The Two Lives of Leela Dube Introductory Remarks on her Life and Work

Growing up in a Maharashtrian Brahmin Household

Leelaji writes in ₹Doing kinship and gender: An autobiographical account’ that she grew up in a traditional Brahmin family of Maharashtrian origin, settled in Madhya Pradesh. A judicial officer in the government of British rulers, her father was a correct, upright, westernized gentleman, who maintained a studied distance from his family, and was worthy of respect and admiration. The bringing up of five children, four girls and a boy, was in the hands of a caring, loving mother. While she went along with the decision characteristic of Maharashtrian Brahmins of their class to give a modern education to the daughters, in her personal relations with them she left them in no doubt about their ‘destiny’ as married women and prospective mothers, home makers rather than career women, much less unmarried women.

Traditional mythology and folklore may not have been a significant component of school and college syllabi, they were known, told, and heard at home: Ramacharitmanas, Leelaji writes, ‘was read at home more or less regularly’ (2000: p. 4038). The ideals of feminine chastity and fidelity as depicted in the epic and otherwise recalled were family talk. Leelaji does not say anything about the relatively muted role Tulasidas allotted to Sita in this epic, or the indignity of agnipariksha (fire ordeal) she had to suffer to prove that she had remained chaste during her year-long captivity in Ravana’s Lanka. I find this silence rather puzzling, considering the fact that when she wrote this essay, she was in the throes of reconsiderations of traditional man-woman relations in patriarchal societies. She perhaps wanted to avoid imposing newly acquired perspectives on her memories of childhood and adolescence.

On her own, Leelaji was reading Marathi, Bengali and Hindi novels which woke her up to the new ideals of autonomy and romantic love. Leelaji wanted to marry for love, and marry someone whom she could respect as ‘truly superior to her in intellect’, so that the ideals of partnership and deference (one may say ‘equality’ and ‘hierarchy’) could be reconciled. And Leelaji did indeed fall in love with such a man. When she entered college in Nagpur for an M.A. in political science, she heard of a brilliant young man, Shyama Charan Dube, who had distinguished himself at the University level as a student of political science at the same college a couple of years earlier. But he had since moved on to Raipur on a scholarship for doctoral research in anthropology. One day he came to the Nagpur college, perhaps to collect his scholarship money, and someone pointed him out to Leelaji. She knew instantaneously that he was indeed the man for her, as if she had always known this, although he did not belong to the same Brahmin or linguistic community as herself.

The decision to marry him may not have really amounted to a serious revolt against the conventions of her family, but it certainly was a clear assertion of Leelaji’s autonomy, the right to make her own choice in the critical matter of marriage. In 2002, she recalled her ‘mother’s extraordinary influence’ on her, which led her to ‘combine a tendency to give in within close relationships’, but she also had her own ‘strength to take decisions and carry them out’ (p. 4038), such as the one regarding her marriage. Leelaji was at that time between the first and second years of her M.A. courses, and she was just twenty one. She obtained the consent of S.C. Dube and both the families, and they were married in 1945 at a civil ceremony ― another innovation, I presume. He was less than a year older than her. I do not remember him ever talking of this crucial event in his life. Did this silence reflect the traditional patriarchal attitude that men should not be sentimental about their wives?

Leelaji returned to her college and passed her final M.A. examination in 1946. There was no time taken off, no break in her studies. She then joined her husband who was engaged in fieldwork among the Kamar of Chhattisgarh. She recalls in her 1975 essay that they ‘welcomed’ her as the ‘wife of a friendly outsider’ (p. 158).

From him, she got her ‘first assignment as the wife of an ethnographer … to obtain from Kamar woman some information on essentially feminine matters’ (p.158), which had remained inaccessible to him. Leelaji recalls that she was her husband’s ‘lone pupil’, doing under his guidance what he asked her to do. She thus realized quite early that anthropology was a ‘happy byproduct of her marriage’, that it indeed was ‘an integral part of the content of [her] marriage’ (p. 158). And she was keen on being accepted by her husband and father-in-law (his wife was dead). For the latter, the arrival of a woman in a house, which had been for some time without a mistress, was most auspicious and welcome. Everybody was happy!

A good wife, a good daughter-in-law, and a professional academic —this is how she wanted to live her life as a young woman. She certainly wanted to succeed in life and be somebody on her own, not merely derivatively (as a wife or mother). Ironically perhaps, but quite under-standably, she decided to become an anthropologist like her husband, and put an academic career in political science out of her mind, exactly as he had done. Once S.C. Dube’s fieldwork was completed with her assistance in its last phase, she decided that it was time to set out for her own fieldwork. Her husband was of the same opinion. Where she would do it and what she would focus on—these issues were settled in consultation with the two new men in her life.

Leelaji’s husband and father-in-law advised her that she explore the ‘woman’s world’, that is the women’s view of culture and society, among the Gonds of southern Chhattisgarh, who generally lived in relatively accessible villages, often alongside of Hindu castes. Her ‘being a woman’, she recalled in 1975, was ‘what lay behind this advice’. Her husband suggested the topic of research; her father-in-law assured her that, as a government officer, he would be able to facilitate her work in the chosen area; there she would be, as she puts it, ‘under [his] protective umbrella’ (1975, p. 159). He arranged for a bullock cart (with cartman), a maid servant, and a peon to accompany her. It was thus that Leelaji began her maiden fieldwork to eventually become a leading anthropologist of her time.

The limits of her autonomy as a choice-maker were gently but clearly defined. As a person, her comfort and safety were responsibilities that her father-in-law took into his hands; as an aspiring anthropologist, her area of study, the ‘women’s world’, had already been chosen by her husband when he had taken her with him to assist him in his fieldwork among the Kamar. She was comfortable in this fully-fledged but accommodative patriarchal milieu. It is thus that she remembered the beginnings of her career as a woman anthropologist studying women’s worlds in her 1975 essay (and a year earlier in her conversations with my wife and me). And she did not ever change this judgment as is evident from the following observations in her 2000 Economic and Political Weekly (EPW) essay:

I was very conscious of my roles as a housewife, wife, and daughter-in-law. Looking back, I feel that in suggesting that I study Gond women, besides being keen on my taking up a career and expecting that [the] women’s world would be more accessible to me, [S.C.] Dube had perhaps wanted me to see other worlds and to face facts beyond a sheltered existence in order to better think through my confusions and contradictions (p. 4040, emphasis added).

The modicum of doubt conveyed by the qualifying word ‘perhaps’ could of course not be confirmed or rejected since S.C. Dube had passed away in 1996. What is really important, however, is that the passage of time, and the emergence of Leelaji as a pioneer in the field of ‘Gender Studies’ through the 1980s and 1990s, did not basically alter her perception of the beginnings of her career as a woman anthropologist in the lap, as it were, of a caring and protective patriarchal family. That takes me back to the 1940s.

Leelaji’s stay among the Gonds (it lasted ten months between 1947 and 1950) reinforced her values and perspectives. Her ‘broad research plan’ was to study the status and role of Gond women in order ‘to obtain a picture of Gond culture and society, mainly through the eyes of women’ (1975, p. 159). On man/husband-woman/wife relations,

the two most important conceptions’ she was told about by her Gond women informants were: “Man is a brass utensil while woman is an earthen pot”; “man provides the seed while woman provides only the field” (p. 163).

The significance of the foregoing analogies is obvious enough: a brass utensil is not easily broken, nor easily replaced, but easily purified when rendered impure — in short, it is precious. Contrariwise, earthenware is fragile, cannot be purified when polluted, and is dispensable and easily replaced. As for the seed-field idea, it is widespread in north Indian folklore. The idea is that a woman is naturally wild like the forest which is potentially cultivable. She must be tamed (protected from her own nature) first, as the Manusmriti (IX.3) says, by her father and then by her husband, who is expected to beget children with her, and finally by her son. This is analogous to the clearing of forest land for conversion into cultivable land which, when seeds are sown in it, yields a harvest. ²

Many years later, Leelaji was to author an article, ‘Seed and Earth: The Symbolism of Biological Reproduction and Sexual Relations of Production’ (1986), which rightly has been very influential, and is better known than the fact of its traditional moorings. It is noteworthy that Leelaji draws pointed attention to these moorings in the ethnography of tribal and caste communities of eastern, northern, and central India, and in Vedic, dharmashastra, smriti, and Ayurvedic texts (Dube 1986, pp. 24-7, 34-38). She concludes her detailed examination of the evidence thus:

‘the supposed unequal contribution of the two sexes in human reproduction as expressed through the symbolism of “seed” and “earth” provides the rationalization for a system in which woman stands alienated from productive resources, has no control over her own labour power, and is denied rights over her own offspring’ (p. 44).

Incidentally — although this is not the place to argue the point — by drawing attention to the continuities of ideas between oral and literary traditions, Leelaji was challenging the prevailing notions of the dichotomy of the so-called Great and Little Traditions.

I have gone into the arguments of Leelaji’s seminal 1986 paper because of its immense influence in the field of gender studies. I would now like to return to my own main concern here, which is to focus on the connections between her life and work. There is a cryptic aside in the 2000 EPW essay, enclosed in brackets, which is remarkable for what it says and what it does not say, and is relevant here. Apropos the description of ‘conjugal love, pre-marital romance, and tragic separations’ in Sanskrit and Marathi plays, Leelaji writes.

While enjoying their beauty and lyrical quality, one had to ignore the fact that in most cases the male protagonist was polygamous. Much later in life did I come to realize that after all monogamy was an ideal hard to maintain, not only for men but perhaps also for women, and that breaking the marital norms was often likely to harm women more (p. 4038, emphasis added).

For one thing, this was a bold statement insofar as it considers men and women as equally open to temptations. She was assuming a modern stance. As Lionel Trilling perceptively puts it, ‘the modern self is characterized by certain powers of indignant perception which, turned upon [the “unconscious assumptions” and “unformulated valuations”] of culture, have made it accessible to conscious thought’ (1955, p.x). And yet Leelaji did not wholly break away from the traditional by implicitly suggesting that, in the larger context of the well-being and happiness of the family (of children), and (thus?) in their own interest, women needed to restrict themselves to monogamous marriage and even to acquiesce in male infidelity? If so, she was voicing a male (patriarchal) judgement in the maturity of her years, and that too in an essay where she made a bow to gender sensitivity. Is it, then, a lament on the limitations that, in her own times, defined the life of a woman in a patriarchal society? Or, is it an expression of rage? If it is the latter, it betrays its own helplessness. Affirmation and subversion are not easy to reconcile. This is a complex issue, involving examination of women’s changing attitudes and changing strategies from generation to generation. ³

Cultivation of Independent Academic Interests as a Teacher and Researcher

By 1954, Leelaji was 31 and her Ph.D. dissertation on Gond women had been completed and submitted to the University of Nagpur. The degree was awarded in 1956. She had actually graduated from being a guided wife and protected daughter-in-law to being a home maker, and an anthropologist like her husband and in a sense his academic peer.

But not quite, for she yet had no publications to her name nor an academic position. That year (1954) she joined her husband, who had been teaching courses in anthropology at the Sociology Department of Osmania University since 1949, and was currently engaged in a research project sponsored by Cornell University (Ithaca, USA). Leelaji was formally designated as a Research Associate. Fieldwork was being conducted in the village of Rankhandi in western Uttar Pradesh, and there were four other Research Associates, three men and a woman. Two of these men were known to her as they had been in S.C. Dube’s fieldwork team in the village of Shamirpet near Hyderabad (the outcome of which was in press: Indian Village was published in 1955), and they were deferential towards her. The other two Research Associates were unknown to her, and for them she was someone like themselves although senior in age. Indeed, that is how S.C. Dube treated them — justifiably — in the context of his fieldwork: each was assigned a topic for investigation, and their reports on the work they did were to be reworked by him and incorporated in his India’s Changing Villages: Human Factors in Community Development (1958). Neither, she, nor her three colleagues, were to publish any of the materials they had collected in their own names.

Here then was a situation which was stressful: she was, as she puts it in her 2000 essay, an ‘adjunct’ to her husband, not as yet really a researcher or teacher in her own right. There was obvious role confusion here, and status dissonance, being simultaneously a qualified anthropologist (although the Ph.D. had not yet been awarded, but that was of course only a formality to be completed), and yet a research assistant to S.C. Dube; his wife, distinct from everybody else in the team, yet a Research Associate on par with the others. Actually, and I know this for a fact, she even considered quitting membership of the team, and then leaving Rankhandi. What saved the situation was that the fieldwork itself was concluded in 1955, and the Dubes went to the USA, where he had been appointed a Visiting Professor at Cornell University.

The tension was eased but not wholly resolved. The Dubes returned to Hyderabad in 1956, the year in which Leelaji was awarded her Ph.D. The following year, they moved to Sagar (M.P.) where Shyama Charan had been appointed Professor of Anthropology at the university. Leelaji’s professional position remained ambiguous, ‘an interrupted career’ in her own words. She recalled in 2000: ‘my destinies were tied to my husband’s moves. In a way I had become an adjunct of S.C. Dube’, whether as a temporary or honorary lecturer ‘teaching in his place’ whenever he was on leave, or as his research associate. She even helped doctoral students, her own and his, with their work.

From The Sociology of Kinship to Gender Studies

This situation changed when, in 1961, she became a regular, salaried, faculty member in the Department of Anthropology at the university. This happened at the initiative of Vice-Chancellor D.P. Mishra, and not because S.C. Dube, a distinguished member of the teaching faculty, pushed her case, which he did not. Her credentials to participate in the teaching programme of the university were thus at long last formally recognized. An even more important event, perhaps, was her coming into contact with and becoming the supervisor of a doctoral student, A.R. Kutty, who was engaged in research on matrilineal kinship among the Muslims of Kalpeni in the Lakshadweep islands (off the Kerala coast). Her nascent interest in kinship and marriage, at that time regarded everywhere as a core area of anthropology, was now fully aroused. She prepared a small monograph, presenting Kutty’s fieldwork data within a comparative analytical framework, and jointly authored with him. Matriliny and Islam, Leela Dube’s first book, came out in 1969.

The same year Leelaji herself visited Kalpeni. Although the visit lasted just two months, it was of critical importance to her life and work. It was nothing short of an emancipatory rite of passage. ⁴ Leela Dube had arrived as a person and as a professional. Going beyond the world of women, but not abandoning it altogether, also going beyond being an ‘adjunct’ to S.C. Dube, she had emerged as an anthropologist in her own right, with her own special area of interest, namely the study of marriage, family and kinship. This was not the specialization S.C. Dube had cultivated for himself (see Saurabh Dube 2007).

Leelaji was now, in a manner of speaking, on her own as an anthropologist, and this undoubtedly altered her personal life also. The younger of her two sons was now nearly ten, and the older twenty; the responsibilities of motherhood had been honourably discharged. On their part, Saurabh and Mukul repaid their ‘debt’ (matri rin) by their significant substantive and editorial contributions, to her chores of authorship. She explicitly acknowledged this (see, e.g., foot notes on pages 87 and 119 in Dube 2001). Besides, one should not forget that she always turned to her husband, S.C. Dube, for advice. It was a modern, dynamic nuclear family, but not one in which the wife-mother was entirely on her own, a solitary scholar.

Leelaji’s mastery of the vast body of sociological and social anthropological literature in her area of specialization, and her analytical and interpretive skills, were in full display in Sociology of Kinship (1974), which is primarily a survey report on the relevant literature on India. I was at that stage of my academic career virtually at the end of my engagement of two decades with this very field, and we often had discussions on such issues as had been raised by scholars like Claude Lévi-Strauss and Nur Yalman. S.C. Dube used to good humouredly refer to us as the ‘FaFaMoMo’ (father’s father-mother’s mother) people, that is students of kinship!

Another senior Indian specialist in this area whose work Leelaji greatly admired was Ramkrishna Mukerjee, although she never followed his quantitative approach and statistical techniques. She remained wedded to the qualitative approach, combining careful attention to ethnographic details with insightful interpretations of the same to bring to life, as it were, the nuanced richness of interpersonal relations in the setting of the household, the family, and the larger kinship and descent groups. Leelaji also appreciated the insights available in fiction and biographical/autobiographical writing. Actually, when she became a member of the Committee on the Status of Women in India (CSWI, 1971-74), she asked me to prepare one of the background studies on the status of Hindu women in the familial setting on the basis of such writings. I enjoyed writing it and she, reading it. (These ‘backgrounders’ were never published.)

The importance of the experience she gained, and the enlargement of her interest in the anthropology of women, is best stated in her own words:

The idea gripped me that there was serious urgency about attending to women’s issues and multidimensional problems through both reflection and action, and many of these could be effectively explored through serious research within anthropology’ (2000, p. 4043, emphasis added).

From analytical ethnographic narratives she thus moved to action anthropology, and this in turn led her to address what were coming to be known then as ‘gender studies’, which she describes in the 2000 essay as ‘my major field for over the last two and a half decades’ (p. 4037). She never became an activist, however. Being a crusader was alien to her mode of doing anthropology. In her work, as in her personal life, she always was engaged in constructively managing the tension between what was given and to be retained or reconstituted or abandoned.

Two comments are called for. The new interest in ‘action anthropology’ made her acutely aware of the importance of ‘commitment in social sciences’, and she ‘began to question the myth of “value neutrality” in the humanities and social sciences’ (2000, pp. 4043, 4044). And here, a little ironic though it may seem, she explicitly acknowledges ‘S.C. Dube’s influence on [her] thinking’ (p. 4045, no. 10). Having freed herself from intellectual tutelage to her husband by becoming an expert in a field that she cultivated on her own, seeding it with her own ideas and those of like-minded scholars interested in kinship studies and women’s issues, she comfortably related to S.C. Dube’s work at another, higher, level—that of methodology (in the broadest sense) rather than thematic foci. Incidentally, in yet another aside in the same essay (n. 14, p. 4045), Leelaji acknowledges how her husband’s various ‘assignments’ brought her into contact with ‘scholars and writers of high calibre’. This reiteration of his professional eminence recalls to one’s mind her hope as a young woman that she would find a husband who would be intellectually her superior so that the traditional inequality between husband and wife would not be burdensome.

The second comment I would like to make is similarly significant. Having located herself in the opening paragraph of her 2000 EPW paper in the ‘area’ of ‘gender’, she tucks away in one of the last footnotes a sense of unease: was she yielding to an intellectual trend?

Was she one of these sceptics? Was ‘Gender Studies’ for her just a catchy phrase, a voguish hurrah expression?

Be that as it may, Leela Dube had, I think, by and large, resolved the acute tensions she had experienced in the mid-1950s between being S.C. Dube’s wife who also doubled as his research assistant, and her wanting to be an anthropologist in her own right. At home and among friends, S.C. Dube remained ‘Doctor Sahab’ for her until the very end (she of course addressed him as Shyam), and she his caring home maker; in the field of professional engagements, she was an anthropologist, teacher, member of an important national committee on women, convenor of the international commission on the study of women under the auspices of the International Union of Anthropological Sciences (IUAES), Director of Research at the Indian Council of Science Research, Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, etc. Two worlds were, in a manner of speaking, accommodated in one life through adjustment and achievement. ⁵

I cannot do better than let her speak for herself. In her book Women and Kinship (1997), published a year after S.C. Dube’s death, Leelaji gives us a fresh formulation of their unique relationship. She writes:

He is not with us any more, but this book bears the imprint of his close association with my work and his rare acumen to sense the kind of help and support I needed at critical points’ (p. x, emphasis added).

This final judgement does not annul anything she had written earlier about their relationship. It rather marks the culmination of a personal journey which was characterized by productive tensions ― a journey that began with love and apprenticeship and matured into a ‘partnership in kinship and anthropology’, as she puts it in the dedication to Women and Kinship. Her use of the word ‘kinship’ instead of marriage, as one may well have expected, is indeed most remarkable. Does it suggest a closeness that is closer than marriage, consubstantial, as it were, rather than marital?

Interstitial spaces between tradition and modernity, home and professional work, need not be ‘no-woman’s’ land, barren and uninteresting, but a fertile field to cultivate. And she showed this could be done and done very well. There were exemplars who had preceded her, most notably Iravati Karve, and Leelaji acknowledges her indebtedness to Karve ― but that is a topic for another seminar/discussion. ⁶ Meanwhile, I laud the efforts of Centre for Women’s Development Studies (CWDS) and the editors of Indian Journal of Gender Studies (IJGS) there for doing honour to Leela Dube’s work. My contribution to the symposium acquires added meaningfulness when read together with the papers of Janaki Abraham, Rajni Palriwala, and Patricia Uberoi, who ably engage with some of Leela Dube’s contributions to gender debates and kinship studies.