It is the reflection of one mind in another that is the real thing, the real mind, free from external restrictions, just playing for the sake of playing, thinking wild thoughts. All human minds are equal on that playing field. Lévi-Strauss valued the great diversity of human cultures and the essentiality of communication among them. He pointed out that the people once called “primitive” are in fact people without reading and writing. Such people are more aware than the highly literate of realities that the literate do not see. A sacrifice is involved in the transition to literacy, but without that transition the accomplishments of the literate, communication among them, cannot be achieved. It is a trade-off, then.20
I cannot agree with everything that Lévi-Strauss says—in particular the nature/culture divide, which among anthropologists today is rapidly dissolving, and his omission of women and children, to say nothing of animals, as people of interest—but I do agree with the general idea that without a connection of one mind with another, without a reflection of each in the eyes and the mind of the other, without a great number of minds all connected and all reflecting and refracting each other’s lights, there is no reality at all. For Lévi-Strauss, the story told, the myth, was more real than the minds that reflected and refracted it, like mirrors, among each other, without any awareness on the part of an individual mind that it was a vessel for the transmission of that myth. Likewise, for me, the act of communication, the fact of connection, is more real than anything to be found in a purportedly isolated mind.
A repeating theme of this book is the congruence between the verbal art produced by laborers in the fields of India and theories of the highly literate who come from far away. Is this congruence, this harmony, a sign that the theory works, or is it a sign that laborers in the fields of India have minds able to play in the fields inhabited by famous theoreticians? Lévi-Strauss’s dictum that the meeting of minds is what is important, whether they are studying me or whether I am studying them, and the discovery that something in the distant theoretician’s mind meshes with something in the proximal laborer’s mind, shows that these minds, on the profoundest levels, know each other.
How does this happen? Life is less a matter of binary oppositions than it is a matter of mutual perception, less a matter of inheritance than a matter of development, less a matter of growing up than a matter of reaching out, less a matter of not touching than a matter of touching.21
The abandonment of traditional ways, and the learning of the English language, is stressed not only by South Indian Dalits but also by North Indian ones, who see it as the only way for them to escape the oppressive caste system under which they are compelled to live.
The spirit world is not exactly the same thing as religion. Religions have rules. Spirits have only habits, which they may change. Spirits in India, including gods, have no fixed image, no fixed stories attached to them. They have personalities, but these personalities grow in multiplicity as time wears on. A spirit is not independent of mortals. If nobody sees it or believes in it, a spirit cannot exist. A spirit can turn into a god only if some people decide to make it so. A spirit is not a thing floating through the air. It is not a thing at all. A spirit is a memory, a feeling, a desire. A spirit may occupy a living person, or a statue or a temple or a rock. A spirit who is a god is a movement, with fans and followers, who give money to keep it going, or in some circumstances offer their own suffering to the spirit, even sacrifice their own lives, to achieve a certain desired goal. Protect my son who has gone into combat. Protect my father who has lost his ability to work. Protect my sister from danger. Protect my children from hunger and disease. Protect the world. A spirit can give protection or cause harm, just as a living human being or animal may do. A spirit may instigate a war or fight on one side or the other. A person may believe or disbelieve in a particular spirit, or in a category of spirit. For instance, a man may say that Māriamman does not exist but that ghosts definitely do. A ghost (pēy) is the spirit of someone who has died. It is scary, and a person may die of fright from seeing it. But a pēy may be turned into something else.
This happened with Siṅgammā. The spirit of a woman who has died in childbirth is both honored and feared. A memorial stone is created for her, to soften her anger. An ancestor who has performed some horrible valorous deed, such as killing her grandchildren to save them from Muslim raiders, may become a family deity. Some live human beings are treated like gods. If a person gets high enough in politics, he can be a god if he wants to. Narendra Modi, the current prime minister of India, had a temple built to himself. Spirits like nice homes that belong only to them. Māriamman told me to build a temple for her to spread her fame. Siṅgammā demanded that a home be built for her, and so it was. If she grows in popularity, her home may grow into a regular temple. But such a growth is unlikely, as her people have turned to a more secular life. There is no structure to the spirit world. It is not in itself an organization. A spirit, great or small, may slip through anyone’s fingers, in or out of a person’s mind, or of many people’s minds simultaneously. A great spirit such as Draupadi (Chapter 6, note 4) has done that.
Sarasvati (Chapter 1) had skills and experience that, in America, might have brought her higher education and a career. In Chennai and environs, she went to all the temples and participated in their rituals, but she considered that people who appeared to enter a state of trance were fake. She laughed at them and mocked them. I agree with her that some are surely fake, but you never know. At the temple, she slipped into the spirit world, or it slipped into her, when a Māriamman temple was being consecrated and she found herself desiring proof that, although the people she mocked were fake, the spirit world itself was real. The consecration ceremony was a conjunction between ritual and the spirit world. Sarasvati prayed to the god of the temple, Māriamman, that the god come for real into somebody, anybody. Then Māriamman came into Sarasvati herself. “She came into my person [en peyarle] only.” At that point Sarasvati knew that she was special. From then onward, she and Māriamman were one.
The Paṟaiyar singers did not show any sign that they thought themselves specially blessed. In their situation, how could they imagine such a thing? They did not mention any god but Yama, the god of death, and that mention was only in passing. Although they did not think themselves special, when they sang they became different people. Anyone who sings may feel this. The singers whose songs I recorded had no text, but they remembered, and somehow the song, fully formed, came out from them and the tears flowed. When you sing, something comes upon you or into you that carries you beyond yourself.
Kanyammā was by inheritance an Iruḷar, a person of the darkness, of the forest, and the forest was a spirit world in itself, a world that Kanyammā could bring forth only with difficulty. And Kanyammā was a woman who had lost her home, the forest itself, the whole boundless forest that was scary to some but mother and father to others, animated by many beings with many voices. Now, from the point of view of those above, she was little more than a ghost, or worse still, a useless half-dead body. But still she could sing. She sang of life in the forest.
By the time I learned of her, Siṅgammā had been dead for decades, her body buried in pieces behind a mill that had later been built after she died. The area behind the mill was surrounded by barbed wire, and I was not allowed to go there. In her life, Siṅgammā may well have sung, as singing was part of her work of selling birds in the marketplace. Sevi, the woman who sang the story of Siṅgammā, was not one of Siṅgammā’s people. Sevi was of a caste considered higher than the one Siṅgammā belonged to. In her song, Sevi cast doubt on Siṅgammā’s virtue. But the song was so beautifully performed that perhaps Sevi silently cared about Siṅgammā, regretted what had happened to her, and on a certain level saw the similarities between herself and the girl who had died.
Veḷḷaiccāmi performed a narrative/chant/song to and about Siṅgammā. In this performance there is no question that Siṅgammā, having died as a girl, lived on as a possessing spirit, attacking young, recently married girls of the area and ultimately becoming a deity of beauty, generosity, and power. Whether she will continue
