What is it about?
Looking at a corpus of proverbs (folk sayings) known as Dāk vachan this article explores the ways in which these sayings constitute a field of knowledge production in contemporary Mithila (north Bihar) revealing claims along the trajectories of caste, gender and historical lineages. Addressed to different aspects of agrarian life, presence of these sayings in the Maithil agrarian society also suggests a complicated and contested relation between modern and nonmodern practices of time in general and agrarian environment in particular.
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Why is it important?
This study makes it imperative to take an account of not merely how people conserve their environment through religious and non-scientific idioms (Gold and Gujar) but also the manner in which the discourse on the non-modern knowledge has been fraught along caste lines. Focused on Dāk vachan, an attempt has been made to understand the process, in and through which colonial–modern knowledge, caste politics and multiple worlds of proverbial wisdom intersect with each other.
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This page is a summary of: Dāk Vachan, History and Sociology of South Asia, January 2014, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/2230807513506628.
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