Shiptown. Ann Grodzins Gold
big suburbs where you can build big houses.”
Another young woman we interviewed, called Tinku, came from a predominantly agricultural community. She stood out among my early interviewees as assessing Jahazpur in a more positive way. I describe her in my mid-August journal as “very voluble,” noting, “Tinku had a lot to say about Jahazpur, she had a lot to say about everything.”10 In our recorded interview with Tinku she readily made comparisons between village and town:
In the village the atmosphere (vatavaran) is good but the education isn’t good. Here there are good schools nearby; business is good also in Jahazpur. Jobs are here. You can’t do business in the village!
The qasba is better than the village; you don’t have to go too far for your work. [She unites here two senses of kam, or work, which can mean in this phrase both “to get things done” and “to get the things you need”]. You can do it all right here. But if you live in a village, you have to go outside the village to take care of your work [whether shopping or bureaucratic]. For that reason Jahazpur is better than a village.
This voice from a young woman with village experience presents what can be appreciated about Jahazpur if you have tried living in both kinds of places (and if you cease indulging in a grass-is-greener yearning for the dubious charms of Devli). The very things Tinku highlighted I also appreciated, for I too had shifted from village to town.11
Each of the five chapters in Part I—Origins, Gateways, Dwellings, Routes, and Histories—recounts in detail how people and communities use and transform places through imagining, residing in, and traversing them.
The first chapter relates the mythic origins of Jahazpur, well known to all its residents, and offers ethnographic elaborations embroidering these legends’ meanings. Chapter 2 enters Shiptown, the place and the book, through multiple openings. The town is walled and gated, thus not only contained but permeable. While gazing both ways through its five and a half gates, I highlight thematic motifs that crisscross the whole.
Chapter 3 begins from my own fieldwork circumstances and practices as they emerge from the increasingly undisciplined discipline of anthropology. Fieldwork produces a particular kind of lived relationship to place and to neighbors; cohabiting is a method of sorts. From attending to those neighbors with whom I interacted regularly, it requires no shift in focus to talk about gender roles in a new kind of place: a small town’s still smaller suburb or “colony” (an English word fully incorporated into Hindi). Fieldwork is ever permeable to emotions even while generating data.12
Chapter 4 focuses on how, in a fundamentally plural place, religion periodically overflows its primary interiority (whether temples, mosques, or hearts) to fill up town streets with visual and aural sensations generating sensory surfeit. Equally, this chapter about parades and other festive modes of claiming space may enhance understandings of identity, tension, and peacekeeping. Chapter 5 turns to the depths of the past in order to ponder how these do and do not appear on the surface in present times. It is in part about the layers of displacement that centuries precipitate, and how some groups organize themselves regularly to remember the places they once lived and ritually revisit them. It is also, in part, about how some people accidentally rediscover the past underground and respond to it. Here I seek to evoke the ways places speak of history and history speaks through places—processes that are meaningful to communities.
Part I thus begins with names and tales, then meanders in and out the qasba gates and up and down the road leading from the bus stand to the colony Santosh Nagar. It parades noisily all around the qasba streets and makes several quick excursions to the surrounding hamlets, attuned to oral histories tapping the depths of the past. Of course there remains a great deal left to learn about Jahazpur and its residents.
Each of the three chapters composing Part II of Shiptown grapples with a particular set of complicated, purposeful human activities which develop around areas glossed, for drama and convenience, as Ecology, Love, and Money. My selection of these three foci for human endeavors is based (as I believe most honest ethnographic explorations are) on a partially serendipitous, partially plotted blend of what fascinated me, what presented itself readily to me, and what I realized I had better not ignore if I wanted to stay true to my larger project. That ultimately was to write a good book about a qasba and its relationship to the rural that surrounds it.13 Each of these clusters of activity—ecological, social, and commercial—offers a panoramic window onto rural and urban interchanges, fusions, transformations, oscillations.
Environmental protection, marriage, and trade as human projects exist throughout the globe, inflected by locality. Sometimes alone, more often in association with Bhoju and his daughters, I observed, experienced, and queried these projects in Jahazpur. Whether focused on unique instantiations or seeking connective threads among multiple cases, my attempt remains above all to be attentive to myriad locally embedded specificities. Part II thus fleshes out ethnographic explorations of Jahazpur as place in three different ways. These are how to protect and sustain valued environments; how ritually and materially to ensure the future happiness of couples and satisfy the pressures of society; and how to keep one’s business afloat in the unstable world of the market ridden with uncertainties but also with promises. Part II’s chapters represent learning experiences for me as an ethnographer—sometimes tentatively, delicately, blindly groping my way; sometimes racing into the purely unknown, as if on a dare; sometimes beckoned by others, sometimes barging in quite uninvited. Each project I consider also constitutes for participants a kind of activity involving the acquisition of knowledge, the development of strategies, the transformation of selves.
I drew the content of Part I from my whole year’s study and organized the bits and pieces in order to layer content and build up understanding. By contrast, a fieldwork chronology loosely structures Part II. That is, I follow my own learning experiences: the trees predated and overlook this fieldwork, while the river occupied Bhoju and me between Diwali (mid-November) and winter. The wedding was a bright gash in the midst of my research and dominated the brief cold season. The market, my last big focus, we pursued in the relentlessly increasing heat from March into June. There’s a neat circularity too, as the very latest effort to save the river, observed on social media and my most recent return visit in 2015, is above all a shopkeepers’ movement, aligned with ideals of self-improvement within qasba culture. Underlying these ideals is the conviction that an improved environment would also improve business.
Chapter 6 also follows closely from the last chapter of Part I, because one of the wooded hilltops, the first one to which Bhoju called my attention, is protected by the Mautis Minas. Engaging with trees and river has in some ways framed my entire encounter with Jahazpur. The trees brought me there to begin with, drawing me from rural to urban, from village to town, via Malaji’s sacred grove. The river and its travails flowed or trickled into my consciousness only when I heard in the fall of 2010 about a hunger striker’s efforts to save it. Thus Chapter 6 bridges two contexts and eras of my Rajasthan anthropology, juxtaposing successful tree protection and an ongoing struggle for river restoration, asking why the former has been more easily executed than the latter.
In Chapter 7 I practice full participant observation during about a month of preparation