serves to determine the karmic necessity for Ram’s exile and his father’s mortal grief.7
The first individual to tell me about Shravan Kumar’s Jahazpur moment was an elder in the Khatik community. Durga Lal Khatik had been instrumental in founding the Khatiks’ Satya Narayan temple—a watershed in their history as well as in Jahazpur’s (Gold 2016). He told us that Jahazpur was known far and wide as a pitiless land because when Shravan placed his foot within the town boundary, the young man halted in his tracks and demanded kiraya or “fare” from his parents. They said, “Wait, son, the ground beneath your feet must be what causes you to speak in such pitiless fashion. Just keep walking until you have passed once again outside the border of this place.” Sure enough, as soon as Shravan Kumar stepped outside of Jahazpur territory, he once again became a model of filial devotion.8
If Jahazpur’s mythic snake sacrifice charters both name and character of place, Shravan Kumar’s story builds on and reinforces the notion that Jahazpur ground is somehow stamped with, or programmed for, primal violations of moral order: the ascendance of business over kinship. To me this story brings us to the heart of things. A market is a place, so unlike a family, where everyone must pay their way.
Individuals occasionally add a few narrative embellishments to their tellings, but there is little significant variation. A few examples suffice to show the ways a particular teller may inflect the basic story.
Kamala Dholin—a woman from the community of drummers, who serve as bards and whose verbal skills are renowned—located her telling of the Shravan Kumar story in Nagola, which, as we just heard, is reputed to be the actual site of Janamejaya’s sacrifice and which is a bit of a way out of town. But she quickly merges the two places in her story:
In Nagola, Shravan Kumar was carrying his parents. Then he stopped and said to them, “I have taken you on a pilgrimage around the entire world. Now you pay me the fare (kiraya)!”
They said, “You didn’t ask for the fare before. Why do you ask for it here in Jahazpur?”
Shravan’s father told his son, “Pick up some of this soil (mitti) and take it with you.” After they crossed the Banas River, his mother said, “All right, so you want your fare now?” But he had no idea what she was talking about.9
Then his mother put down the Jahazpur soil and as soon as he put his foot on it he began all over again, demanding from his parents their fare.
But the moment he moved his foot to the actual soil belonging to that far side of the Banas, he said he didn’t want the fare.
Kamala concluded: “Such are the qualities (gun) in Jahazpur’s soil.” Hers was the most explicit and dramatic telling in that the son does not even remember his demand once his feet are no longer touching the soil of the pitiless land.
Chittar Gujar belonged to one of the few Gujar families rooted in Jahazpur. He was among the first elders we visited in 2010, due to Bhoju’s feeling comfortable with Gujars.10 Historically, of course, Chittar’s community was associated with herding and dairy production, as are Gujars throughout Rajasthan. But he had successfully developed a truck transport business. As does Kamala’s, Chittar’s concise telling establishes a precise boundary for the pitiless land: “Shravan Kumar was carrying his parents on a pilgrimage. When he reached Jahazpur, he asked them—his mother and father—for the fare. They said, ‘OK, we’ll pay you the fare if you want it … but in this place there is no compassion. Between Jahazpur and the Banas River is the pitiless territory. So just go a little farther.’ ” And of course, no sooner do they cross the Banas River than Shravan Kumar becomes the perfect son once again.
Satyabala, a vivacious Brahmin woman who lived in the qasba, had rented rooms in her house to Bhoju Ram and two of his children for several years before Bhoju purchased his own property in Santosh Nagar. I had also stayed with her on one of my earlier visits. She was therefore one of the people we knew best in the qasba. Moreover, Jahazpur was both her natal home and her in-laws’ home, making her a lifelong Jahazpurite and a nice resource in that regard, as many women I interviewed had only moved here after marriage. On one visit I asked her about Jahazpur being a pitiless land, and she launched into the Shravan Kumar story without even mentioning the snake sacrifice. She told it like this:
Once Shravan Kumar was serving his mother and father, by taking them on pilgrimage. He took them throughout Mewar, but when he came to Jahazpur, he asked them for money: “Give me my fare (kiraya).”
His mother and father were both blind and they had nothing to give him, so they said to go forward, and he did, and when they came out from Jahazpur he didn’t ask anymore—and that is why people say this is sinful earth (papi dharti).
One Santosh Nagar neighbor, Ayodhya Vaishnav, was about forty years of age and had scant education. I met her in the company of Bhoju’s two daughters. Ayodhya surprised me by stating early on in our conversation that people like me (that is foreigners, non-Indians) had “more love among yourselves than we do here.”
She then without prompting launched straight into the story of Shravan Kumar or, as she called him, Shravan Beta (Son). “He took his mother and father everywhere,” she told us, “but only near the Nagdi did he ask for money. He asked for it when he came to Pander Road.” Thus embroidering the story in maplike local geography, she related the basic episode and concluded with a flourish: “It is a true story.” I asked her then to go back to the topic of love and explain what she had said earlier. She answered firmly, as if the Shravan Kumar narrative had served to prove her point, “You see, there is more love in your country than there is in Jahazpur.”
Ayodhya’s reference to America serves my purposes as this opening chapter’s final pitiless land telling (we return to Shravan Kumar in Chapter 8). I wish here to emphasize another effort and motif running throughout this book: the two-way gaze, and two-way passages of understanding—or at times misunderstanding. Looking back, I recollect during my first research three decades ago that people in the village of Ghatiyali (less than thirty kilometers from Jahazpur) were sometimes naive enough to believe that American streets were made of glass. At the same time they were severely critical of American culture that shunned its duties to the elderly as well as to children (and that I put my son in boarding school was perfect proof). Many people I met during my earlier village research claimed that my land so rich in possessions lacked love, a quality they insisted was more abundant in India.
So why would Ayodhya, in Jahazpur in 2010, idealize relationships in America? Possibly she wished to emphasize her own bitter assessment of the local: even in the materialistic USA she might have met with more kindness than in pitiless Jahazpur. I learned that Ayodhya had her private troubles, as was the case with most interviewees who agreed with the legends and attributed a genuine harshness to human relationships in Jahazpur. Such people were, I emphasize, in the minority.
By beginning with the pitiless land cycle, and by taking it not only as origin tale but as a kind of chartering mythology, I do not intend in any fashion to take it as valid judgment. Neither do most Jahazpur residents. Interviewees generally related the pitiless land cycle without a lot of reflection or reflexivity. It was simply part of a ready store of local lore, and a query as to whether it were true that Jahazpur had such a nature, or was any worse than other towns, would meet most often with dismissive replies.
However, there were a number, such as Ayodhya Vaishnav, for whom the pitiless land cycle served, as does the Mahabharata itself, to provoke pondering what Gurcharan Das has called “the difficulty of being good” (2010). That is, some people use the tales to rethink their own life experiences and even their own actions. Some people may conclude that snake slaughter is not the answer after all. As the young Vaishnav
