indeed death.” One discussant, Anand Pandian, spoke of “the liquid appeal of that anthropological imagination that Trawick’s work encourages us to exercise.” He likens this “liquid appeal” to an attitude he learned from his grandfather, who would speak of his lack of fear under many trying circumstances including drinking water from dirty ditches: “What I learned, listening to my grandfather, is that there is health, as well as danger, in breaching the boundaries of the self” (Pandian 2012; see also Pandian and Mariappan 2014).8
Prompted by these appreciations, I slip, in conclusion, from a trope of light to one of liquid. I urge readers of this wonderful book to sip or gulp from the real, demonic, transgressive fount of Margaret Trawick’s anthropology and the voices of South Indian women transmitted here. I hope readers will imbibe with these healthy draughts the energy to cross the lines and breach the boundaries, in modes that are not invasive but incorporative.
Preface
The fieldwork that resulted in this book was done intermittently from 1975 to 1991 while I was engaged in other projects in Tamil Nadu. The study for the book and the writing of it have been done continuously until now. Emergent from this work has been, among other things, a picture of how the government of India, and the British colonial government before it, tried to freeze groups of people in particular times, places, and occupations. Some are categorized as “Backward.” Others categorize themselves as “Forward.” Others are considered untouchable and categorized as “Scheduled Castes” or “Scheduled Tribes.” All the castes are ranked against each other. This ranking developed in parts of India millennia ago through a long and slow process. But real time has disrupted such categories. What has changed quickly, what has changed slowly, how the life of one or another person or group has been broken by change, how one or another person or group has adapted to change, how valuable the work of memory is, and how damaging old moralities are—these are realities unsought but uncovered in this book.
Anthropology, my chosen discipline, the study of humanity, has a long history and has been through many changes, from ancient days until now. This book presents bits of that history in India, from poems and organized treatises created millennia ago, to accounts from the nineteenth century, to ethnography from the late twentieth century, to articles and books from the twenty-first. Some of these have been created by Tamil people who did not think in terms of anthropology or history but more in terms of poetry and song. Later works have been composed by journalists, authors, filmmakers, artists, poets.
Most of my life, whether in the field or reading and writing, I did not think much about caste or gender or systems of rank. All of those were boring to me. So was politics. But now I cannot avoid such topics. The focus of these chapters is not on caste and gender oppression, important as these issues are to Indian society, but on the verbal art of the oppressed. These were people I thought of as normal. This book is about human beings as they describe and express their own lives and the lives of others in narrative, song, and conversation. Although individuals are important, relationships are more so. Caste, gender, and familial relationships, though rarely mentioned in song or speech, constitute an important feature of each of these women’s lived environments. In the larger view, caste, gender, familial, religious, and ethnic hierarchies in India cannot be ignored. This book shows clearly that nonliterate people living in the most abject circumstances, women of untouchable castes, may be the intellectual equals of great scholars far away from India. Caste is not overlooked, but it is seen in this book mostly through the eyes of Dalit women, or more precisely, through their voices.
Introduction
When you’re looking for something you haven’t yet seen, what you encounter may be entirely different from what you expect. Among my unsought experiences have been the people, the stories, and the songs appearing in this book. Franz Boas realized that the Inuit, then called Eskimo, knew more than geologists about the geology of the area that he studied and where they lived. This led him to the more powerful discovery that the Inuit language, though having no written literature, was as complex as any of the languages Boas already knew, and from there to the discovery that every human language is as complex, as intricately and precisely organized, as every other (Stocking 1974).1 For others, it may be the breakthrough that some barely literate person knows better than you (who are highly educated) how your shared world is constituted. This discovery may or may not lead you to reconsider a whole category of people you previously hardly knew, and further to reconsider the premises on which human beings are categorized in the first place—the premises underlying divisions of religion, gender, race, family, class, and nation.
The world I inhabited in India could not be more different from the world in which I now live. True, there are many different worlds in India. Some are hellish, some are heavenly, and most are a mixture of both. The art, the food, the way coffee is poured, how everyday work is turned into dance, the music, the stories, the smiles, the laughter, the weeping, the jokes, the puns, the scents of jasmine and sandalwood are heavenly. But the poverty, the cruelties inflicted on the vulnerable, the needlessly dying children, the diseases floating through the water, lying in the soil, and wafting through the wind are hell.
Coming from America, traveling to India, and living there for eighteen months with my own baby changed me. I became addicted to idlis and sambar, with Indian coffee on the side. Total immersion in the Tamil language made me better at conversational Tamil, a skill more valuable than either Tamils or Anglos could easily comprehend. Even some of those who have grown up multilingual do not perceive the value of this skill. I met babies who were taught two or three languages as they grew up. Those few with whom I have kept up have flourished.
The experience of living in India made me see, among other things, that people in India can and do live on less than I had been accustomed to. But beyond this I saw extreme poverty. I was waiting at a bus stop, with several other people, when a little boy came to us holding a limp, thin baby over his shoulder. The other people at the bus stop turned away. I had been taught not to give money to a beggar, even a beggar child, because the child would just take the money back to whatever adult was controlling him or her. I gave the boy some food I had just bought, and told him to share it with the baby. Later I witnessed other cases of children being used by adults in this callous way. It was clear that the baby at the bus stop would die if it did not get serious medical attention, and I thought to myself, what if that were my child? But if I took such a baby in my arms, how could I bring it back to life? Was there a doctor, an agency somewhere, that would do this?
Returning from India to America brought a series of new shocks. “Culture shock” it was called then, by returning Peace Corps volunteers. Over time we came to see that America and India have some things in common, bad things, in particular the fact that certain categories of people are subject to discrimination despite laws forbidding it. In both countries, such discrimination entails forced exclusion from some places, such as temples, where one might want to go, forced inclusion in other places, such as prisons, where one would not want to go, police violence, civilian violence, violence by men against women, violence by the highly ranked against those whose rank is low. And aside from violence is the sneering contempt for those one considers one’s inferiors. Poverty of people marked from birth by skin color, by caste, and by sex is an inevitable consequence of such practices. Neglect and hatred of such people in both countries promotes terrible violence. Most people here have no clue of what is happening there, and vice versa. In America, the outcastes are African Americans. In India, they are Dalits. Both African Americans and Dalits have been known by other, uglier names. In this introduction, a disproportionate number of words are spent on caste, untouchability, and poverty. In subsequent chapters, other topics assume priority.
The three words in the main title—death, beauty, struggle—indicate what Dalits of both sexes mean to the Indian world, what untouchable women strive to be and to create, and what their lives are, relentlessly,
