Notes on Love in a Tamil Family

The book I am reading in recent two weeks is Notes on Love in a Tamil Family by Margaret Trawick. She lived for a time in the midst of one large South Indian family and sought to understand the multiple and mutually shared expressions of love. This family performed before the young anthropologist's eyes the meaning of love through poetry and conversation, through the not always gentle raising of children, through the weaving of kinship tapestries, through erotic exchanges among women, among men, and across the great sexual boundary. She communicates with grace and insight what she learned from this Tamil family, and we discover that love is no less universal than selfishness and individualism.

What I am looking for is that how the anthropologist expresses herself through telling the story of her research. In this case, the author explains that her approach to the study of this feeling has been through feeling. “I have tried throughout the course of my research and writing to remain honest, clear-headed, and open-minded, and to follow the dictates of reason and empirical observation in my descriptions and analyses of the events I have sought to comprehend. But I have not attempted to be "objective" in the common sense of this term. I have never pretended to be disinterested or uninvolved in the lives of my informants, and I have never set my own feelings aside. Only by heeding them have I been able to learn the lessons that I try, in this volume, to pass on.”

Then she presents Western expectations of India which are included some stereotypes as India is "more spiritual" than the West, its people "impoverished," "non materialistic," "fatalistic," and "other-worldly," its society structured according to a "rigid caste hierarchy," its women "repressed" and "submissive," its villagers "tradition-bound" and "past-oriented," their behavior ordered by "rituals" and constrained by "rules" of "purity" and "pollution."

Then she confesses that one thing she had learned in India was that “these words are just words, our words, to refer to certain scattered events occurring in South Asia. The propositions they imply are partial truths, half truths, and anyone going to India who expects all of Indian life to confirm to them will find herself merely deluded and confused. It would almost be better, I think, if we could abandon such words, all those words that imply explanation and understanding of such a large place as India.”

She has tried, anyway, in her own narrative not to lean on such words too much. Another interesting thing for me is that how the anthropologist as a woman, compare herself to other women whom she is working and studying on them. She expresses about this concern: “The women I knew there, for instance, were more aggressive than me, more openly sexual than me, more free in their criticisms of their men than me. Here in America I often get in trouble for arguing, losing my temper, speaking my mind.”
She honestly discloses herself in her book when she talks about one of her Indian women friend’s question: "is it your habit to bow and defer to everyone?" She confesses that:

My personality in Tamil Nadu was no more sweet and obliging than it is in America; if anything, I was more short-tempered there. As for Anni, she was milder than many Tamil women I knew indeed, she was known for her patient and loving nature. But when she accused me, through her question, of excessive deference, she was not being sarcastic. Compared to her, I was a little mouse. The notion of the repressed and submissive Indian woman simply did not apply to the people among whom I lived-and yet in some ways it did. Anni would not have been Anni without her fidelity to her men and her ability to endure hardship for their sake, to do without while they did with. She was proud of these qualities of hers and wore them fiercely. They entitled her to speak freely and to walk with her head held high...."