Dolls Also Have A Story To Tell
By Priyanka Dass Saharia
07 July, 2015
Countercurrents.org
Stringed marionettes; a riot of colours, sparkling sequin jackets, maroon pleated skirts and kohl rimmed eyes - all add to a certain candour. The dolls come alive.
The intimate lives of the diverse communities in this spatial polyglot; the everyday and the ordinary come together with the ethereal and extraordinary in these embodied artefacts.
Haggling over my weekend stupor, I decide to pay a visit to my field site. Hollow promises of visitation were conveniently broken into spells of disappointment; my friends from that land had ceased contact. Laden with packets of sesame jaggery bites and half baked fabrications of drudgery that kept me away, I trudged down the dusty lanes of Shadipur.
The sweets were in order; my friend had betrothed another. Fervently exchanging tokens of love, the mother clasped me in a tight squeeze while her eyes brimmed with untold joy, "You have made me very happy, by coming here." Love abound, I reciprocated. Expressions of affection comes lucid, when the mind knows no bounds. As Marilyn Strathern had apltly stated, relationships are both the objects of study and the means through which we arrive at an understanding of abstract reason ad concrete patterns of sociality.
Seething below, was a niggling question - Were these puppets born out of a routine work, carried out in the name of the daily bread or a sense of pursuing Art, an alchemy born of creativity and patience in their intimate, everyday lives?
I decided to unravel some knots in my head and trace the birth of the inspiration that lay behind these exquisite pieces. Piecing together snippets of a conversational milieu, I decided upon assuaging my curiosity.
With mild trepidation, I embarked upon the path, "How did you learn to make these beautiful dolls?"
"With our eyes" came the simple, seemingly obvious reply.
When we learn to see beyond pure scenes of theoretical tools, we observe the clarity of real life, spelt out in clear tones.
"It is a part of growing up. We have been doing it since we were kids."
My friend, the eldest sister, chimed in, observing my curious vein, "Just like you do certain activities while drinking tea at your homes, like discussing a book or a serial, we did these dolls. We talked about them, made them, decorated them, thought about them. It was a constant. Everyday we would do it. It became a part of us. After a while, we needn't be consciously doing it. It came naturally."
It seem fairly simple, with the analogy. It was a pattern, repeated, over time, which was woven into the very fabric of life and person-hood.
I followed it up with another, "Did you engage other women from the neighbourhood into it?"
"No, just like we cook our own food, and they cook theirs, in the same way we make our dolls and they make theirs" swiftly responded. I observed how my tepid questions seemed fairly simple, obvious and backed up with rapid responses. It was a current, whose tempo, we both started to enjoy. These artefacts which were a crucial symbol of the community's identity were not made out of a communal communion. The shade of defiance added to those words marked a boundary in the very transaction of them.
I was trying to search for those elements that were written into that tone. I had learnt that repression, often translated into unspeakability of certain emotions added shades of tonal overtures to words. Her face didn't betray anything so that discrepancy, though needed explanation, was quieted temporarily.
I took a doll and gazed deeply into the semiotic frontage in front of me. I spend some time on its delicate minutiae. In the pleats of the soft fabric, the crust of the stone studded lace, smoothness of the glossy painted exterior hiding a dented wooden core, beady black eyes reflecting my own image - I realised that it was a picture of thought; aspirations and dare I say, dreams. Discordant voices were abuzz in the backdrop, breaking my trance.
"We feel immense joy when we talk about these dolls. Just like you have your favourite book when you were young, we have our favourite doll. We dress them imaging ourselves in their place," explained the younger girl, her.
The adjacent self that wanted to escape the regimes of domesticity; were the dolls then embodying a self that wanted to come into being?
"It is our celebration of all things we love. It is not only about craving something. It is not about deprivation at all. It's about living our wishes of adorning ourselves, looking beautiful and dreams of love" Jyoti, my dear friend tells me.
Aspirations woven into the very texture of the art wasn't a remuneration for lost dreams but a heralding of better things to come within the accepted templates of sociality.
The moral profundity immanent in the clay and wooden figurines indicated an inherited tradition whose ethical values were deeply cherished. "When my brother made his first toy, at 5, my mother was happy, like he topped a class exam" responds the youngest one. The values ascribed to the form of art from this insight helped me reconfigure the precarious margins on which we have placed artefacts of such kind in today's time. A doll as such, when bestowed upon an outsider, like myself, not only marked a transaction, a material exchange but a spiritual exchange.
Jyoti, observing my crinkling forehead, comments, "Of course, the passage of time can often drain oneself of the intensity of such feelings. We often oscillate between affinities and distances from our work. I think it is important."
The sudden proclamation of monetary ruptures which divested meaning from this certitude that this was a cherished process (which seem to have an almost transcendental value), unnerved me, "Why do you say so?"
"Though we don't think of money all the time when we make them but it is the curse of our plight that we have to give them off to burn the oil lamp in the house" bemoans Jyoti with resignation. Though she adds, "But the condolence is that the parties that want them, they value them. They have a good price in the market too."
I searched deeper into this compound expression. The back-flipping of the affective coin tied in the tensions of the imperatives and the recourse had realigned the ever shifting boundaries of vitality. In this age when every embodied (or disembodied) object possessed a double character - its identity as a commodity, where was this piece of art situated (and what 'kind' of currency did it hold, let along how much?)
The reconfiguration of the relation between this folk artists' community and the larger urban whole was being redefined everyday in varied spaces, through varied modes and built into the everyday through varied narratives. Maybe, this was just one instance. There were some residual questions in me, "Did they see it as a form of deprivation? A repression of self? An erosion of meaning in which that meaning was constituted and negotiated on their own terms? Was it a form of urban violence or having to live on the margins? Did they live off the city, off their art by packaging it as trade or did they city live off them? What forms did their sealed bits of language take in their repressed vessels of desire? Did they harbour temptations to escape this reality? Instead I asked another, "Do you ever want to go and sell them out yourselves?"
With much amusement, Jyoti replied, "We don't think of such things. We don't really want to go and sell them. As long as we trust our men to do it and seek our best interests, it is enough. We are happy. In fact, we think that if the men are in the house why should we go out? We do our share." On a lighter note, the younger one added, "It is fun. We introduce newness to our work by imitating these actresses of the movies and western dolls."
With these, somewhat, alternating (and competing) strands of thought, I sought a middle path. Weight of practices lend them a depth of meaning that often are congruous with the perceived harmony of the system. It reminds me of the profound words spoken by a professor - While we may en-frame social realities into epistemic categories, for our convenience, to analyse, present and reproduce, real life is fluid and so are positions (and roles) played by social actors. Expressions of analytic concepts when encountered in real lives are a constellation of simultaneity and multiplicities marked by a contingency that cascades through twists and turn. 'Uncertainty' and its true appreciation is thus felt best by the anthropology student (in the thoughts of the celebrated Veena Das as well). While 'newness' is a metaphor; the outgrowth of a thought, a fear of a waning identity, an innovation perhaps, it is also an emergence otherwise of bringing in the elements of the old and the new, the potential and the actual, through this creative appropriation of boundaries?
As my friends laid bare, pair by pair, a constellation of varied narratives, the story behind the painted, stringed marionette, I could only marvel at the unfolding of a bequest that constituted this exquisite assemblage, often reduced to a 'commodity'.
Priyanka Dass Saharia, Delhi School of Economics
Image: Clay figurine by the Kumhar Community
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