city of very imposing gates, as one of the most recent examples of cosmos-replicating town planning (1971:440). Wheatley writes: “The city gates, where power generated at the axis mundi flowed out from the confines of the ceremonial complex towards the cardinal points of the compass, possessed a heightened symbolic significance which, in virtually all Asian urban traditions, was expressed in massive constructions whose size far exceeded that necessary for the performance of their mundane functions of granting access and affording defense” (1971:435). It is unlikely that Jahazpur was designed to replicate the cosmos. Still, it is reasonable to conclude that the inspiration for the size and shape of Jahazpur’s Royal Gate was found in one or another of the region’s grander urban spaces. And it is indisputably the case that processions both sacred and secular regularly pass through Royal Gate, making an impressive sight even in the twenty-first century. Surely these processions with their clamorous if temporary claims on public space draw upon that ancient symbolic resonance.
A literal translation for the name of the gate I am calling “Royal” cannot readily be extracted from the Rajasthani-Hindi dictionary. According to Bhoju, Bhavarkala in the local language might awkwardly be rendered into English, putting the pieces together, as the “King’s Grandson’s Big Gate.” When I proposed “Royal” as a convenient gloss, he agreed with some relief, averring that it made perfect sense. Royal Gate’s name is the same as the name of the nearby water reservoir (talab) which has town-wide uses both practical and ritual—the latter including the bathing of gods every Jal Jhulani Gyaras (Jahazpur’s most ambitious and spectacular Hindu festival; see Chapter 4).
Royal Gate is the largest of the gates, so large that within its structure, set into each side of the passageway, are two venerable bangle shops. Commerce, which is the raison d’être of the qasba, thus insinuates its presence into the majesty of the gate itself. Jahazpur’s Royal Gate sees a constant two-way flow of people, animals, handcarts, and motor vehicles. On one side of this massive structure is the bus stand with its constant bustle of noisy ordered chaos. On the other side is the main market. If after entering you veer to the right, you will immediately arrive in Chameli Market, where Muslim-run businesses including meat, fish, and cotton quilts are clustered near the smaller of Jahazpur’s mosques, known as Takiya Mosque.8 Or you can wend more or less directly through the main market, eventually to reach Delhi Gate and pass through to the fenced, open parklike square known as Nau Chauk (discussed below). If you did not stop to chat, browse, or shop—which honestly never happens—you could easily walk the distance between Royal and Delhi Gates, or between the bus stand and Nau Chauk, in about ten minutes.
Figure 6. Looking outward from market to bus stand through Royal Gate, 2015.
Jahazpur’s main market is utterly crammed with shops; the shops themselves are equally crammed with goods. Whether you are in the street or inside a shop there is a feeling of tightness, density, and abundance of merchandise. Perhaps most common are the grocery stores (kirane ki dukan), followed by unstitched cloth, and increasingly popular (although largely for men and children) ready-made clothing. But the market also holds, in random order: shoe stores, photo studios, cookware, toys, electronics, sweets, gold and silver ornaments, stationery and school supplies, a dairy, plastic utensils, “fancy” (cosmetics, bangles, costume jewelry, and other trinkets and finery), supplies for festivals and rituals, and a lot more. There are barbers and tailors, for example, trading in services rather than goods. With just a few exceptions, any and all of life’s everyday necessities as well as its pleasures, comforts, and minor entertainments may be obtained inside the walls. There are no restaurants, but the largest sweet shop has a few tables. There is no cinema, but to my amazement, late in my stay, I was led down a few steps into a videogame parlor, a site I had passed countless times but simply never seen. I have noted just one pharmacy inside the market; the rest are conveniently lined up in a row near the hospital, which is down the road that leads to Santosh Nagar well beyond the bus stand and far outside the walls.
Between the two sides of Royal Gate, the bus stand, and the market, there is both continuity of merchandise and contrasts. Besides transport, the central and most vital feature of Jahazpur bus stand’s central space is the produce market; this space houses the vast majority of stalls conducting a flourishing produce trade—a wide variety of fresh fruits and vegetables in season. Some of the same items are available from small, individual gardener-vendors at the other end of the market, outside Delhi Gate at Nau Chauk. None of the grocery stores inside the walls sells fresh produce, although they do deal in garlic, onions, chilies, and other spices.
Outside Royal Gate at the bus stand we encounter, appropriately for a transport hub, various ways that the town of Jahazpur is hooked into the world around it. Obvious are those actual moving vehicles—buses, trucks, jeeps, and cars for hire—absorbing and disgorging passengers. Ever increasing in number are parked motorcycles, still the vehicle of choice for men with jobs or businesses that have endowed them with middle-class status but whose means are still limited.9 A car is not simply a one-time investment of capital; to drive one regularly requires outlays for petrol that far outstrip the cost of running a motorcycle. Nonetheless, private cars are also multiplying in numbers, and an automobile showroom was the latest business to arrive in the town some years after my fieldwork time.
The Hotel Prakash with its colorful facade stands out on one side of the bus stand. I understand decent, simple accommodations may be had there, but I never did enter its premises. There are places at the bus stand where you can eat a cooked meal, but they are not considered to be proper restaurants. Rather they are dhabas (roadside eateries), in that they have no menus and, like the Hotel Prakash, would rarely if ever be patronized by women or families.10 Another flourishing business is the fully stuffed “tent house” which rents out all the requisite hospitality accoutrements for a wedding or funeral feast, including the tent itself, cookware, and bedding for guests. There is a jam-packed store I privately called the “everything” store, where soap, toothpaste, vitamins, padlocks, cookies, undershirts, socks, and countless other useful items may be acquired, although you must know what you need and ask for it.
Ranged around the bus stand’s periphery are the high-speed Internet place, the bank, the cash machines (two of them), and several mobile phone recharge shops also offering fax services and other forms of telecommunication. (Some dispensers of similar services are also found in the interior market.) Also located at the bus stand, doing business with Jahazpur residents and villagers, are agents selling insurance, notable because their shops appear strangely vacant in contrast to the densely packed merchandise on display in most stores. Insurance, however invisible, sells.
One of the town’s oldest sweet shops, where we often purchased our favorite “milk cakes,” is located there. Next to the sweet shop is a paan stall; its owner reminisced about bygone days when lengthy lines of customers waited patiently to savor his special betel leaf concoctions. Now they may prefer to purchase inferior prepackaged substitutes at a far lower cost, lacking flavor, complexity, and art. Fried snacks including delicious kachoris are available at the bus stand. In the hot season there is a sugar-cane juice press in constant operation, producing lovely frothy green drinks; next to it, run by the same family, a year-round stall features cigarettes and such. The shops at the bus stand in the vicinity of Royal Gate continue to expand. The municipality profits from opening up space for the construction of new stalls to house additional businesses; two rows were under way in 2011.
If everything described thus far could easily apply to hundreds or even thousands of small-town bus stands in South Asia (and likely other parts of the developing world as well), Jahazpur’s bus stand also has a distinctive landscape, tapping the town’s particular histories of devotion and struggle. These permanent sites and moveable events reflect pan-Indian as well as local traditions. The Tejaji shrine, dedicated to an epic regional hero-god with the power to cure snakebites, is located right here.11 The Ram Lila stage is set up here in advance of Dashera—the
