Abstract
Procreative Ideologies: Banal or Crucial? 1
In different cultures of South Asia, the contributions of mother and father in biological reproduction are expressed in terms of body fluids—semen, blood and milk. The intergenerational transmission of these ‘vital’ bodily substances assumes a variety of meanings, which can influence the broad aspects of social organisation and worldview (Böck & Rao, 2000; Daniel, 1984). In the Indian context, the ethnographies of Das (1993), Dube (1986), Fruzzetti (1982), Inden and Nicholas (1977), Lambert (2000), Madan (1981) and Nongbri (1993), among others, touch upon the conception beliefs of the societies which they studied. Among these, the writings of Dube and Nongbri pay special attention to gender.
Ideas about procreation are generally bilateral. In the textual and oral traditions of people in South Asia, the mother’s role in procreation is not altogether absent (Böck and Rao, 2000; Hershman, 1981), but most of the patrilineal societies of the region lay strong emphasis on the father’s contribution. In a path-breaking early article, Dube (1986) demonstrated the ubiquity of notions of ‘seed’ and ‘earth’ in South Asian conception ideologies. The seed symbolises the father’s contribution and the field represents the part of the mother. The ‘seed’ contained in semen is the essence for the creation of offspring. In popular understanding as well as in Ayurveda (the indigenous system of physiology and medicine in India), semen is understood as derived from blood. Being the product of the father’s ‘seed’, a child inherits the father’s blood and is therefore placed in his group. The mother’s blood is significant in nourishing the foetus (Fruzzetti & Ostor, 1984, p. 108) but qualified in imparting identity to a child. A very popular (masculine) adage in the Indian subcontinent is ma ka doodh piya hai to (if you have suckled the milk of your mother), generally used by men to express their physical prowess. This might express appreciation of the mother’s ‘valuable’ role in nourishing, but one does not find similar idioms which emphasise the role of a mother’s bodily fluids in imparting identity to the child. It is in this sense that Fruzzetti and Ostor write that ‘[B]lood is male, and while it is unchangeable, it is transmitted in the male line and cut off at some point in the female line’ (1984, p. 103).
It has been suggested by Dube (2001) that the cultural notions of the maleness and femaleness of blood shed significant light on patriliny. In patrilineal cultures, where blood is defined as male, women are expected to behave like ‘earth’, as the mere receptacles of male seed (Fruzzetti & Ostor, 1984; Madan, 1981; Meillassoux, 1981, p. 38) and give back the fruit, preferably male children. Women are ‘exchanged’ to tie men to each other through the line, maintaining the purity of the jati (caste) (Fruzzetti, 1982, p. xx). The symbolism of ‘seed’ and ‘earth’ places women at a disadvantage in terms of staking a claim on property, particularly land and/or children, in agrarian societies. Kamala Ganesh (2001, p. 21) also points out that the metaphor of seed and field/ earth/soil for the respective contribution of father and the mother in the making of a child is both widespread and deep-rooted in India. It seeps into everyday language, becoming a paralegal reference point during family crises—death, divorce and property divisions. In the case of rural India, Dube (2001, p. 120) finds the persistence of this ideology without much change, as reflected in customary laws and traditional decision-making operations.
The present article focuses on the conception beliefs of the Kolam, a ‘primitive’ tribe residing in southeastern Maharashtra bordering northern Andhra Pradesh. It seeks to analyse the bearing of the procreative ideology on the symbolic and material aspects of community life with a special focus on gender. By ‘symbolic resources’, I mean here those ritual and religious aspects of life which go into defining and concretising the identity of an individual man or woman in the realm of kinship. As will be brought out in the discussion, the concept of khanda-watan, which is associated with the domains of ritual and religion, constitutes a vital element in articulating ‘who you are’ and is almost as significant as gathering and hunting for survival. Without articulating this linkage, there is no sense of self to a Kolam man or woman. It is through this linkage that a child is placed in the kinship group. The questions addressed here are as follows (a) whether such conception beliefs have a more restricted application in the case of the Kolams, in view of the fact that the Kolams are a non-agriculturist community whose acquisition of private property in land in the field village is only 40 years deep; 2 and (b) the extent to which the Kolam’s conception beliefs are deployed to control and regulate the body and sexuality of women, as proposed in many case studies of procreative ideologies.
The discussion which follows brings out the peculiar mix of the salience and leniency of Kolami patriliny from the viewpoint of gender. The Kolami case appears to validate Dube’s (1986) argument that procreative ideologies have material consequences for women. For instance, when the Kolams have acquired land in the recent past, the land is passed on to the sons who bear the father’s ‘blood’ (nettur). The notion of patrilineal ‘blood’ is also the crucial determinant of group placement and identity formation in Kolami kinship. However, paradoxically, these strong patrilineal thrusts remain rather ineffectual in controlling the body and sexuality of the women. The relatively flexible marriage and sexual norms, along with the lack of a straight fit between the modes of descent and post-marital residence, defy any straitjacketed understanding of patrilineality in this case, 3 which goes against Dube’s (1986) generalisations that ‘maleness of blood’ correlates with relatively tight control over female sexuality. Pauline Kolenda (1987) and Bina Agarwal (1994) have independently proposed a set of measures of the extent of control exercised over women’s sexuality which might indicate the degree of gender (in)egalitarianism in a given cultural context. Apart from the factor of post-marital residence, these include the prevalence of bride price, uxorilateral bonds and social tolerance for divorce, premarital sex and adultery, etc. The ‘bargaining power’ of women within the family and community is seen to be contingent upon these factors (ibid.), as well as factors such as access to communal resources like village commons and forests (Agarwal, 1997, p. 8). These have been taken into consideration while discussing Kolami patriliny with empirical cases cited from the field village.
The Kolams
The Kolams are a Scheduled Tribe, identified as one of the ‘primitive’ groups by the Government of India (Shashi, 1994, p. 8). They are distributed mainly in Yeotmal, Osmanabad, Chandrapur, Gadchiroli and Nagpur districts of Maharashtra, and the Adilabad district of Andhra Pradesh (Singh, 1998, p. 1767). Though Singh (ibid.) has not included Nanded district of Maharashtra in his account, the Kolams also reside in several villages along the hill and forest areas of Kinwat tehsil of Nanded district.
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The Kolams of this region speak their own dialect, Kolami, apart from Telugu and Marathi, and practise cross-cousin marriage. Thomas Trautmann (1995, p. 11–12) includes Kolami in the Dravidian group of languages, and the Kolami kinship terminology and its semantics reveal close proximity to the structure of Dravidian kinship terminologies (Kumar, 2012).
This article is the outcome of my study, conducted over several years, of the Kolams of Jawarla village in the Kinwat tehsil of Nanded district. Jawarla can be designated a ‘tribal’ village because of the numerical dominance of Gonds and Kolams. Everyone in the village, including the non-tribal communities, refers to it as a ‘village of adivasi’ (adivasi che gaon). There is no upper-caste group in the village and the number of lower and middle castes remains insignificant compared to the village’s tribal population.…
The Kolams have historically been a propertyless community … Today the situation is slightly different from what it was during the mid-1940s (Fürer-Haimendorf, 1945). Many Kolam households now own goats, mostly provided by the state government under its tribal development schemes, and many households possess land. Some 60 per cent of Kolam households in the village possess small tracts of land (though they lack pattas or deeds), while the remaining 40 per cent are landless.
All Kolam households in the village engage in agriculture, either as wage labourers or as small cultivators or both. However, agriculture does not contribute substantially to the subsistence livelihood of the Kolams. The forest continues to play a significant role in the livelihood system of the Kolams and the attempts of the local forest officials to restrict their entry to the forest in recent years have met with stiff resistance.…
Kolam communities have always resided in pods in close proximity to the forest. Thus, while the other communities reside in the main village, called gaothan in Gondi and Marathi, the Kolams reside in ‘isolated’ pods situated at least a kilometre away from the gaothan. All members of this community spread over several villages in Adilabad district and Kinwat Tehsil have a right to move into any Kolam pod.… A Kolam family will shift to another pod where it finds a relative abundance of bamboo.… If they get information that bamboo is available in a particular village at a shorter distance and if they have their known affines (soyere) 4 in that place, they will generally migrate to that pod either temporarily or permanently.… Apart from economic necessity, migration within their limited geographical territory has also been facilitated by certain cultural features. It has been quite a common practice among the Gond and Kolam men to shift to their in-laws’ place and construct a hut alongside their in-laws.… Second, even if the bamboo is relatively scarce, requiring longer travel inside the forest, many Kolam families have not shifted to another pod. For instance, if the family possesses land, the likelihood of migration is less, though it cannot be ruled out.… In the past 30 years, many Kolam families in the village have taken to agriculture but the majority of them continue to derive a major portion of their livelihood from bamboo weaving, as noted previously.
Apart from bamboo weaving, selling firewood fetches immediate cash for the Kolam women. The cash generated through this economic activity makes a significant contribution to the household subsistence economy. Despite a growing alienation from the forest, the pod dwellers still consider a stake in the forest resources as their natural and legitimate right, not least because their deity, Bhimaiyak, and his maternal uncle, Shrishambhu Mahadev, reside there. The forest is the place where the Pandavas (whose descendants the Kolam claim themselves to be) wandered while they were exiled by the Kauravas, eating whatever came their way. Hunting is still very central to the Kolami notion of masculinity, and wild pig, rabbit, python, etc., do provide fresh nutritional meat to most Kolam households in the village, at least intermittently.
In the symbolic domain, the association with the place of origin (khanda-watan) and the worship of the clan deity, Bhimaiyak, are inextricably interwoven with the everyday existence of the Kolams. Any disorder and crisis in life is associated with the mood and tantrums of the deity, who chooses to speak through the chief male priest (katora). A person’s identity remains suspect in the absence of a clear articulation of khanda-watan, which in turn is associated with a particular deity located in the guri of a particular village pod. This association with a place of origin becomes central during marriage negotiations among the Kolams. The Kolam notion of ‘blood’, mentioned earlier, is not only significant from the viewpoint of placement in the group and marriage, but can operate as a paralegal force in some significant contexts, such as rights over children in case of divorce and remarriage.
The Maleness of Blood
The Kolams have no explicit metaphor to express the male and female contribution in biological reproduction, but their procreative ideology surfaces dramatically in certain specific contexts. One such occasion is the marriage negotiation (soyerik) in which the fathers of the prospective groom and bride publicly declare that the latter are of their ‘blood’.…
A child acquires his/her father’s dev, pari and khanda, along with his name, and without this, the child has no identity in Kolami social organisation. The dev are exogamous units, sometimes termed ‘phratries’, 5 of which there are four among the Kolams. Every phratry member feels connected to other members of his or her own group in a ‘brotherhood’ tie. Members belonging to the same phratry can never marry as they share the ‘blood’ of their unknown mythical ancestor. A phratry or dev is further divided into different clans or surnames, pari. Moreover, members of a pari are further subdivided into lineages, khanda. A particular lineage includes all those who have a single ‘place of origin’ (watan), where the guri or temple of the deity is located. The members of this khanda-watan, who may or may not know each other, are dispersed over several villages and, in principle, are expected to gather at the ‘place of their origin’ to celebrate the annual festival of Bhimaiyak. In case the members of a khanda-watan reside in the same pod where the guri of their Aiyak is located, the group may be called a ‘localised patrilineage’. However, a ‘localised patrilineage’ may not necessarily be a landholding or property-holding unit. The Kolams who trace their origin from the Pulsi pod of Jawarla village are not invariably landowners, while many residents of the pod who possess land do not belong to this khanda-watan. The residents of any Kolam pod belong to different exogamous groups and constitute real and classificatory affines to each other.
While the dev is an essential but amorphous category, the pari, along with the khanda-watan, concretises the identity of the individual among the Kolams. A male ego inherits his dev, pari and khanda from his father and these remain unchanged throughout his life. A female ego also takes her dev, pari and khanda from her father, but upon marriage she takes the dev, pari and khanda of her husband and becomes a blood relative to her husband’s patrikin. She however retains her residual membership in her father’s group and can never remarry in her father’s phratry. This can be substantiated by the fact that a Kolam woman can always come back to her natal home in case of divorce and separation and can stay with her parents if she is single. In case she has come with her husband and children, she can construct a house near that of her parents. The Kolam woman always articulates that she is the daughter of a particular dev, and the wife of another dev. Marrying in the dev of her father is deemed incestuous. So, upon marriage, she is assimilated in the patrilineal group of her husband, but this unity with the husband’s ‘blood’ cannot be ‘total’, to use Fruzzetti, Ostor and Barnett’s phrase (1983, p. 13). In other words, she does not become a ‘blood’ relative as sibling to her husband.…
The Kolami kinship structure allows flexibility to men and women to seek divorce (wegre pattam) and to remarry. Both men and women can marry several times after taking divorce or informal separation, which is accepted in principle. In case of divorce and remarriage, the woman will take the dev, pari and khanda of her new husband, leaving aside the dev, khanda and pari of the earlier husband. Now the question arises about the identity of her own children. Whose dev, pari and khanda do her children from the previous husband take? The patrilineality of Kolami kinship entails that the children take the dev, pari and khanda of their ‘own’ father, and not those of the man who is the mother’s present husband. In case a woman has married thrice and has children from three different men, the children would take the dev, pari and khanda of their respective ‘biological’ fathers, while the woman will take up the dev, pari and khanda identity of her current husband. Thus, a woman cannot transmit her group membership to her own children. A father still gives identity to his children even if he is not responsible for their upkeep and maintenance, may have no contact with them or might have remarried and shifted to a village which is further away. He is still required to be present during the marriage negotiations of his children.
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This brings us to the whole question of the notion of ‘blood’ among the Kolams. During the marriage negotiations, known as soyerik, people from the bride’s side ask the groom’s party about the identity of the prospective groom. One of the persons representing the bride’s side will ask publicly in a loud voice: ‘Whose blood is this?’ (Ni wene nettur?). The father of the boy, who is generally there on the occasion, will get up and publicly declare: ‘He is my blood’ (Id aane nettur). Blood here will be understood in terms of the dev, pari and khanda of the father. In case the father is not available, the other closest agnatic male (the father’s elder or younger brother) will perform this task. Even if the boy has lost track of his father for a long time, the father and his family are traced and invited to perform this public ritual of declaration regarding the bloodline. The declaration of ‘blood’ will also be repeated in case of the prospective ‘bride’. The bride’s mother might have married another man and the latter might have developed affection for the girl, but it is her own biological father’s name that will be highlighted on this occasion, even if she is not in touch with him.
The power of patrilineal ‘blood’ can be seen in case of the remarriage of a woman. The patrilineal kin of the ex-husband have a legitimate claim to her children in case of her remarriage, based on common nettur which the child shares with his father and his/her patrikin. 6 Children are regarded as an asset among the Kolams, and the maternal or paternal grandparents are always willing to maintain and keep the children with themselves in expectation of the support they might receive from these children, at least until they are married. This is something that makes much sense in a society where the near universal nuclearity of households leaves elderly people to fend for themselves. Significantly, however, the maternal grandparents cannot veto the legitimate rights of the patrikin over the children. In case of remarriage, there seem to be two or three possibilities. The first legitimate right goes to the patrikin of the child who can come and take the children away from the mother. If the patrikin shows indifference, then the children might remain with the mother. Alternatively, the woman might leave the children under the care of her own natal kin.
The emphasis on nettur does not obliterate the significance of pal (milk). Pal is provided by mother (amma). The nettur is male, while the pal is female. On the occasion of soyerik the people from the bride’s side will also speak loudly: Ni wene pal undi? (Whose milk has the groom sucked?) The father will say: Id amme pal undi? (He has sucked the milk of my wife). A close agnatic relative of the groom will respond by uttering the dev, pari and khanda of the groom’s mother’s natal home. A similar process will be repeated for the bride. Both men and women can marry persons belonging to their mother’s natal dev. The emphasis on mother’s milk (which signifies the mother’s father’s dev) is in consonance with the Dravidian kinship principle of re-establishing the previous marriage ties. Though mother’s milk has no role in imparting identity, its public acknowledgement shows the significance of affines in Kolami kinship. Among the Kolams, the bride givers and bride takers, the soyere or cross relatives, 7 are treated on equal terms on all ritual occasions. During the annual festival of Bhimaiyak, the soyere (affines or cross-relatives) are of special importance to every Kolam household, ahead of the sagge (patrilineal kin or consanguines). Without affinal presence, as the Kolams say, the ritual occasions do not make much sense. During the death rituals, it is two sagge and two soyere who together carry the corpse.
The aforementioned description shows that the identity and group placement of a child is transmitted by the father because the child carries the nettur of the father. This confers the right to reside in the territory of the pod and participate in the ritual and religious life of the community. The marriage prospects of a person are determined by this group placement, and the father’s (or his close kin’s) approval is of utmost importance during marriage negotiations, even if the latter are neither in physical nor in emotional proximity to the groom or bride. The legitimate claim of the patrikin over the children in case of a woman’s remarriage further reaffirms the maleness of the blood. The access to symbolic resources is also seen to be contingent upon the legitimacy of blood.
As noted earlier, every khanda-watan has its own guri (temple) of Bhimaiyak located in different villages, which are treated as the place of origin of the members of this group. Without articulating the place of origin, along with the surname, there is no sense of self and recognition in the Kolami community. Persons without these identities will always be suspect and will not be assimilated in the group. This is reflected in the treatment of any stranger or unknown person, called suttam among the Kolams. When a person approaches the Kolam pod claiming himself or herself as a Kolam, the first question he or she encounters is: ‘Which place do you belong to?’ (Yete tana watter?). The reference is not the physical place but the place of origin, khanda-watan. Once this identity is clear, he or she has access to the pod, can construct a hut and reside in the pod, 8 [and] access the material resources of the community.
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Placement in an exogamous unit and its clear articulation is very significant from the viewpoint of community membership and marriage. Though the point seems very obvious here, we need to consider it from the perspective of Kolam women. There have been cases of sexual relations of Kolam women with non-adivasi men in the village. In case of pregnancy from such relations, as the Kolam women informed me, the identity of a child and his/her marriage prospects would be uncertain. As a result, some of the women have successfully manipulated the stipulation ordained by the Kolami kinship that a woman’s statements are treated as authentic in case of ‘illicit’ pregnancies.…
In sum, it is the father’s nettur which places the child in a particular dev, pari and khanda. The kinship concepts of dev, pari and khanda place the Kolam in various exogamous units and ensure entitlement to the territory and access to certain symbolic and material resources of the community. They give legitimacy to the patrikin who have the right to take away the child from a woman’s lap in case of her remarriage. By marrying a different man, a woman’s dev, pari and khanda will also change. With a change in her nettur, she loses her rights to her own children who now carry a different nettur. Many separated and divorced women prefer to remain unmarried for, even if they wish to marry, they fear the loss of their children.
The Blood, Body and Sexuality
Mention has already been made of the all-pervasiveness of the ideology of ‘seed’ and ‘earth’ in South Asian cultures. From the Kolam perspective, too, it appears that a woman’s body is also conceived as a vehicle for the continuation of the male line, though the Kolam do not expressly invoke the seed and earth idiom. But, importantly in the Kolami conceptualisation, the vessel, the woman’s body, need not on that account be controlled and tied to a single man, the sole owner, as is the case in many patrilineal societies in South Asia (cf. Agarwal, 1994, p. 345). The ideology of kanyadan and the concomitant stress on the virginity and purity of the bride which hold in the case of (upper-caste) Hindu women (Chakravarti, 2003) is not conspicuous among the Kolams. 9 A woman can get a divorce and remarry or stay single when she decides not to remarry in case of divorce, desertion and widowhood. Among the Kolams, a woman is not subjected to violence in case of a pre-marital pregnancy or pregnancy out of ‘illicit’ relations, as she might have to face in ‘mainstream’ Hindu society. She is either married off to the man who is responsible for the act, or the man is heavily fined if he is found more guilty than the woman. The child, however, will bear the name of the identified biological father—the impregnator of the mother—and can claim a share in his father’s property when he/she grows up even if the mother is not married to this man. At least, this is accepted in principle, though for the Kolams, being largely a propertyless group, the question of staking a claim in the family property does not generally arise.
While the Kolams do not approve of premarital sex, it is tolerated in practice.…The sexual norms of Kolams do not sanction adulterous behaviour either, but in everyday life, deviance from this prescribed norm is tolerated. As some of the women told me, ‘In a drunken state no one knows who is sleeping with whom.’ I came across many Kolam women buying liquor from the shop of a Komti 10 in the nearby market at Mandwi. One of these women is Nagi Bai (name changed) from Kazi pod. She is in her mid-thirties and is the mother of three children. She has a passion for liquor, as the men and women of this pod confirm. On many occasions, she goes to the market and, when her husband is not in the village, she does not come back home. Everyone in the pod talked about her sexual conduct, but she does not face social ostracism on that account. For instance, on the occasion of festival of Bhimaiyak in the pod, she was singing devotional songs with the other women and cooking garkalamba with women of the pod to offer to the deity. She frequently shares liquor with her husband. Once, however, she was severely beaten up by her husband. On my inquiry, the women of the pod told me that she was beaten up by her husband as she had taken the millet and pulses from her house to buy liquor, and not for her adulterous behaviour per se. These cases point to the flexible sexual norms among the Kolams where adulterous behaviour may not lead to social ostracism and exclusion from community life.
Apparently, there has been a slight shift in the attitude of Kolam youths in this regard. Despite loyalty to Kolami traditions, they also expressed their preference for sustained monogamy rather than divorce, remarriage and extramarital relations. Perhaps, this is the impact of watching Bollywood movies, which is a regular leisure activity for them. Interestingly, all the Kolams of the older generation (who do not watch movies) strongly advocate divorce in case of lack of adjustment, and also remarriage, and they generally condone sexual liaisons outside marriage.
This shift in attitude along intergenerational lines can also be attributed to sanskritisation, as all these young men have some exposure to modern education, which the older Kolams were completely deprived of. They study in Ashram shalas (free residential schools for tribal students up to the tenth standard) where most of the teachers who stay on the campus along with their families are from caste Hindu backgrounds. Though I do not have any direct evidence to illustrate the attitudinal shift among these young men as a result of this interaction, I was really surprised to see that many of these Kolam youth also abstain from liquor consumption and highlight the hazards of drinking!
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Despite the ostensible attitudinal shift among the youth, the customary norms of Gonds and Kolams pertaining to marriage and sexuality in the village are not subject to much modification. Control of the body and sexuality of the wife or concern over the virginity and purity of the ‘field’ remain imperceptible in the case of the Kolams. As regards, a woman who decides to remain single, even in case of widowhood, divorce, desertion or separation, all Kolam men and women agree that it is the will of the woman which should reign supreme. No one should force her to remarry, or to go back to the ex-husband’s family. The ideal of the husband as the ‘lord’ or unquestioned owner of the ‘field’ seems remote, and even alien. This was substantiated by my key informants who cited cases where the economic condition of some women improved after the death of their husbands. Both my Gond and Kolam key respondents say: ‘She has improved after the death of her husband’. Such women have been able to multiply their cash and cattle wealth through selling firewood and bamboo weaving. They then invest in agriculture by leasing land from better-off Gond families and also from other caste groups in the village. Now they are in a position to lend money to other villagers.
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Such instances make an interesting contrast with the notion of what is called suhagin (total wifehood) discussed by Khare in his study of the kinship system of a twice-born caste of the Lucknow–Rae Bareli region. Khare writes as follows
As an ethnographic term suhagin is a popular corruption of saubhagyavati, a word the literate use to denote a woman in the blessed state of wifehood.… [A] saubhagyavati is a ‘married woman whose husband is alive, a married unwidowed woman’.… A living husband is thus the most important single condition that keeps the woman suhagin. [Ideally] the suhagin attains her best in being what my informants called sati savitri, an image of absolute fidelity …. Statements about sati extol suhaga (wifehood) and decry pitiable widowhood (Khare, 1983, p. 153).
I contrast Khare’s data on the gender and kinship norms of sanskritic caste groups from upper-caste north Indian society with communities which are not in close interaction with and/or influenced by sanskritic groups. The Kolams belong to the latter category and their kinship norms betray an altogether different gender equation. [Indeed], the notion of suhagin would sound completely alien to the Kolams, and the Kolam widows are not subjected to severe community surveillance (cf. Chakravarti, 1996) or forced cohabitation (Chowdhry, 1998). There is no expectation that a woman must live in her marital home under all circumstances, and she is not unwelcome in her natal home. She has not defiled the purity of her lineage or family through her ‘illicit’ relations. The only ‘violence’ (if any) done to her is that she is wedded to the man who she claims is responsible for impregnating her. Here, her own will does not count, and it is the will of the community which prevails. But she can get a divorce or simply separate from this man. [In one case from my field data, a son born of a woman’s] ‘illicit’ relation [did] not [present] a big problem. Her son, [who was known to be industrious], was made into a gharjawain 11 by the richest Kolam family of the village who, despite knowing his antecedents, came asking for his hand for their only daughter. In this way, the Kolam woman stands in contrast to the ideal, Hindu upper-caste woman whose purity is crucial for the position of her family in the social hierarchy (Chen, 2000) and who is the ‘repository of family honour’—of her own family as daughter, and of her husband’s family as wife and mother (Bennett, 1983; Yalman, 1963). Her condition is better than the ‘untouchable’ Chuhra women studied by Pauline Kolenda (1983).
In the past at least, the patrilineal affiliation did not adversely affect the position of women or their right to strategic resources like land for the reason that the Kolams have historically been a resourceless and propertyless group. But with the acquisition of land and with agriculture assuming a more important place in the economy, the Kolam women are at a disadvantaged position, as land is passed on to the one who bears the nettur. The women bear their father’s nettur only temporarily; their rights in property are severed with their marriage, following which they become members of their husband’s group. The Kolami case in some ways supports Draper’s (1975) hypothesis that, while women have a great deal of autonomy and influence in economies based on foraging, this begins to decline with sedentarisation. But Kolam women are not denied access to forest resources—these belong to any resident of the pod—and a woman is welcome at any time in her parental pod even if she is wedded in a different pod.…
While patrilineality can be asserted very powerfully in some contexts, for example, when the husband’s family asserts its claim over a woman’s children in case of divorce and desertion, there are also women who themselves decide to leave their young children in the custody of the husband’s patrikin, or sometimes with their natal kin, and remarry. Frequently, no tie is maintained with these children, but a woman behaving in such fashion is not blamed as a bad mother among the Kolams.
Further, among the Kolams, there is no conspicuous son-preference, as in the case of upper-caste Hindus as well as Muslims (Chowdhry, 1994; Dube, 2001, p. 122; Jeffery and Jeffery, 1996; Minturn, 1993). In Jawarla village, some eight or ten men of the older generation had only daughters, but neither the Gonds nor the Kolams expressed regret about not having a son. In fact, the family planning programme in the village is relatively successful, and some Kolam women have undergone a tubectomy after only two daughters. When asked the reasons, they did not have any answer, as if the question itself was alien and ridiculous. So, while the blood is male among the Kolams, there is no obsession with male progeny.
Despite this sexual egalitarianism, some form of direct and indirect exclusion and control is exercised that curtails woman’s voice and agency. The children from different husbands will carry the name, dev, pari and khanda of their respective fathers and in the case of an unattached woman, the placement of the offspring can be problematic (cf. Dube, 1986, p. 29). Though the metaphor of ‘seed’ and ‘earth’ is not explicitly invoked by the Kolams in their everyday life to express the respective roles of men and women in biological reproduction, the idea that women are merely receptacles of the male seed is expressed in subtle ways in certain specific contexts. But importantly, while the woman’s body is considered as the field into which a man sows his seed, the field is not necessarily tied to a single ‘owner’, the ‘sower’ of the seed. The woman is entitled to ‘select’ and to ‘reject’, and does not necessarily have a single ‘owner’. This is in contrast with the formulation of Leela Dube (1986, p. 41) who presumes that both the seed and the field belong to man. Due to flexible gender norms, the Kolam women have relative sexual freedom and they can be independent economic actors. Despite this, women are never free from the burden of reproductive tasks and they enjoy less leisure than men. Men generally assert their superior physical strength by emphasising their role as hunters. Women are also debarred from the role of chief priest, the dandi Katora, among the Kolams.
Conclusion
The procreative ideologies come from the folk models of … biological reproduction. Since the roles of male and female are not equally emphasised in these folk models, they might have critical implications for gender in a given culture. Leela Dube (1986, 2001) has argued that they shed significant light on the conceptualisation of patriliny in South Asian society. Her analysis suggests the prevalence of a rather strong patriliny in South Asian societies. An attempt was made in the present article to analyse the procreative ideology of the Kolams in order to understand their patriliny from a gender perspective. Though the Kolams do not expressly use the metaphor of ‘seed’ and ‘earth’, their patrilineal procreative ideology is dramatically asserted in certain specific contexts. The discussion in the first part of this article underlines the significance of male body fluids in ascribing identity to persons and placing them in discrete exogamous groups. In Kolami symbolism, the father’s nettur becomes synonymous with the dev, pari and khanda; it takes on a sacred meaning since the khanda-watan is the place of the lineage temple.This transmission of identity, however, has to be understood in terms of the flexible marriage norms of the Kolams, which allow a Kolam man or woman to remarry several times after separation and/or divorce. The children born from different fathers but a common mother would draw their identity from their respective fathers. Even when the children have no interaction with their ‘biological’ fathers, in cases of divorce and remarriage it is agreed in principle that the former can stake a claim in the latter’s property. At certain junctures, such as marriage negotiations, the father’s or agnatic kin’s recognition of this ‘blood-tie’ assumes utmost significance.
There is not even a token recognition of the role of the mother’s bodily fluid in the process of procreation. Rather, the recognition of ‘milk’ on the occasion of marriage negotiations emphasises the Dravidian norm of the repetition of marriage within the same closed group and underlines the importance of affines in the Dravidian kinship system. In certain contexts, the patrilineal blood shows absolute resonance with patriarchy among the Kolams. It fully legitimises the stake of an ex-husband and his patrikin over a woman’s children in case of her remarriage, discouraging many ‘marriageable’ widowed, divorced and separated mothers from entering into new marital relations. In Kolami cultural comprehension, in case of a woman’s remarriage, her nettur changes and she has no claim over the nettur (the children) of her ex-husband. The immediate patrikin belong to the same nettur as the child/children and hence their claim is ‘legalised’ through the customary law. The power of patrilineal blood can also be seen in the inheritance of land as the Kolams in the village have begun to acquire land in the last 30 years. Land belongs to those who bear the nettur. The daughter, even if she stays matrilocally, does not have any inheritance rights in the land, while a son, even if he resides in a different village or does not maintain any relations with the father, can in principle assert his claim.
Despite inheritance in the male line, there is no son-preference among the Kolams. The force of patrilineal ‘blood’ can be evident in exercising control over the ‘crop’ (the children), but not over the ‘field’—a woman’s body and sexuality—in the same way. As the cases in the text indicate, a Kolam woman can be an independent economic actor and her rights are not curbed by the husband’s kin as in the case of the Chuhra widows of Khalapur described by Pauline Kolenda (1983). A widowed, divorced or separated woman cannot be forced into marriage against her consent, though she generally opts for remarriage if she does not have children. Female-headedness is a culturally accepted fact among the Kolams in case of widowhood, divorce and separation. Single women are not the subjects of suspicion and even in cases of sexual relations with men of other communities, they have not been excommunicated. Moreover, a woman’s voice is treated as ‘authentic’ in case of illicit impregnation, something which can provide women space for manoeuvrability and negotiations within the Kolami kinship arrangement. There seems to be a certain tolerance in case of the transgression of prescribed norms.
So while blood is male among the Kolams, to use Fruzzetti and Ostor’s (1984, p. 103) idiom, the maleness of blood does not mean that the female body is treated as a mere receptacle or a passive field, or that the husband has absolute control over his wife and her productive and reproductive capacity. The ‘field’ also has a right to free itself from the sower of the seed, the ‘owner’. The purity of the ‘field’ is not jealously guarded. An attitudinal shift in regard to marriage and sexuality among some of the youth, however, might in future diminish the tolerant and egalitarian elements of Kolami kinship.