No One Cries for the Dead: Tamil Dirges, Rowdy Songs, and Graveyard Petitions
252
No One Cries for the Dead: Tamil Dirges, Rowdy Songs, and Graveyard Petitions
252eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520938342 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 02/22/2005 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 252 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
No One Cries for the Dead
Tamil Dirges, Rowdy Songs, and Graveyard Petitions
By Isabelle Clark-Decès
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2005 the Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-93834-2
CHAPTER 1
A Different Grief
No village sound is more disturbing than the shrill cries announcing a death. Even in cases when death has been anticipated, the wails of close female relatives hovering over the dead person, occasionally throwing themselves across his or her body, still come as a shock. Their words "Oh my mother!" "My father!" "My brother!" or "My husband!" uttered with deep rhythmic elongations in a pealing moan punctuated with tears and outbursts of distress, spread rapidly through the neighborhood, and female friends and neighbors quickly gather to "share the grief" (pankita tukkatai). The principal female mourner, or the woman with the "right" (urimai) to the deceased (the widow, for instance, in the case of a married man), greets the gatherers by beating her breast and exclaming, for example, "Ayyo, he left me and went away!" The arriving women respond with hugs, saying, "Akka!" (Elder Sister!) or "Amma!" (Mother!). They may also respond in commiseration, "What a shame! You lost your husband."
The women then drop to the ground and squat together in a formation known as punai kattu. In agricultural jargon this usually refers to the rounds made by bullocks when they are tied together to thresh wheat. In the funeral context, the word describes the tight circle women form around the principal mourner by interlocking their arms in a collective embrace, each woman simultaneously hugging her companions to the left and right. Although the mourner steps out to greet arriving female relatives, the encircling women remain bound to each other, weeping, wailing, and drawling out crying songs. The women break formation only to make space for the newcomers, who rush into the crying cluster as soon as they too "share grief." When the group exceeds ten women, a second cluster forms. As the crowd continues to swell, the number of clusters increases to twenty or more, made up of women swaying, moaning, and crying out dirges beside the dead person.
In fieldwork, as in daily life, we often encounter radical difference, and we come up against things we cannot immediately identify or understand because nothing in our previous experience has prepared us for them. This happened to me while working in Tamilnadu. When I first saw crying clusters, I simply assumed that women were grieving the loss of a relative or a friend, much as we cry at the funerals of loved ones. Later, however, I discovered that the meanings of women's heartbreaking sobs and crying songs went beyond what was immediately imaginable to me.
The Tamil women I talked with revealed unexpectedly that at funerals they do not cry for the dead. They told me, "We may shout to the deceased 'You left me,' 'You left your wife,' and the like, but [we shout] only a few words. For the most part we do not cry for the dead." These women further surprised me when they disclosed that they do not cry for the mourners either. "We share grief out of sympathy or respect for the widow and the daughter," one said, "but we do not cry for them." All agreed instead that they go to funerals to "cry for their own losses." To underscore this point, in these statements these women are not suggesting that they mourn the loss of their own long-gone loved ones. "No one cries for the dead," women told me over and over again. "We all cry for ourselves." In this and the following chapter, I focus on the meaning of this puzzling statement.
THE SOURCE OF TAMIL LAMENTS
In his 1915 analysis of Australian aboriginal funerals, the French sociologist Émile Durkheim argued, "Mourning is not a natural movement of private feelings wounded by a cruel loss; it is a duty imposed by the group. One weeps, not simply because he is sad, but because he is forced to weep. It is a ritual attitude which he is forced to adopt out of respect for custom, but which is, in a large measure independent of his affective state" (1965: 443). In some measure the Tamil women I met endorsed this viewpoint. At the death of a close relative, they told me, they have an obligation to wail. One woman said, "If we don't cry, people will speak badly of us. They'll say, 'Look at her, her father-in-law just died and she stands as stiff as a tree!'" Another woman told me, "It is the law [murai]. We must cry or people will scold us."
Tamil women are also required to cry at the funerals of friends, neighbors, and acquaintances. As one woman explained, "We can skip a marriage, but we cannot skip a funeral. We must share the grief." Actually, this sharing follows the logic of a business transaction: "I cry in your house so that you will cry in mine." One woman clearly expressed this mourning economy when she said, "Crying in a cluster [katti alutal] is a loan [katan], not a gift [inam]." "If I cry at other women's funerals," she explained, "they'll come to ours. If I don't [cry], no one will come." Another friend reiterated: "Crying is a loan. If I hug and cry [with] a woman in mourning, she'll hug me when I am in mourning." In practice this means that women friends, neighbors, and acquaintances embrace the principal female mourner not only out of empathy but also to mark their presence at the event. One woman told me, "I hug the woman to show her that I have come to her funeral." Another woman said, "We must hug the widow, for this is how she keeps attendance." Apparently, when the funeral is over, the principal mourner makes a mental list of the women who came to "share grief." Of a woman who was absent she might say, "Who does she think she is? What an arrogant bitch!" The woman who told me this added, "The widow will resent the fact that such and such a woman did not show up. She'll ask herself, 'I come to her funerals, [so] why doesn't she come to mine?'"
Although the Tamil women I engaged to discuss crying songs agreed that mourning is a duty, their views radically departed from Durkheimian sociology on the point of the relationship between felt and expressed emotion. These women conceded that a woman's subjective feelings could not always be deduced from her behavior. After all, a woman might go through the motions of crying, beating her breast, pulling her hair, and singing a melodious crying song "for appearance" (oppuku), only as they put it, meaning without any emotional participation. But for the most part, these women insisted, one need not speak of masks and postures to describe the performance of crying songs. Usually women do not merely pose with tear-streaked faces, strike their breasts, and pull their hair to show proper deference. Nor do they fabricate or affect their emotions. They sob desperately and appear completely absorbed in pain because they do in fact feel grief. In short, in the dirges performed by Tamil women, expression of emotion corresponds to what is felt.
Emotions, as many anthropologists have reminded us, do not precede or stand outside of culture. Despite their deep intimacy and physical immediacy, emotions too are part of the many ways in which men and women in a given society shape and are shaped by their world (Abu-Lughod 1986; Lutz 1988; Trawick 1990; Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990). Nancy Scheper-Hughes succinctly summarizes the most radical assumption of this relativistic position: "Without our cultures, we simply would not know how to feel" (1992: 431, her emphasis). Emotions, therefore, cannot be understood outside of the particular social contexts that produce them. Nor can their concepts be viewed as simply "labels for internal states whose nature or essence is presumed to be universal" (Lutz 1988: 5). Though no doubt responsive to physiological reactions and "feelings," emotions are deeply configured within a culture's wider web of meanings and significations, values, and ideals, and thus can in no way be categorized simply as natural. As Margaret Trawick discovered, what her Tamil consultants meant by anpu (love) sometimes ran head-on into her own culturally developed feelings about what love is or should be (1990: 92).
Likewise my own research taught me that my consultants' definition of grief did not quite match the one I brought with me to the field. To the Tamil women I talked to, grief was inextricably mixed with the experience of kurai, meaning "little," "want," or "deficiency." My female consultants also underscored that the emotion kurai is actually the very source and inspiration of their funeral dirges. "Without kurai," they would tell me, "we could not cry out our songs." They even defined the aesthetics of their dirges with reference to the depth of a woman's kurai: "The more kurai a woman feels, the better her dirge."
What kinds of experience does the Tamil term kurai encompass? Let me preface the answer to this question by pointing out that kurai is not unique to women crying at funerals. In Tamilnadu, kurai is the catalyst for a wide range of life experiences. "Everybody has kurai of some sort or another," a woman once told me. When I asked my consultants to define this word, they used it in the context of their own lives, illustrating it with personal examples of disappointment, deficiency, and regret. A fifty-year-old Chettiar woman from Gingee told me, "I wanted to become a doctor, but instead I got married. This is kurai. I wanted one of my five children to go to medical school, but none did. This is kurai. I wanted my younger son to study but he did not. This is kurai." A woman whose son owned a jewelry store in Gingee explained kurai like this: "Sometimes my son has to borrow money to buy inventory. If business is bad, he feels kurai when he pays the interests on his loan." Tamil people are also compelled to feel kurai when their siblings do not buy them gifts or when their relatives fail to invite them to a marriage. When a Tamil woman finds out that her husband has a lover, she may yell out to him, "What kurai do you have with me?" In other words, "What is wrong with me? What is it that I don't have that this other woman has?" Apparently, Tamil people also feel kurai when they cannot fulfill the needs of friends and loved ones. One young high-caste woman told me, "At his daughter's engagement, a father promises to give ten sovereigns of gold to his in-laws. Later he can afford to give only five. He feels kurai because he is short." The feeling of kurai is so broad and pervasive that my village friends took it for granted that I had experienced it too. At the end of my last fieldwork trip, one of my neighbors, a young man, wanted to buy my radio. I gave him a good price—so good that he asked me if I harbored kurai over our transaction. I reassured him that I felt none.
To summarize, the paramount experience of kurai is that of feeling unfulfilled, slighted, shortchanged, inadequate, or disappointed. This experience often commingles with the feeling known in Tamil as ankalayppu. Implicit in the experience of ankalayppu is an act of comparison, in which others appear to be better off than you. As one woman explained, "See! This boy is studying, but my son is not. This is ankalayppu. See! These women got a good deal on a sari, but I did not. This is ankalayppu. See! These people are doing well, but we are not. This is ankalayppu." She made a point of stipulating that, unlike envy or jealousy, ankalayppu is not malicious. She said, "It's not that you don't want others to do well, but that you despair over your own inability to succeed." "This sense of inadequacy," she added, "only fuels your kurai." Thus this critical self-appraisal underlying the sorrow of ankalayppu adds to the negative tally of disappointment that constitutes kurai.
In the context of death the experience of kurai corresponds to feeling acutely deprived of the love and gifts of food, clothing, money, and so on once provided by the deceased. This came to light when a young high-caste woman who had recently lost her father told me, "I feel kurai because my father raised me and married me well." An untouchable widow confided, "I feel kurai when I think of the past, of my husband, of the things he did for me." Such definitions flowed easily from Tamil women, suggesting that grief, for them, is inextricably linked with the feeling that they have been cheated out of a relationship that once grounded and completed them. The same feeling organizes the poetics of their crying songs.
Tamil dirges use the vocative case, often addressing the deceased from the perspective of his or her particular kinship relationship to the singer. At the funeral of her mother, for example, a woman is likely to intersperse among her lyrics the words "Oh my dear mother!" She is also likely to eulogize. Her dirge, however, does not praise what her culture defines as "a good person." That her deceased mother was an honored and respected member of an occupational or social group is of little value to the crying woman. Tamil dirges constitute a self-centered language: they always identify the dead in terms of who they were and what they meant "to me." The mourning daughter might therefore continue her song by praising her mother for what she did for her daughter. As a woman told me, "We do not cry to the dead 'You were great,' 'You did so many good things,' and the like. Instead we cry words like 'You took good care of me.'"
In her dirge a mourning daughter does not merely describe how her mother used to love or spoil her. She makes emotional comparisons (oppari)—the common Tamil term for the crying-song genre—and juxtaposes this golden past with the desolate present in which she finds herself, now without a mother's emotional involvement in her life. The woman quoted above best captured the nature of these comparisons when she told me, "What we most say to the dead is this: 'You took good care of me, but now you are gone. I am completely alone. Who is going to watch out for me.'"
Not all Tamil dirges praise the dead. Some songs accuse them of not caring about the singer. In these cases, women may address their complaints with questions like "Why aren't you protecting me?" and "Why am I suffering?" The complaints may also be directed to the gods, particularly to Yama, the god of death: "What did I do to you?" "Why aren't you sparing me from grief ?" "Are you a god?" Whether they praise, accuse, or question, Tamil dirges nearly always focus on painful feelings of loss over a kin relationship that was (and could otherwise still be) fulfilling and centering.
What about my warning that it is impossible to understand emotions outside the particular social context that produces them? Do some of us relate, perhaps even instinctively identify with, the inner state defined by my Tamil consultants as kurai? I, for one, have come close to feeling it since my mother passed away three years ago. Like the prototypical orphaned daughter of Tamil dirges, I grieve for what I have lost: a luminous and generous being, a wise and sympathetic confidant, an unconditional source of support, a spirited grandmother to my daughter, and so much more. When I long for my mother's phone calls, visits, gifts, and invitations to shop, travel, and lunch together in fancy restaurants, I can feel kurai suffusing my grief. But like many anthropologists, I remain leery of the proposition that emotions can be felt across cultures (but see Rosaldo 1984). I am not even confident that their full configuration and experiential impact can be translated. At the very least, in order to ascertain, the full meaning of an emotion such as kurai, we must do more than elicit practical definitions of its gloss in more or less artificial contexts. We must explore cultural understandings of the situations in which it arises as well as explore the ways of talking about these situations (see Lutz 1988; Abu-Lughod 1986).
The name Yama in the previous paragraph should serve as a case in point: the Tamil emotion of kurai is inextricable from the experience of people whose worldview includes this god of death, a divine power to whom cries, complaints, and prayers may be addressed. The point is that emotions are not feelings pure and simple, but feelings within a culture that casts them in a particular form and imparts to them a quality all their own.
Indeed, when we delve further into the Tamil language of dirges, we realize that crying songs represent kurai as resulting less from death and more from the marital practices and relationships that affect Indian women. In fact, according to Tamil dirges this grief is never simply a consequence of death, but almost always ensues from the dislocations in women's lives caused by kinship arrangements and the relatives who enact them. This helps explain why we in the West cannot necessarily feel the kurai of lamenting Tamil women. Such grief is associated with life circumstances, forms of social organization, and gender experiences that are foreign to us. Kurai is also associated with a particular symptomology, etiology, and "cure" that stresses the necessity to cry out laments and make others suffer for you—in short with a configuration of meanings that are strange to us because they are intended to negotiate and create a social reality that is not ours.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from No One Cries for the Dead by Isabelle Clark-Decès. Copyright © 2005 the Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction
1. A Different Grief
2. Songs of Experience
3. Why Should We Cry?
4. Life as a Record of Failure
5. Between Performance and Experience
Appendix A: Four Abridged Versions of the Virajampuhan Story
Appendix B: The Story of Virajampuhan in Tamil
Glossary
References