Grains of Truth: Shifting Hierarchies of Food and Grace in Three Rajasthani TalesAuthor(s): Ann Grodzins GoldSource: History of Religions, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Nov., 1998), pp. 150-171Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3176672Accessed: 08/12/2009 09:46

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Ann Grodzins Gold GRAINS OF TRUTH: SHIFTING HIERARCHIES OF FOOD AND GRACE IN THREE RAJASTHANI TALES

Grain is in human history a heavily charged item; no less so in the vil- lage of Ghatiyali, Rajasthan, North India.1 In this article I use three oral tales to evoke and interpret a charged nexus of mythic and economic meanings surrounding grain as a divine and organic substance. I encoun- tered these tales in 1993 when I was trying to learn about the ritualiza- tion of agriculture, among other things. In each case the first telling was more or less by happenstance. Later, struck by their converging motifs, I began tracking these stories, and the central theme of grain, through informal conversations and recorded interviews. I sought to learn about grain as a sign of value, about the moralities encoded in this primary

This article is based largely on 1993 fieldwork in Rajasthan supplemented by two return visits in 1997. I am thankful for support from Fulbright and the American Institute of Indian Studies which awarded me funds granted by the National Endowment for the Humanities. I benefited greatly from affiliations with the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi, and the Institute of Rajasthan Studies, Jaipur. Without the help of Lila Devi Chauhan, Bhoju Ram Gujar, and Ugma Nathji Natisar Nath, I could not have gathered either tales or meanings. I am deeply grateful to all who shared their words with us, and I offer this work in respectful memory of Gopi Char Gujar, who told the first story. Grains of this article have been in my head and computer for years, and I have tried them at various sites including the Depart- ment of Religious Studies, McMaster University; the South Asia Seminar, University of Virginia; and most recently the Conference on South Asia, University of Wisconsin (1996). Thanks to all who commented helpfully in those and other settings, especially Mark Baker and Vijaya Nagarajan. For substantial improvements in the present draft, I am indebted to Saurabh Dube, Philip Lutgendorf, Gloria Raheja, and Eleanor Zelliot; special thanks to Saurabh for helpful clarifications and generous encouragement at the last minute. No per- sons or institutions are responsible for the results.

1 For a general description of Ghatiyali in 1979-81, see Ann Grodzins Gold, Fruitful Journeys: The Ways of Rajasthani Pilgrims (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Cal- ifornia Press, 1988), pp. 22-34.

? 1998 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0018-2710/99/3802-0001 $02.00

History of Religions

staple food substance and in its distribution among living creatures. I thought that the grain motif, interwoven through religious and agricul- tural domains, would help me in my efforts to understand how farming, as work conditioned by nature, was religiously conceived and effected.2

Yet the more I pursued grain and grain stories, the more evident it became that they were less concerned with agriculture than with its product: food-which allays hunger and which is exchangeable for other goods. Each of the three stories gathered here poses grain as a desired and paradigmatic food. Each story contrasts plenitude with hunger. Each story-and here religious ideas do come vividly into play-sees grain as a negotiated boon, and sign of divine favor. Most strikingly, each story is about unequal access to food, about socioeconomic hierarchies and their mythic causalities.3 Each tale reveals the surprising ways God's grace can rearrange conditions of existence for the disadvantaged, with- out recalibrating the scale defining degradation.

All three tales frankly acknowledge a common human and divine de- sire for abundance and satiation, for food and prosperity. All teach that God sometimes grants these even to the humble, impoverished, and dirty. Although none of the tales suggests a permanent alteration of hierarchies based on birth or property, all challenge an essentializing devaluation of the lowborn and their modes of survival. That is, all challenge a cosmol- ogy favoring hierarchies of caste identity, pollution, wealth, and decorum, replacing these bases for rank with devotion to, or intimacy with, the Lord.4 Although gender is not the focal point of these stories, all make the model of devotion, either explicitly or implicitly, a woman. Thus the tales-while acknowledging the reality and roots of social rankings based on property, ritual purity, and gender-radically challenge the moral ba- sis of human inequality and material inequity.

I find in these grain stories food for thought.5 To think through them might modestly contribute to a growing literature on possibilities for in- subordination in Indian devotional traditions or bhakti. About a decade

2 I focus on changing evaluations of agricultural rituals, especially ritual ploughing and planting of grain seeds, in Ann Grodzins Gold, "Abandoned Rituals: Knowledge, Time, and Rhetorics of Modernity in Rural India," in Religion, Ritual and Royalty, ed. N. K. Singhi and Rajendra Joshi (Jaipur: Rawat, 1998), in press, pp. 295-308.

3 I shall not discuss here the vast literature on Hindu hierarchies or the so-called caste system and its ritual and economic indicators.

4 For a helpful discussion of the relation between cosmogony in mythic representations and human ethics on the ground, see Robin W. Lovin and Frank E. Reynolds, "In the Be- ginning," in Cosmogony and Ethical Order: New Studies in Comparative Ethics, ed. Robin W. Lovin and Frank E. Reynolds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 1-35.

5 In a book on peasant rebellions titled Communities of Grain, Magagna tells us that "the intermittent and performative quality of rural hierarchy is most amenable to an analysis that focuses on the small scale and the mundane." See Victor V. Magagna, Communities of Grain: Rural Rebellion in Comparative Perspective (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 45.

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ago, subaltern historian Ranajit Guha trenchantly critiqued bhakti as "an ideology of subordination par excellence."6 More recently, authors associated with the subaltern school set into motion by Guha have found tropes of resistance in devotional movements worthy of attention, if hardly revolutionary in ultimate impact.7

Saurabh Dube, for example, in his study of the nineteenth-century origins of a religious movement mobilizing untouchable Chamars- Satnampanth of Chhattisgarh-states: "I was specifically interested in the manner in which a subordinate group resisted and questioned au- thority in the idiom of religion. What was at stake was a recognition of the intermeshing of domination, subordination, and resistance in subal- tern lives and of exploring the critical place of religion and caste in structuring the beliefs and practices of subordinate groups."8 Dube finds-looking at both myth and action-that indeed Satnampanth "in- terrogated and disrupted the hegemonic symbolic order." Some of this was quite blatant: for example, Chamars donning sacred threads. Dube qualifies the force of this disruption, however, noting that "there were limits to the challenge" because the "world fashioned by Satnampanth reproduced the significance of old meanings."9 Dube's approach none- theless remains open-ended, as his focal interest is less in dead-end limits than in lively interplay of "contestations of authority and contain- ments of power."'0

In a recent publication, Sumit Sarkar explores bhakti as a counterhi- erarchical theme in early twentieth-century discourse in Bengal, focus- ing on notions of the degenerate present era, or Kaliyuga. Sarkar finds expansive possibilities for resistance in this religious idiom. But he concludes that ultimately social consequences are transient because the encompassing system inevitably reclaims counterpoint voices, and re-

6 Ranajit Guha, "Dominance without Hegemony and Its Historiography," in Subaltern Studies VI: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 210-309, quote on p. 259. Sherry Ortner takes Guha, among others, to task for failing to consider seriously the genuine complexities of religious thought, noting that Guha's "notion of peasant religiosity still bears the traces of Marx's hostility toward religion"; see Sherry Ortner, "Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal," Comparative Studies in Society and History 37 (1995): 173-93, quote on 181.

7 For an earlier apprehension of strongly worded resistance to caste discrimination in bhakti poetry, see Eleanor Zelliot's essay on Marathi sant poets Chokhamela and Eknath, originally published in 1980 and reprinted in her From Untouchable to Dalit: Essays on the Ambedkar Movement (Delhi: Manohar, 1992), pp. 3-32. See also Daniel Gold, The Lord as Guru (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 65-67, for North Indian sant poets' denial of caste identity as mattering to God.

8 Saurabh Dube, "Myths, Symbols, and Community: Satnampanth of Chhattisgarh," in Subaltern Studies VII: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. P. Chatterjee and G. Pandey (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 121-58, quote on p. 127.

9 Ibid., p. 146. 10 Saurabh Dube, personal communication; see also Saurabh Dube, Untouchable Pasts:

Religion, Identity, and Power among a Central Indian Community, 1780-1950 (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1998), for a full discussion of the Satnami case in its rich complexity.

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asserts preexisting hegemonies. "Bhakti modulations of Kaliyuga thus created a richly ambiguous space for subordinate groups, offering oppor- tunities that were profoundly attractive, at times almost rebellious-and

yet always open to ultimate recuperation by dominant hierarchies of caste and gender."11

Thus in Sarkar's study new currents are co-opted by hegemony, while in Dube's, new expressions, constrained by prevailing structures, are doomed eventually to reconstitute them. Either way, resistance "in the idiom of religion"-however feisty its show-can neither erase prevail- ing patterns nor fully undermine the values on which preinscribed struc- tures of inequality are based.12 Raheja's recent cautions against thinking in binarisms when considering critiques of social injustices from within are relevant here. She points out that such thinking may result in dis-

missing voices that fail to change the system without recognizing their

generative vitality in other realms of existence.13 Between complicity in that refusal and romanticizing resistance there remains, I believe, a ten- uous space for attentiveness. Both Dube and Sarkar find unruly mes-

sages in religious thought and action well worth examining, as do I.

My sources in this article are tales that circulate in a village. I write not of social movements but of narratives. Bruce Lincoln has suggested that a myth (or, I would add, a folktale) "is also a discursive act through which actors evoke the sentiments out of which society is actively con- structed."'4 In these stories we see discursive and sentimental deconstruc- tion of hierarchy-dually based on personal devotion as an overriding force, and on a cosmology that refuses discrimination. One ringing theme is: "For the Lord all that matters is the devotee." Another (a message I

11 Sumit Sarkar, Writing Social History (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 204. 12 This is succinctly confirmed in Rodrigues's discussion of why untouchable leader

Ambedkar rejected the Hindi and Marathi sant tradition in spite of its "subaltern basis, egalitarianism and non-caste, open-ended approach." It was, Rodrigues continues, "unable sufficiently to distance itself from what is generally called the Great Tradition of Hinduism, or to evolve its own philosophical basis and programme in opposition to the social system based on caste." Valerian Rodrigues, "Making a Tradition Critical: Ambedkar's Reading of Buddhism," in Dalit Movements and the Meanings of Labour in India, ed. Peter Robb (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 299-338, quote on pp. 303-4. For another illuminating discussion of Dalit rejection of bhakti heritage, see Jayashree B. Gokhale, "The Evolution of a Counter-Ideology: Dalit Consciousness in Maharashtra," in Domi- nance and State Power in Modern India: Decline of a Social Order, ed. Francine R. Frankel and M. S. A. Rao (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 212-77.

13 Gloria Goodwin Raheja, "The Paradoxes of Power and Community: Women's Oral Traditions and the Uses of Ethnography," Oral Tradition, vol. 12 (1998), in press. In an ear- lier essay, Raheja documents colonial folklorists' denials of popular critiques of caste in oral traditions, showing their persistent refusal to acknowledge "knowingly critical com- mentary on a living social form." See also Gloria Goodwin Raheja, "Caste, Colonialism, and the Speech of the Colonized: Entextualization and Disciplinary Control in India," American Ethnologist 23 (1996): 494-513, quote on 499.

14 Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 25.

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recall from Sesame Street in the seventies) is "everybody eats" (and, carried by the tales to its logical sequitur, everybody defecates). I concur with both Dube's and Sarkar's understandings that devotional subver- sions of hierarchical ideologies cannot be credited with fully undoing their bondage in theory or practice. It is evident that such challenges are then systemically susceptible to regenerated models of subordination. All I want to argue is that in such tales are seeds or grains of truth that

may later sprout locally, in newly fertile ground, when encompassing political circumstances are significantly altered.'5

THE SEED OF ADORNMENT

Before telling the stories, I present minimal background on grain as a material feature in Ghatiyali's practices of everyday life. My friend and collaborator Bhoju Ram Gujar and I asked Shivji Mali, a young farmer then in his mid-twenties, why grain was called "Lord" (bhagvan). His

response introduced many salient features of grain in village life:

It is Lord. How could our bodies live without grain? It's like, when we plant a small tree, if we water it then it stays green and grows. In the same way our body needs grain to keep it alive and growing.

When a sick man gives up eating grain, then people understand that he is going to die. There is a saying, "If you've left grain you've left your house" (ann chhutya to ghar chhu.tyd)....

We need so many things like oil and pepper and turmeric for cooking, so how do we get those things? [The answer-by trading grain for them-is so obvious he does not verbalize it.]

Grain God is the greatest, and if we have him then we can do weddings, funeral feasts, buy clothes, or complete whatever work we need to do-we can sell grain and do it. We can build a house. But if there is no grain in our stomach then how can we do all those things?

You see, if we have a certain amount of grain, we keep what we need for our family and sell the rest in the market, and from that we can buy jewelry, build houses, have weddings. We can do everything with grain; that's why we say that "grain is the seed of adornment," and that Grain God [annadev] is the greatest god.

15 This may be close to Zelliot's idea of "creative figures from the past" becoming a theme of inspiration, or an "enabling force" (Zelliot, pp. 26-27). See also Margaret Tra- wick, "Wandering Lost: A Landless Laborer's Sense of Place and Self," in Gender, Genre, and Power in South Asian Expressive Traditions, ed. Arjun Appadurai, Frank Korom, and Margaret Mills (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), pp. 224-66. Tra- wick writes of an untouchable woman's performance: "Is she perhaps trying to move be- yond the pecking-order mentality of caste, to create a more enlightened response to her own abjection? Out of the stench of pollution, to produce something not conditioned by that stench?" (p. 228). For Dalit women's "modifications," see Persis Ginwalla and Suguna Ra- manathan, "Dalit Women as Receivers and Modifiers of Discourse," in The Emerging Dalit Identity: The Re-assertion of the Subalterns, ed. Walter Fernandes (New Delhi: Indian So- cial Institute, 1996), pp. 36-62.

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In this conversation Shivji Mali did not directly answer our question about the divinity of grain; rather he reaffirmed its truth by richly de- scribing some of grain's basic attributes. His language reveals the inter- changeability of grain as food and wealth, and grain as god. He articulates their unified significance in Ghatiyali's moral economy.

Shivji Mali's words help me to list, although far from exhaustively, grain's multiple significances for Rajasthani villagers today. Right up un- til Independence and its aftermath, all farmers in Ghatiyali were heavily taxed at the grain harvest by local rulers who were in turn squeezed by the British government in Ajmer.16 In the 1990s, grain remains a prev- alent medium of exchange. At the several general stores in Ghatiyali goods may still be purchased with grain: foodstuffs, from hard candy to cooking oil; worship supplies, from incense to coconuts.17 Gardeners ped- dling fresh vegetables readily accept grain over cash, weighing it either one to one or two to one against their fresh produce, depending on their ware's quality or scarcity-what the market will bear.

Grain gets you everything but jewelry, one person explained to me- but then qualified this by adding that, of course, you can sell grain for cash which buys silver and gold. Shivji Mali was not the only one to quote the proverb: "Grain is the seed of adornment." I asked Ugma Mali, an older man, to interpret this and he said, "We say this because grain is the source of life and health. If you are hungry you won't look good no matter how much jewelry you wear, but if you are healthy you look good, even without jewelry."

In the eighteen years since I first started traveling to Rajasthan, and observing rural rituals, I have never attended one that did not involve grain offerings. When dealing with deities and their priests, one always brings grain. Women hold grains during worship stories, tossing them with prayers when the stories conclude. "Asking grain" (akho puchbo) is the most common and simple divination method at local shrines: the (non-Brahmin) priest plucks grains from a small offered pile and counts them; auspicious numbers mean favor and success.18

Good works, charities, are measured out in grain-from the cupful poured each morning for the Brahmin priest who announces the date and

16 For the potent bitterness in living memories of this taxation system, see Ann Grodzins Gold with Bhoju Ram Gujar, "Wild Pigs and Kings," American Anthropologist 99 (1997): 70-84.

17 McKim Marriott noted over two decades ago that grain is a generative substance, ranked below knowledge and money but "not so gross as cooked food or garbage." It is "more capable of transformation, and therefore imbued with greater power and value"; see his "Hindu Transactions: Diversity without Dualism," in Transaction and Meaning: Direc- tions in the Anthropology of Exchange and Symbolic Behavior, ed. Bruce Kapferer (Phil- adelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues Publications, 1976), pp. 109-42, quote onp. 110.

18 Ann Grodzins Gold, Fruitful Journeys (n. 1 above), p. 139.

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distributes his temple's blessings in the form of basil leaf and auspicious forehead marks, to the grain scattered for pigeons or fed to cows in order to increase merit or atone for errors, to collections taken for major public works. For example, in 1993 a plan to raise a golden dome on a central village temple involved every household giving one hundred rupees cash plus twenty kilograms of grain. Pilgrims on the road pledge their largest donations not in cash but in kind: wheat to be delivered on demand in the village. Once a year priests from pilgrimage centers in other states circulate in the countryside redeeming these grain pledges.19

Several generic terms are used for grain, each carrying different se- mantic weights, evoking different contexts. One of these terms-akho (singular); ikha (plural)-is employed specifically in religious contexts. Its primary sense is whole, unbroken, as is grain before being crushed by humans into flour.20 Another word, ann means grain as food, rather than offering and, by extension, all food. Annaddta, literally "grain giver," is Lord, master, benefactor.21 This is a very common term of address from low to high; to use it is simultaneously to offer respect and to implore favors. It goes from worshippers to enshrined deities, from peasants to rulers or other authoritative figures, from beggars or clients at the door to the ordinary householders who give them food in the form of grains- uncooked or cooked, depending on their mutual identities. Gifts of grain both encode and manipulate hunger and hierarchy.

To be possessed of grain is to hold power; to bestow grain is to enact largesse on the model of divinity or nobility; to offer grain is, as Shivji Mali put it in the same conversation already cited, "to bring the god to the god, and by our causing them to meet, they are pleased and give us a blessing." As the seed of adornment grain visibly marks those persons blessed by abundance.

THREE GRAIN STORIES

Each story presented and discussed here was elicited in interview con- texts, but all are traditional stories although of different genres. The first has ritual and cosmological import in connection with solar and lunar eclipses; the second is a devotional tale; the third is a caste identity

19 See Bhoju Ram Gujar and Ann Grodzins Gold, "From the Research Assistant's Point of View," Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly 17 (1992): 72-84, reference on 78.

20 The Rajasthani Sabad Kos (hereafter RSK) gives among its definitions for the mascu- line singular noun, dkho: a seed of grain; an ox or horse that is not castrated; ritual grain offerings. For akha (masculine plural) glosses include: those grains that are used for work on auspicious or holy occasions; that grain given to a Brahmin as alms (my translation). Si- taram Lalas, Rajasthani Sabad Kos, 9 vols. (Jodhpur: Rajasthani Shodh Sansthan, 1962-78).

21 Glosses for annadatd in the RSK include svami and possak-meaning nourisher, benefactor, supporter. Goddess Annapurna's name literally means "full of food."

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story.22 I present each of these in performance, contextualizing initial tell- ings, so that the flow of discourse in which they emerged is transparent.

My interpretive comments focus on these tales' portrayals of grain bounty, grain famine, and grain flows. I shall try to point out some in- terplays of hierarchy and hunger, devotion and grace-both in the stories and in the social world where through performance, their meanings are emergent.23 The stories are (1) "Why Grain God Is the Greatest (and Why Harijans Beg during Eclipses)"; (2) "Why It Sometimes Hails When the Crops Are Ripe (Lord Shiva's Boon to the Bhilini)"; and (3) "Why Gar- deners' Grain Bins Are Never Empty."

The first is the longest and most complex story. Moreover, after hear- ing it for the first time, a telling that was accidental and unrecorded, I elicited and taped three variants. The story is known throughout the vil- lage, but told differently from different positions in the hierarchy. Here I shall look very closely at two of the four variants, with considerable attention to a third.

WHY GRAIN GOD IS THE GREATEST (AND WHY HARIJANS

BEG DURING ECLIPSES)

One day in early February 1993, I was on my way to interviews in the fields, accompanied by my occasional assistant, Ugma Nathji-a farmer, bhajan singer, and religious expert in his own right. We were leaving Bhoju Ram Gujar's household where I was staying when Gopiji-the shrine-priest hero of chapter 3 of my book Fruitful Journeys-stopped by and pointedly detained me.24 A round of tea was served. Gopiji seemed in no hurry to move along, although I was evidently restless and wanted to head out to the fields in search of farmers. I had paid my respects to Gopiji soon after my arrival over a month earlier, but rarely sought him out in the weeks that followed. He asked me with evident disgust why I-who had once studied the gods and goddesses and appreciated his spe- cial knowledge-was now troubling myself with farming.

22 Readers concerned with genre will quickly perceive that the first tale is more readily called a "myth" (it deals with origins; it charters ritual); while the other two are not. This definitional distinction does not concern me here. More relevant to my project, although also not the focus of discussion, is to hear these three oral tales as part of a folklore com- munity's shared traditions having at least implicit intertextuality. See Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger, Gender and Genre in the Folklore of Middle India (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Uni- versity Press, 1996); and A. K. Ramanujan, "Two Realms of Kannada Folklore," in Another Harmony: New Essays on the Folklore of India, ed. Stuart H. Blackburn and A. K. Ra- manujan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 41-75.

23 For an excellent review essay on dynamic social forces in performance, see Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs, "Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Lan- guage and Social Life," Annual Review of Anthropology 19 (1990): 59-88.

24 Ann Grodzins Gold, Fruitful Journeys, pp. 154-79.

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Inspired perhaps by his contempt, I had a rare burst of Hindi elo-

quence. I said something to this effect: "When I came to your village be- fore I spent all my time studying religion. I recorded hymns and tried to understand their hidden meanings. But I never went to the fields; I never looked at farmers' work. But the life of the village depends on the land; and who would sing praises of the gods if they didn't have bread to eat?"

Gopiji did not long ponder my words but responded immediately by telling a story, which I condense somewhat here. I did not have a tape recorder with me at the time, but with the help of Ugma Nathji I wrote down the story in my notebook as Gopiji had told it very soon after our encounter.

Here, as in all the texts that follow, explanatory interpolations are bracketed, and condensed portions of the narrative are set apart with sin-

gle asterisks:

Lord Vishnu was holding court and the 330 million deities were going there. Each of them greeted the Lord, and he gave them all blessings.

Last of all came Grain God; he came late, but the Lord stood up to meet him when he came, because he was equal to Lord Vishnu, the caretaker of all.

The 330 million deities were angry with the Lord. He asked them, "Why are you angry?" They said, "When we came, you sat and gave us blessings, but you stood up

for him. And Grain God is dirty and covered with flies." [Later, Ugma Nathji explained this to me: "Flies are attracted to people be-

cause people eat grain; our blood is made from grain and it attracts flies; look at the trees, do they attract flies?"]

So Grain God and Lord Vishnu got together and decided: "Let's show the 330 million what's what."

Vishnu said, "So disappear for five days, and what will they do?" Grain God said, "Where shall I go to disappear?" *Vishnu told Grain God to go to the Underworld to the house of a Harijan

woman, Sati Churi, who was Vishnu's special devotee.25 [Gopiji, probably for my benefit, uses the term Harijan, "children of god"-coined by Gandhi to re- fer to the lowest of the low.]26 The woman was very happy to see Grain God. He asked her to hide him. She put him in a gourd and buried him in the dirt.*

25 In Hindu cosmology, the underworld, patal lok, is not "hell" but a subterranean region inhabited by various beings.

26 In India today there is an active political movement of "dalit," or oppressed castes, that rejects Harijan as condescending and externally imposed. But I never heard anyone in Ghatiyali, in 1993 or in 1997, use the word "dalit" for untouchables. For the present, Harijan remains the "polite" term for the caste of sweepers, who are also latrine cleaners and herders of pigs. The more common and derogatory village terms for members of this community are Bhangi and Mehtar. Others who told the story called Sati Churi a Bhangan (female Bhangi). Churi, according to the RSK, means Harijan or Bhangi. Rama Sharma refers to both Churi and Bhangin as derogatory names for the sweeper caste in his Bhangi: Scavenger in Indian Society: Marginality, Identity and Politicization of the Community (New Delhi: MD Pub- lications, 1995), p. 83. The name "Sati"-beyond its well-known implications of fearsome fidelity-implies a unique female capacity for power and truthfulness.

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Five days went by and the 330 million came to the Lord in distress: "Where is Grain God? Without grain no work goes on and we are very hungry."

*Vishnu pretended not to know how to find Grain God. He sent a bird to search the earth and oceans, but it came back unsuccessful. Then he sent an ant. The ant reached the home of Sati Churi, and she gave it a grain as a sign that Grain God had been found. But the ant was afraid to carry the grain in its mouth, lest it dissolve and be digested. So Sati Churi twisted the ant into a knot. [And that is how ants got their shape.] The ant returned to the Lord's court with the whole grain.*

Then, accompanied by the Moon and the Sun, Lord Vishnu returned to the Harijan devotee's home. She welcomed him; he gave her a sari and said, "Promise to give me grain."

With the sun and the moon as witnesses to the transaction, she agreed to pro- vide grain. She then prepared and served them all a meal. They took Grain God back with them and fed the 330 million deities.

The deities were happy and said: "We'll never be angry again; you take care of us."

Recall that I evoked this story by stating that without farming, without food production, there would be no religion. The story affirms this on a

mythic stage: the gods themselves depend on grain. The tale also re- minds us that farming is not the whole story when it comes to food. By telling this tale, Gopiji perhaps intended to instruct me that I still had

something to learn from priests. If the primacy of grain as the source of human and divine life is the

overarching frame of Grain God's myth, the tale offers an array of com-

plex sociological and cosmological, moral and devotional themes. Within the splendor and etiquette of heaven's court we find some fleshly condi- tions: vulnerability to flies and hunger. The 330 million gods share this

vulnerability; they may seek to avoid flies but they cannot escape the need for food.

Grain God, who is equal to Lord Vishnu, is covered with flies. The

myth poses a substantial, bodily connection between the most valued fruit of the earth, grain, and flies (which were particularly obnoxious that year in Ghatiyali). The story opens with the plurality of deities an-

gry at the Lord's favoring this unclean Grain God over them. But soon their false pride is unmasked. Bodily impurities are common to all be-

ings, because they are implicit in food consumption, and gods get hun-

gry too. Although placing the untouchable woman away from society underground, the myth affirms her crucial participation in the foundation of all human and divine life: grain.27

27 Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty discusses folk variants on a cycle of myth that includes stories about untouchable females giving food to starving kings, sometimes on the condi- tion that the kings marry them; see her Dreams, Illusion and Other Realities (Chicago: Uni- versity of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 165-72. We may find remote echoes of the Ghatiyali folk myth in the image of untouchable females as nourishing and lifesaving.

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The myth further establishes that hierarchies of devotion and religious knowledge may be based on criteria other than those defining social hi- erarchies. The lowest of the low-for example, untouchable female and crawling ant-do the most important work. The crawling ant succeeds where the soaring bird fails. Finally, supreme celestial beings receive cooked food from an untouchable's home and are thankful for it. Vishnu's gift of a sari implies an ongoing exchange relationship, that could be a brother-sister relationship, because patrons normally would receive ser- vices, not cooked food, from lower client castes. The tale's unstated im-

plication is that all the food consumed in all three worlds is blessed leftovers (prasad) from the Harijans.28

However, even as the story of Grain God seems to exalt in religious terms persons disadvantaged in caste hierarchy, ultimately it demeans them in social consequences. I learned later that the story of Grain God

explains why on the days of solar and lunar eclipses, when everyone else stays indoors because of very inauspicious, dangerous astrological con- ditions, untouchable sweepers beg from house to house. They beg, of course, for grain.29

I thought that the Harijans must have their own version of this story, but several months passed before I heard it. Late in the hot season (around the end of May), I talked at length with Gendi Bhangi, an aged and blind sweeper woman in her eighties, whose memories were vivid. I was able to elicit the story of Grain God from her toward the end of a

long interview that included her own life history and her memories of

working for the former rulers. I asked about her community's practice of

begging during eclipses:

Gendi: When the sun and moon are eclipsed, we beg in their name and eat; sometimes it comes on the full moon and sometimes on the dark moon. People give us clothes, grain, or money, as they desire, on eclipse days.... Only Har-

ijans beg, no other caste at all. Ann: Is there some story about the eclipse? Gendi: Grain God, he went from our house to the Lord's. Once all the gods

28 For a relentlessly painful portrayal of the brutal conditions under which members of

scavenger castes may obtain their food even in the present decade, see Dalit author Bandhu- madhav's story, "The Poisoned Bread," in Homeless in My Land: Translations from Modern Marathi Dalit Short Stories, ed. Arjun Dangle (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1992), p. 1-8.

29 I am indebted to Eleanor Zelliot for a reference to a powerfully angry Dalit poem con-

cluding with the following lines: "The messengers of peace are dashing along the path of the sky. / The song emerges from the chaos, the song of the Republic: / 'Give alms, the

eclipse is over, / Give alms, the eclipse is over.'" A footnote to the poem tells of the de-

grading practice of begging at eclipses, and adds that the poet's "use of the chant here is a bitter and negative comment on the place of the dalit in the Republic." Namdeo Dhasal, "Song of the Republic and the Dog," trans. Vidya Dixit et al., Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 10 (1978): 4-5. On gifts of grain as a means of averting evil at eclipses, see also J. Abbott, The Keys of Power (Seacaucus, N.J.: University Books, 1974), p. 393.

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were going, and they said, "Lord please don't take the fly-wala with us." Then the Lord said, "If I don't take him, who will worship you and what will

you eat?" They didn't accept this. Then the Lord told Grain God, "Don't come with us because you have flies

on you." So they assembled the court of the goddesses and gods, and all the gods

were sitting, and Grain God wasn't there, and all the goddesses and gods were

hungry and the Lord was hungry but what will they eat? "We are dying of hunger." "I am dying of hunger too. How can I call him and how will he get here? If

I call him then the flies will get on you too [a striking evocation of the conta-

gion of pollution]. He is the Lord of Flies and the Lord of Grain; they are com- panions; where there are flies there is grain and where there are grains there are flies."

[Gendi added in an aside: You know flies sit on everything, they sit on shit, they sit on food, they sit on everything, and that's why they forbid him to call Grain God.]

Still, all the gods said, "O Lord, we are dying of hunger." *The Lord sends an ant who locates Grain God in a Harijan woman's house.

The ant brings one grain after its body is twisted, and tells the Lord where to find Grain God. [There is no mention of an "underworld" here.]*

So the Lord went to her [the Harijan woman's] house. She was very happy: "The Lord has come to my house." She bathed, and was making food, but then she had to shit; a broken pot was hanging from the ceiling in a net so she shit and peed in that pot, and cleaned her nose, and then she washed her hands and bathed and started to cook.

She called the Lord into her house to eat. And the Lord asked "What's in this hanging pot?"

She said, "There is nothing at all, eat your meal!" But the Lord insisted, "No, take it down and show it to me." She was very ashamed, "Oh no! Oh alas!" But it had turned into onions and

radishes, it had become green vegetables; the shit became radish and the pee and spit became onion; and from the snot of her nose, garlic. Because of her truthfulness. Her head became a garden and her breasts became oranges. [No- tice how the woman's entire body, not just its polluting products, is cleansed, transvalued, made wholesome and useful.] Then the Lord cut up the radishes and onions and feasted.30

The Harijan woman said to the Lord, "I will give you grain, but make some- one the witness that I gave you grain."

30 In another version, told by gardener Bardu Mali, there are four substances: phlegm be- comes garlic, saliva becomes onions, shit becomes eggplant, and piss becomes radish. Bardu goes on to say, musingly, "That's why some people have vows: some don't eat egg- plant, some don't eat garlic, some don't eat radishes ... these Gujaratis [the ritually "high- est" and consequently the fussiest Brahmins in Ghatiyali] don't eat any of it! But these are all made by the Lord, so . .." Thus Bardu justifies common consumption of these items, which his own caste produces and sells, on devotional grounds, rejecting elite Brahmins' ritual purity strictures.

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The Lord brought the sun and the moon as witnesses. She said to them: "You are the guarantors, so if the Lord will not give me the grain, then I will take it from you. And they agreed, "Yes, we will give it."

So from that time, Harijans beg for grain in their names. Still we can't get our interest [badi] from the grain we gave to the Lord.31 By the time we get back our grain and our interest the whole world will die, because no one will have any grain.

This is why whenever there is an eclipse we say "Give! Give! Give!"

This, it seemed to me, was the perfect closure to the story, but the old woman continued:

Lord Shankar gave the garden to the Malis [i.e., he gave the head of the Har- ijan devotee who had saved the gods and goddesses from starvation to the gar- dener caste, a clean caste, to be their source of livelihood].

And then we [i.e., the sweepers] asked for a golden broom and a silver win- nowing basket; we sweep your home and take food from you. [Another caste occupation of Harijans is to make and sell winnowing baskets-strongly asso- ciated with grain.]

When we go to someone's house, we don't eat there but take it away; if they want to feed us they give us grain; or they can give us a plate, a pitcher, all the dishes, and we don't give them back.... Even now we don't eat at people's houses; they give us food to take away.

She then trailed off into reminiscences of a rich merchant's funeral feast and the gifts her kin received there. The myth for her led not to lin-

gering contemplation of injustice and abasement but to whatever prag- matic advantage remained: an occupation and the right to collect gifts from patrons. The story, of course, "charters" this right. Yet inherent in Gendi's version is a strong claim for equality of all who eat.32

Gendi's version explicitly completes the circuit between flies, grain, and human blood established in the first telling by adding shit-the sub- stance that Harijans alone must deal with professionally among all the

village castes. It is the source of their unwashable pollution, yet, of course,

31 The common word for interest in the village is vyaj. I cannot locate badi in the RSK. According to Bhoju Ram Gujar, badi is local language for interest on grain loans that is paid in grain; e.g., if you borrow forty kilograms you pay back, at the next harvest, fifty kilograms; hence, as Gendi implies, the debt keeps on increasing if never paid in full.

32 Vijay Prashad says of Chuhra (sweeper) folklore, "We have an indication of the infinity of traces which make up the composite character of the Chuhras, one which inter- acts with the dominant social forces in order to absorb uncritically some of the practices as well as to challenge those very practices in terms of their effects on their lives." He goes on to speak of the relationship of this untouchable community with their "caste Hindu and Muslim masters," noting that they "shared a world which they interpreted in various ways." See his "The Killing of Bala Shah and the Birth of Valmiki: Hinduisation and the Politics of Religion," Indian Economic and Social History Review 32 (1995): 287-325, quote on 295.

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it is a substance with which all human beings come daily in contact. If there is an equivalence between grain and shit (recognized by flies as well as common sense), then, the story seems to ask, what is the stigma attached to dealing with feces?33

Some clean caste helpers grimaced or laughed in nervous embar- rassment at this version of Grain God's story, but eventually I recorded two other versions that acknowledged the link between food and excre- ment. One was from two old gardener men, and did not contain many distinctive features. Another was from a Damami, or "royal drummer" woman, Lila, who was an old friend and helper of mine. Damamis are also "untouchable" but their ritual work makes the stigma of a different order from that borne by Harijans.

Lila's telling like the others begins in the court of heaven. She has Grain God hide in the "latrin" of a Harijan located very explicitly on the earth (prithvi lok). As a semiprofessional performer in private village circles, Lila capitalized on this irony: "After that he went to a Harijan's house and settled there. He settled in such a place, in the latrine! He slipped into a dirty place and hid there." Her version continues more or less as do the others until the ant locates Grain God and informs the Lord. Then it diverges significantly.

Lord Vishnu takes his boar incarnation and comically roots with his snout in the Harijan's latrine until he brings Grain God out from the pile of shit-a nice Sanskritic touch. There is no transformation of polluted substances into food. But back in heaven, the other deities who previ- ously had been disrespectful apologize to Grain God very elaborately, touching his feet and asking forgiveness and saying that they were wrong. They then sing his praises, and Lila closed her telling by chanting as a rhythmic jingle their hymn to Annadevata:

From grain song, from grain dance, from grain clapping time.

Were there no grain at all, then all the gods would die.

My Grain God, Lord, come quickly!34

33 Zelliot suggests that "the rejection of the idea of pollution may be much older than the moder period." She cites fourteenth-century Mahar saint-poet Chokhamela who asked: "In the beginning, at the end, / There is nothing but pollution. / No one knows anyone who is born pure. / Chokh says, in wonder, who is pure?" Zelliot (n. 7 above), p. 325.

34 anyo gavai anyo nachai anyo tal bajavai

ar anyo na hovai to sabhi dev mar javai [sabhi log mar jivai]

mara anndev bhagvan beg padharo ji

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She repeated the whole verse, substituting the word "people" for the word "gods" the second time round as if to stress the identity shared in

dependence on grain. If Grain God's myth speaks of universal dependency on agricultural

products, it ultimately establishes differential, if unjustly differential, ac- cess to food: some grow it; others beg for it. The second story treats sim- ilar themes in its concern with how the landless, through devotion and

grace, may receive some grain.

WHY IT SOMETIMES HAILS WHEN THE CROPS ARE ALMOST RIPE

(LORD SHIVA'S BOON TO THE BHILINI)

Ugma Nathji and I were out early in the March harvest season; most of the oil seed crops were cut but still drying at the threshing ground; bar-

ley and wheat were ripening on the stalks. The weather was ominous:

cloudy with gusts of wind and occasional unseasonable showers sprin- kling the land. A big downpour at this time could rot the cut crops lying at the threshing floor and hurt the almost-ripe grains standing in the fields. Most dreaded, though, was a hailstorm. We sat down with some farmers. I brought up the subject of the bad weather. One farmer in-

stantly responded:

Farmer: In this season if it rains or hails then all the grain will be mixed with the mud [i.e., knocked off the stalk] and this destroys our work.

Another farmer: We will all die. First farmer: Seeing the clouds are there, our souls are very sorrowful. Ann: That means there shouldn't be clouds? [What I mean is, it's the wrong

time of year for rain.] First Farmer [defensive because my awkwardly worded question came out

sounding as if I were blaming him for the clouds]: Yes, there shouldn't be clouds but how can we put our hand against them? ... Last week there was de- struction to the chickpeas and wheat from the cold wind [blowing on the morn- ing dew], and the tomatoes and eggplants dried up; they "burned" with cold.

Ann: Why did it happen? Farmer: How do I know? It is the Lord's nature (bhagvdn ki kudarat).35 The

parvai [a Northeasterly wind considered very bad for all crops] was blowing and it blew the clouds in.

Ann: Are there any sayings about that? [I was collecting sayings about winds and weather.]

Farmer: I don't know about sayings, but there was a "boon" [varddn] to a Bhilini [tribal woman].

35 Kudarat is an Urdu (Perso-Arabic) word meaning divine power, as well as creation or nature; this almost seems like a pun, as the weather is a manifestation of divine power and is also "nature."

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At this juncture Ugma Nathji happily switched from the role of "as- sistant" to that of "informant," and narrated this story, while the others listened.

There was a Bhilini. And she served Lord Shiva. The Bhil and Bhilini both served Lord Shiva, and he became happy.

After he became happy, he said, "Tell what you want and whatever you want I'll give."

[The Bhilini said to Lord Shiva]: "We are sweeping the fields. So make your horses go round the fields twice a year, once around Holi [the carnival festival surrounding the wheat harvest, now about a week away] and once around Gan- gaur [16 days after Holi]."

Who are those horses? Hailstones (gara)! [Ugma Nathji explained in an aside to Ann: "Running a horse through the

fields when the grain is ripe has the same effect as hailstones falling: to knock the grains down into the dirt." He went on to talk about the Bhils: "They are the kind of caste that does no work; or they only do one kind of work and that is very poor: sweeping the field. They do this with a broom after the harvest. Bhils will spend all day getting enough fallen grain from the dirt to make one meal. Other castes would consider everything lost, and would not spend their time this way."]

So ten days before Holi or between Holi and Gangaur, it can rain or hail, and this is destruction to the farmers and advantage to the Bhils; it is advantage for them.

And all the castes may get together, and collect money and buy butter and worship the gods and do fire oblations, but. . [the unstated implication is: it won't do any good if God is granting the Bhilini's boon].

Their knowledge is of the forest, not the fields. Yet they too want some grain.

Pondering this moral, troubled by the idea of geophysical disaster as

blessing, I sought other versions that might elaborate it. One links this

village story of destructive hail as a boon to a female tribal devotee of Shiva with the famous episode from popular Ramayana traditions of a female tribal devotee of Lord Ram named Shabari (called here Savari).36 Ugma Mali, a farmer about fifty years of age in 1993, related this to me and Bhoju Ram Gujar when we asked him for the causality of hail at harvest time.

36 See Philip Lutgendorf's delightful essay tracing the Shabari episode through various Ramayana traditions: "Dining out at Lake Pampa: The Shabari Episode in Multiple Ra- mayanas," in Questioning Ramayanas: A South Asian Tradition, ed. Paula Richman (Delhi: Oxford University Press, in press). Often, Lutgendorf tells us, Shabari is referred to simply as a Bhilini. He points out that although the berry tasting itself is absent in major literary works including those in the vernaculars, it is highlighted and most memorable in "popular imagination."

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Ram Chandraji went to live in the woods; and one day he and Lakshman were both sitting under a tree.

And a Bhil woman named Savari was there in the jungle. She saw Ram and Lakshman, and she brought them some berries from the jungle.

She thought to herself, "These are deities and I don't want to give them any- thing bitter or sour," so she tasted each one.

Ram ate them and Lakshman threw them away. Ram said, "These are great berries!" Lakshman said, "They are polluted and bad." Ram said, "Greater than god is his devotee. Don't think of their caste but their feeling!"

Then the berries that Lakshman threw away grew into the life-restoring herb.37

At that time the Lord was very happy with the Bhilini and gave her a boon (vardan): "Around Holi hail will fall and collecting, collecting you will receive grain."

Bhoju Ram then asked Ugma the question that had been bothering me for some time: "Why give for one woman a promise that causes so much trouble to all the farmers?" The response was another example of God's blindness to all other character traits in the overweening presence of devotion: "Well why did Shankar give such a boon to Ravana [Rama's major demonic enemy in the epic tale] knowing that he could cause so much trouble? For the Lord all that matters is the devotee."38

Many stories pit one caste against another. In this one it seems to be the Bhils against all, religiously and economically. But this is explicitly not God's point of view.39 In the Harijan version of Grain God's story, a group denied commensality becomes the source for all food, alleviat-

ing other beings' hunger. Like the Harijan woman devotee, the landless tribal woman is empowered through devotion. But in this case grace to her means hunger for others. Moreover, and here is a parallel to Grain God's story, the tale's outcome reinforces her inferior status. The effect of the Lord's boon is to allow her work that others despise. So even

though grain as a desired commodity is singular and common to all, pro- cesses of production and consumption remain highly differentiated. The Bhils' relation to grain is "sweeping the fields"-painstakingly picking grains from the mud, and hence doing work to which others literally would not stoop. Although I was able to obtain a positioned Harijan tell-

37 Thus Ugma connects the berry story with another major Ramayana episode, and does so with a further jab at Lakshman's misguided fastidiousness. This herb sprung from the polluted berries Lakshman refused to eat is the very herb that later restores his life. I am indebted to Philip Lutgendorf for this insight.

38 Ravana was a devotee of Shankar (i.e., Shiva). 39 Lutgendorf cites a similar explanation from a twentieth-century commentary on Tul-

sidas by Anjaninandan Sharan: "God is famished for love [italics in original]-what does he care about pollution and whatnot? Only a devotee can understand this, no one else." See Lutgendorf.

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ing of Grain God's tale, I have no knowledge of any Bhil version of the hail boon, if one exists.

WHY GARDENERS' GRAIN BINS ARE NEVER EMPTY

After several hours of interviewing farmers in their fields, Ugma Nathji and I were resting at the shrine Puvali ka Devji. There we ran into an old gardener, Bhairu Mali, and he began to talk about his caste's special- izations-vegetable and flower gardens-with only a little prompting. He told us that Malis' gardens were a "boon from Lord Shiva."

It is Shiva's garden and we give him the first fruits and he protects the gar- den. We have such faith [he instantly launches into this story].

A farmer and a gardener were friends. And the gardener had a small bin full of grain and the farmer had seven hundred maund of grain in his storage bin.40

Then the farmer said to the gardener, "How will you have enough for your children with such a small bin? But I have lots and lots of grain."

And the gardener said to the farmer: "You do what you want, but this is what we have."

The gardener met the farmer one year later; and the gardener said, "Brother how is your grain bin, full or not?"

The farmer said, "My grain bin is empty. Later there will be grain and I'll fill it."

Now the gardener said to the farmer, "My grain bin is just as full as it was before, but yours is empty."

So the farmer said to him, "Mine is empty so how could yours possibly still be full?"

The gardener said, "If you don't believe me come to my house and look, my grain bin is full." Then the gardener explained, "You see, every day I sell veg- etables and get grain in exchange, and put it in the grain bin and thus my grain bin remains full. This is Lord Shiva's grace that keeps coming to me, cease- lessly. Everyday, I receive Lord Shiva's grace. There is always a flow of money and grain from the garden, Lord Shiva's stream."

Ugma Nathji asked why the gardeners had this special boon from Shiva, and Bhairu Mali explained that gardeners were created from Shiva's

bodily substance (his grime); Shiva thus feels kinship with them and accords them special favor. Farmers must wait for harvest time to re-

plenish their grain stores, but gardeners have produce to trade for grain year round.

I pursued this story's implications in interviews with other members of the Mali community. There was a defensiveness among them regard- ing the practice of hawking vegetables from door to door in the village,

40 One maund is forty kilograms.

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especially by women who most often did this work. Some judged this to be degrading in today's society. Processes whereby lower castes increase collective prestige by emulating higher-ranking groups (labeled "San- skritization" by anthropologists decades ago) have been noted to include

increasing the confinement of women.41 But this tale resists that social

impulse by insisting that public circulation in the village is the very source of Lord Shiva's boon to the gardener community. Were they to leave off this practice they would lose the boon as well. Shivji Mali ex-

pressed this very vividly:

Shivji Mali: If we don't go around, how will people know we are growing vegetables? ... It was a boon of Lord Shiva: as much as you will wander with vegetables to sell them you will earn that much, but if you stay home you will lose.

It is like a hole in the river: as much water as you take out, that much will come in; if you don't take some out then nothing will come in.

This is why we wander, because of Lord Shankar's boon ... Even today the Malis who do this work are successful, but people who are too proud-they have nothing.

Today Malis with baskets on their heads come calling: "Buy onions! Come and buy eggplants!" They are very happy.

Someone is home wondering what to cook, and the Mali comes and they make each other happy.

The implication of this gardener's story is that Shiva as divine bene- factor will favor the gardener community with a flow of grain as grace, only as long as Mali women remain vegetable peddlers. As in the other two tales, a community's link with divine grace is through a female be-

ing. While farmers might hold themselves higher than gardeners because their women do not go from door to door, the story derides this as false

pride. Moreover, this tale mildly but distinctly warns the Mali commu-

nity that they buy in at their peril to a version of what constitutes dignity and virtue that would alter their past modes of acquiring grain.42 It im-

plies that Malis would be left hungry were they to refuse peddling, just as the gods and goddesses in heaven were left hungry when they ban- ished the unkempt Annadev.

41 The classic essay on Sanskritization is in M. N. Srinivas, Social Change in Modern In- dia (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), pp. 1-45. Nicholas B. Dirks revisits this concept and points out several centuries of colonial collusion evident in a process anthropologists accepted as spontaneous; see his "The Policing of Tradition: Colonialism and Anthropology in Southern India," Comparative Studies in Society and His- tory 39 (1997): 182-212.

42 In Ghatiyali, Malis are held by other communities to be notoriously "backward" in their attitudes toward education and other movements toward modernity.

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MYTHS/SEEDS

Wendy Doniger (following Thurber) cautions that, in the myth business, "We are always in danger of drawing our own eye, for we depict our own vision of the world when we think we are depicting the world."43 This could be a particularly apt warning to those who would find resis- tance and egalitarianism in the oral traditions of a profoundly hierarchi- cal society. However, in the case of these three oral tales, it seemed that the stories were forcing me to think about caste, pollution, and economic inequities (which were not on my research agenda). I had wanted, and tried in public, to read these tales for ecological insights; but I always had an uneasy feeling, even as I carefully crafted my lectures, that I was missing the point.44

In an earlier analysis of a cycle of tales from Sanskrit sources, con- cerned with kings who live or dream lives as untouchables, Doniger ar- gues that although the doctrine of illusion exemplified in the tales "could have been used to challenge the baseless strictures of the social system," in fact it was not. Rather, she observes, it was employed "to preserve the stability of the socioeconomic and political status quo, rechanneling whatever discontent there might be into abstract formulations."45 Earthy in every way, these Rajasthani village tales by contrast propose no ab- stract formulations. If they do give supreme priority to bhakti, it is as emotion, service, and shared substance-everyday experiences as close to home as farming and food.

We see grain in all three tales from Ghatiyali's oral traditions as an indication of divine favor bestowed on particular communities-in re- sponse to devotion. In addition, as I have already pointed out, women (in rural Rajasthan as most other places low ranked among the low) are the channels of divinely granted grain bounty in every case. Each of these stories evokes implicit and fundamental relationships among people, food, and gods. In them we see grain in its singularity uniting human- kind as valued sustenance while in its diverse roles-as the measured stuff of charity and barter-it separates one group from another. Owned, gifted, and traded, then, grain creates temporal configurations of rank. But, the first tale certainly insists, when swallowed and digested it is no respecter of persons. Different kinds of people who do different kinds of

43 Wendy Doniger, "Myths and Methods in the Dark," Journal of Religion (1996): 531- 47, quote on 545.

44 Most recently I attempted to interpret the grain stories, rather plausibly, within the framework of "embedded ecologies," which Vijaya Nagarajan has used so effectively to discuss South Indian women's ritual art; see her "Embedded Ecologies," in Purifying the Earthly Body of God: Religion and Ecology in Hindu India, ed. Lance Nelson (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1998).

45 Doniger O'Flaherty (n. 27 above), p. 158.

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work have different moralities and different modes of livelihood. None- theless, devotion to a personal god-as lived emotion rather than en- acted code for conduct-levels persons here as elsewhere in Hinduism.

All three stories show ways that persons and groups are distinguished and evaluated according to their access to food production and accumu- lation. Landless Harijans beg for farmers' grain during the dangerous time of eclipses. Landless Bhils are "people of the forest" but they too want to eat grain, and thus they glean from other men's ruined fields. Gardeners through diligent cultivation of small plots of land are able to acquire a perpetual stream of grain that they receive in exchange for their vegetables-but only if they are humble enough to remain peddlers. Thus each tale while questioning profoundly the moral basis of social differences that organize village society, at the same time could be said to reinforce the very practices that sustain difference.46 This would re- turn us fatally-not to apolitical abstractions but to Dube's and Sarkar's critiques of the limits of a religious idiom for resistance. Those born low may be allowed no more than to sing (or tell stories) in their chains.

However, I do not quite want to close there. Recently, at least one ap- proach within mythography has found that myths and tales with their multiple emergent meanings and polyvocality could, when their timeless truths are launched into play in historical contexts, be seen as "power- ful mediators of cultural transition."47 If myths can reflect and reveal re- alities of inner and outer cultural worlds, they may also transform them under changing historical circumstances. When the hierarchical universe of popular Hinduism is infused with bhakti, genuine transformation may not be ruled out under a democratizing political order.

Let me close by returning to Ghatiyali's Harijans, whose primary re- lationship with food production as portrayed in the story of Grain God is so thoroughly reversed from its reality in traditional contexts. In the old days, Harijans received grain only through patron farmers' obliga- tory payments and ritualized donations, not through farming. Yet the tale makes them the source of all grain; and while chartering clean caste grain gifts to sweepers, names these not as charities but as repayment of a bot- tomless debt. Today Harijans, helped by government programs, have their own land to farm. Legally they must be served at the same tea stall as Brahmins. Persons from higher castes told me, ruefully but with resig-

46 Gloria Raheja brought to my attention another story involving an untouchable woman giving polluted food (barley) to a deity. While the results are divisive, the underlying theme is the common humanity of "outcastes" and Brahmins; all human communities are "thirty- six knots in a single sheet." William Crooke, The Tribes and Castes of the North Western India (Delhi: Cosmo, 1974), 2:315.

47 Laurie L. Patton and Wendy Doniger, "Introduction," in Myth and Method, ed. Laurie L. Patton and Wendy Doniger (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), pp. 1- 28, quote on pp. 12-13. See also Lincoln (n. 14 above), pp. 15-26.

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History of Religions

nation, that people have a healthy respect for the law in this regard; it has been tested and proved. Times have changed.

Gendi Bhangi's grandson's generation lives uneasily at the border be- tween old subservience and new self-respect. One day when I was sit- ting in the bazaar interviewing a shopkeeper, this middle-aged Harijan man joined us. He crouched in the street while we sat on the raised curb. But he said, with the tape recorder going, that the government had given him the right to sit with us; he crouched only for the sake of other peo- ple's "honor" (ijjat), and not because anyone had the right to force him to crouch. Even assuming this customary posture of humility, the man's dignity was evident. Although soft-spoken, he struck me as unafraid, con- fident in the knowledge that his caste superiors' days of dominion were doomed by law.

I thought of his blind grandmother's story of the greatness of the fly- covered god, and of the unpayable debt in food society owes to those it shuns and excludes. Perhaps this tale holds lessons of transition. As an origin story set in mythic time, it seems to carry seeds of transformations underway, if not yet fully realized today. In all three grain stories may lie such grains of truth, seeds of change.

Syracuse University

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