Maithil Women's Tales: Storytelling on the Nepal-India Border by Coralynn V. Davis (review)

Maithil Women's Tales is a deep cultural study of folktales narrated by women in the region of Mithila, especially in the town of Janakpur and the rural vicinity marking Nepal's eastern Tarai region, where the author has conducted research for nearly 20 years. As Davis tells us, Mithila and Janakpur are enshrined in Indic storylore as the natal home of Sita, the heroine-princess of the pan-South Asian epic of the Rāmāyaṇa. Beyond that, although prominent in Nepal's political and economic history, the region remains folkloristically understudied, making this book an important presentation of voices from the ground.

While studying women's income-generating art in the tourist economy of Janakpur in 1994–1995, Davis discovered that storytelling was a robust part of Maithil women's lives and returned specifically to research this subject in 2004–2005. Davis finds that shared "folk" stories (she uses the quotation marks, but does not spell out why) were not only used for "maintaining heritage," but also constituted a medium through which women grappled with cosmological and everyday questions of "mobility, the meaning of family, and the degree to which the tenor of their lives is fated or agentively forged" (p. 18). While this key observation about the sociality of storytelling is not presented as novel—Davis is thoroughly acquainted with narrative scholarship of recent decades that highlights the importance of the convergence between "life" and "story"—she shows how relationality and self-becoming are negotiated both within and outside Maithil stories, across "taleworlds" and "storyrealms," as she notes (p. 11), using Katherine young's framework (Taleworlds and Storyrealms, Martinus Nijhoff, 1987).

Davis recorded 140 stories in total from 12 Maithil women, who were selected from different caste, class, age, and educational backgrounds. However, stories by women from dalit communities (a generic name for particularly marginalized and stigmatized "lower" castes) were difficult to obtain. Davis astutely speculates that the burdened daily routines of dalit women preclude them from developing storytelling repertoires or finding time to share them with ethnographers, especially Western ethnographers, toward whom lower-caste Maithils understandably may "harbor a distaste" because of Westerners' complicity with development aid politics that favor higher castes (p. 19). This relative absence is troubling, as it leaves veiled the expressive agency retained by a social group that is severely disenfranchised in South Asia, but it makes the reader appreciate, for example, the story narrated by a dalit woman, a field laborer from the Halalkhor community. Not only do we have this story recounted, but Davis highlights the special contribution it makes to narrative theory in general.

Davis' research design includes audio-recording storytelling sessions in domestic settings as well as in an office she rents in Janakpur, "located near Dollie's home (near enough for Dollie's family members to keep an eye on us)" (p. 4). Dollie Sah, Davis' research assistant who is acknowledged for her immense contribution to the research process, is somebody the reader can expect to know not by way of a biography or an extended reflection on the relationship between collaborators, but through her narrative interventions and presence in the storytelling sessions. As such, her ethnographic persona remains somewhat enigmatic. Emic understandings of the stories come by way of "transcription, translation, and analysis" (p. 20), which are shared by two other upper-caste and high-class Maithil women, fluent in English, who in turn occasionally consult older women in their own families. Although Davis is orally competent in Nepali, the national language that Maithil women also understand, stories are mostly narrated in colloquial Maithili, which Davis picks up. These links in the chain of translation and interpretation are crucial to grasp, as the project is oriented toward understanding how fictionalized narration allegorically engages experiences of Maithil women. Davis turns to various genres, marked as such, and blended forms—ritual, song, and painting...