At the end of this introduction are two questions: How does it feel, how must it feel, to be an untouchable woman? And how do creativity and insight arise from situations of abjection?
It must be said, first, that every woman who sang or spoke to me or for me was different from every other. Any generalization about Dalit women must be approached with care. Shared environments, shared memories, shared experiences, shared longings are some of the things that bind them to each other. In Chapter 1 of this book, Māriamman told me, “For Tamil women only, I will do much good.” Tamil is a language different from any other. It is an old language. It is a world embracing emotions, pain, and oneness of self with other. Every language creates and is created by some world, some cultural ontology. The concept of Tamil womanhood both precedes and transcends caste. Caste is something that Tamil women have fought but have not been able to break. Instead, many of them are broken by caste. Such brokenness comes through in every chapter of this book.
Creativity, insight, and abjection are at the heart of the book I am writing now. It is not that you have to be suffering to make beautiful songs. Many fine singers/songwriters can attest to that fact. The question is why and how people living in deep misery are able to create things of beauty nonetheless. One is reminded of Maya Angelou’s book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Here the similarity between the situation of African American women and the situation of Indian untouchable women makes itself known. Given all the great horrors that both groups had to endure, it may seem trivial to point out that both African Americans and Indian pariahs were denied education. But certainly both cultures were affected by this deprivation. Their songs may have given them the strength to carry on.
The similarity between African Americans and untouchables in India has been discussed by Gerald Berreman (1960) and more recently by Gyanendra Pandey (2013). A defining feature of African American memories and history is that they were slaves for hundreds of years and still are treated as inferiors and worse by some white Americans. Before independence, untouchables in India were slaves. Those then called pariahs included farm laborers, who could be used at will by their owners (Viswanath 2014).22 Some, such as Kanyammā in Chapter 4 of this book, are virtual slaves now because they cannot run and have no place to run to. In other parts of the world there are child slaves and prostitute slaves. Does slavery in itself bring song from the slaves? It can, if the slaves do not mention the cruelty of their masters. If they do, they must be very brave. Kanyammā was very brave.
All of these topics are intertwined and inseparable from each other. Throughout the whole book, some named topics appear as parts of others. So does writing of my own experiences to the extent that they bear upon the topic at hand.
The people I knew in India were all good people. The ones I have written about in this book were brilliant and original narrators and singers who struggled with the handicap called womanhood, who were poor, had no schooling, were despised by the people they worked for, and were subject to domestic violence, as well as to the violence of men outside their families and castes. They never spoke or sang to me about such violence directly, except for Sevi, who spoke of the terrible violence against her sister, whom she never named, and against a Kuṟavar girl who died before Sevi was born.
I have been tempted to suggest that the very fact of suffering gives rise to beautiful creations. After all, what were these beautiful songs but laments? What were they but displays of pain? However, in the midst of terrible suffering you may scream out, but you do not sing. Afterward you sing laments, songs of sadness, songs of feeling blue. But while it happens, you lack the ability to speak. And about shameful and painful things that happen to you, you never speak or sing a word, ever. Generations later, your story may be told.
Chapter 1
Māriamman
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.
—Simone de Beauvoir
First Meeting
My first encounter with Sarasvati was in 1975, while I was doing research for my doctoral dissertation. She did not fit into that dissertation, but what she showed me was more enduring, if less elegant, than what I was able to write about then. The dissertation was about Tamil views of the living body. The people who taught me their views on this topic were a scholar who lectured about Tirumantiram and other difficult Tamil texts, an octogenarian Brahman Ayurvedic doctor who described his work as nāḍḍu vaidyam, “country medicine,” and the women who worked in the fields owned by the doctor. The people who taught me were very different from each other, but their views were remarkably congruent, and so I wrote a well-put-together dissertation.
Sarasvati’s view was completely different from that of my other teachers. She lived with a spirit with whom she struggled, a combative alter ego who told Sarasvati to do things she did not want to do, and not to do things she wanted to do. When Sarasvati rebelled, the spirit punished her. Both Sarasvati and the spirit were female, but they were not the soft interior female that my other teachers spoke about. This spirit was hard as rock. Sarasvati was tough, and torn between living the life of a good married woman and the life of someone else, a life like that chosen by the spirit Māriamman.
The story of Māriamman (aka Rēṇukā Paramēswari) is centuries old, as, I learned later, was attested in a Sanskrit text. She was a woman betrayed by both husband and son, a Brahman woman merged with a woman of untouchable caste via the bloody murders of both. She came back to life as a goddess with the head of a Brahman and the body of an untouchable. She was angry and she controlled bloody diseases, most notably smallpox.
Some say that Māriamman was a much older goddess, pre-Sanskritic, therefore thousands of years old. She was and remains a spirit in control of the rain. But the disease of smallpox may have emerged earlier than Sanskrit, in the Neolithic, when the first cities appeared. A disease like smallpox needs large, close populations to continue, as everyone who contracts this terrible and terrifying disease either dies or is rendered immune. When a small isolated place with a small number of people in it is hit for the first time by smallpox, there remains nobody left to infect. To fight it, there was nothing for people to do but resort to whatever spirit they believed controlled it. Maybe there was a time in human prehistory when the spirits were kinder and gentler. Or maybe there was a time when there were no spirits at all.
The Māriamman that Sarasvati knew had renounced her family and children. But Sarasvati manifestly loved her children and grandchildren, both male and female. She was in addition an attractive woman and she liked to be that way. But Māriamman commanded her not to cook for her family and not to comb her hair or wear ornaments. Sarasvati obeyed the commands of Māriamman.
Some art, not all, as well as some theory, is autobiographical, in the sense that the idea for it comes from experience, from life as lived by the artist or theoretician. Einstein believed in unity and simplicity, in his own life as well as in the universe, and lived his life and developed his theory according to that belief (Holton 1988). Mikhail Bakhtin developed his literary theory as a model of the society in which he desired to live, a nontotalitarian society in which the ideals of Martin Buber held sway, and as a model of the kind of person he wanted to be. He could not describe this social and personal ideal as such, because he lived under the totalitarian regime of Stalin. So he encrypted it in his literary theory (Bakhtin 1978, 1981, 1984; see also Chapter 3 of this volume). Claude Lévi-Strauss (1978) found that the way his mind worked resembled that of the Amazonian people whose myths he described and analyzed.
Similarly,
