Gender and Genre in the Folklore of Middle India.

• Author: Feldhaus, Anne
• Position: Review

By JOYCE BURKHALTER FLUECKIGER. Ithaca: CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1996. Pp. xxiii + 351, illustrations, maps, index. $49.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

The past two decades have seen stunning advances in the study of South Asian folklore. With her new book, Joyce Flueckiger, who has already played a significant role in these advances, carries the scholarly study of South Asian folklore to a new level of sophistication. The result of intensive field work carried out for and since a 1984 Ph.D. dissertation, Flueckiger's Gender and Genre is a solid, complex work that explores the indigenous categorization and social locations of a regional folklore repertoire. Besides gender and genre, Flueckiger examines caste, age group, individual creativity, modernization, regional identity, and centrality and peripherality as keys to understanding the repertoire she presents. In the course of her work, she thus manages to tell her readers a great deal about South Asian society and literature.

The book's geographical focus is the Chhattisgarh region of Madhya Pradesh. Flueckiger carried out her field work in two different parts of Chhattisgarh: at one place in the "heartland" and another near Chhattisgarh's border with Orissa. The book examines in detail six of the folklore genres that inhabitants of this region identify as typical of Chhattisgarh, and makes a different point about each of the genres. In the case of bhojali, a women's festival- and song genre involving the sprouting of seeds and the sealing of friendships, Flueckiger finds significant differences in the meaning of the festival and the social composition of the participants in her two different sites. In central Chhattisgarh, the principal participants are married women (although not-yet-married girls may also take part), and the main reference of the festival is fertility of the fields and of the women themselves. In the border area, only unmarried girls participate, and the theme of fertility remains implicit; instead, what gets expressly articulated in the bhojali songs and in other, related genres is the girls' impending marriages. Flueckiger sees these social and thematic differences as related to one another, and suggests that they may also be connected with Oriya (and south Indian) influence on the border area, specifically with the ritual attention paid to puberty in south India and Orissa, with cross-cousin marriage patterns, and with the higher economic status of women in south India...