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, and her interventions are timely. Introducing a recent anthology of Tamil Dalit writings (all from literate authors, among whom approximately 20 percent are female), the coeditors write, “numerous bits of evidence show that even before the birth of the word ‘Dalit’, there was a recorded history of the ‘untouchables” fight against discrimination and literary expressions that spoke about it. A turn towards this recovered history of the region may help alter our vision of Dalit literature” (Ravikumar and Azhagarasan 2012, xv). While their volume contains a rich range of important and moving material, there is exactly nothing in it from oral traditions. Work such as Trawick’s furthers the project of recovering regional history by bringing to the page eloquent voices from unwritten sources.

      These chapters shed all kinds of light, providing a shifting radiance: sometimes flaming, sometimes flickering; sometimes glaring, sometimes soft. It is full-spectrum light. My foreword points to just four thematic elements in Trawick’s book, considering each as a filament, each possessing a special glow, each at times delivering bright