Kindred publics: the modernity of kin fetishism in western India

Abstract

This essay offers a particular reading of postcolonial publics while attending specifically to the modern Marathi public in western India. Whereas modern publics are assumed to be animated by stranger-sociality, this essay argues that, on the contrary, it is a kind of fetishized performance of kin relations that we see in Marathi publics. What the author calls 'kin fetishism' makes for a qualitatively different kind of public arena, a difference accounted for by the fact that the postcolonial public is situated in a socio-economic reality that is distinct from that which underpins the much-theorized Western public. The essay explores how, in postcolonial publics, the dichotomy of 'outside' to 'inside' troubles the dichotomy between public and private, and suggests that such jostling is symbolically resolved in cultural forms in Marathi public spaces.

Acknowledgements

Thanks first to my parents Vasant and Jennifer Talwalker whose help gave me the time to write this essay. My special gratitude always to my partner Munis Faruqui. Thanks also to many readers and co-panellists, especially Nilgun Uygun and Beth Roy, and to the participants in the faculty workshop of the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. Versions of this essay have been presented at the American Anthropological Association meetings (2006) and the Berkeley South Asia Conference (2007).

Notes

1. Earlier known as Bombay—a name I will occasionally use.

2. Jacqueline Stevens, Reproducing the State, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.

3. See Janet Carsten, After Kinship, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon, ‘New Directions in Kinship Study: A Core Concept Revisited’, Current Anthropology 41(2), 2000, pp 275–279; Linda Stone (ed), New Directions in Anthropological Kinship, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001; Sylvia Yanagisako and Carol Delaney (eds), Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis, New York: Routledge, 1995.

4. This paper is based on fieldwork conducted amongst middle-class Marathi teachers and litterateurs in Mumbai in the late 1990s.

5. The ‘public sphere’ is a term theorized most famously by Jürgen Habermas, whose work has been widely debated and revised both by European scholars and, importantly for this essay, also by South Asianists.

6. See Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge, ‘Public Modernity in India’, in Carol A Breckenridge (ed), Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995, pp 1–20; Rachel Dwyer, All You Want is Money, All You Need is Love: Sex and Romance in Modern India, London: Cassell, 2000; and Christopher Pinney, ‘Introduction: Public, Popular, and Other Cultures’, in Rachel Dwyer and Christopher Pinney (eds), Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Politics, and Consumption of Public Culture in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp 1–34, for the ubiquitous and dominating imprint of Bollywood on India's public sphere.

7. Sheldon Pollock, ‘The Cosmopolitan Vernacular’, Journal of Asian Studies 57(1), 1988, pp 6–37.

8. See the works of Durga Bhagwat, Philip Engblom and Eleanor Zelliot, and specifically Irawati Karve, ‘On the Road: A Maharashtrian Pilgrimage’, Journal of Asian Studies 22(1), 1962, pp 13–29; and Prachi Deshpande, Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India, 1700–1960, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

9. See Veena Naregal, Language Politics, Elites, and the Public Sphere: Western India under Colonialism, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001; and Verinder Grover (ed), Mahadev Govind Ranade, New Delhi: Deep & Deep Publishers, 1990, on Ranade.

10. See http://musicandnoise.blogspot.com/2008/10/in-defence-of-marathi.html (accessed November 5, 2008).

11. Madhava M Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998.

12. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981.

13. See Arjun Appadurai, ‘Why Public Culture?’, Public Culture Bulletin 1(15), 1988; and Appadurai and Breckenridge, ‘Public Modernity in India’.

14. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Adda, Calcutta: Dwelling in Modernity’, Public Culture 11(1), 1999, pp 109–145.

15. Chakrabarty, ‘Adda, Calcutta’, p 182. Though this quote seems clearly to suggest that Chakrabarty views the Bengali adda as permitting some kind of coming to terms for the Bengali middle class with what he calls capitalist modernization, he later contradicts this very point, writing that ‘The modern and hybrid space of Bengali adda thus does not in any way resolve the tensions brought about by the discourses of modernity and capitalism’ (p 212). He prefers to think of adda as a space where the tensions are played out, and not resolved. This is not unlike Kaviraj's view of modern urban spaces as sites of the conflict between public/private and inside/outside. My rereading (later in this essay) of Kaviraj to foreground symbolic resolutions, albeit uneasy, over conflicts, applies more or less exactly to Chakrabarty's qualification here.

16. Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘Filth and Public Space’, Public Culture 10(1), 1997, p 91.

17. Kaviraj, ‘Filth and Public Space’, p 86.

18. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Open Space/Public Place: Garbage, Modernity and India’, South Asia 14(1), 1991, p 25.

19. Kaviraj, ‘Filth and Public Space’, p 100—italics his own.

20. ‘Partible selves’—a term famously coined by Marilyn Strathern, The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

21. Kaviraj, ‘Filth and Public Space’, p 101.

22. Partha Chatterjee, ‘Whose Imagined Community?’, in The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994, pp 6–9.

23. See Jürgen Habermas, ‘The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964)’, New German Critique 1(3), 1974, pp 49–55; and The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.

24. See Nancy Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’, in Bruce Robbins (ed), The Phantom Public Sphere, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993; and James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

25. Chatterjee, ‘Whose Imagined Community?’, p 6.

26. Chatterjee, ‘Whose Imagined Community?’, p 11.

27. Partha Chatterjee, ‘Beyond the Nation? Or Within?’, Economic and Political Weekly 32(1/2), 1997, pp 30–34.

28. Whereas the Kaviraj description of public/private tangled with inside/outside works nicely for the bourgeois or middle-class spaces of bhadralok homes, city parks, and the worlds of mainstream modern Indian literature, we would need to look to the works of Robin Jeffrey, India's Newspaper Revolution: Capitalism, Politics and the Indian-language Press, 1977–99, New York: St Martin's Press, 2000; S V Srinivas, ‘Is There a Public in the Cinema Hall?’, Framework 42, www.frameworkonline.com/42svs.htm (accessed in 2000); Susan Seizer, Stigmas of the Tamil Stage: An Ethnography of Special Drama Artists in South India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005; Sara Dickey, ‘Opposing Faces: Film Star Fan Clubs and the Construction of Class Identities in South India’, in Rachel Dwyer and Christopher Pinney (eds), Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Politics and Consumption of Public Culture in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001; and others, for discussions of how, if at all, such a tangle obtains beyond the Indian middle class.

29. Michael Warner, ‘Publics and Counterpublics’, Public Culture 14(1), 2002, pp 49–90.

30. Warner, ‘Publics’, p 9.

31. Naregal, Language Politics, p 254n.

32. See M S Dixit, Maharashtra Sahitya Parishad [Maharashtra Literature Organization], Mumbai: Rajya Marathi Vikas Sanstha, 2005, for more on the history of the Marathi Sahitya Sammelan.

33. Sandria Freitag, ‘Enactments of Ram's Story and the Changing Nature of “The Public” in British India’, South Asia 14(1), 1991, pp 65–90.

34. See Clare Talwalker, ‘Shivaji's Army and Other “Natives” in Bombay’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 16(2), 1996, pp 114–122, for a discussion of various strands of Marathi identity.

35. See Sumathi Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891–1970, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997, for a discussion of the deification of the Tamil language.

36. See Karve, ‘On the Road’, for an enchanting account of the caste barriers and other emotional experiences Karve experienced when she participated in the quintessential Maharashtrian Pandharpur pilgrimage.

37. Jainism is a religion, or a religious sect, organized around the reverence of the saint Mahavir.