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This introductory chapter provides an overview of Maithil women and storytelling. Through the imperatives of purdah, Maithil womanhood entails a significant degree of constriction of movement and speech both in and outside domestic spaces. They do, however, tell and listen to stories in the context of women- and children-only settings and have collectively promulgated a rich body of tales, which, while inevitably modified at least slightly with each telling, nonetheless display strong continuities in their themes, structures, and complexity of cosmological thinking and moral lessons. The behavioral norms of purdah have never been totalizing, yet they have been subject to new challenges as well as reassertion in the era of globalization, with its attendant and uneven expansion of mobility, mediation, education, and consumption. It is in these shifting conditions that Maithil women continue to weave their tales and navigate the terrain of their increasingly unstable lives.

This concluding chapter looks at what happens in Maithil women's folktales when stories of women's suffering at the hands of other women are first suppressed and later overheard by men who have the power to alleviate such suffering. Maithil women are structurally pitted against one another in their pursuit of security and resources in the context of patriarchal, patrilineal, and patrilocal formations. It is these oppositions that account for the storied abuse meted out by co-wives, mothers-in-law, and the mistresses of servants. However, the solidarities women nonetheless form—in part through sharing stories together, as well as through keeping each other's secrets—serve to mitigate their suffering and maintain a counter-system of ideational patterns and practices.

This chapter demonstrates that Maithil women weave theories of storytelling into their tales; moreover, some of these theories resonate with those developed in multidisciplinary literatures that consider the role of narrative in human life. Three specific contentions are examined. The first is Maithil women's implicit argument that stories themselves carry a form of agency that renders them irrepressible. This irrepressibility of tales takes on a particularly gendered significance in the context of Maithil gender order. The second narratological point is that stories move and morph. When stories travel across space, genre, context, and teller, as they inevitably do, they change in meaning and content. Finally, Maithil women's tales intimate a theory about the political nature of stories and storytelling: that insights and viewpoints on the social configurations of power are embedded in tales, and therefore their telling is a form of discursive political engagement.

This chapter examines the universe of virtue as it is displayed in Maithil women's taleworlds—such virtues as devoutness, compassion, and generosity. One striking characteristic of Maithil women's narratives is that they generally portray very little gendering in regard to basic tenets of virtue. In other words, the same virtuous qualities are appreciated in men and women; virtues are gender specific only in the particulars of their enactment. The chapter also shows that, in Maithil women's narrative hands, differences in fortune are correlated with the measure of women's virtuousness, and, further, such virtue in women is portrayed as a heritable trait passed on to offspring through maternal substance.

This chapter explores how Maithil women see the relationship between experiences of prosperity and misery, on the one hand, and the capacity to tell stories, on the other. The persistence in advocating for a life story framed by experiences of sukha (prosperity, happiness) and especially dukha (hardship, sorrow) illustrates two important notions about the experience and narrativization of life that are prevalent among the Maithil women who shared their folktales and personal stories. First, life is marked in memory by its measure of and shifts between good and bad times in which the painful experiences are especially memorable and meaningful to one's sense of self. Second, in order to be a good storyteller, a woman must have experienced dukha in her life to a significant degree.

This chapter discusses the meaning of forests in Maithil women's tales. An examination of Maithil women's stories reveals that while forests and jungles represent a form of alterity to the settlement (village, city, kingdom, etc.) for both men and women, the quality of this alterity is not identical for the two genders. From a woman-centered perspective, the alterity to the settlement produced by the forest/jungle is a complex one that operates somewhat differently than it would from a male-centered perspective, particularly with respect to issues of mobility, access, and sexuality. The potential dangers and opportunities of the forest also take a particularly gendered cast in Maithil women's tales.

This chapter focuses on tales in which the virtue of compassion is embodied in the persona of the devoted mother. Collectively, Maithil women's tales assert that maternal devotion presents an especially intensified and idealized form of the otherwise gender undifferentiated virtue of compassion. The action women take based on this maternal sentiment is portrayed as making a positive difference in the lives of children, even other women's children. As mentioned in the previous chapter, a mother may pass on her moral or sinful nature through the sharing of bodily substances. In these ways, through their stories, Maithil women position their own embodied selves as a fundamental source of social virtue.