Gender and Story in South India

5. Transformation of Gender Roles: Converging Identities in Personal and Poetic Narratives

87 5 Transformation of Gender Roles: Converging Identities in Personal and Poetic Narratives P. S. KANAKA DURGA I n India’s privileged civil society, knowledge, truth, and reality are constructed in terms of the dominant male gender, and female voices and experiences are either ignored or merely given passing reference in the representation of cultures, which results in a monocular depiction of society. Folklore, on the other hand, depicts the totality of tradition-based creations by both men and women in a variety of gender relations with a matrix of power and sexuality in many different cultural contexts. Folk narrative captures the experiences of women and men in different expressive or generic forms and demands attention by depicting interactions between gender and genre. Each generation forms, and transforms, generic expressions and transmits them orally to the next generation. In this transmission, women play a prominent role as tradition bearers. In the process of socialization, women internalize traditions and values and also perpetuate them for generations by expressing them in their own lives as they live them and in generic forms peculiar to their own cultural groups. In oral narrative, women are free to compose, recompose, and disseminate creations that more often than not reveal unexpected voices. Reality, as they construe it, projects fantasy about protest against, resistance to, and dissatisfaction with their society in ways that are free of filtration and censorship (Kanaka Durga 1999a). Their folk narratives echo complementary and contradictory negotiations of men and women who operate within the matrix of gender-power-sexuality. As such, they are of great cultural value for interpreting women’s perspectives. Women’s folk narratives uncover the process of constructing a gendered self-identity within the sociocultural context of their own lives. Further, they represent conflicts that arise within an individual, as well as between individuals and society, and also suggest strategies for negotiating conflict and for balancing gender relations within family and society. According to Wendy O’Flaherty, women’s folk narratives show a perfect blending of tradition and creativity, that is, of artistry in the context of folkloristic performance (1989: 5). These narratives provide vital entry points for examining interactions between the individual and society in the construction of gender. Recent discourse on folk narrative research recognized gender as an issue in culture studies (Appadurai et al. 1991; Abu Lughod 1986; Ramanujan 1986a, 1991a; Degh 1969; Brill 1978). Women’s personal narratives are primary documents for analyzing gender issues. Grounded in women’s lives, they reveal the perceived gender roles and how meaningful they are to their lives vis-à-vis society. Women’s personal narratives offer stories about how women negotiate their exceptional gender status both in their daily lives and over the course of their lifetimes. Gender is perceived not only as a variable factor in the study of folklore, but also as an ever-present variable in the analysis of performance of a particular narrative. In this essay, I make an attempt to study women-centered narratives in order to analyze the narrators’ personal identity and personality in comparison with those of the characters and events in the narratives themselves . The women-centered narratives can be defined as those that are told by women, are owned by women, and are centered around women (Ramanujan 1991 33–34; 1991a xxv–xxvi). These narratives reveal the existence of an independent and exclusive domain for women within which they freely identify with female and male characters in texts that they perform. This evident interchangeability of gender roles (in terms of transformation and transcendence in the performance context of a narrative) is a strategy adopted by narrators (here, invariably women) to claim their due social status. Therefore, it can be hypothesized that their women-centered narrative structures reenact and dramatize women’s struggles and women’s search for identity. My essay is based on fieldwork conducted in Andhra Pradesh. I documented several narratives, both in prose and verse, together with an autobiographical account by an old woman from a pastoral community. To demonstrate the images and the narrator’s points of identification with her narratives, I examined five of her poetic narratives together with narratives 88 Gender and Story in South India of her personal life experiences. Through her narratives she questioned and resisted the stereotypic notion of females whose survival depends on serving males. Though in reality my informant had to reckon with the values and norms of the...