Shiptown. Ann Grodzins Gold
The Kir (boatmen) keep boats in their street as emblems of identity (and these are still in occasional seasonal use as for harvesting water chestnuts). Kewat is their dignified caste name, after the fabled boatman from the Ramayana epic who took Ram, Sita, and Lakshman across the river when the three divine beings made their way from the palace of Ayodhya to their fated forest exile. New bridges and dams combined with draught would be the main combined causes of decline for the traditional work of boatmen. The lathe-turning carpenters (Kairathi) have seen their business markedly dwindle with the lowered demand for wooden implements, including toys, for which the town of Jahazpur was once well known (Census of India 1994). Several Kairathi families moved away from Jahazpur, having sold their homes to Sindhi merchants who now populate their neighborhood, I was told. In 2011 there were just two active Kairathi workshops infused with the sense of an accomplished yet moribund artisan identity. I say moribund because fathers deliberately were not apprenticing their sons but rather devoting familial resources to training the new generation for alternative careers.
Leather workers retain neither mementos (as the Kir do their boats) nor active workshops (as the Kairathi still possess) that would bring to mind their own stigmatizing past work of tanning hides. Many have gone into construction. A fair number of leather workers are government servants and have ascended to middle-class status, at least economically. Affirmative action (called “reservations” in India) supports higher percentages of government service jobs for members of SC communities, but some appear more able to find advantage in these programs than others. I found, when interviewing persons close to the bottom of the old ritual caste hierarchy, expressions of gratification that much had indeed changed, and simultaneously of anger that change was maddeningly incomplete.
This is not a book about social organization, social hierarchy, or power. I will not make a list of all the castes that live in Jahazpur, nor could I with total accuracy even if I wished to do so. No chapter here is devoted to compiling or analyzing the many statements about social hierarchy that in fact I did record. Mostly I recorded them because Bhoju Ram, who assisted in about two-thirds of my interviews, inserted into most of them routinely, and without my ever requesting that he do so, one or more queries about caste. I privately brooded over what seemed to me to be his tiresome fascination, or his old-fashioned sense of what might be significant. References to caste in the interviews would have been far fewer had I been the only one asking questions. In my interviews with women, where I controlled the lines of inquiry, there is almost nothing about the birth-given social hierarchy. When the conversation departed, as it often would, from my own directed interests it followed theirs: domestic politics, neighborhood quarrels, food.
Sumit Guha has recently suggested that “caste’s religious strand has frayed away but the one binding it to the exercise of power is thicker than ever” (Guha 2013:211). Guha and others see caste today as something akin to ethnicity. I appreciate that turn in the recent literature on India’s social hierarchy. Basically it lays stress on inherited identity as it infuses sense of self and as it is used instrumentally in relation to others both politically and professionally. Such active uses of birth-given identity or rank certainly are among the circumstances of life in contemporary Jahazpur.
Bhoju is my collaborative research partner, not an assistant paid only to do my bidding. I therefore held my tongue and respected his interests. Indeed I thought it might represent an integral feature of the village-to-town transition that I seek to highlight in these pages that Bhoju, himself a participant in that transition, thought in terms of caste when living in a place where it had genuinely lost certain kinds of salience. People in Jahazpur readily, and for the most part unhesitatingly, respond to questions framed in a language of caste with answers similarly framed. It is not that the caste framework had become alien to them. But it is, I would argue, not their first way of looking at things. Only very rarely did an interviewee initiate this topic.
Throughout this book I make observations using the language of caste. When I write in Chapter 3 about Santosh Nagar, I talk about a Brahmin woman and her status as a self-proclaimed ritual expert, often but not always valued by the women from agricultural communities who predominated in the groups that gathered around her at collective rituals. When I write about processions in Chapter 4, I speak of the leather workers’ struggle to be included in the Jal Jhulani parade and the rather anticlimactic if satisfying result: normalization of their participation (as if the resistance had been more knee-jerk than of any heartfelt discriminatory depths). When I write about the market in Chapter 8 I emphasize roles played by former butchers and former wine sellers, and it seems to matter who they are “by caste.” Caste identity literally leaps out at a stranger; here as throughout much of Rajasthan, caste names are used as last names, including Gujar, Khatik, Kir, Mina, Regar, Vaishnav, and so forth (see Pandey 2013:208–10). But caste is not the dominant subject of my book, and I would venture further to argue that caste is not the dominant subject of life in contemporary Jahazpur.21
Bindi Gate, by evoking the old revenue village and the contemporary struggles of leather workers, carpenters, and boatmen, leads us in two directions: outward to the fiscal bindings of town with larger units of governance including taxes and benefits for the poor; inward to the intersections and interactions of discrete but variously integrated communities, to the histories of political and ritual struggles for power and dignity, and to the ways that governance enables, obstructs, or ignores these struggles.
Mosque Gate: Pluralistic Passages
An archway traditionally bestows honor and respect, creating a passage simultaneously conferring and confirming status. We see this easily in the plentitude of temporary cloth arches set up to welcome the Ram Lila procession, a distinguished visitor, or a wedding party. Mosque Gate is an internal gate. It never served to segregate the Muslim population but rather to mark a sacred area before the doorway to the mosque and thus to set apart and to honor the mosque itself.22
We learned from Mahavir Singh (one of just two Rajput interviewees) that long ago the Rajput neighborhood also had an arched gateway, as did a few other neighborhoods belonging to more important merchant and Brahmin lineages. With the decline of residents most invested in maintaining them, these structures had been torn down when it became expedient to make way for additional construction of more useful edifices. Small but vividly blue, Mosque Gate, in contrast, was in fine condition during my stay in 2010–11. On revisits, I noted that the old deep blue gate I had always thought very attractive had been allowed to deteriorate, while an imposing, tall, new Masjid Gate of stone blocks was constructed.
A number of persons, when pressed to list the characteristics of a qasba during both recorded interviews and casual conversations, would begin with a single defining attribute: diversity. This comprised a multiplicity of castes and secondarily of religions. One of the hallmarks of urbanization is diversity; and with diversity arrives the necessity of pluralism. This observation would certainly be deemed a truism in urban studies. However, here I follow the lead of Gérard Fussman, who codirected an Indo-French collaborative investigation of history and culture in Chanderi, a qasba in Madhya Pradesh state. Nearly the same size as Jahazpur, Chanderi, like Jahazpur, has a mixed population of Hindus, Muslims, and Jains. I summarize Fussman’s points in a condensed paraphrase: The passage between a village population and a town population entails a veritable rupture corresponding to the transformation from a population which is relatively homogeneous and an economy which is essentially pastoral or agricultural, to a population and an economy which have become much more diversified, and where commerce, manufacturing and political-administrative functions all play roles of more or less increased importance (Fussman et al. 2003, vol. 1, 67). Places such as Jahazpur, and other North Indian qasbas including Chanderi, present this “veritable rupture” on a smallish scale and thus perhaps with particular vividness. Just to run your eyes over the styles of clothing visible at Jahazpur’s busy bus stand, or worn by those peopling its crowded market streets, is to observe a diversity that is locally so run-of-the-mill as to attract no notice whatsoever.
Only the foreign outsider finds the scene striking and wonders at the proximities of men in Western shirts and pants, some bareheaded,