Death, Beauty, Struggle. Margaret Trawick
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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 as a deity or will cease to exist is questionable.
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.