PRIMUS LIVING DYING & Meanings in Maithili Folklore Dev Nath Pathak LIVING & DYING Living & Dying MEANINGS IN MAITHILI FOLKLORE Dev Nath Pathak PRIMUS BOOKS An imprint of Ratna Sagar P. Ltd. Virat Bhavan Mukherjee Nagar Commercial Complex Delhi 110 009 Offices at CHENNAI LUCKNOW AGRA AHMEDABAD BENGALURU COIMBATORE DEHRADUN GUWAHATI HYDERABAD JAIPUR JALANDHAR KANPUR KOCHI KOLKATA MADURAI MUMBAI PATNA RANCHI VARANASI © Dev Nath Pathak 2018 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Primus Books, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to Primus Books at the address above. First published 2018 ISBN: 978-93-5290-215-6 (hardback) ISBN: 978-93-5290-216-3 (POD) Published by Primus Books Laser typeset by Mithu Karmakar mithu.karma@gmail.com Printed and bound in India by Replika Press Pvt. Ltd. This book is meant for educational and learning purposes. The author(s) of the book has/have taken all reasonable care to ensure that the contents of the book do not violate any existing copyright or other intellectual property rights of any person in any manner whatsoever. In the event the author(s) has/have been unable to track any source and if any copyright has been inadvertently infringed, please notify the publisher in writing for corrective action. Contents preface vii acknowledgements xiii 1 Introduction: A Brief Outline of the Context of Quest 1 2 Living and Dying in the Age of Plural Cultural Scripts 25 3 Discursive Framework: Probing Folk and Seeking Lore in the Time of Polyphony 43 4 Methodology of Being: Ruminations on the Field-Hermeneutics 66 5 Mithila, Maithili and Maithil: Field in Historical Context 98 6 In Fulhara: Sound and Sight in a World View (Part I) 131 7 In Fulhara: Sound and Sight in a World View (Part II) 153 8 Art of Dying in the Maithil Folk Philosophy 194 9 Conclusion: Text, Subtexts, Inter alia! 215 bibliography 229 index 239 Preface Nachiketa was very unhappy to witness his father’s ethical decline, as his father King Vajashrava was donating unhealthy cows to the priests who had offered services in the yajna (sacrifice). The unhappiness of Nachiketa in the Kathopanishad—one of the ancient texts of wisdom in India—seems to be a nuanced expression of any growing child at any juncture in the history of human civilization. To cut the tall claim to size, Nachiketa’s dissatisfaction on his father’s cunningness is alike the critical sense of any growing child. In the story a son questions and resists an allegedly deviant father. Thus anguished by his son’s unrelenting query, the father uttered the words which perhaps wrote Nachiketa’s destiny. The child had to set on a journey to meet the god of death. The travail eventuated into a meeting with the god, after spending a long time knocking at the door of the god’s abode. The clever and kind god allured him with many glittering gifts the mortals cherish. But Nachiketa only wanted answers to questions that could enable him to understand the mystery of life and death. The winsome innocence and disarming curiosity of the learner worked out, and the god relented. This famous story from the Kathopanishad, narrated from my personal memory, was always in the backdrop of the research behind this book. My retelling of this tale serves me the purpose of making a statement on the self-reflexive underpinning of this work. Reflexivity is a radical necessity in Sociology to bring the self of the researcher on the anvil of interpretative analysis.1 For me, reflexivity is also an inherently psychoanalytical process in which the personal and public intersect through discursive acts. In many ways, a retelling of this story constituted my reconciliation viii PREFACE with biographical tumult, episodes of my personal tryst with the event of dying. Not that like Nachiketa I found absolute answers to questions pertaining to living and dying. I never witnessed a corporeal entity called the god of death. Instead death to my ‘significant others’, to borrow a phrase from the lexicon of social psychology, happened with due accompaniment of suffering. But there was a Nachiketa mode, so to say, at work when I had to make sense of the death and dying amidst emotional upheavals. Every time somebody died, I vicariously experienced my own death, something anthropologists have discussed as couvade syndrome in a different context. Simply put, it was an empathic experience of dying with the dying. It all occasioned a rationale for a quest, technically called research, on which this book thrives. Dying is an extreme form of separation. The other myriad versions of separating may be equally potent and pertinent for the invocation of Nachiketa. I do not claim to be Nachiketa incarnate, but I believe anybody approaching the issue of suffering, separation, and ending with simmering conscience is likely to take a Nachiketa-route, consciously or otherwise. Be it the ethical decline of a father in a ritual performance of sacrifice or the father’s willingness to die following the death of his wife, there occur moments of crises whereby agency shelters in liminality. The liminality becomes the womb of a research/quest, to know the unknown, even though the unknown remains as chimerical as before. Embarking upon such quests is perhaps an essential part of being even though the pursuit of knowing the unknown is only partial, and at best delusional.2 Walking down the corridor of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Delhi on several occasions built up for me a phase of ‘neither here nor there’ (the betwixt about which anthropologists have deliberated). It was no less than an emotive drama under the dictate of some divine conspiracy. The cruelty of the divine conspiracy is inexplicable and hence not a morsel for simple romantic imagining. Running around to have my father diagnosed with kidney failure and deciding on his behalf to put him on a regular dialysis was almost like nudging myself along with him towards the abode of death. Asking my father insistently to generate some life-force (the Freudian notions of Eros, against the death drive, Thanatos) and PREFACE ix live for me for a few more years, and getting to see in response his helplessly blank face with moist eyes, happened to be an impetus for the eternally curious Nachiketa. Then descended a night with an uncanny dream whereby the ailing father asked the unrelenting son whether he could take leave as nothing was holding him back. The son looked at him with his tearful eyes and said, ‘May I accompany you to wherever you intend to go?’ The father said, ‘You cannot, for nobody can really accompany to that abode,’ and he walked off the dimly lit stage. And the son could see with blurry eyes the merger of his father into a velvety darkness of the auditorium. This was the closure in the script for a play titled ‘Melodrama of Death’ I wrote after experiencing the death of my parents. I must confess that the hypothetical assumptions that made the theatrical performance, elucidating the endearing cruelty of the melodrama of death, were not original. I had committed plagiarism in the sense that I picked them from myriad songs without acknowledging in any footnote. I grew up listening to them and they constituted the sonic background of my consciousness. When everything was rosy in my surroundings, I did not hear the pangs in those songs—they were only soothing. They also seemed irritating for my mother sang them a little too frequently and nobody could stop her. She was not a cassette player to be unplugged when a listener was bored. She sang at her own will and created a soundscape for the household. Even sadness did not hinder her singing. She sang songs of sadness to match her mood, time, and season. The repertoire of my mother’s songs, unrecorded and unarchived, remained in my memory for ready reference. They appeared on my lips only occasionally so long as I was not curious about their meanings. In the spring of my upbringing when I was learning physics and mathematics those songs seemed to be insignificant renditions of a semi-literate woman. All those songs, however, magnified in meaning as nostalgia played uncanny tricks. After my mother’s sudden demise, I did not seem to abort the effortless occurrence of those songs in my solitary humming. As a student of social anthropology, rather than of physical sciences, I grew curious about the songs. I began to ask questions from women of my mother’s age in the villages, about the meanings of the songs x PREFACE and also the stories about my parents’ lives. Perhaps this was my personal psychic arrangement to revive a sense of the normal in the face of the militant death and its after effects. Alongside my quest unfolded myriad stories, punctuated with songs, which became the skeleton of the research undertaken in this book. This was my Nachiketa pursuit, if it could be called so, of the meanings of the songs. Those songs and their varied meanings led me to comprehend the ideas of living and dying. Needless to say, this entails due limitations. The latter is aptly encapsulated in a verse in Isha Upanishad: Into darkness enter those who worship ignorance, into as if still greater darkness enter those who delight in knowledge.3 It is indeed this spirit in which this book joins in various already existent discursive frames. And hence the claim is not to lead anybody (from darkness) to the domain of light; instead, it is more to deal with various layers of darkness. A very thick kind of darkness perhaps arises from the domain of the ‘known’, and ‘familiar’, and consequently the convenient and comfortable. This predominant domain too has its failures. There is something incredible about the failure of scientificobjective thinking. When it fails, it paves the novel ways for understanding. The failure of scientific-objective thinking, calculation, and certainty invokes a more sensible social scientist. When the intended consequences are superseded by unintended ones, science has to reorient itself. In the face of such situations my rational thinking faltered at many junctures as though it were a shock to a struggling doctor whose every bit of medical analysis is washed away by the tide of time. Somehow it dawned upon me that one cannot die until one wants to, almost like the Bhishma (the grandfather of the Kaurawas and the Pandwas) in the epic Mahabharata. Bhishma stayed on the spiky deathbed (made of arrows) for almost a fortnight and decided to die only at the right/auspicious moment. There is a moment somewhere in life where everybody instantly realizes the visibility of death in the shadows of life. As soon as it is accepted it becomes possible to die a happy death. Various Buddhist tales exhibit such an acceptance PREFACE xi as a key to happiness. Acceptance of sorrow too becomes a reason for ecstasy, about which a distant observer may only wonder or turn cynical. If I have to put the crux of this research, the kernel of this book, in one line I would say ‘life and death unfold simultaneously and hence they are imagined in the same breath using the same set of metaphoric symbols’. The element of sorrow (especially pertaining to separation), widespread throughout life, is the best evidence of the interrelatedness. We learn to say ‘yes’ to an ending. Not that after this there is no continuity in the journey of Nachiketa, for the god of death was cunning enough to answer only three questions. And the questions cannot be only three; indeed questions cannot be limited to countable numbers. My exposure to the anthropological and sociological literature on performative art and notions of life and death generated both an optimism to tell the tale in the language which offers objectivity, and a pessimism that everything that belongs to felt-knowledge of the folk cannot be put into the same language. Admittedly this work is also a compromise on the infinite possibilities as it restricts the articulation to the domain of the institutionalized. The bid to make everything fathomable relies on a compromise. But then, I do not regret this compromise as it is the only way to say the unsaid. I must not, for I am not a selfish mystic who revels alone in the trap of sublime psychic energy. Another level at which this work assumes distinction, to put it immodestly, is to do with a slightly unconventional interest in the folk imagination. While most of the a priori analyses have been focused on the ritualistic dimensions, or the institutional arrangements, or the sociomaterialistic dimensions of ritual performances, in the studies of the folk literature or oral tradition, they fail to comprehend the philosophical import and the fluidity of imagination. This work is also an antithesis to the age-old social scientific prejudice that poetry is mere fantasy and thus, unreal; or that it is, as Freud felt, merely a neurotic articulation of the upset libido. If the whole of life is a work of art, everything people say and do are artistic expressions. While there may be occasional spectacles to remark certain ideas, there are more benign and ordinary expressions in everyday life as well. This work attempts at the totality with PREFACE xii unflinching interest in the ordinary and lacklustre moments in the routine set up for human emotion does not conform to the socio-structural restrictions, and often the former redefines the latter. It was necessary to investigate the presence of sorrow in everyday life, and its significance in the occurrences of life and death. It was all supported by the conviction expressed in myriad poetic expressions, such as a couplet from the rich anthology of Mirza Ghalib: Quaid-e-hayat Band-o-gham Asla mei dono ek hai, Maut se pehle aadmi gham se nizaat paaye kyu! Parallel are the two indeed; Prison of life and chain of grief; Why would, thus, We shall be free, from sorrow before death; and this is the decree. Department of Sociology South Asian University Dev Nath Pathak Notes 1. See Gouldner 1970. Suffice to say, many interventions in the discourse on reflexivity have emerged ever since the discomfort with the conventional idea of self-free sociology and social anthropology. But, next to Alwin Gouldner in my scheme of inspiration are Michael Jackson (2013) and Avijit Pathak (2014, 2015). Both in different locations, dealing with different issues, perform one characteristic laying out a distinct pathway that this book treads—juxtaposition of personal, experiential, and existential with the objects of study. 2. This is an important lesson an anthropologist, interested in the significance of mystical experience qua dreams, can learn from Obeyesekere (2012). 3. This is translated and edited by Katz and Egenes (2015: 31). Acknowledgements This book has taken so long to come into the public domain that it needs a word of explanation. After a series of rejections and phases of silence from publishers of repute, the manuscript finally found two anonymous reviewers who suggested that with proper revisions in certain areas, the book could be published. However, up to the present time, I have not heard from the publishing house that had commissioned these two reviews. It was at this stage that my seasoned colleague Sasanka Perera, advised me that it would be useless to keep waiting for the elusive communication from the publisher. Aware of the politics of publishing, instead, he said that I should submit the book proposal with the existing review reports to Primus. I am thankful to Primus for the keen interest it has shown in the book from the very outset. Here I would like to acknowledge those anonymous reviewers who delivered two wonderfully critical essays on my manuscript. Their comments have helped me to revise my work in significant ways, and I am indeed grateful to them. I also received detailed comments on earlier drafts of this book from N. Jairam and the late Hetukar Jha. I still read the handwritten comments of Hetukar Jha with great joy though also with strong disagreements. On a later occasion, Sadan Jha was generous enough to tender some useful comments towards tightening the manuscript. Also, I must thank Avijit Pathak who has been a perpetual source of feedback on my work in addition to being a storehouse of intellectual provocation. He persuaded me to believe in the merits of my work, despite my self-doubts. I can never thank him enough. I have also received much encouragement to engage with this work in several fora in India as well as abroad. Some anthropologists xiv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS inclined towards ethnomusicology at Queen’s University, Belfast, found this work to be a significant departure in the anthropology of mourning. Scholars at Boston University as well as Brown University were curious about the philosophically significant roles played by women in the context of Maithili folklore. I thank them all, without performing the politics of naming, for inspiring me with their perceptive comments. However, it is pertinent not to forget a long-term friend and teacher at MIT, Jyoti Sinha, for bringing together the South Asian folks in Boston who wanted to hear about the research as well as hear me sing some of the songs I had recorded in my manuscript. I remember a similar situation, a demand to sing similar material, at a conference at School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU in Delhi too. I had managed to narrowly escape such demands even though I was a confident actor with a theatre background. But I acknowledge those moments of awkwardness for a researcher of folk songs, which prepared me to be more sombre while speaking of the songs. I am immensely grateful to Sasanka Perera for standing by me at a time when my authorial spirit had become low. He made me realize the importance of not giving up. We have done much work in collaboration, and I am deeply influenced by the diehard spirit and tough workmanship that he upholds. I am also indebted to his wife Anoli Perera for helping out with the designing of the jacket. Anoli Perera is a prominent name in the contemporary visual art scene in Sri Lanka, and her inputs have indeed been invaluable. Finally, I must thank Jagath Weerasinghe, an eminent archaeologist, artist, art-historian, and many other things rolled in one, who lent the image of his art work for this book’s jacket. The fine blend of morbid and aesthetics, abstraction and emotion that Jagath chisels out in his craft is very much at the centre of this book, and pivotal in our friendship. Now I deserve to pester Jagath with demands to have more discussions over coffee and cigarettes. In the process of becoming of this book, which spanned almost a decade, many of the great sources of my strength and weakness, instigation and inspiration, met with an untimely demise. I am not naming them since they have gone beyond naming, in the cosmological sense, but I will always remember the time spent with them, intellectually and emotionally, in sharing my pursuits. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xv Too many dramatic events of living and dying have fallen under the pale of this book. I acknowledge them all, humans and events, with due humility. And I thank all who huddled with me to help me cope despite our differences: Tuni and Bed, Badki and Chhotki Didi, Khusbu and Lali, Bhaiji and Ojha, Pankaj and Jhunna, Rikki, Bundul and Baua (Shlok), Pataniya wali and many others. I shall duly acknowledge the assistance I received from some students, young scholars, who tend to look up to somewhat iconoclastic tendencies in teachers. Divyendu Jha was considerably helpful in getting copies of the maps done even though they were in tattered conditions in some of the premier institutions. I also thank Mithilesh Kumar Jha, a scholar on the Maithili language movement, for the discussions on the sources, and Vagish Jha for providing ignitions at the onset of the research. Many scholars from Mithila University, Darbhanga, were patient interlocutors during the research. I shall name Ramdev Jha, a living authority on Maithili literature, for generous conversations even though he had problems with my intellectual orientation. Towards the end of the research that led to this book, I presented a paper based on women’s songs in Mithila in a conference convened by Lata Singh and late Biswamoy Pati, which translated into a chapter in the book edited by the conveners. The comments that came through the editors, Lata di and Bismoy sir (as I fondly call them), was truly a timely inspiration. I am filled with gratitude. Finally, I shall be ever thankful to Priya, who grew almost fanatic about her surname ‘Mirza’ while the final version of the manuscript of this book was underway. No thanking will be sufficient for her being the most patient audience of my swaggy monologues, despite considering me a kaafir. To Chanda (Prabuddh), who has started asking me questions about death, and I have already announced: I have a book to answer your questions. I hope Prabuddh, with little Tara (Nargis), will use this book more for information on melody and the metaphors of living and dying rather than as a doorstopper or a paperweight! Dev Nath Pathak 1 Introduction: A Brief Outline of the Context of the Quest One dark night an old woman was searching intently for something in the street. A passer-by asked her, ‘Have you lost something?’ She answered, ‘Yes I have lost my keys. I have been looking for them all evening.’ ‘Where did you lose them?’ ‘I don’t know, may be inside the house.’ ‘Then why are you looking for them here?’ ‘Because it’s dark in there. I can see much better here under the street lights.’ —a.k. ramanujan (1991)1 The above Kannada folktale lends an appropriate beginning for this book. Connecting insight (into) and site of the exploration, the tale assumes significance by being a constant guide. As with many folktales, this one too is not free from the possibility of multiple implications. The latter only adds to the tale’s significance for the discourse that this book entails. One of the meanings of the tale, as A.K. Ramanujan suggests, alludes to the inability of conventional quests of meanings. The quests carried out in the ‘light’ of the classical texts, much like the search of the old woman, could not make any inroad in the dark stores of meanings. This was the quest of the learned, pundits, and scholars trained in the enquiries into the secrets of living and dying. They could develop spectacular conceptualizations, a semblance of the meanings of the mundane. This means that the analyses informed by the Sanskrit classics could not explore what 2 l i v i n g an d dy i n g folklore consisted of. Folklore, as it were, consisted of meanings of the ordinary folk and their negotiations with the events and emotions of life. Hence, it is a legitimate need to have a folkloristic enterprise where the classical does not dictate terms and conditions. There is thus an imperative, which this book is saddled with, to interpret meanings imbued in folk narratives that are performed on appropriate occasions. And in doing so, the book straddles between the particularities from a cultural context named Mithila, and generalities of questions emanating from the anthropological and sociological enquiries. The book makes propositions at the cusp of micro-context and macro-questions, as it were, with the hope that interpretative comprehension of meanings in Maithili folklore could evoke an interest in revisiting folklore in other parts of the region of South Asia on some other occasion. There is yet another implication of the Kannada folktale. The search of the lost key under the street light (public), and not in the darkness of the chamber (personal), is also symbolic of locating subconscious abstractions at the tangible level of consciousness. Everything buried in the dark subterrain could not be accessed. They could be, however, approximately comprehended in the concrete domain of cognition. The personal (dark chamber of meanings) makes sense when brought to the public (street lights). Perhaps our metaphors, idioms, and other linguistic tools, like liminal and subliminal cues, could reveal some of our concealed notions. The classical, Sanskrit textual tradition of scholars could also lead us to cognize some of the meanings replete in folk traditions. And in the same breath, subjective disposition and objective manifestations could unfold together in the realm of meanings. Many more binaries come for a rest, or for a dialogic negotiation, in the quest for meanings. Personal and public, subjective and objective, emotional and rational, do not seem to be irredeemable antinomies. It would, thus, not be an exaggeration to suggest that meanings in tradition seem to be Janus-faced, deriving from both textual and folk traditions and inextricably confusing the two sources. In an ideal sense there need not be an irredeemable contrast between the classical and the folk, textual and oral, literary and popular. There is an imperative to be aware of the sharp divides mostly engendered by the researches on folklore a brief outline of the context of quest 3 from bygone times as one embarks on understanding meanings in the domain of folklore. It is also a need at this juncture in intellectual history where recognition of plural cultural scripts of meanings is a necessary point of commencement for any discourse. This is the mainstay of the second and third essays in this book. Meanings in the folk world view indeed solicit an ability to comprehend, and be intellectually tolerant to a myriad crisscrossing of cultural forms and trafficking of contents. It would be impertinent to foreclose the possibility of, for instance, folklore and popular cinematic transactions, mutual influences, and reformulations of styles and content. This also underlines a possibly mediated character, rather than the pristine nature, of folklore. Consequently, this dents the cultural arrogance of folks from across the regions. This is another reason why the Kannada tale, borrowed from the compilation of Ramanujan, is pertinently insightful for the journey this book promises to undertake. The quest of meanings, or the veritable ‘key’ of meanings as in the tale, demands shedding the garbs of cultural, qua intellectual, superiority. The cultural superiority manifests at various levels—genericnotional, conceptual-philosophical, and regional-geographical. We are aware of the rise of some of the overlapping trajectories of this superiority complex. The scientific epistemology, of promisingly emancipatory rationalist philosophy, is one key domain of superiority. It provides with methods, techniques, perspectives, and a value orientation for critical enquiries. Folklore studies too operated within this and placed the emotional content as being synonymous with the non-rational. In this light, we are aware of the politics of knowledge construction about cultural contexts. Knowledge about cultural phenomenon aids in understanding; but in historical context it has also played an instrumental role in the imperialist drive of colonialism. Closer to the various cultural domains we are aware of the sense of cultural superiority based on the distinctions of caste, class, and gender. They all shape the becoming of meanings, to say the least. In this wake, it is curious to visit a linguistic region, notorious for its own share of cultural superiority (glaring street light!, despite evident fragments within the whole). The third, fourth, and fifth essay ensure that we steer clear of superiority complex. 4 l i v i n g an d dy i n g Context(s): Particular Location(s) and General Question(s) The journey that this book invites the readers to is towards the northern Indian linguistic zone and its collective memory. This book seeks to unravel the world view constituted by Maithili folklore. The latter—the mainstay of this book—is geographically identified with the linguistic region Mithila, located roughly in north-east Bihar, abutting Nepal. The ambiguous status of Maithili language on one hand and the mythical significance of Mithila on the other renders ‘world view’ into world views. Perhaps there could not be one world view in Mithila. A pluralism of world views and of contested meanings, however, does not deter an engagement with Maithili folklore. Despite heterogeneity, there are genres performed across social groups with a uniformity of meanings. This is especially true of the Maithili folk songs of everyday life in which notions of life and death figure prominently and are sung across social groups. These songs are replete with folk ideas, leading to a systematic body of ‘folk philosophy’. It is not philosophy in the typical academic sense of the term suggestive of a sophisticated epistemological system of enquiry. However, it is philosophy in a generic, semantic sense, with reference to reasoning with cognitive and emotional categories. In the scheme of folk philosophy ‘reasoning’ and ‘doing’ seem to overlap and reinforce each other. Hence, ritual performances, singing, and wailing—synonymously termed mourning and tuneful weeping in anthropological texts—are significant aspects of folk culture in Mithila. They occur on diverse occasions of union and separation including the event of death, in the cycle of life. On all such occasions of crying, a complexity of meanings, essentials of world view, and constituents of folk philosophy become intelligible. This book dwells upon the premium of the philosophical import in the folk songs, by engaging with the notions of union-separation, merging-parting, material-spiritual, divine-mundane, and broadly, life and death. The philosophical temperament of this work reaffirms the fundamental suggestion of sociology and social anthropology that human social institutions are also reflective of deep thoughts. This book ferrets out some of these crucial a brief outline of the context of quest 5 characteristics of folklore through an interpretative engagement with Maithili folk songs. This endeavour is premised upon a confluence of many ways of looking at folklore, emanating from folklore studies/folkloristics, ethnomusicology, social anthropology, and sociology.The format of this work is, thus, interdisciplinary. The Maithili folk songs sung in the rite of the passage and occasions in everyday life were gathered from the village named Fulhara in the southern part of Mithila located in Samastipur district. Research was also conducted in other villages such as Navtol, Beri, and Bhindi (located in the district of Darbhanga) for more clarity on the functions and renditions of the songs. Unlike the pre-existing anthropological works which focus on ritual aspects in the rite of the passage this book dwells upon songs sung alongside rituals as a more suitable domain of meanings. The discursive framework of this book departs from the usual positivistic doubt about the heard—hearing cannot lead to believing! This is ironical since methodological positivism more or less amounts to saying ‘seeing is believing’. The supremacy of seeing over hearing in the hierarchy of the bodily/sense organs of a researcher ought to be questioned by giving ears their due. More discussion on it follows in the essay on methodology of being, where an attempt is made to restore a researcher’s faith in the act of hearing, the heard, the act of understanding, and the understood. By disclosing key aspects of the Maithil world view through the method (or a humane attribute) of hearing and believing, this book seeks to unearth folk engagement with the ideas of life and death. How life with its various junctures marked by the rites of the passage is visualized and how death is perceived through the prism of life forms the centrality of this discourse. Death is not a separate phenomenon in the world view of Mithila as these songs reveal that departure of the soul from the body is similar to that of a bride from her natal home. The cognition of living and dying unfolds at the intersection between religious and social, metaphysical and material, and sacred and mundane. This complexity consummates the Maithil world view. The analytical understanding of the songs also establishes a notion of complementarity that rules the relationship between men and women in a patriarchal society such as of Mithila. Maithil 6 l i v i n g an d dy i n g women’s songs, underpinning the social structure, open for a possible rethinking on the feminist arguments about women’s position in a patriarchal society. This is however not to suggest an absence of power-relations within Maithili society. In a kinship structure and ideology that favours men folk, women are not merely either a subjugated agency lying as a dormant volcano of repressed anguish nor an unleashed agency seeking to demolish a structure. The research underpinning this book takes the onus of presenting women as a complementary partner, who can protest, plead, redefine, and reconcile with as well as without the ‘freedom of agency’ in a structure.2 These issues, among others, dominate the sixth, seventh, and eighth essays in this book. The reason why a research of this kind, and its textual consequence such as this book, assumes significance is mainly three fold—the singularity of focus on the thoughts of the folk and how these thoughts as expressed in their songs seem to regulate everyday lives; the focus here is beyond the spectacle of rituals, which may be an occasional phenomenon, and is on the repeated renditions and circulation of motifs; the thoughts of the folk also influence their practices and social institutions. Additionally, the relentless suggestion in social anthropology to draw the totality of the world view with respect to the gendered roles and performances also flags the significance of this research. By researching into tradition without dismissing the ambiguous presence of modernity, this work produces knowledge that is rife with the possibility of conceptual regeneration. The conceptual dichotomy between tradition and modernity takes a rest here to allow their intertwined nature to surface. In a socially globalized world, allegedly homogenizing as well as hybridizing in effect, when the intellectual and imaginative realm is restricted to predominant notions of our time, a study of folk songs, its meanings and philosophy in association with the folk practice assumes significance for a researcher of indigenous tradition. A few questions gaping in the face of this book are worth recounting. Why to make meanings of living and dying so prominent? Why Maithili folk songs? And how could they be relevant in social anthropology? The book tends to deliver an answer, overtly as well as covertly. It is worth, briefly, reflecting a brief outline of the context of quest 7 upon them in a manner to satiate impulsive curiosity and fulfil introductory basics. More than once I was asked this question, a daunting one, by both friends as well as foes. Why to think of the meaning of death? It looked like a downright case of necrophilia to many. The well-wishers, sympathizers, and even academic friends were not quite sure about the meaning of death. For death was a taboo stronger than sex in the world of non-academic common sense; and it was an alleged hobbyhorse of myth-mongering godmen, as the academic common sense suggests. One could watch ‘pornographic stuff ’ but could not consider contemplating about death. On a lighter note, it was acceptable to fantasize about the opposite sex, singing one of the famous Sahir Ludhianvi lyric Chaudhavin ka chand ho (you are the lunar beauty of the resplendent waxing moon) (Sadiq 1960). But it was bizarre to use similar lyrical tenor for death and dying. One of my colleagues once gave me an unsolicited nugget of wisdom worth unalloyed mention, ‘make love with as many women as possible and you would forget about death!’ Barring the bluntness of expression, making love seemed parallel to the other part of my quest, namely meaning of life. However, the latter was never divorced from the tabooed part, meaning of death, in my contemplation. And that was a serious issue as per the popular observation. To my academic peers the whole formulation, meaning of life and death, seemed a little like the title of a godman’s sermon. There are way too many godmen around and they invariably talk about living and dying. There is no longer a divide between the East and West as far as popular appearances of the godmen is concerned. They are the most circulated commodities, promising packaged spiritual salvation, from India to the United States of America. Amidst the bewildering abundance of packaged sermons, one is always wary of echoing the populist spiritual ideas about the secrets of life and death. While my academic friends and foes were not sure about the academic credence of the thematic issue of my interest, some odd non-academic curious folks deemed me to be a mystique in the making. They raised intriguing questions about ‘after-death’ and I obviously had no interest in the after-death. The question about the validity of the research, and by the same breath that of 8 l i v i n g an d dy i n g this book, is always susceptible to dubious attitudes and questions. This trope of questions and doubts also opens up a window to the idea of living and dying. Why do we think in the way we think about death? Why is it a taboo? If not a categorical taboo, this is perhaps something about which one cannot speak freely. Why is it only associated with the notion of after-death? Why is there not much thinking on the ordinary and aesthetic speculation about death in relation with life? Curiously enough, this is so despite the popular cinematic imagination of death and dying that places death in the realm of ordinary experiences. The dominant popular cultural trope, heavily determined by the cinematic medium, presents an abundance of acoustic propositions. A generation heard it, and sang it for the youngsters, admi musafir hai, aata hai jaata hai, aate jaate raste me yaade chhod jata hai (humans are merely travellers, in the flux of arriving and departing, and in this course of being, they leave behind memories) (Om Prakash 1977).3 Many among the Hindi cinema viewers grew up singing a popular lyric among many others, such as Rote huye aate hain sab, hansta hua jo jayega, wo muqaddar ka sikandar jaaneman kahlayega (all arrived crying, those who leave with a smile, will be hailed by all, as the conqueror of destiny) (Mehra 1978).4 If one adds more regional varieties of cinema, the richness of the popular cultural trope is further enhanced and the abundance of meanings in the sonic surrounding becomes evident. Despite the ubiquity of popular cinematic notions of living and dying, there is a queer attitude toward death. The paradoxical significance of death today makes it even more important a muse in social anthropology. Death, dying, and living have been some of the key coordinates in the anthropological understanding of primitive society.There is, however, an interesting challenge in discussing these coordinates in the context of a society which is not primitive in a typical anthropological sense. One such sociocultural context, namely of Maithili folk songs, occasions a possibility of some debates. There could be many more similar sociocultural contexts used as an analytical premise. This book centres the Maithili case for a few curious reasons. One is that it has been relatively under-researched in India. There are reams of writings mostly by scholars of Maithili languages and cultural historians. Some of these writings are in English, while a brief outline of the context of quest 9 a larger proportion of the writings are in Maithili and in Hindi. With a few exceptions, a common and dominant motif has been a celebration of the cultural superiority of Mithila.These celebratory accounts present Maithili culture and practice as superior fossils of a past in the scheme of cultural glorification. They use history and mythology to create a heady cocktail of ‘my superior Mithila!’ And indeed everybody seems intolerant to even the slightest of criticism about the fakeness of such celebratory accounts. I grew up listening to all versions of the celebratory accounts making me more sickly curious until they became sources of research questions for critical enquiry. Moreover, in recent times there has been narcissistic mobilization on the idea of the state of Mithila.5 It dwells upon a hyper-emphatic invention of Maithili heritage and development. It seeks to present an overly simplified idea of Maithili culture that is conducive for the tourism industry and dominant model of development. Political groups vie with each other to ‘encourage’ Maithili culture through various funded mahotsavas (state-sponsored festivals). 6 The postcard image of Maithili culture may have adverse political implications for the cultural complexities in the region. Also, it may not convey the deeper interpretative meanings of the cultural performances in the wake of the political window-dressing and crescendo of cultural nationalism. This book seeks to present a discussion on the songs from Mithila while being conscious of the cultural politics lurking in the background. Departures in the Quest of Meanings The brief outline above hints at the messy realm of meanings which this book seeks to engage with. In this scheme, it is imperative to stress on the importance of departing from the clinically clean domains of enquiries that have occupied social anthropologists ever since the beginning of classical anthropology. The area of life wherein emotions confuse formal patterns is what becomes important in a work which this book aims to present. In this regard, it seems urgent to recall Veena Das: Anthropologists have been very successful in studying formal aspects of life when individuals can be shown to be playing their roles, or when they are 10 l i v i n g an d dy i n g engaged in formal exchanges or when people are acting out rituals whose format is collectively agreed upon. But in the entire mushy area of life when the individual emotion seems to confuse the formal pattern or when the context is not formally structured as in Levi-Strauss’7 example of two strangers sharing a restaurant table in Paris, the models of the anthropologist begin to falter. (Das 1986: 185) It is the domain where ‘individual emotion seems to confuse the formal pattern’ that renders this book and the underpinning research relevant. It makes a conscious effort to look for meanings beyond the familiar way of fathoming the Hindu world view. The most familiar way has been allegedly restricted to the categories arising from the ‘cognitive structure of Hindu society’ (Das 1987). The categories pertaining to the classical texts, e.g. dharma, karma, moksha, have dominated our understanding of Hindu belief and practices.8 The bifurcation of the classical Hindu religion and its counterpart, alternative Hindu dharma, seems to facilitate a systematic knowledge about a particular version of Hindu world view. But it also delimits the exploration of the folk world view and of social philosophy. 9 This was the reason why the ethno-sociological approach of Mckim Marriott put the categories from the classical texts as the only set of indigenous cognitive categories of Hindu society. This facilitated a very neat conceptualization of Little tradition and Great tradition on the one hand, and Universalization and Parochialization, the processes of social change in traditional society, on the other hand (Marriott 1967; 1990). This discursive trope seldom makes visible the widespread significance of ‘folklorization’ in the Indian context. With excessive attention to the ritual performance the available discursive tropes rarely arrive at the totality of folk world view, let alone folk-philosophizing that deals with finer nuances attached to the events of life, including death. The possible improvization of the classical Hindu categories of dharma, karma and moksha in folklore, which resists as well as reconciles with the Brahminic-Sanskritic textual ideas, seldom surface in the conventional anthropological discussions. They shed little light on the instrumental role played by the category of emotion in framing the folk world view and formulating folk philosophy. Perhaps, this also explains one of the reasons why intolerant a brief outline of the context of quest 11 religious sentiments have emerged in the politics of Hinduism. This sentiment seeks to put Hindu dharma into pure (classical) and impure (folk). The public sentiment similar to the academic bifurcation precludes a possible comprehension of the fluidity of Hindu belief and practices. This is indeed the need of the time to reason with Hindu dharma beyond the familiar bifurcation in academic discourse and emphasize the perpetual negotiations between the binaries in the realm of folk performances. Along this line, Wendy Doniger’s proposition is significant. Showing that ‘Hinduism has porous margins and is polycentric’ (2011: 29), she underlines that: Hinduism is composed of local as well as pan-Indian traditions, oral as well as written traditions, vernacular as well as Sanskrit traditions, and nontextual as well as textual sources. The first (often marginalized) elements of each of these pairs tend to reinforce one another, as do the second elements, the dominant elements, but there are important distinctions within each of the two groups. For these contrasting pairs did not translate into polarized groups of people; a single person would often have both halves (as well as non-Hindu traditions) in his or her head; a Brahmin would know the folk traditions, just as, in the Euro-American world, many people study paleography and then go to church and read Genesis. (Ibid.: 32–3) This is the scheme that aids in fathoming the interactive framework of folk culture in which the ‘written’ and ‘oral’ interact. Elsewhere, Gananath Obeyesekere dwelt upon a similar interactive framework to show that ‘little’ (of the unreflective many) and great (of the reflective few) parts of a tradition does not mean a disjuncted existence of tradition. Robert Redfield’s binaries for understanding peasant societies underlined that the two traditions are interdependent. In the context of Sinhala Buddhism, thus, there is a perplexing paradox. Obeyesekere suggests that: the paradox is a result of the synthesis or fusion of pre-existing beliefs or later diffused beliefs from the great tradition. These beliefs are contradictory to the great tradition, but from the point of view of the people, they are resolved and explained in terms of a single tradition. (1963: 150) This is the reason why the common worshippers, irrespective of caste groups in the social hierarchy, persist with their belief in the contradictory aspects which arise from the ceaseless interaction between the two aspects of a tradition. And in this wake, there is 12 l i v i n g an d dy i n g seldom a recognition of the divide between the belief and practices of the literate or illiterate, elite or masses, and scholars or ordinary folk. This indeed paves the way for envisaging a consolidated body of thought, corpus of idioms and metaphors, and imagination to emerge from the expressive domain of folklore. Another key issue which this book grapples with is the impact of modernity in conditioning our thinking of life and death. Death figures as a ‘sequestered reality’ (Clark 1993), with loneliness of dying in the modern society as an absolute reality apprehended in the framework of sociology of death (For example, Elias 1985; Kearl 1989). The polemical understanding of the experiences of death in the contemporary world enables us to find ways forward. One of the many such ways forward is the recognition of plural cultural script of experiencing death and dying. A validity of pluralism summons a return to the anthropological accounts of death in various cultural contexts. In the anthropological literatures, the cultural imagination of dying has been largely captured through the performed rituals in rites of the passage.10 These works are fair antitheses to the dead-end of individualizedatomized experience of death as ‘sequestered reality’ in the postmodern condition. The conventional anthropological account, however, also tends to reduce the phenomenon of death into performance of mediated rituals. Does death also not constitute social philosophy? How do folk express their philosophy, or thoughts, of death? What are those thoughts, the epistemic units of the folk philosophy of death? To turn to the Indian context, there are Indological works dealing with thoughts on death. 11 They derived largely from the classical literature from textual tradition of India to unearth the cosmological imagination of death and the phenomenon of after-life. Needless to say, anthropology and indology in India have shared interest in this regard despite the difference of truth-claims and veracity of materials.12 But then, it was also delimiting due to the preoccupation with the textual tradition. The fluid relation of text and context, in the folk world view, could not assume centrality in discussions on the cultural imagination of death and dying in India, barring a few exceptions.13 It becomes challenging indeed to understand the traditional social structure by fathoming the acoustic dimension a brief outline of the context of quest 13 vis-à-vis folk songs, and arrive at the folk notions of living and dying. It is imperative while doing so to not fall prey to the conceptual divides such as folk and classical, folk and popular, and in short Little tradition and Great tradition. Instead, one has to operate by viewing tradition as an integrated whole in which intermixing brings about paradoxes even as the belief system still remains intact. The conventional way of studying tradition has been prepossessed with the notion of order and disorder. Everything that belonged to tradition has been looked at with the objective of discovering the structure of order, and how disorder is avoided or coped with in a traditional society. Studying death meant understanding the issue of order and disorder. While it is a valid concern of a study on traditional society, it somewhere lost the basic prerequisite to understand the inherently fluid structure of traditional societies. Let alone the dynamics of day-to-day social relations and occurrences, the studies on traditional society and of meanings did not move away from the classical/Sanskritic texts and the social exotica of rites and rituals. The prepossession with the issue of order and disorder vis-à-vis the phenomenon of death and dying in traditional society has reached a stage whereby sociologists perceive a modern society where death is a sequestered reality and dying is a lonely act. In this light, it is significant to notice the recurrence of traditional notions of death and dying in the folk society in modern times, where doctors are an important part in the folk society. But the modern-medical injunctions are almost same as the classical-textual ones, as they are both subject to folklorization. Folk philosophy works in close collaboration with other sources of insights and ideas without compromising on its own accord. Hence, in our times, the study of tradition demands an orientation towards neither modernity nor the traditional elements. The study of tradition could, as an aspired departure in this work, be beyond the binary opposition of conceptual categories. An event in the life cycle finds cultural expressions according to the world view of the folk which may be inclusive of the features of both tradition and modernity or hybrid, or something that is beyond such categorization. The present work intends to discuss ‘folk philosophy’ vis-à-vis perceptions/ 14 l i v i n g an d dy i n g beliefs about life and death as found in narratives within folk songs without simplifying the complex of emotion and participation of both men and women. Moreover, one must emphasize that this research evaluates women’s position in the Hindu society on the basis of the songs they sing. As already stated in the beginning, the context of the work is Mithila. Mooting Maithil Contexts Mithila and Maithili have been awfully intriguing for ethnologists in colonial India (Burghart 1993). Perhaps the intrigue resonates in the fact that ‘Mithila’ is more mythical than historical in terms of territory, for it was never a politically demarcated geographical territory, an explicit import in the chapter five that places Mithila in historical framework. It may not go well with the sense of cultural superiority in the prevalent common sense in Mithila that views mythical as opposed to real, and Mithila and Maithili identity as an eternal reality. The claim of eternal reality however solicits a critical discussion which this book offers. This is not to deny the reality, so to say. Instead, the attempt is to substantiate it with the world view of the Maithili speaking people. Perhaps this was one of the reasons why ‘speech marks’ rather than ‘landmarks’ are more important to understand Mithila. The heterogeneous composition of the region and its people and language assume importance in this scheme. This also entails an acknowledgement of the peculiarity of social stratification along caste lines within Maithil society. For all ritual purposes, superiority of status lies with the Brahmins. The powerful position in terms of land and property ownership is with the ‘forward castes’14 such as Brahmin, Rajput, Bhumihar, Kayastha, and Bania. The anomalies of caste structure are manifest in Mithila too. Instances of caste violence, marginalization of lower caste, and also caste-based votebank politics are regularly reported in newspapers. In the daily encounters too, I have personally come across various modes of humiliation along caste lines. I have heard sayings, which target caste groups, belonging to both forward and backward castes. A famous saying, which was a colonial construct according to hearsay, is: kill a Maithil Brahmin first if you spot both at once, a brief outline of the context of quest 15 a Maithil Brahmin and a black cobra! The idea is that all the Maithil Brahmins could be more venomous and deadlier than a black cobra. Similarly, there is a saying targeting Kayasthas: Lala ka bachcha kabhi na sachcha (a Kayastha is too cunning to be trusted, and if he is trustworthy, it means he is a mixed breed)! This saying is used, replacing Kayastha with Bhumihar, to target the latter too. All these caste groups are apparently upper caste in Bihar in general and in Mithila in particular. 15 There are several such sayings that target lower caste groups as well. One saying blends casteism with racism: a black Brahmin and a fair Chamar is suspicious character! Apart from the deeply entrenched caste hierarchy, the villages in Mithila also exhibit the secondary status of women. Patriarchy underpins the social structure of Mithila society. The line of inheritance and kinship is patrilineal. The notorious line from Tulsidas’ Ramayana is known and uttered every now and then: dhol, gamar, shudra, pashu, naari, ye sab hain taran ke haari (a drum, a rustic, a lower caste man, an animal, and a woman is to be treated with stringent measures). In this wake, combining caste and gender discriminations, Mithila too exhibits the regressive social politics of inclusion and exclusion. In other words, the land of pride and prejudices pertaining to the Maithil common sense is not devoid of the peculiarities of social inequality. If one adds the secondary status of Muslims in contemporary Mithila, the mirror image of the region will perhaps reflect more of the cracks than of the proudly proclaimed ‘civilizational harmony’. It hence becomes quite daunting a task to discuss the folk world view of a community. The central question of this book, folk world view, and its philosophical engagement with death and dying, demands a drift away from the familiar ‘sociological trope of discussion’. The latter in inverted commas could be significant exploration on some other occasion. However, a brief awareness of it enables this book to hint at the totality of the Maithil world view optimally including caste and gender dimensions. Aware of the socio-political dynamics of the divides along caste, communities, and gender, this book unravels Maithili folk world view of the Hindus. There is, however, a conscious effort to ensure that such an awareness does not eclipse the central objectives. This is a point at which this book may disappoint many of us who hold our 16 l i v i n g an d dy i n g sociological sense of social divide as superior to the notions, ideas, and thoughts of the folk. This book indeed restraints from feeding into identity politics, be it of Maithil Brahmins or of the other politico-ethnic groups. To reiterate, this is not to suggest that these are less important issues and it ought not to be erased even in this book. It is important that the heterogeneous constitution of the Maithil, Mithila, and Maithili precedes the discussion on Maithili folk songs in this book. It is in this scheme that the book factors in the intermingling of a variety of sects, religious influences, historical encounters, and philosophical transactions in the shaping of the world view. There is also a conscious effort to engage with the idea of the exclusive space of women in the song culture of Mithila. ‘The exclusive privilege of women in rendering these songs without any formal training, mainly in terms of creation and recreation of the stories of Sita’s marriage, on several occasions, like marriage and other rituals, (which) make the Maithil folk songs distinctive’ (Jha 2002: 14). Such an assertion has to be taken with a pinch of salt and therefore the book tends to unravel such claims without undermining the possibility of a space for women. The framework of discussions on the folk songs is not unaware of the larger trope of songs in Mithila. The latter encapsulates songs among the Brahmins, as well as folk songs and ballads among other caste groups, such as the Salhesa songs of the Dusadhas, the Deenabhadri of Musahars, the Loric of Yadavas, the Jat-Jatin of Mallahs, among others. Some of the common found categories of folklore in Bihar (in Mithila in particular) are cumulative songs, non-sense rhymes, pastoral songs, and folk plays. Cumulative songs are various integrated songs, which give an impression of a rhythmically moving tale. Non-sense rhymes are yet another element of folklore of Bihar, which are often used to lull the child in to drowsiness and finally to sleep. Pastoral songs occupy a great deal of space in the folk life. These songs ‘express the thoughts, aspirations and sorrow of the villagers’ (Roy Chaudhury 1980: 36). Folk plays are not plays in a typical sense. These are often aided by cumulative songs in association with real life performance of the social actors. The example from Maithili folklore is of ‘ShamaChakwa’ and ‘Bhaiya Duj/Bhardutia (Bhratri Dwitiya)’. a brief outline of the context of quest 17 The deep stratification and complex belief system in Mithila along with multiple genres of folk songs tempts one to believe in what many ethnomusicological researches concluded elsewhere: the genres are allocated in accordance with social structure to different social categories/groups of the folk (Lomax 1962; Blacking 1973; Feld 1984). Conversely, Edward O. Henry observes, ‘genres may cross social categories, that is genres may become dissociated from their categories of origin, and linked with other categories, a process that can be called genre drift’ (1988: 224). Hence a possibility to discover a hermeneutic unity amid the heterogeneity of genres is never ruled out. At this juncture it is important to mention that all the available printed literature on Maithili folk songs do not mention any song for the last rite occasioned by the event of death. 16 The most commonly found songs are samskar geet, which literally means the songs of the rites of the passage, though without the songs of the last rite. The published collections of songs, albeit, mention songs of everyday life and seasonal songs. Samskar geet is the prerogative of women folk and they are context specific, associated with the auspicious occasion of life of the passage such as birth, pregnancy, tonsorial rite, sacred thread giving ceremony, marriage, etc. The songs from the category of everyday life such as Parati and seasonal songs that are sung by both men and women are free from the spectacular occasions associated with rites of the passage. Unlike samskar geet, they can be sung by an individual for himself/herself in solitude without any audience at hand. Interestingly, these songs present narratives replete with paradoxical tones and tenor. They speak of devotion, faith in the divine, existential question of being, the social matrix in which the individual is located, the pain and pleasure of being social, and an invitation to the unseen for a final release from the cycle of pain and pleasure. It is not a reinforcement of the textual-classical categories such as dharma, karma, and moksha. Instead, it is in an ordinary register of union and separation coloured by emotions that these songs tend to present philosophical postulates. The notion of union and separation that is found in the songs of everyday life is also present in the songs sung on spectacular occasions observed through rites of the passage. It is as if the notion of transition from one stage 18 l i v i n g an d dy i n g to the other in the life cycle of an individual gives an occasion to the whole community of the folk to narrate for themselves a tacitly present story of life. The sohar geet, songs on the occasion of the birth of a baby and during the pregnancy of the motherto-be, vent out the pain of bearing the unseen and the pleasure of graduating in the life cycle. The marriage songs such as udasi/ bidagiri are mixed with the joy of the successful marriage of the daughter, her fear of an unknown destination, and dilemmas between the social and existential. The variety in Maithili folk songs is that though there are a few exceptional songs under the title of mrityu geet, the ritual wailing/mourning/tuneful weeping is indispensable. This applies to other situations of life as well, such as marriage where tuneful weeping is never to be substituted by a clearly structured song. Lastly, one must mention the existence of the social institution of Nepobhatin17 that performed wailing on the event of death. This institution and their practices are outside the scope of this discussion for nobody seems to know about it. Having outlined the genres of folk songs, one could surmise the broader questions thus: first, what is the significance of tuneful weeping/ritual wailing/crying/mourning as a folkloric element in the social structure?; how and why do they become indispensable markers of folk’s world view?; does weeping connote an acceptance of fragility of social order or is it only a sociocultural tool to restore the order? Whether tuneful weeping on several occasions bears a subversive tone and if so what is the reaction of society to it is a moot point. Second, what is/are world view(s) found in the Maithili folk songs of everyday life and in the samskar geet, and, what is the equation between the notions of life and death in them? Whether the Maithili world view perpetuates the binaries of life and death or it encapsulates a spectrum where every colour is two-dimensional vis-à-vis life and death is another moot point. Overlapping with these two broad questions, there are questions of heterogeneity of world view vis-à-vis social groups (along caste, religion, and gender) and genres in the same linguistic-folkloric context, and, the dynamic relation between folklore, classical texts, and popular media. Not less important are questions pertaining to sociology of religion. If heterogeneity rules the linguistic and folkloric landscape, what a brief outline of the context of quest 19 are the characteristics of religious structure in Mithila? What is the nature and scope of interaction between religions and sects intertwined in the sociocultural context of folklore in Mithila? On account of world view in folklore, the question would be with regard to the performance and meaning. How do the folk make sense of their performance, the context and the text that they deliver? What are the coordinates in the meaning-making exercise? What are the avenues of conflict and reconciliation in the making of meaning within world view(s)? All the above stated questions point to the neologism I began with, i.e. folk philosophy. In the context of Maithili folklore, folk philosophy is a confluence of diverse notional categories. It is the operational version of world view that brings about a parallel between their theory and praxis. In other words, what they communicate in their songs, in their crying, and in their practice, characterizes the concept of folk philosophy. It entails numerous folk ideas/ unstated postulates/taken-for-granted assumptions on the basis of which the folk reason with matters of everyday life. It is widely accepted among the various communities of the followers of Hinduism that everything is religious and philosophical. Religious and philosophical aspects of the folk, as articulated in their songs, offer a vast array of meanings, and it figures in the outcome of this work. This book, in a nutshell, aims at the folk philosophy of the Maithili-speaking folk. With these objectives, questions, and hypothetical assumptions the research underpinning this book not only deciphers the narratives within each song, instances of crying, and performances in context, but also seeks for an interpretation and explanation of the folk in the context. Scheme of the Book With this introduction on what this book is about, the following essays unfold elaborate accounts on the central issues of the book.The very next essay presents a discursive reflection on the unbecoming of the idea of death. The alleged ‘death of death’ in contemporary sociology of death emerged in a specific sociocultural context. But the recognition of ambivalent modernity, and the possibility of plural cultural scripts, enables us to further explore the social imagining of death and dying. One of such cultural scripts is 20 l i v i n g an d dy i n g folklore in the age of polyphony, discussed in the subsequent essay laying out the prerequisite discursive framework for the whole book. The discursive framework underlines the archaeology of knowledge on folklore, and location of world view, role of folk, and issue of living and dying in the centrestage of folklore. This essay is a thick perusal of literatures, with an irreverence to the notions of pastness and monolith associated with folklore. This is followed by a discussion in the fourth essay on the way the research underpinning this book unfolds in the field. However, this essay defies the conventional ways of discussing methodology by connecting the processes of learning, unlearning, and relearning in a relational framework.This is intended to establish the significance of a dialectic between book view and field view of hermeneutics, for a more thorough idea on ‘interpretative understanding’. This entails a synoptic discussion on hermeneutic philosophy to devise the methodology that could help arrive at the folk world view and the folk philosophy of living and dying. The dichotomy between subjectivity and objectivity, the researcher and researched, which has ruled the roost of methodological reflections in social science in general and in sociology in particular, is questioned. A research of this kind warrants this critical orientation, as part of methodological preparation, so as to render the hidden and the obvious in juxtaposition to arrive at the meaning. The second, third, and fourth essays, largely based on the perusal of literature, underline the schematic predisposition of the book characterized by swing between micro-context and macro-questions. It begins to incline more toward the micro-context in the following essay. The fifth essay questions the three predominant categories of Mithila, Maithil, and Maithili with critical readings of historical accounts to elucidate the broad realm of micro. It is in the background of history with recurrent mythology that the broadness of the notions become clearer. Dispelling the ethnocentric air, without indulging in the never-ending glorification of Mithila or even denigrating the same, this essay discloses the limits of the glorification. Here we get a glimpse of the formation of Maithil pride in a historical as well as mythological context. It also underlines the misplaced Maithili pride, a case of cultural arrogance in the wake of multiple undercurrents. Various a brief outline of the context of quest 21 religious denominations, nurtured in the historical contexts of Mithila, also express multiplicity of versions, and thus humility rather than arrogance. This essay also reveals the polysemy in the categories of Maithil, the people of the region who belong to various caste groups rather than only the Shrotriya Brahmin, and the pluri-vocal character of the language Maithili, which is not only the chaste (pure Sanskritic) Maithili of the Shrotriya. It is in this broadened framework that the wide ambit of Maithili folk songs makes sense. This essay also establishes the significance of Mithila where the rulers were as much into philosophical, poetic, and artistic vocation as were the courtiers, patronized, and nonpatronized scholars. Besides, this essay highlights the missing link in the conventional historiography between the historical accounts based on the deeds of the mighty and the contributions of the unsung ordinary people. This is ironical because the region of Mithila has been described as that of unconventional kingship: any politically ambitious king met with utter failure. The reason why an essay of this kind is significant is mainly three fold: 1. It helps in understanding the inner dynamics of the region visà-vis thereof people, socio-religious varieties, stratification, linguistic complexity, and over all the contributions of history and mythology together in the evolution of Mithila; 2. It offers a continuum on the timeline to imagine past and present of the society, thereof people, their religious belief and practices, thereof language and knowledge; and 3. It lays out the context in which the field work in one of the villages of this region can be presented for microscopic analysis. In other words it also bridges the gap between the historical and the sociological. The sixth and seventh essays zero in on an even more focussed part within the micro-context of Mithila, with the two essay complementing each other in drawing the cultural landscape with sound and sight, and the renditions of songs in the village of Fulhara. The two essays are therefore put as two parts with the same title. They present a descriptive glimpse of the everyday life in the village, the calendar of festivity, and the events in the rites of the passage. They chart the demographic composition, spatial 22 l i v i n g an d dy i n g arrangement, main occupations, agricultural as well as otherwise, of the people to render the ethnography into a narrative of pulsating lives. The presentation of songs is peppered with slices of biographies and everyday living as part of the ethnographic details along with the spontaneous interpretation offered by the singers. Through these songs, consisting of innumerable genres, the seventh essay extends the interpretative analysis by connecting the loose threads. The interpretative analysis in this essay aims at drawing the totality of world view. It emerges that the Maithil world view, elucidated in the songs, projects a particular notion of dying and death in the folk context. Hence, the eighth essay specifically discusses this notion, which is conceptualized as art of dying, returning to the creative swing between micro-context and macro-questions. The intent here is to elaborate upon the holistic idea of death, without resorting to the generic binaries often apparent in the common sense. In association with the events of life, the imagination of death involves emotional responses of the people to it. It is not bereft of, what this essay conceptualizes as emotional truthfulness of the folk.Thus, the ubiquity of metaphors of death seems to be artistic expressions of the folk connecting living and dying in the rite of the passage. This is where the interplay of emotions, classical categories, and a negotiational process becomes intelligible. In this essay, ‘art of dying’ thus forges a connection between the special events of life and the ordinary everyday life. In addition to the songs, everyday life conversations aid to the folk philosophy. The conclusion is an attempt to summarize the book with a proposition that the key thesis of the book emanates with support from significant peripheral expositions, which ought not to be put into oblivion. Also, the conclusion is not drawn in theoretical vacuum. This is evident as the essay tends to place them in the larger, theoretical discourse to make sense of the sociological implications of these findings. The conclusions leave room for further research by stating the futuristic dispositions behind them. a brief outline of the context of quest 23 Notes 1. For another version of this tale in which the elderly lady is replaced by Mulla Nasrudin, the famous eccentric thinker, see Doniger 2011: 17. Wendy Doniger’s reading of the search of the lost key in the street light (outside) whereas the key was lost in the dark house (inside) questions the divide between insider and outsider. The contact with outsider (foreigner) may be heuristically useful for the insider (native) in the quest of the lost key. 2. A preliminary essay on this note is available elsewhere, see Pathak 2013. 3. This was a song in a musical hit. 4. There are many such songs in popular Hindi cinema expressing engagement with death and dying using melodramatic lyrics. 5. See http://news.webindia123.com/news/articles/India/20130801/ 2233768.html, accessed 5 January 2017. 6. See http://zeenews.india.com/news/bihar/nitish-kumar-inauguratesmithila-mahotsav_1562220.html, accessed 5 January 2017. 7. Veena Das, here, refers to the example of strangers in a coffee house from Lévi-Strauss’s 1969. 8. See for example, Kakar 1978; Madan 1991, 2006; Srinivas and Shah 1968; Doniger 2011. 9. M.N. Srinivas hints at the potentially distinguishable version of Hinduism, emerging from the practices of the people rather than the ancient texts. It, however, fails doubly to note that Hinduism is not either textual or practical. It may consist of both in perpetual negotiation. 10. The anthropological trope is too thick to be encapsulated, but a few could be quickly mentioned: Gennep 1960; Turner 1969; Hertz 1960a, 1960b; Parry 1981; Vitebsky 1993; or Myerhoff 1984, among so many others. 11. To mention a representative few: Schombucher and Zoller 1999; Filippi 2005; Saraswati 2005, from a fairly huge corpus of published literatures. 12. See Tambiah (1987) and Dumont (1970) on the confluence between Indology and Sociology. 13. Blackburn 1988 is one of the exceptions. 14. I am using the term ‘forward caste’ in accordance with the general usage among the people of the region, rather than meaning any conceptually clear term, to indicate those caste groups who are socially perceived to be higher in the caste hierarchy, as opposed to the ‘backward caste’. Both the groups in question and the perceiving groups share the perception of location in the social hierarchy.