Death, Beauty, Struggle
CONTEMPORARY ETHNOGRAPHY
Kirin Narayan and Alma Gottlieb, Series Editors
A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.
DEATH, BEAUTY, STRUGGLE
Untouchable Women Create the World
Margaret Trawick
Foreword by Ann Grodzins Gold
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2017 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Trawick, Margaret, author. | Gold, Ann Grodzins, writer of foreword.
Title: Death, beauty, struggle : untouchable women create the world / Margaret Trawick ; foreword by Ann Grodzins Gold.
Other titles: Contemporary ethnography.
Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2017] | Series: Contemporary ethnography | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016047654 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4905-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Dalit women—India—Tamil Nadu—Attitudes. | Dalit women—India—Tamil Nadu—Psychology. | Women and spiritualism—India—Tamil Nadu. | Women and religion—India—Tamil Nadu.
Classification: LCC HQ1744.T3 T73 2017 | DDC 305.5/688082095475—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016047654
Contents
Foreword by Ann Grodzins Gold
Chapter 4. On the Edge of the Wild
Chapter 6. The Song of Siṅgammā
Glossary of Tamil Words and Phrases
Foreword
ANN GRODZINS GOLD
Margaret Trawick’s writings on Tamil women’s songs and lives offer rare and intimate glimpses into kinship, myth, work, want, anger, reverence, and more. Revealing a subtle, never static, interplay between abjection and empowerment, this book testifies that human beings, low born and ill-treated within a punishing social system, neither acquiesce to fate nor simply rail against it, but may indeed radically create the world. And I stress that it is absolutely the world being created: not their world, but ours too.
Much that Tamil women shared with Trawick is rooted in the passionate attachments and acute wounds generated within families, but these women’s voices resonate well beyond individually circumscribed lives. In their songs and life histories they critique social, political, economic, and domestic oppressions. They also incorporate visions of natural beauty and immanent divinity. Trawick presents Tamil women’s words as relevant to universal human themes. She never hesitates to put high social theory in conversation with observations and assessments made by unschooled and often impoverished women, and thereby shows deftly how each body of thought may enlighten the other. Much of Trawick’s work has at its center her gifted rendering of vernacular Tamil oral performances into an English that profoundly affects the heart.
Trawick’s fieldwork in India and in Sri Lanka resulted in two monographs: Notes on Love in a Tamil Family (1990b) and Enemy Lines: Warfare, Childhood, and Play in Batticaloa (2007). Now she offers an ethnographically grounded book on women’s expressive traditions. Death, Beauty, Struggle contains an original vision of gendered lives, poetry, devotion, and social hierarchy in Tamil Nadu. This book displays the full range of Trawick’s ethnographic artistry: her acute attentiveness to feelings, to linguistic nuances, to fragile bonds, to fierce commitments, to the ways lyrical composition and storytelling articulate otherwise suppressed struggles.
If most of the fieldwork on which this book is based was conducted during the last two decades of the twentieth century, Trawick is reporting on conditions that have been slow to change,
