Waiting for Moonrise: Fasting, Storytelling, and Marriage in Provincial Rajasthan

Abstract

Ethnographic encounters with women’s ritual storytelling in North India provide the central substance of this essay and contribute to the study of narrative transformations over time. I highlight two distinct although related themes. First, and most importantly, I consider women’s changing expectations of marriage, approaching these through intimate, conversational ethnographic accounts. Second, with an expanded scope stretching across regions as well as over decades, I observe variations as well as processes of standardization: how diverse tales associated with a specific ritual may ultimately be reduced to one standard plot. Such processes are hastened by all forms of media—print, film, and internet. My account here draws on long experience (intermittent visits and revisits between 1980 and 2015) in a single region of Rajasthan, North India. I focus on storytelling and other practices in the context of two women’s ritual fasts: Bari Tij (“Grand Third”) and Karva Chauth (“Pitcher Fourth”). The festival names refer to dates in the Hindu lunar calendar. In what follows I normally refer to Bari Tij simply as Tij.