Table Of ContentMaithil WoMen’s t ales
Storytelling on the
nepal–india Border
Coralynn V. Davis
Maithil Women’s Tales
Maithil Women’s Tales
Storytelling on the Nepal-India Border
Coralynn V. Davis
University of Illinois Press
Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield
© 2014 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
C 5 4 3 2 1
∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014940415
ISBN 978-0-252-03842-6 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-252-09630-3 (e-book)
ConTenTs
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: The Living Story and the Storying of Life 1
Chapter 1. Homo narrans and the Irrepressibility of Stories 23
Chapter 2. Metaphysical Questions of Fortune
and Social Stratification 37
Chapter 3. Virtue, Truth, and the Motherline of Morality 67
Chapter 4. Loving Compassion, Maternal Devotion,
and the Yearning for Home 93
Chapter 5. Gendering Spatial Alterity:
Why the Story Went into the Forest 113
Chapter 6. Ponds, the Feminine Divine, and a Shift
in Moral Register 135
Chapter 7. Talking Tools, Femina narrans,
and the Irrepressibility of Women 161
Notes 183
Works Cited 201
Index 209
ACknoWledgMenTs
The field research on which this book is primarily based was funded by a Fulbright
Senior Research Grant in 2003–4. I also wish to acknowledge the support I received
as a research associate at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center at Mount
Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, in 2005–6, and as a research
associate/visiting faculty member in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at
Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2008–9. I am thankful
for financial support provided by the Center for the Studies of Race, Ethnicity
and Gender and the Provost’s and Dean of Arts and Sciences Offices at Bucknell
University. I am deeply indebted to Dollie Sah for her unflagging engagement in this
project as a research assistant and bahin—including many hot days of transcription
performed in an uncomfortable barber’s chair! I want to express my gratitude to
Dollie’s parents and siblings for providing me with shelter, sustenance, and human
connection, as well as the twin offerings of protection and freedom. I very much
appreciate the careful transcription and translation work on the stories that was
carried out with me by Smriti Jaiswal and Mita Jha. Finally, I am personally grateful
to Missie Pressly (in memoriam) and Ojae Michal Beale for their emotional and
practical support at different periods in this project, as well as to family, friends, and
colleagues all along the way.
Portions of chapter 6 were published earlier in my article “Pond Women
Revelations: The Subaltern Registers in Maithil Women’s Expressive Forms” (Davis
2008). Portions of chapter 7 were published earlier in my article “Talking Tools,
Suffering Servants, and Defecating Men: The Power of Storytelling in Maithil
Women’s Tales” (Davis 2009b). Both are used here with permission.
vii
THe TAILoR TALe: painting depicts the tailor’s dog rescuing him from being
buried alive by his wayward wife and her lover, shown embracing in bed.
InTroduCTIon
The Living Story and the Storying of Life
“Khīsā gelait ban me, socha āpnā man me.” “The story went into the forest, the
thoughts into one’s own mind,” rhymed Sukumariya Devi Dhanukh. Her tattooed
arm first waved outward toward the imagined forest and then drew inward to touch
her sternum lightly with gnarled, life-worn fingers. In this manner, Sukumariya Devi
brought to an end the tale she had been elaborating. With this rhetorical closing, she
also intimated a theory about the relationship between stories, space, and movement
on the one hand and thinking, feeling subjects on the other.
This book explores how storytellers harness the genre of folktale to grapple with
particular arenas of meaning and practice in their lives. More specifically, the book is
about Maithil women living in a Nepal-India border region; about their storytelling;
and about the relationships between the social, cosmological, and physical worlds
from and into which their stories flow, on the one hand, and storytellers’ own
culturally shaped but nonetheless singularly formed hearts and minds, on the other.
More particularly, the volume explores how Maithil women construct and negotiate
cosmological principles, social values, behavioral norms, and relational selves
through the everyday practice of “folk” storytelling. Each chapter retells intriguing,
often fantastical, and sometimes quite funny stories while also incorporating
ethnographic and personal information gleaned from field research and interviews,
as well as story illustrations painted by Maithil women themselves. In engaging such
expressive forms and practices and the women who shared them, the study addresses
three interrelated subjects. First, it examines the cultural work accomplished by
Maithil women’s storytelling. Second, it investigates, for the case of Maithil women,
the ontological and epistemological relationships among folktales, life experiences,
and personhood. Third, and most broadly, the text queries how Maithil women’s
perspectives evidenced in their stories complicate our understandings of South Asian
Hindu conceptions of the self, the social, and the sacred.
Maithil Women’s Tales theorizes the role of storytelling in contexts of cultural
dissensus, especially in regard to the persistence of unsanctioned or nonnormative
ways of understanding and acting upon reality. The volume investigates the complex
manner in which agency, virtue, and other key aspects of the human condition are
1
Description:Constrained by traditions restricting their movements and speech, the Maithil women of Nepal and India have long explored individual and collective life experiences by sharing stories with one another. Sometimes fantastical, sometimes including a kind of magical realism, these tales allow women to b
