Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies

On an April evening in 1999, in Sringeri, a small town in South India, the retired schoolteacher Meshtru 1 and I walked together on our way to our homes after the lively celebrations of the Rama 's festival. 2 We stood to chat at the street corner where our paths would part. "It went really well!" I said. Meshtru's family, with whom I had become friendly over the years of my research in Sringeri, had been publicly thanked for sponsoring the evening's festive activities. "It went well, yes, this service to Rama !" he acknowledged. Amid nods and goodnights to familiar passersby, he narrated this experience. I still had my tape recorder on from the music performance I had been recording at the celebrations we had just attended.

For over two thousand years, the notion of sastra has had an astonishing presence in Hindu normative thought and culture, and sastras, as codifications of knowledge, have been composed in virtually every aspect of life from love and politics to thieving and horse rearing. The concept of sastra yokes precept and practice in a way that perhaps no other concept in Hindu life does, and indexes a complexity that is understated by dictionary meanings of the term which include "to instruct," "order," "command," "precept," "rules," "scientific treatise," or "lawbook." Drawing on my ethnographic research in the Hindu pilgrimage town of Sringeri, south India, my essay explores how the notion of sastra, or, more widely, the "normative," is expressed in everyday contexts of Sringeri. The location of Sringeri itself is significant. A small town in the lush southwestern mountains of India, Sringeri is famous for its smòrta matha (monastery) and its temples which are believed to have been founded by Sankara in approximately 800 A.D. Historical records of the matha show that in an unbroken lineage of over 1200 years, the gurus who head the matha have counseled royalty and laypersons on matters ranging from military campaigns and land disputes to propriety of marriage alliances and business practice. The matha today is an influential interpreter of the Hindu codes of conduct, the DharmaMstras, for a large following of Hindus in south India. To a visitor to Sringeri, the monastic institution with its emphasis on sastra, would seem to symbolize a normative centrality in the lives of Sringeri residents. However, conversations and oral narratives from Sringeri challenge this assumption, and demonstrate that sastra is one concept among others such as paddhati (custom), äcära (proper conduct), sampradäya (tradition), and niyama (principle; restraint) that individuals employ to indicate moral authority and enactment. While these terms are often used interchangeably, they highlight subtle differences in agency, textuality, historicity, jurisdiction, and permissibility in the context of the normative. I argue that underlying ethical practice is a dynamically-constituted "text" that draws on and weaves together various sources of the normative -a sacred book, an exemplar, a tradition, a principle, and so on. Such a text is essentially an imagined text, a fluid "text" which engages © Koninkhjke Brill NV, Leiden NUMEN, Vol. 53 Also available online -www.brill.nl

᭛ ABSTRACT Between 1860 and 1920, a staggering number of collections of Indian folklore was published by British administrators, missionaries, wives and daughters of officials, and Indian scholars. Rich in local detail, these collections of folklore contain copious prefaces, notes and explanatory appendixes. I examine the prefatory material of two folktale collections-Mary Frere's Old Deccan Days (1868), and Georgiana A. Kingscote and S.M. Nat˙eśa Śā stri's Tales of the Sun (1890)-for their display of multiple levels of engagement between co-authors, informants, and representatives of colonial authority, calling into question the concept of a stable authorial center. I argue that these collections comment on how collectors of folklore delineated alterity and subjectivity while themselves experiencing shifting subaltern positions.

Prasad re-tools Hannah Arendt’s concept of “interspace,” the world that emerges from the simultaneous recognition of the distinctiveness of subjects, their shared relations, and purposes. She compares discrepant related texts, acknowledging and bridging their distances. This is illustrated through a comparative and inter- and extra-textual reading of Shakespeare’s King Lear and variants of Indic filial-love folktales drawn from late nineteenth-century folktale collections and contemporary ethnographic studies. Prasad concludes that though Indic filial-love stories share some central predicaments and premises with King Lear, they propose different reconciliations to questions about selfhood, namely, “Who am I?” and “Who makes me?” Read together, Indic filial-love stories and King Lear illustrate that the self, always an intertext, finds itself by being symbiotically sovereign.
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Most controversies about religious representation enact conceptions of
the public that construct boundaries which stridently mark insiders and
outsiders, friends and foes, or practice and theory. This article begins
with a controversy in California over representations of Hinduism in
middle-school textbooks. A legal settlement closed the controversy but
brought little sense of closure. Asking more broadly why publics fail, I
put together, through deliberate anachronism, elements of a praxis of the
public taking from political philosopher Hannah Arendt and bhakti poets
of the Hindu tradition from the sixth century to the sixteenth century.
This alternative praxis of the public creates “co-being,” a state of society
achieved by reimagining how we occupy space, how we own things and
ideas, and how we form pacts. Gandhi’s ashram, in concept and practice,
exemplifies how an unlikely commonality is a possible one and is in fact
the foundation of a meaningful and sustainable public.

This essay defines ethical resonance through an ethnographic interlude that paves the way for a broader theorization of the concept. It begins by contextually recounting the story of an individual who had stayed at Sevagram, Mahatma Gandhi's last ashram in 1944, shadowing Gandhi for some 20 days. The young man's brief meeting with Gandhi in which Gandhi uttered only one sentence transformed him for his lifetime. I reflect on the experience and its narrative qualities to explore the broader question of why one is moved, and moved enough to be altered. I propose that the theorization of resonance in modern physics, in phenomenology, and in 11th-century Sanskrit poetics is productive for understanding the subjective and the transsubjective elements that underlie ethical persuasion. I argue that the idea of resonance helps bridge the affective and the aesthetic in moral self-formation that occurs in everyday life.

This article analyses an intriguing unfinished long narrative poem published in 1894 about the ‘origin and rise’ of the English empire in India.
Written in Sanskrit by eminent literary scholar, P. V. Ramaswami Raju,
Sreemat Rajangala Mahodyanam (The Great Park of the English Raj) also
contains an English translation that he himself provides alongside. The
story dramatically describes the birth of the English race through the fall
to earth of a celestial musician in heaven who is cursed to be nameless.
This article argues that Ramaswami Raju devised creative strategies and
adapted Indian forms of narration such as the purāṇa to tell this story
boldly, without fear of censure. With the imperial ruler being its subject,
the narrative curates two ways of speaking within and across the Sanskrit
and English texts – unfolding a double register of praise and critique –
that creates an ethos of irony that suffuses the poem. Raju’s creative
strategy of a double register becomes ‘visible’ to a bilingual reader who
is also literate in a religious idiom. The inclusion of a colonial power into
a Hindu mythology and cosmos creates a moral caesura in the narrative
of British imperial glory and makes the very idea of ‘English’ history
impossible. Colonial-era genre debates with their focus on categories
such as folk and classical largely overlooked the highly improvisational
ways in which Indian scholars such as Ramaswami Raju represented
controversial subjects through their creative work. In the light of the
creative freedom they display, authors like Ramaswami Raju express a
cultural sovereignty that transcends their political subalternity.

This essay which is the Introduction to a co-edited volume argues that a vibrant female-oriented poetics is discernible across a variety of regions across India, a poetics whose political richness is often overlooked in theorizations of gender. I highlight various female voices to reveal the source and power of this poetic: unnamed female narrators of nineteenth century folktale collections, anonymous Telugu cradle songs that affirm femininity, and the natal songs of an itinerant female street singer. I argue that all these women’s voices demonstrate the remarkable crisscrossing ways in which women in India arrive at self-understanding. In this
process, the gendered sharing of experience overcomes divergences of class, caste, region, religion and historical time.

Publication of this open monograph was the result of Duke University's participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries. TOME aims to expand the reach of long-form humanities and social science scholarship including digital scholarship. Additionally, the program looks to ensure the sustainability of university press monograph publishing by supporting the highest quality scholarship and promoting a new ecology of scholarly publishing in which authors' institutions bear the publication costs. Funding from Duke University Libraries made it possible to open this publication to the world. Learn more at the TOME website, available at: openmonographs.org.

"Gabriel N. Rosenberg's masterful history of 4-H is the first in-depth study of an institution that every historian of agriculture, not to mention every rural American, recognizes as an essential component of the modern rural landscape. The project delivers a sophisticated mix of cultural, political, and economic history that exposes the hidden hands and visible bodies at work in constructing twentieth-century U.S. governance in the American heartland."—Shane Hamilton, author of Trucking Country: The Road to America's Wal-Mart Economy

"This beautifully crafted study offers a braided history of the state, the body, and the countryside. At its center is the 4-H club, which Rosenberg brilliantly reveals not as a nostalgic relic of an agrarian past but as an active engine of modern biopolitics. Whether or not you have ever set foot at the county fair, The 4-H Harvest is an absorbing and utterly original read."—Margot Canaday, author of The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America

4-H, the iconic rural youth program run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has enrolled more than 70 million Americans over the last century. As the first comprehensive history of the organization, The 4-H Harvest tracks 4-H from its origins in turn-of-the-century agricultural modernization efforts, through its role in the administration of federal programs during the New Deal and World War II, to its status as an instrument of international development in Cold War battlegrounds like Vietnam and Latin America.

In domestic and global settings, 4-H's advocates dreamed of transforming rural economies, communities, and families. Organizers believed the clubs would bypass backward patriarchs reluctant to embrace modern farming techniques. In their place, 4-H would cultivate efficient, capital-intensive farms and convince rural people to trust federal expertise. The modern 4-H farm also featured gender-appropriate divisions of labor and produced healthy, robust children. To retain the economic potential of the "best" youth, clubs insinuated state agents at the heart of rural family life. By midcentury, the vision of healthy 4-H'ers on family farms advertised the attractiveness of the emerging agribusiness economy.

With rigorous archival research, Gabriel N. Rosenberg provocatively argues that public acceptance of the political economy of agribusiness hinged on federal efforts to establish a modern rural society through effective farming technology and techniques as well as through carefully managed gender roles, procreation, and sexuality. The 4-H Harvest shows how 4-H, like the countryside it often symbolizes, is the product of the modernist ambition to efficiently govern rural economies, landscapes, and populations.

The article examines meat agriculture as a site for the production of knowledge about gender, race, and sexuality that spanned human and non-human animals. Livestock breeders and commentators alike parsed animal bodies for their susceptibility and resistance to “race suicide,” a popular early twentieth century concept that, when applied to humans, signaled concern that the white middle-class reproduction and masculine vigor were faltering. Race suicide discourses gained traction in breeding literature precisely because animal breeding functioned as a popular laboratory of racial knowledge and biopolitical management. Porcine racial categories stabilized the rapidly reconfiguring infrastructures of American meat consumption and discourses of racial decline and contamination that spanned both human and non-human animals. These categories both reflected and constituted understandings of human race, and thus the article demonstrates how human and non-human racial knowledges were locked in a fluid conversation about what types of lives were livable and what types of bodies were fit to receive violence.