fenced square, although presumably Sukh Devji’s recruitment into the British Army did. All the other events of public import described here take place around the edge of that park. The actual space within the square offers another complicated story from recent times of which I am certainly missing some key elements, but which nonetheless I shall attempt to sketch. The fenced center of Nau Chauk was somewhat unkempt during most of my fieldwork. There were some trees and other greenery including flowering vines inside, but the ground was dry and brown and the space unattractive. Sometime in 2011 all that began to change. While I was still living there the town chairman (mayor), influenced doubtless by some patronage group, had the interior spruced up and planted with flowers. He had a decorative fountain and a stone lion’s head on a pillar installed there. Later a cardboard image of Maharana Pratap (ruled Mewar 1572–97) appeared.
Over a year after I departed, a proper stone statue of Maharana Pratap was installed inside Nau Chauk with festive pomp including rains of rose petals. Although locals such as Bhoju Ram were drawn to participate, the event organizers and sponsors were part of a statewide organization of Rajput patriots; few hailed from Jahazpur where, as already noted, Rajput power has thoroughly dwindled. The entire transformative process was marred (I heard after the fact) by minor but prickly “communal” incidents expressive of rancor. These included small vandalisms to the new fence followed by disputes over who would pay the cost of repair for said vandalisms.
I confess that Maharana Pratap, as an icon of Rajasthan’s glorious martial history, has never warmed my heart. I would prefer to refuse ethnographic responsibility for reporting on a development that happened, after all, more than a year beyond my fieldwork’s conclusion. But there are two things I must add to update my account of Nau Chauk. First, on my most recent visit in 2015 the space inside the fence was very nicely maintained, with green grass and colorful flowers pleasing to the eye. Yet it is hardly a public park in the Euro-American sense, designated for democratized enjoyment of its pleasant features. Nau Chauk is fenced and the gate kept locked. Second, in spite of the local Muslim community’s objection to the statue, and Hindu rebuttals, there has been a kind of reconciliation, at least on the surface. The taziya continues to spend the nights before Muharram in its usual place near the small park with its new statue. For the time being, Jahazpur’s inner spirit of “live and let live” prevails.
Bindi Gate: Sociological Passages
In late August 2010, well before my systematic tour of the gates, Bhoju and I made our first foray into the leather workers’ neighborhood inside the walls.
Then we drove through Bindi Gate and into the Regar mohalla, where firewood is stacked in huge piles, where fans don’t run, where I sweated for the hour of the interview. There was arati [ritual of circling lights before an image] going on at the Ram Devji temple, and the children crowded round me in an amazingly non-Jahazpur way, more like village children. The arati was extensive and beautiful; I took pictures, the children wanted to be in the pictures and nearly wrenched the camera from my hand in their excitement to see themselves in the small screen.
Then we want to the home of a Regar teacher whose old father talked to us. I appreciated the respect the younger man gave to the older, letting his father’s interview finish, before he began speaking to us with eloquence about the disadvantages faced by his community, even in recent years: the slights they suffered in schools, as workers, when bridegrooms go to villages, at tea stalls, and worst of all the story of the Ambedkar statue purchased 6 years ago but not yet installed due to high caste objections.19 (field journal, 29 August 2010)
Bindi Gate may be the most dilapidated of the old doorways, and its part of town feels the most “villagey,” as my journal exclaims. Children are more numerous and more of them are wearing torn T-shirts, while few dress in the ornate, costly jeans favored by the qasba’s middle-class youth. The Regar children’s excited behavior was likely indicative of less training in the disciplines of the schoolroom, where the first lesson taught is how to sit, that is, how to submit their small bodies to an ideal of order (doubtless inherited from the British; see Kumar 2007:25–48).
When I initially inquired what the name “Bindi” signified, people told me that the gate once led to a village called Bindi that “no longer existed.” As it turns out, Bindi village still does exist in Jahazpur tehsil (subdistrict). The 2011 Census records it as inhabited by seventeen families with a population that is 94 percent Scheduled Tribe.20 Although Bindi is not numbered among the twelve hamlets incorporated into Jahazpur municipality, it shares with them a preponderant Mina identity. Yet not that long ago, before Independence when Jahazpur belonged to Mewar, Bindi was a “revenue village,” defined as an administrative unit of the smallest order. At that time, members of the ruling Rajput community lived there, doubtless in order to collect taxes and perform other low-level administrative functions. Even in its heyday, and despite its giving its name to one of the three qasba gates to the exterior, I suspect we might safely presume that Bindi was never a plum posting.
Looking out from Bindi Gate you can see the old fort on the hilltop. Turning inward you find that those neighborhoods nearest to this gate belonged to leather workers (SC), lathe-turning woodworkers, and boatmen (the latter both categorized OBC, “other backward classes”). Among these communities, unlike the former butchers with their reputation of collective improvement, it seems only a few of their members have prospered in these changing times.
The Kir (boatmen) keep boats in their street as emblems of identity (and these are still in occasional seasonal use as for harvesting water chestnuts). Kewat is their dignified caste name, after the fabled boatman from the Ramayana epic who took Ram, Sita, and Lakshman across the river when the three divine beings made their way from the palace of Ayodhya to their fated forest exile. New bridges and dams combined with draught would be the main combined causes of decline for the traditional work of boatmen. The lathe-turning carpenters (Kairathi) have seen their business markedly dwindle with the lowered demand for wooden implements, including toys, for which the town of Jahazpur was once well known (Census of India 1994). Several Kairathi families moved away from Jahazpur, having sold their homes to Sindhi merchants who now populate their neighborhood, I was told. In 2011 there were just two active Kairathi workshops infused with the sense of an accomplished yet moribund artisan identity. I say moribund because fathers deliberately were not apprenticing their sons but rather devoting familial resources to training the new generation for alternative careers.
Leather workers retain neither mementos (as the Kir do their boats) nor active workshops (as the Kairathi still possess) that would bring to mind their own stigmatizing past work of tanning hides. Many have gone into construction. A fair number of leather workers are government servants and have ascended to middle-class status, at least economically. Affirmative action (called “reservations” in India) supports higher percentages of government service jobs for members of SC communities, but some appear more able to find advantage in these programs than others. I found, when interviewing persons close to the bottom of the old ritual caste hierarchy, expressions of gratification that much had indeed changed, and simultaneously of anger that change was maddeningly incomplete.
This is not a book about social organization, social hierarchy, or power. I will not make a list of all the castes that live in Jahazpur, nor could I with total accuracy even if I wished to do so. No chapter here is devoted to compiling or analyzing the many statements about social hierarchy that in fact I did record. Mostly I recorded them because Bhoju Ram, who assisted in about two-thirds of my interviews, inserted into most of them routinely, and without my ever requesting that he do so, one or more queries about caste. I privately brooded over what seemed to me to be his tiresome fascination, or his old-fashioned sense of what might be significant. References to caste in the interviews would have been far fewer had I been the only one asking questions. In my interviews with women, where I controlled the lines of inquiry, there is almost nothing about the birth-given social hierarchy. When the conversation departed, as it often would, from my own directed interests it followed theirs: domestic politics, neighborhood quarrels, food.
Sumit
