Gender and Story in South India

Abstract

Gender and Story in South India. Edited by Leela Prasad, Ruth B. Bottigheimer, and Lalita Handoo. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. Pp. viii + 152, acknowledgments, map, chapter notes, chapter bibliographies. $45.00 cloth, $18.95 paper) This slim but useful volume is a re-edited and updated version of an earlier book edited by Lalita Handoo and Ruth Bottigheimer that was published in India in 1999 under the title Folklore and Gender. Four of the papers (those by Kanaka Durga, Narasamamba, Handoo, and Venugopal) were originally presented at the XIth Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research, which was held in Mysore. These same papers, in reworked form, have been sandwiched between a new introduction by Leela Prasad and a very brief afterword by Ruth Bottigheimer. In her introduction, Prasad essentially sets the theoretical agenda of the volume: namely, to look at gender as one factor, albeit an essential one, of identity construction. She points out that the stories analyzed herein are by, about, and for women, but not to the exclusion of men (5). Virtually all of the examples included in the essays, she states, deal with kinship, anguish, and patriarchal norms, as well as tensions between the natal home and the conjugal one (8). The stories in the various essays also suggest the strong but complex relationship between brother and sister, in which the brother often has a strong moral obligation to the sister, even though sometimes this obligation can become dangerous, as when incest enters into the picture. Prasad also points out reflexively that one factor weaving together these diverse essays is the intersection between the narratives told and the lived experiences of the narrators. Lalita Handoo's comparative essay focuses on stupid-son-in-law stories, which she correctly identifies as a subgenre of numskull tales (35). Her data comes from her own fieldwork in Kashmir, but also from published collections, providing ten examples from ten places in India. Hence she is able to make the claim that the genre is pan-regional in nature. Handoo's main point is that the tales use humor to subvert male dominance (37) , a reminder to us that Indian women often do not fit the stereotype of the silent, suffering daughter, wife, or mother. While Handoo's approach is mainly morphological and thematic in nature, Saraswati Venugopal's contribution emphasizes "contextual meaning" (55) by comparing audience responses in rural and urban settings in and around the city of Madurai, located in the state of Tamil Nadu. …