**********************
KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Friday, April 8, 2016 - 6:00 pm, Barker Center 133
**********************
Margaret Mills, Ohio State University (Professor Emerita)
How Stories Lodge in Lives
Mary Frere’s Old Deccan Days (1868) introduction to the storyteller, Anna Liberata deSouza, abundantly illustrates how the performer’s choices among traditional stories reflected specific challenges of a personal life full of loss. Frere’s framing of the stories set a model for attention to individual artistry and contexts of performance not again pursued in South Asia till the mid-20th century, with the performance turn in folklore studies. In recent decades, Wadley, Gold and Raheja, Narayan, Prasad, Naithani, and Narasamamba, among others, developed text presentations and analyses linking repertoire, performance, and personal history in various ways. As Ramanujan has pointed out, vrat katha itself is a major ritual genre in which the telling of stories shapes performatively the lives of the tellers and listeners, both in the ostensibly biographical miracle narratives framed within the ritual and the lives of the ritual participants who keep the stories alive. Blackburn’s Another Harmony itself offered a foundational analysis of relationships of biography, narrative performance genre and ritual efficacy in South Asia. The present paper reviews trajectories of this complex from biography to ritual studies and ends with some reflections on why the studies of performed narrative in and of lives have more usually, though not exclusively, focused on women protagonists and performers. Are we missing parallels in men’s equally situated narrative performances, or is there a systematic difference in performative focus determined by genre and/or gender?
_________________________________________________________________________
SYMPOSIUM PANELS
Saturday, April 9, 2016 - 9:00 am - 6:00 pm - Thompson Room, Barker Center
UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT PANEL
Aniket De, Tufts University
Divided Songs, Altered Gods: Partition, Nationalism, and Performance in the Bengal Borderland
This paper studies the history of the Gambhira, a popular performance on either side of the India-Bangladesh border, mainly in Malda (West Bengal) and Rajshahi (Bangladesh). Gambhira originated from rites of the god Hindu Shiva, and later became a popular theatre form in which both Hindu and Muslim performers complained to Shiva, with ridicule, and sarcasm, about people in power. After the Partition of British India in 1947, many Muslim performers fled across the border to East Pakistan (later Bangladesh). The Muslim performers, in Bangladesh’s Islamic context, replaced the figure of Shiva with that of a Muslim farmer, and continued the performance’s older tradition of questioning authority. The paper explores the interaction between broader structural changes in state structure and the consequent impact on folk forms. I explore the realities of such performances in the borderland, as well as the competing historical metanarratives on the changes and continuities in Gambhira.
Benjamin D. Grimm, Harvard University
Trans-gression: Gender, Divinity, and Cross-dressing in the Krishna Līlāhava
The līlahāva – a story in which Krishna and Rādhā exchange clothes during a night of passion – is inflected in poetry, art, and drama, and in its many loci cloaks itself in various symbolic modes: as comedic farce, as amorous play, and as a profound act of devotion. The story is imbued by tense dichotomies of male and female, divine and human, unity and disunity: is it transgressive for a cowherdess to wear Krishna’s peacock-feather crown? If so, from what does this transgression spring? The act of crossdressing exhumes basic tensions between male and female in Hindu thought. Moreover, it leads us to question the very nature of Krishna’s divinity; assuming one another’s identity reveals Rādhā as a mirror of Krishna, suggesting that she is indeed a divine consort, an endemic aspect of his own being. Declaring transgression in the līlahāva emerges from cultural – and thus human – prescriptions for a pair who is incontrovertibly transcendent.
Megan Taing, Harvard University
Brotherhood and Humor: Negotiating the South Asian American College Experience
This study analyzes the interaction among members of an all-male South Asian American club at an American university, contending that humor is the principle method through which members negotiate bicultural tensions. While seemingly raucous, judgmental, or even discriminatory on the surface, their jokes reveal a deeper sentiment of tolerance and support between members of the club. This mentorship vis-à-vis comedy can be invaluable to some South Asian American males transitioning from a stricter home life to more independence in college – including newfound freedom within the academic and romantic relationship domains. By maintaining membership in a South Asian American brotherhood of sorts, these students are able to retain ties to a familiar part of their identities, the “traditional” upbringing and expectations of their parents, while simultaneously exploring and receiving peer feedback on new interests that could contradict the familiar itself.
SOUTH ASIAN FOLKLORE IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
Frank J. Korom, Boston University
Three Decades of Folklore Studies in South Asia: Toward a History
Another Harmony marked the end of a previous era and signaled a new one in terms of studying South Asian folklore. This paper surveys the past thirty years of folkloristic scholarship on South Asia to identify significant contributions but also to point out gaps in areas of research that demand more and fuller attention. I conclude that while much has been done in the area of verbal art, very little has been done to address material culture. Moreover, the output of work on folklore in South Asia has been predominantly Indocentric, that is to say focusing almost exclusively on India at the expense of that nation’s neighbors in the region. Lastly, an overwhelming majority of the academic literature that one might call “folkloristic” focuses on Hindu traditions, while far less attention has been paid to Islam, and even less on Christianity, Sikhism, Jainism, and Buddhism.
Adheesh Sathaye, University of British Colombia
The Scribal Life of Folktales in Premodern India
This paper will explore how and why, about a thousand years ago, it became popular in India to compile large anthologies of folktales that were told in Sanskrit and disseminated through handwritten manuscripts. Oral variants of these tales are found scattered around the world, and folklorists have long recognized that this diffusion had taken place through an intricate interplay between written and oral modes of transmission. Less understood are the historical motivations for such oral/written interplay, especially within the specific context of the medieval Sanskrit literary culture in which these anthologies were being produced. I propose to sharpen our understanding of the cultural value of folktales in the premodern past, based on the textual history of the Vetāla-pañcaviṃśati (25 Tales of the Animated Corpse) a popular medieval anthology of riddle-tales. I focus on the active role of scribes—both professional and amateur—in carving out a scribal public culture in premodern India, using a combination of folktales, proverbs, and riddles that both complemented and challenged the elite Brahminical intellectual traditions of the time.
Leela Prasad, Duke University
Nameless in a Great Garden: When English Imperial Conquest Becomes a Purāṇa
My paper will examine a moment on the Indian side of the colonial archive of the anthropology of India to consider an intriguing dramatic poem written by eminent folklorist and literary scholar, P. V. Ramaswami Raju (1852-1897). Sreemat Rajangala Mahodyanam, or The Great Park of The English Raj, is a long poem in Sanskrit with an English translation provided by Raju himself. I will argue that the Raju’s purāṇa-style poem, set in a wondrous garden, operates in two core registers. One register maintains a tension between superlative praise of the English empire and the other is coded criticism about empire itself. I hope to demonstrate that by skillfully incorporating the origin of the English empire (yoked to a narrative about the discovery of America) into a Hindu mythos, Ramaswami Raju is able to project the error of empire as a cosmic error. In this frame, the abrupt ending of the poem, anguished over the namelessness of its protagonist, creates a kind of a moral caesura in the narrative of glory.
SOUTH ASIAN MATERIAL CULTURE & BELIEF
Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger, Emory University
Standing in Cement: Ravana on the Chhattisgarhi Plains
Over the last two decades, an interdisciplinary focus on the body and visual and material culture has emerged in folklore and religious studies, to counter, in part, the traditional textual/verbal focus of the respective disciplines. This paper is part of a larger study of the agency of materiality in Indian traditions, which analyzes different forms of materiality in ritual and everyday contexts. Here, I focus on the 8-10 foot tall cement images of the rakshasa antagonist Ravana of the Ramayana that are unique to the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh. They stand at village and town centers or on open fields at their outskirts. Dramatic performances and textual readings are held in front of these images during the festival of Dashera, at the end of which firecrackers are set off around the image to indicate Ravana’s destruction. Narratively, the hero-god Ram kills him; however, materially Ravana lives, standing in cement all year. The permanence of the Ravana physical images creates an alternative theology and worldview to that of verbal epic performances. I argue that the cement Ravanas are material actors.
Kirin Narayan, Australian National University
Making and Narrating: Vishwakarma Family Stories among Artisans
Many artisan communities across India trace descent from the Hindu god Vishwakarma, the “Universe Maker.” Identifying themselves by labels marking this family connection—including “Vishwakarmas” or “The Sons of Vishwakarma”—their traditional work was thought to continue their divine ancestor’s making and shaping of the material world. This paper examines themes of making as a form of thinking (Ingold 2013) that pervade the mythology of hereditary artisan castes associated with Vishwakarma (cf. Brouwer 1986). I focus particularly on Gujarat-based family stories and rituals of the goddess Randal Ma, honored as Vishwakarma’s daughter. How, I ask, does this unusually doubled goddess point to larger associations between Vishwakarma kinship, goddess worship, and gendered aspects of making, even as traditional caste occupations have given way to other professions, and the “Make in India” scheme has become a politicized project?
Puja Sahney, SUNY- Albany
Transnational Spaces of Belonging: Immigration Process, Social Ties, and Hindu Homes of Purity
This paper discusses the role trans-boundary social and symbolic ties play in shaping the way newly arrived Hindu immigrants from India manage and organize spaces in their suburban American homes around the Hindu notion of “purity.” The focus is on the Hindu domestic shrine, an important religious artifact found in Hindu houses, which influences the movement and behavior of family members and Hindus’ efforts to produce and consume religious spaces within and immediately outside the house. The paper argues that Hindu immigrant homes are transnational spaces of belonging. This transnationality of space is regulated both formally through the lengthy immigration process as well as informally through social ties maintained between people across nations. Using ethnographic data, this paper examines the space-artifact continuum around the notion of purity and how the relationships Hindus build and rebuild with domestic spaces reveal important aspects of their sense of belonging in a new country.
Ülo Valk, University of Tartu
Where the Goddess Spent her Wedding Night: Place-Lore of the Kāmākhyā Temple in Silghat, Assam
The paper discusses mythic histories of the temple of Kāmākhyā in Silghat on the southern bank of Brahmaputra in Nagaon district, Assam. It is based on fieldwork, conducted in the temple and the adjacent village intermittently from 2009–2015, concentrating on the stories of three Brahmin families, who have been serving the temple since its establishment in 1745. Especially important is the position of the temple in the mythic landscape of Assam and the strategies of storytelling to enhance its power of narrative gravitation to attract pilgrims. Place-lore about the temple displays some significant discrepancies and disagreements between the narrators who refer to the authority of literary sources but rely on oral traditions of the neighbourhood and on their family histories.
THE POLITICS OF FOLKLORE
Leah Lowthorp, Harvard University
Folklore, Politics, and the State: Kutiyattam and National/Global Heritage in India
In recent decades, scholars of South Asian folklore have increasingly engaged the politics of folklore, interrogating its role in both colonialist, nationalist, and other political agendas. This paper considers the role of expressive culture in Indian postcolonial nation building through the lens of Kutiyattam Sanskrit theater of Kerala state, recognized as India’s first UNESCO Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2001. Through an examination of the art’s relationship with India’s national academy for dance, drama, and music, the Sangeet Natak Akademi, it traces state heritage discourse and practice over a fifty year period. It thereby explores the (re)production of the State’s role as arts patron and cultural educator, as well as a sustained state-level promotion of artistic continuity through creative adaptation and change.
Shakthi Nataraj, University of California, Berkeley
Critical Folkloristics and the Study of Transgender Women’s Communities in South India
Scholars in the emerging field of "critical folkloristics" have criticized notions of folklore that distinguish it from "modern" institutions, emphasizing instead how notions of modernity and traditionality actively shape one another. My research examines the jamath (family) system of Tamil Nadu's thirunangai (transgender woman) communities that has lately become the object of much controversy amongst LGBT activists. Some see these precolonial kinship structures, placing gurus (mentors), above chelas (disciples), as outdated feudal relics, at odds with "modern" notions of equality. Representatives of transnational non-profits similarly argue that jamaths compromise thirunangai's abilities to effectively make "objective" decisions. Examining narratives of kinship by transgender women that manage and staff a Community Based Organization in Chennai, I argue that the logic of jamath kinship, far from being an outdated relic, both shapes and is shaped by the politics of international LGBT and HIV activism, and the functioning of Community Based Organizations.
Finnian Gerety, Brown University
The Amplified Sacrifice: Sound, Technology, and Participation in Vedic Rituals in Kerala
For generations, Nambudiri Brahmins of Kerala have performed sacrifices based on liturgies of the first millennium BCE. While their praxis evokes the ideal of an archaic, unchanging sacrifice, the soundscape of Nambudiri ritual culture in recent years has come to reflect technological shifts in Indian society: microphones and megawatt speakers now amplify mantras well beyond the power of the human voice. This paper examines the amplified sacrifice, arguing that local amplification of performances tracks with a regional "amplification" of the cultural prominence of Vedic ritual. This feedback loop increases the participation of non-Nambudiris in the funding, organization, and celebration of such rituals, which are now carried out as festivals with thousands of attendees and a full suite of marketing, media coverage, and VIPs.