Visvamitra: Intertextuality and performance of classical narratives about caste

This dissertation, "Visvamitra: Intertextuality and Performance of Classical Narratives about Caste," is a literary and folkloristic study of the epic and puran˙ic narratives of Visvamitra. Stories of this sage recount how, through sheer will and determination, this legendary king successfully changes his varn&dotbelow;a and becomes a Brahman&dotbelow;. In Sanskrit literature, he comes to be the most profound representation of human will and power, a character as much feared for his great temper as admired for his great compassion. Visvamitra is an icon of counter-normativity, and this dissertation seeks to understand how a set of legends about him, embedded within larger epic and puran&dotbelow;ic texts as 'textual performances,' construct literary spaces in which the boundaries of caste are negotiated.; Developing a post-Dumontian understanding of caste not simply as an unquestioned, watertight system of social categories but as contextual applications of ideologies, this dissertation seeks to foreground the narrative as the site where this historical negotiation of varn&dotbelow;a occurs. The narratological investigation of this dissertation explores how these legends performatively map varn&dotbelow;a categories onto domestic spaces within the storyworld. The successful movement of characters like Visvamitra across these varn&dotbelow;a/domestic boundaries produces ruptures within an ordinarily rigid social hierarchy. This study suggests that through such narrative maneuvers, counter-normative legends are able to raise legitimate questions about caste, questions that are not easily answerable and that compel retellings of these stories for centuries.; A comparative analysis of variation in the Visvamitra legends reveals that epic and puran&dotbelow;ic texts provide different normativizing answers to these questions through the embedding process---that is, in the 'textual performance.' To understand how this performance works, how interactions between narrators and audiences result in different interpretations of Visvamitra's challenges to orthodoxy, this dissertation compares the Sanskrit textual versions to those found in contemporary naradiya kirtan, a genre of Marathi devotional storytelling and preaching. This dissertation uniquely suggests that the concept of homology---the discursive equation of storyworld events to realworld issues through performer-audience interaction---is a critical aspect of performance, and ultimately the means through which legendary narratives become sites of ideological negotiation in traditional South Asian cultural forms.