Preface
Listening to Women in Rural North India

The heron is a bird of ambiguous moral significance in North Indian traditions. Graceful and white, circling herons guide the lost and thirsty to refreshing pools in popular stories and epics. But in hymns or bhajans , largely a male performance genre, in Sanskrit texts like the Laws of Manu and the Panchatantra , and in a number of Hindi proverbs, herons symbolize predatory hypocrisy. Appearing pure when really deceitful and corrupt, they seem to meditate as they stand perfectly still gazing into the water of a pond, when in fact they are looking for fish to eat. In women's songs, however, a heron's speech suggests a different moral configuration. Herons act as narrators, inviting listeners to consider tales of illicit encounters, resistance to dominating power, or both. Such accounts are resonant with genuine but commonly suppressed truths. One insult song begins: "On a banyan sat a heron, listen to the heron's words." The heron boldly tells of an adulterous liaison that results in a desired birth. A devotional song addressed to the lusty male deity, Bhairuji, opens: "A heron spoke on the water's edge." The song goes on to describe Bhairuji's attempt to enter a low-caste wine-seller woman's house in the night, the excuses she makes to keep her door shut, and the curses he showers upon her for this resistance.

The heron is not a female image; rather herons in women's songs are grammatically male. But in contrast to the massive body of male lore, where these birds signify a dichotomous split between purity and corruption or surface and core, in women's texts a heron's framing speech points to a potent shift in moral register. In inviting our readers to listen to the heron's words, we undertake to convey that shift and suggest that its spoken truths, if sometimes devalued in male-dominated expressive traditions,

are compelling and consequential for the women we know in rural North India. The heron tells us of alternative moral perspectives on kinship, gender, and sexuality, ones that are shaped by women but are sometimes shared by men. This book describes such perspectives found in North Indian women's expressive traditions and begins to examine their consequences for the lives of these women in Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan.

Neither Gloria Goodwin Raheja nor Ann Grodzins Gold went to India intending to study women, gender, or oral traditions. The existence of this volume bears testimony not only to the ways fieldwork has a mind of its own but to the strength of Indian women's voices and the complex, arresting beauties of their expressive genres. Gloria and Ann both attended graduate school in the seventies at the University of Chicago. There, although we learned a great deal about ways of understanding cultures, we received no education in women's studies or feminist theory. Though we had read much of the work on issues of gender in India, we first began to reflect seriously upon the implications of feminist anthropology after listening to women in rural India. Living in different villages in the adjacent but distinctive North Indian states of Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, we were persuaded by the power of women's voices to listen, pay attention, and attempt to comprehend their words. They spoke and sang of female lives—celebrating vitality, resisting devaluation, contesting subordination.

Although we studied with the same professors and read many of the same books, our intellectual inclinations and our writing styles are very different. Gloria began dissertation research in India when Ann was in her third year of course work, and was back in Chicago at the start of her "writing-up" phase around the time Ann was preparing to leave for her own fieldwork. Gloria is among perhaps a minority of scholars in our generation who took up the study of Indian culture for purely academic reasons (rather than because of previous links with India's traditions by way of gurus, the Peace Corps, childhood residence, or gypsy wanderings). Her marriage to Mahipal Tomar, an Indian man, has no doubt shaped her interpretations in ways, as she acknowledges, she may not yet fully understand. But her interest in Indian anthropology goes back to her undergraduate days, long before

Figure 1.
Map of India

her marriage. Before entering graduate school, Ann was among those American youths who adventured through the subcontinent in the late sixties. Her dissertation research proposal was on the otherworldly aim of liberation and the romantic practice of pilgrimage. Gloria, by contrast, had planned to study kinship in relation to landholding and hierarchy, and eventually focused on caste, dominance, ritual, and exchange.

It strikes us as especially significant that, initially lacking a feminist perspective and with different approaches and different fieldwork goals, we reached similar conclusions concerning an apparently flawed representation of Indian women in much

Western scholarship. Both of us based our conclusions on the bearing, behavior, and words of the women with whom we lived. Independently we heard and wished to highlight in our writings the subversive and critically ironic refrains in North Indian women's oral traditions. We began this collaborative effort in 1988 shortly after Gloria returned from a second research period in India, when we first became aware of convergences in our thoughts and preliminary writings on North Indian women's oral traditions and lives.

We have learned from working together in the production of this volume that the ways we practice writing are as unlike as were our fieldwork goals. Both of us, alas, are slow, but for different reasons. Ann puts inchoate fragments down on paper and then revises them countless times until meaning and order emerge; thinking takes place as an integral part of the process of arranging words artistically. Gloria labors in her mind, synthesizing abstractions, until complicated thoughts emerge full-blown in sentence form. The resulting prose styles are dramatically different. Moreover, the performance traditions of Ghatiyali in Rajas-than, and Pahansu and Hathchoya in Uttar Pradesh—traditions that substantiate much of our argument in this book—are different too. As far as Gloria is aware, no insult songs in Pahansu are quite as sexually graphic as those performed in Ghatiyali. As far as Ann is aware, no dance songs in Ghatiyali recount long dramatic narratives like those Pahansu's women perform. Our translation styles are certainly unlike, but we are also translating unlike genres from unlike dialects. (An appendix provides transliterated texts for all songs.)

Foreigners with imperfect language skills, we are acutely aware of the multiple impositions and presumptions we make in attempting to convey the spirit and qualities of women whose lives we shared only partially and briefly. Teachers of courses on Indian culture, on folklore, and on gender, we are equally aware of a dominant mode in both academic and journalistic accounts depicting rural South Asian women as submissive if decorative, as kept in their subordinate place by a patriarchal economy and a religious tradition that devalues them, as ashamed of their bodies and their sexuality. Privileged white Americans commenting on relatively poor and often nonliterate Indian villagers, we recog-

nize our attempt to interpret other lives as inherently compromised, but we feel strongly that it is worth the risk to add to the ethnographic record our impressions of North Indian women's identities as exuberant, resilient, and often refusing degradations imposed by male ideologies or structures of authority. It is striking to us and will be, we hope, to others that despite the ethnographic differences between our research areas and the differences in our own interests and intellectual styles, we find that the ways in which Rajasthani and Uttar Pradesh women redefine gender, kinship, and identity through song and story are fundamentally the same.

As a group, the women of rural North India impressed us overwhelmingly with their sense of their own power, dignity, and worth. This worth was not something nourished secretly in defiance of a degraded existence. Rather, it was integral to their daily lives, labors, relationships, and to the religious and cultural performances that imbued those lives with meaning. In the past decade, many Indian feminists have turned from a blanket rejection of Hindu traditions to reexamine them as possible sources of empowerment. We see such possibilities in the songs and stories we write about here.

We acknowledge from the start inevitable limitations and unhappy complicities that haunt any who set out from the "first world" to speak of "others." If we devote our efforts, as we do, to emphasizing positive aspects of rural South Asian women's imaginative lives, we might seem to lack appreciation for feminist initiatives that seek to make legal and social changes that will redress gender inequities and concretely better those lives. But it goes without saying that we wish only to support and not to undermine that work. We hope that recognition of rural women's poetic resistance to structures of power may help to ground feminist activities in local understandings of gender and power. If we recognize, as we do, that most rural South Asian women negotiate their existences from subordinate positions, we may seem to be insensitive outsiders judging Indian culture by standards alien to it. For us, there is no pure, uncompromised space from which to speak, and nothing but partial truths to tell.

While of course we possessed some kinds of power not given to the women we knew—the power, for example, to write

of our lives and theirs and expect to see our words published and disseminated—we nevertheless wish to record that we were humbled and reminded of our dependence again and again by the persons on whose hospitality and goodwill we relied for our immediate creature comforts and future career success. The women we knew in Pahansu, Hathchoya, and Ghatiyali were proud of their work, of their children, of their appearance, of their knowledge and skill as singers, dancers, storytellers, ritual actors, and givers of gifts. They both pitied and berated us—although we were relatively wealthy, independent, and educated—for our lack of much that they most valued and for our incompetence at tasks they accomplished with skill and success. We ourselves felt our inferiority, because we so lamentably lacked those skills. And it was not infrequently that we felt that our insight into human relationships was meager in comparison to that of the women we knew.

We are both without brothers, and Indian women knew this to be a sorrowful condition without remedy. Neither of us ever learned how to clean or season vegetables properly; both of us, no matter how we tried to dress appropriately, were geese among the swans: clumsy and drab. Neither of us ever shed her own sense of embarrassment enough to sing and dance, and thus we were judged deficient in artistry and capacity for enjoyment. Both of us became subjects of stories and jokes that grew up around our mistakes and emotional weaknesses and were incorporated into the narrative repertoires of persons who knew us best.

We have each published monographs based on our first and longest research periods in the villages of Pahansu in Uttar Pradesh and Ghatiyali in Rajasthan. Our chapters in this volume grow out of the same sojourns in rural India, supplemented for Gloria by two subsequent stays in Uttar Pradesh and for Ann by one revisit. We choose not to summarize or repeat in this preface ethnographic details available elsewhere. Instead we recount, in personal voices, that background most immediately relevant to the theoretical introduction and the substantive chapters that follow: how we got to know Indian women and began to learn from them. Ann has previously described some of the ways she was taught to act, dress, and think about herself in the village of Ghatiyali; thus her account is somewhat briefer than Gloria's.

While we have discovered that many aspects of our experiences as female foreigners in Indian villages overlap and converge—hence this book's existence—some elements that significantly structured our lives "in the field" differed sharply. Most important, Gloria was "adopted" into a family and, from the moment of her arrival, was cast in the role of village daughter. Ann was never thus incorporated in clear-cut fashion, although many called her "aunt" and "sister." Because there was an American man, Joseph Miller, already working in Ghatiyali, Ann entered the village as his "father's brother's daughter"; perhaps as a result of this, her foreignness remained more palpable. We have tried in the descriptive accounts that follow to highlight some of the ways our experiences were different. At the same time, simple and similar revelations punctuate each of our separately composed narratives. These are mundane moments when our informal education in the meanings of village women's lives shattered preconceptions with what was, to us at least, revelatory impact.

Gloria's Account

I went to India in 1977 planning to live in a village in western Uttar Pradesh and study the kinship practices of a dominant landholding caste. After spending several months visiting many villages in Muzaffarnagar and Saharanpur districts and trying to deride where to work, and doing some research in the National Archives, I visited Pahansu, a Gujar village in Saharanpur district. I stayed for a few days in the house of Amar Singh, spending most of my time with his brother's wife Shanti and his son's wife Omi. And I stayed briefly in the house next door to theirs, where a very large family of four married brothers, their mother, wives, and children lived. A week later, having decided on Pahansu as a research site and having returned to Delhi to pack my tape recorder and notebooks, I settled down in "banyan tree neighborhood" in the second house, the house of Telu Ram and Jabar Singh. I seemed to have been claimed by them; when I climbed down from the water-buffalo cart that had brought me there, my things were immediately taken into the house, before I could even sort out the difficulties in choosing between Amar Singh's house and Telu's. Nothing had been said to me about rent or the cost

of my food. When I broached the topic after I had moved in, my question was greeted with shocked dismay. I was the sister of Telu Ram and Jabar Singh and the daughter of Asikaur, they said, and one never takes anything from a sister or daughter. It is acceptable, however, for a daughter or sister to give sets of cloth to her brothers' wives and to their children, and so I assuaged my conscience by bringing cloth and sweets and shawls anytime I made a trip outside the village and returned to Pahansu, which had become my pihar , my natal village.

I suppose that I did not anticipate being anything other than anthropologist in the village, and I did not anticipate a need to transform myself in any way. But Telu's mother, Asikaur, did not like the sails I had been wearing. She considered this garment to be immodest, and advised me to wear salvar-kamiz , the long shirt and baggy pants worn by most women in Saharanpur and Muzaffarnagar villages. She found my appearance unsatisfactory on other counts too; a married woman, I was told, should wear glass bangles on her arms and toe tings on her feet, lest the absence of these tokens of suhag (marital good fortune) cause harm to her husband. So I purchased these things and felt myself more and more understood as Gujar daughter and sister, and less and less as anthropologist. Throughout my stay in Pahansu, at each wedding I was urged to let the women beautify my palms with henna. Women could not understand my resistance to this. "Henna looks beautiful," they said. But the patterns traced in henna last a long time, I thought, and I felt that though I could put on the clothes and jewelry, I could not let my body itself be imprinted with this sign of an alien way of life, an alien way of being a woman. To be thus imprinted was too lasting a transformation. I did not want, then, to become too much like these women among whom I lived, and my resistance to the henna was, it seems to me now, a strategy for keeping some vestige of myself intact, away from them. I imagined, at that time, a great distance between myself and the women I knew there in Pahansu, a distance I attributed to the weight of a tradition that I couldn't, then, envision them resisting or subverting. Perhaps I had been persuaded to make this unthinking assumption then, in the 1970s, because so much of the colonial, anthropological, feminist, and journalistic writing on South Asian women stressed their sub-

mission to a monolithic "tradition," just as anthropological writing of the time so frequently assumed that Indian untouchables had fully internalized their own subordinate status and the morality of caste hierarchy.

My relationship as daughter and sister, though, extended to the kamins (people of lower service castes attached to Gujar landholders in hereditary relationships) of the household as well as to the family itself. Just after I arrived in the village, I announced that I wanted to ride to Saharanpur on the next departing water-buffalo cart so that I could purchase a worktable. A week later, when I was becoming increasingly annoyed that no offer of a ride had been forthcoming, a very fine table appeared in my room. It had been made for me, I was told, by Chotu Barhai, the family's Carpenter, with wood supplied by Telu. I had at that point not even heard of Chotu Barhai, and I immediately wanted to be taken to him so that I could thank him and pay him for his work. Again, shocked dismay. Telu patiently explained to me that Chotu Barhai received a share of the harvest and additional compensation for such out-of-the-ordinary services he performed for their household, and besides, I was a "sister of the whole village" (pure gam ki bahan ), and no one there would take any money from me.

Though I may have been in some ways a "sister of the whole village," it soon became clear to me that I was considered to be "sister" more to some villagers than to others. First of all, I made no particular effort to hide the fact that my research focused on the Gujar farmers and landholders of the village; I came to know people of other castes very well, but my identification with the Gujars of the community was always taken for granted. I was not invited to and was not even made aware of some of the ritual activities of the untouchable Sweepers, for example, though I did visit frequently with Sweeper women in their homes. I was on fairly intimate terms with several Barber women and heard much about their rituals and their lives, but I always felt that I continued to be perceived as allied to the Gujar landholders for whom they worked. The fact that Asikaur continually admonished me not to accept any food from Brahman households (Gujars say they never take anything from Brahmans because Brahmans accept the dangerous ritual gifts called dan ) was well known

in the village. Just as Brahmans would never invite a Gujar to a meal in their house, I was never asked to eat in a Brahman household, though I was plied with many cups of tea in the Brahman neighborhood, and I established close relationships with several men and women there. (Asikaur was not altogether happy about even this tea drinking though.) Most of what I write about women's songs and women's lives, then, is grounded in my understanding of the words and experiences that Gujar women shared with me as I sat with them at their cooking hearths, watched them giving birth and caring for their children, traveled with them to their natal villages, and listened to them sing at births and weddings and festival days.

Not only was I seen as being particularly connected with the Gujars of the village, I was also identified with a particular kunba (lineage) of Gujars, the sadhu hera lineage. This was the lineage of Telu's family, and I would hear people comment that I lived "among the sadhu hera ." My ties throughout my stay in Pahansu were strongest with people of that lineage, and my presence in their houses was so much a part of the daily routine that people barely looked up from their work or their conversations when I entered a courtyard. My relationships with other families were generally a bit more formal: water would be set to boil for tea, work would be set aside, conversations dropped, and quarrels silenced when I paid visits to other households. But it was only in 1988, when several major disputes had broken out concerning the impending state-mandated land consolidation and redistribution, that I was asked by the women of Telu's house not to visit several other Gujar homes in the village, because tensions were running so high over land consolidation. I was the sister of Telu Ram and Jabar Singh, they said, and it would not do for me to sit with women in those courtyards. I did in fact visit with women I had been close to, in Rupram's house across the lane, and I was welcomed there, but there was nonetheless some tension in the air, so much was I perceived as part of Telu's family.

Though of course I could become a daughter of the village in only limited ways, and though I never did, at that time, have henna put on my palms, sometimes I did feel that I had internalized some of the expectations about women's behavior in Pahansu. While daughters never veil their faces in their natal

village, they do keep their heads covered with their shawls; to go about with uncovered head or loosely flowing hair would be an open admission that one was besaram , without modesty. I soon began to feel incompletely clothed if my head wasn't covered, and I often felt uncomfortable in the company of men who weren't known to me. And my own discomfort brought an understanding that just as I covered my head and avoided unwanted male gazes out of a sense of expediency and privacy, so too might other women in Pahansu veil not because they believe themselves to be inferior to men but because such a pose of deference and modesty is required if the honor of one's household is to be upheld.

The only village event that I was asked not to attend was a folk drama, a sang , at the time of Holi, performed on the outskirts of the village by a troupe of traveling actors and musicians. Gujar women never attend these dramas, but I insisted that I should witness the event. It was with pained expressions that Telu and several other men of the family walked with me to the spot in the fields where the stage had been erected and sat with me through the first day's performance. And I too felt uncomfortable, because there were so many strangers there who had come only for the folk drama, and it happened that more eyes seemed to be focused on me, the very tall foreigner in the salvar-kamiz , than on the drama. When we returned home afterward, Telu again reminded me that Gujar wives and daughters never attend folk drama performances, and that it was a matter of the honor (izzat ) of one's family that it should be so. I didn't go to the play the next day, thinking that the small increment of ethnographic knowledge that I would acquire was not adequate compensation for those pained expressions and my own unease.

I realized on the day I left Pahansu in 1979, at the conclusion of my dissertation research, just how hazardous to their honor it had seemed to Asikaur and her family to take me into their home for such a long time, as their daughter and sister. Just as I was leaving, with several of my Pahansu brothers who had decided to escort me to Delhi to catch the plane back to Chicago, Asikaur, with the relief evident in her voice, said, "Thank God nothing happened." I think she was expressing her relief that I had done nothing to disgrace them, and relief also that no one in Pahansu had insulted me or done me any harm, because in either case

their izzat , their honor, would have been besmirched. And I realized, as I decided not to return to the sang so many months before, that a woman might conform to certain cultural expectations not out of an inner conviction of her own inferiority but out of concern for the feelings and honor of others. It seems obvious that the North Indian women who behave as I did then, and who take to heart the common Hindi proverb "The woman who preserves the honor of her husband is the ornament of the house" (tiriya to hai sobha ghar ki jo laj rakhe apne nar ki ), are thereby complicit in the preservation of a system of inequality, since "honor" is so dearly part of an ideology that contributes to the power of men over women. But these same women may nonetheless be moved, as I also came to see, to resist this ideology in subtle ways.

Through my own limited participation, I began to recognize some of the complex ways in which women might mock conventions concerning modesty while adhering to them for the sake of honor. Gujar daughters, when they return from their husbands' villages for a visit, spend much time visiting neighbors and kin, gossiping, and going to various houses to "view the dowries" that are being given or received in the village and to pass judgment on whether the sets of cloth involved are barhiya or vaise-hi fine or not so fine, and whether sets of cloth have been given to all the right recipients. As this was pretty much how I spent my day, or at least how most people interpreted my activities, the role of daughter and sister that I fell into seemed appropriate. One major restriction that this role seemed to bring with it was that I should under no circumstances, even in jest, comport myself as a wife (bahu ) of the village. Once when I had gone to a house on the other side of the village with the women of our house to look over dowries, I was joking about the necessity of veiling one's face as one walked through the streets. Asikaur and her daughters-in-law all appreciated my mocking jibes at the practice of ghunghat , or veiling. Yet when I attempted to mimic the fairly complicated method of holding the shawl over the head that a wife employs when she walks veiled through the lanes of her husband's village, the mood of iconoclastic levity abruptly ended. The moment Asikaur saw me do this, she let loose the only torrent of reproach and anger that I ever received from her. What sort of shameless

behavior was this? How could I, a daughter of the whole village, veil my face in my natal village? What would people say about my character and that of my family if I thus behaved as only a wife of the village should behave? To veil implied a sexuality that needed protection; in one's natal village no issues of sexuality ought to arise, for one is daughter and sister to all. Thus the same veiling that would signify modesty in a husband's village meant immoral wantonness in one's natal home. Asikaur's appreciation of the verbal mockery while angrily disapproving of my burlesque of the veiling made me see early on in my fieldwork that a woman may voice an ironic critique of a cultural practice while at the same time embracing that practice and much that it implies, to uphold her own honor and that of her family.

In other ways too I saw that women could subtly mock many conventions concerning kinship, gender, sexuality, and "modesty" (saram ). Babbli, the eldest of Jabar Singh's two daughters, was a lively and bright twelve year old when I left Pahansu in 1979. When I returned in 1988, she was married and pregnant with her first child. Though she was nearing the end of her pregnancy, she returned to Pahansu when she heard that I had arrived. As quick and animated now as I had remembered her, she seemed delighted to see me and to visit with her family, and she seemed rather to enjoy flaunting her disregard of the convention that women are too ashamed of their sexuality to visit their natal village when they are in an advanced stage of pregnancy. On the day of her arrival, Babbli sat in our courtyard companionably eating from the same plate as Kusum, her father's sister's daughter, who was also paying a visit to Pahansu. Just then one of the family's agricultural laborers came into the courtyard. He flashed a devilish smile at her and said, kanghe te ayi , "Where have you come from?" teasing the young bride who had returned from her husband's place. Babbli looked him straight in the eye, laughed conspiratorially and replied, sarak sarakon te , "I've come by way of the roads." Far from exhibiting the modesty about referring to her husband's place that convention required, Babbli seemed to me to be satirizing that convention, by the mirth in her eyes and the jesting, mocking tone of her repartee. A few weeks later, when Babbli's husband came to fetch her back to her in-laws' home, she resumed before our eyes the posture of a shy and reticent wife.

It was from listening closely to Pahansu women that I first became vividly aware of how they reimagined gender and kinship and how those reimaginings subverted some of the generally more audible commonplaces of North Indian social life. One of the first things I did in Pahansu in 1977 was to take down genealogies, piecemeal, here and there, from both men and women. I was given, in answer to my questions, exactly what I expected: a web of kinship ties, among men, was traced out for me, and armed with this, I assumed that I would understand how everybody was related to everybody else in the village. I hadn't been in Pahansu for more than a few days, however, when I noticed that everything was not as neat and tidy as the genealogies seemed to suggest. Why was Omi not properly deferential to her husband's father's brother's wife? Why was Shanti not veiling before several of the men of her husband's kunba? Why did Usha, Shanti's daughter-in-law, call two men of the lineage "brother" and joke with them, instead of silently veiling in their presence as a daughter-in-law should? I realized that women were constantly redefining patrilineal relationships in their husband's village, and gaining allies for themselves in the process, in the many cases in which genealogical ambiguity existed. By "accepting" even remote ties "from the direction of the natal village," when such ties could be traced, and disregarding the much more hierarchical (though genealogically much closer) relationship "from the direction of the husband's village," women were able to shift, if ever so slightly, the lines of authority and power in their conjugal village. These were subtle though important shifts, discernible only as I sat and listened to women's talk in their courtyards or listened to them tell tales of how they were able to depend on these natal ties in times of adversity. Yet these reimaginings of patrilineal kinship were never evident from interviews or in the genealogies; they emerged only in the particular contexts in which women invoked them. I don't think I would have become aware of their significance had I not sat companion-ably in so many courtyards for so many hours of the day.

It was from listening to and translating the words of women's songs that I began to realize that such negotiations of kinship relationships, and the defiance of authority in the husband's house that sometimes followed, were not viewed by women as devia-

tions from a unitary set of norms but as positively valued and celebrated ways of constructing an alternative female identity in rural North India. In these songs, women's forthright speech was valued, and the complex visions of proper kinship behavior were articulated very differently from what I heard from men and from what I often heard from women too in abstract interview situations. What this meant to me was that the enormous gulf between us that I first imagined narrowed, when I saw that like me women in Pahansu and Hathchoya contested dominant gender ideologies and were not content to accept everything that male traditions said of them. I was able to feel that when I began to listen attentively to the songs.

When I had been in Pahansu in the 1970s, I had recorded some birth and marriage songs and rather desultorily translated a few of them. They seemed boring to me then—long, repetitive lists of kin; long, repetitive lists of ornaments demanded and ornaments received. I didn't really turn my attention seriously to women's expressive traditions until 1988. I had gone to Pahansu then with my six-year-old son and eighteen-month-old daughter. Lauren didn't take much to water-buffalo milk, and she compensated by demanding to breastfeed more frequently than usual. I found myself sitting in the courtyard with her in my lap for a good part of the day, and so I turned my attention to the tapes, old ones from my previous visit and new ones I was making then. While the men of our household could not understand why I would want to devote so much attention to something as insignificant as "women's songs," I was simply astonished at women's reaction to my new interest. I had only to take out my tape recorder, and I would be surrounded by women eager to "fill up" a tape with songs or to explicate the meaning of ones we listened to. I sometimes felt that my ability occasionally to grasp quickly the emotional nuances of a song gave them proof, finally, that I was a thinking and feeling human being. When women spoke with me about a song, they often spoke also about their own lives, about their relationships with brothers, husbands, mothers-in-law. I felt that through these songs I came to see a different side of the women I thought I had known so well. My most vivid memories of that 1988 trip to Pahansu are of Simla poignantly reminding me of the parallels between the words of a song and her own life, of

young girls thinking of their own approaching marriages as they helped me translate a wedding song, of Rajavati mourning the loss of her brother many years before and thinking of her son's approaching marriage as she tried to explicate a song about a mother's brother's wedding gifts. I saw so clearly then that these songs question the dominant conventions concerning North Indian kinship and gender and reflect upon the ironies of women's lives in a patrilineal system. And this is why they are, to the women who sing them and to me, so emotionally compelling. The words of the songs, and women's commentaries on them, allowed me to hear, at last, that women were not the unquestioning bearers of "tradition" I had assumed them to be. They subtly but articulately challenged tradition at every turn. One need only listen to their words.

I spent the summer of 1990 in Hathchoya, doing almost nothing but tape-recording and translating women's songs. At the end of the summer, just before I left, I finally, after all those years, had henna applied to my palms. It looked beautiful. The distance I had originally sensed between myself and the women I knew there seemed to have diminished. Though of course I cannot claim to have abolished the postcolonial and academic legacies informing, ineluctably, my perceptions of those I tried to learn about, I had at least begun to see that critical reflection and resistance were as much characteristic of women's expressive genres there as I hope they are of mine.

Ann's Account

I went to India in 1979 intending to live in a village and study religious values, especially those associated with Hindu pilgrimage. I did not anticipate that these elusive values, or life in the "field," would be particularly affected by sexual difference. But to move from the United States of the seventies into a North Indian village is to move into a context where gender differences are much more blatantly highlighted and constitutive of behavior. Almost from the moment I set foot in the place called Ghatiyali, the women who lived there set about to teach me that any pretense of gender-free thought and behavior was folly.

Ghatiyali's women claimed me—with words and beckoning

gestures. Although I was a foreigner, and therefore visibly and verbally different from them, they told me that I was like them more than any man was. In the Rajasthani dialect they contrasted "women" (lugaya ) with "men" (log ). Although in Hindi as I had learned it log meant "people" in the unmarked, ungendered, encompassing sense, in Ghatiyali women used log to mean the opposite of "people." Thus they might say about a place, "There's nobody to talk with over there, nothing but log, " as if men were an alien species.

Groups of laughing women called to me, it seemed, from every housefront as I learned my way through the lanes of Ghatiyali. When I stopped to talk with them I was subjected to friendly interrogations that circled around family, clothing, and money. Once these points were established (I did have a husband and a son, my skirt was made of cloth from Jodhpur, the government paid me a stipend), talk often turned to food (What vegetable did you eat today?) or to the—for them—ever-fascinating topic of life in America (What's the price of wheat? Are small children and aging parents really abandoned into the care of strangers? Do you have the same moon?).

During my first months in Rajasthan I wearied of answering questions on the limited set of topics I had come to label "women's" interests. No longer flattered by their warm inclusion of me, anxious to get on with my serious quest for cultural values, I frequently preferred to shut myself up in rooms with educated men who could teach me the hidden meanings of esoteric hymns and who spoke clear Hindi and not the—to me—often murky Rajasthani.

Hierarchies of caste and gender manifest in control of language skills powerfully affected my early relationships in Ghatiyali. Because I knew Hindi and not the local dialect, the persons with whom I could have the most intelligent, wide-ranging, informative conversations were educated men. My own naïveté was such that it took me months to realize why women's conversations appeared so simpleminded and repetitive. They had readily perceived that I couldn't understand them when they said anything complex, and yet they were kindly determined to include me in the companionable sociability without which life was unthinkable. Therefore they repeated their elementary questions and no

doubt felt bored themselves. (I know that they judged me fairly dull and obtuse, if comical enough to entertain.)

Although I never became perfectly fluent in Rajasthani, gradually my language skills improved enough that women could include me in discussions about their own world. I began to understand how much religious knowledge they possessed. For example, women were far better sources for the meanings of, and practices associated with, calendrical or life-cycle festivals than were men. If I asked a man what happens on such and such a day, the most common answer would be "We eat pudding" or some equivalent. It was women who readily explained what gods were worshiped, what stories were told, what results were expected— and they were the ones who knew the pudding recipe too. My respect for Ghatiyali's women increased vastly, and I began to relax in their company, no longer worried that I was "wasting time." But my research focus remained "religious values," not gender.

I had arrived in Rajasthan in 1979 with various preconceptions about Indian women, and most of them—drawn from gossip, fiction, films, and occasionally anthropology—were at least partially wrong. For example, I had been warned, seriously, by Indian men living in the United States not to tell the villagers that I was divorced, because they didn't have the concept of divorce and to them it could mean only that I was a "loose woman." I found, on the contrary, that they had a perfect understanding of divorce, although the term used to describe it meant "connection" and stressed not separation but union. Often women "ran off" and made new connections with men more desirable to them than the husbands with whom their parents had matched them in early childhood. But a second marriage could also be properly arranged. Excluding the Brahman, Rajput, and Baniya castes, the practice of making new connections was not infrequent.

I had been led to expect extreme reticence about sexual matters and about women's bodily processes. I found, to the contrary, that both marital sexuality and scandalous love affairs were subjects of frequent discussion, and often of jokes, playfulness, and occasional sentimentality—usually, it is true, only in unmixed company, although there were exceptions to this rule too. "Do you miss your husband?" village women whispered to me with both mischief and sympathy. "In which spot do you miss him?"

Even regarding menstruation—the ultimate polluting process that I had assumed would be taboo—I found Rajasthani women more frank and unabashed than I was. Once when I was sitting outside with a young woman she observed that I must have my period. Nervously, I replied, "What makes you say that?" and she responded that she knew because of the flies buzzing around my skirt. She and her friends, she continued, always guessed about and questioned one another in this way. To my professional discredit, rather than pursue this new avenue of ethnographic inquiry I covered up a sense of mortification by telling her rather brusquely that in my country it was not customary to talk about such things.

I was somewhat more prepared to see older women exercising considerable power in the domestic setting. But I was surprised by the ready acknowledgment given this power by mature men. My first and haughtiest male research assistant—a tall, handsome Brahman in his mid-thirties, with a wife, two children, and a reputation for womanizing—was the absolute dependent of his toothless, widowed mother (rather than vice versa, despite what is published on the lot of Hindu widows). This man was assisting Joe Miller and me in our attempt at a house-to-house census. Of course his own household was one of the first where he chose to try out our freshly printed census forms with their carefully constructed Hindi categories. One of these categories was mukhya admi , or chief man—intended to describe the head of household. At the end of the first day of census taking our assistant came to us and sheepishly explained his problem with this category. "In my house," he said, "the 'chief man' is a woman—my mother. What shall I do?" Obviously, we had erred in imposing male gender on the "head of household" category.

Ghatiyali was indeed a sexually segregated society, but I began to perceive that women felt comfortable among themselves partly because they had to assume postures of submission and modesty in the presence of men. Thus I began to understand, much as Gloria did through her everyday experiences in Pahansu and Hathchoya, that the gestures constituting purdah, or female seclusion, were recognized as poses—enforced by behavioral codes. Although the women of Ghatiyali certainly accepted these codes, covering their faces and lowering their voices accordingly, they

were freer in thought, and their domestic influence more blatant than I had anticipated. They did not appear in the least to be fundamentally ashamed of female bodily processes.

It was performed stories and songs that persuasively turned my anthropological attention directly to the "female species" (stri jat ) in Ghatiyali. Initially, male power over language continued to impose a gulf between me and this material; for, as I rarely understood all the words of women's performances in action, I taped them, and they were then transcribed by one of several male research assistants jointly employed by Joe Miller and me. At that time, 1979-81, no woman in the village could write well enough to do transcription work, although Joe and I often employed one marginally literate woman to help our male assistants transcribe women's songs. Moreover, I used male assistants to explain Rajasthani song and story texts to me in Hindi, and thus male judgments affected my interpretations. Because men, like women, feel "shame" in discussing intimate matters with the opposite sex, most men would not work with me on genres of songs with sexual import.

Eventually a bold woman of an untouchable caste—my friend Lila, the drummer and dancer—was willing to sit with me and go over the words of galis , or insult songs. She helped me to master the vocabulary for bodily parts and sexual acts. Once I knew the words, it was not impossible to discuss these songs with some men. Here is what one of my research assistants wrote about this work, in an account of how foreigners had affected his life:

At this time I was doing translations of Rajasthani folk songs with Ann. This was a completely new experience for me: [to note] the ways in which a woman, by means of a song, reveals her desires, and also reveals her happiness upon obtaining these desires. These songs express joy, grief, pleasure, and one's own needs, and they make some specific references too. I worked on translating all songs with Ann. Among them there were some songs that were so obscene I wouldn't be able to write them, but women easily sang them in the open bazaar.
(Gujar and Gold 1992: 77)

In 1979-81 I almost never spoke with women about the texts of their performances. The questions I asked were usually about the meanings of ritual actions or about the myths surrounding holi-

days that songs accompanied. I did not ask women why they sang these songs or whether the songs expressed their inner feelings. But I did spend hours and hours in the company of singing, joking, dancing, laughing women, sharing with them the vital, emergent reality of performative situations. I was swept along within a closely packed group of energetic young women intensely hurling insults as they blocked a bridegroom's path; I relaxed in the peaceful, soothing companionship of middle-aged matrons melodically praising the goddesses and gods.

Most of my analytic thinking about women's oral traditions was done in the United States as I pondered transcribed texts several years after my return from Rajasthan. I was back in India in 1987-88—once again on a research project that had nothing to do with gender. Shobhag, heroine of chapter 6, drove with me and my family to the pilgrimage center of Pushkar, and on the way we happened to stop near a sugarcane stand. One of the engagingly ribald songs discussed in chapter 2 plays on an analogy between penises and sugarcane. Testing my grasp of the song's language, I recited two words only, in a kind of singsong: santo mitho (Sugarcane is sweet). Although this might have made an ordinary descriptive statement, Shobhag dissolved into delighted laughter, and I glowed with happiness at the success of my small experiment. When she stopped laughing my companion muttered, half chiding, half informing, "Hey, that's the insult for toran marna "—the striking by the groom of the wedding emblem before he enters his bride's door. She thus not only visibly enjoyed my having learned and spontaneously produced a bit of her cultural knowledge, but continued to educate me in the at least pro forma necessity for appropriate context. Even then, I refrained from asking more about sugarcane.

As I undertook to write about Rajasthani women I set out to educate myself in the current literature and found that much of it focused on sufferings, abuses, and discriminations to which women were subject. Moreover, there were chilling case studies and equally depressing statistics confirming cruel realities. It has always been difficult for me to reconcile these bleak images with my memories of Ghatiyali. I do vividly recall a funeral I witnessed in September 1979 of a small girl, a Barber's daughter. Her family was notoriously impoverished. When, beside the cremation fire,

Joe Miller asked her father, "Is there sorrow?" the man replied dully, "No, we hadn't married her yet."

A daughter's loss was grievous, we might conclude, only if one had already gone to the expense of performing her marriage. But many in the village shook their heads, clicked their tongues, and commented that this was a bleak house, a family with nothing. There seems to be a strong correlation in India between general poverty and increased female suffering. Confirming this, Indian feminist activists have observed that women from the comfortable peasant groups are less readily engaged in movements. In Ghatiyali in 1979-81 few lacked the physical necessities to live. Yet the women I know did, in their way, through artistic performances and sometimes through determined actions, resist male-authored gender inequities.

Most little girls in Ghatiyali were cherished, their spirits as buoyant as were their brothers', their giggles as loud, their behavior as gutsy. It was true that mothers and grandparents expressed special affection for their girl children by calling them "son," but this could be construed as negating gender difference as much as privileging males. (I think it is both.) I couldn't believe that girls were perceived or treated as second-rate human beings. Metaphorically, they were little birds destined to fly away —as one poignant wedding song puts it. But this departure is mourned rather than welcomed. Messages of love and yearning follow daughters when they go, and summon them home again. When Joe Miller and I undertook to do family portraits for every house in the village our systematic operation was infinitely hampered by the wish most parents had that we wait until daughters came home for a visit before taking a group photo. In-married wives might be present, but the family was not complete without the daughters born to the house.

That Ghatiyali's women had internalized neither submissiveness nor lack of worth was as evident in public oral performances as in private encounters. Women's rituals kept the world of domestic and community life orderly, auspicious, and productive. The stories they told and songs they sang as part of worship explicitly portrayed outspoken, beneficent, powerful women (and incidentally often featured passive, obedient, ineffectual, or blundering males). Women enjoyed and requested the presence of

the tape recorder—calling it the "thing to be filled," offering to fill it with their words and melodies, and relishing hearing their voices emerge from it. Thus oral traditions reinforced the positive messages I received in daily interactions.

Gloria and Ann

One of the major arguments of this book is that the performances associated with Hindu festivals and the many rituals surrounding birth, children, and weddings are both expressions of and sources for women's positive self-images. The celebration of these festivals depends on surplus, and during the time we lived in Pahansu, Hathchoya, and Ghatiyali there was enough surplus to permit a rich ritual and festival life to flourish. But if the richness of cultural performances is dependent on the richness of performers, our conclusions may be partially undermined. Ann resided with well-off Rajputs, and Gloria with prosperous landowning Gujars. Certainly we moved, and carried our tape recorders with us, among many other groups. But neither of us spent a lot of time with women of the untouchable castes. We acknowledge the consequently partial nature of our conclusions, based largely on our experiences among women of relatively high caste. Yet Margaret Trawick's work among South Indian untouchable women suggests that reimaginings of the kind we heard among landowning farmer groups are voiced in song even by women in dire economic situations.

We are conscious of the documentable counterpoint realities to our portrayal of North Indian women as outspoken, free-minded, reveling in womanhood, and exercising genuine control over the terms of their lives. Did they possess land and livestock or decide on cash expenditures in ways comparable to men? Did they eat before or after men? Did they eat more or less than men? Did little girls receive more or less medicine than little boys? Why were so few females literate that no woman in Ghatiyali was able to act as research assistant? Would the songs and stories we write about here continue to be performed if the men of Pahansu, Hathchoya, or Ghatiyali decided that they posed an immediate threat to male authority? The unadorned answers to all these questions are the predictable ones, confirming female disadvantage in

every case. What matter if women sing of the power of female sexuality and of their rethinking of patrilineal kinship if in real life their husbands beat them with community approval?

On the other hand, for those who will agree there is another hand, if we fail to hear Indian women's self-affirming voices or to appreciate their own sense of what constitutes a good life or to see how they skillfully negotiate their chance for such a life, we perpetuate the mistaken assumption that these women have completely internalized the dominant conventions of female subordination and fragmented identity. If we juxtapose the arenas of politics and economics to those of folklore and ritual without seeing the ways they meld and fluctuate in mutual regard, we perpetuate not only the old and false split between practice and ideology but the equally false notion that ideology is single and uncontested. This book argues not that one reality should obscure the other but rather that better pictures are to be had only by frequently shifting lenses.

A. K. Ramanujan's newly published collection of folktales from India contains this translation of an Urdu tale from the folk cycle about Akbar, the Moghul emperor, and his wise adviser Birbal:

Bring Me Four

One day Akbar said to Birbal, "Bring me four individuals: one, a modest person; two, a shameless person; three, a coward; four, a heroic person."

Next day Birbal brought a woman and had her stand before the emperor. Akbar said, "I asked for four people, and you have brought only one. Where are the others?"

Birbal said, "Refuge of the World, this one woman has the qualities of all four kinds of persons."

Akbar asked him, "How so?"

Birbal replied, "When she stays in her in-laws' house, out of modesty she doesn't even open her mouth. And when she sings obscene insult-songs at a marriage, her father and brothers and husband and in-laws and caste-people all sit and listen, but she's not ashamed. When she sits with her husband at night, she won't even go alone into the storeroom and she says, "I'm afraid to go." But then, if she takes a fancy to someone, she goes fearlessly to meet her lover at midnight, in the dark, all alone, with no weapon, and she is not at all afraid of robbers or evil spirits."

Hearing this, Akbar said, "You speak truly," and gave Birbal a reward.

(Ramanujan 1991b: 95)

This tale from male oral tradition expresses a stereotypical South Asian misogyny. Two men treat a voiceless female as an object. They see her as split between virtue and sexuality, weakness and strength, essentially duplicitous or hypocritical because of her multiplicity. But with a slight interpretive shift this same story could also point to aspects of infinite resourceful female power—fluid, shape-changing, boundless, formless—that are part of Hindu cosmology: prakriti , or the multiplicity of nature; maya , or the goddess's art of illusion; sakti , or the fearless energy that activates everything in the universe.

In this book we wish to make that interpretive shift: to listen to the truth-speaking heron, to move from Akbar and Birbal's external and judgmental account of female multiplicity as duplicity to more interior, less fragmented views. Without denying the evident reality of male voices maligning a silent female figure and congratulating themselves, we argue that silence itself is a construct neither monolithic nor pervasive. We have seen the same women who veil with utmost modesty before in-laws boldly hurl obscene insult songs; we have seen that model wives sometimes do risk everything to seek enriched lives by meeting their lovers after dark or by defying husbands and in-laws to pursue religious goals; and we have seen the less dramatic ways, too, in which women may manipulate kinship ties to the advantage of themselves and the people they care most about. The object woman of the male tradition is a speaking, imagining, singing, acting person, whose multiplicity—both in artistic expressions and in everyday negotiations—makes her all the more whole and strong.

Acknowledgments

Both Ann and Gloria wish to thank the institutions that have supported their work and the many people who have helped them in their research and in the writing of this book.

Gloria

My research in Pahansu was supported in 1977-79 by the Social Science Research Council/American Council of Learned Societies and by the American Institute of Indian Studies. Additional work there in 1988 was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for

Anthropological Research. Fieldwork in the village of Hathchoya in 1990 was made possible by the McKnight Foundation, in the form of a McKnight-Land Grant Professorship from the University of Minnesota.

Portions of chapters 3 and 4 have been presented at seminars at Cornell University, the University of Rochester, the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, the University of Virginia, and the Center for Advanced Feminist Studies at the University of Minnesota. Discussions generated at those presentations have enriched my analyses. I thank Jane Bestor, Carol Delaney, Richard Herrell, John Ingham, Patricia and Roger Jeffery, Frédérique Marglin, McKim Marriott, Mattison Mines, Cynthia Talbot, Mahipal Tomar, and especially Sylvia Vatuk for taking the time to comment extensively on these chapters. I also thank Ingrid Pars for help in preparing the final manuscript.

I must once again record my gratitude to Asikaur, Rajavati, Simla, Santroj, and Sarla for taking me into their home in Pahansu for eighteen months in the 1970s and for welcoming me and my children in 1988. Kevin and Lauren will not forget their nani Asikaur, and I can never forget the generous hospitality always shown us in her house. Of the many women in Pahansu who instructed me and whose friendship sustained me, I wish especially to acknowledge Bugli, Atri, Kamala and Sansar, Omi and Shanti, and Sumitra Kaushik and Anguri.

My debts to my sisters-in-law Saroj and Prem are of a different sort; I cannot find words to express my affection and my admiration for them. I hope that this book is something Bugli Devi could have taken pride in had she lived to see its completion.

Ann

My research in India was supported by the American Institute of Indian Studies in 1979-81 and again in 1987-88 and by the Social Science Research Council in 1980-81. Chapters 2, 5, and 6 were originally composed between 1984 and 1988, have circulated widely, and formed the substance for numerous lectures and conference presentations. Along the way, more persons than I can name have helped to shape them. I must particularly thank Jane Atkinson, Wendy Doniger, Daniel Gold, Ruth Grodzins, Sudhir

Kakar, Jyotsna Kapur, Kath March, Frédérique Marglin, McKim Marriott, Gail Minault, Michael Moffatt, Kirin Narayan, Margaret Trawick, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, and Susan Wadley. Carol Delaney, Vijay Gambhir, and Mary Katzenstein responded most helpfully to my pleas for immediate feedback on the preface. My debt to Shobhag Kanvar and to Bhoju Ram Gujar, as ever, is of the kind unpayable in a single life.

Gloria and Ann

No institution or person named here is responsible for the final published form of these materials.

We dedicate this book to all the women who taught us to listen and to all the young girls now growing up in Pahansu, Hathchoya, and Ghatiyali (with a special cheer for Hemalata, Chinu, and Ghumar). May the births and lives of daughters be joyful.