The muddy semiotics of mud

Luisa Cortesi

doi:10.2458/v25i1.22945

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

Introduction

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.

Mud and caste

Mud across the river

For a muddy semiotics of mud