Shiptown. Ann Grodzins Gold

the college lecturer who lives in one of Jahazpur municipality’s tiny hamlets with his nonliterate wife and who has meticulously researched, written, and self-published in collaboration with the temple committee a detailed history of his lineage deity, the herogod Malaji; the crippled tailor (born into a caste specializing in dairy production) married to his elder brother’s widow, a woman who looks old enough to be his mother, who sits at the bus stand sewing pennants for deities as well as simple clothing items; the passionate Muslim devotee of a local pir, a businessman with a flourishing side trade in protective amulets in spite of some in his community disapproving strongly of such magical props; the young single mother who is studying for a teaching certificate and who insisted on showing me her glamorous, costly wedding album with apparently unmitigated pride in spite of having been unceremoniously abandoned and divorced by her handsome groom; the middle-aged man of the wine-selling caste who went on a hunger strike to try to get the local government behind a plan to clean up Jahazpur’s once-sacred Nagdi River; an enterprising member of the once-stigmatized formerly “butcher” community whose fleet of buyers on motorbikes assist him in purchasing every kind of unwanted materials from beer bottles to women’s hair to candy boxes, which he sorts and resells in diverse areas at a tidy profit; the old entrepreneur-cum-patriarch from a farming caste who as a young man cornered the market on manufacturing lime used in construction and whose burgeoning prosperity allows him to import a Brahmin from a remote sacred center to do multiday rituals to ward off astrological impediments to his business.

      These and other unique individuals—many of whom make cameo appearances in the pages that follow—are slivers of the whole that is Jahazpur. It is not always easy to see how their highly diverse, exquisitely particular stories and viewpoints converge. This is why the place Jahazpur—its name, its history, its gates and walls and markets and temples and mosques, its river, its trash, its cows and pigs and grasshoppers—this is why Jahazpur as place is the subject of my ethnographic story.

      Although the town name Jahazpur would literally translate as Shiptown, you may rightly assume that in titling this book, I had metaphors in mind. However counterintuitive it might be, I ask you to imagine a town in motion, a town as transport, a town providing a specific form of transport linking rural with urban. I suggest that Shiptown is a place providing passages, sometimes regular shuttles back and forth, between an agropastoral economy and a market economy. All travel is risky. Ships cross the high seas. These twenty-first-century passages we understand to be subject to dangerous swells, currents, storms. Still, my title intends to imply Shiptown’s potential to provide less sudden transitions, less high-speed transport than, let’s say, a rocket. I might liken transitions from village to megacities such as Mumbai or Delhi to shockingly disorienting dislocations involving blastoffs. By contrast, ships travel in stately fashion. On board a ship it is sometimes possible to imagine oneself not going anywhere at all, that is, to experience a sense of stasis while actually in motion.

      Around the time when I began to write Shiptown in earnest, I encountered in translation Rahi Masoom Reza’s novel, A Village Divided (Adha Gaon, first published in 1966).³ I felt simultaneously elated and downhearted. Reza portrays aspects of human interaction in a pluralistic qasba in ways that unfold much I had longed to understand in Jahazpur. Shiptown cannot bring to the page the intimacies and intricacies of small-town life as does a novel or memoir. Accepting that ethnography is a lesser art, my hope is to align myself with Reza’s insistent grounding in humanity; or maybe more accurately, in the human comedy.

      In this work I frequently acknowledge deficiencies of ambition and capacity and own up to inadequacy of research scope and skill. These statements are less apologies than reflections arising from an acute awareness of limitations.⁴ Such acknowledged deficiencies of aims or abilities might be counterbalanced by another posture, which is pride in what I have been able to convey through intimacy and resonance. If shyness is my greatest deficit (and I have no doubt Shiptown would be far richer were I less withdrawn a personality), another asset I possess as a researcher is willing pliability; I allow myself to be led, pushed, diverted, instructed, and in these passive modes I find I often garner glimpses of an otherwise elusive cultural reality.

      Because I remain a professor, an academic, a scholar, I have not been able to free myself of ingrained habits: tracking relevant sources and writing notes. These should provide helpful cross-references for a study so idiosyncratically qualitative.

      From my fieldwork journal the first week, August 2010:

      the aging ann

      anthropologist I meant to type

      why am I here?

      no longer ambitious

      and no longer physically strong

      I want Jahazpur to be a good place, a place of which I can say look: by calling themselves pitiless they somehow keep in their consciousness the need for compassion, as the mynah birds on Huxley’s island calling “Karuna Karuna”

      So what will I find out about insan ka jivan [human life] in Jahazpur? probably that it is no better and no worse than anywhere on earth.

      A Brief Note on Names, Transliteration, and Related Matters

      For evident reasons, I could not give the town of Jahazpur a pseudonym. As in all my earlier ethnographic writings (excepting Gold 2014b), when I name persons, I supply real names. It is both my conviction and my experience that people who give their valuable time to express views or share knowledge want to be credited. In rare cases where I am at all concerned that a particular individual would not wish to be named in a particular context, I have simply not used any name and withheld or blurred identifying details.

      In accord with current fashion and a post-Orientalist rationale, I eschew the use of diacritics in the text of this book for words or names transliterated from Hindi, Urdu, or Rajasthani. The only exception is when I directly cite a publication that does employ them. When I use for the first time in my own writing a Hindi word, I italicize it; after that it appears in roman. For terms from Hindi and Rajasthani that occur very frequently in the text, a selective glossary provides limited diacritics. When a translated interview text includes English words within Hindi or Rajasthani speech, I flag them with an asterisk before the word or phrase, unless they are fully incorporated loanwords such as “colony.” Those South Asian words that have come into English are neither italicized nor starred; for them I use the OED spelling (e.g., purdah, qawwali). A single important exception is to write qasba, not casbah; the latter would mislead because, although etymologies merge, North Indian usage is particular and qasba as place is the subject of Shiptown.

      Caste names in this part of Rajasthan are often used as surnames. I capitalize them when they serve as proper names and also when I use the local caste name categorically, for example, Khatik, Regar. However, when I translate to a professional identity often still associated with a named group even if abandoned by the majority of its members, I do not capitalize: for example, butcher, leather worker.

      In Jahazpur it is quite common in polite conversation to employ the government designation SC (Scheduled Caste) to refer to persons belonging to birth groups (jati) that elsewhere are known collectively as Dalit (oppressed). The SC designation originated in colonial times but has gained increased significance with post-Independence India’s affirmative action efforts. Speaking generally, SC encompasses all those communities once discriminated against as “untouchable.” In Jahazpur the most visible SC groups would be Harijan, Khatik, and Regar. Members of communities identified as indigenous peoples may be called ST, which stands for Scheduled Tribe. Around Jahazpur the largest ST population is Mina. Minas have a fair measure of local clout and dignity; no euphemism is required when naming them so ST is heard less often. The ST designation is nonetheless of high salience for Minas, as it too is linked with advantageous government programs (Moodie 2014).

      Introduction

      This book is about a small town in Rajasthan called Jahazpur (literally, “shiptown”) and the people I met there in the second decade of the twenty-first century. What kind of a place is Jahazpur? First, it is a qasba, a market town that not so long ago was walled and gated. As a qasba Jahazpur