Abstract
In North Bihar, mud ensures prosperity for farmers, but also materially signals the lower status from which their wives try to raise the family, even at the cost of risking their own and their children's lives. This article provides a semiotic analysis of mud, an ambiguous material in its physical combination of land and water, a substance with specific gendered and class dimensions, and a symbolic marker whose presence on bodies indexes their socio-political identity. The sensuous relationships that revolve around mud and the prejudices it indexes illuminate meanings of dirt within processes of environmental knowledge and risk. By attending to the semiotic processes through which we understand nature, this article suggests that mud naturalizes the discrimination at the origin of dirtiness.Historical and political circumstances, such as the progressive loosening of the links between caste and occupation, show that mud is not dirt, but it becomes dirt when other kinds of dirt lose their meaning.
Highlights
North Bihar, India, is a place of mud
Mud is deeply ambiguous, connoting labor along, or more generally belonging to, the river, it is indicative of class and caste
Absence from mud is considered a path for upward mobility, its apparent absence is the chain by which discriminated people are tied down to their lower social status. It does not matter whether, as we have seen, these people are the cleanest, and there is no visible mud on them: mud is so semiotically sticky that it remains on the body even in its absence
Summary
North Bihar, India, is a place of mud. The many rivers that traverse it recurrently flood, depositing vast amounts of sediment eroded from the youngest and most friable mountains in the world, the Himalayas. Because the river's movement has forced the interior (riverside) settlement to relocate a few times, the social ties between the two sides of the village have fractured, and they are officially two separate settlements.7 With keen dedication, these farmers patiently explain how to differentiate muds by their texture, their color. There is gorki kewal, which is similar in composition, but whitish (gorki being the Maitheli for gori, light in color, used to name people of Caucasian origin) Both are different from chickni mitti, rich in clay and silt, which looks yellowish and holds water and feels oily between the fingers, and different from bangar, an even more slippery variety of mud. When "out of place", like on a woman's sari, cow dung is still considered dirt.10 Mud is found both in the space of the river and outside of it, in the riverside and in the countryside. Ai Balan to bandhalon dalan, gai Balan to tutlon dalan, which means, when the river comes we build a dalan (an additional room, a sign of prosperity), when the river goes (elsewhere) the dalan falls apart.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
