a good opening in this description to get at local history, I said, “I heard this place was called Bhutkhera.” Saraswati, who made no pretense of appreciating her place of residence, answered, “For me, even today it is still Bhutkhera. When they started selling plots here, they named it “Santosh Nagar,” so it would strike people as good.” (She digressed then from local history to speak scornfully of how only weak-minded people, unlike herself, were afraid of ghosts.)
Kalu Singh, the retired Mina who had returned to Jahazpur after an adventurous working life and whose views I cited in the introduction, described Santosh Nagar before he built his house. He said that thirty-five years ago, “you couldn’t even get here, there was no road, nothing! There was only jungle, and thorn bushes; Bhils would gather wood and sell it for fuel. When there was still royalty in Jahazpur, horses and camels belonging to the rulers grazed in the jungle right here where Santosh Nagar is today.” The Bhil are an ST group that historically lived off of forest products.7
As it approaches the end of the colony where Bhoju’s family lived and where my husband and I resided, Santosh Nagar Road becomes known as Ghanta Rani Road, for once past town it leads a few kilometers farther to the regionally famous goddess shrine of Ghanta Rani (Valley Queen)—a place I had first visited in 1981 when studying regional pilgrimage. Ghanta Rani was near enough that her Jahazpur devotees told me they sometimes made round-trip foot pilgrimages, barefoot, in a single day. On monthly dates special to the goddess, jeeps and trolleys overflowing with pilgrims passed by on their way to Ghanta Rani. Her annual fair drew huge throngs of devotees.8
Just beyond Santosh Nagar, a few minutes’ walk further in the direction of Ghanta Rani, another housing development, already named Shiv Colony, is coming into being. Plots had been surveyed and sold, and by the time Daniel and I left in June 2011, a few houses were going up. But many of the plots had been purchased as real estate investments and remained empty as late as 2015, perhaps indicating that Jahazpur was not growing as fast as some expected. Another reason given to me for the slow pace of Shiv Colony becoming populated is that investors, or speculators, were biding their time, convinced that the price of land would only go higher. Still, some families have begun to settle there, and power and water hook-ups are available for the new plots.
During our fieldwork year, Dan and I liked to stroll through and beyond Shiv Colony in the cool of the evening. Once past the empty plots or scattered construction sites, where sometimes a worker greeted us, we encountered only goatherds and shepherds who daily take small flocks out to forage, ranging across the uncultivated, rocky grazing lands that characterize the landscape on this side of Jahazpur qasba: a source of fodder, firewood from thorny mesquite, and little else.
Bhoju bought his home in Santosh Nagar in 2007. The first time I visited, that same summer, when all the interior paint was new, small representations of Ganesh, the god of beginnings rendered in bright orange paint, were still visible above every doorway in the house. They had been painted for the ceremonial inauguration of the family’s new lives as home-owning townspeople. Three years later, at the beginning of August 2010, my husband and I settled in a rented flat just one street over from where Bhoju’s family lived. We had agreed with Bhoju’s suggestion that we rent in this area and not seek housing in the heart of Jahazpur qasba, a decision finalized in a single day that profoundly impacted my fieldwork and shaped this book, for better or worse. Bhoju had scouted potential rentals in advance of our arrival. He conducted us to three or four possibilities the day after we reached town. All of these were within a few blocks of his own house.
The overriding, important reason for staying where we did was to be close, a neighbor, to Bhoju and his family. I could see their rooftop from my rooftop and this pleased us all. At this time all three of Bhoju’s daughters, not yet married although their engagements were fixed, lived in Jahazpur while pursuing their education. One son was in boarding school (which he disliked) not far down the Devli road. The youngest son lived with Bhoju’s wife and mother in their village home in Ghatiyali. Except during the protracted season of the wedding (Chapter 7) these three significant family members were not often present.
There was one more reasonably weighty justification for positioning myself outside the walls while studying the qasba: physical and psychological comfort. It was much easier to find commodious rooms and relatively more (if far from absolutely) private space by settling in this newer area where plots and homes were simply larger. In terms of ethnographic work, privacy is not always a desideratum; my earlier fieldwork experiences were often richly abetted by exposure, permeability. Having an unintrusive nature, not at all well suited for a career in anthropology, being intruded upon by others is actually good for me. However, my husband, whose company I dearly value, had come with me. He was finishing a book manuscript and needed a quiet place to work, a long day’s journey from his main research site in Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh (D. Gold 2015).
Figure 10. View of rooftops and street where author lived in Santosh Nagar; woman carrying firewood; motorbikes.
Dan and I resided in our Santosh Nagar flat through the middle of June 2011, for the better part of a year. We had two inner rooms with doors—one our bedroom and the other a shared study with two small writing desks obtained locally, and two desk chairs purchased on an emergency run to Jaipur when we realized our aging backs were in deep trouble. We had one Internet card and it only worked on Dan’s machine, and then with a slowmotion quality that felt like the virtual equivalent of walking in rubber boots through a sea of molasses. Our accommodations also included a small kitchen with sink and shelves, in which we installed a typical two-burner stovetop fueled by a gas cylinder (normally rationed but magically obtained for us by friends through channels into which we discreetly refrained from inquiring). We also had a sitting and dining space with two plastic chairs, a plastic coffee table, and a small fridge. Unlike the two side rooms, this central sitting space was semipublic. A large metal grating covered most of the floor, and directly beneath it was our landlord’s front hallway, allowing the passage of air, and of course sound. On both sides of this ceiling/floor courteous discretion on all our parts limited visual intrusions, but we had no way not to hear one another’s arguments and smell one another’s cooking. Our sitting room also offered the only passage to a shared rooftop strung with all-important clotheslines in daily use by all of us. From the roof Daniel and I had access to our own “latrine-bathroom,” two separate spaces next to one another each with its designated bucket, and water on tap from the rooftop tank where it would (under auspicious conditions) be pumped up every other afternoon when the town supplied water to public and private faucets.
The three-generational family with whom we shared our space, and to whom we paid our rent, consisted of five adults and two children, a boy and a girl, whose ages at the time were around six and five respectively. My unfulfilled yearning for grandchildren meant that I never minded hearing them repetitively recite their school lessons in a charming singsong lilt. The adults were a retired teacher and his wife; their son and his wife (whose first child was born after our time living there); and their divorced daughter, mother of the children, who together with her brother and father worked in a small store they owned. Sometimes two additional married daughters, each with two somewhat older offspring, came to visit, and at those times the noise and rowdiness level could get overwhelming. But we grew very fond of the boy and girl who regularly lived below us and who would bring up our milk and our newspaper each morning, melodiously and exuberantly announcing their arrival by calling, “Auntie-ji!, Uncle-ji!”
In contrast to the more homogeneous neighborhoods in the congested heart of Jahazpur’s old walled center, Santosh Nagar is a locality with a radically mixed population. Castes are mixed: persons from the top, middle, and lowest realms of the Hindu ritual hierarchy live in Santosh Nagar, including priests and butchers, shopkeepers and drummers, herders, farmers, and artisans. On one street with which I was familiar, right across the main road from our own street,
