Everyday Creativity: Singing Goddesses in the Himalayan Foothills

Reviewed by: Everyday Creativity: Singing Goddesses in the Himalayan Foothills by Kirin Narayan Victoria M. Dalzell Everyday Creativity: Singing Goddesses in the Himalayan Foothills. By Kirin Narayan. (Big Issues in Music.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. [xxiv, 254 p. ISBN 9780226407562 (paperback), $25; ISBN 9780226407425 (cloth), $75; ISBN 9780226407739 (e-book), price varies).] Forward, illustrations, bibliography, index. The region of Kangra in northwestern India is the abode of goddesses—Parvati is the daughter of the mountains, and a network of shrines dedicated to Sati connects the region. Yet the "singing goddesses" that Kirin [End Page 677] Narayan alludes to in her book's title are in fact upper-caste Hindu women, on whom this book focuses. Appending devi (goddess) to their names after marriage, these women disseminate an oral repertory of songs that invoke the goddesses and make these deities present in the lives of their communities. Though the women are known for their songs, their primary identity is not that of singer, but rather of daughter, sister, wife, or mother. This book is about how these women embody the songs of the goddesses that they sing and thus cultivate their own lives as well as the lives of the communities in which they live. One of the book's strengths is its limited scope. Narayan spent decades conducting ethnographic research in Kangra and published extensively on songs and folktales from that region of India. Her choice to limit the amount of material included in this book prevents the reader unfamiliar with these traditions from being overwhelmed. To organize the chosen material, Narayan employs the metaphors used by the "singing goddesses" to talk about parts of a song as growing plants: chapters 1 and 2 are the "base," and chapters 3 through 6 explore the "fruits" of singing. She ends with a reflection on the benefits of singing, which acts as the "head" of the work. A commonly sung coda outlining some of these benefits orders the internal chapters. Each chapter expounds on a benefit by examining songs about a particular god or goddess and focuses on a specific woman singer as a main character. Each also looks at a particular genre of song that correlates to women's life stages: wedding songs for younger women and new brides, ballads about everyday life as a householder, or devotional songs sung by older women to gain religious merit. Limiting the material allows Narayan to pay close attention to the particular roles the songs play in these women's lives. Narayan's choices on organization and content allow her to make the case for "everyday creativity"—the book's key theoretical contribution. She modifies creativity with everyday to take away the assumption that creativity equates innovation and instead draws attention to the women's resourcefulness in curating and reconstructing oral material. Many singers do not recite memorized texts but rather choose elements within storylines to emphasize or embellish. For this reason, each rendition of a song is different. Narayan's transcriptions of these oral texts are one way that she demonstrates the creativity of the women. The song transcriptions within her book all stem from a particular performance and do not represent every performance of that song. In a few instances, she includes transcriptions of the same song from two different singers; she traces how certain verses become inserted into different songs, or how the same character or event appears in songs across genres. These instances demonstrate the creativity involved in curating oral material. Even as Narayan focuses on the musical choices of individual singers, she does not lose sight of the cultural context in which this creativity occurs. She briefly provides background on where and when these songs are sung and what role they fill in community life. She also places the songs within a larger tradition of sung stories about deities and devotees within Indian religions that cross oral and written bodies of work. Narayan's writing, however, continuously forefronts the personal pleasure that the women derive from curating and singing these songs. So, as Narayan examines oral literature—a common topic in anthropology and ethnomusicology—she constantly reminds the reader that its significance derives from the people who...

Reviewed by: Everyday Creativity: Singing Goddesses in the Himalayan Foothills by Kirin Narayan Shweta Krishnan Kirin Narayan, Everyday Creativity: Singing Goddesses in the Himalayan Foothills. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. 256 pp. Everyday Creativity begins with Kirin Narayan's memory of herself as a 15-year-old girl, sitting in a courtyard in Kangra at the base of the Western Himalayas, listening to women singing songs that she cannot fully understand (xviii). Over the three decades that follow, Narayan visits the region several times, forging a strong bond with the singers, recording their songs, and noting the many textures of meaning that the singing practices bring into women's lives. In this book, she combines her memories and notes to contextualize oral literacy in Kangra, enlightening the reader with stories of individual women who became her mentors, and providing a detailed commentary on collective memory, intimate social relations, and the history of everyday life in the region. Narayan's book is a part of the Big Issues in Music Series.1 In its foreword, Philip Bohlman, one of the series editors, writes that the series aims to highlight cultural plurality in music and challenge hegemonic views that treat music as "a sonic object that is aesthetically autonomous and (universally) identifiable as music" (xiii). Narayan takes up the issue of plurality through the concept of "everyday creativity." To Narayan, creativity does not signify a deliberate display of innovation or genius. Instead, she emphasizes the minute, often unintentional, variations that occur in the lyrics and the music when mundane contexts prompt women to express themselves through song (29). Narayan calls these variations "everyday" because the improvisation spills across the boundaries of ritual and religious ceremonies. Women sing throughout the day—when they work, rest, socialize—allowing these songs to pervade all aspects of their lives, [End Page 421] filling their silences with stories of their beloved gods, and offering them solace and a sense of well-being. Through an analysis of minute textual variations, Narayan and the women she interviews reflect on the music's intimate connections to the history of the region and to individual women's embodiments of these histories. As residents in agrarian Kangra, women use plant metaphors to structure their songs. Each song proceeds from a base (dhak) to a head (sire), and notes the fruits (phal) that women will gain by singing that particular song (30). Narayan uses these very metaphors to structure her book (xxii). Chapters 1 and 2 form the "dhak" or the root, grounding the songs in the history of Kangra, and contextualizing the songs' relations to its singers. Chapters 3–6 organize the "phals" or the rewards of singing into four different genres, exploring each one in detail. The epilogue becomes the "sire" and accounts for challenges posed to the songs and to the singers after the liberalization of the economy and the intrusion of Hindu nationalist narratives in the everyday lives of the singers. The use of local metaphors to structure the book underlines the credence that local language and knowledge have among women in Kangra. This ethnographic strategy also reinforces Narayan's attempt to account for the authority of oral literacy and the female voice. In fact, it is precisely the authority of oral literacy that the "dhak," comprising of Chapters 1 and 2, emphasizes. Studying how multiple oral renditions allow women to chronicle their varying experiences, Narayan underlines the role that singing practices play in producing a record of Kangra's rich gendered history. In Chapter 1, she explains how singing allows women to take care of themselves, even as they navigate a complex, gendered life that puts them in charge of tending to the needs of others, particularly men. Through songs, women "remember" stories of local goddesses, and by likening these stories to their own, women create an archive of gendered life in Kangra. Recalling these songs in moments of anxiety and sorrow allows women to reach into the lives of other women for comfort and to heal through social bonds that stretch across time. Similarly, women form intimate friendships with each other as they come together to recall and render songs. Chapter 2 illustrates the unintended variations...

This chapter focuses on the making of the preface for Everyday Creativity: Singing Goddesses in the Himalayan Foothills. Writing the preface to The Philosophy of Natural History, published in 1790. Every preface, besides occasional and explanatory remarks, should contain not only the general design of the work, but the motives and circumstances which led the author to write on that particular subject. Opening paragraph of the first preface to Everyday Creativity that can find on current desktop, preserved across computers and the transition from WordPerfect. Recently copied into an email exchange in which one scholar was advising another to move all key orienting material out of the preface and into the introduction of her book manuscript. Many academic friends, though, confess to starting scholarly books with a quick flip to ascertain the conversations invoked in the bibliography or the networks revealed through acknowledgments.

India’s diversity of religious beliefs and practices, the life of women in important moments of their life as mirrored through colourful rites the passage, the passing of time in seemingly ordinary...

Students and scholars of Indian culture will be familiar with some of Kirin Narayan’s numerous publications, which include, among others, a delightful novel, an engaging family history and, most re...

Journal of the Royal Anthropological InstituteVolume 24, Issue 2 p. 413-414 Book and film review Narayan, Kirin. Everyday creativity: singing goddesses in the Himalayan foothills. xxiv, 254 pp., illus., bibliogr. Chicago: Univ. Press, 2016. £19.00 (paper) Anna Stirr, Anna Stirr University of Hawai‘iSearch for more papers by this author Anna Stirr, Anna Stirr University of Hawai‘iSearch for more papers by this author First published: 01 May 2018 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12845Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume24, Issue2June 2018Pages 413-414 RelatedInformation

Everyday Creativity: Singing Goddesses in the Himalayan Foothills

Kirin Narayan’s Everyday Creativity explores women’s devotional songs as affective and aesthetic labour in the Kangra Valley of Himachal Pradesh, India. Having first heard upper-caste Kangra women’s songs as a teenager in 1975, Narayan draws on over three decades of fieldwork in the region and pays homage to the women who brought her into their lifeworlds and into the field of anthropology, some of whom did not live to see the fruits of her labour in the form of this rich ethnography. ‘How st...