Eric
Miller. 2001. “The Culture Area, South India” This
essay is composed of two sections: I) A review of the geography, races,
history, and cultural characteristics of South India; and II) A review of the
history and prominent themes of folklore and anthropology scholarship
concerning South India. I. Geography, Races, History, and Cultural
Characteristics of South India. The
Vindhya mountains of central India form the proverbial border between North
and South India. However, in practical terms the South is not defined
by a geographical border, but rather by linguistic and political ones.
In 1956, the government of India created states largely based on the
languages spoken: it was then that the four southern states came into being
(previously, there had been a plethora of administrative areas which had been
developed by local rulers and then by the British). Thus, the northern
borders of the southern states, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, mark the
practical border between South and North. This is hundreds of miles
south of the Vindhya mountains. There
are four southern states: to the northwest, Karnataka (Kannada language); to
the northeast, Andhra Pradesh (Telegu language); to the southwest, Kerala
(Malayalam language); and to the southeast, Tamil Nadu (Tamil
language). The four major modern southern languages derive from a
single ancient Tamil language. There are seventeen Northern states: the
languages of those states derive from Sanskrit. South
India has a wide variety of climate and vegetation zones. To give an
outline, from east to west: Along the east coast, there is sandy beach,
with the beach often extending hundreds of yards before vegetation
begins. As one moves westward, the land is flat or rolling. Even
today, small-scale agriculture is the primary activity in the countryside.
The Western Ghats mountain range, thickly-forested with trees, runs
north-south along, generally-speaking, the western third of South India: it
can be very cool in these mountains, but there is no snow. (There is
also a much smaller Eastern Ghats mountain range). On the far side of
the Western Ghats is jungle: moisture coming over the sea from the west is
trapped here. Finally, there is a narrow strip of flat land along the
west coast. Archeological
evidence suggests that Neanderthals lived in South India from 500,000 to
40,000 years ago (Rao 1990). Homo sapiens, according to the most
commonly-held academic theory, came into being 100,000 years ago in Africa,
and reached South India 60,000 years ago (Cavalli-Sforza 1995). Complex
and numerous migrations occurred by land and sea between Africa and Oceania
prior to 10,000 years ago (Hall 1996; Pawley 1993; Toussaint 1966).
South India is in the center of this region. Many of the details of
these ancient migrations can never be reconstructed, but this much is certain:
the earliest Homo sapiens inhabitants of South India were what
anthropologists have labeled as Negritos and Austro-Asiatics (a.k.a,
Asian-Australoids) (Gardner 1966; Nagaraju 1990; Thurston 1909.).
Indeed, the racial and cultural bedrock of all South and Southeast Asia is
provided by these aboriginal peoples, a number of whom (Kurumbas, Irulas,
Paniyas, Paliyans, Kadirs, Kanikarans, Vedans, etc.) continue to live in the
Western Ghats. Many scholars have commented on the physical
similarities between some of these South Indian aborigines and certain
Australian and Malaysian aborigines. To quote one such statement:
“Paliyans’ various physical types fall within the range of South and
Southeast Asian-Australoid types, formerly termed Negrito, Malid, Veddid, and
proto-Australoid. They are physically most similar to the Semang of
Malaya” (Gardner, 1969, p. 390). There
are also cultural similarities, including the practices of animism and
shamanism, and the use of boomerangs. By all accounts, Austro-Asiatic
languages are no longer spoken by these tribal peoples of South India,
although traces of such languages may be present. Beginning
8,000 years ago, aboriginal peoples were joined in South India by the ancient
Tamils. According to the most commonly-held academic theory, the
ancient Tamils were of the Eelamite people, who were based in the eastern
Mediterranean area, especially in the territory of present-day Iraq
(Cavalli-Sforza 1995). The Eelamites, mentioned in the Hebrew Bible,
were related to the Sumerians and Mesopotamians of the Tigris-Euphrates
valley, and were among the world’s first agriculturalists and
urbanists. Over the centuries, Eelamite civilization spread
eastward. The Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa sites, in present-day Pakistan,
were of this civilization. The ancient Tamils were taller and had
thinner noses than the South Indian aboriginal peoples. (The
anthropological terms for nose-types are: leptorhine, thin; platyrhine,
broad.) Little is known about the interaction between the ancient
Tamils and the aboriginal peoples of South India, other than that some of the
latter retreated to the Western Ghats, where their descendants have remained
to this day. By
4,000 years ago, there existed on the sub-continent a culture with kings,
courts, urban centers, and irrigation systems. It was at this juncture
that a branch of the Aryan people, who originated in what is today known as
the Caucasus area of Russia, arrived in India (again, according to the most
commonly-held academic theory) (Cavalli-Sforza 1995). The Aryans spoke
Sanskrit, and had light skin and thin noses. Their general term for the
peoples they found in the sub-continent was, “Dravidians.” (I attempt
to avoid using the term, “Dravidian,” for two reasons: 1) it is a Sanskrit
word, and in that language it seems to have negative connotations; and 2) it
groups the ancient Tamils and the aboriginal peoples in a vague manner.
“Ancient Tamil” well-describes the people derived from the Eelamites, but it
does not acknowledge the presence of the aboriginal peoples. South
Indians have now divided into four major modern states and languages, and
“Dravidian” does function to describe them as a whole. Incidentally, of
the four major southern languages, modern Tamil is the least Sanskritized,
and modern Tamils have led the various so-called Dravidian political and
cultural movements: Tamil Nadu is the seat of so-called Dravidian
culture.) Aryan
culture was nomadic and seems to have centered around the conquering of
sedentary peoples: they used metal, horses, and chariots for this
purpose. Aryans primarily worshiped father gods in the sky, largely
through the ritual use of fire and the chanting (by men only) of sacred
verses known as Vedas. The Aryans smashed the ancient Tamil urban
centers and irrigation systems, and imposed a hierarchical form of racial
segregation (later to be known as the caste system). This system
featured themselves -- as Brahmins, i.e., priests and landowners -- at the
top and stressed the impurity of others. The
earliest strata of South India’s Sangam poetry (please see below: Literature...in
ancient times) portrays an optimistic secular view of life in a heroic
(prefeudal) age of meat-eating and wine-drinking (Nayagam 1966).
Religion centered around worship of the goddess in her myriad forms
(Korravai, Palaiyol, Kanamar Selvi, Kadu Kihal, etc.) and of her son Murugan,
in rituals involving dancing (Kuravai, Thudi, Vallikuthu) and the sacrifice
of cock and goats. The Brahmins’ culture, in contrast, forbade meat-eating
and animal sacrifice: theirs was a pessimistic worldview, dwelling upon the
impurity of material existence. Interaction between the aboriginal,
ancient Tamil, and Brahmanic cultures has continued to the present day, and
has formed the syncretic religion known as Hinduism (with animism and local
ancestor worship at the periphery). In
South India, ancient Tamil rulers and languages remained dominant. By
2,500 years ago, three dynasties had come into being: the Chola (east),
Pandian (central), and Chera (west). Buddhism and Jainism, associated
with trading and urban groups, were important factors in South India from
2,300 to 1,800 years ago. (Although these ideologies originated in the
North 2,600 years ago, they denied the authority of the Brahminic Vedas and
stressed compassion, and thus may have had pre-Aryan roots.) There was
extensive trade on both coasts of South India: ancient Greeks and Romans
visited, as did Arabs and Chinese. A Tamil word, yavana,
described foreigners who were employed by South Indian kings.
Christianity made an early appearance: Christ’s disciple, Thomas, is said to
have died in South India. A settlement of Jews settled on the west
coast. Islamic Moghal rulers made some headway in the South beginning
1,200 years ago, but never dominated as they did in many sections of the
North. Beginning
approximately 1,600 years ago, Tamils began to colonize Southeast Asia,
bringing Hinduism to Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia (Ghosh 1989).
1,300 years ago, Bhakti (devotional) practices originated in the South and
swept across all of India: Bhaktiism stressed love for and mystical union
with the divine and was typically expressed in song. With the Age of
Discovery came Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British traders. All
of this is to say that South India, surrounded on three sides by the sea, has
had lengthy and varied traditions of cultural and material exchange with
distant lands. An
essential part of the British project in South India involved sedentizing the
population, so as to be able to administrate more easily, and to collect
taxes regularly. They attempted -- with much assistance from middle-
and upper-class Tamils -- to discredit, marginalize, and even criminalize
those who resisted settled agricultural life. The British tended to
support the cultural centrality of large temples (Appadurai 1981). In
these ways, the British lowered a bureaucratic grid of systemization and
codification (Irschick 1994). For
many South Indians, the fight to expel the British was accompanied by another
fight: one against domination by North Indians and Brahmins. This was
especially expressed by Tamils’ resistance to the imposition of the Hindi
language in schools ands workplaces (Hardgrave 1969, 1979; Irschick 1969,
1994). However, the Dravidian movements were led by upper-caste (albeit
non-Brahman) Tamils. Members of lower castes have only recently begun
to speak for themselves in the public sphere, in part through what has come
to be called Dalit culture, which is expressed in literary, performative,
economic, and political activities. Dalits claim to avoid hero-worship:
theoretically, at Dalit meetings all sit around a circle and each has a
chance to speak. In
the 1920’s-50’s, there was a good deal of South Indian sentiment for making
South India a separate country, possibly to be called, Dravidanadu.
This project was diffused for the most part in 1956, when the states were
created according to language (Hardgrave 1965; Irschick 1986; Barnett
1976). The
Tamil struggle on Sri Lanka can be seen as an extension of the Dravidian
struggle in India. The British transported large numbers of Tamils to
Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) to work on tea plantations. Many of the three
million Sri Lankan Tamils, who are concentrated on the northeast section of
the island, feel persecuted by the majority Sinhalese, whose language is
Sanskrit-derived and whose ancestors migrated from North India in ancient
times. Thus, the leadership of these Tamils is demanding an independent
Tamil nation on Sri Lanka. The guerrilla war that has been waged on Sri
Lanka since the mid-1980s has led to a clamp-down on general tourism and
trade not only between Indians and Sri Lankans, but also between Indians and
the peoples of Singapore and Malaysia, as the central government of India
patrols the southeast coast of South India very closely and travel is
restricted. However, the war has also led to the presence of middle-
and upper-class Sri Lankan Tamil “refugees” around the world. These
people tend to be extremely motivated and sophisticated regarding the use of
interactive telecommunication. The
worldwide South Indian diaspora in general is very much a middle- and
upper-class affair (Ghosh 1989). This diaspora presents an excellent
opportunity for multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 1995). It can be seen
not as a dislocation, but as a continuation of South Indians’ colonizing of
Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Here perhaps the concept of Lemuria
comes into play: actually, Lemuria was a concept originally developed by Westerners,
especially Theosophists based in Madras: according to them, Lemuria was an
island, or great land mass, to the south of India, which enabled people and
animals to walk most or all of the way from Madagascar to Australia
(Ramaswamy 1999). The idea of Lemuria has been adopted by many South
Indians, as it fits with the native legend that the far southern Tamil lands
have been covered by a series of floods. Both of these ideas seem to
grapple with the aforementioned Africa-to-Oceania presence of seemingly-related
aboriginal peoples. In
summary, South India is a hybrid culture extraordinaire, having been composed
of Austro-Asiatic and African aboriginal peoples, ancient Tamils from the
Middle East (or West Asia, as it is called in India), and Aryans from the
north. The original people and civilization of Ealamite culture are
gone, as are the Aryan nomadic tribes: only the (descendants of)
Austro-Asians and Negritos remain in their original homelands. South
Indians can look in all of these directions today, as well as to the large
Tamil populations in Singapore and Malaysia, as they develop international
networks. In
the balance of this section, cultural characteristics of South India are
discussed in the following categories: 1)
Literature, life, and kingship in ancient times From
2,200 to 1,800 years ago, the third Tamil Sangam (“association of poets and
scholars”) flourished, based in the city of Madurai. (The first two
Sangams are ascribed to earlier times and are likely to have existed
primarily in legend.) Most of the Sangam poems, engraved on hard palm
leaves, were rediscovered 100-150 years ago. There are eight volumes of
short poems and ten volumes of longer poems: in all, there are 2,381 poems
written by 473 poets. Recent translations have brought some of this
material to a wide English-reading audience (Hart 1975, 1979, 1999; Ramanujan
1984, 1994). Included in the corpus of Sangam literature is
Tholkappiar’s Tholkappiam (“preservation of ancient wisdom”), the
earliest known Tamil work of phonology, morphology, grammar, and literary
analysis. There are also five literary epics, which were written in
slightly later periods. The most important of these is the central epic
of the Tamil people, the Silappatikaram (“anklet story”), the Epic
of the Anklet (which, according to linguistic analysis, was written
between 1,800 and 1,400 years ago). Sangam
literature paints a picture of a cosmopolitan, trade-oriented, and tolerant
society: the three leading ideologies of the day -- Brahminism, Jainism, and
Buddhism -- co-existing in harmony. (The Epic of the Anklet is ascribed
to Ilango Adigal, a Jain monk: the story’s heroine and her husband are of a
merchant caste.) Center stage are aristocratic young men and women,
questing for heroic action and love. The human condition, albeit
idealized, is the subject matter. Spirituality, religion, and mythology
is peripheral. It must be remembered that this literature is of an
urban, courtly milieu. One famous Sangam poem gently ridicules folk
religion: a village maiden is brought to an exorcist, as her parents fear she
is possessed by a malicious spirit: in fact, she is secretly pining for her
human lover. The
Tholkappiam discusses the distinction between akam and puram
poetry. Akam poetry pertains to love and romance. It is written
in the form of conversations between participants, often voicing
participants’ thoughts and feelings, with the heroine’s female friends and
relatives playing supporting roles. No names, places, or dates are
mentioned. Puram poetry, on the other hand, pertains to matters of
state, primarily war; and here specific historical and geographical
references are appropriate. Akam and puram are often mingled in a
single poem, as in one in which a wounded but victorious young man rushing
home from a distant battlefield imagines his love waiting for him. The
institution of kingship was central to ancient South Indian culture.
The tradition of justice in ancient South India decreed that a king should
inflict upon himself whatever injustices he had inadvertently inflicted upon
others, and there are many stories of this occurring. Praise-songs
for kings were later applied to Aryan deities. Many of the Sangam poems
are in the form of Aarruppatai, a literary device which portrays an
oral bard who has received bountiful gifts from a local king and who now,
upon meeting other bards in the course of travel, praises that king and his
land and directs these others to him. Numerous scholars have speculated
that Sangam poetry is derived from the oral tradition (Kailasapathy 1968;
Stephen 1999). As mentioned, the poets, in the poems, often
self-consciously pattern themselves after oral bards. Much of the
Sangam poetry is formulaic, which lends further credence to the likelihood
that the oral tradition was close at hand. It seems that during the
Sangam age, there was lively interaction between the oral and literary
traditions. An
ancient South Indian king periodically spent time in the forest wilderness,
so as to renew his mystical connection with nature (Falk 1973). The
king’s valor was reflected in the land: the physical-spiritual health of the
realm depended on his behavior. The greatness of a king was assessed in
terms of the fertility and the diversity of the regions found within his
territory, and therefore descriptions of the kingdom’s landscapes often form
an integral part of laudatory and heroic verse. The
Tholkappiam also explains the Sangam poetic convention that there are
five landscapes in South India, each one corresponding to a flower, time of
day, and stage of love-relationship (Nayagam 1966): coastal areas agricultural areas barren-land (vegetation is sparse, earth is dried
out) pasture-lands (shrubbery) mountains It
seems that the stages of war also corresponded to certain terrains and
flowers. 2) Women In
South Indian culture, women are considered very powerful. A married
woman is auspicious: her sakti (divine cosmic energy) protects and
animates her husband and their children (Wadley 1980). A girl’s sakti
benefits her parents and siblings. A single woman, especially a
beautiful woman, is potentially dangerous: the dominant culture states that
her power should be bounded and channeled by marriage to a man. An
example of things going awry is presented by Kannagi, the heroine of the Epic
of the Anklet: upon learning that her husband was (unjustly) put to death
by the local king, Kannagi ripped off her left breast and threw it against
Madurai’s city walls, whereupon the city burst into flames. Here the
female breast, usually the most life-giving of elements, is inverted into the
most destructive. In
South India, a girl’s first menstruation is cause for celebration and
ceremony. In olden days -- and even today, especially among lower
classes and in the countryside -- the girl would remain in a specially built
hut for some days, where female relatives would bring her food and visit with
her. In the South, the menstruating girl’s fertility is emphasized and
her pollution is de-emphasized: the opposite is the case in the North
(Kapadia 1995). A
traditional South Indian ideal is that a girl should marry her mother’s
brother or his sons. The principle is that a woman’s marriage home
should be as close to her natal home as possible, both in terms of kin and
geography. This practice gives social power to women. The
brother-sister bond is very strong in India in general, and this is
especially the case in the South (Beck 1974, 1989; Peterson 1988). Various
South Indian kinship systems have been identified as matrilocal, matrilineal,
and/or matricentric (S. Daniel 1980; Gough 1952, 1955, 1959, 1960, 1961,
1965, 1973, 1974, 1978; Schneider 1974). None, as far as I know, have
been called matriarchal. What is clear is that Dravidian cultures tend
to give social and mythological prominence to females, and that the
overwhelmingly patriarchal cultures that arrived from the North (Brahminism
and Islam) have not taken hold in the South nearly to the degree that they
have in the North. 3) Village Religion A
cornerstone of South Indian culture, contributed by aboriginal peoples and
ancient Tamils, is the sense that the divine is immanent: it is in anything
and everything, and can spring up at any moment (Harper 1957). This
South Indian animism developed from the association of special trees, plants,
animals, stones, and other objects with local divinities (Elmore 1913;
Whitehead 1921). Moreover, South Indian village religion revolves
around ancestor-, nature-, and local goddess-worship. Village deities
are typically represented by stones, carved or uncarved. South
India is famous for her village goddesses. Many of these figures were
once, according to legend, local women (please see below: epic heroines).
Some village goddesses are “married” to Sanskritic gods, but many are
not. The single, or virgin, goddesses are considered capricious,
hot-tempered, and mercurial: sometimes the line between central deities and
peripheral spirits is not clear (Brubaker 1978; Craddock 1994; Trawick
1983). Sanskritic culture presents its divinities as timeless, transcendent,
distant, calm, and benevolent: as Sansritic goddesses are portrayed on the
South Indian village level, these deities become aggressive and dangerous
(Shulman 1986). Scholars such as Christopher Fuller have argued that
South Indian village religion, and popular Hinduism in general, needs to
looked at on its own terms, not as a degenerated or distorted version of
Sanskritic culture (Fuller 1992). In
its practices of animal sacrifice and its stories of goddesses who often kill
males in fury, South Indian village religion points to a cyclical sense of
time and matter: children of the goddess grow, become her consorts, and
die. In South Indian versions of the pan-Indian myth of the goddess
killing a buffalo-demon, the buffalo-demon is actually the thinly-disguised
figure of the goddess’ own divine son-consort-husband (Shulman 1980).
This is rationalized away in Sanskrit culture, which claims that its gods
created the goddess in the first place, in order to have her to defeat a
buffalo-demon who had temporarily gotten the best of them. Moreover,
local goddesses are related to in the context of a crisis-oriented worldview:
i.e., when personal or community disasters occur, people call on the
goddess. Local goddesses are also celebrated during annual festivals,
which are coordinated with agricultural and seasonal cycles. Sanskritic
mythology is not generally intimately related to places in South India;
Dravidian legends and myths, on the other hand, are extremely place-centric. Puja is the characteristic Dravidian form of worship.
It consists of a fluid complex of activities, including: the drawing of
kolams (designs with powdered chalk); the pouring of liquids over, and the
placing flowers on, the deity stone; the offering of gifts; and the singing of
praise to the deity (and other forms of storytelling). Deities are
believed to demand attention, and puja attempts to please the deity by
summoning her into the idol and into the worshippers’ body (please see below:
possession). People
of low-castes perform services for people of higher-castes. Barbers,
washerpeople, and other removers of human waste, act as mediators with death
in South Indian villages. The lowly are in touch with dangerous local
spirits, and can deal with them through ritual. For example, Paraiyers
(“pariahs”) play drums (made of cattlehide) in village ritual
performances. The lowly are also often employed as watchmen. As
the low castes are to the high, so the South is to the North: the South is
the subaltern space of India. 4) Dravidian political-cultural movements From
the early 1900’s onward, Dravidian political-cultural movements have been
composed of a thorough mix of the religious, the theatrical, and the
civic-political. Dravidian politicians developed a grand and sweeping
style of political oratory: highly alliterative and rhythmic, with extensive
parallelism (repetition with variation, of phrases, sentences, etc.), and
classical literary touches. In
the 1930’s, N. S. Krishnan, a star comedian, created and toured widely with a
modernized-Villupaattu (“bow song,” please see below) about Mahatma
Gandhi’s “salt march.” Numerous recent governors of Tamil Nadu have
been cinema actors, writers, and producers. South India has seen a mix
of drama, music, dance, cinema, and politics, to a degree unequaled by any
other state of India (Baskaran 1981). The
ancient Tamil tradition of humanism was invoked by E.V. Ramasamy, leader of
the early Dravidian movement, in his promotion of Rationalism
(atheism). E.V.R. and many other urbane South Indians, past and
present, identify mythology as an Aryan element, introduced so as to confuse
and subjugate Dravidians. For the most part, however, recent leaders of
Dravidian political parties have retreated from E.V.R.’s championing of atheism.
5) A contrast between Kerala and Tamil Nadu (a personal
view)
There
are two Keralas. Along the flat coastal land, which is always less than
one hundred miles, many people have light, yellowish skin, the result of
mixing with traders from Arab lands and Portugal. Many Christian
churches can be seen. Male authorities tend to be very strict: Brahmins
actively prevent non-Hindus from entering temples; police tend to be
overbearing; and hotel managers tend to insist on foreigners filling out
forms very properly. In the interior, on the other hand, dark-skinned
people (ancient-Tamil-derived and aboriginal) predominate, and women tend to
be very strong on social levels. Kerala for many years had an elected
Communist state government (which refrained from criticizing citizens’
religious beliefs and practices), and today Kerala has one of the highest
literacy rates in India. Kerala feels to me to be a tense place in that
the coastal governmental and Sanskritic people seem to be determined to control
“their” treasure: the lands and peoples of the interior waterways, jungles,
and mountains. Tamil
Nadu, in contrast, is a much more relaxed and jolly place. People in
authority positions tend to be proud of their Dravidian identity, and tend to
be much friendlier to foreigners. The Tamil language is perceived as a
goddess, bestowing beneficence on the entire world (Ramaswamy 1997). II. The History and Prominent Themes of Folklore and
Anthropology Scholarship concerning South India. History The
initial period of Western scholarship in South India began during the Age
of Discovery, and was conducted primarily by missionaries trained in
philology. Their work was in part motivated by a desire to discredit
the caste system and undercut Brahmin control (Ravindiran 1996). The
Scotsman Robert Caldwell’s A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or
South-Indian Family of Languages (1856) laid a foundation for the claim
of ancient Dravidian heritage, including a classical literary golden
age. The first Western folklore collectors in the area were for the
most part colonial administrators and their wives. Texts of songs and
stories were often highly edited and “retold” in the course of translation
from the native language to English, and from the oral to the written (Gover
1871). W.
H. R. Rivers was one of the first self-identified anthropologists to conduct
fieldwork in South India. He studied the Toda people of the Nilgiri
Hills, part of the Western Ghats (Rivers 1906). M. B. Emeneau studied
the Nilgiri’s Kota people (Emeneau 1944-6): he caused a stir by positing that
folklore should be approached on its own terms, and not as derivations or
deviations from classical modes. The Nilgiris have become one of the
most examined regions in Asia, partly because the British built their largest
hill station, Ooty, in the area (Hockings 1978, 1980a, 1980b, 1988, 1989,
1996, 1997, 1999; Mandelbaum 1941, 1955, 1989; Walker 1986; Wolf 1997a,
1997b, 2000a; Zvelebil 1988). The primary focus of this scholarship has
been on the Todas, the most European-looking (light-skinned and thin-nosed)
of the region’s tribal peoples: there has been speculation that the Todas are
one of the lost tribes of Israel. Attention has also been paid to the
complex cultural ecology that had developed among the various tribal peoples
of the Nilgiris, including the Badaga, Irula, and Kurumba. Kurumbas are
the most aboriginal group in the region: they are associated with sorcery,
which they have alternately been hired for, and persecuted for, by members of
the other groups. Based on his fieldwork with the Kota, Richard Wolf
has asked if there might be common cultural characteristics shared by tribal
people throughout India, and throughout Southeast Asia (Wolf 1997a, 200b) George
Hart remains the dean of American scholars of the ancient Sangam literature
(Hart 1975, 1979, 1999); he has also written about the interpaly between
ancient and contemporary literature, and between the literary and the oral
(Hart 1986). David Shulman has done superb work in analyzing Puranic
and other literary versions of South Indian stories (1980, 1985). Of
course, many South Indian scholars have also been at work. To name just
two: S. Sakthivel, chair, Folklore Dept., Tamil University, Thanjavur, has
especially studied Toda linguistics (Sakthivel 1976, 1977); and Saraswati
Venugopal, chair, Folklore Dept., Madurai Kamaraj U., has studied women’s
folksongs, including types of lullabies and lament (Venugopal 1996). In
Pathways: Approaches to the Study of Society in India (1994), T. N.
Madan provides an excellent survey of both Indian and foreign scholars of
Indian culture. Until
approximately 20 years ago, the standard practice by virtually all scholars
in publishing folklore collected from the field was to give little specific
performance-event context, or description of para-verbal aspects of the
event, and to keep the performers anonymous: direct transcriptions of actual
performances were rarely given. This was partly due to the early
scarcity of portable audio and video recording equipment. South India
was given a large boost in this area when the Ford Foundation sponsored a
series of workshops in ethnographic video in the 1980’s, with Stuart
Blackburn and others. (The Ford Foundation continues to fund South
Indian folklore-related projects). Brenda
Beck published an excellent and very thorough description of a
performance-ritual system in northern Tamil Nadu in 1982, but it was Stuart
Blackburn who really first applied to South India the performance-centered
approach to folklore, with his study of villupaattu (“bow song,” so called
because a long bow with a single string is played during singing segments:
villupaattu, which involves alternation between speaking, chanting, and
singing, and traditionally culminates in possession by people present, has
been called epic-chanting and ballad-singing, although neither Western
performance genre seems to fully fit the phenomenon) (Blackburn 1980).
At the same time, Blackburn criticized some performance-centric scholars for
not paying enough attention to storylines or to performers’ uses of fixed
oral and written texts in the course of performance: he pointed out how
written texts are read or sung aloud in the course of some villupaattu
events. As Arjun Appadurai, Frank Korom, and Margaret Mills wrote in
the introduction to Gender, Genre, and Power in South Asian Expressive
Traditions,
Prominent themes: 1) Caste; 1) Caste One
major way that Western scholarship has perceived and approached India is in
terms of the caste system. Scholars such as Louis Dumont (1957, 1967)
and Michael Moffatt (1979) have claimed that the caste system is a rigid
hierarchy, with everyone involved knowing and accepting their place.
Others have claimed that in reality this system is not so systematic, pointing
out that there are innumerable sub-castes and that the question of who is
superior to whom is often contested or ignored; and moreover, that some
people in lower castes reject the idea that they are somehow inherently
impure (Appadurai 1986, 1988; Kapadia 1995). It has become clear that
the British, in the course of trying to organize and administrate their
realm, encouraged, codified, and fetishized the idea of the caste system
(Irschick 1994). 2) The bounded village After
World War II, leadership of Western anthropological and folkloristic
scholarship in India shifted from British to USA scholars. One early
USA theme of investigation centered around the concept of the village as a
self-contained unit, a living laboratory. This was part of what was
known as the Chicago school (Marriot 1955; Redfield 1956; Singer 1972).
It was eventually concluded that in fact there always had been much
communication beyond the village, and the bounded village concept was
modified. 3) Great tradition, little tradition The
Chicago school formulated that villages in India had been affected by
Brahminic culture, which they called the Great tradition of India, meaning,
among other things, that it had spread throughout the sub-continent and
involved writing (Redfield 1956; Singer 1972; Srinivas 1952). The use
of the terms, Great and Little, has been questioned in recent years
especially by certain South Indian scholars, who feel that value judgments
are inherent to these terms, and have pointed out that Dravidian culture is
also pan-South-Indian and also has used writing since ancient times.
Possible substitutes for the Great-Little dialectic that have been proposed
are the less abstract dialectics, Sanskritic-local, and Sanskritic-Dravidian
(Muthiah 2000). 4) Diffusion The
Great-Little model acknowledges that there is movement upward and outward
from the local to larger regions, as well as from the Great to the
local. For example, when a story of a dead hero or heroine spreads
beyond its local base, attracting new patronage outside the small group that
originally worshipped the figure, the stress on the figure’s painful and
tragic death often wanes. Added is emphasis on the figure’s
supernatural birth, and identification of the local figure with a pan-Indian
(Sanskritic) deity. As this happens, the possession aspect of the
performance loses strength because the intimacy and sense of community that
this ritual requires weakens (Blackburn, Claus, Flueckiger, and Wadley 1989).
5) Modernization Sankritization
and Westernization are the two types of modernization discussed by Milton
Singer (Singer 1968, 1972). Sankritization involves vegetarianism,
teetotalism, wearing of a sacred thread, performance of life-cycle rites by
Brahmin priests with the use of Vedic mantras and vegetarian offerings,
prohibition of widow remarriage, belief in the doctrines of karma, dharma
(cosmically-ordained duty), rebirth, and release, and worship of the
Sanskritic pantheon of benevolent and transcendent deities. Westernization
is associated with technical improvements in communication and
transportation, urbanization, industrialization and the new occupational
opportunities that come with them, Western-style education, civil
institutions of parliamentary democracy -- and, I would add, the unraveling
of kin connections, immorality, commodity and consumption, and unfettered
conversation in communication. 6) Classical, orthodox, folk, and popular cultures In
India, these various levels of culture have borrowed from each other since
ancient times: they share a common base (Blackburn and Ramanujan 1986;
Shulman 1986). For example, the frontal glance of deities (or
representations of deities), enabling eye-to-eye contact between the divine
and the worshiper, is important in all these levels of culture (Babb 1981;
Jhala 1997). 7) Interaction between the oral, written, and other media Interaction
between the oral and the written has also occurred since ancient times
(Varadarajan 1970). Much originally orally-transmitted material has
found its way into South Indian cinema, and now television also (Baskaran
1996; Dickey 1993; Lutgendorf 1990; Pandian 1992). In addition, there
is widespread use of written texts within oral performances (Blackburn 1980,
1988). Temples house written works which describe local deities, and
explain and sustain the shrine’s claim to sanctity. Paul Greene has
argued that the playing of audio cassettes in a South Indian village
can be seen as a performative and a devotional ritual activity (Greene 1997,
1999). He has also written about the folk music commercialization
process in South India (Greene 2001); audio-cassette culture in the region
(Greene 1998); and a conflict that arose over the singing of cinema songs at
a funeral (Greene 1999). 8)
The performance-centered approach to folklore This
approach emphasizes context: both micro (including para-linguistic and
para-verbal behavior during the actual event) and macro (social, cultural,
and historical background). It is associated with the ethnographies of
performance, communication, and speaking. In the past twenty years,
there has been a large number of dissertations by USA students working in
South India which utilize these approaches. Some of these
concern: In Tamil Nadu: women’s rituals (Reynolds 1978); villuppaattu
(Blackburn 1980); terukkuttu, a form of street theatre (Frasca 1990),
and a follow-up by a Dutch woman (de Bruin 1999); karagattam, a form
of folk street dance, with speech and song (Diamond 1999); folk healing and
divination rituals (Nabakov 1995); special drama, a semi-Westernized
form of street theatre (Seizer 1995). In Kerala: mudiyettu, an
orthodox ritual dance-drama (Caldwell 1995); a folk ritual by the Pulluvan
people, involving the drawing of kolams, and song (Neff 1995). Many of
these forms culminate in possession. There have also been studies of
cultural behavior and beliefs (V. Daniel 1984; Prasad 1998; Trawick 1978, 1990a).
Margaret Trawick has written a series of very fine articles about women’s
performance of ayirapaattu (“crying song”), a form of lament (Trawick
1986, 1990b, 1991). Alf Hiltebeitel has researched the cult of Draupadi
(Hiltebeitel 1988, 1999). There have also been numerous sociological
studies, especially concerning on the plight of women (Kapadia 1995; Ram
1992). 9) Performance of epic, with possession cult Lauri
Honko has written of his realization that the performance of epic continues
to exist, from Africa to Oceania (Honko 1998). He has helped to record
and transcribe, and has published, the Tulu people’s Siri epic. (The
Tulu are a Dravidian people living in southern Karnataka). Honko points
out that many of these performance traditions, including the Siri epic,
involve a possession cult. There are “strong contexts”: the story is
sung by women while they work in paddy fields; and by a male priest during
ceremonies tat culminate in possession. Because of these activities,
the priest found he had no opportunity to sing his full mental text, so he
summoned Honko and other scholars, who enabled him to perform and record the
whole. The singer, who also leads the ritual events in which he is
possessed by the son of the epic’s heroine, claims that he is the sole owner
of the epic, at least as it is performed by him (Honko 2000). One
wonders how the local women who sing and tell the story amongst themselves,
and who also participate in the ritual possession events, feel about this
claim of ownership. In any event, this research, following Blackburn’s,
has greatly expanded the academic model of performance of epic. 10) Central and peripheral possession, especially among
women
Possession
has emerged in recent years as a central theme in the discourse around the
subaltern. Possession can be seen as a means of psychic integration,
and of protest against authority (Boddy 1994; Lewis 1971, 1988; Moreno 1984;
Nabakov 1995, 1996, 1998, 2000; Waghorne 1984). As with the study of
lament (in which possession may occur), the mature ethnographic study of
possession has been enabled by the development of the ethnography of
speaking, the performance-centered approach to folklore, the feminist revolution,
and the anthropology of emotions (Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990; Lutz and White
1986). The
standard sequence of possession events is: the deity is summoned by the
recitation of her story (and associated activities); the deity enters dancing
people; and, finally, these people stop dancing and speak in the voice of the
deity. When considering possession events, questions that need to be
asked are: Who presides? Who summons the divinity? Whom does the
divinity enter? Does the possessed person have the opportunity to
extensively speak in the voice of the divinity? If so, who
listens? In
her dissertation about mudiyettu, a ritual-performance form practiced in
Kerala, Sarah Caldwell bemoans the fact that men have appropriated roles of
ritual-leader and possession in relation to the goddess in Kerala (Caldwell
1995). The problem was that she was studying a Sanskritized, orthodox,
temple-sponsored ritual dance-drama form, which dealt with a pan-Indian
goddess. In fact, women do experience possession by goddesses in South
India, but much of this activity occurs “under the radar”: often even local
people, especially local men, are unaware of it. Where goddess
possession of females does tend to occur is among entrepreneurial women of
lower classes: folk healers, especially those involved with mid-wife and
lament activity (Nabakov 1995). These events are conducted in the
context of healer-client relationships, and among women themselves as
variations of puja, often around life-transition ceremonies. Much of this
activity must remain secret or semi-secret, as it may involve illegal
procedures and substances, or expression of anger against various
authorities; public exposure may bring repercussions from governmental and
religious authorities, or from males in general (husbands beating
wives). It is unusual and problematic for outsiders to be allowed to
witness such events: ever-present is the danger of throwing off the local
social ecology, the balance of power between local men and women, for
example. Moreover, this activity is integrated with everyday ongoing
family and kinship life, and is not framed as formal public ritual or
artistic performance. Comprehension of the local vernacular language
and extended participant-observation ethnographic fieldwork is essential in
order to begin to be able to tap into this level of culture (Ram 1992).
Even should one witness it, much will be unintelligible, as speech during
possession is coded in various ways, often so as to be partly unintelligible
to some of those present. In
South Indian villages, possession by local deities is a part of regular
periodic worship: this is central possession. Some scholars claim that
women are most often possessed by malicious spirits, who then must be
exorcised: this is peripheral possession (Lewis 1971, 1998). However,
as mentioned, South Indian women continue to also experience central
possession. In
South India there is an ancient tradition of females experiencing central
possession. The phenomenon is portrayed in the Epic of the Anklet:
On the way to Madurai, Kannagi and her husband come upon a group of forest
tribal people. The group’s shamaness/priestess prepares to be possessed
by the group’s goddess. As a means of summoning the goddess into the
shamaness, gifts are presented at her feet: “women offered her dolls,
parrots, wild fowl with small beautiful feathers, blue peacocks, balls and
dried black beans used for divination, roots..., paints, colored powders,
cool, fragrant pastes, pulses, sesame candy, boiled rice laced with suet,
flowers, incense, and perfume” (Canto 12, lines 46-54; Parthasarathy
trans.). The gifts -- combined with kolams, music, words of praise, and
gestures and dance -- constitute a synaesthetic (“all the senses”)
experience. Once possessed, the shamaness mysteriously declares that
Kannagi will one day be queen of the Tamil lands. 11) Folk male and female epic heroes/heroines The
South, especially the mountains, is known by some as a dangerous place: even
in South Indian folktales, characters are often warned, “Don’t go
south!” According to one of India’s “national” epics, Ramayana,
south India is a place of hazardous forests, inhabited by monkeys and lustful
demons. A
good deal of ink has been spilled in the effort to establish that ancient Tamil
Nadu had an aristocratic epic tradition on a par with ancient Greece
(Kailasapathy 1968). It was left to N. Vanamamalai and Stuart Blackburn
to bring to light Tamil Nadu’s most prominent living folk epic tradition,
villupaattu (Blackburn 1978, 1980, 1988; Vanamamalai 1969, 1981, 1990).
Many of the stories told within this tradition emphasize human agency, as
opposed to karma, reincarnation, and divine figures. Heroes and
heroines rebel against oppression from upper classes and unjust laws.
The central locale is the village, not the king’s court. The South
Indian male epic hero is at times accused of being a bandit, and is often
engaged by the local king to fight against bandits. Blackburn draws
parallels between these figures and the Mexican folk heroes identified by
Américo Paredes. Honko
calls the Tulu Siri epic a feminist epic: the heroine must travel about in
the course of struggling to keep her land; in the process she divorces her
husband (Honko 1998). Kannagi -- heroine of the Epic of the Anklet --
has received much scholarly attention (Beck 1972; Choondal 1978; Fines 1993;
Induchudan 1969; Macphail 1993; Noble 1990; Obeyesekere 1980, 1984; Pandian
1982). Although folk theatre and storytelling performances have
developed around Kannagi, she is primarily known in Tamil Nadu as a figure
from classical literature. In some places, Kannagi is considered a form
of Sakti, Siva’s consort; in the far southwest of Tamil Nadu, however, it
seems she is associated with Bhadrakali (Kali in her deadliest form), who has
no male partner, and who is worshipped through puja, traditional villupaattu,
etc. However,
Kannagi is just one variant of the archetype, the local South Indian
goddess. As mentioned above, most every South Indian locale has such a
figure, who is thought to overlook the local territory, rewarding people for
good behavior and punishing them for bad behavior, which can include ignoring
her worship (Brubaker 1978). Typical types of punishment are extreme
heat and drought (in the environment), and infertility and skin diseases (in
the body). The stories of these goddesses are based on legends about
woman who supposedly once lived in the area, and who, as a result of
themselves or their family being violated, exploded in fury and in that state
committed suicide and/or murder. Variants of this figure include:
1) Esikki (Nili): killed by her lover, a Brahmin temple priest,
Esikki returned to rip his heart out of his chest. 2) Anantaci:
a widow expelled from her village, Anantaci climbed a mountain and jumped in
a pool, which overflowed and flooded her village, washing it away
entirely. 3) Pulankontal: carried off and thrown in a well by
suitors, Pulankontal returned to exact revenge. 4) Nallathangal:
returning penniless to her brother’s home, Nallathangal was turned away by
her brother’s wife, whereupon she threw her seven children in a well and
followed them...disaster ensued. 5) Singamma, goddess of the
Kuruvan people: Singamma was raped, murdered, and buried by her brothers, but
arose to demand that a building be built in her honor (Blackburn 1988;
Trawick 1986, 1990, 1991). 6) Antaragattamma: a lower-class man
disguised himself as a Brahmin in order to marry a Brahmin woman; when she
discovered the deception she flew into a very destructive rage. Each of
these heroines is sung to and possesses worshipers, in a variety of
contexts. Small temples may be built for these figures; often shrines
in their honor are created around trees or anthills at the boundaries of
human habitation. I am unsure if such goddesses are represented in home
shrines. Snakes tend to be associated with these local goddesses
(Aravaanan 1977, 1988; Binod 1979; Mundkur 1983). In
conclusion: As it has been for at least the last 20 years, South India
remains a very popular locale for study. This is in part because so
many aspects of her traditional culture continue to thrive. South India
features one of the largest pockets of goddess worship in the world, which
makes the area extremely attractive and interesting to feminists and to
anyone interested in gender issues, on both the social and mythical
levels. Because so many of her traditional verbal and other performing
arts traditions are so vibrant, South India is an excellent area in which to
observe what happens when these traditions are transposed into electronic
media, including interactive telecommunication. (The South leads India
in the creation of public and commercial community Internet centers.)
By virtue of the ongoing presence of descendents of its original human
inhabitants, South India is linked to Africa to the west and Indonesia to the
east; much work is to be done in investigating ancient migrations as well as
possible kinship ties between the present-day inhabitants of these
regions. There is a great deal of friendly interaction between native
(South Indian) and foreign scholars. The cosmopolitan and tolerant
nature of South Indian culture makes it a delightful place for foreigners to
work. ***
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