Gender as a Genre in Women's Oral Tradition in India [PDF]

Uppsala University Faculty of Languages Department of Linguistics and Philology

Gender as a Genre in Women’s Oral Tradition in India

Master Thesis by Eleonor Marcussen Hindi D Spring 2009

Supervisor: Mirja Juntunen Submitted 2009-05-21

Abstract This thesis is about gendered approaches to women’s oral tradition in India. The first aim of the thesis is to see how gender is treated as a genre in the specific context of Indian women’s oral tradition, and the second aim is to look at the methodological implications to consider when defining ‘gender as a genre’. Drawing upon previous research on women’s oral tradition two texts exemplify how local interpretative frameworks for performances and songs are used to define genres based on gender. In the texts the use of local interpretative frameworks is argued for as better conveying and understanding the meaning and contexts of the uttered words for the academic texts’ readers. This leads to a methodological discussion on the genre formation’s importance for interpreting texts and for creating a sense of community as well as expressing a voice of a community. Explanatory models of how this occurs and what function women’s voices have in various contexts surface from using local interpretative frameworks. The focus of the researchers seems to shifts from attributing meaning to words to looking at how the ambiguity of words is fitted into social processes of defining identities. Keywords: India, oral tradition, women, gender, literature, methodology

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Acknowledgements The time spent in the stimulating premises of Teen Murti Bhawan, Jawaharlal Nehru University, the Sahitya Akademi Library, India Habitat Centre, India International Center, and finally Delhi’s buses and autorickshaws, was made possible with the fund from Helmer och Ellen Smith Stiftelsen (The Helmer and Ellen Smith Foundation). In particular the diversity in lectures and speeches at the Teen Murti Bhawan and the performances at the India Habitat Centre often made my day and put me in contact with very interesting people. In Delhi the SARAI program and the organisation Katha take an inspiring active interest in oral traditions and the multipronged uses of words in any media form.1 The Royal Danish Library electronic on-line service Elektra has, in addition to Uppsala University’s facilities, been a source for books and articles. I would also like to acknowledge the peacocks and dogs of Delhi for bringing in entertainment and colour. Most of all I am happy for all my friends who both supported me and helped me with comments and editing, and of course for my teacher’s interest in my writing. Foreword Some of the thoughts that have underpinned the writing process in this thesis emerged during the field study I did in the villages around Gopeshwar in Uttarakhand (India) for my Master of Asian Studies (Lund University) during two autumn months in 2007. The interviewees, parents of young students, would - except for acknowledging the practical as well as intrinsic value of literacy - stress how things had changed; literacy and the written word would shape the destinies of their children’s lives. They expressed sentiments of being at loss with their own illiteracy, but their perceptions and experience with how things had changed rather than anything else, was the underlying reason for their cornered positions. Mothers would say, “tell me, how would I benefit from reading and writing while walking and talking in the field all day?” and revive happy days of singing and playing games while grazing cows and goats with their friends, as schools were only for boys back in the days. But times had changed; the status of education per se, as well as the skills gained from it, would, according to the parents, define the future of their children’s lives and be crucial for their social as well as mental development. After talking about education and writing (and whatever that may entail) with illiterate and literate parents, I got more interested in the so-called oral tradition and people’s views on it, and ended up writing this thesis.

1 SARAI is located in the premises of Center for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), 29 Rajpur Road, Civil Lines, 110054 Delhi. http://www.sarai.net (accessed 11-04-2009). Katha’s office is in A3 Sarvoday Enclave, Sri Aurobindo Marg, New Delhi 110017. http://www.katha.org (accessed 11-04-2009).

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Table of Contents 1. Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 5 1.1. Defining the Field of Women’s Oral Tradition ............................................................. 7 1.2. Previous Research and Literary Review .......................................................................... 8 1.3. Research Question............................................................................................................ 10 1.4. Outline of the Thesis ....................................................................................................... 11 2. Methodology ............................................................................................................................. 11 2.1. Method and Limitations .................................................................................................. 11 2.2. Concepts and Relevance of the Study ........................................................................... 13 2.3. Genre.................................................................................................................................. 14 2.4. Theory: Intertextual Gaps within Genres ..................................................................... 15 3. Text, Words and Gender ........................................................................................................ 16 3.1. Women’s Oral Tradition and the Written Word ......................................................... 16 3.2. Situating Women’s Oral Tradition in History Writing................................................ 20 4. Gendered Oral Tradition ........................................................................................................ 22 4.1. Theoretical Standpoints – Gender as a Genre ............................................................. 22 5. Conclusion – Revisiting Genre Formation and Local Interpretative Frameworks........ 24 6. Bibliography .............................................................................................................................. 29

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1. Introduction In the editorial of the September-October issue of Biblio – A Review of Books (thematic issue on literature in Asia Pacific) Rukmini Bhaya Nair touches on many of the important aspects that foreground the discussion on women’s oral tradition: Living in a region of the world where so many are deprived of basic literacy (about a third of India’s population especially women cannot read and write), there seems to be an urgent need for us to think about the ethics as well as the practice of writing. Jaques Derrida has called writing a great adventure where the hand and eye combine to open up new vistas of learning and imagination, but is not writing, which is so magisterial and so powerful a form of communication, also a mode that marginalises the oral as a cultural resource? …. It seems to me undeniable that writing is, in very literal sense, a ‘putting down’ of speech; it is a dominating, often violent mode that tends to ‘freeze’ the infinitely variant and flexible forms of spoken language and to render passing thoughts alarmingly permanent. Not all cultures have, however, developed systems of writing. Those that have – or those that have borrowed writing and made it their own – know that it is far from sinless. Writing is speech made silent. (Editorial essay in Biblio, Nair 2008: 5)

The topics Nair raises are in this thesis discussed in relation to women’s oral tradition in India: widespread illiteracy, especially among women2, the usages of the written word – as Nair writes - even the “ethics” of writing, and the possible marginalisation of the oral as a cultural resource, and at the same time the important interlinking between oral and written modes and their co-existence in the performance traditions. Today larger literacy discourses emphasise the necessity of written communication for transmission of knowledge while in India the oral and visual mode is in use like in few other regions (Appadurai 1991: 471). The contextual factor of the oral mode, the situation and the collective action within women’s oral tradition, play an important role that cannot be compared to the “silence” of the written tradition. It is important where the song is performed, the story is told, the space and action attached to the words. Both literate and illiterate people are influenced by the fact of living in a culture where the spoken word plays a major role (Ramanujan 1991: 46).

53.7% of the Indian women are literate compared to a 75.3% literacy rate among men, and the national literacy rate is 64.8% (Census of India 2001). 2

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Women’s songs and stories are often counted as a part of the “smaller tradition” and left out as sources for knowledge production, especially compared to other oral texts, like for instance the Vedas, which are regarded as foundational for a cultural understanding of India both within India and by researchers and colonizers. In this thesis, I will look into some aspects for analysing women’s oral tradition in contemporary India. Women writers’ production in Indian literature is negligible but often accounted for by women’s rich oral tradition. The gendered use of “women’s oral tradition” is discussed and partly treated as a genre in itself: as identity positioning within a culture, where women can express a subjective voice. Studies point to the complicated relationship between oral and written modes that occurs when one encounters specifically women’s oral tradition (Davis 2008; Finnegan 2003; Flueckiger 1996; Raheja 1997). Physical expressions, the tone and the enactment in the oral tradition give meaning to the words but are easily lost when taking them out of their context (Finnegan 2005: 164-165, 173). I find it interesting to look at different approaches towards women’s oral tradition and its effect on interpretative frameworks. In this context the methodology and theory in use becomes more important to establish, as there seems to be a need to justify perspectives that have previously been rejected, or at least ‘un-acknowledged’. In the 1980s the Subaltern school, mainly concerned with historiography, and Gayatri Spivak’s article Can the Subaltern Speak? (1994 [1988]) were influential in raising a debate on representation and voice in texts relating women’s lives. The debate has continued and today in folklore and ethnography on women’s oral tradition the methodological and theoretical approaches to women’s voices are, as we will see, discussed further. My main interest is the importance given to the oral tradition for especially women in the Indian context. In the wake of the debate on subaltern voices there are many interesting aspects to not just women’s oral tradition: the increasing use of multi-media forms has come to play a prominent role for displaying all forms of oral tradition and performance culture. Surely, many influences shape the uses and understanding of folklore, both for practitioners, professional performers and not the least for the audience from outside the community of the contextual performance. How are the methodologies considered to convey the essence of performances, or any utterance, carrying specific contextual conceptions to outsiders? What happens to texts in women’s oral tradition when they are mediated in academic writings in ethnography? In the academic field, I find the discussion on understanding the uses and proposed contextual purposes of folklore interesting. As I have briefly touched upon above, women’s oral tradition gets a special position in the Indian context. How and why this is useful in understanding the performances

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and words is argued for in methodological and theoretical approaches which use gender as an analytical genre in dealing with women’s oral tradition.

1.1. Defining the Field of Women’s Oral Tradition ‘Women’s oral tradition’ in India encompasses a wide range of performances, covering a varied display of topics and contextual locations; it stretches from lullabies and proverbs to performances and songs in numerous languages and dialects, both in public spaces as well as in secluded ‘women’s spaces’ - predominantly in the home environment, in pardā and while engaged in work. As such, women’s oral tradition encompasses in its widest sense any formalised utterance made by women, whether or not the precedent source of the utterance is written or oral. Women’s stories are often labelled as centred on issues of intimacy, family relations, and household prosperity, whereas men’s folklore emphasizes broad political themes (Davis 2008: 296). Disciplines such as anthropology, linguistics, and historiography came to influence Indian folklore studies in the 1970s, when debating concepts such as “tradition”, “genre”, “modernity”, “performance” and “texts” and Indian folklore became an interdisciplinary ground for discussions on these concepts (Appadurai et al 1991: 4-5). In particular the treatment of minorities’ ‘oral tradition’ is debated in subaltern-, postcolonial-, and later in postpostcolonial historiography, while women’s oral tradition as well as feminism was initially neglected (Raheja 1997; Lal 2003: 188).3 Ethnographic accounts of women’s oral tradition often interpret the multiple perspectives given by women primarily in their gendered roles (e.g. mothers, daughters, wives, widows, etc.). Recent approaches look at “struggles of resistance”, power relations and ideologies around gender in women’s expressions, rather than positioning women’s voices in relation to primarily the gendered role as mothers, wives, daughters, and so forth (Eckert and McConnell 1992: 475-476; Raheja 1997: 5-6; Raheja and Gold 1996: 1).4 The

3 This changed with the advent of the famous article ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (Spivak 1994 [1988]). Spivak brings forth various ways the subaltern in the form of the South Asian woman is silent, silenced and represented in colonial as well as in postcolonial writings. 4 The most cited example for how women are stereotyped in their gendered role and giving a skewed picture of the female Indian ‘ideal woman’ is probably Manu smriti, the law book of Manu, where a woman’s role is to be a daughter, a sister, a wife, a mother or a widow; primarily not a woman (Ramaswamy 2003: 19). Ramanujan illustrates the way women are secondary as a part of the prize to the man, or a part of the male protagonist lifecycle in male centred stories such as the Pañcatantra while in female centred stories the woman is already married in the beginning of a story or gets married and thereafter her troubles start (1997: 226).

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focus on power relations around gender and kinship in women’s oral traditions is seen as articulated as a reaction to earlier studies that tried to homogenise and lump together oral traditions under “The oral tradition” and “the decontextualizing and depoliticizing of folklore” (Raheja 1997: 6). Raheja also acknowledges the many layers of identities depending on caste, class etc. - as women are “engaged in multiple projects and that these projects may collide with one another or smoothly dovetail, and thus women’s resistance may at times appear as ambivalent and ambiguous, and too complex to easily classify by the terms of Western social science” (Raheja 1997: 9). In particular ethnographic research in the field of women’s oral tradition is regarded as burdened by the colonial undertaking of constructing the South Asian woman “as passive and silently submissive to the dictates of ‘tradition’”. Meanwhile the postcolonial rhetoric is also criticised for projecting Indian women as “powerless ‘victims’ of an oppressive ‘tradition’” (Raheja 1997: 4-5). Recent ethnographic studies (primarily from the 1990s until today) try to take into consideration the implications of previous works, but also questioning when writing down stories or listening to songs: Is it possible for us to listen to these words today, to interpret them in ways that are not tied, inextricably and hopelessly, to the colonial interpretations that have so shaped the histories of anthropology and of folklore? (Raheja 1997: 5) Women’s oral tradition is also regarded as important to restore women to the Indian historiography as many see them as marginalised and silenced by dominating indigenous as well as colonial textual traditions. Both gender oriented-, postcolonial and subaltern scholars have altered theoretical and methodological standpoints when interpreting women’s oral tradition, also referred to as “the politics of women’s speech” (Davis 2008: 290).

1.2. Previous Research and Literary Review I will here introduce the text I have used for the analytical part in the essay. The literary review first takes into consideration the ethnographic texts dealing with gender as a genre. Secondly, it introduces texts dealing with the specific Indian context for women’s oral tradition, and in the end, it gives an outline of the methodological and theoretical underpinnings in research on women’s oral tradition.

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Research on women’s oral tradition comes from various disciplines but predominantly from sociolinguistics, ethnography, anthropology, folklore, gender studies and historiography. My focus is on ethnographic and folkloristic approaches to women’s oral tradition, but the researcher is off course also influenced by the other disciplines mentioned above. I have chosen to look at a couple of ethnographic studies where gender as a genre in India is explicitly in focus (Flueckiger 1996; Narayan 1995). In Gender and Genre in the Folklore of Middle India Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger (1996) explores how the indigenous categories of genre identification work specifically in local performances in Chhattisgarh. The research focuses on what difference the indigenous genres and the principles of organisation make for the reception and interpretation of performance, both for researchers and for the community (Flueckiger 1996: 177). Narayan (1995) in her essay ‘The Practice of Oral Literary Criticism: Women’s Songs in Kangra, India’ focuses less on the gender issues of women’s songs but more on the use of interpretative frameworks and theoretical approaches to oral tradition. The research points to the methodological and theoretical implications for using the local frameworks (Narayan 1995). Narayan does not explicitly treat gender as a genre, she approaches pakhaṛu as a genre of women’s songs (Narayan 1995: 243). Narayan’s method with interpretative frameworks from the ‘informants’, or the ‘indigenous’ repertoire, is very similar to Flueckiger’s. Both Narayan and Flueckiger approach the texts through the local interpretative frameworks, Narayan when looking at specifically women’s songs in the Himalayan region and Flueckiger in the Chhattisgarhi performance repertoire. In the Indian context, it is important to understand the specific cultural, social and literary heritage in which women’s oral tradition exists. In folklore studies there are multiple perspectives on the function and uses of oral tradition (Finnegan 2005, 2003), and especially on women’s oral tradition, in enacting and expressing culture (Bucholtz 2003, 2000). ‘Oral tradition’ is studied in various contexts, Pollock (2003) gives an account on the importance of the form in its relationship to literature, Gupta (2000) and Ghosh (2003) write about how literature and ‘the coming of the book’ during colonial times was influenced by oral traditions. Oral tradition is in India primarily given attention in the performance tradition (Blackburn 1986). The Subaltern school of historiography (Guha 1982; Spivak (1994 [1988]); Panjabi 2002; Lal 2003; Midgley 2001) has influenced researchers to “re-searching Indian women” and “representing” them, in the words of Ramaswamy (2003: 17), like Forbes (2005) who argue for the use of alternative sources to text such as photographs for recording women’s lives, in history and for the present. The ‘subaltern voices’ are also recognised by Davis (2008) and

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Garlough (2008), but rather than looking at colonial legacies they study women’s oral tradition in narratives and songs of today. Summing up discussions from the 1980s, Gender, Genre and Power in South Asian Expressive Traditions (Appadurai, Korom and Mills (eds.) 1991) focuses on the expressive mode in “traditions” where scholars give their interpretation of gender and genre. Especially Ramanujan’s essay ‘Toward a Counter-System: Women’s Tales’ often is cited in later studies (ex. Midgley 2001). In the essay Ramanujan points to the different meaning imbibed in cultural concepts, as well as structure in stories told by women and from women’s perspective as compared to men’s (Ramanujan 1991). Raheja (1997, in the introduction to the special issue on South Asian Oral Tradition by the journal Oral Tradition Vol. 12, no. 1) tells us about diverse ways of understanding women’s words as negotiating identities and positioning women in their gendered roles. Ethnography, especially carried out by western scholars, sometimes with certain agendas and obvious biases, has also learnt from the postcolonial critique of recreating colonial discourses and textualizations as a form of power (Raheja 1997: 1). Bauman (2004) and Bauman and Briggs (2003, 1992) discuss genre formation in folk traditions in general, and in particular how they manage to communicate marginalized perspectives that may be socially threatening, which in the context of this paper is the perspective of women in oral tradition. Haring (2008) and Appadurai (1991) give interesting perspectives on the research methodology underlying a lot of research on women’s oral tradition- the first mentions it from a folklorist perspective, and the latter discusses research agendas in social sciences also pertaining to women’s oral tradition. Haring questions the usefulness of using local interpretative frameworks and would rather place the specific and the local within larger theoretical frameworks (Haring 2008).

1.3. Research Question In this thesis I have chosen to look at approaches towards women’s oral tradition and especially when treating it as a ‘gender genre’. Women’s oral tradition becomes a genre where either a subject or its social context expresses positioning primarily based on gender – i.e. the primary classification for analysis is gender (here in this context - women performing oral tradition). The gendered approaches to women’s oral tradition take up theoretical and methodological discussions on researching oral tradition. One of the methodological

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discussions is on the genre formation’s importance for interpreting the texts and for creating a sense of community as well as expressing a voice of a community (Bauman and Briggs 1992: 150). It also encompasses explanatory models of how this happens, and what function women’s voices have in various contexts (Appadurai 1991: 469-471). With the writing down of oral tradition, scholars point towards the multiple ways texts can be understood, and the implications this has for a ‘knowledge production’. Here, to me it seems as women’s oral tradition is placed in an interesting position with method and theory. The overarching research questions are: How is gender treated as a genre in the context of Indian women’s oral tradition? And: What are the methodological implications to consider when defining ‘gender as a genre’? – Again, in the specific context of women’s oral tradition in India. Here I focus especially on local interpretative frameworks and the arguments for using them.

1.4. Outline of the Thesis In chapter 2, I present the methodology with concepts, limitations, relevance of the study, and the theory in use. Chapter 3 contains the major historical and cultural traits in India that form the background to the importance given to specifically women’s oral tradition. In chapter 4, I discuss my main points on how gender is treated as a genre, both in ethnographic studies and in using women’s oral tradition for historiography. Chapter 5 contains the conclusion where I focus on the different methodological and theoretical approaches and problems.

2. Methodology 2.1. Method and Limitations This study is based on texts dealing with women’s oral tradition through a gendered lens. My empirical search has been for texts where the scholars especially look at expressions of gender in women’s oral tradition. In these texts I have looked at various approaches towards interpreting the expressions which often is done with a feminist approach. Among the researchers there are different positions and views towards doing activist research for making ‘women’s voices’ more available, visible and for providing so-called ‘alternative histories’ and stories besides the bigger narratives. There is also a discussion in the research community regarding how “the concern to look beyond ethics has only resulted in an ’advocacy position’ characterised by commitment on the part of the researchers to do research for subjects and not

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just on them” (emphasis and quotes in original, Vasanta 2001: 80), while other finds research on women’s history increasingly “intrinsically apolitical” (Forbes 2005: 5). Other question the constant questioning of the researchers’ position and their inability of “representing voices” as their identities and agendas are seen as inseparability from the knowledge produced (Raju 2002: 174). On one hand, objects of research often express a private view, while research method, theoretical frameworks and concepts are geared for a public domain, and the research agenda shapes the information received and transformed into knowledge. In this thesis I am aware of the methodological difficulties for data collection in the field of oral traditions, especially when it comes to the position of the researcher which is always contextual and the difficulties in presenting a text out of its context. I believe the researcher’s position and the always contextual of any text. Here, in this thesis the purpose is to illustrate the ways in which the researchers use local interpretative frameworks for understanding the text, especially coming to the conclusion of the fruitfulness of using gender as a genre. The limitation to the ‘contemporary’ focus is traced back through past studies, following the process underlying today’s genre discourse on women’s orality - its value for history writing and as giving a voice for groups of women in present day India. Thus I refrain from any over-generalization; the texts dealt with here refer to gender as constituting a genre in diverse Indian contexts, dealing with women of different ethnicities as well as geographical belongings in a by no means homogenous cultural area. The studies I have used contain data from fieldwork in diverse areas, such as tribal areas of Chhattisgarh and the mountain regions of Himalayas. As for ‘positioning within context’ - within the genre of university students I can place myself in the category of Scandinavian female students with six longer visits to India, two field studies, and a general interest in languages and literature. The postcolonial and subaltern voices point towards many of the implications for doing research on what is often regarded as being an entangled and exotic culture where ‘Indian women’ is yet another sub-category. Being the “investigating subject” (Spivak 1994 [1988]: 90, 92) I hope I have mapped some of the pitfalls and, in the wording of Spivak, ‘unlearnt’ or at least thought twice about colonial concepts as well as “master narratives” underlying the meanings in my terminology (Appadurai 1991: 468469) and inherent in my education and conception of the world. The largest challenge to me has been the various disciplines’ theoretically underpinned approaches to treating and defining women’s oral tradition.

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2.2. Concepts and Relevance of the Study The phrase ‘oral tradition’ has caused me some trouble in the scholarly texts. The word ‘tradition’ is embedded in historical discussions and loaded with meaning, but here in this context, ‘oral tradition’ includes all kinds of women’s oral performances, whether tracing a tradition or not (Finnegan 2003: 84; Flueckiger 1996: 21). ‘Tradition’ is generally defined as handed down, transmitted over generations, and it is usually considered an entity preserved as a part of culture. Within folklore the term is widely debated and can carry different connotations (Valk 2003: 139; Raheja 1997: 3; Appadurai 1991). “Tradition” is often connected to the colonial project of demonstrating Indians as followers of “customs” as they were “submitted to the dictates of ‘tradition’” (Raheja 1997: 3). Defining the word can also be part of the discussion whether ‘oral tradition’ is a mode that can carry an intact transmission over generations. As Finnegan (1991) elucidates – rather than ‘tradition’ scholars prefer to talk about the process of ‘traditionalization’ where knowledge and performances are always changing and given new meaning and should not be seen as representing ancient static cultural facts. Rather the process of something ‘becoming tradition’ is what is of interest to researchers (Finnegan 1991: 119). The flexibility to use tradition according to present needs is its strength as “it connects us to our past and yet provides pathways to any number of potential futures” (Garlough 2008: 187). Likewise ‘gender’ is a frequently used word which can carry different meanings. In gender studies it used to be common to draw a sharp distinction between sex (biology and its function to establish “maleness” and “femaleness”) and gender (cultural beliefs and norms linked to sex, often a particular normative conception of individual attributes associated with sex and therefore expressed in “femininity” and “masculinity”). Crucial in the distinction between the sexes is “female” and “male” - “what is made out of these two categories [female and male]” (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992: 463). A way “to think practically about gender is to focus on the historical processes of constructing gender categories and power relations: ‘Gender’ becomes a dynamic verb” (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992: 463). Practices, including traits, activities and values, become so-called “gendered”, i.e. people’s practices construct members of a community as women and as men (or other gender categories) and their interaction within and between groups (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992: 462-463). Worth mentioning is the closely related topic ‘women’s language’, i.e. specific language use by women as different from men’s. In the Indian context this has been studied both where women use dialects when talking in secluded places (in for example the zenanas of 19th century

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Delhi) and in sociolinguistics where women’s grammar and gender marking differ from the normative male language (Vasanta 2001; Bucholtz 2000: 80). To various degrees research on women’s oral tradition bring in women’s language usage to argue for a ‘difference’ position, i.e. that ‘men’s language’ is normative and therefore women’s oral tradition is also ‘different’. The discussion on gendered or distinct languages for the sexes is indeed interesting but will not be approached more in-depth in this thesis.

2.3. Genre Oral tradition in folklore is often approached through the conceptual organizing principles: performance and genre. The first, performance, is of lesser relevance in this essay; but I will present genre and its relation to gender more in-depth. Briefly put, performance is the communicative display of words also incorporating visual and audio effects (Finnegan 2003:84; Bauman 2004). The generic categories have played an important part in linguistic anthropology and textual studies to classify orders of text. Originally, the generic categories stem from European folklore studies and received little critical or theoretical attention until the advent of ethnoscience in the late 1960s, when indigenous systems of classification, structuralism and the ethnography of speaking received increased attention (Bauman 2004: 3; Appadurai et al 1991: 12). Similarly, in sociolinguistics there was a shift from understanding ‘language as reflecting society’, that it per se expresses the speaker’s social identity and implies social categories, towards looking at language in itself as a social practice and a site to negotiate power relations and agency (Vasanta 2001:76). Dan Ben-Amos (1971) wrote an influential essay on analytical genres and “ethnic” genres, and later in the 1970s, methodologies of the ethnography of speaking influenced performance-centred folklore scholars who reoriented the definitions of folklore genres from those of classificatory labels based on form or content to frameworks for producing and interpreting discourses (Flueckiger 1996: 21). These later approaches are strongly influenced by ‘Bakhtinian perspectives’ on genre as the principle that “guides us in the process of speaking” in specific context, when performing and perceiving (Bakhtin in Bauman 2004: 3). As Valk (2003:140) puts it: “There is a shift from taking ‘genre’ as a noun towards understanding it as a verb”. With this shift, genres started to focus on practice rather than on the thematic label or ‘item’ of the performance, also acknowledging active cultural categories rather than their static classificatory form (Appadurai et al 1991: 12). The result is that genre is

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often treated as a taxonomic problem, a problem of ethnopoetics, and a meta-folkloristic phenomenon, and regarded as essential to understand the local way of classifying expressions (Appadurai et al. 1991: 12). Likewise, genre is “a form of artistic expression, and of verbalization of a special worldview or a modality of verbal thinking” (Valk 2003:140).

2.4. Theory: Intertextual Gaps within Genres From Bauman’s point of view, genre is a primary means not only for dealing with continued social matters, but also for “the expressive enactment of subjectivity” as “different genres implicate different subject positions and formation,” and a field where studies of gender and genre are the most prominent (Bauman 2004:6). Bauman (2004) and Bauman and Briggs (2003) argue for a step away from strong genre formations, talking about what they call an ‘intertextual gap,’ e.g. how the relationship of texts to other texts widens as genre is stressed (Bauman 2004:7-8; Bauman and Briggs 1992).5 Genres vary with regard to the relative tightness or looseness of generic regimentation, within any speech community or historical period, but certain genres may become the object of special ideological focus, somewhat evident in the formation of gender as a genre. If the genre form insists on its form, it works conservatively in the service of established authority and order, while the impulse towards the widening of intertextual gaps and generic innovation is more likely to contribute to creativity, resistance to hegemonic order, and openness to change. These factors will also be closely tied to hierarchies of value and taste (which genres are evaluated as relatively higher, better, more beautiful, more moral) and to “the social regimentation of access to particular generic forms (who can learn them, master them, own them perform them, and to what effect)” (Bauman 2004:8). Following Bauman (2004), I understand ‘genre’ in this essay as ‘positioning within contexts’. Gender becomes a genre when either a subject or its social context expresses positioning primarily based on his/her gender. Bauman’s (2004) and Bauman and Brigg’s (2003) view is on the same line as much of later trends in ethnographic research and linguistic anthropology on specifically gender and language where there is “an emphasis on the practice and performance of gender over the traditional foci of difference and dominance”. Earlier research often took a comparative approach, seeking to explain gender differences in language use where the ‘dominance perspective’ was supported by the patriarchal privilege to uphold such differences, and the ‘difference perspective’ saw the female and male genders as separate cultures and explained

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“Intertextual gap” is a term coined by Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs (Bauman 2004: 7-8).

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gender difference as cultural difference (Bucholtz 2000: 81-82). The emphasis on ‘practice and performance’ views practices, activities and values as gendered, i.e. people’s practices construct members of a community as women and as men, and how they interact (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992:462-463). I find the discussion and theorizing of Bauman and Briggs useful as the genre formation in the context of women’s oral tradition could in one way be seen as working conservatively for the expressive modes and expression. At the same time a strong tendency for genre formation could strengthen the group of women as a community. On line with postcolonial discourses ‘women’ could not be seen as a homogenous group or identity – but rather a diversity of human beings gathered under an umbrella of a common sex. The various expressions for ‘gender’ in oral tradition becomes a way to reflect local practices, the particular and contextual, and would highlight how gender is practiced.

3. Text, Words and Gender In this chapter we will look at some of the underlying conceptions and explanations for why women’s oral tradition gets a special position in the Indian context. The limited access to writing and reading among women has resulted in their use of the oral mode for stories and knowledge transfers. Researchers are however accused of, if not for neglecting the oral tradition of women, at least selectively choosing and interpreting it to fit interests of the researchers’ communities (Raheja 1997). In India the oral traditions and written texts are in many ways working in a complementary way, the general perception of the oral as opposite to the written is more ambiguous, especially as we will see when it comes to literature in the India.

3.1. Women’s Oral Tradition and the Written Word The written word and literary traditions have usually been vestiges of men belonging to higher strata in society. The ideology behind leaving the literary heritage in the hands of high caste men is historically seen as sanctioned by sacred texts with further instructions for division of labour and social interaction which also affect gender divisions (Ramaswamy 2003:19). The skills of literacy and the right to education were important parts of the “First Wave” feminism movement during the late nineteenth century (Forbes 2005: 13). In the eyes of the reformers, a major cause for the social deprivation of Indian women was their lack of education. Earlier in the same century Indian intelligentsia had started to criticise social customs which denied

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women access to education and a few influential male leaders and educators spoke in favour of women’s education (Forbes 2005: 13). As women became literate and found a “voice,” they were able to express their own version of women’s positions, grievances, and solutions. The early works of these women manifest a deep concern with “tearing the purdah,” “breaking out of the cage,” and escaping from bondage.” Imposed seclusion kept them from education and from knowing about and experiencing the world outside the home and family. (Original quotation marks, Forbes 2005:13) Just like during the First Wave feminism movement, education and literacy are today generally seen as crucial for women’s ‘empowerment’. The written word is not necessarily used to directly oppose or subdue women specifically - but languages, literature and print are all seen as important means for contests over power and the spreading of dominant ideas, and the forming of national, regional and community identities (Gupta 2000:90; Ghosh 2006:3-4). Colonial powers, as well as oriental Indologists, nationalist interests and indigenous patriarchy are all seen as having pushed for a heterogeneous male-oriented knowledge production where “women” and gendered ideals are constructed to fit certain interests (Ghosh 2006:230). Most prominent is the way women are made into icons within Hindu texts in the form of the good daughter, the devoted mother and specially the chaste woman in the form of the faithful wife (pativratā) (Flueckiger 1996: 139; Ramaswamy 2003). Some, primarily feminist oriented researchers, regard men as in control over language. By setting standards for normative language men control the meaning of words as a part of the patriarchal agenda (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992:481-482). Among these explanations and models, some tend to overlook differences among women based on race, ethnicity, sexuality, social class, nationality, and local factors (Bucholtz 2000: 81-82; Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992: 463). Even where women have taken part in literary activities they are seen as caught up in a “male hegemonic discourse” (Ghosh 2006: 230). According to Ghosh (2006: 30), the “silence” of women in their writings as loyal subjects to male interest of nationalist or colonial character can also show another picture of women’s critique if one is “looking for signs of struggle”. This is similar to the literary method ‘reading against the grain’ used by some feminist critics keen on advancing a politically empowering reading to resurrect and make articulate the tradition of femaleaesthetics. It is a strategy whereby ‘woman-as-a-reader’ enters a given text with a specific

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purpose of exposing its gendered embodiment (Ramaswamy 2003:25-26).6 In so-called “women-centered tales”, where the protagonist is a woman, certain characteristics emerge in women’s voices. Men can also be the storytellers of such tales, but more commonly they are told by women (Ramanujan 1997: 226). For example in the local Chhattisgarhi version of the Candaini epic, Candaini initiates most of the epic action and in contrast to the versions in Uttar Pradesh she is the one who rescues the hero Lorik. Candaini and the other women in the story are not portrayed as property to be exchanged or protected, and instead of relying on the ritual power of their chastity, they use their own intuitive common sense and practical knowledge (Flueckiger 1996: 146-147). Women’s oral tradition is often seen as positioned parallel to, separated from or as a minor stream within the dominant bodies of texts - both oral and written. The separation and difference of men’s and women’s lives is “a fundamental factor in the gendering of South Asian folklore” (Davis 2008:295) - a generalisation which could be argued differs from place to place and with specific contexts. Many today contest the dichotomy between the oral and the written (spelled out by for example Lord 1974: 209), a myth partly funded on the Enlightenment vision of the iterate society of the West as rational, scientific, individualistic, creative etc. - while the oral came to represent the undeveloped, emotional, communal and primitive (Finnegan 2005:167). Particularly in India, the relationship between the two is understood as more complex (Finnegan 2005:175): It is fair enough to point out the limitations of transcripts that aspire to transform performance into written text: such points still need making. But in our human culture such translations are in fact constantly happening. They are not confined to contrived scholarly transcriptions (though these too are part of the scene) but include regular transformations and interchanges among the many different modes of literary formulation. (Finnegan 2005: 177) Just like it might seem futile to talk about ‘oral’ and ‘literate’ traditions as two terms in opposition, the deployment of terms such as ‘folk’ and ‘classical’ traditions in the Indian context of literary or oral production becomes useless since stories and themes are constantly used over and over again (Ramanujan 1991:33). People regardless of being literate or illiterate

6 See for example, Tharu, Susie and K. Lalita (eds.) (1993 [1991]) Women Writing in India: Volume I, 600 BC to the Early Twentieth Century. New Delhi: Oxford University Press; Tharu, Susie and K. Lalita (eds.) (1995 [1993]) Women Writing in India: Vol. II, the Twentieth Century. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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are influenced by the fact of living in a “largely nonliterate culture” where the spoken word plays a major role (Ramanujan 1991:46). Interestingly, Pollock (2003: 7) finds that a clear definition of what “literature” encompasses is lacking in major works dealing with Indian literature. In the late Jan Gonda’s History of Indian Literature, everything ever textualized appears to fall under the umbrella of literature. In Sahitya Akademi’s introduction to the projected nine-volume History of Indian Literature, an explanation of the term “literature” is evaded, but according to one essay in the volume it can encompass all “memorable utterances” (Pollock 2003: 7). A general conception, outside the South Asian region, is that “literature” is defined by “texts” in writing, i.e. “the written text”, while everything that is performed falls outside literature (Finnegan 2005: 164165). The difficulties with defining ‘literature’, by no means just in the South Asian context, is that the ambiguity of the word “literature” is built into the versatile “semantic development of the European word itself” (Pollock 2003: 8). A new approach to South Asian literature encourages a search “for ways to generate the procedures, questions, and theory appropriate to South Asian literary materials from those materials themselves” (Pollock 2003: 13) - a field where women’s oral tradition has come to provide alternative knowledge. Studies also point to the influence of print in northern India when it comes to actually spreading oral performances and giving them a wider diffusion rather than pushing out the oral mode (Ghosh 2003: 25; Gupta 2000: 92; Pollock 2003: 22). Concepts such as ‘oral-literate’ neither recapitulates that of so-called ‘folk-elite’, nor does it mirror the cultural-historical stages in Europe. Written literature in India continued to be orally performed among most social orders well into the modern period, but while in some traditions literacy was unquestionably primary in both composition and performance (the latter typically from a written text), in others orality was a far more powerful influence (Pollock 2003: 22). Similarly, various media formats increasingly started getting used in the mid 90s as “songs that used to be sung and heard primarily by women may now be heard blasting loudly over All India Radio’s folklore programming in public contexts” (Flueckiger 1996: 183). Josiane Racine tells about the female singer Viramma whose life history she recorded: “She always thought that her life offered no event worthy of a book. On the other hand, she hoped her songs would be broadcast by the local radio and “in foreign lands.” That no such things happened was for her a real disappointment, and a source of complaint against me.” (Racine and Racine 2004: 261)

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Finnegan (1988: 143) and Appadurai (1991: 472-474) noted, about twenty years ago, that the historical oppositions between the written and the oral and the importance of print and written communication is often emphasised while today the great influence of new audio-visual devices might be superseding them. New media (in people’s everyday life and in the hands of the researcher) and the spread of education - with the notions of what being educated embodies “our educated girls shouldn’t be singing these songs” (original quote by male village elders in Flueckiger 1996: 184), has contributed towards a change in indigenous categories when defining genre and linking it to gender (Flueckiger 1996: 133, 184-185). Compared to women’s oral tradition, other oral performances generally give larger importance to documents in the form of manuscripts (handwritten notebooks copied from palm-leaf manuscripts or printed pamphlets) which serve as aides-mémoire, either memorized or interpreted according to their special skills, inserting songs, sidetrack- or supporting stories.7 Written text can also serve as an authorization to perform in temples, if dispossessed of the written source, the singer or performer can loose the ‘right’ to perform (Blackburn 1986: 530). Historically in the collective narrative sessions like the kathakatas, religious works based on Hindu epics and mythology and literature were read out by professional Brahmin narrators to literate audiences as well as illiterate groups (and among them women) in communitarian ceremonial reading sessions (Ghosh 2003: 33). Oral tradition is generally regarded as more prone to change in the process of transmission in contrast to ‘literary tradition’ (Finnegan 2005).8 Previously, written literature has been treated as stable historical sources but Pollock’s approach to “think about texts and pasts as situated practices rather than stable things” and “to conceive languages themselves as processes rather than objects” (Pollock 2003: 22-23) has increasingly gained currency. 3.2. Situating Women’s Oral Tradition in History Writing Women’s oral tradition as a part of women’s narrative experience has become an important part of feminist historiography (Panjabi 2002: 241; Ramusack 2003). The Subaltern school of 7 These can be divided into two types of oral performance based on ‘textual source’. The memorized performance follows a text more strict and the accurate word-by-word knowledge of the text is part of the performance. The performance open to interpretation has a “textual base” but the skill of the narrator is also shown in possible interpretations and ways of enriching the performance. Of course the relationship between text and spoken word can be discussed in most of the cases, if the main body or ‘original’ text exists mainly in one form or the other. 8 Today ‘written traditions’ intactness over generations is being increasingly questioned, whether it is historical legal documents, fictional writing or dogmatic texts (Sumit Guha, 9 February 2009, lecture at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University).

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historiography has sought to redirect the study of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Indian society and politics towards the popular, the vernacular, the oral, and the local, and to recapture the role of small people in effecting big historical change. Contemporary analyses of colonialism and imperialism have shown how the traditionalisation of the social order by the systematic miscognition of indigenous discourses on caste was created by colonial knowledge, and gives impetus for tracing contrasting historiographies (Pollock 2003: 13; Guha 1982). Women’s oral tradition has come to provide alternative historiographies where previously texts and generalisations have dominated the content of history (Midgley 2001: 91; Ramusack 2003; Ramusack and Sievers 1999). The subjective expressions from women in oral tradition become a way of reclaiming public space in present time as well as situating them in historiographies for the past. Women, together with others in societies that have had - and to a large extent still have - an oral history tradition rather than written historical sources are seen as neglected and left out of history (Midgley 2001: 94) as “the subaltern is enacted through verbal and other practices” (Davis 2008: 290). For instance, folklore and women’s songs are used in multiple context and reinterpreted in various contexts such as in street theatre performance groups, both during late colonial times and in the 1990s, to reinsert the ‘common woman’ into history and give the text a sense of meaning in the present (Garlough 2008). New perspectives emerge through using images of women from women’s songs (Ramaswamy 2003: 29-30). The songs, stories, lullabies etc, are not real-life accounts but a voice told by women themselves and often about women and their life.9 In history women are “imaged by men”, especially through a selective representation in history, rather then describing their perceived social reality and lived experience (Ramaswamy 2003: 27-28). Instead of gender, studies on resistance carried out by the subaltern school have been preoccupied with struggles between oppressed groups, and with the interplay between state, local communities, elites and colonial rulers while women’s voices have fallen into the background (Raheja 1997: 6-7; Midgley 2001: 90-91). […] it [the idea of resistance] allowed us to begin to counter the colonial and postcolonial representation of the silence and passivity of Indian women; and it provided one kind of framework for thinking about the dynamic relationship between narrative texts and social life, about the fact that such texts do not simply mirror already given social differentiations and hierarchies of power, but may in fact come to constitute them or reconstitute them. (Raheja 1997: 6) There are also other oral forms of oral transmitted knowledge, like for example that of women’s medicine and dais (midwives) (Ramaswamy 2003: 31). 9

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Postcolonial and subaltern scholars are criticised for portraying women as speaking with a uniform voice without fractures, while feminist scholars of women’s oral traditions often are said to lose sight of local solidarities of kinship and community (Raheja 1997: 7-8; Davis 2008: 310). Equally valid in identity politics is to look at how songs play a unifying role rather than stressing difference and disjunction, within a community or between communities, as it at the same time singles out characteristics of some people’s identities and can be seen as internally strengthening, without necessitating an ‘Other’ (Raheja 1997: 15). Songs might be a way of expressing sympathies for different kinship roles at different stages of life across generations where usually a stereotypical hostile relationship is shown, for instance between daughters-inlaw and mothers-in-law (Narayan 1995: 252). The multiple identifications with a gender are evident in Flueckiger’s experience from her fieldwork in Chhattisgarh when the promised wedding songs the women had told her about did not appear: “I thought you said you sang vīhā gīt at your weddings.” They laughed, and one explained, “When we said we, we didn’t mean our caste, we meant Oriya women.” (original italics and quotation marks, Flueckiger 1996: 2)

4. Gendered Oral Tradition 4.1. Theoretical Standpoints – Gender as a Genre Flueckiger (1996) concludes that recognizing indigenous genres and categories is a fruitful method to explore performance in ways that are consistent with local perceptions and understandings (1996: 186). The frames of the indigenous genres and categories, whether stable or flexible, are defined in a social context. There is a local ‘way of talking’ about performance, where a system of indigenously articulated genres “provides both us and indigenous audiences with frames for interpretation” - “a cultural framework for interpretation that sets up certain expectations, orientations and interpretive frameworks” (Flueckiger 1996: 15, 21). Importantly, in Chhattisgarh, where Flueckiger has carried out the research, no single term exists in the language for the English-usage term “genre” and none of the categories of “religion/nonreligious, ritual/nonritual” exist in labelling performance (Flueckiger 1996: 21). Similar to Bauman, Flueckiger sees genres as practices, as active cultural categories:

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So conceived, genres are not objective categories but became ‘part of politics of interpretation in which meaning and the authority to propose and ascribe categories is contested.’ (Original quote by Shuman 1993: 71, in Flueckiger 1996: 15) As in the Chhattisgarhi version of the Candaini epic, Flueckiger tells us that Candaini is enacted by mostly male performers. Nevertheless, the epic story becomes a way to single out specific regional Chhattisgarhi culture, shared by both men and women, where particularly the status of women and marriage customs mark a difference as compared to the sentiment in the version told in Uttar Pradesh (Flueckiger 1996: 151). The conceptions of and the authority to define and interpret genre in a culture is also portrayed in Narayan’s (1995) essay on women’s songs in Kangra Valley in the Northwest Himalayas in India. The genre pakhaṛu, songs about suffering in married life, is a subset within the larger genre of women’s songs where according to a singer “everyone might sing, but only those who had experienced similar sufferings would really engage with the song” (Narayan 1995: 255). Again, as Flueckiger touches upon above, in interpreting women’s oral tradition, “all these interpretations are likely to be framed within cultural idioms that may be unequally shared” (Narayan 1995: 259). Narayan brings in oral literary criticism, a method for understanding the meaning attributed to folklore texts by the people who use them (Narayan 1995: 243). Specific individuals regarded as knowledgeable by people at large may be appointed to interpret based on their specified social role (as a guru, Brahman etc.), stage of life (old woman) or simply their personal inclination (Narayan 1995: 259). Narayan here underlines “the methodological and theoretical implications of taking seriously what people have to say about their own folklore” (Narayan 1995: 244). Three main implications surface in Narayan’s conclusion. First, the method involves making clear what the context is for the performed folklore - “the sociological, economic and cultural constraints that frame their lives and, by extension, their production and interpretation of folklore” (Narayan 1995: 259). Also, all informants do not have the same access to the text – they have “unequal access to material and symbolic resources”. Instead of focusing on “meanings”, it is more important to look at the interpretations and highlight what the indigenous experts voiced and that came out as a result of the researcher applying a theoretical framework. And, the important thing here is the way interpretation of texts always takes different shapes based on the informants positioning in society and also individual preferences. Folklore should be treated as “practices by positioned

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subjects” rather than as “cultural objects”, since the situational and performative aspect in folklore is constitutional for interpretation (Narayan 1995: 259-260). The terms “performance genre” and “genre” are used interchangeably in some texts but often with slightly different meanings. Flueckiger finds that the situation for performance, properties (of the song or story), caste, gender etc., define the indigenously expressed repertoire – but still: “the social identity of the group to whom the genre belongs” is the organizing feature used by audience and performer, rather than form or content (Flueckiger 1996: 11-12) and she therefore uses both terms and also makes us aware of the shifting ‘identities’ in genre: The boundaries and interpretations of such indigenous genres are flexible and shifting within changing historical contexts. A central task of the folklorist, then, becomes that of determining not only what the repertoire of available genres is within a particular culture or community and the indigenous categories and organization of that repertoire but also who is articulating these categories. (Flueckiger 1996: 15) One category Flueckiger names by herself, beside the indigenously pronounced categories, is the genres of what she calls “private” (original quotation marks) performance genres, such as nonprofessional, domestically performed folktales and lullabies, and genres embedded in everyday speech, such as jokes and proverbs (Flueckiger 1996: 12).10

5. Conclusion – Revisiting Genre Formation and Local Interpretative Frameworks Several points emerge from looking at ‘gender as a genre’. As my purpose with this essay is to look at the ways gender as a genre is used in research on women’s oral tradition, I will first briefly recapitulate from where we started. First, I wanted to find out how gender is treated as a genre in the context of Indian women’s oral tradition, and secondly what are then the methodological implications to consider when defining ‘gender as a genre’, especially when considering the local interpretative frameworks and invoking arguments for taking them into use. With the two studies by Flueckiger and Narayan, I have showed how they argue for the indigenous interpretative frameworks expressing positioning primarily based on gender – i.e.

10 In ethnography it is rather common to focus on labels given by members of a culture rather than ordinary conversation where much of social life takes place but which is not recognised as of importance within the culture (Bucholtz 2003: 48).

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the primary classification for analysis is gender. To view ‘gender as a genre’ I believe it is necessary to first understand that the boundaries of ‘gender’ and also ‘genre’ are constantly being redefined and negotiated in practice. Firstly and foremost is ‘genre’ and the relationship between words and identities. With the understanding of gender as a genre, gender becomes the primary classificatory category for a genre. The words emerging from this category signifies a positioning within society, identifying women according to their gender as women. In the case of women’s oral tradition, the words become secondary to gender; it is a positioning based on gender rather than on the content. As pointed out, this becomes problematic to use as a category for looking at content or ‘a meaning’ in expressions as if representing a homogenous groups of the ‘female gender’. Women’s oral tradition might voice subjective concerns from the perspective of social identities, based both on gendered roles such as mothers, sisters-in-law etc., as well as on caste, regional or national identities. This is an issue raised by the studies discussed in the thesis (4.1. Theoretical Standpoints – Gender as a Genre), and one way is, as we have seen, to look at the indigenous classificatory system of genres and the explanatory models the performers and audience apply. This is contrary to earlier approaches of ‘language as reflecting society’, which implied that language expresses speakers’ social identity and social categories (Valk 2003: 140). Here, instead, language is a social practice and a forum to negotiate power relations and agency (Vasanta 2001:76). This view of language as a social practice, is on line with the Bakhtinian perception of genre as the principle that “guides us in the process of speaking” in a specific context, while performing and perceiving (Bauman 2004: 3). The researchers view women’s words as dealing with social concerns from the subjective position of being primarily women and therefore it can be analysed as a genre in itself (Bauman 2004: 6). Here it is important to understand the shift in seeing ‘genre’ as a process rather that a static category – gender is constantly redefined depending on context. Through using the local interpretative framework, the researchers end up with a meta-folkloristic framework to use as a reference point. Additionally, the analysis often contains a theoretical approach to how and what women define and interpret in their own expressions. The attachment to local frameworks loosens when applying theory to how and why women’s oral tradition is ‘owned’ by women explicitly (Appadurai et al. 1991: 12). Here I find it interesting that there seems to be less ground for applying local conceptions of the processes behind divisions in speech and genres as defined by the informants by the informants themselves. This is primarily visible in Flueckiger (1996) where the frames of the indigenous genres and categories are used in line with indigenous

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perceptions and understandings - the “local ‘way of talking’ about performance” - to facilitate interpretation (Flueckiger 1996: 15, 21, 186). The argument for using this form of methodological approach is grounded in, and argued for, with women deprived of voice by both their own societies as well as academic and institutional writings. Likewise when Narayan (1995: 255) examines women’s expression in pakhaṛu, songs about suffering in married life, the main emphasis is on the gendered position of women being unhappily married, it is based on women being unhappy wives rather than in unhappy marriages. In women’s interpretation of their own songs, stories etc. “struggles of resistance” emerge where critique and resistance can be expressed subtly and many times not primarily defined from a woman’s perspective. Rather, the words in their oral tradition often position themselves with regard to their kinship roles as well as other social categories. Women’s oral tradition is in a way possible to view as an expression of their gendered position, i.e. it is based on expressing themselves as women - the expressions to some extent are based on how they view themselves as positioned in social contexts. The kinship view is also gendered in the sense that is based on sex but the power structure is not primarily between the gendered roles but rather depends on age and relation within the family. The kinship practices as mothers, sisters etc, become socalled “gendered”, i.e. people’s practices construct members of a community as women and as men (or other gender categories) and their interaction within and between groups (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992: 462-463). Women participation in communities of oral tradition illustrates how gender and identity constantly shift categories – this is hardly news. However, what surfaces as a recurrent problem in primarily folkloristic research and linguistic anthropology in India seems to be to what extent the local framework of ‘knowledge’ can be held valid for interpretation of text and convey meaning to the people in the community as well as to ‘others’, i.e. researchers and people interested in ‘literature’ based on oral tradition. As we have seen, the same text is used in historiography by primarily the subaltern school. It becomes necessary to legitimize the oral tradition of women as equally valid as the written (‘of men’) to use it as knowledge. Women’s oral tradition is partly seen as a social practice embedded in society, it is context specific and connected to women’s spaces and spheres. From the development of gender as a genre, as a means to highlight women’s voices, there seems to be a gap in capturing local methodological processes while integrating a gendered theoretical approach. According to Haring (2008: 4), American folklorists do not have a ‘Grand Theory’, instead local definitions, as well as definitions in the communities and from individuals there guide the researcher. Haring asks “What theory authorizes American

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folklorists to focus on vernacular practices?” (Haring 2008: 3). In 1991, Appadurai raised similar concerns in the ‘Afterword’ to Gender Genre and Power in South Asian Expressive Traditions – but then in relation to method and placing folklore in contexts. To him the main concern for a successful understanding is the lack of a “powerful reception theory” where the key is “understanding of the dynamics of intertextuality in a complex civilization” (Appadurai 1991: 472). (…) the texts we read and their contexts, like translucent eyes, are instruments for seeing history and social life, while, through their subtexts and structures, they show us something of social life and history in the modes of the tellings themselves. (Appadurai 1991: 471) This is illustrated by Flueckiger who uses the way audience and performer organise genre according to “the social identity of the group to whom the genre belongs” (Flueckiger 1996: 11-12). The boundaries and interpretations of such indigenous genres are flexible and shifting within changing historical contexts. A central task of the folklorist, then, becomes that of determining not only what the repertoire of available genres is within a particular culture or community and the indigenous categories and organization of that repertoire but also who is articulating these categories. (Flueckiger 1996: 15) Here ‘gender as a genre’ is clearly defined as a category “from within”. As mentioned earlier, Haring’s (2008) remark on American folklore scholars’ acceptance of local frames, definitions and approaches in conducting research, is method and not theory. I think those concepts easily get mixed up. I would argue the scholars forge theory from method. As I see it, the researchers’ method consists of contextualization of the performance and from there they conceptualize the local theoretical frameworks to mediate the contextualized meaning to a reading audience. So far, it seems to me as though theory is defined and derived from the local frame, which is accepted since the method consists of securing the contextual knowledge production’s ontology, as that is what gives the text meaning. The indigenous meaning of utterances to performers and audience, would never move outside their context. The ‘oral’ mode of women’s oral tradition necessitates a method of seeing the textual production similar to approaching performances because meaning is viewed as constantly redefined in processes.

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Women’s oral tradition is not perceived as existing in relation to something called “men’s oral tradition” or “the oral tradition”. Rather in treating gender as a genre, it is seen as encompassing a large knowledge production of what exists outside written sources dominated by men. In Bauman’s view “the generic regimentation” - that is when a genre insists on its form - works conservatively in the service of established authority and order if insisted on too harshly. Here, in the writing down and mediation of meaning in the words by scholars, there are both “looseness” and “tightness” in the genre of women’s oral tradition. The ‘written’ form is often seen as an insufficient mean to infuse ‘meaning’ into what is seen as social and historic processes. The stress on the importance of the ‘oral’, by the practitioners, is often complemented by the ability of using other forms of media, where the ‘oral’ is in use and acknowledged. This can be seen as a change in how the hierarchies of value and taste is often context specific and it might have changed with the coming of modern audiovisual media where the oral mode gets a wide diffusion and recognition.

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6. Bibliography Appadurai, Arjun (1991) ‘Afterword.’ In Arjun Appadurai, Frank J. Korom, and Margaret A. Mills (eds.), Gender, Genre and Power in South Asian Expressive traditions. (South Asia Seminar Series, general ed. Patrick Mullen) Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 467-476. Appadurai, Arjun, Frank J. Korom, and Margaret A. Mills (eds.) (1991) ‘Introduction’. In Arjun Appadurai, Frank J. Korom, and Margaret A. Mills (eds.), Gender, Genre and Power in South Asian Expressive traditions. (South Asia Seminar Series, general ed. Patrick Mullen) Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 3-29. Bauman, Richard (2004) A World of Others’ Words: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Intertextuality. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Bauman, Richard and Charles L. Briggs (2003) Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bauman, Richard and Charles L. Briggs (1992) ‘Genre, Intertextuality and Social Power.’ Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 2 (2): 131-172. Ben-Amos, Dan (1971) ‘Toward a Definition of Folklore in Context.’ The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 84, No. 331, Toward New Perspectives in Folklore (Jan. – Mar., 1971): 315. Bhaya Nair, Rukmini (2008) ‘Writing the Future and the Future of Writing.’ Biblio: A Review of Books, Vol. XIII, Nos. 9 & 10, (Sep.-Oct.): 5-6. Blackburn, Stuart (1986) ‘Domesticating the Cosmos: History and Structure in a Folktale from India.’ The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 45, No. 3 (May): 527-543. Bucholtz, Mary (2003) ‘Theories of Discourse as Theories of Gender: Discourse Analysis in Language and Gender Studies.’ In Janet Holmes and Miriam Meyerhoff (eds.), The Handbook of Language and Gender. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Limited, ch. 2, pp. 43-68. Bucholtz, Mary (2000) ‘Gender.’ Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 9 (1-2): 80-83. Census of India (2001) Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, India. http://demotemp395.nic.in/Census_Data_2001/India_at_Glance/literates1.aspx (accessed 28-03-2009) Davis, Coralynn V. (2008) ‘Pond-Women Revelations: The Subaltern Registers in Maithil Women’s Expressive Forms.’ Journal of American Folklore, 121 (481): 286-318. Finnegan, Ruth (2005) ‘The How of Literature.’ Oral Tradition, 20/2: 164-187.

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