Notes on Love in a Tamil Family by Trawick
Marriage and alliance have been central topics in ethnographic studies in anthropology and the referred monograph, a profusely illustrated study is a significant contribution to anthropology and south Asian studies. The Dravidian kinship system with its preference for cross-cousin marriage has been the subject of wide anthropological theorising. Cross-cousin marriage is a ‘romantic ideal’ in southern India (Trawick 1996:151). For Tamils, as Thomas Trautman and
others show, the whole conceptual structure is as much in the language as in the actual behaviour. An approach proposed by Margaret Trawick is that the pattern itself is something like an art form that is perpetuated as any form of expressive culture; moreover, it creates longings that can never be fulfilled, and so it becomes a web of unrelieved tensions and architecture of conflicting desires that are fundamental in interpersonal relationships of Tamils.
The monograph by Trawick is a person-centred ethnography in which she has attempted to present the notion of love in social scientific discourse which was not treated as focal theme by earlier social scientists. Emotional love is primarily dealt within the monograph; though it provides deeper insights into kinship patterns, terminologies and bonding in south Indian families. It also explains how ‘relational’ love is an enduring feature of filial interactions.
In the ethnography, Trawick illustrates the lives of women and children in the everyday context of life. The theme of ‘intentional ambiguity’ (p. 40–41) as a means of understanding how multiple strands are woven into everyday life, drawing from experience, mythology, poetry, and most importantly, relationships with others, is drawn up and elaborated. In Trawick’s estimation, ambiguity is a fundamental quality of the Asian psyche. It is assumed to be an inherent part of
the belief of the sacred, and is an integral part of the communication system. Issues of relationships between caste groups, which are an integral part of Indian life, are also dealt within the association between the members of the family and their servants, who belong to a lower caste (Sriram and Choudhary, 2004).
In her work, Trawick has weaved together exegesis of an ancient Tamil poem and her fieldwork notes or in other words we can say that she combines classical Tamil poetry with her ethnographic details to analyse emotions and relationships in south India with special emphasis to Tamil families. Trawick is of the opinion that previous ethnographers including idealist structuralists like Levi-Strauss (by way of Louis Dumont) and culturalists like Kenneth David and Stephen Barnett had presented distorted understandings of Tamil family and culture. Here in this monograph Trawick attempts to remove such shortcomings by rendering the ethnographer’s relationship to her subjects and theoretical framework transparent (Samanta, 1991). Trawick met Pullawar S.R. Themozhiyar (known as ‘Ayya’ in the ethnography) accidently who was a Tamil scholar engaged in lecturing masses about Saiva literature. He introduced Trawick to the epic poem Tirukkovaiyar by Manikkavacakar. It was a love poem replete with metonymy and metaphor.
While Trawick was involved in translating the epic, she met the various members of Themozhiyar’s (Ayya) extended family whose members acted as subjects for her study. She lived for a long time in the midst of this extended South Indian family and sought to understand the multiple and mutually shared expressions of anpu —what in English we call love. Often enveloping the author herself, changing her as she inevitably changed her hosts, this family performed before the anthropologist’s eyes the meaning of anpu: through poetry and conversation, through the not always gentle raising of children, through the weaving of kinship
tapestries, through erotic exchanges among women, among men, and across the great sexual boundary.
Trawick explains that the first thing this book is about is the way that India both exceeds and shatters Western expectations. Of course there are the stereotypes: India is “more spiritual” than the West, its people “impoverished”, “nonmaterialistic”, “fatalistic”, and “other-worldly”, its society structured according to a “rigid caste hierarchy”, its women “repressed” and “submissive”, its villagers “tradition-bound” and “past-oriented”, their behaviour ordered by “rituals” and constrained by “rules” of “purity” and “pollution” (p.4-5). The remaining chapters
of this book are about exactly what the title says, love in a Tamil family, the family of the man who taught the poem. These chapters describe different aspects of Tamil family life that touch upon love-kinship organisation, child rearing, sexual relations, habits of speaking, rules of behaviour (p. 2). Trawick attempts to highlight those anecdotes focusing upon anpu’s expression which are originally baffling for the Western ethnographer (and her readers) – a mother’s cruel
provocation of her two-year old to tears, for instance (p.77). Then, by unpacking her informants’ understandings of the ideal forms and expressions of anpu, Trawick renders ‘legible’those baffling anecdotes of a suddenly less alien culture: a mother’s love expressed through cruelty could be viewed as sowing the seeds for the child’s future happiness (p.104).
This study of anpu (or love) offers extraordinary insight into how familial relationships in South India are expressed and experienced. Her highly original study of an extended family establishes the ideology of love as central to interpreting the tensions and shifting balances between generations and genders.
Demonstrating remarkable ease with a range of topics in South Indian scholarship, she shows how anpu illuminates patterns in Tamil poetics, theology, ritual life, cross-cousin marriage, and the raising of children. The book’s engaging style intertwines vivid description, self-disclosure and questioning, and critical analysis of earlier theory. Trawick presents an understanding of culture as performed or constructed in the interaction between the informant and the anthropologist, a refreshing addition to the current critiques on ethnography. She skillfully weaves many strands into a poetic text. Scholars familiar with South Asia will perhaps respond differently to the multiple levels of this book, but all will admire its courage and intelligence. Margaret Trawick treats the most powerful of all emotions, love, with humanity. In the introduction to Divine Passions: On the Social Construction of Emotion in India, Lynch (1990) refers to Trawick’s work as being ‘a doubled dialogue’(p. 25; see Trawick, 1990).At one level, an ongoing dialogue with the family is taking place. At a more crucial level, Trawick is in dialogue with herself, trying to explicate, analyse and elucidate the dialogues with the family. It is possible to discern yet another level of communication in the book: that with the reader as she guides her audience to accompany her in the search for the reality as it unfolds before her. This dialogue is carried through till the end with skill and openness. Trawick does not set herself up to judge the people whom she lives with and becomes a part of (Sriram and Choudhary, 2004).
Trawick conducted her fieldwork in three phases, first phase of which was started in 1975 and continued till August 1976. The second phase was in 1980 and then third phase in 1984. Trawick spent long period in the villages of Madras and Madurai while doing her fieldwork in South India.
The merits of the work are:
This work by a woman anthropologists, avowedly feminist in that it deals with: “the particular, the private, the affective, and the domestic”, and because it considers the relations between males and females, and children’s experience of these relations, to be largely constitutive of the social order (p. 154).
A deconstructionist approach forms the theoretical mainstay of Trawick’s interpretation of love (anpu). On the premise that “meaning” lies beneath its surface and obvious explanation (Samanta, 1991).
- Trawick seeks to understand anpu in terms of what it does, what directions it inspires and takes within her Tamil family. In other words, anpu’s meaning is found in its use: “To many people, the informational content of what they say is not nearly as important as the personal relationship they establish in saying it. And this relationship is established largely through indirection, hidden messages, subtle responses to context” (p. 50) (Samanta, 1991).
- Trawick herself says, “…The central topic of this book – in Tamil, anpu, in English, “love” is a feeling, and my approach to the study of this feeling has been through feeling. I have tried throughout the course of my research and writing to remain honest, clear-headed, and open-minded, and to follow the dictates of reason and empirical observation in my descriptions and analyses of the events I have sought to comprehend. But I have not attempted to be “objective” in the common sense of this term. I have never pretended to be disinterested or uninvolved in the lives of my informants, and I have never set my own feelings aside. Only by heeding them have I been able to learn the lessons that I try, in this volume, to pass on” (p. 2). Trawick mentions
that while searching for “good informants”, she mostly found two kinds (1) scholars who quoted to her from books (2) ordinary folks who couldn’t understand what she wanted to know and were afraid of answering her abstract philosophical questions (p.8). - She lived with Ayya’s family for extended periods of time, along with her husband and sons. In addition, she carried out open-ended but prearranged interviews with 150 other respondents to supplement the findings from Ayya’s family. However she also reiterates that she never formally interviewedany one in Themozhiyar’s household. Trawick’s stay in Tamil Nadu withAyya’s family earlier was not with the intention of studying love and its diverse expressions in India. Her primary interest was Tamil poetry and how it related to everyday life.
- Trawick didn’t use any interpreter to translate the responses of her respondents. Perhaps due to this Trawick was able to get integrated with Themozhiyar’s family. Her familiarity with Tamil would also have helped her understand the nuances emerging from the discourse that she observed and was involved in. As Trawick says (speaking of Ayya’s inability to communicate with others when he visited America, so that she acted as interpreter), ‘I learned the powers of an interpreter, then, and was glad I never had one in India. The temptation to edit things people said to each other was sometimes very great’ (p. 21). It is precisely this feature that produces the consciously dialogical framework.
- However, it appears from the ethnography that Trawick is not an impartial observer; she is very much a part of what is happening around her.
- Also, an important feature of Trawick’s ethnography is that she enters into a dialogical relationship with her subjects; her subjects are not merely informants, but people on an equal footing from whom researcher can also learn.
- When Trawick introduces the family to the readers, she also includes her son and herself in the introduction, a subtle inclusion but a significant stance in the political implication of doing research in the field. This is another thread that is woven in the rendering of her story: the balancing of her position as an obvious outsider who has chosen to mediate the social distance between herself and her field to become closer to the people whose lives she unpackages for the world.
- As a participant observer Trawick attempted to use tape recorder in order to record natural conversations but often found it very difficult. However, she was successful in recording songs sung by labourers who were considered untouchables.
- The important feature of Tamil society is that Tamils organise their families and larger kin groups into patterned systems. Trawick is of the view that several western scholars have studied such kinship patterns in one way or another. Few explained these abstract patterns just as such as ‘patterns’ without ever having to deal with real people. Others explained such patterns believing that south Indian people create such patterns because they perform some necessary social ‘function’ and they may be understood as objects of artistic appreciation.
- In the words of Trawick, “kinship organisation is as much a matter of feeling as it is of thinking, or, it is as much a matter of “affect” and free from “aesthetics” as it is a matter of “cognition” and social “regulation”. Also there exists continuity between abstract patterns of kinship organisation and lived reality of actual people on the ground (Trawick, 1996).
In south Indian kinship system preferred or prescribed cross-cousin marriages are found i.e. (i) a man can marry a woman in the category of his father’s sister’s daughter (FZD) (patrilateral cross-cousin marriage); (ii) a man can marry mother’s brother’s daughter (MBD) (matrilateral cross-cousin marriage); (iii) in a few cases, a man can marry his own sister’s daughter.
In other words we can say matrilateral cross-cousin marriages are approved and are found in higher frequency but patrilateral cross-cousin marriages are in very less frequency and are disapproved. The Dravidian kinship terminology varies from region to region but within a given region the terminology is same irrespective of above mentioned variants of marriage systems.
An important feature of Dravidian kinship terminology is that its overall semantic structure is uniform throughout South India. Such uniformity or shared semantic structure strongly suggests an ‘ideal’ system of bilateral cross-cousin marriage i.e. two men exchange sisters, their sons also exchange sisters and so on down through the generations, so that the mother’s brother’s daughter and father’s sister’s daughter are the same person.
Trawick (1996: 121) is of the opinion that real life, of course, seldom if ever matches this ideal. She further opines that in Dravidian kinship, three levels of ‘ideal’ versus ‘reality’ exists
- Level A is the bilateral marriage ideal indicated by the Dravidian terminology itself.
- Level B is preferred marriage pattern of any group which is usually unilateral and only partially fulfills the conditions set by level A.
- Level C is set of actual marriages which take place.
Another important feature of Tamil kinship is that without departing from the fundamental pattern of cross-cousin marriage, a particular kindred group (vakaiyara) may opt for matrilateral or patrilateral marriage; patrilocal or matrilocal residence. Here, matrilateral and patrilocal marriages contribute to the solidarity of male and female patrilines by allowing all the members of a patriline to remain together within a single household, but become dispersed over separate households. Matrilateral and matrilocal marriages allow for the continuity within a single household of male and female matrilines, but patrilines are spatially dispersed.
Approaches to the study of cross-cousin marriages in South India
The functionalist explanation asserts that the practice of cross-cousin marriage fulfills some social function or human desire and contributes to individual or societal wholeness. For South Indians, the principle of kanyadana is much like the notion of transubstantiation of a woman’s bodily substance to that of her husband at marriage. Both principles align southern praxis with northern ideology but at the same time skew southern praxis in a certain direction. Both principles justify a complete severance of ties between a woman and her natal family at the time of a woman’s marriage; both principles also justify the complete subordination of a married woman to her husband and his family (Trawick, 1996: 138).
The continuity of a kinship strategy such as cross-cousin marriage may be attributed to a dynamic of unresolved tensions and unfulfilled desires as much as to the fulfillment of some function or the resolution of some conflict. Second, we can see kinship strategies as played out from the emotional habits acquired in early childhood within the domestic family, (Trawick, 1996: 154).
The purpose of getting married, according to village men was to have offspring, heirs (varicu). These were people who would carry on the lineage, take care of one in one’s old age, work the land that one passed on to them, and see that one was properly buried and remembered in yearly rites after one died. Daughters, however much one cared for them, could not contribute to one’s continuity in this way. “They stay with you for ten years and then they are gone,” said a number
of fathers. Ironically, the consensus among both male and female parents was that daughters were more loving than sons, if there was any difference at all among them along this dimension. Daughters would welcome their father into the house. They would ask, “Have you eaten?” Sons would just say, “Oh, it’s you.” (Trawick, 1996: 158).
In Tamil marriage, in life it is the girl who is most likely to be separated from her mother, especially while still a child, because marriage is normally virilocal, and girls are younger than boys when they marry. Not only when she is still a child, but when she is a mother, or even a grandmother herself, a woman may still make visits to her natal home, “seeking her mother.” Thus it happened that one young woman, married to her mother’s brother, come to the town of her birth to visit her mother, only to find that their paths had crossed on the way (Trawick, 1996:166).Another feature is that patrilocal marriage contributes to the continuity of the patriline, but it uses a break in the continuity of the martiline, and this break is felt specially keenly by the daughter who is cut off (albeit only partially and temporarily) not only from the mother but from the entire natal home and family. The mother stays in the place she was, and she may have other children to console her, but the daughter has no other mothers. So a daughter may feel herself to be shattered by her marriage. Conversely, a return to the mother’s home may be felt by the daughter as reuniting of herself, with herself. Surely, the break in continuity with the mother is one meaning of the several major myths about females shattered or dismembered as a consequence of marriage of the allied action of males (Trawick, 1996: 167).
In most of Tamil Nadu, however, the brother-sister tie is neither clearly severed at marriage, nor is its emotional priority over other ties translated into social priority. The blood bond remains, and is affectively the strongest bond, but the marital bond is supposed to take precedence over it in cases where the two bonds conflict (Trawick, 1996: 179).
Meanwhile, the nature of the bond between spouses is vague, neither clearly hierarchical nor clearly egalitarian. On the one hand, the ideal of chastity and devotion to the spouse is entirely a female ideal, entailing a wife’s subordination to her husband. On the other hand, it is not unusual to find men espousing a “feminist” point of view on this matter. So for example, one old man, advising a young man on his imminent marriage, told him, “Think that a goddess is entering your home.” On the level of technology, either the male or the female may be regarded as superior, depending upon who is talking, and under what circumstances. In practice an egalitarian household policy appears to be common.
When Trawick asked villagers about decision making authority in their households, more than half of both males and females said that husband and wife made them together (Trawick, 1996: 179).
Within the household, as well as in the domain of paid labour, there was a strong spirit of rivalry between many women and their husbands. Wives would not automatically accept submission, neither would their husbands. Neither was it easy for wives nor husbands to keep out of each other’s way, sharing a household as they did. Consequently their relationship was often- disputatious. Nevertheless, at all levels of society, lifelong monogamy and fidelity to the spouse were the ideal, though some honoured this rule in the breach more than did others. Even among members of untouchable castes, who are often reported to be more lax than higher castes as regards marriage rules, divorce was not easy. When a one young Paraiyar woman whose husband had deserted her and her children was asked why she did not divorce him and remarry, she replied, “It would bring down the caste.” Others of the community concurred (Trawick, 1996: 180).
Conclusion
The Themozhiyar’s family described by Trawick in the ethnography is characterised by the kinds of kin networks assumed to be typical of Southern India. In many South Indian families, cross-cousin marriage is desirable. This further means that the position of the bride on entry into the family is not as a stranger, as occurs in North Indian families, where this form of marriage is not
permitted. Thus, relationships within a marriage are likely to carry the resonance of earlier, comfortable relationships within the natal family. While there is social sanction for cross-cousin marriage, data from actual marriages show that the incidence of such marriages is low (Trautman, 1981).
The phenomenon of mirroring or twinning, patterns of complementarity, dynamic union, connections between Tamil myths and everyday life, sequential contrast, phenomenon of projection/introjections are some important principles which help in maintaining cultural unity and sameness. Trawick indicates that these are certain operating principles functioning towards the solidarity of the family.
Trawick’s methods, which can be seen as unconventional by some, can be of use in the study of families in a cultural context. She has used a certain amount of licence in extrapolating from her observations to linkages in classical literature, and applying her findings to everyday life.
Intuition has played a part in her analysis. It requires courage and a great deal of conviction to use this method of studying a culture and, more importantly, of reporting that allows the reader to enter into a dialogical frame with the researcher and the respondents.
Trawick develops a theory of the importance of ambiguity in the life of the Indian and the Tamil in particular. In Trawick’s estimation, ambiguity is a fundamental quality of the Asian psyche and it is assumed to be an inherent part of the belief of the sacred, and is an integral part of the communication system. Also, an understanding of ambiguity is crucial to the understanding of the cultural system.
Dynamic union is an integral part of the Dravidian cosmos as reflected in the kinship system and the conscious seeking for affinity as belonging. Trawick makes connections between Tamil myths and everyday life. Just as in myths, events are viewed in sequence, never being seen at the same time to give a complete picture (Sriram & Choudhary, 2004)
HOW DOES THE ETHNOGRAPHY ADVANCE OUR UNDERSTANDING
The ethnography Notes on love in a Tamil Family, is a fine contribution to critical theory. It looks at the aspects of marriage, family and kinship from the perspective of a strong human emotion called love. Her method, which may be unconventional, is most appropriate for the study of emotions and sentiments that bind the family. Trawick has contributed to the development of an indigenous theory of emotional expression.