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Madhu Natisar Nath is a Rajasthani farmer with no formal schooling. He is also a singer, a musician, and a storyteller. At the center of A Carnival of Parting are Madhu Nath's oral performances of two linked tales about the legendary Indian kings, Bharthari of Ujjain and Gopi Chand of Bengal. Both characters, while still in their prime, leave thrones and families to be initiated as yogis—a process rich in adventure and melodrama, one that offers unique insights into popular Hinduism's view of world renunciation. Ann Grodzins Gold presents these living oral epic traditions as flowing narratives, transmitting to Western readers the pleasures, moods, and interactive dimensions of a village bard's performance.Three introductory chapters and an interpretive afterword, together with an appendix on the bard's language by linguist David Magier, supply A Carnival of Parting with a full range of ethnographic, historical, and cultural backgrounds. Gold gives a frank and engaging portrayal of the bard Madhu Nath and her work with him.The tales are most profoundly concerned, Gold argues, with human rather than divine realities. In a compelling afterword, she highlights their thematic emphases on politics, love, and death. Madhu Nath's vital colloquial telling of Gopi Chand and Bharthari's stories depicts renunciation as inevitable and interpersonal attachments as doomed, yet celebrates human existence as a "carnival of parting."

Tales --- Folk songs, Rajasthani --- Storytellers --- Folk singers --- Anthropology --- Social Sciences --- Folklore --- Folksingers --- Raconteurs --- Tellers of stories --- Rajasthani ballads and songs --- Rajasthani folk songs --- Folk musicians --- Singers --- Entertainers --- Folk songs, Rajasthani. --- Nath, Madhu Natisar. --- Madhu Natisar Nath --- adventure. --- bengal. --- bharthari of ujjain. --- birth story. --- black hole of fate. --- cultural studies. --- detachment. --- divine. --- ethnography. --- fatalism. --- folklore. --- gopi chand of bengal. --- gorakh nath. --- guru. --- hindu. --- hinduism. --- history. --- human existence. --- humanity. --- indian kings. --- madhu natisar nath. --- magical powers. --- melodrama. --- musician. --- north indian hinduism. --- oral performances. --- oral traditions. --- performance. --- pottery lessons. --- rajasthani farmer. --- singer. --- spiritual. --- storyteller. --- thrones. --- village bard. --- world renunciation. --- yogis. --- Nath, Madhu Natisar

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In the Time of Trees and Sorrows showcases peasants’ memories of everyday life in North India under royal rule and their musings on the contrast between the old days and the unprecedented shifts that a half century of Indian Independence has wrought. It is an oral history of the former Kingdom of Sawar in the modern state of Rajasthan as it was from the 1930's to the 1950's.Based on testimonies from the 1990's, this book stands as a polyvocal account of the radical political and environmental changes the region and its people have faced in the twentieth century. Not just the story of modernity from the perspective of a rural village, these interviews and author commentaries narrate this small rural community’s relatively sudden transformation from subjection to a local despot and to a remote colonial power to citizenship in a modern postcolonial democracy. Unlike other recent studies of Rajasthan, the current study gives voice exclusively to former subjects who endured the double oppression of colonial and regional rulers. Gold and Gujar thus place subjective subaltern experiences of daily routines, manifestations of power relations, and sweeping changes to the environment (after the fall of kings) that turned lush forests into a barren landscape on equal footing with historical “fact” and archival sources. Ambiguous, complex, and culturally laden as it is in Western thought, the concept of nature is queried in this ethnographic text. For persons in Sawar the environment is not only a means of sustenance, its deterioration is linked to human morality and to power, both royal and divine. The framing questions of this South Asian history revealed through memories are: what was it like in the time of kings and what happened to the trees?

Kings and rulers --- Rajasthan (India) --- Rajasthan (India) --- Rajasthan (India) --- Rural conditions. --- Social conditions. --- Economic conditions.