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 its composition. Over the past thirty years Bhoju and I have crafted, recrafted, and published accounts of an evolving relationship at once working and familial (Gujar and Gold 1992; Gold and Gujar 2002; Gold, Gujar, Gujar, and Gujar 2014). Although professional and familial motifs have intertwined in our relationship from the beginning, both in Bhoju’s mind and in my own the mode of our connectedness has increasingly become one of kinship. I am part of Bhoju’s family now as he is part of mine. Madhu and Chinu take these conditions for granted, having known me since birth as their paternal aunt (Buaji). In 2010–11 they too became graceful, part-time producers of ethnography (see Chapter 3).
How do we negotiate this odd union of kinship and research? I expect it sounds much harder than it is. Familial relatedness and intellectual relatedness have in common an intimacy and an interdependence that is at once psychological, emotional, cognitive. As family we exchange gifts, we worry about one another, we chide one another, we ask personal questions, we quarrel, we forgive. As research collaborators, we labor tediously to get details right and exalt in shared discoveries.
By his own account, Bhoju’s orientations to matters such as caste rules of commensality remained rooted in the rural community that had formed and nourished him and on which he still depended for crucial social solidarity. This led to some discomforts with our new research endeavor.33 It would go without saying that Bhoju’s experiences of caste and religious difference in Jahazpur should contrast strongly with my own. Sometimes we argue openly about these matters, and sometimes we brood silently but palpably. Friction is the word that comes to mind, and in highlighting tensions resulting from our disparate viewpoints, I argue that such friction is fruitful—that dissonant, alternative perspectives may yield enhanced understandings.
One source of friction between me and Bhoju derived from my enthusiasm for documenting Jahazpur’s pluralistic culture. The qasba’s significant Muslim population was to me one of the most important pieces of my study, and I found Jahazpur Muslims, most of them, welcoming with an almost overwhelming hospitality. If Bhoju had his ingrained doubts about Muslims as a collectivity, fortunately all his negative thoughts were impersonal. When it came to interacting with individuals or families he was able not only to present a smiling face but, it seemed to me, to relish discovering a varied religio-cultural universe so close to home.
Bhoju closed a written account of our ethnographic collaboration in Jahazpur with the following words, chastening to me. (Small capitals denote a change of script: words that stand out on the original page from Bhoju’s Hindi composition because they are written in the English alphabet.) “In conclusion: In this kind of work, the ASSISTANT has a more important role than the RESEARCHER, because if the RESEARCHER makes a mistake or asks a question that really shouldn’t be asked, no one MINDS all that much because after all she is a foreigner, and there are a lot of things she doesn’t know. But as for the ASSISTANT, he must think a whole lot and every single question that he asks should take into account the local atmosphere” (Gold, Gujar, Gujar, and Gujar 2014:350). It seems important to recognize the validity of Bhoju’s conclusion.
Figure 9. Window Gate, showing latrines and Shiva Shrine, 2015.
I explained to Bhoju on my 2015 visit that I was using Window Gate to represent ethnography. He immediately “got” my metaphor. Reading my mind, he suggested we take my picture there. So we revisited Window Gate, and I received a fresh lesson in the selective nature of memory. There was much nearby this small opening I had failed to retain since the last time I was there in 2010: an old shrine to Mahadevji; a neem tree; decaying garbage; vital pig life; and—I wonder how I missed it?—public facilities for men and women, of which Jahazpur qasba had a lamentable shortage. Possibly the weather or the wind was different the last time we were there, but on this day in February the place reeked. Bhoju, who is especially sensitive to odors, became nauseated. We had to duck into the conveniently nearby homeopathic dispensary (another institutional setting of which I had no previous inkling). There the attendant cheerfully informed us that no qualified homeopathic physician was currently posted to our medically challenged municipality. He nonetheless unhesitatingly selected a bottle from dozens lined up on the shelves behind the counter and unceremoniously applied a few drops of something or other straight onto Bhoju’s tongue. Whatever the potion was, Bhoju started to feel better and we proceeded on our way. However, I never posed at Window Gate, and I wouldn’t especially want to pose there anymore.
I felt not only chagrined but embarrassed that the Window Gate smelled bad: this is decidedly not the association I intended to make with ethnography when I first conceived this chapter. Of course I could contrive an evocative theoretical point along the lines that human beings are embodied creatures; bodily functions unite us while cultural approaches to bodily functions divide us. Such truisms could even be seen as standing for the subject of all anthropology. But embodiment, however valid a condition of ethnographic work, was not the point I originally intended to have Window Gate signify for me. Rather, it was that my vision through however many windows is of small scale and limited scope. That point holds. What my 2015 revisit impels me to add is the need to keep all the senses—the “gates of the body,” as the Bhagavad Gita calls them—engaged in fieldwork.34
Chapter 3
Colony
Suburban Satisfaction
We also produce knowledge in a mode of intimacy with our subjects. Hence ethnography as a genre seems to me to be a form of knowledge in which I come to acknowledge my own experience within a scene of alterity.… In being attentive to the life of others we also give meaning to our lives or so I feel…. So ethnography becomes for me a mode in which I can be attentive to how the work of very ordinary people constantly reshapes the world we live in. (Das 2015b:404)
Fieldwork is life itself. (ca. October 2010, author’s optimistic email to colleague)
Suman [my neighbor, chiding me for speaking as if we lived in the qasba] “This isn’t Jahazpur, this is two km distance from Jahazpur, this is Santosh Nagar!” The truth! (30 April 2011, author’s journal entry)
Having introduced