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Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology

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Voice as birth of culture

a
Veena Das
a
University of Delhi , India
Published online: 20 Jul 2010.

To cite this article: Veena Das (1995) Voice as birth of culture , Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, 60:3-4, 159-179

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00141844.1995.9981516

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 Voice as Birth of Culture*

Veena Das
University of Delhi, India

This article examines the position of voice as standing beside culture in a manner
similar to Wittgensteins notion of the soul standing beside the body and meaning
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standing next to the word. While the article takes off from the realm of the imaginary
in which the figure of the woman standing between the zone of two deaths is
privileged since it draws forceful attention to uniqueness of being, it dwells at length
in the realm of everyday life. Here it is shown that it isfor the patient work of the
repair of relationships within which poisonous knowledge has entered. The weaving
of voice into the everyday concerns of cultural meanings enables us to see a kind of
healing that allows the 'souling' of culture.

T he occasion of the Vega Symposium on Culture and Voice, and the

honour done to me by the Swedish Society for Anthropology and
Geography in conferring on me the Anders Retzius medal for 1995
have become an invitation to overreach myself. For many years I have been
perplexed by the question: can one describe culture as having a soul, and
what would it mean to answer this question in the affirmative? One usually
associates the idea of a soul with an interiority that lies behind the exteriority
of the body or the face. But the culture of a society presents itself to us in vari-
ous external forms does it also have an interior? I shall do nothing more
here than evoke the very last statement in "Wittgenstein's Last Writings on the
Philosophy ofPsychology and then hope that the discussion and the examples
taken both from the register of the imaginary in Indian society and from per-
sonal biographies collected by me will elucidate this issue as it appears to me

The external does not have to be seen as a facade behind which the mental powers
are at work.... The idea of the human soul, which one either sees or doesn't see,

ETHNOS VOL. 6 0 : 3 - 4 , 1 9 9 5
Scandinavian University Press, pp. 159-179
 l6o VEENA DAS

is very similar to the idea of the meaning of a word, which stands next to the word,
whether as a process or an object (1982:127).

I see then the notions of culture and voice standing next to each other, rather
like word and meaning, but what this nextness implies is very difficult to con-
ceptualize once and for all. There are constantly moving, dynamic, challenging,
encompassing relations between culture as a societally agreed set of values
which structure voice and voice as appearing in transgression, proclaiming
the truth of culture and relationships - yet allowing culture to be born not
only as the external facade but as endowed with soul. Perhaps I should begin
with that splendid figure that has mesmerized Western philosophers and
poets, the figure of Antigone as one possible entry into the question of culture
and voice.
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The Figure of Antigone

The figure of Antigone as the foundational myth which explores the con-
ditions under which conscience may be voiced has captured the imagination
ofWestern scholars since Hegel. I want to take this mythic motif in a different
direction and ask what relation the appearance of voice has to the birth of
culture and its sustenance - does it soul1 culture? The perspective comes
from my study of Indian culture and society, taking both the production of
voice from the register of the imaginary and from that of women's everyday
life as seen through their personal biographies.
What should one consider essential in the figure of Antigone? Hegel
(1931) saw here a conflict of discourses since he believed that it is the spoken
dialogues that embody the fundamental arena of the play. He also assumed
that the conflict of discourses moved towards some kind of reconciliation
yet what reconciliation can one speak of in the face of Oedipus's final male-
diction, 'it was better never to have been born'? In the Hegelian view of Anti-
gone, Creon is opposed to Antigone as one principle of law is opposed to
another let us call it the opposition between the law of the state and the
law of family. It is linked to the opposition of structures.
As long as we are with Hegel in looking at the dialogue as constituting the
arena of the play, it is difficult to find other meanings in this tragedy except
in the conflict of structures. But let us look at the tragic setting of Antigone
which Jacques Lacan(i9Q2) has compared to the Shakespearian tragedies of
Hamlet and King Lear. If Hamlet stops when he is at the point of killing
Claudius, says Lacan, it is because he wants him to suffer hell's eternal torture

ETHNOS VOL. 60:3-4, I995

 Voice as Birth of Culture 161

- to die is not enough for him. Lacan draws our attention forcefully to the
nature of this zone - variously specified as the limit, as a happening between
two deaths, as the point in which death is engaged with life. The scene of
Antigone's death is this particular zone which she is compelled to occupy -
a zone from which alone certain unspeakable truths can be spoken.
Lacan rejects Hegel's view that Creon is opposed to Antigone as one
principle of law is opposed to another. Instead, he is more sympathetic to
Goethe's view that in striking Polyneices, Creon had gone beyond the limit,
for the issue was not that of one law versus another but whether the law of
Creon could subsume everything including the funerary rites to the dead.
Thus, says Lacan, it was never a question of one right versus another but one
wrongversus something else (another wrong? what wrong?). The first wrong
he identifies as the idea that there is no sphere of life to which law does not
have access. But what is it that Antigone represents in relation to this wrong?
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Lacan insists that Antigone's passion is not for the sacred rites of the dead
or of the family. Instead he draws our attention to the famous passage in
Antigone's speech which has caused discomfort to many of its commentators.
This is the speech Antigone makes after every move has been made her
capture, her defiance, her condemnation, her lamentation. Antigone is fac-
ing the tomb in which she is to be buried alive when she makes this speech:

Understand this. I would not have defied the law ofthe city, for a husband or a child
to whom a tomb had been dented, because after all if I had lost a husband I could
have taken another and even if I had lost a child I could have made another child
with another husband. But it concerned my brother, born of the same father and
the same mother.

It appears that there are two points here - the first that Antigone has moved
towards the limit at which the self separates itself into that which can be
destroyed and that which must endure. Antigone is making that speech
when she can imagine herself as already dead - and yet she endures this awe-
some play of pain to affirm not her own desires but the the non-substituta-
bility of her brother. Lacan rendering his own interpretation through the
voice of Antigone says, 'My brother may be a criminal, she is saying, but from
my point of view my brother is my brother, the register of being of someone
who has been named must be preserved*.
To Lacan it appears that it is Antigone speaking from this zone between
two deaths, who can voice the truth of the uniqueness ofbeing. The truth on

ETHNOS VOL. 6 0 : 3 - 4 , IQQ5

 162 VEENA DAS

whose name she speaks, goes beyond the laws of the State, and one may say
that in affirming the uniqueness of her criminal brother, her passion evokes
the crime underlying the law of the city itself.
We have one formulation here of the relation between culture and voice.
I believe this foundational myth has contributed much to the current
understanding of voice as appearing at the moment of transgression and
hence the location of agency in the act of transgression. But what transforms
Lacan's argument and lifts it away from the hundreds of papers appearing
every year on desire, pleasure, transgression and agency - is that desire to
affirm the uniqueness ofbeing against the suffocation of culture is not located
in the obsessive search for fulfilment of desire in submission to immediacy.
Instead, the zone between two deaths is identified as the privileged domain
within which the unspeakable truth about society may be spoken. Why is it
Antigone who must affirm the uniqueness of the person whom the law of the
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state has condemned as a criminal and whom it wishes to consign to an

eternal forgetfulness? In Lacan's formulation, the unspeakable truth that
Antigone speaks is too terrible to behold for it questions the legitimacy of the
rule that would efface the uniqueness of a person's being, consigning him to
complete forgetfulness. This truth needs the envelope of beauty to wrap it
and make it available to the gaze. Hence the splendour of Antigone. While
Lacan's stress on language over images has been noted by authors such as
MacCannell (1986) and Jay (1993), the manner in which beauty becomes an
envelope for truth, wraps it in splendour, so that its horror may be gazed at
has not been sufficiently explored.
The theme of the woman who is transformed by her place in this zone
lying between two deaths who can utter the terrible truth about society,
about relationships is an extremely important one in the Indian imaginary.
But does this truth need the envelope of beauty in this imaginary? I am not
too sure. Lacan himself uses the metaphor of seeing rather than hearing. Let
me evoke a scene from the register of the imaginary in modern Indian
literature and cinema to show how culture as the adherence to rule, or better,
as the adherence to societally proclaimed values alone, dies when faced with
the articulation of voice from the zone between two deaths. It is born again,
it acquires a soul, in the act of hearing. When a person can bear witness to
this form of suffering through the act of hearing, when the eye becomes
transformed from the organ that sees to one that weeps, that we can speak
of culture as having developed a soul. But is this way of speaking of culture
anything more than a metaphor or would it charge us as anthropologists to

ETHNOS VOL. 60:3-4, I995

 Voice as Birth of Culture 163

invent new ways of speaking about our ethnography? First let us look at the
register of the imaginary.

Voice in the Register of the Imaginary

Much of social science in India has been concerned with the eclipse of
traditional culture in the face of the twin birth of colonialism and modernity.
This theme of the contamination of traditions and the attempts to save them
against the colonial/modernist models by posing certain aspects of tradition
as the defence that a culture sets up to protect its authenticity, bears a re-
semblance to the earlier works of sociologists like Simmel. Simmel (1903).
thought of the interior of the houses as the counterpart of the public spaces
of the metropolis. This interior, he said, was filled with furniture that had the
character of fortification against the outside world and its transitory nature.
This theme of the exterior whose nature has become problematic and an in-
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terior that is conceived almost as a protest against the passage of time finds
its most sophisticated expression in India in Ashis Nandy's reading ofTagore.
In his most recent statement on the issue, Nandy (1994) argues that an
analysis of the distribution of male and female characters in the novels of Ra-
bindranath Tagore would show that colonialism made the male subject be-
reft of any authentic relation to tradition. An aggressive nationalism became
the substitute for the loss of self- an inauthentic response by the male subject
to overcome his loss of masculinity at the hands of colonial powers. The male
subject was penetrated by a foreign language; his dress codes altered to suit
the new role of the babu, and his English education cut him off not only from
his past but also from the more authentic ways of being Indian, by a sharp
divide between the home and the world.
Against this penetration of the male subject by the colonist discourses,
Nandy argues, was the sphere of the home - the feminine sphere in which
the continuities of tradition were maintained effortlessly by the women. The
maintenance of traditions of female modesty, the code of dress, and the ritual
encoding of tradition found their natural habitat in the home which became
the sphere in which the Indian identity was protected from the colonial on-
slaught.
Commenting on the male protagonists of Tagore's three well-known
novels {Gora, Char Adhyaya and GhoreBairi) Nandy (1994) says:

The apparent robustness of Sandip, Indranath, and the Hindu nationalist Gora,
derives from the denial of aspects of their culture and self that are identified with

ETHNOS VOL. 60:3-4, 1995

 164 VEENA DAS

effeminacy, especially maternity. The strongest resistance to them, too, finally

turns out to come from women; they are the psychological barricade that the
culture puts up to protect its svadharma (Nandy 1994).

Nandy's evocation of the feminine as the value in which the 'spirit* of India
lives and that acts as a kind of natural barrier against the values ofhypermascu-
linity that he has identified in his various writings as essential to the project
of modernity, recreates the common distribution of traits between the femi-
nine and the masculine as being equivalent to the opposition of nature and
culture; emotion and reason; the heterogeneity of the everyday versus the
purified and abstract character of reified ideologies. In this rendering culture
is born and sustained in a painless manner by the everyday activities of
women who do not ever have to invent themselves as cultural beings. Nor
is any character of Tagore in Nandy's reading called upon to deal with know-
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ledge that has become poisonous, or to affirm the uniqueness of being and
the non-substitutability of the being of someone who has been named, as in
Antigone. I take this not so much as a description of early twentieth-century
Bengal but the nostalgia that one encounters in the midst of the new for an
area of life that would remain untouched by the newness of modernity. In the
face of the loss of self to new and alienating forms of cultural domination the
hidden presence of women in the interior is the only guarantee that the civi-
lization has of an inner life of the spirit Nandy is led to equate this with some-
thing like the notion of soul that I have been labouring to describe.

Tradition and Fierce RegrefcThe Second Example

A very different view of tradition emerges from the work of Ritwik Gha-
tak who made films on Bengal, but from the subject position of an exile. Rit-
wik Ghatak was a product of the Indian People's Theatre Association which
was the cultural front of the Communist Movement in pre-independence
India. In the description of Ghatak's project, Geeta Kapur writes 'he pro-
vided the impetus to see the Indian tradition turned inside out' and problematized
the nurturing potential of perennial symbols by 'confronting them with a
historically framed subjectivity' (Kapur 1993). But how was this subjectivity
articulated? The finest example of the 'tradition turned inside out', is the film
Meghe Dhaka Tara, which portrays the life of a displaced family from East
Bengal made destitute, and its transformation into 'respectability' by the sac-
rifices it imposes on the eldest daughter. As the family exploits the labour of
the girl and even snatches away her desire for sexual love-investing it in a

ETHNOS VOL. 60:3-4, I995

 Voice as Birth of Culture 165

more appropriate receptacle in the form of the younger daughter, she herself
sinks into devastating disease (tuberculosis) and unbearable sorrow. Her
brother becomes a famous singer; the man she had imagined as her lover is
seduced by her younger sister and the parents are saved from the devastation
of poverty. All this is built on the money she has earned. Towards the end
of the film, the family shrinks from this diseased daughter, fearing for their
own health. Her brother takes her to a sanatorium on the hills. In the last few
shots brother and sister occupy the centre of the frame. As the camera stands
laterally to him, the brother describes the 'normality' that the family has
achieved - the two-storeyed house; her sister's son who is learning to walk
- then the camera foregrounds the face of the sister, now devastated with dis-
ease, as it pictures her top down, turned towards her brother, who is outside
the frame. Her voice takes over and she interrupts his smooth flow of words
by letting slip a waif-like desire and says 'Dada, I wanted to live' arid then the
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speech becomes a wail - repeated again and again; again and again D-a-a-a-
d-a-a Aami B-a-a-achb-0-0-0 ('Dada I will live"). In one of the concluding
frames of their togetherness, her sorrow has a support she is leaning over
the shoulder of her brother but soon the brother disappears from the frame.
Then Ghatak's camera moves to take panoramic shots of the beauty and
splendour of the sky, the hills and the majestic trees. The human faces dis-
appear from view - only the cry 'Dada, I will live' is heard pressing its des-
perate demand on the viewer. But the camera continues to move away, cap-
turing the majestic beauty of nature and its complete indifference to human
suffering. At this point a silence descends and we hear a string of musical
notes - the same notes with which Ghatak had announced himself at the
beginning of the film. He seems to be saying but I hear you.
In Ghatak's theme of the predatory nature of culture, it is not the everyday
occupations of women that can guarantee the spirit of the civilization -
indeed, it is the building up of the family by eating one of its own daughters
is a recurring theme in Ghatak. Unlike Antigone, the female protagonist is
presented at this moment when she speaks the bitter truth about the criminal
nature of culture as devoid of all splendour. Her beauty is stripped, her body
is wasted, and she presses her claim to life at this moment of her engagement
with death. If Antigone was covering the rotting body of her brother, the
sister in Ghatak must cover the poison that has entered the soul of each and
every relationship that she had cherished. It is my claim that Ghatak's
women occupy the zone between two deaths as much as the protagonists in
the tragic scenes fom Hamlet, Lear, and Antigone, but what differentiates

ETHNOS VOL. 60:3-4, 1995

 l66 VEENA DAS

Ghatak is that he poses the question: 'who hears this voice?' and not the
question: 'how should one gaze at this terrible truth?'
In a recent paper on the transactions between language and body in the
construction of pain, I noted that denial of the other's pain is not about the
failings of the intellect but the failings of the spirit. Stanley Cavell (1995)
makes explicit this claim in the following words:

So I understand Veena Das's more or less implicit claim to be a double one,

namely, that the study of a society's suffering must contain a study of that society's
silence toward its suffering (or say the degree of its incapacity to acknowledge it),
and that the study of that suffering and that silence must contain an awareness of
the study's own dangers in mimicking the social silence that perpetuates the suf-
fering. ('Dangers'? Say that a society must be allowed some degree of unconsciousness
of itself, to disguise from itself, in order to maintain belief in itself, the 'unnecessary'
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pain it inflicts upon itself; as the individual ego must be allowed some unconsciousness
of its desires in order to live with itself. But a science can make no allowance for
itself of such a kind. To recognize what it does not know is part of its mission of
knowledge) (Cavell 1995).

Thus in the register of the imaginary, the failure to recognize pain is port-
rayed as a spiritual failure. We find this intuition in the film maker Ritwik
Ghatak as well as in the short stories of Manto that I have analysed else-
where. Both seem to recognize that it is when a character can view another
in the uniqueness of her being rather than through the categories enjoined
by tradition that he or she is born into the culture. Moral judgement then is
not a mechanical application of rules of culture but stems from the recog-
nition of the other's pain.
I reproduce the following observations from my interpretation of a
famous story by Manto in which a father recognizes the pain of the daughter
who has been brutally raped during the communal riots in 1947, and does not
simply cast her aside as one who has violated the family honour (see Das
1991 and 1995).

In giving the shout of joy and saying 'my daughter is alive', the father does not
speak here in the personalized voice of tradition. In the societal context of this
period, when ideas of purity and honour densely populated the literary narratives
as well as family and political narratives so that fathers willed their daughters to
die for family honour rather than live with bodies that had been violated by other
men, this father wills his daughter to live even as parts of her body can do nothing else

ETHNOS VOL. 60:3-4, 1995

 Voice as Birth of Culture 167

but proclaim her brutal violation. ...Compare this with hundreds of stories in
accounts purporting to be based on direct experience in which the archetypical
motif was of a girl finding her way to her parents after having been subjected to
rape and plunder and being told, 'why are you here - it would have been better
if you were dead'. As I have argued elsewhere, such rejections may not have
occurred as often as they were alleged to have happened in narratives. But the
wide spread belief in such narrative truths of sacrificing the daughter for main-
taining the unsullied purity and honour of the family, attests to the power of this
myth. To be masculine when death was all around was to be able to hand death
to your violated daughter without flinching one bit - to obliterate any desire for
the concreteness of this human being who once played in your family yard. In the
background of such stories, a single sentence of joy uttered by old Sarjuddin trans-
forms the meaning of being a father (Das 1995)-

Against the dominant view of culture as simply shared values or as critique

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of judgement, the realm of the imagination is seen to become possible be-

cause the moment of the engagement between life and death, the zone be-
tween two deaths is also the zone from which the truth about that culture can
be spoken and heard. From beinga dead shell, culture comes to be born para-
doxically at this juncture when a different relationship between the articula-
tion of voice and hearing is established. This birthing is for me the act which
enables us to speak of culture as having a soul.

The Realm of Everyday Relations

It may be argued that in the realm of the imaginary we can find it possible
to address the question of the souling of culture, but that it is difficult to ask
the same question for the realm of the everyday. I give an example in this
section of the manner in which families which had suffered the trauma of
Partition dealt with the poisonous knowledge of having witnessed unprece-
dented violence. I evoke here only one biography, that of Asha, and show
how the events of the Partition get woven into the events of her life in a
manner that makes the vulnerability of the widow appear in stark relief.2
Asha was not herself subjected to sexual violence from the rioters, but the
trauma of the violence transformed her world. Hers is a story of how ordi-
nary women lived with these transformations and engaged in their everyday
life doing the work of the patient repair of relationships. Hence they did not
make dramatic pronouncements about the death of their worlds, but as Anti-
gone covered the rotting body of her brother, refusing to let it lie unacknow-
ledged - so it seems to me Asha like many other women covered the rotting

ETHNOS VOL. 60:3-4, *995

 l68 VEENA DAS

scenes they had witnessed. Unlike women who sacrificed their lives rather
than submit to dishonour and who were valorized in family narratives,
women like Asha who had transgressed the received norms of their culture
but who laboured to restore the being of those who had violated them in
several ways, were erased from family memories. They became the castaways
of the official face of culture. Yet it seems to me that it is they who allowed
the culture as a system of meanings and of relationships which they lived, to
be reborn through various acts of forgiveness.
Asha was 55 year old when I came to know her. Married into an affluent
family of the trader caste, she had lived with her husband and his two elder
married brothers in the ancestral home in Lahore. She had been widowed
at the age of twenty in 1941. Her husband had typhoid and he died within
three weeks of his illness. He was the youngest brother in a fraternally joint
family. In addition he had been very close to his two older married sisters
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who had virtually brought him up since their mother had died in childbirth.
She said that the grief of her husband's sisters had been as fierce as her own
grief.
She recalled the earliest period of her bereavement as one in which she
had received enormous affection and support from them. She continued to
live with the family of her husband's elder brother. The fact that she was
childless weighed very heavily with her. She said that she had lost all interest
in life. In order to reawaken her interest in life, her husband's younger sister
gave her own son in 'adoption' to her. The child was not taken away from
his own mother but it was presumed that as he grew into adulthood, he
would take the responsibility of caring for her. Such arrangements were com-
mon within a kinship group even thirty years ago, for women often treated
their children as 'shared' (Bache te sajhe honde ham). It was, therefore, not
unusual for various combinations of relationships to evolve over a single
child. This was one way by which a community of women took care of a
particular member who had become bereaved. In some ways they evolved
cultural subtexts which were anchored in the dominant patriarchal texts of
the society, yet created spaces for new and caring relations. In this case, for
example, it would have been out of the question to let the widow adopt a
child outside the patrilineal kinship group by marking one child from
within the kinship group as especially hers, a special relationship was sought
to be created between them. In the women's understanding and construction
of nature, a woman, it was felt, experienced the lack of motherhood most
acutely - hence her husband's sisters tried to fill this emptiness in Asha's life.

ETHNOS VOL. 60:3-4, X 995

 Voice as Birth of Culture 169

It may be argued that this very construction of female 'need' constrains

women to invest desire in maternity rather than, let us say, sexuality. Hence
it constructs the female self in accordance with the dominant cultural para-
digms. This is true - yet we shall see that the cultural representations do not
become completely mapped upon the self. If the social context alters sudden-
ly, a different definition of female 'need' may be evoked by the woman her-
self, or by other social actors. Thus individual lives may traverse moments
when the social context suddenly alters. Periods of political violence may
make a family descend into violence, as often as these may elevate it into
reachingheights of altruism. In both contexts other possibilities of constructing
agency may be taken by a person by combining different subject positions in
new ways. The Partition became such an event for Asha.
During the Partition Asha's conjugal family lost everything and had to
escape from Lahore empty-handed. Her husband's elder sister died in the
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riots. It was never clear whether she had killed herself or whether she had
been abducted. In all the narratives about Lahore that I heard in this family,
there was a blanking of this period.
In the months just preceding and following the Partition, residential
arrangements were very unstable with people moving from one place to
another in search of jobs, houses, and for ways to reformulate their existence.
Families coming from the Pakistani side of the border sought the help of
relatives who lived on the Indian side. If there were no relatives or if they
could not sustain and support these waves of migrants, then people sought
shelter in refugee camps.
Asha's natal family lived in Amritsar so they became the first source of
support for her conjugal family. At one time she recalled that forty persons
were being given shelter in their house. Slowly, within months, as other
relatives in Simla, Delhi, and Ferozpur (all places that remained within the
Indian side of the border) came forward to help, the affinal kin of Asha began
to scatter in different places. Asha was left with her 'adopted' son in her
father's family. But while her parents were supportive, her brother and his
wife did not want to take on this extra burden upon themselves. This would
never have been directly stated by them but would have been communicated
through veiled speech and an aesthetic of gestures.
Asha philosophized on this in the following way: 'A daughter's food is
never heavy on her parents but how long will one's parests live? When even
two pieces of bread are experienced as heavy by one's own brother then it
is better to save your honour and rake one's peace and to live where one was

ETHNOS VOL. 60:3-4, I995

 170 VEENA DAS

destined to live*. The idiom in which Asha's complaint is expressed needs

further exegesis3. A daughter's food is never heavy on her parents - lit. beti
dirotimapyo te bharinahin hondi.
Asha is evoking the cultural idea here that even though the norms of kin-
ship orient a daughter towards her affinal kin, the natal kin have some residu-
al obligations towards a daughter. She can always lay claims on her father
and mother for support in case of trouble - parents do not consider the obli-
gation to provide the daughter with support as a burden because of their love
for a daughter (but one should note that the emphasis is only on support for
survival; attempts on the part of parents to provide more than this would
create resentment). Hence what the daughter claims as food from the fath-
er's house is not experienced as heavy by them.

But How Long Will One's Parents Live?

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When a married daughter makes a claim on her parents because she is

fadngmisfortune in her husband's house, she tends to forget time's effacement
of relationships. There will inevitably come a time when parents will not be
there to offer her a welcome - power will pass into the hands of her brother
and his wife. Then the two pieces of bread she is laying claims on in her
parental home will become heavy on her brother and his wife. The ephemerality
ofher claim on her parents' home must always be kept in mind by a daughter.

When even two pieces ofbread are experienced as 'heavy' by one's own brother...

In Punjabi society, the relations between brothers are acknowledged as

fraught with tensions which stem from the fact of their being coparcenaries.
There is a further tension between the principle of hierarchy by which the
elder brother is to be treated as a father and the principle of equality by which
all brothers have equal rights over the ancestral property and are to be
treated as equals. In contrast, the relation between brother and sister is valor-
ized as a sacred relationship in which the sister provides spiritual protection
to the brother. In exchange she is the honoured gift receiver in her brother's
house. A married sister who visits on ritual occasions, brings gifts for her
brother's children as is appropriate, and receives gifts given freely and loving-
ly from her brother's house, bringing honour to both families. But a destitute
married sister who has been compelled to leave her affinal home to make a
place for herself in her brother's house comes to be an object of suspicion,
especially from the brother's wife who suspects that she may use her position

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 Voice as Birth of Culture 171

to usurp a share of the brother's property. Many of the women's songs cap-
ture this sense of the married daughter being an exile - her desire to visit her
father's home being seen by the brother as an excuse to demand a share in
the father's property. This is why the two pieces of bread that the sister con-
sumes come to be seen as heavy - they point to a time when the anguish of
the sister will not be heard any more in the natal home.

... it is better to keep your honour ...

Asha knows that in the altered circumstances, her affinal kin were hard-
pressed to support her. Yet it is better to keep your honour, she says, by
putting up with humiliations in the affinal homethat is a woman's lot - she
will lose her place in the parental home where she is entitled to receive
honour if she fails to anticipate the inevitable souring of relations were she
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to claim the right to make her home there.

... and make your peace (lit. shanti banaye rai/10).

Making your peace does not have the sense of a passive submission here but
of an active engagement - the constant doing of little things that will make
the affinal family see you under a different aspect than that of a widow who
is a burden. For example, while Asha must completely efface her sexuality,
she must always be available for chores that others shrink from - rolling
papads for hours, cleaning a young child's bottom, grinding or pounding
spices. Similarly the expression of affect has to be managed carefully. As a
widow Asha's face must always portray the constant presence of grief - the
parting of the hair being emptied of the auspicious red vermilion, she told me
once, was symbolic of all that is in the nature of a void in the cosmos. Yet if
grief is too flamboyantly displayed, it makes everyone uncomfortable, as if
they were betraying a departed brother, or an uncle, by laughing or enjoying
a special snack. There is a special aesthetic of the senses here by which a
widow, especially a young childless widow, understands her vulnerability
which consists of recognizing that she is inauspicious; that she reminds
everyone in the family of a much beloved brother whom they have lost to
untimely death; and yet whose memory must not be allowed to come in the
way of other tasks of getting ahead in life. Her face and her body must
constantly enact this aesthetic.

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 172 VEENA DAS

... and live where one is destined to live ...

Here there is the evocation of the cultural idea that a woman's destiny lies
in the husband's house. This is reiterated for girls whose socialization em-
phasizes their future in the husband's house. Older women often expressed
the idea that a girl goes into her husband's house in the bridal palanquin (doh)
- and should come out riding on the shoulders of four men as a corpse.
The exegesis of this single statement makes clear how much of Asha's
voice was shaped by the cultural norms of widowhood yet it must be re-
membered that before the Partition she did not have to consider these choi-
ces. It was not that the norms were different earlier - but that the composition
of the family and especially the close relations she had with her husband's
sister did not require such articulation of norms. Though a widow, she felt
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that she had a rightful place within the affinal family.

With the Partition came an enormous decline in the family's fortunes.
Each unit of the previously joint family was facing new and what appeared
as insurmountable problems. Where would they live? Where would the
children go to school? One of the children was ready for medical school.
How was his father going to raise money for his education? Under the new
kinds of tensions to which the families were now subjected, Asha found a
subtle change in the way she was being treated. Whereas earlier the death
of her husband was seen as a great misfortune for her, now blame began to
be attached to her for his death. She was slowly being pushed into the posi-
tion of a scapegoat Sometimes her affinal kinswomen, i.e., her husband's
brother's wife and her husband's sister, would taunt her for having been un-
able to lure her husband into life. As Asha described it:

They began to say that he had been very disappointed in my looks. He was such
a handsome man and I was such an ordinary woman, Perhaps he lost interest in
life because he did not really like me. This made me so guilty that I often thought
of killing myself.

Asha moved between her natal family, her husband's brother's family and
her husband's sister's family for the next four years.

Everywhere I tried to make myself useful. I would work from morning to night.
I was so fond of the children that I was prepared to put up with anything for their

ETHNOS VOL. 60:3-4, I995

 Voice as Birth of Culture 173

sake. But soon the taunts became worse. And what was unbearable was the fact
that my///a/V [HZH] who was now a widower began to make sexual passes at me
which were very difficult to resist. I was torn between loyalty to my dead husband,
his sister whom I had loved very much and the new kinds of needs that seemed
to be aroused by the possibility of a new relationship. I began to see that I would
always be the person who was available for experimentation. He never suggested
marriage which would have created a scandal since I had lived in their house for
so long. Finally, I wrote to a very dear friend of my husband's who lived in Poona.
He suggested that I come to visit his family. When I went to Poona, he persuaded
me that I had long life stretching ahead of me and that if I did not wish to be con-
stantly degraded, I should get remarried. There was a wealthy man in Poona. His
wife had left him. He was much older than me but this friend arranged a marriage
between us. I then wrote both to my natal family and to the members of my conju-
gal family that I had been remarried. There was a complete furore and they swore
never to see me again. They said I had disgraced them with my behaviour. And,
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indeed, I had disgraced them. They had showered me with so much love till their
own lives had become disrupted and I had responded by sullying their white
pagdis. They would not be able to show their face in the community. But I was
helpless.

There followed a period of great tension for Asha. Although she was re-
married and in the next four years had two children, she was unable to forget
the connections with her earlier conjugal family. Her new husband also was
unable to sever all connections with his first wife who visited them from her
village often to reiterate the rights of her children over the property and
affection of their father. In fact, one of her sons came to live with his father
and seemed to consider himself as the proper heir to the father's property.
My impression after several prolonged interviews with Asha was that she
regarded herself more as a concubine of her new husband rather than his
wife. For instance, when I asked her how she felt as a young woman when
her husband's previous wife visited their house, she looked a little surprised
and said, 'but she had the right to visit him*.
This may be a transformation of the strong religious commitment of the
conjugal relationship that Obeyesekere (1987) argues is the core of Brahm-
anical values. What struck me, however, was that the first husband did not
seem to preoccupy her in the same way as his natal family. Her attempts to
reestablish links with the family of her first husband were, indeed, heroic and
this is all the more remarkable when one considers that these relationships
could have been easily obliterated from her life. During the first five years of

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 174 VEENA DAS

her marriage to the second husband, she continued to write letters to the sur-
viving sister of her husband. She heard from her that there was no possibility
of rapprochement. Her first husband's sister, as I said, had died under cir-
cumstances that were never made clear. The sexual interest shown by the
dead woman's husband towards Asha and her struggle over this relationship
had perhaps made him defensive towards her. As a result he was virulent in
his attacks on her morality. But the husband's younger sister continued to
make attempts for rapprochement, and finally after eight years of her new
marriage she was invited to come and visit the family from Puna.
I was curious as to why it had been so important for her to continue her
relationships with her earlier conjugal family. Her own answer was that she
felt an extreme attachment to the husband's sister who had given her young
son to Asha. She also felt that by going away she had made the child feel that
he was of no importance in her life whereas the fact was that she felt she
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owed her life to the child and his mother.

'When I married', she said 'my husband's sister was very young and she
became very attached to me. We had evolved all kinds of games as a sign of
our special relationship, for example, we always exchanged our duppattas
(veils). When we sat down to eat we ate from the same plate. She would feed
me one grahi (mouthful) and then I would feed her one. Everyone in the
family used to laugh but we really had fun. She did not articulate her relation
to her husband's young sister as an individuated relationship but tended to
derive it from the relationship with her dead husband.

'I don't know. I had such little time with my husband. It was almost as if a flower
that was to blossom was picked off a branch. But I had so many desires that in
some odier time, some other place they are bound to bear fruition. The only
important thing is that I must keep my connections with that house alive'.

One is bound to ask, what was the meaning of the second marriage to her?
That marriage had, after all borne fruit. There were two lovely daughters to
whom she seemed very attached. In one rare meeting she said:

I have been very happy, very lucky that I found someone so good to marry me.
He has really looked after me. To the best of my own conscience I have provided
him with every comfort But I was drawn to this marriage because of this wretched
body it has needs, it has an existence over which I have no control.
I don't mean just my needs. I could not help it when men looked at me with
lust in their eyes. It was not me it was this body which attracted them. Vijijaji

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 Voice as Birth of Culture 175

had not begun to make passes at me (ched chad na karde) I might have lived an
ascetic life, appropriate to a widow in my husband's house. But after what
happened between us, how could I have faced my sister-in-law? How could I have
faced my husband in my next life? With him it is a connection for eternity. With
my present husband - it is like two sticks brought together in a stormy sea - the
union of a moment and then oblivion. I want all accounts settled with him in this
life - all Una dena must be completed. Then I can depart without sorrow. After all
he has another wife and in God's eyes it is she and not I who will stand with him.
I am a sinner (papin).

It may seem from the above account that Asha had a deep attachment to her
dead husband. Yet, in conversations with her it often appeared to me that her
husband was a very shadowy character to her. She once remarked that when
she saw old photographs of herself with her husband, she felt that she was
looking at two strangers. It is also remarkable that it is memories of her hus-
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band's sisters which appear to be far more concrete and vital in her narrative
as also that it was the first husband's sister who slowly overcame the objec-
tions of the men to welcome Asha back into their lives.
I would suggest, therefore, that what disrupted Asha's life was very similar
to other cases I have recorded in which women felt betrayed by their own
kinsmen. There was the case of Manjeet whose memories of the Partition
were of a brother leaving a packet of poison with her while he went out
everyday with the instructions that she should not hesitate to swallow the
contents if the house was raided by Muslims. Manjeet, then barely thirteen
years old, had no doubt that while he himself indulged in the deadly games
of murder and rape, he expected her to die rather than court dishonour. This
had been an experience as frightening as the experience of waiting everyday,
expecting to be attacked or the experience of being rescued by the army. In
Asha's case it was when the protector of yesteryear became the aggressor
that her life had to be reformulated. In all this it was the solidarity forged
between the women that helped her not only to escape a suffocating situa-
tion but also to connect the present with the past. Yet she was unable to
acknowledge that it was the community of women that healed, framing this
relationship itself within the dominant male-female relationships.4 Perhaps
this suggests that even when a woman has broken the most important taboos
as Asha did, she may not feel that she has really transgressed against the
idealized norms - Asha did not feel that she had become another person,
only that she had entered into temporary arrangements while her true rela-
tionships remained suspended for a while.

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 176 VEENA DAS

Till this point I have described the events of Asha's life primarily in her
voice. I want to give one vignette of how her first visit after she was remarried
had appeared to her 'adopted son' (Suraj) who was then about eight years
old. After news of her remarriage had come, he said, he remembered how
bitterly everyone would talk about her - about how they had showered af-
fection on her but she had betrayed them. For instance, her (first) husband's
brother would say that 'we had clasped her to our heart thinking she was the
only sign of our dead brother, but she wanted to take out a different mean-
ing/purpose (the phrase matlab kadna in Punjabi can refer to a manipulative
use of others for self-servingpurposes)'. A common genre of family conversations
among urban Punjabis is to address an absent person as if he/she is present.
In this case she was made the subject of taunts,5 e.g., (vah niranitu ladilaj
rakhisadi) kudos to you, oh queen you truly preserved our honour. Her
adopted son said that only his own mother would mutter to herself some-
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times in his presence, what is the life of a woman?

Suraj had been very tense at the prospect of seeing her. Somehow the
family conversations had built her image as a shameless woman who had be-
trayed the family and especially betrayed a special trust by abandoning him,
her 'special' son. When she came she looked well, clearly had lots of new
clothes and some jewellery. Her body was not a proclamation of her widow-
hood he had himself wanted to avoid looking at her, as if she were too dazz-
ling. But she did not display her newly found wealth - she settled into
helping in the domestic chores as she used to. One day, Suraj particularly
remembered for he had become adamant that they should all go out to eat
ice. cream. The whole family had been gathered and the elders were not
particularly encouraging. But, he said, he wanted his will to prevail - he
wanted to claim that he had special rights over her against everyone else.
Conceding to his demands, she went in to change and came out wearing a
colourful sari. A tonga was called to take them to the market and as they
Asha, Suraj, and a cousin were going to embark, his uncle (the same man
who had subjected her to sexual advances) said, there is no need to show the
stylized charms (nakhri) of a sethani. The term literally means the wife of a
seth or a rich trader but is used among Punjabis to refer to a woman who is
lazy, does not perform household chores and is only interested in dressing
up and displaying her wealth. Asha's eyes filled with tears and as they sat in
the tonga she put her arm around Suraj and said, 'See, for your sake I have
to listen to such taunts' {boliyan sun-nipaindiyan hain).

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 Voice as Birth of Culture 177

Reflections
What is the meaning of evoking such a scene of 'ordinariness' in the midst
of the enormity of violence that was witnessed in the Partition riots?
Through this very quest for the ordinary, I want to make the claim that such
violence can alter the ways in which people recognize or withhold recognition
from each other, even when it appears that they have been relatively lucky,
that they have escaped the violence relatively unscathed. Consider in this
context the formulation of Martha Nussbaum:

There is a kind of knowing that works by suffering because suffering is the appro-
priate acknowledgement of the way human life, in these cases, is. And in general:
to grasp either a love or a tragedy by intellect is not sufficient for having real
human knowledge of it. Agamennon inoze/sthat Iphigenia is his child all through,
if by this we mean that he has the correct beliefs, can answer many questions
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about her truly etc. But because in his emotions, his imagination and his behaviour
he does not acknowledge the tie, we want to join the Chorus in saying that his
state is less one of knowledge than one of delusion. He doesn't really know that she
is his daughter. A piece of true understanding is missing (Nussbaum 1986:46).

In the case of Asha, she was also known in her role as the widow of a much
loved brother - her body was incorporated, not only ritually, but in everyday
interactions in the family, in the body of her dead husband. This was the only
acknowledged aspect of her being. Yet there might have been other subtexts
operating - the love between her husband's younger sister and herself, the
recognition that she was a sexual being whose sexuality had been forcibly
effaced by the death of her husband and the demands of family honour. It
appears to me that these were the subtexts which came to be articulated as
a result of the turbulence of the novelty that was born during the Partition.
Once her sexual being was recognized in the new ways that her male
affinal relative began to see her, she had to make a choice. Would she wish
to carry on a clandestine relation and participate in the 'bad faith' on which
Bourdieu recognizes the politics of the family to be based? Or would she
accept the public opprobrium and even the risks to which she subjected the
family honour for a new definition of herself which promised a certain inte-
grity as an exile to the life projects she had earlier formulated for herself? In
the process of this decision the self may have become radically fragmented
and a fugitive, but I think what I have described is the kind of complex agency
which becomes evident not necessarily at the moment of violence - but in
the years of patient work through which Asha and her first husband's sister

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 178 VEENA DAS

repair the torn shreds of relations. There was the poisonous knowledge that
she was betrayed by her senior affinal kin who instead of protector became
aggressor, as well as her brother who could not undertake to sustain the long-
term commitment to a destitute sister. What was equally important"forhervtzs
the knowledge that she may have herself betrayed her dead husband and his
dead sister by the imagination of infidelity, and made a young child, her 'spe-
cial* adopted son, feel abandoned. It was not any momentary heroic gestures
but the patient work of living with this new knowledge - really knowingnoX.
just by intellect but through the passions that made the two women's work
described simply as aisgharnalsambandh bana rahe- let the relation be-
tween these two houses continue as an exemplary instance of the way in
which women's work creates the ongoing flow of social relationships and
cultural meanings.
In the introduction to this article I shared my puzzle as to whether we can
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speak of the soul/souling of culture and I posed the appearance of voice as

standing beside culture much as meaning stands beside a word. While the
theatricality of voice as it condemns culture through a daring act of trans-
gression has the effect of capturing our gaze, it is in the everyday life of
women, articulating the poisons that enter social relationships, that the act
of hearing and recognition gets done, and through which I propose that
culture acquires a soul - that it is born.

Notes
* I am grateful to Ulf Hannerz, Arthur Kleinman, Gyanendra Pandey, and Pamela
Reynolds, who participated in the Symposium on 'Culture and Voice in Anthropology'
for their support over the years and for their comments on this paper.
J. P. S. Uberoi has repeatedly drawn attention to Antigone in several seminars
in the Delhi School of Economics it is pleasure to acknowledge his contribution
to this analysis. Stanley Cavell's work provides the inspiration for ideas on pain
and for the mysteries of understanding the relation between presence and ab-
sence.
1. I hope I can be permitted some liberty with the English language in converting
the noun form 'soul' into a verbal form 'to soul' to capture the idea that things do
not simply have or not have a soul as this results from engagements of certain
kinds.
2. I have described her biography along with that of other women in Das 1991.
3. The technique of exegesis that I have used here is taken from certain dance forms
in India in which each segment of a verse may be elaborated through movement
and gesture for anything up to an hour. Seeing this dance form made me realize
how each statement was bristling with unsaid ones that need to be amplified for
the act of understanding to take place.

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 Voice as Birth of Culture 179

4. One severe limitation of my analysis is that I could not meet the man, Asha's first
husband's friend who is supposed to have arranged the marriage. There were
several rumours I picked up and several veiled hints that he had ravished Asha and
then 'sold' her to this elderly man. Others said that it was really her first husband's
younger sister who had encouraged her to leave for Puna and that this friend of
her dead husband had really been a lover of her sister-in-law in Lahore. My in-
tention was never to find an authoritative version by interviewing everyone con-
cerned but to construct as many of the circumstances as I could since it was the
first widow marriage in this upper-caste kinship network.
5. The word 'taunting' was incorporated in the speech, especially of women, but was
used as an adverb - e.g. bade hi taunting tarike nal bole - he/she spoke in a very
taunting manner.

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