Susan S. Wadley

Family composition strategies in rural north India

Recent evidence on child mortality and fertility trends in the community known as Karimpur in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh presents a troubling puzzle: the female children of the poor are now dying at a much more rapid rate than their brothers. In this community, sex-specific child mortality is not new. What is new is the increasing female bias in child mortality among the poor. My contention is that this trend can only be understood in the larger context of family composition strategies, strategies which have changed due to the socio-economic changes wrought by the green revolution and other development programs of the past 25 years. Moreover, mortality cannot be understood without also considering fertility behavior and the overall shape of the resulting families. My hypothesis is that the Karimpur poor are using high fertility and sex-specific child mortality to maximize the number of surviving males in attempting to insure family welfare.

Exploring the Meaning of Genre in Two Indian Performance Traditions

Two performance traditions found in modern India raise questions about the ways genres are transformed by changing social, cultural, and economic circumstances. Using the examples of ＂Dhola＂, an oral epic from the Braj region of northern India and ＂patas＂, scroll/songs from West Bengal, this paper examines both the traditional and modern meanings of genre via these two traditions. The ＂Dhola＂ functions much like a novel, a heterogeneous compilation of secondary genres including song, chant, narration, reported speech, and more. Now ＂Dhola＂ is found on audio-cassettes and DVDs, shifting its performance style and content away from the oral performance on a village verandah while adding new secondary genres and new content. The ＂pata＂ (plural for ease for English readers, patas), traditionally a performed sung scroll, presented a unity of illustrated scroll and song, which has disappeared as the scroll alone has become a commodity sold to urban Indians and tourists to be hung on their walls as folk art. Exploring both the ＂patas＂ and ＂Dhola＂ over time-in print, oral performance, audio-cassette, or museum exhibitions-leads to an understanding of the ways genres are grounded in social practice. These two traditions, sharing a worldview from below (both are products of marginalized lower castes), allow us to explore the intersections of social value, linguistic and painted conventions, and the world thus portrayed. They are just two examples of the transformations of folk genres occurring around the world due to the influences of globalization.