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Motini, Dumenti, and Other Royal Women 141 powers often against her husband’s will, Motini is always tied to her husband, and ultimately she submits to familial demands. One message of Dhola may be that it is acceptable to be a powerful female, so long as that female uses her powers appropriately. This may be a crucial message in an epic devoted to the goddess, especially the goddess Durga who (usually) stays within the boundaries of rightful action. At one level Dhola tells us how to live on earth and use our (female) powers appropriately. One must also wonder, or at least I do, about this male, lower-caste epic as a site for extolling the powers of women. Women do not sing Dhola and are not likely to hear it sung. Yet, unlike most epics, this one extols the powers of wives and of women in general. In a Bengali version of the Gopi Chand epic, Gopi Chand’s father states, “You are but the wife of my house, / but I am the master of that house. / If I accept wisdom from a housewife / How can I call her guru and take the dust off her feet” (Kanika Sircar; quoted in A. Gold 1992, 66), thus refusing to acknowledge the divine powers of his domestically powerless wife. Raja Nal, albeit with initial reluctance, accedes to the use of his wife’s power, in fact demands it, as he stands tearful and blind at the battlefield where his parents are captured. In later episodes, after he marries Dumenti, he must again call upon this first wife Motini for victory in his battles, for Dumenti’s more human birth and rearing have not given her the magical powers necessary for battle. When I asked singers of Dhola their views of Motini and Dumenti, they always praised Motini for her action and Dumenti for her devotion. This opposition, too, is part of the cultural knowledge of the rural males who sing Dhola even today. Moreover, as we shall see in the next chapter, lower-caste women do not normally adhere to the norms of conduct mandated for the rich and powerful. Whether an Oil Presser’s wife or a female Bangle Seller, or indeed the Jat women who regularly work in the fields alongside their husbands, women display powers and participate in social life in ways not always discussed in the Hindu textual traditions or the scholarly literature. By looking through the lens of caste, the varied and complex roles of women in Hindu society come into greater focus. Hence, as the singers comment on their society by playing with caste identities as they sing Dhola, they further comment on women and their roles. 6 Oil Pressers, Acrobats, and Other Castes Raja Nal to the Oil Presser whom he meets when in the forest covered with the sores of a leper: “How can we fit together? I belong to the caste of Chhatri (Warrior/Kshatriya) and you are an Oil Presser by caste. What about the problem of food?” (WA 84:243) Dhola is performed primarily in the multi-caste farming communities of rural north India, and its performances capture the essence of key social relationships in such communities. Rural villages often contain as many as twenty distinct endogamous caste groups, each living in a specified portion of the village, and with its own caste culture, behaviors that are transmitted from generation to generation, perhaps only through oral learning. Each stereotyped in particular ways (e.g., Merchants, or Banyas, are fat and greedy), caste cultures are reflected in dress codes, in jewelry, in the style of a man’s turban, in the likelihood of a child receiving formal schooling, in rules for appropriate female behavior and for marriage, as well as male occupation. Caste culture is also manifested in rituals, as the annual cycle of ritual activity changes as one moves from caste to caste. And it can be reflected (and enacted) in the actual performance of rituals that all groups share, for the details of the same rituals vary by caste (not unlike the ways in which the Irish and the Italians might differ in how they celebrate Christmas or a wedding). Each caste is also linked to a particular occupation.1 The social and geographic separation of castes sets up relatively impenetrable social and physical boundaries. Dhola singers construct their epic story building upon these core ideas about individual castes, especially using ideas based on occupations...

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