Pravina Shukla & Henry Glassie - The Sacred Image in Modern India
Thursday evening, 7:30 p.m.-9:00 p.m.
November 19, 2009
Chafee Auditorium URI Kingston Campus
Professor duo from Indiana University will take us through a cultural journey of Bridal Fashions, Body Adornments, and Folk Arts of India.
PRAVINA SHUKLA
Pravina Shukla is Associate Professor in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Indiana University, where she teaches courses on dress, adornment, and body art, museums, food, and material culture. She is a two-time winner of the Indiana University Trustees’s Teaching Award. Her museum experience has included working at the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, Los Angeles, California, and at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York City. Two research topics that have interested her, resulting in extensive fieldwork, exhibitions, and publications, are: carnival costumes in Brazil, and dress and body adornment in India. She is the author of The Grace of Four Moons: Dress, Adornment and the Art of the Body in Modern India, winner of the 2009 Milia Davenport Award given by the Costume Society of America for excellence in dress scholarship. Her current research topic is the various cultural uses of costume.
Professor Shukla has lectured on material culture, dress, and adornment within the United States, and also in India, Bangladesh, Canada, and Israel.
About her talk, Professor Pravina Shukla writes this: The sari -- an unstitched women’s garment from India, six meters in length -- is literally remade every time it is worn on the body. The wearer acts as her own tailor every time she drapes, folds, pleats and tucks this piece of cloth made of cotton, silk, wool, or synthetic materials. Fancy saris are still handmade in India today, woven on jacquard pit looms. Once made, they are sold in specialized shops, where customers sit for hours, being shown hundreds of saris, choosing carefully the garments that they will gift and wear. Through an ethnographic analysis of the sari in the city of Banaras, India, we learn much about the people who make, sell, buy and wear the national dress.
This talk is based on my fieldwork in the holy Hindu city of Banaras (officially known as Varanasi) in northeastern India, from 1996 to 2003. The ancient city is a main pilgrimage site, attracting thousands of visitors daily, and therefore, it can be considered India in microcosm. Banaras has also long been a center for the production of saris; Indians associate Banaras with the exquisite gold-brocaded saris known as “Banarasi saris.” Most brides in the country, and in the diaspora, wish to wear and receive for their dowries these lustrous, luxurious lengths of shimmering silk.
Banaras’s population of Muslim weavers—numbering two hundred thousand– create the saris in one of three weaving neighborhoods. National friction between Hindus and Muslims registers tensely in Banaras. The city is, according to many accounts, about forty percent Muslim and sixty percent Hindu. Most of those involved in the sari trade are Muslims, and they have the last name Ansari. My main informants were the master weavers Hashim and Shameem Ansari, two brothers whose workshop contains sixteen looms.
Because of the high number of annual visitors, and the local production of saris and jewelry, Banaras has a thriving commercial culture, both wholesale and retail, serving the people of the city, the pilgrims from afar, and the thousands of nearby villagers who come to the big city to shop. A version of India in miniature, Banaras is a good place to study the interaction between maker and consumer.
While no one would question the fact that clothing displays individual and cultural identities, a deeper look at dress reveals the complexities in the production, marketing, and consumption of items of bodily adornment. The study of the sari furthers an evaluative model for the study of dress, showing how garments interface between producers, merchants, and consumers, how the garment crosses the borders of gender, caste, religion, and socio-economic class in contemporary India.
HENRY GLASSIE
Henry Glassie, recently emeritus College Professor of Folklore at Indiana University, has received many awards for his work, including the Chicago Folklore Prize, the Haney Prize in the Social Sciences, the Cummings Award of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, the Kniffen and Douglas awards of the Pioneer America Society, and formal recognition for his contributions from the ministries of culture of Turkey and Bangladesh. Three of his works have been named among the notable books of the year by The New York Times.
Glassie has lectured throughout the United States and Canada, and in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, France, Germany, Turkey, Israel, Kuwait, India, Bangladesh, China, and Japan. He is the author of 'Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United States'; 'Folk Housing in Middle Virginia'; 'All Silver and No Brass'; 'Irish Folk History'; 'Passing the Time in Ballymenone'; 'Irish Folktales; The Spirit of Folk Art'; 'Turkish Traditional Art Today'; 'Art and Life in Bangladesh'; 'Material Culture'; 'The Potter’s Art'; 'Vernacular Architecture'; and 'The Stars of Ballymenone'. His latest book, 'Prince Twins Seven-Seven: His Art, His Life in Nigeria, His Exile in America', will be published in January 2010.
The colloquium talk by Henry Glassie is entitled "The Sacred Image in Modern India". India is a land of religious diversity. There are Hindus, Sikhs, and Jains, Christians, Jews and more Muslims than there are in most Muslim nations. This talk, though, will treat the diversity within Hinduism. Like the religions of ancient Greece and Rome, Hinduism is an expansive faith, assimilating a vast array of local practices. These practices, while attending to sacred texts, are centered by images of the deities. Power spreads and fragments among them. Shiva balances creation and destruction. Vishnu has appeared in ten avatars, notably Rama, Krishna, and the Buddha. Devi, the Goddess, appears as Parvati in wifely virtue, as Kali in rage, as Durga in power, and Durga is the mother of four: Ganesh, the Lord of Beginnings; Kartikeya, the god of war; Saraswati, the goddess of wisdom; Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth. These deities are worshiped throughout India, but local traditions differ in emphasis, in ritual, and in the incorporation of local divinities. This talk, based on field research among the creators of images, the artists who craft the deities for worship, will suggest the patterns of convergence and divergence in art and ritual in different regions of the Indian subcontinent.
Links:Vernacular Architecture Forum - Henry Glassie Award
Colloquium Coordinators:
Professor Ruby Roy Dholakia
College of Business Administration
Professor Nikhilesh Dholakia,
College of Business Administration
Professor Arun Shukla
College of Engineering
Related Sites:
Demystifying India on Facebook
IndiaAtURI on YouTube
IndiaAtURI on Twitter
IndianAtURI on Sakai
Contacts:
Questions, contact the Honors Center at 401.874.2381, or Deb Gardiner. or www.uri.edu/hpr.
