Maggie Ronkin

Curriculum Vitae

Teaching

Resources for Students

Short Writing Samples

Forensic Consulting

Family

Contact

Zenana: Everyday Peace in a Karachi Apartment Building by Laura A. Ring. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006. 211 pp. $55.00 (cloth); $21.95 (paperback).

In The Journal of Asian Studies.

Karachi, the British Empire’s largest grain exporting port and Pakistan’s commercial hub, is a melting pot beset by lawlessness, ethnic and sectarian bloodshed, and extremism in the wake of the US-led war on terror. Despite abundant reporting on the city’s strife, scant attention is paid to the micro-mechanisms that maintain peace where, since the 1970s, drab concrete high-rise apartment buildings have drawn families into smaller units, and strangers into new relations of proximate living and neighboring. For anthropologist Laura A. Ring, the Shipyard, one such building inhabited by low-paid government workers, wives who stay home, and children, is a site for researching and theorizing women’s efforts to create familiar forms of sociability in the midst of uncertain risks and cautious suspicions of others. 

Rather than stifling empowerment, the Shipyard’s quasi-public places—balconies, hallways, stairwells, and gullies—make space for constructing women’s political subjectivity and agency. In this milieu, getting along is imperative, and women perform peacemaking in neighborly exchange relations, open-ended transactions that take shape around daily care-giving, cleaning, sewing, shopping, and cooking. Interactional transformations of strangers into near-kin also link to society’s macro-political processes. Urban reconfiguration of the zenana (women’s space) and purdah (women’s seclusion) fills with divisive tensions of ethnicity (among Muhajirs, Sindhis, Baluchis, Pathans, Punjabis, and others), and class hierarchy, as well as ideas associated with Islam and Urdu, ubiquitous indices of national identity.

Thus, although gendered spheres interconnect and render women dependent, women’s exchanges, disciplined by their own discourses, are intense in contact, as historians also document. Visiting, borrowing, and returning—generalized reciprocities—accompany talking, gossiping, and quarreling to produce embodied feelings of unresolved tension. Actions and interpretations aim to contain contradictory principles of social organization that fuel ethnic violence, which is typified by men’s refusals to sustain engagements, e.g. in discussions and demonstrations. Peacemaking has been theorized as both the repression and release of tension. Here, however, Ring draws on the anthropology of Marcel Mauss and Marshall Sahlins, and the object relations theory of Ernest Schachtel, to propose that tension maintained without discharge “is a condition of social engagement, self-other knowledge, and peace” (p. 180). 

To elucidate women’s views on managing male violence, Ring considers third-person narratives on honor killings circulated in the Shipyard. These stories pivot neither on notions of honor and shame nor on responses to violations of honor, which researchers elsewhere deem rational and moral. Rather, they constitute a genre of angry men stories about irrational, unpredictable, and uncontrollable eruptions of male violence in women’s lives. Didactic, they also demonstrate women’s construction of a culture-specific discourse on deterring and accommodating male anger. A base impulse, ghussa (anger) is controlled by aql, wisdom and reason channeled into desired dispositions and practices. Anger between men is “immune to discipline” and poses a dangerous “challenge that must be reciprocated” in the absence of deference relations (p. 110). However, women’s anger, construed as sensible and cultivated through superior aql, evokes community support.

Extrapolating, Ring contends that Pakistani officials have not recognized how celebratory and reproving values connect with anger in the macro-political domain.  “[Anger’s] power,” she writes, rests ... “in what it communicates about the actor and his community” (p. 119). Power plays out in enmity between urban Muhajir heirs to the story of Islamic-Urdu unity and other groups conjured as provincial, tribal, and feudal. Key “is the distinction between citizen and savage ... Anger symbolizes the excess ... at the heart of hegemony’s failure—the failure of the nation to contain difference, to assimilate it, to render it a matter of benign heritage” (p. 120). Hence, in 1999, rioting flared over a Pathan woman’s elopement with a Muhajir man; when the groom was shot, intellectuals’ commentary voiced a discourse of difference centered on behavior (and a social type to which behavior attaches) allegedly alien to cosmopolitan Karachi.

While carrying tension, the Shipyard’s women also tell stories in which bad situations force female protagonists into immoral activities. However, performing sanctioned deeds erases such sins and transforms the women; God’s messenger informs them that the good deeds are their Hajj. Connections that these narratives form between inner goodness and performed piety appear to account for women’s motivations. They protect vulnerable inner goodness through purdah, while forging new relations that may free them from oppressive demands of male kin, and furnish material and emotional support. Because they seek certain lives and reject others, obtaining self- and other-knowledge through readable signs becomes a goal. Consequently, making inquiries (about others’ insides, hearts, and true feelings) is beneficial activity, whereas conjugal love is believed to threaten sociability and community that bring peaceful intimacy.

Zenana: Everyday Peace in a Karachi Apartment Building is reminiscent of The Performance of Emotion Among Paxtun Women: The Misfortunes Which Have Befallen Me (New York: Oxford University Press reprint, 2004), Benedict Grima’s ethnography of communication among Paxtun women who visit to share stories of family hardships that they endure. Both books interweave expert ethnography on women with anthropology’s rich understanding of human exchange and emotion. Together they illustrate nicely the development of thinking on connections between gendered spheres of activity, and the value of verbal interactions as data. Ring has gained unusual access to domestic life, and offers superb work for teaching on culture and psychology, conflict resolution, and Indo-Muslim women’s studies.
 

Maggie Ronkin
Georgetown University

*************

In The Journal of Asian Studies.

Degraded and stigmatized at the bottom of the Hindu caste hierarchy, Dalits (those who are crushed underfoot or broken into pieces in a deliberate way; now a self-appellation meaning “oppressed”) are the largest group among the fifth of India’s population that lives in poverty and destitution. Their low status is emphasized by forced, unpaid labor, their vulnerability to atrocities, such as savage massacres and gang rapes, and pervasive discrimination on the basis of associations of impurity, pollution, and untouchability in a society that is organized by caste and kin networks. Dalit studies, then, reveal extreme cases of the essentialization of inequality in modernity. Moreover, as sociologist-activist Gail Omvedt observes, Dalits’ struggles for equality today are exacerbated by high castes’ power to institutionalize the separation of ‘pure’ learning from the performance of ‘impure’ tasks; specifically, India’s gains from IT industries are shallow and dependent on educational and technological opportunities that remain the preserve of high-caste monopolies (Contemporary Review, May 2004, p. 288).

Although such discrimination thwarts Dalits’ entry into prestigious professions, their growing consciousness and politicization has been accompanied by a surge of intellectual activity. Joothan, originally written in Hindi by Omprakash Valmiki, exemplifies this activity by tracing one writer’s struggle to transform the stigma of his untouchability into pride in his Dalit identity. Further, Valmiki aims to merge his memoir with the collective voice of a Dalit literary movement propelled “by an ideology, an agenda, and a[n] … aesthetic” and part of a broader “movement for equality and justice,” which was founded in solidarity with African-American struggles (p. x). In Joothan, Valmiki writes: “We need an ongoing struggle and a consciousness of struggles, a consciousness that brings revolutionary change both in the outside world and in our hearts, [one] … that leads the process of social change” (p. xi). The very title Joothan evokes such a reflexive consciousness, one especially attuned to poverty and humiliation in that it refers to impure scraps of food left by others, which Dalits scavenge for their subsistence.

Valmiki, whose surname signifies his untouchable Chuhra (sweeper or scavenger-caste) status, sets his life story in North India of the 1950s, just after the Constitution outlawed untouchability. After describing the squalor of an open-air village latrine, he breaks ground by depicting incessant harassment that he overcomes to become his village’s first educated Dalit. His adolescent experiences include bouts of skepticism toward religious legitimizations of inequality and poverty, and travels to high school, where he repeatedly suffers indignities for revealing his caste. Later, Valmiki trains for a vocation (producing ordnance), discovers Dalit activism, including works of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, the Dalit movement’s founder, and starts to participate enthusiastically in Dalit political, cultural, and literary activities. Quite prominent throughout Joothan is Valmiki’s documentation of how his struggle gels from efforts to claim an achieved rather than an ascribed identity. Using the system of merit examinations and government employment, he challenges caste-bound values that ascribe his status, elevates himself above oppressors, and, finally, embraces a collective agenda for achieving Dalit empowerment and social change through outreach activities, such as producing dramas and opening schools.

In her introduction, translator Arun Prabha Mukherjee elucidates Valmiki’s choices of rhetorical re-framing strategies that create special textual effects: double exposure, interrogative discourse, irony, and the interweaving of characterizations of the fractured self with indictments of an unjust society. With double exposure, Valmiki first represents events from a traumatized child’s perspective and then comments on them from an adult narrator’s perspective, which allows for authoritative assignments of blame. His uses of interrogative discourse serve a similar function by posing questions that point out contradictions and invite reader responses, such as “Why is it a crime to be paid for one’s labor?” (p. xliv). Irony infuses Valmiki’s work as a whole, which mocks the village pastoral while deploying articulate subjects to interrogate caste-bound myths and other modes of oppression. The interweaving of characterizations of the fractured self and indictments of society is exemplified by portrayals of interaction-avoidance rituals, and by Dalits’ attempts to pass by hiding their caste origins. In addition, this strategy bears witness to life’s harsh realities, and, as testimonial, confronts both elites’ and postmodernists’ claims that representations of ‘truths’ are constructed.

Related to Omvedt’s observation on the IT sector is Mukherjee’s note that Valmiki’s autobiography highlights an important paradox of modern Indian life. On the one hand, Joothan shows how an (albeit limited) expansion of post-independence opportunities has enabled the emergence of articulate Dalits and the florescence of their achievements. On the other hand, Joothan’s witnessing of life’s harsh realities and persistently degrading stigmatization expose serious imperfections in India’s practice of grassroots democracy. In sum, Mukherjee offers English-language readers an accessible translation of Valmiki’s engaging memoir that will prove invaluable to critical teaching on South Asia and on comparative injustices and human rights.

Maggie Ronkin
Georgetown University