were the legends naming it a pitiless land. As they initially provoked the research on which this book is based, I begin with these tales.
PART I
Origins, Gateways, Dwellings,
Routes, Histories
Chapter 1
Legends
Of Names, Snakes, and Compassion
They say that on a dark night in the month of Asharh, at the start of the monsoon, a chieftain of Tughlaq, Saiyid Masood Ghazi, crossed the swollen Ganga and attacked Gadipuri. Accordingly, the town changed its name from Gadipuri to Ghazipur. The roads are the same, the lanes too, and the houses—just the name changed. Perhaps names are outer shells which can be changed. There is no unbreakable bond between names and identity, because if there were then Gadipuri too should have changed when it became Ghazipur. (Reza 2003:4)1
Like Ghazipur which was once Gadipuri, as my epigraph taken from Reza’s novelistic memoir of another qasba explains, Jahazpur also experienced a name change of which it is fully conscious. But while Jahazpur’s name change is associated with a period of history—“Mughal times”—it differs from Ghazipur’s in that no specific ruler or event precipitated the transformation. Moreover, at least until very recently, Jahazpur’s name was locally meaningful only in its provocation of curiosity. Jahazpur is a landlocked place, and a town by definition is set on the ground; so why “Shiptown”?2
On a brief revisit to Jahazpur in 2013 I had one short encounter with a young and visionary Jain nun, an outsider who had taken up residence there in the wake of a miracle (see the Epilogue). She showed me a poster with her design for a new temple to be built on the outskirts of town.3 The temple would have the form of a stylized ship so that, as she expressed it to me, people from elsewhere would come to distinguish this special place, would learn, easily recognize, and recollect its name. This Jain nun’s design and her vision marked the singular instance of reference I ever heard in Jahazpur to the literal meaning of the town’s name, and of course it comes from someone who arrived from some other place. The name does indeed have a story, or stories, but the stories have nothing to do with a ship.
Figure 2. Site of new Jain temple under construction, showing poster with design in the form of a ship, 2015.
The story of Jahazpur’s name, which I first heard casually on a brief visit in 2006 when fieldwork there was not even a gleam in my eye, offers no explanation for why the place is called Shiptown. Rather, Jahazpur origin legends project into the past a wholly different name replete with meaningful stories and witnessed by stone shrines—if you know where to look for them (one is in the jungle; one is in the penumbra of larger, more beautiful structures). These legends perplexed and intrigued me, becoming ultimately the seeds of this book (or to sustain nautical imagery, my tugboats to fieldwork).
Jahaz means ship, but there is no large body of water anywhere in sight in this semiarid region of central Rajasthan. It is only natural to ask how the name arose; Jahazpur residents are therefore well accustomed to this very question. They have a pat and ready answer. They explain that their town was the site of the mythic snake sacrifice performed by King Janamejaya in Mahabharata times, and they offer an etymology of the town’s name having nothing to do with a ship. Common lore has it that, although today it is spelled and pronounced Jahazpur (jahaz “ship,” from the Arabic, -pur “city”), it was originally Yagyapur (yagya “sacrifice,” from the Sanskrit, -pur). Whatever its facticity, this etymology appears in the government-issued District Census Handbook (Census of India 1994:lxxii).
The shift from Sanskrit y to vernacular Hindi j does not necessarily involve the influence of Urdu or Perso-Arabic vocabularies. For example, yatra for pilgrimage becomes jatra in Rajasthani without losing its Sanskritic origins. However, the word jahaz is an Urdu word, and it really doesn’t sound all that much like yagya. In short, the linguistic transformation operative here is not simply the common y to j shift from classical to spoken tongue. Rather the substitution is of an entire meaningful lexeme. There are no stories about a ship because it seems the name “ship” was an expedient accident.
It took me about four years post-fieldwork to realize that my initial question—“Why is your town called Jahazpur, Ship City, when the sea is nowhere in sight?”—had perpetually gone unanswered. In relating the story of Yagyapur as the town’s origin tale, Jahazpur residents simply left it as self-evident that Yagyapur had morphed to Jahazpur. No one ever pinpointed an episode or exact moment in history when an official renaming occurred. We might speculatively fill in the blanks and assume that jahaz was easier to pronounce and to write, perhaps for revenue collectors in the Mughal period who would have kept their records in the Arabic script used for both Persian and Urdu.
In any case, the question of how Jahazpur got its name always led directly to Yagyapur. Diverted by the strangely negative stories associated with “Sacrifice City” I simply forgot to keep wondering: why “Ship”? Yagyapur is an immediate jumping-off place for two compelling and puzzling place legends—each linked to, but departing from, one of India’s great epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. As we arrive in Shiptown, I present these brief, perplexing tales of Yagyapur. Their foundational significances for the town, and for this book, should be self-evident. I relate them with scraps of performative context and in the translated words of diverse tellers rather than simply in synopsis. How and where stories are told matters. And conversational follow-ups sometimes add depth to simple narrative content.
In the indirect nature of this passage to meaning—from “Why a ship?” to “Let me tell you about the ancient sacrifice”—I also would suggest an analogy to some of my fieldwork methods, which rarely involve a single-minded or persistently linear pursuit of specific information. In the incomplete nature of my grasp of Jahazpur’s name transformation, my ethnographic style is foreshadowed. Throughout this work, I try to acknowledge at least some of what I did not learn, or forgot to ask, or did not care to know, or could never find out. Moreover, and importantly, these stories obliquely provide a bridge between an agricultural economy and a market economy—a transition congruent with the subject of Shiptown, the book.
The two brief tales of Sacrifice City, taken together, I will call for convenience the “pitiless land” cycle. These begin with a king who appears in the prologue to the Mahabharata. Janamejaya, the son of King Parikshit, is descended from Arjuna—one of the five Pandava brothers who are the epic heroes. Although Janamejaya ruled four generations after the events of the epic, his tale is related in the prologue as part of a frame story. After his father is killed by a snakebite, Janamejaya determines to hold a great sacrifice during which, by the power of verbal spells (mantras), all kinds of snakes are drawn into the fire pit to perish. Although ultimately thwarted, Janamejaya’s intention is to destroy the entire snake species.4
Many Jahazpur people relate this basic opening, embellished with greater or lesser detail and names from the epic. The locally salient tale, which to the extent of my knowledge appears in no published versions, begins with an inserted premise: because of Janamejaya’s vengeful intentions—basically snake genocide—his sacrifice requires a “pitiless land” (nirday desh).
Bhoju and I had sought out Ram Swarup Chipa, a man in his sixties who belonged to the community of cloth makers—dyers and printers.
