In Amma's Healing Room: Gender and Vernacular Islam in South India

Acknowledgments

xv Acknowledgments For a book whose research and writing has spanned over a decade, the network of family, friends, colleagues, and supporting institutions to which thanks are given extends far beyond what can be contained by the written page. I first offer my deepest gratitude and honor to Amma and Abba and their family, thanks for who they are and for opening their lives and home to me. From the beginning of our relationship, both Amma and Abba saw themselves as my teachers; they cannot have imagined the many levels at which I learned from them. I treasure Amma’s blessings of my children and her intuitions about their personalities and potential. Over many returns to Hyderabad between 1989 and the present, Revati and Thanganne Thangavelu and their extended families have graciously offered me an open home and table, wisdom when I needed to make difficult decisions about research strategies, and daily encouragement . In 1990, they gave over their living room to my fieldwork associate Lakshmi and me for seven weeks when they barely knew us. In those initial days of fieldwork in the healing room, Revati understood the con- flicting demands of research and families and friends; she often kept us on task to “do our work.” Thanganne’s special gift was morning cups of tea. Both Revati and Thanganne have been wonderful conversation partners , friends, and family. Diane and Andreas D’Souzas of the Henry Martyn Institute in Hyderabad similarly offered an open home, rich cups of South Indian coffee, and lively conversation. Their experiences of and insights into vernacular Islam in Hyderabad were invaluable, against which I could check my own experiences and interpretations. They understand well the dominant textual orientations of the study of Islam in the western academy; thus, their Acknowledgments xvi encouragement was particularly important. I also want to thank their children , Tara, Noel, and Mira, for the reminders they gave me of the joy, spontaneity, and balance that children can give, when my own children were far away. For much of 1994–1995 and for shorter visits to Hyderabad thereafter, I stayed in the hostel of the American Studies Research Center (ASRC) on Osmania University campus (a half-hour walk from Amma’s healing room). The hostel manager, Srinivas, found room for me when I was not quite the “standard” guest, and the entire staff of the hostel and library welcomed me and accommodated my sometimes erratic schedule. I am particularly grateful for the e-mail access that was given to me at the library. At the hostel I met young scholars from all over India who had come to the library to conduct research on American Studies topics. We exchanged American and Indian experiences and our knowledge of histories, politics, and literature; these lively conversations provided muchneeded breaks from transcribing tapes and writing up fieldnotes. A. R. Khaleel is one of the friends I met at the ASRC in 1994. Khaleel is a Hyderabadi in all the best senses of the word, steeped in Hyderabadi culture, language, and history, which he shared freely and graciously with me. In later years, we spent many evenings at the hostel transcribing and translating together taped conversations from the healing room. He knew the local resonances of many Urdu and Telugu words for which I may have initially known only a superficial or “standard” meaning. I thank him for his sense of humor, friendship, and assistance. Lakshmi Narasamamba worked with me during my initial sevenweek research with Amma and Abba in 1990–1991. We went to Amma’s healing room together every day and spent our evenings transcribing and translating tapes. Lakshmi was responsible primarily for Telugu translations . She has remained an intellectual colleague in the following years. Durga Yeramilli, an anthropologist turned software computer engineer in Atlanta, spent one summer transcribing and translating Telugu transcriptions of healing-room interactions. My deepest thanks are offered to these two friends for assisting in this tedious work and for the friendships that developed from it. Students in my “Women, Religion and Ethnography” classes at Emory University have been instrumental in the development of the style Acknowledgments xvii and tone of this book. Through class discussions and slides, many of these students got to know Amma on what they felt was a personal basis and continued to ask about her long after their graduation. I thank them for their engagement. Many colleagues have responded to...