invested in the celebration of their miracle-working pir (A. Gold 2013). All other Muslims with whom I conversed, whether in an interview situation or casually, honored Gaji Pir with enthusiasm. Many loved to tell story after story about his miraculous boons.
I persuaded Bhoju (who was acutely sensitive to any potentially delicate or offensive topic when dealing with Muslims) to ask one Deshvali community leader, a professional educator, whether there were any Muslims in town who objected to the practice of revering the tombs of saints. He answered, emphatically, “There are no such people in Jahazpur; it is Jahazpur’s good fate [shobhagya, a Sanskrit word] that there are no such people here yet.” His “yet” (ab tak) reflected an awareness that elsewhere on the subcontinent this might not be the case and that Jahazpur itself might not be spared the arrival of these views.
Jahazpur is by and large a successfully plural place, with a strong Muslim community and an important multistranded sense of commonality among Hindus and Muslims in terms of possessing shared history and traditions as well as contemporary interests in keeping the peace. Among Shiptown’s thematic gateways, Mosque Gate stands for my conviction that Jahazpur qasba is a place where strongly held religious identities coexist not just in mutual tolerance but in mutual regard. It also stands for what Hasan and Roy (2005) call “living together separately.” The new Mosque Gate looks much like an Arabic gate and may speak of this separation in the language of stone. But it also speaks simply of community pride, of the urge to build and display one’s identity, which Jahazpur’s Muslims, Hindus, and Jains all have in common. Thus the imposing proud structure of New Mosque Gate and the egalitarian humility of the idgah may be held in one thought, as all of one piece.
Hanuman Gate: Ecological Passages
Hanuman Gate leads beyond Nau Chauk outside the qasba walls in the direction of Gautam Ashram, a retreat belonging to a Brahmin lineage used as a site for social and religious events. There, it is said, one can still see and decipher an inscription referring to the site as Yagyapur, although a painted signboard for the ashram normally obscures the old lettering. There is also an old temple to Hanuman here, accounting for the gate’s name. Not far from Hanuman Gate is a Muslim saint’s tomb, as well as a separate Muslim shrine of the type known as chilla—not a tomb but rather the location of a saintly person’s ascetic practices, especially fasting. Jahazpur’s chilla is dedicated to Gagaron Baba, whose well-known tomb in another city Bhoju and I had visited in 2006 (A. Gold 2013). The chilla’s wall and the ashram wall are contiguous. When Jahazpur’s chairman set out to redirect the gutters and keep sewage out of the Nagdi River, at least as it flowed through the town, objections made by the communities attached to the two sites were among the difficulties he encountered. The new gutters flowing with pollution would have to pass uncomfortably close to the boundaries of sacred sites—ashram and chilla—a situation ultimately ameliorated by the construction of a wall (see Chapter 6).
Hanuman Gate, through which Bhoju and I passed each time we were on our way to update the river’s ever-changing story, serves to evoke environmental issues. More than that, it evokes the unity of human life as bound, in an ever-fluctuating but permanent condition of mutual interdependency, to a geophysical and natural environment. Hanuman as divine monkey appropriately confuses nature/culture binaries and adds an element of uncalculated power (Lutgendorf 2007).
For about two months of my research time Bhoju and I obsessed together on the Nagdi River’s plight. It was definitely the longest (though not the sole) single-mindedly dedicated phase of my Jahazpur fieldwork. Yet I had never intended to study ecology in Jahazpur. The river itself was not on my agenda, nor was it in my line of sight when I began fieldwork. Because of the garbage I didn’t actually want to see it. We came upon the struggle to save the Nagdi in a roundabout way, through listening to tales of local politics. Years earlier, an interest in small-scale ecological successes effected by divine power brought me to Jahazpur. This was long before I had any interest whatsoever in urban ecologies writ large. On Jahazpur’s hilltops are two well-protected “sacred groves,” each surrounding a shrine, Hindu and Muslim, respectively. Malaji, a regional hero-god of the Hindu Mina community, is housed in a dazzling white temple. Near the fort is the revered tomb of Gaji Pir, a Muslim saint who was also a warrior, eyecatching with its glowing aquamarine wash. Jahazpur’s hilltop shrines are important sites of religious power and community which are lovingly tended.
Stories and practices associated with environments under divine protection offer some promise or potential for imagining benign relations with the natural world (Centre for Science and Environment 2003; Kent 2013; Gold 2010). Taken together, river and hills reveal the thoroughly interlocked nature of urban landscapes with twenty-first-century environmental issues. Hanuman, the monkey god, and the real monkeys that range through Jahazpur seem appropriate mascots for passages into and out from endangered ecologies.
Window Gate: Ethnographic Passages
Window Gate provides an apt metaphor for my own fieldwork practice, which often involved choosing those passages that were small, unheroic, without fanfare (as I never wished to call attention to myself).32 We found Window Gate only when directed there. No parades march through it, nor indeed could they.
How did I encounter Jahazpur? I recorded about 140 interviews. I took so many photographs I cannot even attempt to count them. I drank, by my estimate, more than fifteen hundred cups of tea at other people’s houses, not counting the tea we brewed at home. Anthropologists are consumers and contribute to the economy as well as fattening on sugary hospitality. Mostly, Daniel and I did our shopping in Jahazpur qasba. We patronized the fruit and vegetable vendors at the bus stand almost daily and bought supplies of spices, oil, sugar, raisins, and so forth from shops within the qasba. Soaps and toothpaste, bangles and braid holders, slip-on shoes for winter and rubber thong sandals for the rainy season, cough drops and vitamins galore, a shawl and a sweater and a cotton-stuffed quilt for winter, a cooler (our biggest market purchase) when the hot season rolled around. So many lemons, so much garlic, cases of soda water!
We subscribed to the Hindi Rajasthan Patrika with its Bhilwara District insert full of local color; it was delivered every morning along with a half kilogram of dairy milk. We hired a cook for a while. She was an angry young woman and eventually quit without warning (in spite of the whole neighborhood’s outspoken conviction that we overpaid her outrageously). But before she left she taught me some things I needed to know.
Sometimes the routine of fieldwork took second place to hospitality. We were visited by one of my graduate students whom everyone mistook for my son; to make matters more confusing he was followed not so many weeks later by my actual son with his fiancée (but we told everyone she was his wife); then my niece and great-niece; my husband’s two sisters and one brother-in-law; my younger son; and a whole busload of Syracuse students (who only stayed one afternoon). Thus we made a bit of an impression on Jahazpur; pretty much every female visitor, no matter what her age, was inappropriately dressed by Jahazpur lights.
For about the first eight months of my time in Jahazpur I felt so privileged, so lucky. Except for a terrible worry about my sister’s health that began in November, I was perfectly happy. Released from the classroom, from dull and dulling meetings, from all academic obligations—those are the things I was glad to be without. What was I glad to be with? First, to have Bhoju’s family around the corner, for they are like my family. Second, to have embarked on a vast project, taking me back to my dissertation research days when I lived in Ghatiyali; to know that anything that happened was worth writing down, that every conversation held gemlike glimmers of the unattainable whole; that even if I couldn’t keep perfectly straight who lived in which house and who was married to whose brother, I was nonetheless absorbing a whole new world of sociability.
My voice will not vanish from the chapters that follow. Window Gate opens into every chapter. For this introduction to my ethnographic practice, I need to say a little more about its collaborative nature and
