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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
SYLVIA VATUK 144
7 Cowherd or King? The Sanskrit Biography of
Ananda Ranga Pillai
DAVID SHULMAN 175
Vl Contents

8 Life Histories as Narrative Strategy: Prophecy,. Song, and


Truth-Telling in Tamil Tales and Legends
STUART BLACKBURN 203

Part Ill: Spoken Lives


9 "Honor is Honor, After All:" Silence and Speech in the
Life Stories of Women in Kangra, North-West India
KJRJN NARAYAN 227
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''
] ONATHAN P. pARRY 281
Index 319
Acknowledgments.

T
his volume of essays 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 andNationalism 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 of Islamic 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 ofIndia (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 ofNationalism
(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
The Worlds ofIndian Industrial Labour (with J. 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 ofAnthropology 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
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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
Introduction: Life Histories in India 3
scholarship and colonial ethnography, as much as the post-Independ-
ence anthropology of scholars like Marriott and Louis Dumont (for all
their differences of perspective), seemed to uphold the dominance of
caste identities and the hierarchical ideas and practices that accompa-
nied it (see Inden 1990 for a critique of these ideas). To put it starkly:
in India society was valorized; the individual was not (Dirks 200 I: 57).
Such an extreme emphasis upon caste-based identities and collec-
tivity may now have been overturned, but it has left a long and lasting
impression on the way in which scholars approached the study ofindia
and the kinds of sources considered appropriate to their enquiries.
Moreover, a regional identification of India with the exclusivity of
caste was reinforced by wider presumptions about the unique histori-
cal legacy and cultural specificity of the West. It was confidently as-
sumed that articulate individuality was a hallmark of the West, at least
since the Confessions of St Augustine, and latterly of its modernity, as
it evolved through Renaissance Humanism and Rousseau-style "con-
fessions," through Enlightenment histories that gave prominence to
individual acts and achievements, through self-reflexive travelogues,
and finally to Freudian analysis (cf. Taylor 1989; Porter 1997). And aH
of this, so evident in the West to the West, was seen by contrast to be
absent from "the East.'' In recent years, however, scholars oflndia, 5 as
well as those of the Middle East and South East Asia, have begun,
sometimes indignantly, to reject the idea that a developed sense of self-
hood has existed only in the West, even if the forms that that indi-
vidualism has taken have been influenced by the history and culture
of the specific region. 6 Life histories in India do not necessarily con-
form toWestern conventions and modes of expression (some do, many
don't), nor should one expect to find the peculiar forms of individu-
alism that emerged in the West replicated in India (in fact, these essays
show how much diversity there was and continues to he). One of the
appealing possibilities opened up by examining life histories across
several disciplinary fields and situating them comparatively, side hy
side, is not only to show the variety of forms life histories can take with-
in a single region, but also to shed fresh light on the way we perceive
and analyze Indian society.
Despite the partial move away from the polished biographies and
autobiographies of the "great and famous" toward the investigation of
more marginalized and subaltern sections of society, for which few
such literary self-narratives are available, historians of India have gen-
erally been inclined to consider life histories as sources, of varying
4 Telling Lives in India
degrees of utility and trustworthiness; they have seldom paused to
consider them as genr;es worthy of systematic analysis. In descending
the social scale from elite to subaltern, an emphasis upon individual
lives, and attempts to interrogate their meaning, is often seen by hist-
orians to display a "romantic" tendency,. attributing to individuals an
agency and consciousness, even an "Enlightenment rationalism,." they
could not plausibly possess (see O'Hanlon 1988). Even anthropolo-
gists,. who are among the primary users and theorizers oflife histories,
have sometimes considered the life-histories approach as problematic,
in danger of merely replicating, wit:hout duly analyzing or contextual-
izing, personal stories in which the auditor has become too personally
involved. 7
Nevertheless, one reason for the broad appeal oflife histories, to the
scholar as to the wider public, is precisely that they straddle the elusive
divide between personal narrative and objective truth. Derived from
this double identity are two dominant assumptions about life histories
as they appear in both earlier and current research. The first relates to
veracity. Life stories, far from being mere fabrications, are seen m be
imbued with an extra dose of"truth." Narratives, in this view, are not
just entertaining fictions but meaningful explorations of life which
reveal emotional and social realities that otheiwise dude identification
and explanation. As the psychologist Jerome Bruner (1986) puts it,
narratives represent an alternative way of knowing and a basis for un-
derstanding human action. If narratives in general are imbued with
this oracular quality, then stories of individual lives are seen to be cap-
able of disclosing the deepest secrets, those buried deep in the human
experience of their subjects and creators. A further reason for attribut-
ing an underlying veracity to life histories is that, even when written,
they seem to speak directly to us, without the distorting mediation of
an author, without editing or censorship (rhough, as these essays them-
selves attest, the prooess of eliciting and r,ecording life histories is never
entirely free from outside mediation). As Sandra Stahl (1989) points
out,. the autobiographical element in many life histories can endow
them with the added authority of the speaker, though this might also
make us wary of the partisan telling and selective recollection of events
and experiences.
A second dominant assumption informing much current life-
history research is that these accounts of personal lives reflen cul-
ture-specific notions of the person or sd£ Here written texts, primarily

&:;;;:
Introduction: Life Histories in India 5
biographies and autobiographies, as well as oral histories and stories,
are viewed as valuable sources for understanding the emergence of a
modern sense of self, of individualism and self-consciousness as op-
posed to collective identity. As already observed, one of the purposes
of these essays is to explore life histories in order to counter the percep-
tion oflndia as essentially a society composed of castes, religious com-
munities and kinship net:\Vorks, in which, as a consequence, a sense of
sdfhood, of personal identity and agency, is muted and subsumed
within larger social and cultural domains. However, as discussed in the
conclusion to this Introduction, such a mutually exclusive dichotomy
between collectivity on the one hand, and individuality on the other,
is not fully borne out by these essays: indeed, they show India as a field
of constant interaction and negotiation between the two.
It is certainly not the purpose of these essays to present life histories
as self-evident statements of social or historical "cruth." 8 Contributors
to this volume are well aware that biography, in whatever form it is
presented, is from a scholarly perspective "anything but innocent." As
John and Jean Comaroff have expressed it, "the diary and the life hist-
ory are culturally specific," and can be "patently ideological modes of
inscription" (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992: 26). But such indeed
may be precisely their value as social documents, as insights inro the
ways in which individuals (or the societies around them) sought to
present their version of "truth." Whatever the limitations of this ap-
proach, it would be reckless to discard life histories as being only "an
instrument ofbourgeois history-in-the-making" (Comaroffand Coma-
roff 1992: 26), or as merely valorizing the ''cultural logic oflate capi-
talism" by keeping "the myth of the autono.mous individual alive"
(Goodson 1995). It has also been noted that the recent upsurge of
interest in life histories has followed from a growing distrust of "meta-
narratives," a new-found skepticism toward sweeping generalizations
and grand theories of social change, and hence a move toward a more
nuanced, multi-stranded understanding of society and a greater recog-
nition of the heterogeneity of human lives and lived experience, even
under overarching systems of patriarchy and colonialism (Raheja
and Gold 1994;. Lamb 2000: 4-7; Fay 2001: 2-4). But in the context
of India, life histories should not he seen as therefore a narrowing down
or even a disavowal of grand themes,. even if the immediate source
material and subject content are more focused. Rather, life histories
enable us to render more intelligible precisely the complex of forces at
6 Telling Lives in India
work in modern societies and to reflect further, and from more solid
foundations, on many of the major themes that dominate the subcon-
tinent-gender, modernity, colonialism and nationaljsm, religion,
social change, family and kinship, and interrelationship between self
and society.
In this book we argue that, as a cultural category, the life-history
form is too important to be lightly dismissed or ignored. We hope to
demonstrate that life histories reveal insights not just into the experi-
ences and attitudes of the individuals direcdy concerned, but also of
the wider society, or social segment, of which they are a part. This is
of particular value in seeking to understand and analyze groups that
are socially marginalized and hence not normally heard, such as
women and Dalits ("Untouchables"). k; many of the titles in this type
of scholarship attest,. finding the "voice'' of the otherwise apparently
voiceless has a force propelling the investigation of life histories as a
whole, and not least in South Asia; in this way, the life-history ap-
proach is a means of breaking the silences imposed by society and hist-
ory. We would add, however, that it is of no less value in allowing
us to stand back from the familiar lives of the "great and famous," of
deities, saints and heroes, and to see them as representative of, or cre-
ative departures from, established life-historical forms.
Life hisrories, as they are considered here, show great diversity of
form and intent; they also illustrate the power of certain cultural con-
ventions and constraints in the pr,esentation of one's own or others' life
histories. As readers will see, there are evident differences between the
modern, written life histories discussed in Part One, the more tradi-
tional lives presented in Part Two, and the oral lives dicited in Part
Three of this collection. But it is one of the objectives of the volume
as a whole, and the particular concern of several essays individually
(notably Vatuk's accounr of a life story which was first written as a text
but later amplified through speech), to show that these categories over-
lap and that many life histories are the product of more than one mode
of composition and authorial intent.

2. Life Histories in India


Whatever the vaHdityof earlier cast,e-focused understandings of India,
it is certainly true that life histories have been a historically persistent
and socially pervasive form of,cultural expression in the subcontinent.
Many religious traditions (not only Buddhism, Islam and Christianity
Introduction: Life Histories in India 7
but also Hinduism in its various 1nanifestations, from Sanskrit texts to
popular, devotional bhakti worship), diverse regional cultures, and
different social groups (divided by class, ethnicity and gender), have
combined to produce a variegated repertoire of life stories. These
have circulated and been reworked, by visual, textual and oral techni-
ques, so that both historical and mythological characters are repeatedly
drawn upon by individuals as much to give meaning to their own lives
as to commemorate the lives of others.
Early Pali and Sanskrit narratives told the life story (or carita, a term
which also encompasses both "history" and "legend") of Shakyamuni
Buddha; Buddha's life, from Boddhisatva to enlightenment, was also
represented visually in the didactic iconography of Buddhist temples
from the second century AD onward. Accounts oflives were produced
in a wide spectrum of forms in pre-modern India. Genealogies, both
orally transmitted and written, and horoscopes (again in both oral and
written forms) might be considered part of this wider genre, but
the great majority of pre-modern life histories were hagiographical-
oral and written accounts of the lives of deities, kings, cultural heroes,
saints, poets, poet-gods and poet-kings (see the essays by Shulman and
Blackburn in this volume). Not all were male or high caste, and several
of the best known represented a kind of radical egalitarianism.
While these hagiographies exist in both poetry and prose, and are
told from varying points of view, they are characterized by a tendency
to praise their subjects and to place rhe narrative within a mythic
framework that is explanatory and not merely ornamental. Events in
the life of the poet or hero are often explained by reference to super-
natural events, dreams, predictions, vows and divine intercession.
Lives ofindividual poets and poet-saints were often transmitted as part
of a self-conscious and explicitly named tradition (sampradaya), and
many such lives were canonized and anthologized. Defined by literary
descent and devotion to guru and god, these communities generated
their own life histories, which are sometimes highly dramatic,. even
humorous. The subject faces dilemmas and makes decisions, but there
is little "character developmene' because,. in the end, the course of
events is beyond his or her control. Many of these early life histories
do contain facts, dares and historical events, but these usually provide
context rather than causation. 9
Another stream of Indian life histories entered with rhe arrival of
Islam and the subsequent elaboration of life-history forms derived
from the Middle East and Central Asia (for which see Kramer 1991;
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