Home, Family and Kinship in Maharashtra
This volume is the second comprising the proceedings of the 6th International Conference 'Maharashtra: Culture and Society'. The conference was held in Moscow in 1995 and hosted by the Institute of Orientology, the Russian Academy of Sciences.
By ELENA KARATCHKOVA
Ghar, a term which in many Indian languages signifies the three interrelated but not coincident notions of House, Home, and Household, was chosen as the main theme of the conference. It was indeed a successful choice, as the ghar in all its three implications offers a unique insight into a number of values, historical processes, social relationships, conflicts and compromises, cultural phenomena, and even politics that form an inseparable part of human existence. To recall the title of Tagore's celebrated novel, the field of contributors' researches was 'ghore bahore' or the house and the world outside it. The first volume of the proceedings was edited by Irina Glushkova and Anne Feldhaus under the title 'House and Home in Maharashtra' and was published by Oxford University Press from Delhi in 1998.The companion volume, which is under review now, deals mainly with the historical, social, and political aspects of the ghar. It is divided into three sections. Section I, 'Demarcating the Boundaries of Home' contains three contributions. It opens with the lively paper by Jim Masselos who analyses a concrete historical event, the plague epidemic which ravaged Maharashtra in 1896-1897, on the basis of rich archival material. This is in no way a 'case study', as the evidence of anti-epidemic measures taken by the colonial administration and public response to them have allowed the scholar to discuss a number of topics directly related to the main theme: the traditional concepts of privacy, distribution of 'open' and 'closed' space within the house and the purity of the latter, the social and emotional implications of the home, and the family` s duties towards its members. None of these important factors were taken into consideration by the plague committees, so all the measures they took were looked upon by the Indian public as violation of privacy, intrusion into the boundaries of the ghar and a violation of its purity, hence the overwhelming protest. In her paper, Irina Efremova explores another implication of the home -a socio-cultural space which one defines as the ghar or, in that sense, homeland, which eventually has an effect on job mobility and matrimonial relationship patterns. This contribution is based upon the author` s field work in which the respondents, drawn from Maharashtra` s five sub-regions, were asked to express their feelings towards their place of birth and other areas of the state, by placing the sub-regions upon the scale from 'close to the heart' to 'alien'. The paper by Hemalata C. Dandekar analyses life histories of some village women and throws light upon their perceptions of home, their household activities, and family roles. The material is indisputably informative but, unfortunately, the scholar has somewhat failed to discover the limits of a case study, and to work out a theoretical generalization of the data collected. Therefore the paper looks more like a piece of journalism than a work of research.
Dowry
Section II, 'Problematics of Family in Historical Perspective' consists of five papers. The one by Eleanor Zelliot deals with the position of women in the families of Namdev and Cokhamela, the major poets and preceptors of the Varkari panth, the Maharashtrian bhakti tradition. The female members of these saints' families were, like most Indian women, fully preoccupied with their household chores, nevertheless they distinguished themselves as sharers of the devotional practices of their menfolk and expressed their spiritual pursuits in poetry. Eugenia Vanina's paper has as its theme a well-known story of the tragic love between the Peshwa Bajirao and a Muslim beauty, Mastani, in the eighteenth century. This romantic episode is analysed as a conflict between the two homes, the legal and the illegal, of the same man. It also offers an insight into the traditional perception of home as a social and ritual unit which was to suffer punishment as a whole if defiled by the improper action of one member. The relationships and conflicts within a landlord family and the efforts of the women to find a place for themselves within the narrow space of a patriarchal house is the theme of Vidyut Bhagwat's study based upon the 'Wada Chirebandi', a famous play by Mahesh Elkunchwar; this play with its deep psychological insight and social generalizations, deserves, it would seem, a less simplistic analysis.
Apart from the case studies of individual families, there are two papers in this section which discuss broader themes. Veronique Benei's research into the history and the present state of the dowry practice in Maharashtra is based on her fieldwork. It discusses the economic and social meanings of the institution of dowry and explores the interesting phenomenon of replacing the practice of dyaj or bride-price paid by the groom's family to the bride's, by the practice of giving a dowry. The latter is being ardently opposed and fought against by women activists. Georg Ashoff takes up the theme by analysing the traditional songs sung by women on various occasions as these are successfully employed by the activists who produce the new versions of well-known songs and use them for bringing their message to the grassroots in their struggle for the rights of women. The author's approach is promising, but the study seems somewhat incomplete, like a randomly selected abstract from a book or a doctoral thesis.
Dominant lineages
Section III, 'Kinship and Political Representation in Maharashtra' comprises four papers and opens with A.R. Kulkarni's essay on the gharane, or prestigious and powerful family, of the Jedhes and its history from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. Political life in Maharashtra, especially in the rural areas, has been and still is distinguished by the dominant role played by the extended families or clans; kinship networks therefor emerge as one of the major moving forces of Maharashtrian politics. This is especially relevant to the Maratha caste. In her article Marina Lomova-Oppokova summarizes the kinship relations among the Marathas and their fictitious kinship with other castes as the main factors responsible for the Maratha dominance in the state. Rajendra Vora's enlightening contribution deals with the distribution of landholdings and administrative posts in the four villages of the Latur district of Maharashtra. The author discusses the economic and political roles of the one or two dominant lineages which control most of the land and most of offices in each respective village and convincingly shows that it is not as much caste but lineage and affluence that matter. The author seems to have succeeded wholly in combining a statistical study with deep theoretical comprehension of socio-political processes at work in Maharashtra (and perhaps in some other parts of India too). The house as a political metaphor which, in the Maharashtrian (as well as in the pan-Indian) context, implies that the region (or the whole country) is perceived as a home and its population as a united family. Such a notion was an integral part of the nationalist movement ideology. Eugenia Yurlova's paper discloses how the Untouchables' efforts to establish their own identity and to fight for their rights were looked upon as separatist actions bringing discord into the national and regional house. Special emphasis is laid upon the Gandhi-Ambedkar debate on this important, very delicate problem.
The purpose of the whole two-volume project was to define the ghar and its various aspects within the broader framework of regional culture, in other words, the 'mental programme' of the Maharashtrians. This is disclosed by the very distribution of papers between the sections which constitute inter-disciplinary thematic blocks, each presenting this or that side of the problem. Such an arrangement reveals the editors' good command over the data and their desire to create an all-embracing study cutting across the borders of particular disciplines. To a certain extent they have succeeded in the implementation of their purpose, and the two volumes, if read one after another, leave an impression of a balanced and logically structured whole (with no claim to exhaustiveness, of course). This accords the project a distinguished position among so many other collections of essays. But, no doubt, an ideal can never be fully reached. The second volume, like its companion, is rather uneven in the quality of the research material it features. Some contributions are indeed good pieces of scholarship, both thought-provoking and informative, with a harmonious blend of the analysis of a concrete data and its theoretical generalization; others fail to rise above a case study level or just glide over the surface instead of digging into the problem. It would be however unjustifiable to expect evenness from a collection of essays which inevitably reflects either the variety of the approaches as peculiar to individual scholars or the levels which the research into the concrete aspects of the problem has currently reached. Despite this, the book is a welcome specimen of multidisciplinary approach, a good work which throws a new light upon the most essential sides of life in an Indian region. *
Reference
- Glushkova, Irina and Rajendra Vora (eds)
Home, Family, and Kinship in Maharashtra,
New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999, 240 pp
Dr Elena Karatchkova is associated with Columbia University.
E-mail: ekaratchkov@earthlink.net