See, Vishwakarma and his sons worked together on creating the universe, said Nakulbhai, a smile bright on his face as he started in on one of the many stories he tells about the Hindu god of artisans and his descendants. After this, Vishwakarma was given gifts as payment. Each of his sons went to him and he gave each one a bowl of rice. They were disappointed. They thought, 'We did so much work, the universe is so beautiful. And this bowl of rice is all we've received from our father.'In October 2013, when I heard this story, Nakulbhai was in his eighties. A slender man with alert eyes and a warm smile who habitually wears a short-sleeved white cotton kurta, Nakulbhai is from a community of hereditary carpenters who call themselves the Kutchi Gujar Sutars, carpenters from Kutch in India's far west. Like many other artisan groups across South Asia, Gujar Sutars claim descent from the Hindu deity Vishwakarma, or Universe maker, and tell stories about him-their divine forefather-and also about his sons, his daughters, and talented craftsmen in more recent historical times. In such stories, the relationship between crafting the world and crafting words becomes a set of mutually reflecting mirrors, cascading images down ever-extending corridors of association through mythological, historical, and present times. While this essay is based in South Asia, it resonates with Walter Benjamin's celebrated essay The Storyteller, which refers at several junctures to European artisans and craftsmen as transmitters of stories: through the movements of itinerant labor and when assembled together in workshops (85, 93, 101). I find a big star in the margins of my own faded copy of Illuminations, where Benjamin asks, the relationship of the storyteller to this material, human life, is not in itself a craftsman's relationship, whether it is not his very task to fashion the raw material of experience, his own and that of others, in a solid, useful, and unique way (108). I also follow the lead of scholars like Karin Barber, Lewis Hyde, Stuart McLean, and David Shulman, who examine the cultural theorizations of creativity expressed within oral and literary texts. In this essay I ask: how might stories invoking a divine craftsman and his descendants comment on the refashioning of experience through creative efforts? Such narratives, I argue, offer insights into shifting associations between deities and hereditary caste occupations in India, while also commenting on the pleasures and dangers of creativity.Before I proceed further, I want to briefly clarify my own relation to such stories about the deity Vishwakarma and his descendants. I grew up hearing them occasionally told by my father's relatives, particularly elderly ones. I first wrote these stories down as a college student for the pleasure of the imaginative horizons opened out by stories and the connection to tellers nurtured by close listening. Often the stories were evoked by my presence as a diasporic, half-American relative, and since they were told in English or in Gujarati-inflected Hindi for my benefit, for a long time I thought I would first have to learn the Kutchi dialect and spend a year or more in a Kutch village to say anything academically acceptable about them. I did, though, draw on a handful of such myths and legends in a family memoir, My Family and Other Saints (2007). I have gradually understood that the very fact that such stories are also told in English among families who have for at least two generations lived in cosmopolitan settings like Mumbai, is itself interesting for thinking about transformations in narratives, identities, and imaginative engagements with the pleasures and dangers of creativity.Several other anthropologists, including Mary Catherine Bateson, Ruth Behar, Benjamin Orlove, Alisse Waterston, and Sasha Welland have also set a frame of anthropological interest around their family stories. These stories about Vishwakarma, his sons, and his daughters, extend the realm of family stories beyond immediate human relations and historical memory to intriguing assertions Narrating Creative Process of mythic and cosmological connections. …
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May 1, 2019
Anjan Ray Chaudhury + 1
Open Access