunba of their husbands.

It has frequently been pointed out that in many ways marriage

in North India entails a complete separation between a woman's natal kin and conjugal kin, and between the natal village and the conjugal village (Vatuk 1971: 289; 1982b: 95, Sharma 1978: 221). Such a radical distinction between a woman's identity as daughter and sister in her natal village and as wife in her conjugal village is indeed powerfully marked. Apart from the distinct ritual and gift-giving roles in the two villages, a woman's everyday social identity is also grounded fundamentally in this contrast. Standards for proper behavior differ dramatically in the two villages. In her natal village, a returning married woman may visit freely and walk through the village streets with her face uncovered, and she does not bear responsibility for household work. In her conjugal village, on the other hand, a woman veils her face in a gesture called ghunghat before her own husband and all males senior to him, and she must not speak in the presence of these men. She will "massage the legs" (paon dabana ) of the wives of these men when she encounters them. A woman never veils her face in her natal village, and it is said to be productive of "sin" or "evil" (pap ) if a daughter of the village should ever do paon dabana there.

Powerful as this segregation of women's multiple identities may be in defining the proper relationship of gender and kinship in northern India, there are ways in which women's uses of genealogical ambiguities erase this distinction in certain limited though nonetheless important arenas, as women grant importance to even very tenuous natal village ties in their sasurals .

Ursula Sharma has suggested that, as an aspect of the North Indian patrilineal kinship ideology, ghunghat functions to render women "ineffectual in the very place where their presence is most threatening to the continuous maintenance of . . . relations among men" (1978: 231). It accomplishes this by severely limiting their ability to speak in public arenas in their conjugal village, and by limiting their access to men of influence there. But Sharma also points out that ghunghat and the practices associated with it are not always totally effective in this regard; she writes that 'women in the Himachal Pradesh village in which she worked "do not behave in a particularly passive manner in general. . . . The alliances which they form and the enmities they pursue often have a considerable effect on the course of village factional politics" and on other aspects of domestic and village affairs (229).

The following analysis of ghunghat, paon dabana , terminological usages, and gift giving in situations in which natal village relationships are traced within the conjugal village reveals some of the ways in which an emphasis on these natal ties, on a daughter's identity as "one's own" to her natal kin, facilitates a woman's effectiveness in this regard, and the ways in which aspects of North Indian patrilineal ideology are reconfigured by women in the sasural as they read relationships in this way.

Kolenda (1967, 1968) has suggested that if a woman maintains close ties to her natal kin, there is more likelihood that she will be able to effect an early separation of her own conjugal unit from her husband's joint family, thereby perhaps advancing her own interests over that of her husband's patrilineal kin. This may be possible because strong natal ties presumably enable her to escape a total submission to the authority of the husband's senior kin. I suggest, in the analysis that follows, that women actively create what are viewed as natal ties within their conjugal villages, in order to establish just such a site for possible negotiation, even when their own natal villages may be distant or when their own fathers and brothers are unable or unwilling to show support for them.

Women are occasionally able to utilize a kinship relationship, traced through their natal villages, that would by anybody's reckoning be viewed as a close genealogical connection. But there are many other ways that women are able to construct these pihar relationships. Cases 1 and 2 are examples of the use of relatively dose genealogical ties.

Case 1

Usha married Raj Kumar during my first period of fieldwork in Pahansu. She would normally be expected to perform ghunghat before Mangal Singh and Sukhbir, her husband's elder "brothers" (her jeths ). She does not do ghunghat , however. Mangal Singh explains why: "She is related as sister, the daughter of our mother's brother [here, genealogically, his MFZSD]. Our relationships are like this. From one direction she is our sister, and from the other direction, Amar Singh is our brother." Usha herself says that she does not do ghanghat because Mangal Singh and Sukhbir are the sons of her father's sister (her phuphi ke larke ). Mangal Singh him-

Figure 2.
Usha and Mangal Singh

self went in the groom's party, the barat , to Usha's natal village, as I did, but he gave her several rupees in milai , as he would do for any "sister" he so encountered, but which he would never do in his capacity as patrilineal relative of the groom.

From Usha's perspective, this reckoning of kin ties stresses a pihar (natal village) relationship in existence prior to the relationship to Mangal Singh and Sukhbir established through her marriage. The former relationship was genealogically traceable but never acted upon before her marriage to Raj Kumar. From the perspective of the two Pahansu men, this reckoning entails acting upon a relation through their mother's pihar , which takes precedence over the genealogically closer relationship in their own village, the village of their father, and this is how Mangal Singh himself explained the situation to me.

It is not insignificant, for men or for women, that the reading that privileges the more distant natal village tie over the conjugal tie is acknowledged in such public situations. Bourdieu (1977: 41-43) has suggested that in Kabylia such "heretical" readings, which invoke connections through women, would be relevant only in the most intimate spheres of family life. But for Mangal Singh in this situation, and for all of the other Gujar men with whom I spoke about such natal village ties, relationships through women are matters of public as well as private concern.

Case 2

Descendants of Munshi by his second wife, Harikaur—Rupram and Budha—are related in Pahansu as Shanti's jeths (HeB. According to such a relationship, Shanti should do ghunghat before them

and never utter their names. But because Gomi, the mother of Rupram and Budha, was Shanti's bua (FZ), they are also related as Shanti's "brothers," the sons of her bua . Shanti therefore does not do ghunghat , and she pronounces their names with impunity and, often, gleeful irreverence, saying that "from one direction, the direction of the sas [HM], they are related as jeths , but from my house, from the direction of my pihar , they are my brothers." And of course one does not veil or remain silent in the presence of brothers, and one need not show particular deference to them.

Figure 3.
Shanti and Her Father's Sister's Sons

Shanti told me in this connection that Gomi, her father's sister, had in fact asked that Shanti's marriage be arranged in Pahansu, in the house of her own husband's kinsmen. "She asked for me," Shanti said. Such a pattern is quite common, and women very frequently try to have marriages arranged in such a way that there will be a pihar relationship in the prospective bride's sasural , a situation that women say is infinitely desirable for a bahu , a wife in her husband's village, precisely because she will be able to utilize these ties to gain allies for herself should a dispute arise with her husband or his kin.

In many cases in which women trace such relationships "from the direction of the natal village," perhaps in the majority of cases in fact, there is no such traceable genealogical link at all. But these relationships are regarded by women as no less significant than actual genealogical relationships. Case 3 illustrates a situation in which a tie to a common clan (got ) is used in this way.

Case 3

Shanti is the chachi (FyBW) of Omi's husband, Raj Pal, and thus Omi's pitas , to be addressed as chachi . Omi's mother, however, is of the same clan (got) as Shanti, and although the two women do not know each other, they are regarded as sisters. Omi, therefore, calls Shanti mausi (MZ) and does not do paon dabana to her. Omi says that this is because a woman "keeps the relationship" (nata rakhti hai ), that is, observes that relationship rather than any other, "from birth, from where one's birth took place" (janam se jahan apna paida hua ). This is so, she says, because any relationship "from the direction of the natal village" (pihar ki taraf se ) is "closer" (zyada nazdik ) than the relevant tie traceable through the sasural (the conjugal village), even though the latter is, in this case, genealogically very near. Omi went on to say that "from here [i.e., Pahansu, her sasural ], Shanti is related as pitas , but because of the got , she must be called mausi ; she is my mausi from the direction of my mother" (idhar se hamari pleas lagti , lekin got ki vajah se mausi kahna pare ; apni ma ki taraf se mausi hai ) Omi's use of the verb lagna in this situation, in relation to Shanti, is very telling. As Vatuk (1969: 257-58; 1982a: 63) has indicated, the: word lagna , "to be related," is seldom used in conversation if the relationship at issue is genealogically close. In such a case, the usual expression would be "She is my HFyBW" (hamari pitas hai ), using a form of the verb hona , "to be." But here, in the context of Omi's discussion of the closeness of the pihar tie , she has used the verb lagna , which effectively emphasizes the relative "distance" of any sasural relationship, and she indicates her assessment of the "closeness" of the pihar relationship by the use of the expression "She is my mausi " (mausi hai ).

Omi and Shanti quarrel very frequently, however, usually over

Figure 4.
Omi and Shanti

domestic matters (they live in the same house but maintain separate hearths), but in such argumentative situations neighbors and relatives always comment, as did the two women themselves, that it is "the fighting of a HM and SW" (sas-bahu ki larai ), presumably because it would be inappropriate amid such dissension to emphasize the pihar relationship.

Another way that women establish pihar ties is by acting upon relationships that involve only a link to neighboring villages. Case 4 is such an instance.

Case 4

Gendi is Nakli's chachi (FyBW) and thus the pitas (HFyBW) of Taravati; the latter would normally call Gendi chachi , massage her legs, and show her great deference, but because the pihars of the two women are "neighboring villages" (guwand ) to each other, Taravati calls Gendi bua (FZ)^[16] and does not do paon dabana to her. Thus both women give priority to a pihar relationship over a genealogically very close sasural relationship, even though they previously did not know each other, and the pihar relationship itself is, by usual standards, very distant indeed. But for both the tie is a significant one.

Figure 5.
Gendi and Taravati

In a number of cases that I observed in Pahansu, women observe the importance of natal village ties even when the person to whom they trace a relationship is of another caste, and actual genealogical relationship is therefore not at issue. Cases 5 and 6 illustrate this point.

[16] Kin terminology, reckoned according to "generation" (pirhi ), is used not only for all the people of one's own village but for the people of "neighboring villages" (guwand ) as well.

Case 5

Prithvi is a Water-Carrier man who works as an agricultural laborer for Telu Ram, a Gujar farmer. His wife, Parkashi, frequently assists Telu's mother, Asikaur, in the cultivation of a small cotton crop and in various household chores. Parkashi would normally, according to "village kinship," call Asikaur dadi ([H]FM), but because she herself is from the village of Hathchoya, where Asikaur's daughter Tara is married, she calls Asikaur mausi (literally, "mother's sister," but also, as here, BWM), because, as she says, she "keeps the relationship from the direction of the natal village" (pihar ki taraf se nata rakhti ), and from that perspective Asikaur is not dadi but mausi .

Case 6

Prithvi, Parkashi's husband, is himself not a native of Pahansu but immigrated there from another village in the district. Nevertheless, he has been incorporated into the village kinship "genealogy," and wives of Pahansu are expected to do ghunghat before him accordingly. Telu's wife, Rajavati, however, calls him bhai (brother) and does not veil her face before him because his village of origin is a "neighboring village" (guwand ) of Titron, her own natal village, and she therefore "understands him to be a brother, a neighboring-village brother" (bhai samajhti hun, guwandi bhai ).

Women frequently act upon ties traced through their mother's natal village. This considerably widens the opportunities for tracing pihar relationships that may be of use to them. In some cases, as in the following, this may involve deemphasizing a relationship through their own natal village.

Case 7

Tara's daughter Pushpa came to Pahansu, her mother's pihar , for a visit and remarked to me one day (without my asking about it) that she and Raj Pal are related in two ways. "From one direction" he is her brother (bhai ), the son of her mother's brother, because Amar Singh is related as Tara's brother. Her own natal village, Hathchoya, is the same as that of Raj Pal's wife, who is related to Pushpa there as bua (FZ). Raj Pal is thus related to her "from the direction of Hathchoya" as phupha (FZH). Pushpa

Figure 6.
Pushpa and Raj Pal

calls Raj Pal bhai , thus emphasizing the relationship through her mother's pihar rather than that through her own natal village.

Another way in which a woman's pihar relationships reconfigure relations within her husband's village is in the context of intravillage reciprocal prestations exchanged by families within a kunba , or lineage group. Important among these is the distribution of food packets (parosa ) on festival occasions. When men talk about the distribution of these packets, they always say that they are given to one's "brothers" (bhai ) within the kunba . Now the terms kunba and bhai have both restricted meanings that mark the boundaries of fairly shallow lineages and broader meanings that may at times embrace a very large segment of the population of a caste within the village. Because the average number of parosas that are distributed by a household generally does not exceed fifteen to twenty, the referent for the term kunba in such contexts is in fact a rather small group of kin. Yet the actual distribution of these gifts is not predicated simply on the genealogical closeness of patrilineal kin, as village rhetoric about them would suggest.^[17] In nearly all of the distributions I witnessed, a woman's prior

[17] Vatuk and Vatuk (1976:225, 230) describe parosa gifts as one of several gifts given in "direct and balanced exchange among peers, typically between neighbors in a village or among agnatic kin." This is an apt characterization, except for the fact that women's ties to natal kin may redefine who is to be classed within the network of "peers."

pihar ties redefined the limits of patrilineal connection within her husband's village, as in cases 8 and 9.

Case 8

Parosas were sent from a Gujar household at the festival of Gugga's Ninth because a wife in the first household is from the pihar of a wife in the recipient household. The two households were only distantly related through patrilineal ties, and in the absence of the common pihar tie the parosas would not have been sent.

Case 9

Parosas from a Gujar daughter's wedding feast were sent to another Pahansu Gujar household, in which a wife was related as FZD to the mother of the bride, only because of this pihar connection.

Thus even though the overt meaning of these parosa prestations lies in the reciprocal relation of bhaichara (brother conduct) and patrilineal kinship ties within the village, they are not sent to everyone who could potentially be counted as a "brother." Discriminations are made, and it is significant that the existence of pihar relationships among in-married women may serve to activate an otherwise contextually unstressed "brother" relationship and thus reorder gift-giving patterns among members of the patrilineal kunba .

Although the "patrilineal idiom" of a wife's transformation at marriage, and her "one's own" relationship to her husband's family, is what one might call a "dominant ideology" in the sense that it has very important material consequences for women's lives and in the sense that it would certainly be invoked more frequently in abstract discussions like anthropological interviews, we see here, in this ethnography from Pahansu and Hathchoya, another sort of ideological construct existing in counterpoint to it. We find in these cases of double relationships a very strongly articulated notion that natal ties can never be supplanted by conjugal ones, that even genealogically very distant natal ties are really "closer" than any tie to the husband's kin.

How are we to interpret the relationship between these two sets of ideas about kinship and gender in North India? When Omi

says that a woman always maintains the relationship "from where one's birth took place," and when so many other women say that ties "from the direction of the natal village are closest," these words may appear to represent, for them, a cultural template, a set of rules according to which women and men must order their daily lives. But if we look at the uses to which such words are put in Pahansu and Hathchoya, we may begin to understand the extent to which the variant readings of genealogically ambiguous ties represent, as in the similar cases from Algeria that Bourdieu has discussed (1977: 30-71), strategic negotiations of one's social world, and not enactments of a fixed and determinate cultural structure.

A bride who, because of pihar ties, need not veil her face before a few senior male affinal men in her conjugal village may frequently use this advantage successfully to gain allies for herself in the course of disputes with her husband's family. Such strategies sometimes lead to quarrels and the disruption of the "solidarity" of patrilineal relationships in her husband's village. Yet even in these cases, a woman is deemed morally justified in marshaling the support of the men to whom she traces a natal village tie, and these men in turn generally feel an obligation to aid and perhaps give shelter to her, much as they would if it were their own sister who needed their help.

The extent to which women may invoke these ties in particular contexts for particular purposes and ignore them when it is expedient to do so is illustrated in the following case from the village of Hathchoya.

Case 10

Tara, the daughter of Asikaur, who figured in cases 5 and 7, is married in the village of Hathchoya. Since the time of Omi's marriage (about ten years after her own), Tara maintained little connection with Omi's natal family in Hathchoya, despite the fact that Omi had been married into Tara's natal kunba , in the house next door to her own in Pahansu. (We have already encountered Omi in case 3.) There was little "coming and going" (ana-jana ) on Tara's part, mostly because of factional cleavages that divided her conjugal family from that of Karta Ram. Yash Pal and Dillo were close to this family, however, because Dillo's daughter Anjali had

Figure 7.
The Families of Tara and Omi

been married to Omi's mother's brother's son in the village of Barsi. Yash Pal had even arranged for Omi's brother to obtain a much sought-after position in a local Gujar college. Internal disputes arose within the joint family of Om Singh and Yash Pal, and when Omi's natal family failed to support Yash Pal in a village election, Yash Pal and Dillo stopped all "coming and going" with them. Just after that, Tara began to solidify her relationship with the women of Karta Ram's house. She said publicly that this was because "from the direction of the natal village" she had a close tie to that household, but it was clear to everyone in Hathchoya who observed her actions that she was cultivating this pihar connection specifically in order to influence the internal politics of the patriline in which she had married, and to widen the rift that had developed between Om Singh and Yash Pal.

Sometime later, Tara's daughter Usha was also married in the family of Omi's mother's brother. Anjali and her brother Yash Pal were opposed to the arrangement of this marriage because, they said, they felt that two "sisters" (i.e., two women from the same village) marrying in the same household could possibly cause dissension and disharmony there. (Such marriages are in fact generally avoided in western Uttar Pradesh precisely for this reason.) But the marriage was arranged nonetheless. As a result, Tara is now connected in yet another way to Omi's natal family, and the people of Yash Pal's household say that their own position and influence within the Barsi household are consequently weaker, because they have only one route by which to trace a relationship

with Barsi, while Tara has two. Tara's strategic use of her natal village tie has thus played a significant role not only in reconfiguring relationships within her conjugal village but also in building up and cementing her own network of affinally related kinsmen beyond the village. (It was generally agreed in Hathchoya that it was Tara's intentions and Tara's actions, and not those of her husband, that had shaped the course of these events.) Because of the importance placed on one's position in such networks in rural North India, Tara's deployment of her natal ties to Omi's family has been of critical significance to herself and to a wide network of kinsmen in Hathchoya and beyond.

Both Vatuk (1969, 1982a) and Das (1976b) have analyzed instances from North India of multiple genealogical links between two people, and the strategies through which choices are made as to which relationship will take precedence in any given context. In analyzing North Indian kinship terms of address, Vatuk considers several such cases and finds that in situations involving multiple affinal relationships the most important considerations are that preexisting relationships take priority over newly established ones, and that relationships defining one as a giver of gifts should take priority over others (Vatuk 1982a: 70; on the latter point, see also Das 1976b). Vatuk also observes that in cases in which both the conflicting ties are consanguineal precedence in this patrilineal milieu might be expected to be given to the patrilateral tie. Her data indicate, however, that closeness of consanguineal connection, whether patrilateral or matrilateral, is the decisive consideration (1982a: 68-69). This in itself can be seen as an indication of the limits of patrilineal ideology in northern India, like the bilateral (rather than strictly patrilateral) definitions of the categories of "daughter" and "sister" that Vatuk elsewhere describes (1975:178, 193-94).

The examples of double relationships from Pahansu and Hathchoya seem to go even farther in documenting women's specific resistance to certain aspects of patrilineal ideology. These examples demonstrate that women's pihar ties supersede a husband's patrilateral ties not only when they are genealogically closer but even when they are significantly more distant, thus demonstrating to an even greater degree than Vatuk's data an alternative to

the "patrilineal bias" of North Indian kinship. They also demonstrate that women may utilize such calculations, and the ambiguities of their relationship with natal kin and natal village, to negotiate and renegotiate identities and relations of power within their conjugal villages, and to reconfigure, to some extent, the pattern of kinship relations there.

Margery Wolf has written that rural women in China learn early in their lives to regard many of the conventions of patrilineal kinship as burdens and as obstacles to be maneuvered around rather than as ideals to be upheld or values to be embraced. Wolf has also shown how women utilize uterine relationships, ties to their children and ties to their own natal kin, to subvert some of those conventions (1972, 1991). In Pahansu and Hathchoya, women's talk about gift giving, the songs they sing about natal kin and natal places, and talk in their sasurals of the importance of relationships "from the direction of the natal village" similarly demonstrate that women have only partially and incompletely internalized the ideals of patrilineal kinship. The ironic detachment from these ideals, voiced in song but observable also in everyday life, allows them to see that the system of marriage, familial relations, and power in which they live is not so fixed, unyielding, and monolithic as their men might sometimes wish them to believe.