India academia is so different from American academia. Professors and advisors are called Supervisors. Supervisor is a title that implies tremendous power and authority over a student’s career and topic choices. I would like to think that my professors in the US are more like friends than Supervisors but perhaps I am being too romantic, at some point the relationship between teacher and student is one of power. I met the Dean of the Sociology Department at SVUniversity today as well as a Retd Faculty member from the same department. Both were very encouraging and offered a lot of help as well as clues for me.

Apparently Golu isn’t popular here in Tirupati, as much as it was even thirty years ago. Both professors had vivid memories of visiting Brahmin homes on Chinna Bazaar (Little Shopping hub) Street, a lane flanking the Rama Temple in the area. Golu is known as a Brahmin festival here and one performed by those who are conversant in Tamil, Telegu and English. The one doll maker the Dean remembered was an old Muslim who lived on that street whose son worked at the University alongside the dean. He recalled taking evening walks to visit the Muslim thatha (dear grandfather) and sitting on tea listening to his stories about his craft. This thatha was renowned for his ability to distinguish between a powerful image and a cracked/refurbished /improperly made doll just by looking at it. His son, who worked at the University, has also passed away and never learnt his craft. His youngest son is still alive, and I hope to meet him before leaving Tirupati. Even forty years ago, the amazement and development of the craft of making dolls was a dwindling art form, reserved for the few artisans who remained alive. During the Dean’s childhood, the only customers that remained for the Muslim thatha were wealthy families that had made special orders for their homes.

In search of this family I left to meet them and hoped to recover some information about where the wooden dolls might be made. I arrived in the Muslim thatha’s neighborhood in the afternoon, around lunch time, but instead of shops, I found the area was mostly residential except for a few stationary shops filled with unsold notebooks for the upcoming school year. His home was bolted and the family who lives upstairs’ door was also bolted. I enquired in several neighboring little paan (betel leaf) shops and found that only this Muslim family (living amidst a Hindu and Jain neighborhood) was known for “bommalu” or “mara bommalu” (wooden dolls) and no one else knew of the ritual or the dolls. There was no local familiarity for the ritual or its components. A young girl showed me her plastic doll in response to my questions and asked me,”This thing, why do you bother so much with dolls, akka?” Her lack of enthusiasm made me wonder why I cared so much about a seemingly trivial image such as a doll. A plaything of a child, it represents the epitomy of a transient phase in our lives, one that lasts only a few years, but the impression of which, lasts forever throughout, shaping our personalities. Any American would be familiar with the influence of Brabie dolls in the body-dismorphia experienced in teenage and adult women. Maybe the dolls are not as transient and unimportant as we think they are?