Reading #9

The Making and Unmaking of Persons: Notes on Aging and Gender in North India Author(s): Sarah Lamb Source: Ethos, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Sep., 1997), pp. 279-302 Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/640667 Accessed: 09-05-2020 03:42 UTC

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The Making and Unmaking of Persons: Notes on Aging and Gender in North India SARAH LAMB

ABSTRACT This article explores aging and gender as dimen- sions of personhood in West Bengal, India. The work of aging re- quires unravelling bodily and emotional ties (maya) to people, places, and things, even though these ties feel compellingly stronger and more numerous as life progresses. Women differ from men in that their connections are unmade and remade at a

greater number of critical junctures in their lives, not only through aging and dying, but also in marriage and widowhood. This focus on aging and gender suggests a move beyond those models of South Asian personhood that tend to be static, degen- dered, and based on too sharp a dichotomy between East and West, to a more nuanced understanding of the plural and evolv- ing nature of personhood conceptions over the life course.

s a child living in northern California, I had observed a grandmother and great grandmother, each widowed and liv- ing alone in a big, separate house. These older adults, like my parents and adults in general, struck me as very independent beings whose dwindling relations with others left them too

isolated for their own or anyone else's comfort. Soon after I settled as an anthropologist in the village of Mangaldihi in

West Bengal, however, I met an aged, white-clothed widow called Mejo Ma ("Middle Mother") sitting beside the dusty lane in front of her home. She could not stop complaining about clinging. Her connections to her family, to things, to good food, and to her own body were so tight, she said, that she was afraid of lingering for years in a decrepit state, unable to die. She feared that after her body died her soul (atma) would not ascend but would remain emotionally shackled nearby as a ghost (bhot). Another ancient

SARAH LAMB is an assistant professor of Anthropology, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA.

Ethos 25(3):279-302. Copyright ? 1997, American Anthropological Association.

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villager, a spry 97-year-old Brahman widow called Khudi Thakrun, pur- sued many attachments that she did not consider worrisome, even though others did. She lived with three generations of descendants in a house from which she daily roamed the village to gossip with friends, to arrange marriages, to seek out the best mangoes and bananas, and to transact her prosperous business of money-lending. Other residents spoke of her dis- approvingly, saying that her engaged, outgoing behavior would cause her soul to continue troubling the village as an insatiable ghost after her death. In contrast to Khudi Thakrun, Pramila Mukherjee was precariously un- connected: marriage at age seven and widowhood at age 14 had left her with no one to call her own, and no property with which to support herself. By a few years after her husband's death, her marital kin did not want her any more, and her natal kin saw her as married and "other." Nevertheless, she seemed to find some value in her unconnected life, for she hoped it would free her to die more easily, to find God, or at least a more fortuitous rebirth.

My interest was piqued. It seemed that people (especially in late life) were not so much worried about how to maintain or strengthen connec- tions that were too loose, but rather about how to loosen connections that were too tight. It turns out that this question-of how people live amidst and manage the emotional and bodily attachments that make up persons and their lived-in worlds-speaks centrally to major questions in the study of self or personhood in South Asia.

One of the principal themes in sociocultural studies of South Asia over the past several decades has been that of South Asian notions of what a "person" or "self" is (e.g., Daniel 1984; Dumont 1980; Ewing 1990, 1991; Marriott 1976, 1987, 1990, 1991; Marriott and Inden 1974, 1977; McHugh 1989; M. Mines 1988, 1994; Ortner 1995; Ostor et al. 1982; Parish 1994; Parry 1989; Shweder and Bourne 1984). One of the main insights of some of these studies has been into the fluid and open nature of persons in India.

Research produced by McKim Marriott and E. Valentine Daniel, for in- stance, has suggested that Indian persons are not thought to be bound and self-contained individuals, but rather connected substantially with the other people, places, and things of their lived-in worlds. By means of sub- stantial transactions with other persons, such as through sex, childbirth, living together, feeding, touching, and exchanging words, people are thought to absorb and give out parts of themselves. Thus it is possible-in- deed, inevitable-for persons to establish intersubstantial relations with other people (such as sexual partners, household and village members) and with the places (land, village, houses) in which they live.

For my purposes, one conspicuous deficiency of earlier work on South Asian personhood was its relatively slight attention to processes of change over the life course. Early models of personhood had been concerned

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The Making and Unmaking of Persons ? 281

largely with caste, kinship, economics, and politics, and thus primarily with middle-aged adults. When postulating how transactions might shape life courses, Marriott had found few ethnographic data beyond iterations of the classical sequence of four life "stages" (agramas) (1976: 131-132).1 Except for studies of death (e.g., Gold 1988:59-122; D. Mines 1990; Nicho- las 1982; Parry 1994), scholars of personhood had not treated the ways people may be transformed, or go through processes of deconstruction, in later life.2

This is a problem, however, that in their own terms very much con- cerned the Bengalis I knew. If people are made up of intimate emotional and substantial connections with other people, places, and things-if these connections make up the very stuff or body of what a "person" is-then what happens when the body's substance and relations are at- tenuated? Could not it be quite difficult (emotionally painful, as well as perhaps physically trying) to extract the self from all of these connections at the end of a lifetime?

A second deficiency with work on the person in India is that it has been largely degendered.3 This has been true not only of the work on the person in South Asia, but also of the wider anthropological literature on personhood. What is striking is that although anthropological interest in personhood developed contemporaneously with the anthropology of gen- der (from about the 1970s on), there has been little attempt to bring these two fields of inquiry together. As Henrietta Moore observes: "Indigenous concepts of the person and self are presented, most often, as gender neu- tral, but on closer examination it is clear that the implicit model for the person in much ethnographic writing is, in fact, an adult male" (1994:28). This gives the (misleading, I believe) impression that person and self are ontologically prior to and separate from gender identity.

A third and final problem is that much of the work on personhood in India has contributed to an overly dichotomized view of East and West, where the East represents "relational" persons and the West "individu- als." Marriott (1976, 1990), for instance, contrasts the Indian "dividual" (open, unbound person, partly divisible in nature) with what he views to be the dominant Euro-American notion of persons as relatively bounded and self-contained individuals. Shweder and Bourne (1984) distinguish the "sociocentric" conceptualization of the person in India from the "ego- centric" one in the West, arguing that while Indians view themselves as in- extricably part of the social contexts within which they exist, Westerners see themselves largely as autonomous, bounded individuals. Dumont (1980) takes the position that the particular "individual" has no inde- pendent conceptual reality in India, as it does in the West, arguing that in India each human actor is encompassed within the holistic collectivities of family, caste, village, and society.

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Several more recent studies of self or personhood in South Asia, how- ever, have taken exception to the dichotomizing of East and West, arguing that a strong focus on relationality does not mean that no notion or expe- rience of individuality or individual autonomy exists (Ewing 1990, 1991; McHugh 1989; M. Mines 1994; Ortner 1995; Parish 1994:127-129, 186-187). Other scholars have argued further that the common practice of pitting East against West is problematic, especially in that it tends grossly to oversimplify the Western version of the person-as an autono- mous, bound, self-contained individual, lacking any sense of connection to others-whereas in fact the self-conceptions of most Americans in- clude dimensions of interconnection with others (Battaglia 1995:7-11; Holland and Kipnis 1994; Murray 1993; Spiro 1993).

In this article, by focusing especially on aging and gender, we will see that conceptions of personhood in West Bengal (and, presumably, else- where) are complex and multifaceted. What are often taken as mutually exclusive values, such as relationality and individuality, may actually in- terpenetrate within the same culture in unique and complex ways. I will explore, for instance, how although the Bengalis I knew viewed and expe- rienced themselves as emotionally and substantially part of the other peo- ple, places, and things that made up their lived-in worlds, the fact that many, like Mejo Ma, worried about how to extract themselves from all of these relationships as they aged speaks also to a sense Bengalis have of themselves of being at least partially unique and separable from others. Further, the forming and loosening of social-substantial ties over the life course was practiced and experienced quite differently by women and men. As Ewing (1990:257) and Murray (1993:18) both argue, a single, un- contested folk model of selfhood is not adequate for describing how selves are represented or experienced in any society.

Most of what I report here describes people of modest means and mid- dle or higher Hindu caste residing in the center of the village of Man- galdihi, where I lived for a year and a half in 1989-90. It does not apply as well to the lowest and poorest third of the population, whose concerns often focused more on immediate economic needs than on cultivating a peaceful life, death, and afterlife. Mangaldihi is located about 150 kilome- ters from Calcutta, where I had previously lived and studied language in 1985-86. The village of some 2,000 residents comprised 17 different Hindu caste groups and one neighborhood of Muslims. I will look first at the problem of aging and personhood, and then turn to focus on gender.

PERSONHOOD, MAYA, AND AGING

The problem of aging in Mangaldihi is illustrated by Mejo Ma. Recall that she was worrying about the intensity of her attachments and wonder-

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ing how to die. To understand Mejo Ma's predicament, we must look first at basic understandings of personhood and age.

The people I knew in Mangaldihi (consistent in many ways with pre- vious models of South Asian personhood) did feel themselves to be inher- ently relational, each person functioning as a nexus within a "net" GOal) of ties shared with people (especially kin), places, and things. By sharing and exchanging bodily and other substances through acts such as sex, touch- ing, living together, sharing food, owning things, and eating the fruits of village soil, people saw themselves as forming substantial-emotional bonds with their kin, homes, possessions, and land-all of which together make up a "person" (or lok).4 In this way, persons constructed themselves as parts of the other people, places, and things with which they lived and interacted.

The people I knew in West Bengal most commonly referred to these kinds of relations as maya, a polyvalent term often translated by scholars as "illusion," but locally more often equated with affects like attachment, affection, compassion, love.5 The concept of maya entailed integrally both material and what we might call emotional or sentimental dimensions. Maya was often imaged as a "net" (jal, mayajal), the strands of which were constituted both of shared bodily substance, as well as of emotional at- tachments such as affection, love, and compassion.

What was most striking to me at first was the discovery, voiced regret- fully by Mejo Ma and many other seniors in Mangaldihi, that each person's ties of maya were expected to increase in number and intensity through- out life. This belief ran counter to what I had expected. First, previous work on the person in India by scholars such as Marriott and Daniel had indicated nothing of the sort. They had explored the notion that persons are constructed out of substantial exchanges; but their models nowhere gave any indication that such substantial ties may get stronger and more numerous as life goes on.

Further, other influential scholars, such as Louis Dumont (1980 [1960]), had made much of the fact that Hindu textual traditions present the last stage of life as a time appropriate for reducing ties of attachment, in pursuit of spiritual goals (cf. Tilak 1989). But such studies were based mostly on analyses of Hindu texts, not on real people's life experiences and statements. The people I knew in Mangaldihi were quite firm and con- sistent in their appraisals that, in fact, maya (or the substantial-emotional ties constituting persons) increases with the length of life. This belief had implications, we will see, for both how people understood personhood (and the human condition), as well as for how they dealt with the pro- cesses of aging.

First, why do attachments increase and increase with the length of life? The reasons for this are several. Villagers argued quite logically that

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because kin such as children and grandchildren (and a spouse and affines) tend to increase in number as a person grows older, then maya-or emo- tional and bodily ties-necessarily increases as well. Of course, this argu- ment requires that one highlight junior rather than senior kin, for ascendant relatives would inevitably decrease as they merged into the col- lective body of deceased ancestors. But given the large families that nearly everyone in Mangaldihi favored, people expected increases in the num- bers of their direct, collateral, and affinal descendants. In this way, the common perception was that people came to be made up of more and more ties with kin as they moved through life.

As my closest companion, Hena, put it:

When you are young, you have maya and pull (tan) only for your mother, father, and older sister. But then when you marry, maya increases-for all of the people of your father-in-law's house. And then you have kids, and then they have kids. You see, from all of this, maya is increasing. Look at Khudi Thakrun [the oldest woman in the village]. Almost everyone in the village is her relative! She will never be able to abandon maya-never.

Other people in Mangaldihi explained that not only does the number of kin increase, but connections with all things-including possessions, money, houses, and village soil-accumulate and intensify over a long life. As Khudi Thakrun's middle-aged son, Gurusaday, put it:

For old people, maya and desire increase and increase! ... At the time of death, however many possessions [a person] has, that much maya and asakti [deep love or attachment] he will have-for all of those things.

He went on to explain:

If you throw ghee [clarified butter] in a fire, then the fire increases. In this way, desire and maya increase and increase as one gets old. People should think, "I've received and done [things] all of my life. I won't do any more." But instead they think, "Let more happen, let more happen!" You see, it's like adding ghee to the fire. The more he gets, the more he wants!

He then repeated this last phrase several times in English-"The more he gets, the more he wants! The more he gets, the more he wants!"-with a wide grin and enthusiastic voice, seemingly proud to have come up with such a wise proclamation in my tongue. The more things a person acquires and experiences as the years go by-such as good food, money, sexual pleasure, nice clothes-the stronger becomes his or her attach- ment to and desire for them all, like the process of adding fuel to a fire. And I must admit that this man's mother, Khudi Thakrun, was certainly a good example of one who had possessed and gathered much over her life, and who thereby evidenced this kind of enthusiastically attached attitude in old age.

A third reason some gave to explain why maya increases in late life is that as people grow closer to death, they become more and more aware

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that they will have to part from all of the people and things they have grown so close to, and it is this awareness of impending separation that causes feelings of connection or maya to intensify. On another occasion when I asked Gurusaday if maya increases or decreases with age, he an- swered: "Maya increases.... Why? Because [in old age] [a person] real- izes that he will have to leave everything in this earth and go away," and as he said this, tears rose in his eyes. He added: "When I die, then I will have to leave everyone and everything-my children and everything. Then all of the love and all of the affection that I will have-that is all maya. It will make tears come."

THE PROBLEM OF MAYA AND AGING

The tendency for maya to increase with the length of life is not a posi- tive thing. In fact, the people I knew perceived a kind of tragedy in the life course: while the ties making up persons are in general likely to increase in number and intensity as life goes on, it is also in later life when these same ties must be loosened, as part of preparing for the myriad leave-tak- ings of death. Old age presents a paradox: it is the time of life when attach- ments are the strongest, yet relations the most ephemeral.

The greatest problem of maya in old age is that of how people will free their souls when they die. Maya, according to people in Mangaldihi, can quite literally "bind" a person (or the person's soul, atma) to his or her body, habitat, and relationships, caught as in a "net" (jal), and thereby un- able to die, even if very ill and decrepit, and unable to depart from his or her previous habitat and relations after death. One frail elderly woman, Ananda's Ma, expressed her worries about the binding nature of maya:

It's time for me to die now. But I'm not able to shed off maya. That's why I'm not dying. How will I leave all my kids and things and go? When I cut the maya, then I will go. But how will the maya be cut?

One day as I was walking through the village with a friend, Bani, we came upon another senior woman, Bhogi Bagdi, as she was sitting in the lane in front of her home, moaning loudly (as usual) about her sufferings and the neglect she received from her sons. Bani said first to me, disap- provingly: "Bhogi is in her decrepit age, but she is still lingering." She then turned to Bhogi, "You must have a lot of wishes (iccha) left. Otherwise you wouldn't keep on living like this." Bhogi protested: "No, no! The longer I live, the more pain (kasta) I suffer. If I die it will be good." But Bani insisted that her wishes must be causing her to linger on, and warned that until she "cut [her] maya," she would not be able to die.

Not only can maya or attachments cause people to hang on in this way in a state of decrepitude without dying, but maya can also make the pro- cess of dying itself very slow and painful. I asked one elderly woman, Mita's

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Ma, who was blind in one eye and lame in one leg, "Is it good to try to get rid of maya before death?" She answered:

At the time of death, maya does not go away. It does not go away easily. At the time of death, [the person] is lying in the bed, and all the people are around him. He cannot say anything, but if you look at his eyes, you will see that tears are coming out of them. He will cry. He can't say anything; he's unconscious; his eyes are closed. But you will see that water is coming out of his eyes. Then people will say, "He is crying from maya; he is not able to go."

After death, there is also the considerable danger that a person with too many attachments will cling on to his or her former habitat and rela- tions in the form of a lingering ghost or bhut. People said that if a person has not been able to "cut" the ties of maya before dying, then his or her soul may continue to hang around his former home and relations, unable to leave. Several told of the suffering of such ghosts: how they become con- fused, hungry, and trapped, and painfully long to be reunited with their former households.

Further, it is important to note that it is those who are the most con- spicuously advantaged, with property and plentiful descendants, who are in the most danger of becoming excessively bound by maya in late life. Thus in Mangaldihi it was Khudi Thakrun-the wealthiest and oldest per- son in the village, from a large and powerful Brahman family-who was, according to public opinion, destined to be plagued by lingering ghosthood after death. This kind of criticism could also be viewed, perhaps, as one of the only forms of attack the weaker and poorer could make against supe- riors like Khudi Thakrun, one of their "weapons of the weak" (Scott 1985): a circumscribed way of valorizing being a "poor" or "small" person (garib lok, chota lok) over being "rich" and "big" (boro).6

LOOSENING TIES, DISASSEMBUNG PERSONS

We have seen that many in Mangaldihi experienced a conflict be- tween the natural maximizing of connections and the wish to minimize the complexities of life and pains of separation at death. As a way of deal- ing with this conflict, many older people tried in diverse ways to undo the growing ties of their maya.

Much as observed in Delhi by Vatuk (1990), phases of the life course for people in Mangaldihi were defined not chronologically, but by adjust- ments in their families. While age-linked changes in adults' bodies, such as weakening and cooling, might be cited as indices of the phase called "sen- ior" (buro) or "grown" (briddha), the beginning of this phase was defined by the family heads' deciding (often amidst arguing and competition) to hand over their duties of reproduction, cooking, and feeding to junior suc- cessors, usually their sons and sons' wives. Since such successions and

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retirements might occur when members of the ascendant generation were of any age between about 35 and 60, the extent of the Bengali "senior stage" corresponded roughly to the second halves of most villagers' lives and to the personal years that today's Americans might call "middle age."

The set of practices associated with retirement to the senior stage was thought to help in dissolving extensions of the person. Such activities in- cluded decentering and cooling one's activities, body, and heart-mind (manas), as well as disposing of one's attributes and possessions by giving them to others. Aging persons could decenter themselves by physically re- locating either inside or outside the household. Bourdieu (1977:89 ff.) has suggested that it is in the plan and usage of a house where fundamental cultural principles are generated, experienced, and objectified. But most ethnographers (including Bourdieu) generally overlook the ways in which hierarchies and values surrounding age may index or be indexed by uses of domestic loci.

In Mangaldihi households, a primary dimension of the structuring of old age was that of a movement from center to periphery. The hub of ac- tivity and commingling usually took place in the central courtyard or on the main front veranda of a house. This was where people congregated and socialized, ate, prepared food, studied, negotiated business deals, and fre- quently slept, often together, in long lines of mats spread on the floor. Sen- ior men and women, who had adult sons and resident daughters-in-law to succeed them, tended to move to the outskirts of the household center, perhaps resting on a string cot at one end of the veranda, or tending a young child in a patch of warm winter sun, or cutting vegetables with a curved iron kitchen knife (while leaving the actual cooking to a daughter- in-law), or listening to and watching the activities of visitors and kin.

Such moves toward the periphery of any previous area of activity in- dexed their freedom from former ties and duties, while also signalling sur- render of the kinds of control over goods and people that are best exercised from centers. In this way, retirement to the peripheries was ex- perienced ambivalently by most senior women and men, and was often ac-

companied by serious intergenerational conflict: the peripheral elder may gain in terms of hierarchies of respect and freedoms from encumbering ties and responsibilities, but loses tangible political and economic powers (Cohen in press; Lamb 1993, in press; Vatuk 1990:78-81).

Retirees displayed their greater detachment from family centers as well by moving beyond the confines of household space: spending more of their days at others' houses chatting, playing cards, and drinking tea; rest- ing on the cool platforms of temples; loitering at shops or on roadsides, simply watching people come and go-behaviors that were appropriate for them but that among younger persons would be criticized as defections from duty. Most saw their seniority as presenting opportunities for moving

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beyond the village to visit married daughters or for undertaking pilgrim- ages to faraway holy places.

With regard to household exchanges, senior people also tended to re- move themselves increasingly from the "heat" of a household's major transactional flows. Thus elders were usually fed before and separately from others, a privilege recognizing their seniority, and one that also re- sulted in keeping them from mixing their substance with others'. The principal married couple of a house whose sons were not yet married were felt to be at the warm, reproductive, and redistributive human "center" (majhkhane) of life in a Bengali household; they gave food, knowledge, and services to and made decisions for all the others around them, including retirees and the young children who were located on the household's pe- ripheries. Couples beyond that central reproductive and culinary stage commonly shifted to celibate relations, conventionally saying, "It's the time of the young ones now; our time has passed." A few villagers men- tioned that all these curtailments of household givings and receivings were desirable because they reduced possible competition as well as making the retired heads more "separate" (prthak) in anticipation of their moves toward ultimate separation.

Retirees who took peripheral places in Mangaldihi households spoke also of experiencing concomitant bodily changes. Older people described their bodies as increasingly "cool" (thanda) and "dry" (sukna). According to local theories, cooling and drying constrict the channels through which people flow and mix with the substances of others, thereby making the bodies of older people relatively self-contained. Although people viewed bodily cooling and drying as part of the natural, physiological processes of aging, most also took steps to encourage such internal changes.

Thus some people, especially upper-caste widows and men who pro- fessed spiritual goals, began methodically excluding from their diets any "hot" (garam) foods (such as meat, fish, onions, and garlic), which they thought would excite their worldly passions and attachments. The celi- bacy commonly practiced by (and expected of) elders was also regarded as a "cooling" lifestyle, and many older women and men told me that, be- cause of the cooling and drying of their bodies, they would not be able to engage in sexual activity even if they wanted to. By wearing clothing that was white (a "cool" color), most older people advertised their celibacy or widowhood, their claims of asexual purity, their generally world-renun- ciatory concern with their soul-selves. The transition to white was espe- cially dramatic for women, who during their previous, reproductive years generally favored red, a "hot" color signalling sexuality, fertility, and aus- picious attachments.

Disjoining verbal techniques, too, were practiced both to reduce worldly connections and to promote heavenly ones. Arguing and cursing

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were sometimes used, perhaps unwittingly, as techniques of self-aliena- tion: thus the aged Bhogi Bagdi used to sit daily in the middle of the dusty lane in front of her mud house, loudly berating and effectively driving away any of her sons, sons' wives, or neighbors who might be within hear- ing. Some elders similarly strove by denigrating epithets to loosen their bonds with their own bodies: they compared their flesh with old clothing that should be discarded, or with rice plants that have dropped their seeds and are about to wither away. Others spent hours every day and fell asleep at night chanting the names of deities so as to loosen their own earthly ties and accustom their souls to the discourses of their desired heavenly abodes. People diminished their ties of maya to things as well, by empty- ing themselves of their favorite possessions in late life-giving away prop- erty, jewelry, favorite saris, keepsakes.

All of the techniques of decentering, cooling, and emptying men- tioned above were felt in Mangaldihi to be effective methods for shrinking those personal extensions that are known as maya. We can see, then, that if we take persons (in India, for instance) to be inherently relational, made up of networks of ties, then it does not make sense to examine only how these ties are created (as scholars before have emphasized). We must look as well at how people view the taking apart of themselves. That these tech- niques impinged on so many areas of life and were applied over approxi- mately half of most lifetimes demonstrates their significance: they served to unmake essential parts of previous personhoods.

GENDERED UFE COURSES

To this point, I have discussed the aging of persons in Bengal and the ways they manage their maya, as if no large differences existed between women and men. But this is not so.

As I mentioned above, previous work on the person in India has tended to overlook important forms of difference in South Asian society, not only of age or life stage, but of gender as well. Other studies, not those explicitly concerned with personhood, have compared the nature of women's and men's ties in South Asia; but these studies have concen- trated on marriage, the complex process of causing a woman's natal ties to be attenuated while marital ties are forged (e.g., Dube 1988; Jacobson 1977; Jeffery et al. 1989:31-36; Raheja and Gold 1994:73-120; Sax 1991: 77-126). There have been few studies of the larger life cycle of women,7 of how women's experiences of not only marriage, but of aging, widowhood, and dying compare to those of men's, particularly in terms of the making and taking apart of a person's bodily and other ties over the life course.

The main argument I want to make here is that women's personhood is unique, in that their ties are disjoined and then remade, while men's ties

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are extended and enduring. Feminist theorists such as Nancy Chodorow (1978) and Carol Gilligan (1982) have challenged the adequacy of models of the autonomous individual to explain women's experiences (in the United States, at least), arguing that American women's self-conceptions tend to focus more on connectedness to others than men's do. Such a con-

trast, however, does not really hold for Bengalis.8 Both men and women in Mangaldihi defined themselves strongly in terms of their relations with others, as we have seen. But there were significant differences in the ways women and men found themselves to be constituted via relational ties over their lives.

These contrasts can be said to begin with differences perceived in the biologies of the two sexes, differences magnified by practices in upbring- ing and marriage. The contrasts can also be said to derive from patrilineal- ity and virilocal postmarital residence, which favor the continuity of men and the transformation of incoming women. These perceptions and prac- tices continually led to contrary treatments of the genders: the most im- portant connections of males were made but once and intended to endure throughout and beyond their lifetimes, while those of females were repeat- edly altered-first made, then unmade and remade, then often again unmade.

In the predominant patrilineal discourse of Mangaldihi, women were said to be capable of such changes because their bodies were taken to be naturally more "open" (khola) than men's. Although people seemed to view the bodies of both women and men as relatively open or permeable, they described women as being even more so, especially because of their involvement in the processes of menstruation, marriage, sexuality, and childbirth-all processes that entail, for women, substances going into and out of the body. This meant that women could be viewed as more dan- gerously vulnerable to impurity, sexual violations, and receipts from out- side than were men. The same traits of openness and permeability could also be looked upon as suiting women well to marital exchange. One piece of proverbial wisdom stated that a woman would fare best if she were mal- leable like clay, to be cast into a shape of his choice by the potter (her hus- band), discarding earlier loyalties, attributes, and ties to become absorbed into her husband's family.

Infants of both sexes were marked and initially connected with their kin and the village by a first feeding of rice ceremony (annapraSana). Males were differentiated, however, by the greater scale and elaboration of that ceremony, and among Brahmans by several other subsequent cere- monies of "marking" or "refining" (saspskara). Among Brahmans, mar- riage thus might have been the eighth connection-making ceremony for a boy, but only the second for a girl. In many castes, the male child was iden- tified as a growing node of his enduring patrilineage (bamsa, literally a

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The Making and Unmaking of Persons ? 291

"bamboo"), while a girl might be spoken of as a mere temporary sojourner awaiting her departure in marriage. A phrase I would often hear was, "A daughter is nothing at all. You just raise them for a few days, and then to others you give them away." People spoke of daughters as "belonging not to us but to others" (cf. Dube 1988; Jeffery and Jeffery 1996; Narayan 1986:69-70).

Men in Mangaldihi also usually resided-save perhaps for brief peri- ods of work in other cities-within the same community and on the same soil where they were born. This is why, some men said, it is so difficult for them to loosen their ties of maya at the end of a lifetime, for they have be- come so deeply embedded within a family, community, home, soil. In con- trast, among the several families I knew who had settled in Calcutta apartments upon fleeing East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) at the time of partition, men spoke of having been forced painfully to cut apart the ties of their maya prematurely, like a woman does in marriage, viewing the years following independence and partition as very "separate," "inde- pendent," and maya-reducing times.

For girls in Mangaldihi, it was through marriage that they received their most markings and that the ties of their personhood were substan- tially unmade and remade. Throughout the three-day wedding, the bride would be made to absorb substances originating from her husband's body and household. She rubbed her body with turmeric paste with which he had first been anointed, she ate leftover food from his plate, she absorbed his sexual fluids (which were described as permeating her body), she moved to his place of residence, and there mingled with his kin and mixed with the substances of his soil. The bride's surname and patrilineal mem- bership (bansga) would also be formally changed to those of her husband. In this way, her marriage was generally interpreted as obscuring and greatly reducing, although not obliterating, the connections she once en- joyed with her natal home. She would no longer refer to persons of her na- tal family as her "own people" (nijer lok), but rather as her husband did-as her "relatives by marriage" (kutumb), for she was said to have be- come by marriage the "half body" (ardhangini) of her husband.

For a girl, then, preparing to marry was like a first confrontation with mortality. Anticipating the pain of cutting so many ties with their natal families, homes, and friends, young brides spoke to me with dread, not comprehending how they would ever survive such an ordeal. These con- versations struck me as resembling the ways I heard older people speak of separations at death. During the months before her wedding, my compan- ion Hena would say to me through tears, "Your father gives you away. He makes you other. He wipes out the relation." She would also purposefully pick quarrels with me in order, she said, "to cut the maya" a bit before her actual departure.

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292 ? ETHOS

Mothers at least as much as fathers in Mangaldihi stressed the tran- sience of a daughter's connections with her natal place. Most mothers had known such separations from personal experience, and at each visit after marriage, their own or others', they might relive their earlier feelings. Most said that they felt always the pain of having the ties of their girlhood and family downgraded or ignored in their husbands' homes. Yet all agreed that however disused, violated, or abused their earlier ties might be after marriage, a connection does remain forever between mother and child. Most said they continued to "feel a pull (tan) of maya," "of blood," or "of the womb."

A WIDOW'S BONDS

High-caste families' responses to the deaths of husbands often did more than marriages to unmake women, and did so again mainly through stopping their interpersonal connections. Having lost many earlier rela- tionships in marriage, most women rightly dreaded widowhood as an- other, similar phase of disconnection that would occur in their later lives. They expected such a phase since girls were married at younger ages, gen- erally outlived their husbands, and usually did not remarry.

The legal option of remarriage for widows in West Bengal had been sanctioned by British legislation in 1856;9 it had been exercised by a few highly educated widows in cities, but never by an upper-caste widow in Mangaldihi. A high-caste groom's marking of his bride in the wedding was thus demonstrated to be potent and permanently efficacious (cf. Nicholas 1994). On the other hand, a man who lost his wife was usually encouraged to remarry, and if not already senior and retired, he usually did. There was in fact no common Bengali word for (unremarried) widower.10 Thus in Mangaldihi's 335 households there were only 13 such men, but 69 unre- married widowed women in 1990. Childless young widows of Mangaldihi's lower castes were generally remated swiftly by a simpler ritual called "joining" (sanga kara), which did not require or attempt their removing the marks and ties of their first husbands; for even among these groups, a woman could ordinarily go through a true marriage ceremony (biye) but once.

Women of the higher castes who were widowed at any age in Man- galdihi were pressed by their husbands' kin to minimize their transac- tions. While varying in strictness from group to group, this set of restrictive practices included wearing white clothing, avoiding "hot" foods (such as fish, onions, and garlic), limiting rice intake to only once a day (an amount considered almost equivalent to fasting), living in celibacy, avoiding participation in any auspicious ceremony, and often (because of their other dietary restrictions) cooking their food separately. Until re-

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The Making and Unmaking of Persons ? 293

cently, most families also required their widows to keep the head shaved (a practice some of the most senior Mangaldihi widows still observed) and to sleep on the ground.

In many ways, these cooling and antimixing practices were similar to those that other married adults observed after retirement to the senior

phase (see table 1). Older people performed these practices more or less willingly, aiming to loosen their ties of maya and cool their bodies and selves in preparation for dying. The practices were viewed as in keeping with the natural changes taking place within their bodies and families dur- ing the "senior" or "grown" life phase. For younger widows, such cooling and desiccating of their persons was equivalent to premature aging. One heard these practices recommended because they would reduce the widow's sexual desires and also reduce the husband's family's vulnerabil- ity to the slander and sexual marking that would occur were the widow to engage in liaisons with others. In this way, the fetters of widowhood served to transform widows, before their perceived natural physiological time, into socially old women. Several did comment to me that older, post- menopausal widows actually would not have to observe the widow's re- strictive code if they did not wish to, because their bodies were naturally cool and dry due to age; but most senior widows observed these practices anyway, out of "habit" or aversion to being slandered by others.

Table 1

Practces of widows, older people, and death-impure persons (X = present; - = absent).

Death-impure Prescribed practices Widows Older people persons

Remain celibate X X X Religious orientation X X ? Wear white X X X "Cool" the body X X X Avoid "hot" foods X - X Limit intake of boiled

rice (bhat) X X Restrict sharing food X X Keep out of auspicious rituals X X Shave the head X** X*** Sleep on the ground X** X**

*Performed by chief mourner only (usually the eldest son of the deceased). **Traditionally prescribed practices not commonly performed now. ***Performed at the end of the period of death impurity and by males only.

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294 ? ETHOS

A simple comparison of the widow's practices to those of older people, however, cannot adequately explain the extreme inauspiciousness of wid- ows, or why most believed that high-caste widows could not remarry. It is my belief that one key to these issues lies in the kinds of connections women shared with their husbands. A woman's bonds with her husband

were so strong and complete that they could not be severed. Although sev- eral older widows I knew professed to not even being able to remember or envision well their husbands' faces, they nonetheless proclaimed that they would remain joined to their husbands for the duration of their lives. This made the widow, it seemed, as if married to a corpse, herself half dead. A widow in this way remained perpetually in a state similar to the death impurity (or asauc) that other surviving relatives experienced only temporarily.

I first began to compare the condition of widows with that of other persons suffering death impurity because of their many similarities. Sev- eral of these practices were ones that older people practiced, too, but there were even more similarities between the codes for conduct of widows and

death-impure persons (table 1). Like a widow, persons suffering death im- purity were expected to remain celibate; avoid "hot," nonvegetarian foods; limit intake of boiled rice; restrict sharing food with others; and avoid participating in auspicious rituals. Males suffering from death impu- rity and older, more traditional widows also had their heads shaved.

These are all practices that reduced the likelihood that personal prop- erties would be transferred among people. Together they constituted what McKim Marriott (1976) would call a "minimal transactional strategy." During the transitional phase of death impurity, the survivors limited their interactions, both in order to separate themselves from the deceased person and to avoid infecting others in the community with their condi- tion. The aim was to cut the lingering bodily emotional connections be- tween the survivors and the deceased, so that both the departed spirit and the survivors could move on to form new relationships. For other survi- vors, the practices of impurity ended with the final funeral rites after 10 to 30 days (cf. D. Mines 1990).

But the incapacity and inauspicious (asubha) condition of the widow was permanent, due, it appears, to her having become, through her puta- tively indissoluble merger with him in marriage, the "half-body" (ardhangini) and life-long soul mate of her husband. When he was dead, her living bod- ily presence made her, if young, not merely a sexual hazard, but also a re- pulsive anomaly. Until her own death, she could be seen as either the remnant, leftover half-body of a corpse, or as a faithless companion who had abandoned her husband by remaining on earth. She was also sometimes spoken of as a deficient wife whose lapses had hastened her husband's death. Feared then for her defects as a devouring witch by some (as in Ban-

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The Making and Unmaking of Persons ? 295

dyopadhyay 1990), or as a vulture, she was often peripheralized within the family, if not expelled.

The asymmetry generally thus assumed in the high-caste marital re- lation was extreme, for the husband was not considered to be the wife's half-body, and unlike her, was not said to be diminished by (or responsible for) his partner's death. If she died first, his person remained whole and free to remarry, his temporary incapacity of death impurity lasting no more than that of other close survivors. On the other hand, several people told me that even if the woman dies first, then although her surviving hus- band may be free, her spirit still remains bound to him and wanders around near him until the time of his funeral, when her soul would be merged under his name into the line of his male ancestors.

If the people I knew viewed persons, then, to be constituted of net- works of relations, then women were in a peculiar position because their connections were made, remade, and unmade at several critical junctures over their lives: in girlhood, marriage, widowhood, and death. A daughter had to attenuate painfully ties with her natal family and place, so that she could move on to form new ties within her husband's home. A woman's

ties to others as an ancestor were also uncertain, as she was ritually merged indistinguishably with her husband after death. The only tie for a high-caste woman that seemed to be unambiguously unseverable, within the dominant patrilineal discourse of Mangaldihi, was the one she shared with her husband. This bond, which defined a woman's very bodily sub- stance and identity, was one that a married woman could not cut, even if her husband died. This underlay why the majority of women in Mangaldihi endured such singular existences as widows as the last phase of their lives.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

The widows whom I have mentioned in these pages reveal the widely diverse ways that matters of aging, gender, and personhood get played out in particular people's lives. The distressed Mejo Ma could be seen as a con- ventional virilocal widow, implanted but now peripheralized in the family of her long-dead husband, with grown sons, daughters-in-law, and grand- children, all of whom she felt tightly attached to, even as she sat cultivat- ing freedoms and complaining about clinging in the lane in front of her home. The domineering Khudi Thakrun, on the other hand, was situated more like a successful man: the sole descendant of a sonless father, she had inherited all his considerable property and brought her husband to live in her father's house. She boasted about how many of the village peo- ple were related to her, about how much of the village land and wealth was hers, and about what a huge funeral feast she would have. People agreed that she was destined to turn into a craving ghost after death, pestering

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296 * ETHOS

former kin and neighbors for mangoes and other treats. At an opposite pole was Pramila Mukherjee, once a child widow and now in her seventies, who lived not in Mangaldihi but in an ashram for destitute widows at a Bengali place of pilgrimage. Her voice still broke when she spoke of her re- jection from her two families sixty years before: "It's better not to get mar- ried at all than to be a widow [she said]. It's better not to get married at all. If you never marry, then at least you have the people from your father's house." But one of her comments stuck in my mind as I began to realize the importance of maya in these people's lives: "This life has been so pain- ful; but in one sense it's been good: I don't have all the bindings of maya." That is, she'll be able to die easily, and perhaps find God, or at least an eas- ier rebirth.

I have tried in this article to shed light upon three main theoretical points. First, age is a crucial dimension of personhood. Late life is an un- usually revealing period of myriad transformations, during which many of the dilemmas and properties of cultural understandings of personhood be- come highlighted. Especially in a society such as India where persons are believed to be constituted via networks of substantial-emotional ties, it makes no sense to look only at how these ties are formed; we must also consider how they are loosened and taken apart. My data on maya sug- gests also that the timeworn psychological anthropology argument on re- lational versus autonomous selves is incoherent without close attention to the life course.

Second, people's conceptions about gender and gendered changes over the life course form a crucial part of their understandings of person- hood. I critique the tendency-widespread in anthropological literature on personhood-to examine person and self as ontologically prior to or separate from gender identity. Conceptions of personhood cannot be un- derstood in isolation from conceptions about gendered selves.

Third, a point I have not yet explicitly made is that focusing on aging can also be important methodologically for anthropologists, for it makes us confront squarely issues of change and multivocality in people's con- ceptions about themselves and the processes of their lives. By examining age and gender as dimensions of personhood, I have hoped to elucidate that there is no single or static model of personhood in India. (Just as-I could add-there is no singular, simple folk model of a "Western" person, as anthropologists seem prone to project, when contrasting Western selves with their own discoveries of variable selfhood conceptions else- where [cf. Murray 1993:1819].) By focusing on aging (and gender) as di- mensions of personhood in any society, we gain a much more complex and nuanced understanding of the plural and evolving nature of all person- hood conceptions.

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The Making and Unmaking of Persons * 297

This last point returns us, finally, to a problem I opened with, one that has taken center stage in two decades of research on personhood in South Asia: that concerning the connectivity or individuality, the unbounded- ness or boundedness, of the self. I have stressed over these pages a vision of persons in West Bengal as inherently relational, made up of networks of ties that they share with other people, places, and things. As McHugh (1989), M. Mines (1994), and Parish (1994) each argue, however, a view of persons or selves as interconnected with others does not mean that people have no sense of an inner, private self (with distinct thoughts and feelings, not directly known by others), or a sense of themselves as agents who are at least partially responsible for the origins of their own actions. That is to say, by stressing a vision of interconnected and unbound Bengali persons, I have not meant to preclude any concept of Bengali individuality.

In fact, much of the Bengali material I have described in the preceding pages speaks to a sense that Bengalis have of themselves of being at least partially separate or separable from others. When Mejo Ma and Bhogi Bagdi ponder how they will be able to cut their ties of maya in order to free their selves to die, they are speaking of an aspect of themselves that is-with however much difficulty-unique and separable from others. We are impoverished in our cultural analyses if we stress only one side of the connected vs. autonomous, bounded vs. unbounded, dividual vs. individ- ual dichotomy, to the absolute exclusion of the other. There is no simple or single model of selfhood in either the contemporary Western or con- temporary Indian cultural systems.

NOTES

Acknowledgments. I presented earlier versions of this paper at several academic venues over the past two years: the Anthropology Department of Brandeis University (February 1995), the Harvard University Social Anthropology Seminars (November 1995), and the Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting in Honolulu (April 1996). The article is based on fieldwork conducted in India from December 1988 through June 1990, and I gratefully acknowledge Fulbright-tIays, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research for funding my research. Much of the article was written under the aegis of NIA grant #T3200045 in Sociocultural Gerontology, Linda Mitteness, director. My deepest gratitude is reserved for the people of West Bengal, especially the residents of Mangaldihi, who enabled me to live among them. For his invaluable suggestions and careful readings of several drafts of this work, I am especially indebted to McKim Marriott. I wish also to thank Edward Black, Jean Comaroff, Ann Gold, Ernestine McHugh, Ralph Nicholas, Gloria Raheja, the anonymous reviewers at Ethos, and the Ethos editors for their insightful criticisms and suggestions on earlier portions or versions of the article.

1. That sequence portrayed elite males as first receiving years of marking-absorbing the inputs of superiors-by the pessimizing strategy of the "chaste student"; then adopting the maximizing strategy of the open, active "householder"; then retiring to the optimal strategy of the benevolent, dispositive "forest-dweller"; and finally moving toward life's end by the indifferent, transaction-minimizing strategy of the "hermit" or "renouncer" (Manu chs. 2-4, 6; Marriott 1976:131-132).

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298 ? ETHOS

2. There have been other important studies of aging in India, however, focusing on questions other than persons and their connections. These include Biswas 1987; Cohen 1992, in press; Tilak 1989; and Vatuk 1975, 1980, 1987, 1990, 1992, 1995.

3. For instance, Marriott in 1976 wrote but a single paragraph on gender (p. 137), mostly from male informants' opinions. He did recognize, however, that women's transactional strategies may be different than men's, summarizing women's transactional style as relatively "pessimal" (mark-inviting; receiving more than giving) and variable-likely to fluctuate between "maximal" and "minimal" exchanges.

4. The Bengali (and Sanskrit) term lok can also mean "world." These overlapping meanings of "world" and "person" connote the openness and nonindividuality of persons, as well as the common notion of the person as a microcosm of the world.

5. Among the Newars of Nepal, maya similarly refers to "love" or the "web of relatedness" (Bennett 1983:39; Parish 1994:156 ff). Gold (1991, 1992, n.d.) also compellingly explores the complex, intertwining meanings of maya as "illusion" and as love for women, creative divine grace, delusive magicians' skills, and binding attachments to the relationships of this world.

6. In this way, the discourse of unmaking can be viewed also, as one anonymous reviewer for Ethos suggested, as a discourse of the materiality and moral economy of superannuated bodies.

7. Notable exceptions are Vatuk 1975, 1980, 1987, 1992, 1995, and Roy 1972. 8. Gold, in exploring compelling human attachments and illusions of maya through the

tales of a Rajasthani bard, similarly describes: "Women loom large in Madhu Nath's stories as embodiments of illusion, or love, or intimacy, or bondage. But if women are in certain ways paradigmatic embodiments of illusion's net, they do not have exclusive dominion over attachment" (1992:323).

9. Although the British implemented the Widow Remarriage Act in 1856, it is important to note that this bill had the (presumably unintended) countereffect of reducing widows' rights among the lower castes. This is because the lower castes had always condoned widow remarriage; but the new act brought with it legal restrictions regarding the disposal of the widow's property and children: these were to remain within her deceased husband's patril- ineage upon her remarriage. Thus many widowed women who might have previously sought remarriage refrained from doing so, out of reluctance to give up claims to their children and property. In this way, the economic stake that the high castes had in not allowing widows to remarry was firmly protected by the act, and even homogenized across caste lines at the legal level (Carrol 1983; Chattopadhyaya 1983:54; Chowdhry 1989:321, 1994:101-102; Sangari and Vaid 1989:16-17).

10. There is a Bengali word for widower, bipatnik ("without a wife"); but this learned term was not in common usage in the Mangaldihi region, and in fact most whom I asked professed no knowledge of it.

11. The term individuality, however, is, I believe, a confusing one to use in cross-cultural analyses, because it carries such specific connotations within Euro-American cultural and philosophical traditions, connotations that (as Mines [1994:5-61 also notes) are not always applicable within other social and historical contexts.

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