Book Review: Anne Feldhaus with Ramdas Atkar and Rajaram Zagade,eds. and trans. Say to the Sun,“Don’t Rise,” and to the Moon,“Don’t Set”: Two Oral Narratives from the Countryside of Maharashtra

In this stunning book, Anne Feldhaus, working with her long-time associates Ramdas Atkar and Rajaram Zagade, has managed to make the Sun and Moon stand still, and from the darkness that rests between them, she brings light to a highly unusual and compelling set of stories from Indian folk worlds. The title refers to an expression heard among the Dhangars of pastoral Western India during night-time recitations of the stories translated in this book. Not wanting the story to end, the Dhangars would implore the heavens to cease motion so the stories could linger a bit longer. This is also Feldhaus’ wish to some degree—that the fascinating oral story performances recorded by Gunther Sontheimer in the 1970s and 1980s, translated in this text, might be fixed in time so they can go on being told and enjoyed. This book resists surrender to the inevitable passing of time by preserving these stories and the scholarly legacy of Sontheimer, and so it is an enduring gift to us all.

The Dhangars are Hindu pastoral shepherding group of Western India who are mostly Marathi speakers. They have a rich oral tradition of storytelling that often centres on the tales of the several deities they revere, such as Khandoba, Biroba, Dhuloba, Bhivai and Banai. In the 1970s, Sontheimer collected oral tales of the Dhangars, as well as photographs and films. He sensed the same passage of time that the Dhangars invoke when they call out to the Sun and Moon during night-time recitals and he wanted to preserve their stories. Tragically, with Sontheimer’s untimely passing in 1992 at the age of 58, his goal remained only partially realised. As Feldhaus tells us in a moving preface to the book, Sontheimer guided Feldhaus early in her career, and this book is in many ways a tribute to him and his legacy. Yet, it is also a tribute to Feldhaus herself, who is one of the most accomplished and brilliant scholars of India alive today.

In many ways, Feldhaus inherits Sontheimer’s legacy and also surpasses it. Her work links philology and ethnography, history and religion, spanning a period from the emergence of Marathi as a literary language among the Mahanubhavs in the thirteenth century to studies of contemporary Indian imaginations of geography, gender and identity. With Say to the Sun, Feldhaus reveals the intellectual axis that allows her to hold together this dizzying array of subjects and disciplines into such a coherent whole. In all her work, Feldhaus remains rooted in her unparalleled cultural emersion into the deep core of Maharashtrian culture. In this work, Feldhaus retains Sontheimer’s vision of scholarship as preservation and translation across language and culture, but also in defiance of time and loss. In this text, we not only have preserved two oral epics of the Dhangars, but we have the epic scholarly legacy of Sontheimer and Feldhaus as well.

The two grand oral tales translated in this text are composite narratives containing poetry, group recitation, humorous asides and impromptu interjections arrayed around the adventures of the deities Biroba and Dhuloba, two figures that mediate the divine and mundane. As Feldhaus asserts several times, these are stories recorded during live performances at night over many days, and so much is lost with the transference to English in a book. But Feldhaus goes to great lengths to give her reader their own experience of these stories.

Feldhaus supplies us with an introduction that is almost its own monograph. Composed of five chapters, the introduction details key issues in Feldhaus’ careful, engaging scholarly prose. The mission of these chapters is to provide sufficient context to appreciate the two tales, and so each chapter is orientated around the poetic form (ovi) and its art, drawing from this form the social and cultural contexts of artistic expression, the Dhangar worldview, and key issues surrounding gender and women in these stories of two male deities. These chapters have the effect of painting a portrait of the lived world of epic oral literature, which is surely the core of not only India’s classical epics (the Mahabharata, the Ramayana and the many retellings of them) but of much of the classical purana literature of India. Although, Feldhaus is characteristically modest in her appraisal of her own work here, I feel she does something extraordinary with these chapters in that she splits the atom of oral literature and shows us how and where to find the enduring power of oral-literary-performative culture in India. This is a culture inherited by Bollywood, for example, with its ‘epic’ layering of narrative, and yet this is also preserved even today among Dhangars and millions of other oral story traditions across the subcontinent throughout the long night of the present.

Though the stories of Biroba and Dhuloba are stories of deities, they are also stories of everyday life’s seasons and struggles. The story of Biroba is filled with the themes of domesticity and life in the Dhangar camp or vada. And though, these are stories of male deities, as with India’s other epics, female characters are the chief agents of narrative movement. And so the story of Biroba is also a story of Suravanti, a kind of Rapunzel figure, locked in a tower by her parents because she refuses to marry anyone and prefers to have a child ‘without a man’, a fete accomplished by the intersession of the God Shiva. This child is the God Biroba, whose early story of survival as a baby against nefarious forces is reminiscent of the story of baby Krishna’s trials. Biroba’s boyhood of mischief and conflict is told, and the inevitable question of marriage arises. A romantic adventure is related in which Biroba must meet many challenges, often comical, to win the hand of his wife, Kamabai, an adventure in which he will rely also on the help of his mother.

The story of Dhuloba is the longer of the two and more complicated, though it tends to run a parallel track to the story of Biroba’s conception, childhood and marriage. Dhuloba’s story, however, involves an emphasis on his adoptive cowherd parents, Kamalu Shinde and Lhaubai. The quotidian is also starkly present here, with rich representation of pastoral life, domestic politics and cultural life. Like the story of Biroba, there is much play around gender and power. Women conceive of their godly sons without the help of men (though with the help of the male deity Shiva at a distance), and a king gives birth to a baby girl through a blister on his hand. Feldhaus selects these engagements with gender, power and domesticity for special attention in the last chapter of the introduction. As with the Biroba story, Dhuloba also finds his future wife ensconced in a tower, and must undertake various ordeals to win her in marriage and to defeat a rising kingdom of demons.

The translations that Feldhaus, with Atkar and Zagade, have produced are themselves works of art. They epitomise the art of the storyteller by using the layout of text on the page to indicate changes in voice, character and participation in storytelling. They also represent the art of a master translator who can make of a heterogeneous and seemingly chaotic text, a book-bound experience that readers will relish. This book will no doubt appeal to all who are interested in Indian or Hindu literature, history, religion, folk life, Maharashtra and performance. But the book also holds treasures for the person who loves a great story, replete with the divine and the quotidian, an adventure that is never fully told but still unfolding, and that can hold even the Sun and Moon in thrall.