23. Patterns of Selectivity

When I returned to Banaras from Lucknow in July, I found it in flood. The monsoon that year was the “best” in years. The river had risen above the danger point, and all the riverside areas of the city, as well as other low-lying areas, were under water. Boats had replaced rickshaws as the mode of transport, people habitually folded up their garments to their knees, ready for wading at every step, and a minor exodus had begun from less safe to safer localities.

I realized very quickly that here was another chapter for my book. The floods were an entertainment, a pleasure for the people of Banaras, not simply a hardship. Everyone knew the best places from which to observe the swirling waters, and I went to check them out. Young men and children and women of all ages came to these places to “see the floods.” Adventurous young men dived from the balconies of submerged homes and swam endlessly in the sheltered pools provided by the buildings under water. To reach the Sankatmochan temple was a particular sport, for it was separated from dry land by several hundred yards of water. But topmost on the list of entertainments was an excursion to the Malaviya Bridge, where one could see the whole vista of the river extending beyond either bank for miles, a field of water in between, seemingly still, but in fact rushing on with fury, carrying trees, huts, animals, and unidentified objects along with it. I even succumbed to the Faustian temptation to know everything to the fullest, taking a motorboat tour around the swollen river—a dangerous activity that I did not enjoy too much.

Our house itself was separated from the main road by an expanse of water several feet wide and equally deep. Although also referred to as “flood,” it had not been caused by the overflowing river but by the accumulation of rainwater every time it rained for over half an hour, which it did several times a day. Nothing could be planned, for we were not people to wade through water of unmeasured depths. I myself regarded the floods around our house as impassable, though when they were absent or I crossed them on a rickshaw that had already been brought across to our side, I did so only to go and observe more flood waters!

This was the lighter side of things. More serious was that, now that it was July, I was completing one year of research. There could be no more “excuses.” Nor did I need any: all my earlier problems of where to go, how to meet people, what to say or do, and what sense to make of it all in the process were in the past. I knew the annual cycle of events in the city, which meant that I could gatecrash all those I had already seen or heard about the first time around and could discover all those I had been forced to miss the first time for various reasons. In the former category were the major Hindu festivals—Diwali, Dassehra, Holi, Vishwakarma Puja, Durga Puja, Ganesh Puja, and so on. In the latter category were the major Muslim ones. In 1981 I had known that Moharram was celebrated in October, but I had had an actual fear, apart from simple timidity and uncertainty, about observing it. Some interesting activities took place around the taziya on certain Moharram nights, but could I have just walked into an unknown neighborhood at night and mingled with the males gathered there to become part of their celebration? I could not. I needed familiarity with lanes and mohalla patterns, and I needed friends, preferably a family, on whom I could press myself as a guest. As long as you are sturdily allied with at least one person in the course of such proceedings, you are all right. If you are an utter stranger, the event remains strange for you, and you for the people taking part in it. I have spoken at length here only of Shaukatullah, Jameel Sahab, and Abdul Jabbar, among my developing relationships with Muslim artisans, and but mentioned Alimuddin and Nazir Akbar, but in my second year there were dozens more besides from different mohallas with whom I could hang around.

Sometimes it was not so much a question of people to help me out as a general broadening of the capacity to assimilate. Many events in Banaras, as I have said somewhere, sounded peculiar to my ears when I first heard of them. The Ramlila, yes, but something called the Nakkatayya (the cutting of the nose)? Nati Imli ka Bharat Milap (the reunion with Bharat at the dwarfed tamarind tree), Nagnathayya (the churning of the serpent), Katahriya Mela (the fair of the jackfruit)—all seemed bizarre by virtue of their very nomenclature. The best example was something called Duldul ka Ghora (the horse of Duldul). My husband and I laughed at the images it suggested, and no matter how serious I became, I could not imagine what the thing represented by such a name could be. Nor did I find out in the first year. The procession of the Duldul horse passes through most of the city, in a journey taking over twenty hours, but the most dramatic episodes occur in Chauk. So much I had been told. I repaired to Chauk on the evening that the Duldul horse would pass through there and inquired politely about its whereabouts. People gestured to a neighborhood called Dalmandi, saying, “There.” Dalmandi is a tortuous lane with many tributaries. Because it is a market, it is relatively dark and forbidding at night. Somewhere within it was this procession—how large? Going in which direction? Doing what? I could not have plunged into the darkness, armed only with my camera and notebook, to track down this incomprehensible procession somewhere in the maze of lanes; I simply knew too little about it. Was the horse tame or wild? Bound or loose? The people sane or drunk? Peaceful or in a frenzy of shouting? How did women figure in it; what would be the men’s attitude toward me? Once in, could I get out? Where would be “out”? Dalmandi was an especially tricky proposition because, apart from being a maze and a marketplace, it was the traditional home of courtesans. With flowered curtains in upstairs windows from which emanated the sounds of tabla and singing, this was a stage where different rules prevailed from the rest of Banaras, and I for one certainly did not know what my lines should be or how to enact them. On the Duldul night my first year, therefore, I quietly put my tail between my legs and went home to sleep.

It haunted me, though, as did Moharram, Barawafat, Akhiri Budh, and Shoberaat. To detail how I was able to participate in them all the second year would be too much, but I will give the idea in brief. By September 1982, when it was Duldul time again, I had visited Dalmandi many times and been inside homes and shops. I knew, in fact, the most important grandee of the place, Hakim Mohammad Kazim. I had met with two courtesans through mutual “brothers” and knew what the inside of those curtained upstairs rooms looked like. I had interviewed musicians who made their living by accompanying these courtesans, and I had discovered a guru bhai among them, that is, a brother by virtue of sharing the same guru, Mahadev Mishra. Most of all, I knew to a reassuring extent what the layout of the region was. I had a rough map of the whole of Chauk and could sense where one mohalla connected with another. To get a grasp of the geography of a place is really the first step to feeling comfortable in it.

All this fed into my participation in Duldul, as did also the fact that I had a fair number of Muslim informants by then and was attuned to their domestic arrangements, their life-style and practices, and even their conversation and colloquialisms. The main characteristic of my second year in Banaras was that everything I did fed into everything else. So, at Duldul time, I walked right next to the horse for a large part of its journey (I even thought of petting the beautiful white creature a few times but didn’t, because on that occasion petting was also a ritual—one I was not that up on); entered homes and courtyards along with the horse; scribbled down, without embarrassment, the words of the marsiyahs being sung; and made new acquaintances left and right. Duldul was in my pocket.

Most of Banaras was in my pocket, it felt. On this note I shall end the narration of my exploits because a litany of successes is not particularly edifying. Nor am I sure how to measure “success,” since I for one firmly believe that the proof is in the pudding, that is, in my book The Artisans of Banaras: Popular Culture and Identity (1988). Logically, also, my diary became thinner and thinner as frustrations turned into fulfillment. I would like to use my penultimate chapter to describe rather the shortcomings in my fieldwork procedures that troubled me much of the time and that will probably ring a familiar note to other researchers.

The main limitation was that no matter how I strained, in however many directions, my effort remained a selective one. Even as I widened my circle of informants and interviewees, I functioned within a small universe: a dozen each, say, of weavers, metalworkers, woodworkers, milksellers, and pan sellers; even fewer potters, painters, goldsmiths, with one blacksmith, silversmith, and jeweler thrown in for good measure; and copper wiredrawers and motor parts repairers on the fringes. Was it not likely, I constantly asked myself, that I was getting only a part of the story, given the limited number of people I talked to?

My defense in the face of this damning evidence of numbers came from my growing confidence that what I was constructing, even from the tales of a few artisans, was a correct picture. There were many other discoveries that lay behind the in-depth conversations: observation and participation in activities as part of a crowd, familiarity with details of the urban landscape, random exchanges with people all the time, and of course my archival work. I felt part of my surroundings; I was like a finely tuned instrument from which a complex sound could emerge and all the resonant strings vibrate—in analogy with the sitar—when the correct note was plucked. Reports confirmed one another, facts were buttressed by more facts, interpretations rallied to one another’s defense…I was interacting with only a few informants—on one level—but on many other levels I was interacting with other components of the city. I felt beyond the shadow of a doubt that I was interacting with the city itself.

More of the time I worried not so much about the methodology that called for intimate contact with only a few people, but about my own limitations as a fieldworker, limitations of gender, domestic situation, and personality. I continued to feel guilty about living comfortably in a proper house, devoting my after-work hours to family relations, even of having after-work hours, rather than living in an artisan neighborhood and spending day and night only with my informants. I did spend thousands of hours with them, enough to claim that I was drained and incapable of any more, but the selectivity of the procedure remained—selectivity of day over night, as I call it. My knowledge of what went on in daylight hours was far superior to that regarding nighttime. I traveled to many music sittings and temple celebrations, all in the dead of night, but these were events. What happened quietly on an everyday basis, I never did seek to discover. I place the blame for this wholly on my infant daughter and commonsensical husband; neither would have seen the rationale of my sacrificing a normal domestic routine for an undisturbed immersion in my subject of study. In this context, I think of Baidyanath Saraswati, resident anthropologist-in-chief of Banaras. When I first went to visit him in his monkey-infested apartment, I was told by his wife that he was out. “When will he return?” She didn’t know. “Where has he gone?” She had no idea. “What time should I try tomorrow?” She couldn’t be sure, even of whether he would be back. With each answer, the apparently rural, non-English-speaking lady added, “Woh ‘field’ men gaye hain” (“He is in the field”). I left with a sense of envy and vague dissatisfaction with myself for not being able thus to disappear into “the field,” to become so totally lost there that no one would know my whereabouts, time of return, or anything.

As it was, I had a difficult time with my husband. Although he would have preferred to know where I was at any given moment, he did not because I did not. However, he served to launch me into the first round of organization of my rapidly accumulating materials by advising me to have an index card for everyone I met or interviewed, with the person’s basic description and the dates of my interviews. Every morning, as I left, I was supposed to put in the front of the index card file the card(s) with the name(s) and address(es) of those I would be seeing that day. I couldn’t keep to this demanding plan, but the basic idea, I felt, always remained the opposite of Baidyanath Saraswati’s: circumscribe yourself and keep to the domestic routines as far as possible.

The selectivity of day over night was related to another kind of selectivity that was the product of my interests and preferences—that of public over private. One of the few things I had always found distasteful about the discipline of anthropology was its concentration on kinship. I simply failed to get aroused by the subjects of marriage, family, kinship, and domestic ritual. Something about the four walls of a house stifled me. One reason I kept happy in Banaras was that even where four walls circumscribed one, the number of people within them was so large that it was like being outside. I began to feel that the Banarasis and I shared the same set of preferences. They preferred to do everything in the open, from drying their yarn to pounding their grain to displaying their wares to relaxation and entertainment. But perhaps I thought this partly because I both looked for and saw only activities of this nature. I noted down very little that went on inside the house, unless it was a work activity or puja that was possible only within or it was there for some interesting historical reason. When people got together in large groups unrelated by blood or marriage ties, that was great, that was fascinating. Mushairas (poetry reading), music sittings, handicraft work itself, women’s gossip sessions were all like that. These were for me “public” because they included many people. On one level this selection was justified because I had defined my topic as popular cultural activities, and popular culture is supposedly the culture of “the people,” not of small groups within them. But I had prejudged the issue. In my book I emphasized that the public cultural life of Banaras is an especially rich one; this is partly because I looked selectively at it and never cared for the private.

Even within popular or public culture, I found certain themes much more compatible than others. Another person could write a wholly different book on the popular culture of Banaras, emphasizing the “dirty” aspects: the liquor, drugs, prostitution, gambling, politicking, thuggery, deceit, cheating, and other fully entertaining activities. I didn’t write such a book because I preferred to close my eyes to these aspects of life; I was like that, and the people I drifted toward, Tara Prasad and his family, Markande and his family, were like that as well. I heard indistinct references to many kinds of sleazy goings-on but refused to pursue any of them with the vigor I employed for topics that fascinated me, like seasonality and body building.

One day as I was sitting doing nothing in Tara Prasad’s home, his wife Lilavati brought me his latest wood carving to show. Giggling, she uncovered it. It was a miniature of a large four-poster bed in which a couple was making love. Everything was quite graphic, and Tara Prasad’s genius had succeeded in depicting the couple as both entranced and enthusiastic. Interesting and appealing touches included a plate of laddus (round sweets) by the side of the bed, for when they took a minute off, I suppose, and a hand fan, for when they got heated up.

I was deeply curious and quizzed Lilavati. She had always been shy and noncommunicative with me, and moreover spoke Bhojpuri at a terrifying speed. I gathered that such wooden toys were among the presents to the bride and groom at a wedding, an old Banaras custom no longer very conscientiously observed. I realized, and I know for a fact, that there is in Banaras a whole system of attitudes toward sex, I mean as part of public belief and entertainment, not the domesticated aspect that I find boring; that they are expressed in crafts, in the performing arts, in speech and celebration; and that these attitudes are very alive, clearly articulated, and close to the people. I was sometimes very well placed to observe them, as at the Holi procession and again at an event called the Mahamurkh Sammelan, the Great Fools’ Conference. At the latter, the poems and jokes were what would be called cheap and dirty in another context but were artistic and intellectual on that occasion. The main style of dancing in Banaras, which I had also witnessed at Holi, was used everywhere all the time, in wedding processions, at parties, and on happy occasions, and it was suggestive in a way that few popular dances are. Banaras was a crude, hearty, earthy place, its males very aware of physicality and sexuality and not reticent about depicting their interest in these things on every occasion and through all the media. The females were very likely the same; I never found out, though the giggling Lilavati gave me a clue. When I met the courtesans in Dalmandi, both they and I emphasized the performative aspects of their craft, preferring to pretend that that was all there was to it. I didn’t ask them about their relations with men, only about their song and dance, and they didn’t volunteer the information. Not clear or comfortable about sexuality, my own or anyone else’s, I barely made a note of this Banarasi feature and wrote nothing about it at all. Similarly, I had no idea what to do with drunkenness or drug use, finding the subjects distasteful and myself ignorant. Nevertheless, I don’t want to overplay the selectivity at work in all this, for every researcher categorizes subjects as appropriate or inappropriate in all contexts, and I did so in Banaras with relation to myself, excluding everything I regarded as “sleazy” or “dirty.”

There were two other kinds of selective processes I was aware of that I would like to mention. One was that of Hindus over Muslims, and the other of the poor over the rich. The Hindu preference arose from the fact that I was a born Hindu, though not a practicing one, and knew a great deal more about the religion than about Islam. With Hinduism, right from the beginning I could pick up clues and follow innuendoes in a way that is essential for research, but only in my second year did I even begin to do so with Islam. One of the signs of my developing maturity in research was how much more time I gave to Muslims than to Hindus in my second year, in inverse proportion to the first, achieving a final balance of sorts. My earliest notes with weavers are quite garbled and are punctuated with desperate comments: “Who’s he?” “What does that mean?” “Huzur ki miraj?” “Did she say that?” All these were sorted out and deciphered quite promptly, but meanwhile they created an undeniable bias in favor of working with Hindus, who were familiar, comprehensible, and as easy as a, b, c. My language abilities in Hindi also far exceeded those in Urdu, particularly in reading and writing. I would tire very quickly of an Urdu paper or document and set it aside to read later in consultation with an Urdu-speaking friend—which sometimes happened and sometimes did not—but I needed no special patience or motivation to read Hindi language materials.

I worked so hard to overcome these shortcomings that I was largely successful in doing so. Toward the very end of my stay I was rewarded by repeatedly being taken for a Muslim in Muslim mohallas, often as a lady from Pakistan. I did not plan the deception but did not try hard to undeceive the deceived either, simply taking even greater care with my Urdu vocabulary and pronunciation. This greater ease in Muslim contexts was relevant not merely to my personal satisfaction and sense of balance but also to the materials I could pick up—apart from the oral data that I could record—which increased many times over. Muslims would pull out old books and papers, calendars and wall hangings, diaries and manuscripts because they thought that I was capable of perusing them, and, as a good Muslim, cared to do so and could be trusted not to defile the name of Allah, which was everywhere. They would say as much and look inquiringly into my eyes, and I would look back at them with a steadfast, clear, honest gaze that neither denied nor affirmed, because I did not feel I was lying about being a Muslim; of course I would not defile the name of Allah.

The poor were naturally to be privileged because I had written my research proposal like that. I do not mean to say that I was at fault for deciding on a research focus, because that everyone has to do. I am saying I was biased toward poor people in ways that can only be called emotional or sentimental, and that bias served my research ill. I had developed the method of asking a large cross-section of people about the same thing, to surround and attack it, as it were, on all fronts. Thus, on the question of temple going, I learned all about my artisans’ ideas; then I looked up the information on all these temples in my various written sources; I had Nagendra Sharma scouting around temples collecting a random set of interviews with temple-goers; and finally I went to each and every mahant (temple head), chief priest, and assorted minor priests. In such cases, if the people I wished to interview were rich, as undoubtedly most mahants were, that was fine, because they belonged to my arena of activity. But in any other context, rich people seemed like rude interruptions to be shrugged off as distracting. I sensed that they were valuable sources of information and that I should not harbor such strong prejudices against them. I did so out of sheer immaturity, naivete, and rebelliousness. Maybe it paid off in some unsensed, unobvious way, such as making me think only of the poor or seeing life only from their point of view, but I am not sure. I know that toward the end of my stay, I suddenly got knots in my stomach thinking of all the gaping holes in my information, and made quick trips, among others, to some of the wealthiest businessmen and traders of the city. But these were again people to “use,” so that was all right.

Since I was myself so clearly “wealthy,” that is to say, not suffering from the shortage of any necessity, or even of most comforts, of life, I had to struggle very actively to keep other well-off people away and the poor close to me. To have dressed differently would not have been the solution, because I actually wore rather cheap saris and sandals, usually old, sometimes even torn. Raja Ram, our King Canute, scorned them in his inimitable way. “If you wore these in our village,” he told me once, overseeing my check of laundered saris, “even the dogs would bark.” But other things marked me as well-to-do: the shine of my hair, the well-creamed look of my skin, the well-fed and well-watered look of me altogether, the matching blouses, the watch, bag, sunglasses, the lack of reluctance to pay rickshawallas certain amounts…I could have taken care of one or two of these characteristics, but not all. It would have taken years for my face to develop the thin, pinched, worried look that marks many of the poor. Nor do I consider such physical alignment necessary. It comes up because I was constantly accosted by well-off people with invitations to join them and their kind rather than to hang around, as I was seen to be doing, with the poor and the backward. One of my favorite places in Banaras was the teashop of Lallan Yadav. It was not deeply recessed in the building, so it lacked the dark, cavernous quality of all those other teashops that remained closed to me. It had rows of photographs of wrestlers on the wall, benches and tables with fresh newspapers, and a clientele that by its look seemed to consist of artisans and laborers, but included in fact writers, poets, philosophers (I mean professional ones—everyone was a philosopher in his own right), and priests. I went to this teashop many times a week and sat many hours, talking to Lallan Yadav and whoever else was willing. It was always rewarding and also relaxing, and the only thorn in my side was the special tea that Lallan sardar kept pressing on me, the kind that has a dollop of cream floating on top.

Opposite this teashop in Brahmanal was a silk trader’s, a business run by many brothers. Unknown to me, they had kept a watch on my activities, and one day they finally signaled me over. I was made comfortable on the white sheets and bolsters of the gaddi and given some tea. “Why don’t you sit here and do your work?” they asked me solicitously. “It doesn’t look seemly for you to sit around in that teashop.” I was in agony and didn’t know how to get away, short of being rude. Now if I had been calmer, I could have talked about the silk industry with them, the mohalla of Brahmanal, the subject of teashops and tea drinking from their perspective, and a host of other things. But my ire had been aroused by their class, their protectiveness, their assumption that they were superior, because they had money and education, to those like Lallan Yadav, who had little of both, and by all those other qualities that I lumped together as “middle-class” conservatism and puritanism. So, not only did I suffer needlessly, but I also failed to seize an opportunity and aroused their hostility by my obvious discomfort in their company.

Similarly, Tara Prasad often passed on to me the requests of his rich neighbor, an oil presser’s family, that I visit them. They were prosperous, with a large house and actual furniture; all the members dressed smartly in expensive, modern clothes. The whole idea was unappealing, and I resisted it for days. When I finally had to succumb, I gave an object lesson in how to be an awkward guest. Now these people were patrons of the Khojwa Ramlila, and I doubtlessly could have learned a lot from them about the Ramlila, about the oil-pressing business, and about Khojwa in general. But happiness for me was Tara Prasad’s house, and this comfortable furnished place with its well-dressed inhabitants was close to a torture.

If I could do the whole thing again, I would be open, I think, to people on the basis of their merit as providers of information and not have blinders on my eyes to everyone who appeared affluent or successful. But then, as I also think, I might be subject to the danger of having a more mixed reportage on what the lives of the poor are like, and that deficiency might reflect the distance of the rich from the poor.