Shiptown. Ann Grodzins Gold
no compassion. Between Jahazpur and the Banas River is the pitiless territory. So just go a little farther.’ ” And of course, no sooner do they cross the Banas River than Shravan Kumar becomes the perfect son once again.
Satyabala, a vivacious Brahmin woman who lived in the qasba, had rented rooms in her house to Bhoju Ram and two of his children for several years before Bhoju purchased his own property in Santosh Nagar. I had also stayed with her on one of my earlier visits. She was therefore one of the people we knew best in the qasba. Moreover, Jahazpur was both her natal home and her in-laws’ home, making her a lifelong Jahazpurite and a nice resource in that regard, as many women I interviewed had only moved here after marriage. On one visit I asked her about Jahazpur being a pitiless land, and she launched into the Shravan Kumar story without even mentioning the snake sacrifice. She told it like this:
Once Shravan Kumar was serving his mother and father, by taking them on pilgrimage. He took them throughout Mewar, but when he came to Jahazpur, he asked them for money: “Give me my fare (kiraya).”
His mother and father were both blind and they had nothing to give him, so they said to go forward, and he did, and when they came out from Jahazpur he didn’t ask anymore—and that is why people say this is sinful earth (papi dharti).
One Santosh Nagar neighbor, Ayodhya Vaishnav, was about forty years of age and had scant education. I met her in the company of Bhoju’s two daughters. Ayodhya surprised me by stating early on in our conversation that people like me (that is foreigners, non-Indians) had “more love among yourselves than we do here.”
She then without prompting launched straight into the story of Shravan Kumar or, as she called him, Shravan Beta (Son). “He took his mother and father everywhere,” she told us, “but only near the Nagdi did he ask for money. He asked for it when he came to Pander Road.” Thus embroidering the story in maplike local geography, she related the basic episode and concluded with a flourish: “It is a true story.” I asked her then to go back to the topic of love and explain what she had said earlier. She answered firmly, as if the Shravan Kumar narrative had served to prove her point, “You see, there is more love in your country than there is in Jahazpur.”
Ayodhya’s reference to America serves my purposes as this opening chapter’s final pitiless land telling (we return to Shravan Kumar in Chapter 8). I wish here to emphasize another effort and motif running throughout this book: the two-way gaze, and two-way passages of understanding—or at times misunderstanding. Looking back, I recollect during my first research three decades ago that people in the village of Ghatiyali (less than thirty kilometers from Jahazpur) were sometimes naive enough to believe that American streets were made of glass. At the same time they were severely critical of American culture that shunned its duties to the elderly as well as to children (and that I put my son in boarding school was perfect proof). Many people I met during my earlier village research claimed that my land so rich in possessions lacked love, a quality they insisted was more abundant in India.
So why would Ayodhya, in Jahazpur in 2010, idealize relationships in America? Possibly she wished to emphasize her own bitter assessment of the local: even in the materialistic USA she might have met with more kindness than in pitiless Jahazpur. I learned that Ayodhya had her private troubles, as was the case with most interviewees who agreed with the legends and attributed a genuine harshness to human relationships in Jahazpur. Such people were, I emphasize, in the minority.
By beginning with the pitiless land cycle, and by taking it not only as origin tale but as a kind of chartering mythology, I do not intend in any fashion to take it as valid judgment. Neither do most Jahazpur residents. Interviewees generally related the pitiless land cycle without a lot of reflection or reflexivity. It was simply part of a ready store of local lore, and a query as to whether it were true that Jahazpur had such a nature, or was any worse than other towns, would meet most often with dismissive replies.
However, there were a number, such as Ayodhya Vaishnav, for whom the pitiless land cycle served, as does the Mahabharata itself, to provoke pondering what Gurcharan Das has called “the difficulty of being good” (2010). That is, some people use the tales to rethink their own life experiences and even their own actions. Some people may conclude that snake slaughter is not the answer after all. As the young Vaishnav man was so determined to make us understand, snakes demand respect; if humans ignore this, retribution follows. Moreover, one’s aged parents must not be charged the fare even though it taxes you—financially, emotionally, and physically—to care for them.
Most of the time the following chapters engage the everyday. Jahazpur’s origin legends and the ways people interpret them reveal that the everyday may be stippled with troublesome snakes, heartless relatives, vengeance, and cupidity. Except for the snakes, we could say the same about anywhere on earth. My intention is to emphasize throughout this book that the everyday is equally wondrous in manifestations of concern, curiosity, hospitality, solidarity, integrity. This is my ethnographic version of the free newspaper I sometimes pick up in Ithaca called Positive News.
In Ghatiyali in 1980 village people often told me I was far too bholi—naive and gullible. Many anthropologists in these turbulent times provide accounts of violence, conflict, and suffering, and I read and teach their work with enormous admiration and even awe.11 In claiming my calling to report on easier matters I certainly acknowledge my lack of aptitude and appetite for painful stuff. But I also argue simply that it is good to know not only the worst of which human beings are capable, but to document some of the ways and modes humans’ everyday actions resist or temper the influence of pitiless soil on which we all may find at times that we have (inadvertently or deliberately) placed a foot. One remedy, as the old blind parents advised, is to lift that foot up again. There is some comfort in knowing that the land without compassion is bounded.
Chapter 2
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Five Gates and a Window
From the remote time when walled towns and royal strongholds were first built it was instinctive for men to attribute anagogical, allegorical and topological meanings to gateways. (Smith 1978:10)
I first arrived for a long-term fieldwork spell in Jahazpur on 5 August 2010. I was sixty-three and hardly a novice. Over a period of time extending back more than thirty years I had pursued diverse anthropological projects in this region of Rajasthan. Moreover, I had already spent several nights in Jahazpur and met a number of people there during three consecutive summer visits in 2006, 2007, and 2008. My aim now was to study the nature of small-town life in North India in what I planned would be a wide-ranging, if far from comprehensive, fashion. I had proposed to ground my topic by looking at three specific types of places: neighborhoods, shops, and shrines. These were all around me, in delightful if daunting abundance. Even so, methodological avenues eluded me. How to begin finding meaningful patterns in everyday routes and activities?
Once again, I was working collaboratively with Bhoju Ram Gujar, but only when his schedule as a full-time middle-school headmaster and dedicated government servant permitted. He fitted my work as best he could into the cracks and crevices of what seemed to me to be an inordinately busy and complicated life.1 Bhoju himself, while eager as ever to embark upon ethnographic research, did not radiate his usual confidence as we confronted this vast new space of investigation.
In the past when we had worked together in villages, Bhoju considered himself fully cognizant of, and comfortable in, the social milieu; his gifts as an interlocutor were unparalleled. Now, well-educated and well-traveled though he was, Bhoju remained a village-born person only lately come to town. Although it wasn’t in his nature to declare it, I could tell that Jahazpur society was partially mysterious to him, almost as opaque in some respects as it was to me.2 An economy ruled by trade, not farming, was certainly new territory for both of us. Some important groups here—for example, the former butchers and the former wine sellers—were not present at all in Ghatiyali, Bhoju’s birthplace and my previous fieldwork base.
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