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Jahazpur is a small market town or qasba with a diverse population
of more than 20,000 people located in Bhilwara District in the
North Indian state of Rajasthan. With roots deep in history and
legend, Shiptown (a literal translation of landlocked Jahazpur's
name) today is a subdistrict headquarters and thus a regional hub
for government services unavailable in villages. Rural and town
lives have long intersected in Shiptown's market streets, which are
crammed with shopping opportunities, many designed to allure
village customers. Temples, mosques, and shrines attract Hindus and
Muslims from nearby areas. In the town's densely settled
center-still partially walled, with arched gateways intact-many
neighborhoods remain segregated by hereditary birth group. By
contrast, in some newer, more spacious residential areas outside
the walls, persons of distinct communities and religions live as
neighbors. Throughout Jahazpur municipality a peaceful pluralism
normally prevails. Ann Grodzins Gold lived in Santosh Nagar, the
oldest of Shiptown's new settlements, for ten months, recording
interviews and participating in festival, ritual, and social
events-public and private, religious and secular. While engaged
with contemporary scholarship, Shiptown is moored in the everyday
lives of the town's residents, and each chapter has at its center a
specific node of Jahazpur experience. Gold seeks to portray how
neighborly relations are forged and endure across lines of
difference; how ancient hierarchical social structures shift in
major ways while never exactly disappearing; how in spite of
pervasive conservative family values, gender roles are transforming
rapidly and radically; how environmental deterioration affects not
only public health but individual hearts, inspiring activism; and
how commerce and morality keep uneasy company. She sustains a
conviction that, even in the globalized present, local experiences
are significant, and that anthropology-that most intimate and
poetic of the social sciences-continues to foster productive
conversations among human beings.
Jahazpur is a small market town or qasba with a diverse population
of more than 20,000 people located in Bhilwara District in the
North Indian state of Rajasthan. With roots deep in history and
legend, Shiptown (a literal translation of landlocked Jahazpur's
name) today is a subdistrict headquarters and thus a regional hub
for government services unavailable in villages. Rural and town
lives have long intersected in Shiptown's market streets, which are
crammed with shopping opportunities, many designed to allure
village customers. Temples, mosques, and shrines attract Hindus and
Muslims from nearby areas. In the town's densely settled
center—still partially walled, with arched gateways intact—many
neighborhoods remain segregated by hereditary birth group. By
contrast, in some newer, more spacious residential areas outside
the walls, persons of distinct communities and religions live as
neighbors. Throughout Jahazpur municipality a peaceful pluralism
normally prevails. Ann Grodzins Gold lived in Santosh Nagar, the
oldest of Shiptown's new settlements, for ten months, recording
interviews and participating in festival, ritual, and social
events—public and private, religious and secular. While engaged
with contemporary scholarship, Shiptown is moored in the everyday
lives of the town's residents, and each chapter has at its center a
specific node of Jahazpur experience. Gold seeks to portray how
neighborly relations are forged and endure across lines of
difference; how ancient hierarchical social structures shift in
major ways while never exactly disappearing; how in spite of
pervasive conservative family values, gender roles are transforming
rapidly and radically; how environmental deterioration affects not
only public health but individual hearts, inspiring activism; and
how commerce and morality keep uneasy company. She sustains a
conviction that, even in the globalized present, local experiences
are significant, and that anthropology—that most intimate and
poetic of the social sciences—continues to foster productive
conversations among human beings.
Death, Beauty, Struggle represents a long labor of love and the
summation of forty years of Margaret Trawick's groundbreaking
research. Centering her gaze on the lowest castes of India, now
called Dalits, she describes the experience of women at this
precarious level who are still treated as sub-human, sometimes by
family members, sometimes by higher-caste men. Their private
worlds, however, are full of art; rural Dalit women sing beautiful
songs of their own making and tell remarkable narratives of their
own lives. 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 stories
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. Trawick's frames of analysis, developed
throughout her long career of fieldwork in India, inform her
ethnography of expressive culture. The songs and stories of Dalit
women were recorded and transcribed, to be translated into lyrical
passages in her own work. Death, Beauty, Struggle demonstrates a
conviction that persons without privilege-from the rape victim to
the landless laborer-possess both power and agency. Through verbal
arts, Dalit women produce not only acute cultural critiques but
also astonishing beauty.
In many South Asian oral traditions, herons are viewed as
duplicitous and conniving. These traditions tend also to view women
as fragmented identities, dangerously split between virtue and
virtuosity, between loyalties to their own families and those of
their husbands. In women's songs, however, symbolic herons speak,
telling of alternative moral perspectives shaped by women. The
heron's words--and women's expressive genres more
generally--criticize pervasive North Indian ideologies of gender
and kinship that place women in subordinate positions. By inviting
readers to "listen to the heron's words," the authors convey this
shift in moral perspective and suggest that these spoken truths are
compelling and consequential for the women in North India.
The songs and narratives bear witness to a provocative cultural
dissonance embedded in women's speech. This book reveals the power
of these critical commentaries and the fluid and permeable
boundaries between spoken words and the lives of ordinary village
women.
Madhu Natisar Nath is a Rajasthani farmer with no formal schooling.
He is also a singer, a musician, and a storyteller. At the center
of "A Carnival of Parting" are Madhu Nath's oral performances of
two linked tales about the legendary Indian kings, Bharthari of
Ujjain and Gopi Chand of Bengal. Both characters, while still in
their prime, leave thrones and families to be initiated as yogis--a
process rich in adventure and melodrama, one that offers unique
insights into popular Hinduism's view of world renunciation. Ann
Grodzins Gold presents these living oral epic traditions as flowing
narratives, transmitting to Western readers the pleasures, moods,
and interactive dimensions of a village bard's performance.
Three introductory chapters and an interpretive afterword, together
with an appendix on the bard's language by linguist David Magier,
supply "A Carnival of Parting" with a full range of ethnographic,
historical, and cultural backgrounds. Gold gives a frank and
engaging portrayal of the bard Madhu Nath and her work with
him.
The tales are most profoundly concerned, Gold argues, with human
rather than divine realities. In a compelling afterword, she
highlights their thematic emphases on politics, love, and death.
Madhu Nath's vital colloquial telling of Gopi Chand and Bharthari's
stories depicts renunciation as inevitable and interpersonal
attachments as doomed, yet celebrates human existence as a
"carnival of parting."
"In the Time of Trees and Sorrows" showcases peasants' memories of
everyday life in North India under royal rule and their musings on
the contrast between the old days and the unprecedented shifts that
a half century of Indian Independence has wrought. It is an oral
history of the former Kingdom of Sawar in the modern state of
Rajasthan as it was from the 1930s to the 1950s.
Based on testimonies from the 1990s, this book stands as a
polyvocal account of the radical political and environmental
changes the region and its people have faced in the twentieth
century. Not just the story of modernity from the perspective of a
rural village, these interviews and author commentaries narrate
this small rural community's relatively sudden transformation from
subjection to a local despot and to a remote colonial power to
citizenship in a modern postcolonial democracy. Unlike other recent
studies of Rajasthan, the current study gives voice exclusively to
former subjects who endured the double oppression of colonial and
regional rulers. Gold and Gujar thus place subjective subaltern
experiences of daily routines, manifestations of power relations,
and sweeping changes to the environment (after the fall of kings)
that turned lush forests into a barren landscape on equal footing
with historical "fact" and archival sources. Ambiguous, complex,
and culturally laden as it is in Western thought, the concept of
nature is queried in this ethnographic text. For persons in Sawar
the environment is not only a means of sustenance, its
deterioration is linked to human morality and to power, both royal
and divine. The framing questions of this South Asian history
revealed through memories are: what was it like in the time of
kings and what happened to the trees?
Madhu Natisar Nath is a Rajasthani farmer with no formal schooling.
He is also a singer, a musician and a storyteller. At the centre of
"A Carnival of Parting" are Madhu Nath's oral performances of two
linked tales about the legendary Indian kings, Bharthari of Ujjain
and Gopi Chand of Bengal. Both characters, while still in their
prime, leave thrones and families to be initiated as yogis - a
process rich in adventure and melodrama, one that offers unique
insights into popular Hinduism's view of world renunciation. Ann
Grodzins Gold presents these living oral epic traditions as flowing
narratives, transmitting to Western readers the pleasures, moods
and interactive dimensions of a village bard's performance.;The
tales are most profoundly concerned, Gold argues, with human rather
than divine realities. In an afterword, she highlights their
thematic emphases on politics, love and death. Madhu Nath's vital
colloquial telling of Gopi Chand and Bharthari's stories depicts
renunciation as inevitable and interpersonal attachments as doomed,
yet celebrates human existence as a "carnival of parting".
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