No One Cries for the Dead: Tamil Dirges, Rowdy Songs, and Graveyard Petitions (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: No One Cries for the Dead: Tamil Dirges, Rowdy Songs, and Graveyard Petitions Diane Mines Isabelle Clark-Decès , No One Cries for the Dead: Tamil Dirges, Rowdy Songs, and Graveyard Petitions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. ix-242 pp. In No One Cries for the Dead, Isabelle Clark-Decès gives us a welcome and long needed analysis of death in Tamil culture. Not an ethnography of funerary rituals, this book is rather an evocative study of the relation of (funerary) narrative to life. As such, it fulfills Fabian's (1973) call for anthropology to move beyond parochial case studies of "death behavior" to fully human analyses that give death the place it deserves as a shaper of culture and experience. The book is organized around the analysis of three distinct narrative genres that structure some rural Tamil funerary practices. The narrative material by itself is a valuable contribution to Indian and narrative studies. But of course Clark-Decès is interested not only in presenting new data, but also in developing an analysis that links these narrative forms to the life experience of the performers, and more broadly, to Tamil experiences of self-in-society. During fieldwork conducted over a decade in and around South Arcot district in Tamilnadu, South India, Clark-Decès observed many funerals and worked intensively with eight funeral singers, four women who were experts at laments, or "crying songs," and four Paraiyar Dalit (Untouchable) men who pursued caste-specific performative labor at funerals. Through their narratives, Clark-Decès explores the shape of Tamil subjectivity, which she depicts [End Page 571] as limited (in the sense of constricted or bound by limits of connectivity) and as profoundly isolated. The first narrative genre she elucidates is called a "crying song." Women (of certain middle- and low-ranking castes) are expected to attend and cry at the funerals hosted by families they know. When they arrive, they sit together in "crying circles" of about 10 women each and cry their "songs," really wailing laments that each woman cries for herself without attending to the other cries around her. Neither their words nor their sorrow concern the deceased ("no one cries for the dead," one woman explains). Rather these songs focus on each singer's own feelings of "depletion" (kur-ai), feelings brought about by her own life experiences of loss and separation from relationship. Women sing for the loss of their natal family at marriage, or for the loss of their auspicious family centrality upon the death of their husbands. The songs take the form of comparisons, where a happy past is contrasted with a blighted present. Following Jerome Bruner's theory of narrative as cognitive achievement, Clark-Decès argues that these narratives form scripts not just of but also for life experience. To support this assertion she compares the songs and lives of four singers. Through these comparisons she shows that women actually construct their subjectivity in the language of lament, that is, by internalizing the form of lament that depicts only the past as happy, and the present as depleted. Clark-Decès find that, unlike the argument of much anthropological lament literature from other places (especially Greece), Tamil women's laments are not "resistance" narratives, narratives that give women the power to construct alternative and empowering narratives of their lives (19). Rather, Tamil laments increase and also naturalize women's experience as loss and deprivation of relationship. The form of the songs, in other words, actually restricts women's capacity to express any other subjectivity than one that is deprived (92). The second genre Clark-Decès analyses are the tragicomic songs and praise poems that Dalits perform on the street outside the deceased's house. These songs do several things: as entertainment, they draw and keep a crowd at the funeral; by praising the deceased, they absolve the deceased of sins; and the men in the audience bolster their rank and reputation by making ostentatious donations to the singers, who will then praise these donors. But it isn't only spectacle and praise that gives meaning to these songs. The songs depict men who sacrifice life and...