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
Entries
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.
It says something of significance about the kind of place Jahazpur is that Bhoju and I were initially baffled by a very strong contrast between Jahazpur and Ghatiyali. Ghatiyali was the second-largest village in the twenty-seven-village dominion of Sawar. Most people living within that former kingdom, even in the late 1990s and early 2000s, possessed vivid memories or knowledge of the time preceding India’s independence in 1947 when kings had ruled. They particularly recollected and could tell stories about the last king of Sawar, who had died without progeny the same year that India gained freedom from colonial rule. Even those far too young to have actual memories produced stories about Vansh Pradip Singh, a ruler so attentive to the goings-on in his estates that he was said to have personally and literally sniffed out poached game from his ramparts and sent his guards to arrest whoever was cooking it (Gold and Gujar 2002). Moreover, as recently as 2010 a member of the former ruling family who resides at least part of the time in Ghatiyali’s fort won a local democratic election there.
Jahazpur by contrast was located well beyond the olfactory range of rulers whether they were based in Udaipur, Ajmer, or even relatively nearby Shahpura, and whether they were Hindu, Mughal, or British. The pervasive memories of a “time of kings” that we had relied upon for our research on environmental history in the kingdom of Sawar were perplexingly absent here. Jahazpur politics inside the walls is dominated by merchants, Brahmins, and Deshvali Muslims (the three groups that own the most qasba land as well). In greater Jahazpur—the Nagar Palika, or municipality, incorporating twelve hamlets surrounding the town—Minas have put their numbers to work in block voting and triumphed in a series of recent mayoral elections.3
Participation in Jahazpur politics by members of the former ruling class, the Rajputs, is negligible. Mansions belonging to families once connected with royal power are empty, overgrown, and crumbling; no one in the general public seems to know or care where the owners went. Sawar’s fort remains inhabited by the ruling lineage, but Jahazpur’s is in ruins and long ago was stripped of anything valuable that could be removed (except for images of the gods that still abide there and continue to receive worship and service). Rumor had it that Jahazpur fort had been put up for sale by the government. I have not been able to document this assertion, but a few people jokingly proposed that I purchase the ruins and open a heritage hotel. In sum, in contemporary Jahazpur, the decline of Rajput fortunes seemed complete. Those few remaining members of families slightly related to royalty are poor, disempowered, and command scant interest from the public.4
Figure 4. Maps of Rajasthan and Bhilwara District (produced by Joseph W. Stoll).
Bhoju was initially stunned at how few people in Jahazpur could even name the last ruler, and certainly no one spoke of royalty with any kind of affection or reverence, not even with intense hatred. Much of what we did glean through persistent questioning about the former rulers in these parts had to do with dissolute behavior: unsavory alliances, substance abuse, crushing debt. For the most part, these figures from the past were not a live topic of conversation. This could not have presented a greater contrast with our previous experience.
For a month, during which there were predictable preoccupations connected with domestic and bureaucratic arrangements, I flailed around to match my research agenda to my whereabouts. To counter my hesitations, Bhoju initiated some excellent pragmatic steps. First, he rustled up persons willing to be interviewed on a general level about town and place. These interviews, mostly with busy, senior members of Jahazpur’s merchant community, we conducted in the evening after business hours. Bhoju’s two older daughters, meanwhile, were easily persuaded to help me meet and have conversations with neighbor women, a morning enterprise that proved not only productive but pleasant, even as it stimulated a whole new set of concerns around gender and neighborhood (see Chapter 3). My neighbors lived in Santosh Nagar, on the outskirts of town, where we had decided to settle for excellent reasons. But I worried about the need to keep my attention focused on Jahazpur proper, the qasba, “inside the
