Storytime in India

Wedding Songs, Victorian Tales, and the Ethnographic Experience

Helen Priscilla Myers, Umesh Chandra Pandey

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780253041647
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

An American ethnomusicologist and her Indian collaborator recount their experiences researching Bhojpuri wedding songs in India. Stories are the backbone of ethnographic research. During fieldwork, subjects describe their lives through stories. Afterward ethnographers come home from their journeys with stories of their own about their experiences in the field. Storytime in India is an exploration of the stories that come out of ethnographic fieldwork. Helen Priscilla Myers and Umesh Chandra Pandey examine the ways in which their research collecting Bhojpuri wedding songs became interwoven with the stories of their lives, their work together, and their shared experience reading The Eustace Diamonds by Anthony Trollope. Moving through these intertwined stories, the reader learns about the complete Bhojpuri wedding tradition through songs sung by Gangajali and access to the original song recordings and their translations. In the interludes, Pandey reads and interprets The Eustace Diamonds, confronting the reader with the ever-present influence of colonialism, both in India and in ethnographic fieldwork. Interwoven throughout are stories of the everyday, highlighting the ups and downs of the ethnographic experience. Storytime in India combines the style of the Victorian novel with the structure of traditional Indian village tales, in which stories are told within stories. This book questions how we can and should present ethnography as well as what we really learn in the field. As Myers and Pandey ultimately conclude, writers of scholarly books are storytellers themselves and scholarly books are a form of art, just like the traditions they study.

ONE

A FULBRIGHT GRANT TO BANARAS, INDIA

It was admitted by all her friends, and also by her enemies—who were in truth the more numerous and active body of the two—that Lizzie Greystock had done very well with herself. We will tell the story of Lizzie Greystock from the beginning, but we will not dwell over it at great length, as we might do if we loved her. She was the only child of old Admiral Greystock, who in the latter years of his life was much perplexed by the possession of a daughter…. He had no particular fortune, and yet his daughter, when she was little more than a child, went about everywhere with jewels on her fingers, and red gems hanging round her neck, and yellow gems pendent from her ears, and white gems shining in her black hair.

—Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds (1873)

At our apartment in Banaras, September 14, 2007

My mother died on August 31, 2007—smack in the middle of my Fulbright grant to Banaras, India. I did manage to reach her Maryland bedside a couple of times to attend to her care, and then in time to say a long sad farewell before she faded. We buried her on September 11, 2007, in the East Lawn Cemetery, next to my father, and overlooking Cornell University, where they had both worked. On September 12, I left Ithaca and my family, and I flew back to India. Umesh met me in New Delhi at the Indira Gandhi International Airport.

Here, on this particular September afternoon, having just flown from New York to Delhi and then taken the twenty-four-hour train ride to Banaras, I was soothed by the opening words of The Eustace Diamonds, by Anthony Trollope. The book was on my bookshelf in our Banaras apartment. I had pulled it off the shelf to get my mind off my personal grief.

I loved Trollope, and I loved India. After thirty-three years of wonderful experiences and a few adventures, I had come to feel that India was a second home and that India was the most amazing country in the world. And I also had come to feel a personal responsibility for the violence that Western peoples, mainly white, had inflicted on Indians for centuries. But on this particular afternoon, I was just feeling lonely and lost.

But reading Trollope was comforting and familiar. And he was a big help to me in sorting out my feelings. The Eustace Diamonds is, indeed, wonderfully and delightfully told. Anyhow, there was solace for me in these several well-written familiar sentences. The flow, the detail, the humor, the sharp beginning. I dwelled on each phrase. These well-crafted lines were engaging. In my dark hour, I held on to this classic novel.

I have loved the writings of Anthony Trollope since my teenage years. I loved those well-formed sentences, seemingly written without effort. He wrote so fast, by the word and to the clock. Did he ever go back and revise them? His autobiography tells how this flow of prose was his gift. Contrapuntal lines twist and turn, weaving seamlessly from one thought to the next. The words flow and flow, and often they lead to absurd conclusions about the human condition. He is not Jane Austen. He is not the Brontë sisters, much though I love these earlier authors. His stories have real action plots—burglary, suicide, murder—and he is a comedian. The more carefully you read Trollope, the more you notice how carefully he builds to an ironic conclusion.

And then there is the exotic Victorian punctuation that I so love;—semi, dash, semi, dash. To me it looked like musical notation;—semi, dash. It brought comfort to the mind and reminded me of all the happy hours of escaping into another world with a copy of Trollope in my hand.

The Fulbright Committee paid for each award recipient to ship four boxes of books to their research site. This was just before the age of the Kindle. My boxes were sent to India, where I had been awarded a nine-month senior fellowship to join Umesh and study Indian village women’s wedding songs. Our destination was Banaras, the holiest city of India, on the Ganges, the most sacred river of India;—the city and its river, where the faithful go to die. The four boxes included some light reading, but the bulk was classics by Trollope.

The mocking of India and India’s nobility stands out in The Eustace Diamonds. That a contest between the Lords and the Commons should break out over such an insignificant matter as a “Sawab of Mygawb” is an absurdity. Trollope is making fun of British India. But he had traveled the world, first as an agent of the British General Post Office, and, later, on his own.

In fact, Mom and I had read Trollope out loud together many times. She, with her keen eye and ear, noticed details of style. Her favorite example was how Trollope inserted a proper name in reference to a “he” or a “she” when it was not entirely clear which “he” or “she” he was referring to. He simply put in a comma, and added the name, followed by a second comma.

TWO

TOAST

In our apartment, Banaras, September 14, 2007, evening

Although I felt alone with my grief, Umesh was just across the way in his room, settling down after having escorted me home to Banaras, or, more properly, Varanasi, or, more historically, Kashi. When we finally reached our apartment, we were both exhausted from travel, and we were very grubby. Our little apartment had an Indian bathroom en suite off his room and a Western-style bathroom en suite for me. I mean to make it sound elegant. Well, it was, and it was not.

We both cleaned up and then had a light dinner. Toast and butter. That was our special treat. In kitting out our place, we had splurged on a bright red Western toaster that we discovered in Banaras in a tiny corner electronics shop, the kind that you had to pop up yourself when you figured the toast was done. Umesh liked making toast.

I had known Umesh since my first research trip to India in 1986. We met in the Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology (ARCE) of the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) in New Delhi. I was looking for somebody to aid me with my Hindi and to assist me in documenting women’s songs in the village setting. Then, with the generous support of numerous grants, we had traveled for months and months to the remote and impoverished villages of eastern Uttar Pradesh and western Bihar, searching for women’s songs, especially songs for the Hindu wedding. And we found and recorded and documented many—so many—weddings.

A fast friendship formed between Umesh and me. He had just arrived on the steam train from Damoh, and, naturally, he was filthy. ARCE is the type of archive that really understands the needs of fieldworkers. Scholars arrive directly from rural areas and are offered a fresh clean towel and shower, then tea and biscuits, and, for the night, a clean and comfortable guesthouse with delicious home cooking. So Umesh went off to take a shower and change clothes.

This man soon became one of the very best friends of my life and a steady, trustworthy research colleague with uncanny village wisdom and powerful village emotions. He is a village elder and a farmer, a Brahman (Pandey), and he is impoverished despite his lovely village home and his beautiful fields. During our decades together, I’ve been pretty broke myself, so we were true equals.

His physical constitution is weak, and we spent many hours seeing doctors, local in the villages, in small towns, and in important hospitals—in fact, everywhere we went. He was usually sick, and his complaint was serious: breathing. Sometimes he just couldn’t breathe. It was asthma and then more than asthma. For all the doctoring, we never really got a proper diagnosis. In Banaras in 2007, doctors at Heritage Hospital determined, through a battery of tests, that it was allergies—allergies to the most common substances found in an Indian village: dust, straw and hay, cow dung, mold, plus common foods such as water buffalo milk, cane sugar, wheat flour, ghee. The list went on and on. They made up special serums for him to inject daily to boost his immune system. It all made sense to me. And he and I had hope, really for the first time, that we might have found a cure.

But we had no refrigeration, which was essential for maintaining the serums. And then his reaction taking the very first dose was so violent that I had to rush him immediately back to Heritage Hospital, with his rescue inhaler in hand. He was incapacitated for several weeks, resulting from this single injection of the wonder cure. The serums expired, and we spoke of more tests and a new set of serums, milder ones that he could tolerate. But the months flew by. And he fell sick with malaria, which took a tremendous toll.

There were other problems—I would like to say too many to enumerate, but it was more a case of too many to treat. But the asthma was a daily problem. He suffered, and I expended a great deal of effort to ease his ills, given that we were in India—village India. When I brought him to the United States, some five times, he was upset about the cost of American doctors and drugs. In Mauritius, in 1996 and again in 1999, we found wonderful doctors. When we got together for the Festival of India in Stockholm in 1987, the top Swedish hospital treated him for free and cured him of hookworm.

In January 2016, Umesh had an acute heart attack at home in his village of Karimganj. I was at home in the USA. The family phoned me on Skype. And I could see that there he lay on his string cot in unendurable pain as the thick fog of January in North India had closed in for the night. It seemed that he might die before we could get him to a private cardiologist.

My son, Ian Woolford, who lives in Melbourne, sent out an appeal on Twitter for help. Thanks to the generosity and kindheartedness of Indian folk, Indian people from all over the world answered Ian’s plea. The story was taken up by ETV in Lucknow and also by the editor of The Hindu newspaper in New Delhi. Before long, Ian received a message from the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, the Honorable Akhilesh Yadav, who offered his good offices to help. With the assistance provided by so many private individuals, the press, the CM, and ETV television, it was possible to rush Umesh to the Heart Center, a first-class private hospital in Agra. After some months of tests and treatments, Umesh was released from the hospital. It was found that his blood pressure was a bit high, so Umesh bought a blood pressure machine to check this for himself.

Umesh recovered but remained weak for many months. The doctors had said that he suffered from a lack of oxygen in his body. During my November 2016 visit, India was wrapped in a cloud of pollution following the Diwali festival of lights. I could hardly believe the sounds coming from his lungs, a horrible, suffocating wheeze that I had never, ever heard before. When we reached Delhi, I bought a Philips air purifier for him and a nebulizer. After he took his first dose from the nebulizer, he suddenly sat up and announced, “My eyes are open!”

So Umesh and I sat in my room, munching on buttered toast. When the electricity was on, we hung out in my room because I had had an air conditioner installed. In fact, they had broken down the entire wall to install it—surprising to me. But that was the way it is done in India. It was locked carefully inside a metal cage, too high to reach (and steal) from the ground. I ran it with a remote control. I loved my air conditioner, but Umesh was suspicious of it out of the local fear of mixing hot and cold. It is considered dangerous to go from outside and the summer heat straight into an air-conditioned room. It is dangerous to drink hot coffee and eat yogurt for breakfast. Don’t bathe before going to bed! These are basic beliefs of Indian villagers and city folk alike.

So, toast. He took on the task of buttering. He cut the slices into triangles, and we both ate. There was butter on our fingers and crumbs in my bed. I didn’t mind. That was daily business as we didn’t have a dining room table—or a dining room for that matter.

In our Banaras apartment, September 15, 2007, morning

In the morning, the milk arrived early. It was water buffalo milk, extremely rich and creamy—delicious and addictive. The milkman delivered it fresh every day. Umesh’s milk-boiling ritual took about five minutes. Boiling and skimming and never letting it boil over onto our two-burner gas stove in our tiny kitchen—that was the job. Then he made desi chai—black Indian tea, spiced with ginger in the winter and cardamom in the summer. As it was September with the monsoon rains winding down, but not yet cold, we had cardamom on the morning of September 15. And toast. More buttered toast. We never tired of it. The bright red toaster.

You wouldn’t think that they sold cheap Western-style sliced white bread in India, would you? But they do, and Indians love it. At the end of our lane, there was a small shop that sold white bread for ₹10 (15 cents) a loaf, along with some other simple treats that we had come to enjoy like Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate bars and various flavors of spicy hot potato chips. The shopkeeper became our friend, and he would order extra bread for us. Umesh could also buy a Hindi newspaper there and keep us in touch with the outside world. No television, no radio, no Internet, no Newsweek or Time—the local paper was our contact with the outside world.

We lingered over breakfast, me in my pajamas, Umesh in his full-length saronglike lungi and T-shirt. Umesh would read to me from the newspaper. Some of the stories were so strange, they challenged the imagination. Of the most spectacular was one, purportedly from Germany, of doctors who were keeping alive a severed human head. There was a drawing showing the head with an expression of desperation. The head rested ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Songs and Accessing the Audio Files
• Prologue
• Introduction: Umesh Explains Storytime
• 1. A Fulbright Grant to Bañaras, India
• 2. Toast
• Interlude I: Lizzie Greystock
• 3. Setting Up Our Apartment in Banaras, 2007
• 4. The Daily Routine
• Interlude II: Sir Florian
• 5. Arranging an Indian Wedding
• 6. The Search for a Boy
• 7. Helen and Umesh Meet
• 8. Viewing the Bride
• 9. The Tilak Talk Begins
• 10. Gangajali
• 11. The Tilak, Explained by Umesh
• 12. SongJourney
• 13. Tilak Songs
• 14. “Dress Him in a Bra and Bodice”: Gali for the Tilak
• 15. The Songs Become Personal
• 16. “We Sell Dreams”
• 17. Saguni Songs: “This Night Is Ours”
• Interlude III: Lady Eustace
• 18. Umesh Remembers Charlotte Wiser
• 19. Matikor: Sashi Interrupts, but We Do Not Hear “A Mare Has Pissed”
• 20. Helen’s Pounding Pot
• 21. Umesh Explains Gali
• Interlude IV: Lucy Morris
• 22. The Kalas and the Harish
• 23. Arranging a Priest
• 24. Wedding Expenses
• 25. The Island Diaspora: My Introduction to Indian Culture from Far Away
• Interlude V: Frank Greystock
• 26. Granny Music
• 27. Ethnomusicology
• 28. The Turmeric Is Pleasing
• Interlude VI: The Eustace Necklace
• 29. Heat
• 30. Kissing
• 31. The Bride and Groom Go to the Kohabar
• 32. The Blue Blue Horse
• 33. Umesh Tells the Krishna Story
• Interlude VII: Lady Linlithgow’s Mission, the Sawab of Mygawb
• 34. And Love
• 35. Kabir
• 36. Great Novels and Lesser Novels
• 37. Trapping the Family Gods
• Interlude VIII: Mr. Burke’s Speeches
• 38. Helen Contracts Typhoid
• 39. Getting the Siri at the Home of the Potter
• 40. “My Husband Is the Inspector of Police”
• Interlude IX: The Conquering Hero Comes
• 41. The Evil Eye
• 42. Umesh Gets Malaria
• 43. “The Elephant Is Adorned, the Horse Is Adorned”
• 44. Preparing for Winter
• 45. “Sexy Sweetheart Drinks Slowly Slowly”
• 46. The Jaluaa
• 47. The Story of Krishna and the Crocodile: A Song with Many Many Stories
• 48. Umesh Tells the Remainder of the Krishna Story
• 49. More Jaluaa Songs and Stories
• Interlude X: Showing What the Miss Fawns Said and What Mrs. Hittaway Thought
• 50. Charlotte Wiser Leaves Karimganj
• 51. Wedding Night
• 52. Mona’s Nacchu Nahawan in Rasalpur
• 53. Protecting the Bride from the Evil Eye
• Interlude XI: Lizzie and Her Lover
• 54. Arrival at the Janmassa
• 55. Gali for Barati People and Bridegroom
• 56. What about Clothes and Ornaments?
• 57. Bhajan Interlude
• Interlude XII: Lord Fawn at His Office
• 58. Umesh Recalls His Wedding
• 59. Feeding the Wedding Party
• 60. Dwar Puja—the New System
• 61. The Animal Party
• 62. Departure of the Barat
• Interlude XIII: I Only Thought of It
• 63. The Bridegroom Enters the Courtyard
• 64. The Bride Enters the Courtyard
• 65. Donation of the Virgin Daughter
• 66. Ceremony of the Puffed Rice
• 67. The Sindur Ritual
• 68. The Kohabar Ritual
• 69. Ceremony at the Ganges
• Interlude XIV: Showing What Frank Greystock Did
• 70. Arrival of the Bride in her Sasural, the Gauna
• 71. Love Marriages
• 72. Five Days
• 73. Just One More Song
• 74. Gangajali’s Story
• Interlude XV: “Doan’t Thou Marry for Munny”
• 75. One Last Song
• Interlude XVI: I’ll Give You a Hundred-Guinea Broach
• 76. Preparing for China
• 77. Leaving Banaras in 2008
• 78. Conclusion
• Interlude XVII: The Eustace Diamonds
• 79. Umesh Tells a Story from Karimganj
• 80. A Passage to India
• 81. Bangles in Ballia
• 82. Across the Seven Seas
• 83. Umesh Arranges for the Swan’s Quill
• 84. The Religion of Humanity
• 85. Storytime
• Appendix: Rituals of the Hindu Wedding in Ballia
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index