suggested that “caste’s religious strand has frayed away but the one binding it to the exercise of power is thicker than ever” (Guha 2013:211). Guha and others see caste today as something akin to ethnicity. I appreciate that turn in the recent literature on India’s social hierarchy. Basically it lays stress on inherited identity as it infuses sense of self and as it is used instrumentally in relation to others both politically and professionally. Such active uses of birth-given identity or rank certainly are among the circumstances of life in contemporary Jahazpur.
Bhoju is my collaborative research partner, not an assistant paid only to do my bidding. I therefore held my tongue and respected his interests. Indeed I thought it might represent an integral feature of the village-to-town transition that I seek to highlight in these pages that Bhoju, himself a participant in that transition, thought in terms of caste when living in a place where it had genuinely lost certain kinds of salience. People in Jahazpur readily, and for the most part unhesitatingly, respond to questions framed in a language of caste with answers similarly framed. It is not that the caste framework had become alien to them. But it is, I would argue, not their first way of looking at things. Only very rarely did an interviewee initiate this topic.
Throughout this book I make observations using the language of caste. When I write in Chapter 3 about Santosh Nagar, I talk about a Brahmin woman and her status as a self-proclaimed ritual expert, often but not always valued by the women from agricultural communities who predominated in the groups that gathered around her at collective rituals. When I write about processions in Chapter 4, I speak of the leather workers’ struggle to be included in the Jal Jhulani parade and the rather anticlimactic if satisfying result: normalization of their participation (as if the resistance had been more knee-jerk than of any heartfelt discriminatory depths). When I write about the market in Chapter 8 I emphasize roles played by former butchers and former wine sellers, and it seems to matter who they are “by caste.” Caste identity literally leaps out at a stranger; here as throughout much of Rajasthan, caste names are used as last names, including Gujar, Khatik, Kir, Mina, Regar, Vaishnav, and so forth (see Pandey 2013:208–10). But caste is not the dominant subject of my book, and I would venture further to argue that caste is not the dominant subject of life in contemporary Jahazpur.21
Bindi Gate, by evoking the old revenue village and the contemporary struggles of leather workers, carpenters, and boatmen, leads us in two directions: outward to the fiscal bindings of town with larger units of governance including taxes and benefits for the poor; inward to the intersections and interactions of discrete but variously integrated communities, to the histories of political and ritual struggles for power and dignity, and to the ways that governance enables, obstructs, or ignores these struggles.
Mosque Gate: Pluralistic Passages
An archway traditionally bestows honor and respect, creating a passage simultaneously conferring and confirming status. We see this easily in the plentitude of temporary cloth arches set up to welcome the Ram Lila procession, a distinguished visitor, or a wedding party. Mosque Gate is an internal gate. It never served to segregate the Muslim population but rather to mark a sacred area before the doorway to the mosque and thus to set apart and to honor the mosque itself.22
We learned from Mahavir Singh (one of just two Rajput interviewees) that long ago the Rajput neighborhood also had an arched gateway, as did a few other neighborhoods belonging to more important merchant and Brahmin lineages. With the decline of residents most invested in maintaining them, these structures had been torn down when it became expedient to make way for additional construction of more useful edifices. Small but vividly blue, Mosque Gate, in contrast, was in fine condition during my stay in 2010–11. On revisits, I noted that the old deep blue gate I had always thought very attractive had been allowed to deteriorate, while an imposing, tall, new Masjid Gate of stone blocks was constructed.
A number of persons, when pressed to list the characteristics of a qasba during both recorded interviews and casual conversations, would begin with a single defining attribute: diversity. This comprised a multiplicity of castes and secondarily of religions. One of the hallmarks of urbanization is diversity; and with diversity arrives the necessity of pluralism. This observation would certainly be deemed a truism in urban studies. However, here I follow the lead of Gérard Fussman, who codirected an Indo-French collaborative investigation of history and culture in Chanderi, a qasba in Madhya Pradesh state. Nearly the same size as Jahazpur, Chanderi, like Jahazpur, has a mixed population of Hindus, Muslims, and Jains. I summarize Fussman’s points in a condensed paraphrase: The passage between a village population and a town population entails a veritable rupture corresponding to the transformation from a population which is relatively homogeneous and an economy which is essentially pastoral or agricultural, to a population and an economy which have become much more diversified, and where commerce, manufacturing and political-administrative functions all play roles of more or less increased importance (Fussman et al. 2003, vol. 1, 67). Places such as Jahazpur, and other North Indian qasbas including Chanderi, present this “veritable rupture” on a smallish scale and thus perhaps with particular vividness. Just to run your eyes over the styles of clothing visible at Jahazpur’s busy bus stand, or worn by those peopling its crowded market streets, is to observe a diversity that is locally so run-of-the-mill as to attract no notice whatsoever.
Only the foreign outsider finds the scene striking and wonders at the proximities of men in Western shirts and pants, some bareheaded, some capped; some bearded, some clean-shaven; other men in dhotis or kurta pajamas, some heads adorned with Rajasthan’s characteristically bright red or multicolored turbans. Women’s dress also varies by class and age and religion: some in saris, many in long skirts and blouses covered by the Rajasthani orhni or “wrap”; many in kamiz-salwar, which are worn by Muslim women of all ages and among Hindus and Jains by younger, unmarried teens or young women returned to visit their natal homes; a sprinkling of upper-class teenage girls in stylishly fitted jeans and T-shirts. The latter reflects not just urbanization but the influence of television. Most adult females still keep their heads covered, but it is not uncommon to observe a few on any given day who are bareheaded, and readily to conclude they might be teachers, or perhaps visitors from a larger city, NGO workers, or representatives of local, regional, or state government.
Thus a visible everyday mix encompasses rural/urban; Hindu/Muslim; and an array of differences in caste, class, and profession. Do these differences play out in mutual engagement and enrichment, or in fissure, abhorrence, and violence? Throughout most of Jahazpur’s history, it has been the former. The plural nature of Jahazpur was one of the reasons I was drawn to study it. Jain families, here as elsewhere, are successful in business and influential in local politics. Jains add to the diversity of the qasba, but it is the large Muslim population that distinguishes Jahazpur from most Rajasthan towns. As is the case throughout Rajasthan, Hindus are the majority in Jahazpur. But whereas in the state as a whole, Muslims average around 8 percent of the population, inside the walls in the oldest part of Jahazpur qasba I regularly heard estimates as high as 40–45 percent. In the 2011 Census data for Jahazpur municipality, the official breakdown is 73.05 percent Hindu; 25.39 percent Muslim, and 1.45 percent Jain. Given that the municipality includes the all-Mina twelve hamlets, these high estimates for the qasba itself are not terribly exaggerated.23
Mushirul Hasan, in his literary and historical study of qasba life in the eastern Uttar Pradesh region during the colonial era, particularly celebrates qasbati pluralism. He writes that in North Indian qasba culture, “Besides differences and distinctions there were also relationships and interactions…. The stress is therefore on … religious plurality as the reference point for harmonious living” (Hasan 2004:27, 31).
Jahazpur Muslims are divided into various groups, far from homogeneous in terms of ancestry, social class, attitudes, and reputed behaviors. The majority belong to a jati-like community called Deshvali or “of the land.”24
