Betel plant vastu in tamil

Fluid Signs

FLUID SIGNS Being a Person the Tamil Way

E. Valentine Daniel

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley Los Angeles London

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd. London, England

Copyright© 1984 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Daniel, E. Valentine. Fluid signs.

Bibliography: p. 303 Includes index. 1. Tamils. I. Title.

DS432.T3D3 1984 306' .089948 ISBN 0-520-04725-7

84-163

Printed in the United States of America

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

For Vanessa

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Note on Transliteration xiii

1. Introduction 1

PART I. TOWARD COMPATIBILITY 59

2. An Or Known 61 3. A House Conceived 105 4. Sexuality Exposed 163 5. Kul)ams Divined 182

PART II. TOWARD EQUIPOISE 225

6. A Theoretical Interlude 227 7. Equilibrium Regained 233 8. A "Differant" Conclusion 288

Bibliography 303

Index 313

Acknowledgments

During the course of this study I have accumulated many debts. Grants from three sources funded the fieldwork on which this study is based. The National Science Foundation met the greater part of the expenses of the project, the Danforth Foundation, some of them. A grant from the Amherst Memorial Fellowship fund enabled me to carry out some essential ancillary field research in Sri Lanka among Aru Nattu Vellala expatriates.

To Lee Schlesinger I owe my successful experiment in gathering and interpreting maps drawn by villagers, which was to subsequently lead to my discovery of the iir concept. I also owe thanks to James Lindholm, who along with Lee taught me the value of asking those crucial questions whose quintessence lies concealed in their apparent simplicity. To Nick Dirks, who patiently read over selected portions of various drafts of this manuscript and who proved to be an invaluable source of helpful suggestions, I am grateful.

Among my teachers at the University of Chicago, A. K. Ramanujan helped sharpen my awareness of the aesthetic dimension of Tamil culture through his poems and informal musings, luring the simple qualities of commonplace recog- nitions to inhabit snatches of words. Victor Turner intro- duced me to the rich possibilities of comparative symbol- ogy, and Terry Turner showed me so many different ways

X Acknowledgments

of seeing the forest for the trees during times when I was trapped in the thicket of my field notes. My greatest intel- lectual debt is owed to McKim Marriott, my principal adviser, mentor, and friend, whose high standards of meticulous fieldwork remain paradigmatic and whose skill at critically reevaluating the most convincing idea and interpretation has been unfailingly sobering. Others whose comments, criticisms, and editing of various portions of earlier drafts of the manuscript have enhanced the clarity of the final product are: Bernard Cohn, Veena Das, Dianne Mines, Ralph Nicholas, Paula Richman, Michael Silver- stein, and my colleague Jean-Paul Dumont. Peg Hoey's good taste and good judgment have contributed enor- mously in converting many passages of good Sri Lankan English into good American English. To her and to Larry Epstein, who perused the galleys, I express my thanks.

ToR. Srinivasan, my research assistant in the field, who willingly toiled with me through both happy and trying times, I owe thanks. To all my friends and informants in Kalappur and its neighboring villages, to all my friends in Tiruchirapalli, and to all my Aru Nattu Vellala friends in Sri Lanka, who gave so much of their time and put up with all my prying and rude questions, I shall ever be grateful. I must single out A. Devadas, at whose suggestion Sherry and I chose to work in Kalappur and without whose help our fieldwork might not have been possible.

Special thanks are owed to my sister, Indrani, and to my nieces Rowena and Vero, who generously gave of their time and love during the preparation of this book, in typing, in taking care of Vanessa, and in assuming many of the house- hold responsibilities, thereby freeing Sherry and me to devote ourselves to its completion. The greater part of the child care was assumed by my father and mother, who lovingly and happily gave long hours of their retired life for Vanessa.

To three individuals from the University of California Press I owe a special word of thanks: Stanley Holwitz and

Acknowledgments Xl

Shirley Warren, the kindest of editors, let so many dead- lines slip by, and Sylvia Tidwell made the incomprehen- sible comprehensible in countless ways. Need I add: they were patient.

Finally, and most important, I owe the most special of debts to Sherry, who unstintingly gave of her time, energy, and intellect to help me work through almost every page and idea of the second, third, fourth, fifth, and seventh chapters of this book, who cleared up my thinking when- ever I was unable to do so myself, who lifted up my spirits with sober encouragement in times of despondence, and who saw to hundreds of details, great and small, which have helped make this study an accomplished fact.

Where I have erred, the blame is mine. I dedicate this book to my daughter, Vanessa, who has

taught me more lessons than I could number, foremost among them being those of faith, hope, and charity.

Note on Transliteration

1. Long vowels are distinguished from short ones by a dash over the appropriate roman letter substitute of the corresponding Tamil character.

Vowels

Short

a

u e 0

Long

a i u e 6

Approximately as in

up; ask (Brit. Eng.) in; eat put; boot egg; ale solaire (Fr.); poke

Most Tamil vowels are pure, with no diphthongs. 2. Long, or stressed, consonants are differentiated from

short, or unstressed, consonants by a doubling of the roman letter representing the appropriate sound. For example,

Stressed Unstressed

mullai ("grassland") mulai ("corner")

XIV Note on Transliteration

3. Retroflexes are indexed by the placing of a dot beneath the letter. These occur only in the following forms: t, n, I, and r. The retroflexes are to be phonetically dis- tinguished from the dentals, t, n, l, and r, which roughly correspond to the sounds of the italicized letters in the English words panther or father, cunning, cal/, and in the Scottish roll.

4. The voiced sounds like b, d, j, and g are not repre- sented as such but are represented by p, t, cc, and k. Whether a sound is to be voiced or not is determined by its position. The above consonants are voiced after nasals; p, t, and t are voiced between vowels; k is pronounced as an h or a g. The sound of sis repre- sented by c.

5. Where s or s occur, they indicate Sanskrit words or words in Tamil whose Sanskritic origins are still "fresh," so to speak.

6. The tch sound in the word catch is rendered by a double c, as in paccai ("green").

7. Names of persons and places have been spelled in the text without any diacritical marks, to conform to the manner in which these names have come to be written in English in India. Diacritical marks are provided for the names of deities, jiitis, and the pseudonym of the village where this research was carried out, Kalappur.

1 Introduction

An Overview

If one were to seek out the principal theme that binds most sociocultural studies of two generations of South Asian anthropologists, the one that is bound to surface over and over again is caste. I do not intend to review in any way this literature on caste, except to allude to its somewhat paradoxical nature. By focusing on the caste system, schol- ars who consider it a uniquely Indian institution (Bougie 1971; Dumont 1970) and those who see it as an extreme manifestation of its rudimentary or vestigial counterparts found in other cultures (Berreman 1960; Watson 1963) have both in their own ways subscribed to the creed that to understand caste is to understand India. Caste studies, by becoming autonomous, closed systems of inquiry-ends in themselves-have prevented scholarly inquiry from escap- ing its confines and taking into account symbolic constructs more pervasive and regnant than caste, and more natural to the cultural matrix of South Asia than the "naturalized" one of caste.

This is not to deny that several principles have been identified as underlying or generating the caste system, the

2 Introduction

most popular being that of purity versus pollution (Bougie 1971; Dumont 1970; Dumont and Pocock 1959; Moffatt 1979). Unfortunately, these present but half the truth, in- asmuch as they are chosen from within an artificially en- closed analytic system called caste. The inability to go be- yond or beneath caste arose from the failure to see that jati, meaning "genus" (the source concept of the ill-translated "caste") is not applied to human beings only, but to ani- mals, plants, and even inorganic material, such as metals and minerals, as well. What is more, jati itself is a develop- ment from a generative system of thought that deals with units at both the suprapersonal as well as the infrapersonal levels. There is no better term than substance to describe the general nature of these variously ranked cultural units. In other words, differentially valued and ranked substances underlie the system known as the caste system, which is but one of many surface manifestations of this system of ranked substances. 1

Having said this much, I must hasten to say that the ranking of substances itself is among the least of my con- cerns in this book. Steve Barnett has written two com- mendable essays using ethnographic data gathered in Tamil Nadu which deal directly with the issue of rank and substance2 (1976, and with Fruzzetti and Ostor, 1982). My

1The first notable exception to the traditional approach described above came in working papers written around 1969-1970 by Ronald Jnden and Ralph Nicholas on Bengali kinship (published in 1977). Somewhat later, between 1970 and 1972, Inden's Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Chicago on marriage and rank in Bengali culture and Marriott and lnden's joint essay on caste systems were written (published in 1976 and 1974, respectively). Susan Wadley's study of Karimpur religion (1975) as well as Kenneth David's dissertation on bound and unbound castes (]972) also point to inadequacies in the "purity-pollution" para- digm, and so does the excellent essay "From Varna to Caste through Mixed Unions" by S. J. Tambiah (1973).

2ln this regard, Barnett's insistence on the difference of his use of "substance" --derived from, and faithful to, Schneider's analytic terms (biogenetic substance and code for conduct)-from the more culture specific usage in this and other recent studies (Marriott and Inden 1974, 1977; Inden and Nicholas 1977) is hereby recognized. (See Ostiir, Fruzzetti, and Barnett 1982: 228.)

Introduction 3

interest focuses on certain other properties of substances, .J namely, their ability to mix and separate, to transform and . be transformed, to establish intersubstantial relationships 1 of compatibility and incompatibility, to be in states of equi-/ librium and disequilibrium, and to possess variable degrees/ of fluidity and combinability. __ _

I intend to trace these properties of substance3 not through studying some esoter-ic form of ethnochemistry but by looking at certain phenomena in the cultural world of the Tamil villager, phenomena that are part of daily, ordinary, routine life. These phenomena are a Tamil's attempt to cope with the substance of his village, or iir, his house, or vztu, his sexual partner, and his own body under conditions of sickness and health, and finally, to search for the substance from which all these various substances derive.

The last-mentioned quest for the one undifferentiated, primordial substance of perfect equilibrium may be an extraordinary one, but the awareness of such a substance is neither extraordinary nor esoteric. This is made clear by the following creation myth, told to me by an elderly villager in the presence of a number of other villagers who threw in their own versions, corrections, and modifications as the narrative unfolded. The myth is intended to serve the func- tion of a prolegomenon to the thesis developed in this study.

God (Ka~avuD was everything. In Him were the five elements of fire, water, earth, and ether [akasam ], and wind. These five elements were uniformly spread throughout [the three humors] phlegm [kapam], bile [pittam], and wind [vayu]. They were so evenly distributed that even to say that there were phlegm, bile, and wind would be wrong. Let us say that they were in such a way that one could not tell the

3My use of the singular substance as well as the plural substances somewhat interchangeably is intended. It is in keeping with the Hindu world view (to be discussed later) that the various substances are but manifestations or permutations of a unitary, primordial substance.

4 Introduction

difference between them. Let us say they were nonexistent. Similarly, the three primordial qualities, or dispositions (kw.zams), or rajas, satvikam, and ttimatam, neither existed or did not exist. That is why we still call God KU1pitftan [He who transcends all qualities]. Even the question as to their existence did not arise. Then something happened. The five elements started to move around as if they were not satis- fied, as if they were disturbed. Now, as to who disturbed these elements or why they were disturbed, no one knows.

At this point, a second villager interrupted the narrator to suggest that the one who caused this mysterious distur- bance was Kamam, the god of lust. The narrator found his suggestion unacceptable, because Kama had not even come into existence at that time. But his friend insisted that Kama himself was distributed throughout Siva's body, as are the humors, the elements, and the kuDams. After considerable debate, it was agreed that it did not make sense to speak of Kamam existing when he was as evenly distributed throughout Katavut's body as floating atoms (a~ws). Then the narrator continued.

Let us say that what disturbed them was their talai eruttu [codes for action or literally, "head writing"]. 4 When the elements started moving around, the humors started sepa- rating from one another and recombining in new propor- tions [afavuka!J. These new combinations resulted in the three ku~ams. Now the ku~ams and humors and elements all started to move hither and thither.

Then came the separation, as in an explosion, and all the jatis of the world-male jatis, female jatis, vegetable jatis, tree jatis, animal jatis, Ve!)a!a jatis, Para jatis-were

4 Tamils believe that at the time of birth Ka\avu! writes a script on every individual's head and that the course that each individual's life takes, to the very last dl'tail, is determined by this script. This script, or writing of God on one's head, is known as talai eruttu. In the present narration, my informant ascribes "head writing" even to the particles that constituted the primordial being (Katavu!).

Introduction

formed, and they started meeting and mating and procreat- ing. This is how the world came into being.

5

I then asked him, "What happened to KatavuL then, in this explosion?" He replied:

Oh, He is still here. Not as before, but He is still there, more perfect than any of us. He has more equilibrium [amaitinilai] than any of us. In Him the humors are more perfectly and uniformly [camanilaiyiika] distributed. That is why He does not fall ill, as we do. Our humors keep moving, running from here to there and there to here, all over our bodies and out of our bodies and into our bod- ies .... But even in Him the elements, the humors, and the kuDams move around, try as He might to keep them in equilibrium [otiimal iitiimal]. That is why He is unable to do the same kind of thing for too long. If He meditates for more than a certain number of years, the amount of satvikam begins to increase. So then Kamam comes and disturbs Him, and then He goes after Sakti5 or Asuras. 6 This results in an increase in His rajasa kuDam. When rajasa kuDam increases beyond a certain limit, He must return to medi- tating. But most of the time, He is involved in lila. 7 All our ups and downs are due to His lilas. But that is the only way He can maintain a balance [camanilai pa[uttaliim].

This creation myth, in drawing on the world view of the villager, reveals several central cultural beliefs.

1. All differentiated, manifest substantial forms evolved or devolved from a single, unmanifest, equilibriated substance.

5That is, seeking the goddess Sakti to indulge in sexual pleasure. 6He goes after the Asuras ("demons") to make war. 7Ula may be translated as the play or the sport of the gods. One villager

translated Ilia by the phrase "doing something for the heck of it" (vera vela illatatala cumma irukka mu\iyataUila ceivatu).

6 Introduction

2. What triggered the "first"8 movement (action, or kar- mam) of the generative process is an unknown, hence presumably inner property, such as the codes of ~n.d for action that are "written" into all substances. This IS like the "dissatisfaction" of the five elements that one informant equated with desire, which replicates at a higher level of organization the inception of other disequilibriated entities.

3. Different entities in the manifest world have different degrees of substantial equilibrium. Katavurs ~odily substance is in a more equilibriated state than IS the bodily substance of human beings.

4. As a result of disequilibriation, men and even gods must continue to strive to restore equilibrium to their bodily substance. This equilibriated state within the body is the key to health and well-being.

Seen in the light of the above myth, much of a villager's activities takes on a new meaning and a new purpose. These activities, including the most ordinary and routine ones, are aimed at restoring lost equilibrium. The restora- tion of equilibrium among the multitude of qualitatively different substances (or rather, qualitatively different sub- stance complexes, compound substances, or composite substances) in the phenomenal universe is not easily ac- complished. The process is invariably complex. At times, certain substances attain equilibrium with respect to other substances only when they are qualitatively different; at other times, qualitative similarity is required for bringing about equilibrium; yet again, there are times when two substances are able to achieve equilibrium between them- selves only if one is higher in some respect than is the ot~er, and not vice versa. Thus a balanced (equilibriated) meal m a South Indian home must consist of all six different flavors,

sstrictly speaking, given that Hindu ontology is based on cyclical time, there is no absolute first event. The choice of an event as "first" is an arbitrary one, one of convenience. For a similar myth obtained in rural Bengal, see Davis (1976).

Introduction 7

whereas a marriage will be harmonious (in a state of equilib- rium) only if the partners in marriage belong to similar, if not identical, jatis; however, the male in any marriage must be older than the female (i.e., rank higher with respect to age) if healthy (equilibriated) sexuality is to be achieved, and so on. Clearly, these are but a few of many more possible ways in which states of intersubstantial equilib- rium are attained.

While I hope that someone will undertake the compelling task of enumerating and delineating precisely the various types and dimensions of possible modes and means for achieving intersubstantial equilibriums, in this study I do not intend to embark upon such an enterprise. Part I and Part II are divided according to two broadly differentiatable types of action. In Part II, action will be directed toward bringing about (or restoring) a state of ultimate, perfect, and unlimited equilibrium of substance. Orthodox Hindu con- cerns with salvation as release from saY(lsiira, the cycle of births and deaths, the merging of the individual soul (iitman) with the universal soul (brahman), are all closely related to the ethnography of Part II. In Part I, by contrast we shall encounter people's actions aimed at restoring sub- stantial equilibrium between substances in domains or con- texts that are limited by time, space, and place, among other thing~. The concerns of Part I implicate equilibrated states of a lower, less inclusive, marked order, whereas those of Part II implicate an equilibrium of the highest, unmarked, and most inclusive order. Stated differently, concerns with intersubstantial equilibrium in limited, lower-order, and less inclusive contexts stand in a metonymic relationship to the all-encompassing equilibrium attained in salvation- salvation being not unlike the equilibrated state described to us as having existed in the primordial being at the be- ginning of time in the creation myth above. From the more inclusive perspective, then, context-specific, equilibrium- directed actions are mere rudiments or facsimiles of actions aimed at achieving the ultimate equilibrated order that transcends all contexts.

8 Introduction

More specifically, insofar as the above-mentioned lower- order, less inclusive states of intersubstantial equilibrium are concerned, I focus on a particular expression of this equilibrium, that of intersubstantial "compatibility." The preoccupation with limited equilibrated states is evidenced in almost all of a Tamil's daily activities. Such preoccupa- tions are most often expressed in terms of compatibility. For example, be it with respect to the food one chooses to eat or not to eat or the way one chooses to build one's house or not to build it or the kind of partner one opts to marry or not to marry or the day and time of the year one selects to perform a certain ritual or not to perform it, concern with equilib- riums or equilibrated states is expressed in terms of com- patibility. "Will this food be compatible with my body?" one asks. "Will this house, if built in such and such a way in such and such a place, be compatible with my horoscope?" "Will the time of the day that I set out on a given business venture be compatible with my mental state at that time or not?" The Tamil word most often employed in such in- stances, which I have translated as "compatible," is ottu- vanlfal which also connotes fitness or appropriateness. This concern with compatibility of substances is complemented by specialists' as well as laymen's knowledge of numerous fine distinctions made of the phenomenal universe, distinc- tions characterized by differentially ranked and valued sub- stances, be they Brahmin and Parayan, male and female, bitter earth and sweet earth, bile and phlegm, or consonant and vowel. Disequilibrated or incompatibly conjoined sub- stances are "ill," or "imperfect." This knowledge I have referred to operates at every level of existence and aims at restoring intersubstantial compatibility, if not ultimate equilibri urn.

The knowledge required for the attainment of ultimate and perfect equilibrium is of a special kind. In contradistinc- tion to the knowledge that is at the service of states of limited equilibrium, this knowledge blurs all categorical distinctions until the very distinction between self and

Introduction 9

other is transcended. The process of this transcendence will be illustrated in Part II, whereas the four chapters of Part I that follow this Introduction will be concerned with rela- !ionships of compatibility and incompatibility between and among substances encountered in everyday life.

Apart from this broad organizing principle, the arrange- ment of the chapters of Part I and Part II was basically motivated by a whim, a certain pretension to some measure of architectural finesse. It is not new. Brenda Beck has already written an ethnography on South India, which is basically a replicate of the Chinese box principle (1972). Mine was intended to portray a series of enclosures, con- cealing the "person" at its core, where I wanted ultimately to arrive. The organization of these chapters in this manner was not intended to be a simulacrum of any cultural reality.· Almost fortuitously, however, this organization facilitated· understanding of the fluidity of enclosures in Tamil con- , ceptual thought, whether the boundaries of a village, the , walls of a house, the skin of a person, or the sign vehicle of a ' sign. Another related benefit was my ability to appreciate the cultural reality of the non individual person. Or to put it in terms that anticipate the next chapter, one begins to know a person by knowing the "personality" of the soil on which he lives. So to the question, Wasn't the person at the core the real person? the answer is like "the exhortation of the Majorca storytellers: Aixo er y no era (it was and it was not)" (Ricoeur 1977: 224).

Chapter 2 concerns a person's compatibility with terri- torial substance (ur). The territory that affects a person's bodily substance is the village in which he is born and, to a lesser extent, the village or town or country he chooses to live in. These effects are manifest in significant events as varied as the ups and downs of personal fortune, happi- ness, state of health, or anxiety about the afterlife. We shall also see that village is too flabby a term to render a culturally, though cryptotypically, crucial distinction between an ur and a kiriimam, the former denoting the quality or disposi-

10 Introduction

tion of a territorial unit, especially with regard to its effect on and effect by its inhabitants, and the latter denoting a terri- torial unit, usually a village, which has clear demarcating boundaries. Kiramam would lend itself with ease to distinc- tive feature analysis, whereas ur calls for a pragmatic analy- sis (a Ia Silverstein 1976) in order to unpack its meaning.

In chapter 3 I close further in on the core person by attempting to understand, in cultural terms, the nature of the relationship between houses and those who own or build them. Once again it will become evident that this relationship, as in the case of villager and village, is under- stood in substantial terms. The inhabitants of a house or an ur are concerned as to whether they are compatible with that house or that ur; furthermore, there is sufficient evi- dence that this compatibility is expressed in the idiom of compatibility of substance.

Chapter 4 will sketch the way in which a male and a female exchange substances in sexual intercourse as well as sketch the formation of the nature of the fetus that results from the combination of these sexual-fluid substances. A healthy child is the result of a mixing of compatible sub- stances, not only those of male and female but also of other substances, such as the gaze of auspiciously positioned planets at the moment of birth. Furthermore, it will be shown that not only is the health of the child determined by the compatibility of the sexual fluids but the health of the sexual partners is likewise determined. In the final chapter of Part I, we will focus our attention not on interpersonal exchange of substances but on certain very essential intra- personal substances whose equilibrated state is quintessen- tial for the well-being of a person. In this chapter we will learn how action, or karmam, itself operating as a sub- stance, mixes with a person's prior kul)am9 substance and qualitatively alters the balance of kul)ams for better or for worse. This intrapersonal flow of substances will be ex-

9 Provisionally defined here as "quality" or "disposition."

Introduction 11

plored through the analysis of a popular rite of divination. In Part II, the knowledge of diversity is replaced by the

knowledge of unity, and the quest becomes one for perfect equilibrium and conjunction through a transcendental ex- perience of the undifferentiated tranquillity of inner unity. A pilgrimage of villagers in which the anthropologist par- took becomes the ritual means to effect this experience. For most pilgrims this experience proves to be only a moment's revelation; for some, it leads to a permanent release from the differentiated, manifest world and a total immersion in one's essence, which is the universal essence, the undif- ferentiated primordial substance. From previewing the organization of the text and outlining its main argument, I would like to move on to consider the theoretical matrix in which the text is embedded.

This book was not born with a great title but had to struggle through several intolerable ones before settling on the present one. The last abandoned title read, Kalappiir: From Person to Place Through Mixed Substance. The Semeiosis of a Culture. The trouble with that title, apart from its pon- derousness, was that it failed to include some of the other

' even more interesting, topics discussed in the book, such as houses and boundaries, disputes and color symbolism, marriage and compatibility, sex and divination, sickness and health, food and flavors, ghee and semen, and much more. While all the key terms in that abandoned title spelled out the major abstractions that have helped frame the book, the omitted details-some large, some small-are the ones that have given the volume life. Hence the present com- promise, a title that neither says too much nor too little, constructed with the hope that even the reader who fails to see the whole point of the exercise in abstractions will, after having read this book, feel adequately acquainted with life and living in a tiny Tamil village in South India and will be able to partake in the imagination of its people and the genius of its culture. Before we steep ourselves in the ethnographic description that perfuses the main text, it is

12 Introduction

only proper to delineate some of the major theoretical terms and assumptions that constitute the discursive context of the text. The reader may, however, choose to skip over the rest of this introductory chapter save the last section, en- titled" About This Research," continue to read from chapter 2 through the end, and then return to these unread pages and read them as postface.