The author, a sociologist at the South Asian University in Delhi, India, here provides us with a reflexive study of the “folklore” of the Madhubans, an area of north-central India that is known for its distinct dialect of Hindi (Maithili), as well as for its painting style that became popular all over the world as a result of the festival of India that was held at the Smithsonian’s Folklife Festival on the DC Mall back in 1984. But the tradition has a long and ancient history as a form of wall painting, both in India and Nepal. Dev Nath Pathak is less interested in the visual images of the region, more consumed by their views on death. The most appropriate way to do this is through the region’s oral traditions, which, he argues, do not always correspond directly with the Sanskrit classical tradition. He thus seeks the meanings imbued in “folk” narratives performed on certain appropriate occasions. The hermeneutics of the narratives he explores is based on a number of binaries, such as private/public, subjective/objective, local/translocal, conscious/unconscious, text/context, and oral/written. All of this is to say that folklore should not be interpreted on the basis of classical written texts, for that gives priority to the latter. Folklore, he argues, must be interpreted on its own terms, yet he consistently draws on the classical tradition. To draw out the distinctness of folklore, however, he fashions an interdisciplinary toolbox not only from folkloristics but also from sociology, ethnomusicology, and social anthropology.
Pathak’s field site is the village of Fulhara, in the southern part of Mithila, located in Samastipur district. His primary data is supplemented with less extensive fieldwork in other villages in the district of Darbhanga. The focus of the work is on songs sung in connection with ritual performances conducted during rites of passage. The author is less interested in the rituals themselves than in the songs that are sung during the rituals, since he erroneously feels that the meaning lies in the songs (5). I question whether one can separate the songs from the rituals in which they are sung in order to derive true contextual meaning, since both are part and parcel of the affective dimension of rites of passage performances. But less than a page later, he seems to argue the opposite, when he writes that he is interested in how “life with its various junctures marked by the rites of passage is visualized and how death is perceived through the prism of life form.” From the outset, I continued to find contradictory assumptions such as the one just pointed out. The author wishes to sound savvy by incorporating a sort of postmodern dialogue based on dialectical discourse, but he constantly hems and haws his way through a dense series of complexities that weave through the religious, philosophical, and metaphysical dimensions of “folk” thinking, not to mention how these get filtered through the social lives of the beings inhabiting his study. The author is quick to point out the “messy” realm of meanings (9) with which he engages, but I still find some fault in how he seemingly contradicts himself several times throughout this study of what he calls “folk philosophy.” First of all, who are the folk and what is folk thinking? To my mind, Pathak takes us back to the romanticized notion of the rural folk, who think orally, as opposed to the urban literati who read the classics. Such a move is hardly necessary in this day and age, after folkloristics has long abandoned the rural/urban divide.
What then follows is the author’s musings on the “death of death” in sociological studies, and how the concept of “ambivalent modernity” might be a way of allowing for a more “polyphonous” view of death. Pathak, in his mode of reflexivity, refuses to follow any particular methodological trajectory, so he seems to want to thrive on unconventionality by “learning, unlearning, and relearning” (20). In a sense, he is suggesting that his fieldwork was, in a very real sense, his own rite of passage into the community he studies, but also into the community of academe. None of this is very new, so I became tired of reading about the same well-worn tropes over and over again. I kept waiting for something novel to emerge from his endless meditations, but I was left feeling somewhat disappointed at the end, where he revisits the concept of the folk by returning to Srinivas’s notion of “Sanskritization” and Singer’s analysis of the categories “great” and “little.” I was hoping for more in the very last section of his concluding chapter, titled “Beyond Tradition and Modernity,” in which he coins the concept of “contextual modernity.” The idea is based on the notion that there is “an engagement with social reality and its components that could simultaneously exhibit the features of modern and traditional world views” (223-4). Again, this idea is far from new, and what we end up with is more hyper-reflexivity and self-indulgence than is necessary to make the point that the investigator is part and parcel of the ethnographic discourse.
In conclusion, the author acquired some rich and interesting ethnographic data on Maithili folksongs alluding to death (and life), but it is a pity that he did not include more of this data. Moreover, he does not use proper transliteration, since there are no diacritics employed for his transcribed oral texts, which is problematic from the scholarly, sociolinguistic perspective, especially since he is dealing with a dialect rather than standard Hindi. Diacritics are absolutely necessary for transcribing and analyzing dialects from a sociolinguistic perspective, since it is not just a structural function but a poetic one as well that is being presented to the reader. In short, this volume is theory driven, so we do not get to “hear” enough of the data, which is a pity, since the material he acquired in the field is much richer than the theory he espouses in this awkward volume.
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[Review length: 996 words • Review posted on January 23, 2020]