UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO Casting Selves
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO Casting Selves: Tradition, Practice, and Ethics in an Artisan Community in India A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology by Sowparnika Balaswaminathan Committee in charge: Professor Thomas Evan Levy, Chair Professor Richard Cohen Professor David Pedersen Professor Saiba Varma Professor Kamala Visweswaran 2018 Copyright Sowparnika Balaswaminathan, 2018 All rights reserved. The Dissertation of Sowparnika Balaswaminathan is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm and electronically: Chair University of California San Diego 2018 iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page......................................................................................................................iii Table of Contents..................................................................................................................iv List of Figures........................................................................................................................v List of Tables.........................................................................................................................vi Acknowledgments................................................................................................................vii Vita......................................................................................................................................xiv Abstract of the Dissertation..................................................................................................xv Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 1 Chapter 1: An Economy of Discourse: The Museum, Nationalism, and Handicrafts ......... 52 Chapter 2: The Vishwakarma History/ Myth/ Narrative ..................................................... 97 Chapter 3: The Problem of Tradition in Swamimalai ........................................................ 136 Chapter 4: Wasteful Talk: Morality, Skill, and Boundary-Making through Small Town Oral Discourse ................................................................................................................... 175 Chapter 5: The Murai of It All: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Arts Practice in Swamimalai ..... 211 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 265 References .......................................................................................................................... 266 iv LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Map of Swamimalai and surrounding areas.........................................................10 v LIST OF TABLES Table 1. Proportional Measures of Sculptures in the Uttamadasatalam according to the Shilparatna, Manasara, and Ganapati Sthapati’s Indian Sculpture and Iconography.......................................................................................................................227 vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My parents tell me that when I was a year old, they took me to Swamimalai to tonsure my head. This is a Tamil tradition, where you take your new baby, irregardless of the density of its hair follicles, to the ancestral temple and shave off all of its hair. I do not remember this, for obvious reasons, but I do remember seeing my brother getting his turn, and fearlessly enjoying the experience, turning his little head one way and the other. The tonsurer chuckled at my brother’s hedonism, while my parents expressed surprise, because they had had a very different experience with me. That was the beginning of my relationship with Swamimalai, a day I do not remember, when I left my locks behind. Since then, I have been back innumerable times, initially for religious pilgrimages with my family, and then for research, which is arguably another kind of religious experience, peppered with both inspiration and disillusionment. The generosity and thoughtfulness of the Swamimalai sculptors and residents made this dissertation possible. Many of them have been named in this dissertation, but many have not been named, sometimes because their voices have been echoed by others, and other times, because their voices have been represented by pseudonyms. I need to particularly thank Srikandan Sthapati, Radhakrishnan Sthapati, Swaminathan Sthapati, Mohanraj Sthapati, Veera Ragavan Sthapati, Venkatesan Sthapati, Masilamani Sthapati, Shankar Sthapati and his family and Vidyashankar Sthapati for the many hours they spent on me, talking and showing. I have the deepest regard for Satishkumar Shilpi and Shankar Shilpi, whose heartfelt testimonies about their craft and life illustrated the contradictions of vii hardship and optimism that represents the outlook of many of the sculptors. The staff and workers at Poompuhar were always welcoming when I made my intrusions into their work space, including Mr. Iyappan, and the smiling countenances and cheerful enthusiasm of the students at the Poompuhar Training Center makes me hopeful for the future of the craft of bronzecasting. I am also very grateful to Mr. Balasubramanian and the staff at the Government Museum for helping me with my research at the Government Museum, Chennai, and Dr. Santosh Babu and Mr. Premkumar at Poompuhar, Chennai. Ravi Sthapati and Rajeshwari started off as sculptors that I interviewed and ended up my friends. They not only supported my work by communicating with earnestness what sculpting meant to them, they also stood as models of the “good sculptors”, that I write about in this dissertation. It was always difficult to explain the value of my research to the sculptors in Swamimalai – what worth is in words like those in this manuscript, that in the most optimistic future might bring attention and interest from far flung readers to Swamimalai. What about the now, many sculptors asked me, and I could not say much because I agreed with them. Ravi and Rajeshwari would argue with me that my work had worth, that a view from afar and atop mattered, and that the future should always be considered as a path towards the sublime. Their very many stories about the past made me wish I could have been there, almost as much as they did. I hope that my words work in some small way to bring them the future that they desire. The neighbors and residents of Swamimalai were in turn amused, bemused, accepting, and well wishing of my work, mostly because of the comforting presence of my mother, Girija Balaswaminathan, who stayed with me in Swamimalai, and supported my viii work, as she has supported my existence forever. My father, Balaswaminathan Krishnamurthy, deprived himself off the company of my mother and I, to take care of my brother, Shiva Balaswaminathan, so that I could do my fieldwork, without worrying about safety and succor. My father dreamt of pursuing a PhD in his youth, but had to set the dream aside to take care of his aging parents; this is a work born out of generations of hope. My mother was stalwart in her support for my pursuit of scholarship even as the society around us criticized and lamented my eschewal of the traditional life that an Indian woman should accept; this work is also born out of the rage and fear I felt thinking of the multitudes of women who did not have my mother’s support. My brother stands evidence for the Tamil saying that a person with a brother has no need to fear an army. My grandmother passed away a month before I left to the US to start my PhD – her spirit in life was independent and fearless and it has sustained me after her death. Professor Thomas Evan Levy has not only been a kind and generous advisor who was consistent in his confidence in me as a scholar, but also a mentor who challenged me to experience the breadth of scholarship, from archaeological field schools to census surveys to photogrammetry to digital humanities. His own diverse interests and range of experiences have been a model for me to aspire towards, and I am grateful for him taking a chance on me, even before he met me personally. Tom’s support, financial, academic, and otherwise, has been instrumental in making me into the scholar I am today, and his acumen for developing interesting, important, and successful projects inspires me immensely. Alina Levy, his wife and work partner, and Tom paved the way for this project through their meticulous research of Swamimalai bronzecasting workshop, and their generosity in ix sharing the authorship of their work with their interlocutor-sculptors is a high point of collaboratory scholarship. In 2008, Tom sent his recent PhD student, Dr. Adolfo Muniz to Swamimalai to collect quantitative data concerning the different bronze casting specialists in the village. At that time, I had the opportunity to work with Adolfo as translator. I am grateful to Adolfo for suggesting that I apply to UC San Diego and work with Tom. Thus, the work presented here brings my Swamimalai journey full circle. I would also like to thank Professor Bruce Philips of the Hebrew Union College (Los Angeles) for help with the statistical analyses of the quantitative data collected during the course of this project. Although Professor Kamala Visweswaran became a member of my committee after I had done my fieldwork, her mentorship has been instrumental in my intellectual development, and direction taken by my dissertation. I had never encountered advice before that both told me that I had to