Dāk Vachan

Abstract

Looking at a corpus of proverbs (folk sayings) known as Dā k vachan this article explores the ways in which these sayings constitute a field of knowledge production in contemporary Mithila (north Bihar) revealing claims along the trajectories of caste, gender and historical lineages. Addressed to different aspects of agrarian life, presence of these sayings in the Maithil agrarian society also suggests a complicated and contested relation between modern and non-modern practices of time in general and agrarian environment in particular. This study makes it imperative to take an account of not merely how people conserve their environment through religious and non-scientific idioms (Gold and Gujar) but also the manner in which the discourse on the non-modern knowledge has been fraught along caste lines. Focused on Dā k vachan, an attempt has been made to understand the process, in and through which colonial–modern knowledge, caste politics and multiple worlds of proverbial wisdom intersect with each other. Engaging with both published literature as well as responses coming from the field, the study aspires to make sense of the self of an ethnographer in the manner in which these sayings come to him both through the written sources as well as from the field. Finally, this article is about deconstructing the middle class perception of the domain of the ‘folk’ in this region.