Death, Beauty, Struggle. Margaret Trawick
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the metaphor of “darkness” has been used by some authors—recently in Aravind Adiga’s best-selling novel The White Tiger—to characterize, or in Adiga’s case to caricature, rural India. Thus “The Darkness” with its erratic or nil electricity, its lagging literacy rates, its political impotence, its cherished livestock, is posed in stark contrast to the middle-class ideal of “India shining.”1
If I may indulge in a bit more metaphoric play, let me say that these variegated lights in Trawick’s chapters might also be likened to many alternative sources of light devised and employed in areas sporadically short on current as is much of rural South Asia. In our power-glutted world we fail to realize how many kinds of light can be tapped in times of need: candles, oil wicks, pressure lamps, torches both oil-soaked and battery powered, and lately the light from mobile phone screens. There is also moonlight, and even the fireworks that go “bang! boom!” (Chapter 4). Rural arts of improvisation, in lighting and many other areas, give the lie—as do Trawick’s essays—to diminished views such as Adiga’s of benighted country folk.2
Following the introduction, Trawick’s six central chapters present to readers vocally powerful female beings whose identities may be goddess, priestess, singer, or ambiguously merged and shifting combinations of these. The four filaments I highlight crosscut chapters, although some are particularly evident in one or another. These are gender and social justice; intertwined emotions and ecologies; interpenetration of divine and mortal biographies, and an unrepentant anthropology.
Gender and Social Justice
Then, as the song goes, Siṅgammā, having emerged from within the house, “rising up high, speaking with unsheathed energy, wearing pearls,” addresses her lame older brother.…She leaves the house, she goes outside, they raise her up. (Chapter 6)
Gender and social justice, or injustice as is more often the case, painfully intertwine throughout almost every passage of Trawick’s work but may be most vividly explicit in the tale of Siṅgammā’s life as girl and goddess. Siṅgammā was an untouchable girl, raped and murdered. She emerges as a goddess from prison-like confinement as described in the above excerpt. That she is wearing pearls is meaningful. Of course it is a poetic convention to praise deities as decked in gorgeous and costly items. But in Siṅgammā’s terrible and wonderful story, such celebration of a no longer vulnerable female beauty has extraordinary impact. Like the young woman renamed by the Indian press “Delhi Braveheart” in 2013, Siṅgammā bears painful testimony against gang rape, leaving behind not just a mutilated corpse but a transformative legacy of witness.3
Ghanshyam Shah and colleagues (2006) present a twenty-first-century investigation of “the extent and incidence of untouchability in different spheres of life in contemporary rural India.” Their team covered 565 villages across eleven states including Tamil Nadu, where Trawick worked. They concluded: “Untouchability is a practice that profoundly affects the lives and psyches of millions of Indians.…Despite the abolition of untouchability by the Constitution of India, and despite the passage of numerous legislations classifying untouchability in any sphere as a cognizable criminal offence,… the practice lives on and even takes on new idioms” (2006, 164). The authors of this sobering study also note, unsurprisingly, “the particular double burden borne by Dalit women, for whom gender and caste combine to create greater vulnerability to social exploitation and oppression” (2006, 165).
Trawick makes her readers fully cognizant of women’s double burden. She also teaches us that such burdened women have capabilities to escape their confines imaginatively, and that at times they emerge like Siṅgammā with unsheathed energy. Some of the women whose voices readers encounter in this book have charted truly alternative destinies whether as healer, teacher, or social activist. The majority live their daily lives compliant with a system that denies them value and power, maybe even humanity. But that system does not capture them, as their songs and stories available here show clearly.
In one unusual comical song critiquing European male authority, the singer’s words are most explicitly fierce and rude. As Trawick puts it, “No punches are pulled” (Chapter 3). The singer describes a man sitting “idly on his porch,” clueless because he “doesn’t know any Tamil.” She urges her companions: “Piss into his pot, girl. Pour it into his rosy red mouth.” The foreigner’s ignorance of Tamil surely makes him a safe object of derision in Tamil. It is more perilous to deride internal oppressors, whether male family members or high-caste predators. Toward such persons, women generally lodge aggressive complaints using more oblique language, and more elaborate poetic conceits.
Politicized, literate Dalit voices are loud and strong in the public arena, and no anthropologist is required to convince others of their active resistance and outrage.4 The precious understanding that Trawick offers is an inner core of refusal to accept degradation among persons who are not activists, who are not mobilized, yet who vocally indict the socioreligious system that continues to hurt them. These voices speak and sing with shattering eloquence about injustice, about suffering, about pain. They also reveal embodied lives where moments of beauty, hope, and affection are cherished. Their identities are not defined solely by those who scorn, shun, abuse, exploit or even murder them. Justified anger is there, but so is delight—delight in something as simple as a bar of soap, something as deep as a quest for spiritual truth. This is true dominance without hegemony (Guha 1997). Trawick’s particular genius is her ability to convince us of this and to inspire her readers by showing these women’s courage, fortitude, integrity and ability to turn sorrows and trials into art.
Intertwined Emotions and Ecologies
Today clusters and clusters of eggplants,
O poor girls, though they fruit on the vine,
With no one to hold and embrace us, no one to hold and embrace us,
We rot with the vine, mother. (Chapter 2)
A vine laden with shiny purple eggplants is a welcome image of abundance, food, and fertility. To rot on the vine should not be its fate. In this crying song the verbal imagery of rotting annihilates a healthy source of nourishment, transforming it from plenty to waste. As Trawick explicates this and other verses, the song is about “ineffective containment, containment that offers no fulfillment, completion, or protection” (Chapter 2).
I marvel at this song’s simultaneous evocation of lushness and deprivation. It is only one verse of a very sad song, and the song is not just about neglect. It is also about justice, in the family as well as in the community. It is only one song among many equally deep and compelling in their musical intervention in a world often deaf to the suffering of the lowborn and of women. The songs’ organic imagery fluidly unites human and other forms of life.
Trawick’s translations, of which the eggplant verse offers just a single glimpse, evoke an intertwined universe of plant life and human feelings as they permeate one another. This is a truly human ecology. Other scholars of classical South Indian literatures attest to similar resonance across species and landscapes. In Tamil poetics, as A. K. Ramanujan expressed it, there exists “a taxonomy of landscapes, flora and fauna, and of emotions—an ecosystem of which a man’s activities and feelings are a part” (1990, 50). More recently, Martha Selby, a scholar and translator of Tamil literature, offers additional observations that complicate the poetic meshing of humans with environments. She writes that “in early Tamil poetry, it is not nature—that ‘something out there’—that is the object of the human impulse to tame, rather human emotion and sexuality are the objects of capture and ordering; not nature, not the wild outside but the wild within, disciplined with networks of referents, symbols, and indices culled from the environment.” Selby asks, “What does it mean to assign plant and animal natures to human beings?” (2011, 14). In Trawick’s translations of the songs sung by day laborers, by rat catchers, by gypsy-like scavengers and hunters, there are similarly delicate, evocative,