Arriving in graduate school to study cultural anthropology in 1981, I was already a writer of fiction and enchanted transcriber of oral narratives told by my family and older friends in India. At the University of California at Berkeley, I studied anthropology and also folklore, becoming alert to how oral narratives from the field are integrated into ethnography and can reinvent the genre through strong voices and alternate narrative styles. I received my Ph.D. in 1987 and have taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 1989. I continue to move between the tug of ethnography as a medium rich with narrative forms from fieldwork, and the pull of alternate literary genres within which ethnographic insights can also be expressed: fiction, memoir, short stories composed from events in the field, and literary folklore collections.
My dissertation fieldwork was in Nasik, Western India, with an old Hindu holy man and the circles of Indian and Western listeners who gathered around him as he told stories as a form of counsel. The resulting book Storytellers, Saints and Scoundrels mentioned in passing some of the family associations underlying my interest; more recently, I wrote a different book, My Family and Other Saints, that fleshes out the complex transcultural backdrop of spiritual seeking that I grew up with. I have also worked in Kangra, in the Himalayan foothills of Northwest India, focusing specifically on women’s oral traditions since the early 1980s. In collaboration with Urmila Devi Sood, I have brought together a collection of translated Kangra folktales, with our discussions on their meaning, Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon. I am currently finishing a book on Kangra women’s songs that retell episodes from Hindu mythology. In addition, I’ve listened closely to the narrative accounts of second-generation South Asian Americans. For all this research and writing through time, I’ve been grateful for support from many sources: the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the School of American Research (now the School of Advanced Research), and various grants from the University of Wisconsin.
To amuse friends and distract myself from professional anxieties, as an assistant professor I wrote a comic novel, Love, Stars and All That. Since this book follows the adventures of Gita, a young Indian woman attending graduate school at the University of California—Berkeley to her first year as a professor, readers sometimes assume it’s thinly veiled memoir. I hope that my family memoir will make it clear that Gita and I really are different people.
Partly as a result of the many questions I’ve encountered as an anthropologist who also writes fiction and memoir, I’m working to bring together a book about the insights and techniques that can be carried across these genres.