as the local phrase went.
We were into September, and there was plenty of daylight to spare. Bhoju’s school was still on the hot season schedule, so he normally returned fairly early in the afternoon. Bhoju suggested that we survey the built landscape, especially those landmarks or places in which history was embedded. Of course, I had been several times up to the fort on the hill for the hike, the views, and to visit the tomb of Gaji Pir and adjacent Muslim shrines. But now we would tour the flats systematically and visit the old qasba gates. I had already passed in and out of the grandest gate, the one connecting the bus stand to the market, countless times; but I had taken only sporadic note of the others.
Figure 5. Hand-drawn map of Jahazpur, selected sites (original by Bhoju Ram Gujar, redesigned and produced by Joseph W. Stoll).
Although portions of the old ramparts are no longer standing, Jahazpur’s market and residences were originally contained within a fully walled area. Five major doorways remain intact, three of which lead to the exterior; another opens on an important outdoor square, and another marks the significant Muslim presence within Jahazpur qasba and sets apart the entrance to the mosque as sacred space (Bianca 2000). Lastly, there is a small gate to the exterior, more a window than a doorway. This “Window Gate” was regularly included when our most thorough informants enumerated ways to enter and exit the qasba. That made a total, you might say, of five and a half gates—or as I have put it in my chapter title, five gates and a window.5
We had already conducted some interviews with elderly people whose memories reached back into the 1940s, and there would be many more. We heard repeatedly that right up to Independence, the gates were locked at night, some manned by watchmen. For industrious farmers who lived in the town but farmed in the surrounding countryside, the walls and locked gates could become major inconveniences. I don’t know when the walls were constructed, exactly. But the process of walling market towns to protect from robbers appears to have been a nineteenth-century process elsewhere in the region.6 At certain seasons, farmers must work long past dusk. They were forced to sleep in their fields. Even if a watchman might allow a human to climb through a small window set within the massive door, the big doorways through which livestock might pass were kept closed throughout the night.
These practices were explained to us repeatedly as intended to protect the town with its goods from thieves and wild animals. The wall portions that are still standing have signs of past military functions (slits through which rifles or arrows could be shot). However, although some notations in historical accounts mention battles involving Jahazpur’s fort on the hill, I found neither written nor oral traces of battles around the town itself.
Bhoju and I toured all the gates by motorcycle, me in my usual sidesaddle position behind him. This gave us a happy sense of continuity with our previous successful research in the twenty-seven-village kingdom of Sawar, much of which relied on similar if more grueling motorcycle excursions (Gold and Gujar 2002). It also provided a feeling of current accomplishment. At each gate we disembarked, and I took photographs. When we looked at them later on the computer, I failed to identify all the images correctly. To my recalcitrant brain, with its unusually weak visual recognition skills, three of the six gates were somehow indistinguishable. So we took another round. Frustrated with my deficiencies in visual memory, I digitally pasted my photographs into a document with notes on each gate, cramming my geography lessons.
I knew that however irrelevant the now perpetually open gates seemed today, the life of the qasba had once been channeled through them. I knew I needed to get the layout of Jahazpur. People and their stories, true and mythic, have always been my most passionate ethnographic calling. As such they trump not just architecture but politics, economics, institutions, and theory. This is not to say that I deny the many ways material and invisible structures of power condition the human tales I gather; it is rather a question of what takes precedence in my writing, and in my fieldwork practice too. I was pleased to see a monkey striding along the top of Hanuman Gate, an entry named for a nearby temple dedicated to Hanuman, the monkey deity beloved as Lord Rama’s loyal companion.
I lead readers into Shiptown (aka Sacrifice City) via five gates and a window. I present these entrances as specific, named, located, visible, solid structures. Equally I use them metonymically as contiguous with particular themes and topics running through this book. Each physical gate offers passages in two directions. Each metonymical gate stretches into key elements of my ethnography and may equally be taken as double-faced in that it intentionally links the world of Jahazpur, as far as I was able to participate in or learn about it, with the world of anthropology and South Asian studies, in which I dwell professionally and intellectually.7
Walls, gates, and windows are comforting frames, providing simultaneously apprehensions of containment/protection and access/visibility. The gates are inarguably emblematic of the place Jahazpur, and I deploy each gate to open up one or a set of related themes that readers will encounter in Shiptown. The matchup of gate to theme or subject, as sketched here, is inevitably loose. Nonetheless, I propose that the suggestive affinities are strong enough to sustain a set of topics central to this book and thus to suggest to readers particular kinds of passage.
None of the six built gates or the six conceptual pathways to and from Shiptown posed here is exactly congruent with the content of the six chapters to follow. However, the introductory sections, or entries, that comprise the remainder of Chapter 2 will resonate most strongly in specific additional chapters (as indicated parenthetically below, with the fullest convergence listed first):
1. Royal Gate (Bhanvarkala Gate): Commercial passages (Chapters 8, 4)
2. Delhi Gate: Historical passages (Chapters 5, 4)
3. Bindi Gate: Sociological passages (Chapters 4, 5)
4. Mosque Gate: Pluralistic passages (Chapters 4, 8)
5. Hanuman Gate: Ecological passages (Chapter 6)
5½. Window Gate: Ethnographic passages (Chapters 3, 7)
Those larger themes suggested by passages through the gates are woven throughout the whole text of this book as they are woven throughout life in Jahazpur. All of them characterize aspects of passages between rural and urban lives and livelihoods—this book’s overarching and underlying subject.
Walls no longer contain the place called Jahazpur, if they ever did. Of the chapters to follow not a single one takes place only inside the walls, and three are set almost totally outside them. And yet, the walled qasba is Jahazpur. Nor was Bhoju mistaken in giving significance to the gates. As is frequently the case, I am following his lead or am propelled on my way by his polite push from behind.
Royal Gate: Commercial Passages
In many regions of the world and many eras of human history, gateways carry a set of meanings related to political, economic, and cosmological power.
