"Hear the Tale of the Famine Year" : Famine policy, oral traditions, and the recalcitrant voice of the colonized in nineteenth-century India

Abstract In this essay I suggest that these two profound anxieties, coupled with a need to explain away the countless revolts against colonial rule that had occurred in India since the late eighteenth century, prompted an explosion in the collection and entextualization 2 of Indian speech in colonial documents, at the very moment in the nineteenth century when the triumph of scientific knowledge of Indian bodies had been uneasily declared. Particular varieties of Indian speech, often characterized as "the voice of the people," were inserted into colonial texts to serve as authorizing narrative, to create an illusion of consent to colonial rule, while other voices, the voices of critique or rebellion, were erased, marginalized, or criminalized. And more generally, as Sharma (2001:38) has argued, famine policy and colonial writing about famine were closely intertwined with the British need "to legitimize its authority in the eyes of its subject people and to itself."Gloria Goodwin Raheja is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. She is the author of The Poison in the Gift: Ritual, Presentation, and the Dominant Caste in a North Indian Village, co-author of Listen to the Heron's Words: Reimagining Gender and Kinship in North India (with Ann Grodzins Gold), and editor of Songs, Stories, Lives: Gendered Dialogues and Cultural Critique. She is currently working on two book manuscripts: Logan County Blues: Frank Hutchison in the Sonic Landscape of the Appalachian Coalfields, and Scandalous Traductions: Landscape, History, Memory

Introduction : the paradoxes of power and community : women's oral traditions and the uses of ethnography

The essays in this volume address theoretical and ethnographic issues concerning oral traditions and women's speech in diverse South Asian communities in northern and southern India and in Nepal, and situated in Hindu, Muslim, and Buddhist milieus.1 Our analyses are brought to bear upon a complex set of questions concerning the relation between women's speech and those cultural traditions and social practices that partly structure their lives.Issue title; "South Asian Oral Traditions.

Negotiated solidarities : gendered representations of disruption and desire in north Indian oral traditions and popular culture

Kali ki riti yahi, "this custom of a degenerate age": thus did North Indian women describe, in a song written down in 1910, the plight of women who must move from natal place to conjugal place to be controlled there by their husband's kin.2 And thus do rural women still today critique the ideology of patrilineal kinship that circumscribes their lives, as a "custom" of the age and not as an invariant consequence of the nature of women and men.Issue title; "South Asian Oral Traditions.

Listen to the heron's words: reimagining gender and kinship in North India

In many South Asian oral traditions, herons are viewed as duplicitous and conniving. These traditions tend also to view women as fragmented identities, dangerously split between virtue and virtuosity, between loyalties to their own families and those of their husbands. In women's songs, however, symbolic herons speak, telling of alternative moral perspectives shaped by women. The heron's words - and women's expressive genres more generally - criticize pervasive North Indian ideologies of gender and kinship that place women in subordinate positions. By inviting readers to "listen to the heron's words," the authors convey this shift in moral perspective and suggest that these spoken truths are compelling and consequential for the women in North India.The songs and narratives bear witness to a provocative cultural dissonance embedded in women's speech. This book reveals the power of these critical commentaries and the fluid and permeable boundaries between spoken words and the lives of ordinary village women