Telling Lives in India: Biography, Autobiography, and Life History

333 Pages·2004·20.979 MB·English

by  David Arnold, Stuart Blackburn

Telling Lives in India
Biography, Auto,biography,
and Life Histo,ry
edited by
DAVID ARNOLD
&
STUART BLACKBURN
Indiana University Press
Bloomington and Indianapolis
--,
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Contents
..
Acknowledgments vu
Notes on Contributors
Vlll
1 Introduction: Life Histories in India
DAVID ARNOLD AND STUART BLACKBURN 1
Part I: Confronting Modernity
2 The Self and the Cell: Indian Prison Narratives as
Life Histories
DAVID ARNOLD 29
3 The Reticent Autobiographer: Mahadevi Varma's
Writings
FRANCESCA ORSINI 54
4 The Invention of Private Life: A Reading of
Sibnarh Sastri's Autobiography
SUDIPTA KAVIRAJ 83
Part II: Translating Tradition
5 The Past in the Present: Instruction, Pleasu~e,
and Blessing in Maulana Muhammad Zakariyya's
Aap Biitii
BARBARA D. METCALF 116
6 Hamara Daur-i Hayat: An Indian Muslim Woman
Writes Her Life
VATUK 144
SYLVIA
7 Cowherd or King? The Sanskrit Biography of
Ananda Ranga Pillai
DAVID SHULMAN 175
Contents
Vl
8 Life Histories as Narrative Strategy: Prophecy,. Song, and
Truth-Telling in Tamil Tales and Legends
203
STUART BLACKBURN
Part Ill: Spoken Lives
9 "Honor is Honor, After All:" Silence and Speech in the
Life Stories of Women in Kangra, North-West India
227
KJRJN NARAYAN
I 0 Beyond Silence: A Dalir Life History in South India
JoSIANE RACINE AND JEAN-Luc RACINE 252
11 The Marital History of ''A. Thumb-Impression Man''
P. p 281
] ONATHAN ARRY
Index 319
Acknowledgments.
T
his volume ofe ssays grew out of a "Life Histories" project estab
lished at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in
London, during the period when Stuart Blackburn was Chair
of the South Asia Centre, and where the first workshop was held in
November 1998. Further meetings and discussion took place in
collaboration with other South Asianists, principally at the London
School of Economics (LSE) in London, at Oxford (where a second
meeting was held in June 1999), and at Cambridge. The main
workshop was held in London on May 15-17, 2000, at the British
Library, which kindly made its splendid conference facilities available
for this purpose. In all some twenty-five scholars presented papers,
from a range of very different disciplines and perspectives, and the
editors are grateful to them all for their invaluable contributions.
The editors wish to thank the British Academy and the Research
Committee at SOAS for their help in funding the project,. and to
acknowledge the help of David Washbrook (in hosting the Oxford
meeting), ofJohnny Parry (at LSE) and Sudipta Kaviraj (at SOAS) for
their help in planning the London conference and commenting on the
draft introduction, and of Barbara Lazoi for her assistance as executive
officer at the South Asia Centre at SOAS. The editors are also indebted
co Rukun Advani at Permanent Black and Rebecca Tolen at Indiana
University Press (IUP) for seeing this volume into print and to the two
anonymous reviewers for IUP, whose knowledgeable and constructive
comments enabled us to revise and refram·e the Introduction to this
volume.
DAVID ARNOLD AND STUART BLACKBURN
Notes on Contributors
David Arnold is Professor of South Asian History at the School of
Oriental and African Studies, London. His published work has ranged
extensively over India's colonial history and includes Colonizing the
Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India
(1993) and Gandhi (2001). His current research is on cofonialscience,
landscape, and travel in early-nineteenth-century India.
Stuart Blackburn is Research Associate at the School of Oriental and
African Studies, London,. and Director of the ESRC project, "Tribal
Transitions: Cultural Change in Arunachal Pradesh." His recent
publications include Moral Fictions: Tamil Folktales from Oral Tradi
tion (2002) andPrint, Folklore andN ationalism in Colonial South India
(2003). Currently he is working on oral literature and material culture
in tribal societies in Arunachal Pradesh.
Sudipta Kaviraj is a Reader in the Department of Political Studies at
the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. His research
interests indude Indian politics and theories of the state. His pub
lished work includes The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra
Chattop.adhyay and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India
(1995). He has also edited Politics in India (1997) and,. with Sunil
Khilnani, Civil Society: History and Possibilities (2001).
Barbara D. Metcalf is currently Alice Freeman Palmer Professor of
History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. A specialist in the
history of South Asian Muslims, she is the author ofI slamic Contesta
tions: Essays on Muslims in India and Pakistan (2003) and Islamic
Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860-1900 (2nd edition, 2002); co
author of A Concise History ofI ndia (2002); and author and translator
of Perfecting Women: Maulana Ashraf: Ali Thanawi's "Bih£shti Zewar"
(1990).
Notes on Contributors
IX
Kirin Narayan is Professor of Anthropology and Languages and
Cultures of Asia at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the
author of Storytellers, Saints and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu
Religi.ous Teaching (1989), and (in collaboration with Urmila Devi
Sood) Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon: Himalayan Foothill
Folktales ( 1997). She has also published a novel,. Love, Stars and All
That (1994). She is currently working on a book about her fieldwork
on women's songs and life stories in Kangra.
Francesca Orsini is University Lecturer in Hindi at the Faculty of
Oriental Studies, University of Cambridge, and the author of The
Hindi Public Sphere: Language and Literature in the Age ofN ationalism
(2002). She is currently editing a book on love in South Asian
traditions and working on a project on commercial publishing in
nineteenth-century North India.
Jonathan P. Parry is Professor of Anthropology at the London School
of Economics. His recent publications include Caste and Kinship in
Kangra (1979); Death in Banaras (1994); and the edited collections
J.
The Worlds ofI ndian Industrial Labour (with Breman and K. Kapadia
1999) and Institutions and Inequalities (with R. Guha 1999). He is
currently studying industrialization and industrial life in the Chhattis
garh steel town of Bhilai.
Jean-Luc Racine is Senior Fellow, Centre for the Study of India and
South Asia, CNRS-Ecole des Hautes Erudes en Sciences Sociales,
Paris. In addition to the life history ofViramma, and several essays on
cultural geography in South India, he is the editor of Les Attaches de
l'homme: Enracinement Paysan et Logiques Migratories en Inde du Sud
(1994; English edition, 1996); Tiers Mondes: Figures d'incertitude:
Autonomies e.t Dependances (1991); and Rural Change in Karnataka
(1989).
Josiane Racine researches popular culture in Tamil Nadu, South
India. In addition to the life history of Viramma, she has published
several essays on various aspects of Tamil culture and Ererarure,
especially singing traditions and Dalir identity.
David Shulman is Professor of Indian Studies and Comparative
Religion at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Among his recent
x Notes on Contributors
publications are (with V Narayana Rao and S. Subrahmanyam)
Textures ofTime: Writing History in South India, 1600-1800 (2001)
and (with V. Narayana Rao) Classical Telugu Poetry: An Anthology
(2002). His current research topics are Telugu poetry and poetics;
South Indian Saivism; and the history of the imagination in South
India.
Sylvia Vatuk is Professor Emeritus ofA nthropology at the University
of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author ofa book and many articles on
Indian kinship and family, gender, aging, and intergenerational rela
tions. Her essay in this volume is an outgrowth of research on the
history of a prominent South Indian Muslim family, and she has
recendy completed a field study in Chennai and Hyderabad on
Muslim personal law.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Life Histories in India
DAVID ARNOLD AND STUART BLACKBURN
L
e histories have a wide, if not universal, appeal. Nearly all of us
have at some stage been fascinated by other people's lives. Life
stories 1 of one kind or another have been told to us from child
hood; we have heard them or read them for ourselves or seen them en
acted on stage or screen. They may have been the lives (however edited
or embellished) of historical men and women, or, no less influentially,
characters in folktales, novels and myths. They may have been in
tended to entertain or admonish us, to encourage emulation or inspire
repugnance and fear: we may even have contemplated the prospect,
some day, of publishing a life history of our own. But if life histories
are so omnipresent and central to human experience, how might they
nevertheless differ in content, form and intention from one society to
another, or from one age to another? Given this volume's focus on
India, do different societies, or even part-societies, articulate life hist
ories in distinctive ways? Are there, moreover, significant differences
in the ways in which scholars from different disciplines approach life
historical material, and what can theyprofitably learn from each other's
techniques?
l. Why Life Histories?
India provides a critical site for the discussion oflife histories. It might,
at least until recently, have been remarked that scholars of India, and
of South Asia more generally, have been neglectful, at best wary, of
the life-history form compared to scholars of other regions.2 That the
2 Telling Lives in India
life-history approach has not been entirely absent can readily be de
monstrated by referring to David G. Mandelbaum, the anthropologist
whose pioneering essay, thirty years ago, drew upon the life of Mohan
das Karamchand Gandhi as a case study and argued that the task of
life-history studies was to emphasize "the experiences and require
ments of the individual-how the person copes with society rather
than how society copes with the stream of individuals" (Mandelbaum
1973: 177). It was perhaps significant, however, that Mandelbaum
chose to discuss the life of the most famous-· and most widely written
about-individual in modern India, though his life-history approach
was sub-sequently taken up by other scholars looking at very different
subjects, including James M. Freeman in his 1979 account of MuH, an
Un touch-able in Orissa. Despite something ofa hiatus in life histories
thereafter, recent years, especially since the mid 1990s, have seen the
publication of a number of "person-centered" studies, not just for
India alone but almost the entire South Asia region from Sri Lanka to
Nepal, and from a variety of different (if predominantly anthropologi
cal) perspectives. 3 Despite this,. however, it might stiH be maintained
chat historically there has been a reluctance to regard India as suitable
territory for an approach that has long gained wide acceptance for
many other regions and (especially with regard to autobiographical
narratives) in such well-developed fields as women's studies and black
studies (Olney 1980: 13-17).
One explanation for this general reluctance might be that in South
Asian scholarship a paradigm of"collectivity" has tended to prevail. In
the anthropology of the 1960s and 1970s, as in many related fidds of
study (history, politics and religious studies), it was frequently as
sumed that caste was one of the essential attributes of Indian society
and that identities founded on caste and religion dominated to such
a degree that individual agency and a sense of selfhood (and hence life
histories and other individualistic modes of expression) were marginal
co South Asian thought and behavior. To cite a perhaps extreme case,
McK.im Marriott argued that Indians were besc understood as "divi
duals" rather than individuals, the person in South Asia being a less
discrete, less bounded and more permeable entity than a person in
Europe or North America (Marriott 1976). A few privileged individu
als might be sufficiently exceptional-or Westernized--to be deemed
worthy subjects for conventional biographies by historians or political
scientists; or, like Gandhi, Nehru and Nirad Chaudhuri,4 be able to
compose their own self-narratives. But nineteenth-century Orientalist