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Ponds are ubiquitous in the Maithil region of Nepal, and they figure prominently in folk narratives and ceremonial paintings produced by women there. I argue that in Maithil women's folktales, as in their paintings, the trope of ponds shifts the imaginative register toward women's perspectives and the importance of women's knowledge and influence in shaping Maithil society, even as this register shift occurs within plots featuring male protagonists. I argue further that in the absence of a habit of exegesis in their expressive arts, and given the cross-referential, dialogic nature of expressive practices, a methodology that draws into interpretive conversation the multitude of expressive forms exercised by Maithil women enhances analytical access to Maithil women's collective perspectives on their social and cosmological worlds.
Pond Narratives
I arrived in Nepal's eastern Tarai town of Janakpur at the end of October 2003 to do research on women's storytelling.1 I had first spent time in the region over a fifteenmonth period in 1994-95, during which I conducted ethnographic research in and around Janakpur. Janakpur is a commercial and pilgrimage center located in the heart of Mithila, a primarily rural region named for the ancient kingdom that flourished in its place. Historically, Mithila has more accurately designated a cultural and linguistic region blending into neighboring regions, rather than a definite political or geographical unit (Henry 1998:415-7; Jain 1995:207).2 Mithila expands to the Himalaya foothills to the north, the Ganges River to the south, and the Gandaki and Kosi Rivers to the west and east, respectively (Burghart 1993; Grierson 1881). (See Figures 1a and 1b.) The region is characterized by village clusters surrounded by irrigated rice fields and dotted with ponds. Ponds are arguably the "single most prominent geological feature" of the Mithila region (Brown 1996:728); certainly, as I discuss at greater length below, ponds are an economically, socially, and cosmologically significant element of the Maithil landscape.
I had decided to rent a room to use as an office space in the upstairs of a building just a five-minute walk from the home of my research assistant, Dollie Sah. The metal wardrobe and the crude wooden bed and table that were provided with the room were indications that it was intended as living space, rather than for the uses...