Chite aris and weet angoes AGING, GENDER, AND BODY IN NORTH INDIA C arah amb AGING, GENDER, AND BODY IN NORTH INDIA arah amb LAMB, White Saris 10/15/01 3:37 PM Page i White Saris and Sweet Mangoes LAMB, White Saris 10/15/01 3:37 PM Page ii The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by the General Endowment Fund of the Associates of the University of California Press. LAMB, White Saris 10/15/01 3:37 PM Page iii White Saris and Sweet Mangoes Aging, Gender, and Body in North India sarah lamb University of California Press berkeley los angeles london LAMB, White Saris 10/15/01 3:37 PM Page iv University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2000 by the Regents of the University of California All photographs taken by author Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint portions of the author’s earlier articles: “Aging, Gender and Widowhood: Per- spectives from Rural West Bengal,” from Contributions to Indian Soci- ology 33, no. 3 (1999), and “The Making and Unmaking of Persons: Notes on Aging and Gender in North India,” reprinted by permission of the American Anthropological Association from Ethos 25, no. 3 (September 1997), not for futher reproduction. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lamb, Sarah White saris and sweet mangoes : aging, gender, and body in North India / Sarah Lamb. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Aged—India—Bengal—Social conditions. 2. Aging—India— Bengal—Family relations. 3. Aged—India—Bengal—Psychological aspects. hq1064.i4 l36 2000 305.26'0954'14—dc21 99-088195 Manufactured in the United States of America 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 10987654321 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper). 8 LAMB, White Saris 10/15/01 3:37 PM Page v Contents List of Illustrations vii List of Tables ix Preface xi Note on Translation and Transliteration xvii Introduction: Perspectives through Age 1 Culture, Gender, and Multivocality 3 The Anthropology of Aging 8 The Body in Postmodern and Feminist Anthropology 9 Living in Mangaldihi 17 part i: persons and families 1 Personhoods 27 Entering a Net of Maya in Mangaldihi 27 Open Persons and Substantial Exchanges 30 Studying Persons Cross-culturally 37 2 Family Moral Systems 42 Defining Age 43 Long-Term Relations: Reciprocity and Indebtedness 46 Centrality and Peripherality 58 Hierarchies: Serving and Blessing 59 3 Conflicting Generations: Unreciprocated Houseflows in a Modern Society 70 Contrary Pulls 71 The Degenerate Ways of Modern Society 88 Three Lives 99 LAMB, White Saris 10/15/01 3:37 PM Page vi part ii: aging and dying 4 White Saris and Sweet Mangoes, Partings and Ties 115 The Problem of Maya 116 Loosening Ties, Disassembling Persons 124 Pilgrims, Beggars, and Old Age Home Dwellers 128 The Joys and Perils of Remaining “Hot” and Central, Even in a Ripe Old Age 138 The Values of Attachment and Renunciation 140 5 Dealing with Mortality 144 “How Am I Going to Die?” 145 Rituals of Death: Making and Remaking Persons and Families 153 Cutting Maya, the Separating of Ties 157 Extending Continuities 169 part iii: gendered transformations 6 Transformations of Gender and Gendered Transformations 181 Gendered Bodies and Everyday Practices 181 Competing Perspectives: Everyday Forms of Resistance 194 The Changes of Age 197 Women, Maya, and Aging 207 7 A Widow’s Bonds 213 Becoming a Widow 214 Sexuality and Slander, Devotion and Destruction 220 Unseverable Bonds 229 Afterword 239 Notes 247 Glossary 263 References 269 Index 295 LAMB, White Saris 10/15/01 3:37 PM Page vii Illustrations map India 18 figures 1. Relations of long-term, deferred reciprocity 52 2. Relations of centrality 59 3. Relations of hierarchy 64 4. Aspects of family relations in Mangaldihi 67 5. “Father and son’s fight” 98 6. “Get out of the road, sir! I’m going to the cinema.” 99 7. The widow and the widowed man 232 photographs Khudi Thakrun 101 Bhogi Bagdi 105 Sekh Abdul Gani 109 Four brothers practice the separations of a5auc 173 Young sisters-in-law in colorful saris 202 Mejo Ma, Choto Ma, and Boro Ma 203 An older Bagdi man cares for a neighbor’s child 206 vii LAMB, White Saris 10/15/01 3:37 PM Page viii LAMB, White Saris 10/15/01 3:37 PM Page ix Tables 1. Jatis of Mangaldihi by number and occupation 20 2. Distribution of landholdings in Mangaldihi, 1990 22 3. Distribution of landholdings in Mangaldihi by jati 22 4. Relations of long-term, deferred reciprocity 49 5. Mangaldihi’s seniors: sources of support, 1990 54 6. Relations of hierarchy 63 7. Relations of mutuality 68 8. Practices of widows and older and death-impure persons 230 ix LAMB, White Saris 10/15/01 3:37 PM Page x LAMB, White Saris 10/15/01 3:37 PM Page xi Preface This book is about aging, gender, and the making and unmaking of persons. Early on in my days in Mangaldihi (the village in West Bengal where I did most of the research for this book), I came across a white-clothed widow in her seventies called Mejo Ma (Middle Mother), sitting in the dusty lane in front of her home. She could not stop complaining about clinging. Her at- tachments to her family, to things, to good food, and to her own body were so tight, she said, that she was afraid of lingering for years in a decrepit state, unable to die. “How will I leave all these kids and things and go?” she lamented. She feared that after her body died her soul would not ascend but would remain emotionally shackled nearby as a ghost. Ethnographic knowledge is always influenced by the life experiences of the anthropologist.What anthropologists perceive in the field and what they choose to write primarily about is whatever matters most to them. What struck me, while living and doing research in Mangaldihi, was not so much old age per se, but the ways people thought about and managed one of the fundamental dilemmas of the life course—its compelling intensity, on the one hand, and its irrevocable transience, on the other—a dilemma high- lighted for Bengalis (and for us all, perhaps, in some ways) in late life. As a child living in northern California, I had observed a grandmother and great- grandmother each widowed and living alone in a big, separate house. These older adults, like my divorced parents and adults in general, struck me as very independent beings whose dwindling relations with others left them too isolated for their own or anyone else’s comfort. Mejo Ma’s predicament was a little different, though. She felt that her connections to others were not too loose but too tight. Another ancient vil- lager,a spry ninety-seven-year-old Brahman widow named Khudi Thakrun, pursued many attachments that she did not consider worrisome, even xi LAMB, White Saris 10/15/01 3:37 PM Page xii xii / Preface though others did. She lived in a house with three generations of descen- dants and daily roamed the village to gossip with friends, arrange marriages, seek out the sweetest mangoes and bananas, and transact her prosperous business of moneylending. Other residents spoke of her disapprovingly,say- ing that her outgoing behavior would cause her soul after death to become an insatiable ghost troubling the village. People in Mangaldihi spoke of their connections to the people, places, and things of their worlds as máyá, a multivalent term often translated as “il- lusion” but to Bengalis having the more immediate meaning of attachment, affection, compassion, love. People described maya to me as something won- derful and compelling, yet nonetheless problematic and painful—because the more maya people feel for other persons, places, and things, the more difficult become the separations that inevitably ensue. This is a dilemma faced especially in late life, people said, for the longer one lives, the stronger and more numerous the ties of maya become. Yet it is in late life also when relations are the most ephemeral, as people face the myriad leave-takings of death. Gurusaday Mukherjee, a middle-aged Brahman man, explained to me one day with tears in his eyes: “[In old age, a person] realizes that he will have to leave everything in this earth and go away. When I die, then I will have to leave everyone and everything—my children and everything. Then all of the love and all of the affection that I will have—that is all maya. It will make tears come.” These sentiments of the older women and men I came to know in Man- galdihi reminded me of what I had felt when getting to know my now hus- band, then college companion, ten years before going to Mangaldihi. I would tell him that it is painful to fall in love, because it will be all the more painful when it ends. (He was perplexed, saying that we never had to separate if we did not wish to.) Their statements about maya also reminded me of a pas- sage I had first read a few years earlier in Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty’s Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities. She describes the way some Indian textual traditions present samsára, or the nature of existence in the fluctu- ating world: “[M]any people distrusted samsára not because the world was full of pain but rather that it was so wonderful that one could not bear to be parted from it over and over again at the end of each life, to be torn away from all the people one had come to love” (1984:299).