Part Two

In which there is great progress in finding informants, in getting closer to them, and most of all in understanding them through the use of indigenous categories. In which also there are many dead ends, as in trying to find weavers; and distractions, as in trying to keep the household running efficiently, dealing with the death of a family member, and using police contacts to advantage.

6. A Shift in Technique

During my first months in Banaras my problems, however, were less of interpretation than of getting to know people. I became panicky as Sawan passed me by, followed by the next monsoon month of Bhadon, and still I had located almost no “cultural activities.” I went to talk to my local guide and everybody’s mentor, Dr. Suryanath Gupta. Dr. Gupta always had a mysterious, satisfied expression implying a knowledge of many things that would never get shared simply because you couldn’t ask him about them since you didn’t know what things they were. You could guess at random, as I did, and sometimes hit the mark. When I asked about the Ramlila, Dr. Gupta became suffused with excitement and talked rapidly for hours. Or, when you missed, as when I asked about the indigenous system of wrestling in akharas, he could look as grumpy as a child and say something like, “Oh, a lot has been written on that already,” or, regarding the culture of a particular community, simply, “No such thing exists.” But all these idiosyncrasies aside, Dr. Gupta was one of the most knowledgeable people in Banaras on the subject of the city’s social and cultural life.

He told me that at that very time an important mela, or fair, called Sohariya Mela was in progress, so called because it lasted sixteen (solah) days. It was based at Lakshmi Kund (one of the many artificial tanks, or water reservoirs, in Banaras), centered on the worship of Lakshmi, and was the occasion for the display of handicrafts by the potters of Banaras, who rivaled one another in their production of toys and especially of images of Lakshmi for the mela. It sounded fascinating. But the third general rule I discovered about fieldwork (after the ones about legendary places losing their charm and people in the same mohalla being unknown to one another) was that the description of an event is very different from the direct experience.

To begin with, I had no idea what a mela was, apart from the expectation of dust and cheap stalls where everything could be bought for a few pice—both ideas derived from a short story by Premchand read in my school days. I had been to the Nauchandi mela in Meerut as a child, but all I remember is grown-ups around me saying, “Let’s go to Cozy Corner!” My imagination had soared, and I had expected scones for tea, perhaps cakes and macaroons. I was reading Enid Blyton’s school adventures at the time and relished words like “marmalade,” “fruitcake,” and “pie.” Cozy Corner turned out to be the exact opposite of all its name suggested, a completely desi, or indigenous (in the worst sense), place, almost dirty to my anglophile eyes. The grown-ups ate hot, greasy pakora-fritters.

There is an easy way to find out where something is, and accordingly I took a rickshaw and directed, “Lakshmi Kund!” As soon as vendors and balloon sellers appeared, I hopped off. Again, my timing was wrong. It was the middle of the day and the magic was gone. I was to find it very different when I came again the next year with three women all bearing trays to worship Lakshmi, arriving in the evening and staying on as darkness fell. But this first time, because I was keyed up with expectation, because I was still so ignorant, and because it was the middle of the day, I found nothing.

There were stalls on either side of the lane from about a furlong before the tank to the tank with its neighboring temple. Most of these were manned by children, their parents being busy with more productive work. Children take over many stalls around mid-day as mothers wash and cook, fathers bathe and eat, and youngsters are made to sit still after school. The stalls all sold clay products, mostly images of Lakshmi and a variety of toys, with some toys like the Ramlila bow and arrow already making an appearance, Ramlila being next on the festival calendar. The variety was not as great as it seemed at first sight. After I had exclaimed over a little clay T.V. set and bought a few other charming oddities, there was no attraction in the stalls. I made some effort to find out from the children where they lived, who made the toys, how, and so on, but they were really not the people to ask and did not relish being interrogated. I have found it awkward to approach children as informants on the whole because it is difficult for me to weigh their interest against their indifference and to talk on their level. My worst moment was when I started having a good time with a group of five or six dusty little boys on a street near Lohatiya, beginning to understand their game, their fun, and their personalities. Before departing I wanted to write down their names and where their homes were, driven by my familiar greed to know one more person that I could come back to later. Then I made the gigantic blunder of presenting each with a coin for a treat. Like wildfire the word spread over rooftops and through dusty galis, “Get your name written and receive a coin! Come and get paid for your name!” I have never made a less dignified retreat.

After plodding through all the lanes of the Lakshmi mela, I thought that I should at least enter the temple at the center of it all. There were a few worshipers here, along with bathers at the tank, and a little more to observe. But once inside, I could feel everything floating away from me. The old uneasiness I feel in temples came back, along with questions not to be resolved by mythology: “What is this? Who is this? What do I do? Why is everyone doing what they do?” I also never know what to focus on as observer in a temple and try to take in everything at once: the architecture, the sculpture, the ritual, the social drama…After this experience of my first mela, I was truly at a loss and in need of conversation. I had heard of Vishwanath Mukherjee for some time; an amateur author, historian, and ethnographer, he seemed to vie with Suryanath Gupta for the position of greatest expert on Banaras. I sought him out at his place of work, the Indian Medical Association, where he was on the editorial board of Apana Swasthya (Our Health). I prepared a list of questions for him, of which one was, “What is a mela?”

Vishwanath Mukherjee was confused by my topic, popular culture. Like most people I talked to in the beginning, “culture” meant for him the great musicians and writers of Banaras, and “popular culture” was a contradiction in terms. He kept listing for me all the “great” people I should speak with, and they still weigh on my conscience as a task never accomplished. I kept trying to elucidate my purpose to him. When I told him that I had been to a mela but could not comprehend it, and that I had heard of others like the Nakkatayya but couldn’t guess the sense of them, he seemed to perceive a logic. He never did tell me about melas, but we came to another milestone in my research.

“You know the most special thing in Banaras?” he said that first day. “People like to go on picnics.”

“Picnics?” I asked incredulously. “Yes, they go outside, cook, and eat.”

“Since when has this been going on?” I questioned, convinced that it was a thoroughly middle-class activity, at best learned downward through “trickling” or “seepage.”

“Since always. Banarasis have always loved to do this,” he answered complacently.

“And does it continue?” I persisted, wondering why, if he was correct, I had come across no sight or mention of this activity.

“It was popular till 1947.” I discovered later that most people used 1947 as a landmark in their memories to denote some major change during their lives. Or they would say, “twenty-five to thirty years,” implying 1947, or simply, “Azadi ke samay se” (“Since Independence”). They meant, as it would turn out after further questioning, within one generation, or within their living memory, that they had been familiar with something in their youth but that their children were not.

The lead that Mukherjee gave me was confirmed in the most direct way possible less than a week later. I was talking to Ramji Sahgal, owner of Khatri Medical Hall in the heart of Chauk, as well as a textile store across the street and a store of dried fruits and fruit drinks. When he had a visitor, instead of regaling the person with the usual tea, he would offer, say, a glass of apple juice—but unlike the customary tea offered at each visit, his refreshment was limited to the first visit because it was so much more exotic, special, and expensive, or so it was in my case. Ramji Sahgal is a scion of one of the old, established families of Banaras, not one of the rais, or aristocracy, but on the fringe. He is active in his community and is founder-member or secretary of assorted cultural organizations such as Nagari Natak Mandali (Association for Nagari Theater), Ved Vidyalaya (School for Vedas), Sangeet Parishad (Music Club), and so on. He speaks in a reserved, somewhat pompous way, as befits his position—which I have always found best defined by his location, that is, sitting in his open-fronted shop, exactly where the galis turn for the famed Manikarnika cremation ghat, governing the vista of what is therefore the most crowded, interesting, and important part of Chauk. I made friends with him because of his location.

On that day, after a great deal of interesting talk, I put the question to him, “What are the leisure activities of the people of Banaras?”

He replied promptly without a moment’s thought: “Bhang chhanana (straining bhang, the local narcotic), washing your clothes with soap, and bahri alang jana (going outdoors).” Amazingly, he managed to look pompous and dignified even as he said this.

I was somewhat alarmed to feel reality slip away from me so swiftly, and to gain time I asked my formulaic question: “Has it changed? How is it changing?”

He said, Yes indeed it had changed. The first, bhang, was now too expensive; for the third, bahri alang, there was now less time and money; but the second continued to be the “hobby” (his term) of the people of Banaras.

I left, still in a daze, trying to picture Ramji Sahgal doubled over, scrubbing the shirt from his back with soap.

He was dead on the mark: soap was a valued object and a precious symbol of luxury and good living, but no amount of observation could probably have brought the fact home to me, with my preconceptions on the subject, had it not been stated to me so blandly. Many disconnected pictures fell in place: families gathered at public taps working up a joyous lather of cleansing; a Hindi movie I had recently seen where the middle-class couple comes to the verge of breaking up because the soap of the otherwise docile husband is used by the wife; the powerful advertising industry’s explicit focus on soap.

Thus I entered yet another phase of my fieldwork, in which I started what may be called a systematic search, asking everyone I met about “indigenous categories,” in this case bahri alang, soap, bhang, and water. For the uninitiated reader, bahri alang is best explained by its literal translation, “the outer side,” and refers to the activity of going outside and away. When I thought about it, “picnicking” was quite an acceptable way of putting it, though in my mind I forced an “indigenous” to prefix the “picnic.”

The next time I visited Mohan Lal, I put to him the question, “What is the manoranjan (entertainment) of you people?” His answer: “Bathing in the Ganga…exercise in the akhara…bahri alang…nahana-nipatana (defecation and bathing)…” He was one of those old men who, partly because they have been extremely energetic their whole lives and feel incapacitated with old age, develop a habit of claiming for everything that it is now finished. So Mohan Lal added, “Now everything is forgotten. Ten people would get together, go out, have bhang. Now there is no money, no interest. It’s also a lot of trouble. Liquor is quicker.”

But by that time, I had stopped taking everything informants said at face value. I could dig beneath the surface of their speech quite effectively to uncover the latent preferences and prejudices. I also learned to change my style of questioning from the innocuous, “What is ——?” or “Tell me about ——,” which failed as surely as asking a preschooler (I was to learn), “How was school? What happened today?” With indigenous categories, I had possession of a key, I felt, with which to unlock people’s minds and mouths, one which never failed at its task. The element of surprise was essential in its deployment the first time. With a new woodworker friend, for example, I turned suddenly in the middle of a conversation about something else to ask, “How many times a year exactly did you go to bahri alang?” And Tara Prasad looked at me happily and chortled, “Well, we have to go to Sarnath and Ramnagar, as you know. And then in the Navratras…It adds up to quite a lot.” With my new metalworker families I would smoothly interject into a discussion of, say, poverty, “Then there’s the going out, the bathing…soap…that must cost quite a lot.” They would express appreciation of my perspicacity and proceed to elaborate in gratifying ways. By then also, if further documentation was needed, I had my first photographs of bahri alang revelers, on their way with bhang and lota (water pot) to the other bank of the river.

7. Woodworkers

In the first weeks of my progress with “the people of Banaras” I also met Tara Prasad, who eventually became the closest friend I made among the artisans, and again I use “friend” advisedly. One fine October morning, feeling it was getting “too late”—a feeling that began coming to me more and more often—I decided to explore Khojwa. An excellent article in Aj, the local Hindi daily, had informed me that Khojwa was where the wooden toymakers lived. I had with me that day my sister-in-law, Bandana, a serious young woman doing her Ph.D. in industrial sociology at Kashi Vidyapith. With a good idea of “what sociologists do,” I did not wish to bore her, so I didn’t loiter as I would have if alone. (I expected her to tire very quickly and to ask me pointedly, “What are you searching for?” She had already put me on guard by asking innocently, “What is your universe?”) I put on an appearance of knowing my mind, alighted from the rickshaw at the first sight of wooden toys, and started talking to a young man tending a shop. It turned out to be an elaborate introduction to the industry and the people, far better than I would have had by wandering around.

The shop was called Arya Kashtha Kala Mandir, the Aryan Temple of Wooden Art, and the young man was Ram Chandra Singh. He was reading, had no customers, and was more than happy to show off his expertise and knowledge. With pity for my ignorance, which I was at pains to emphasize through word, gesture, and facial expression, he recounted the history of woodwork in Khojwa, the caste and social composition of the workers, and the nature of production. Everything was very clear except, as usual, his own family and social background. He was one of ten sons—could I have got that right?—whose names went thus: Rameshwar, Parmeshwar, Chandreshwar, Muneshwar, Gyaneshwar, Amiteshwar, Gopeshwar, Shrimanteshwar, and then, for some inexplicable reason, Raj Kumar. There was also one sister, Mina Kumari. Of course! The two glittering stars of the Bombay screen! For reasons of my own—personality, family background, academic training—I always felt awkward and unsure in probing family relationships and processes, considered the subject irrelevant, and tried to relegate it to later meetings. An hour with him felt otherwise like time well spent. The only other discomfort I experienced was in pretending I shared his taste when he began showing me the choicest examples of Banaras woodwork. Only the handmade wooden idols struck me as wonderful, utterly lifelike and charming. Who made those? Where did the ideas come from? Usually from calendars, I was informed, and my heart sank. I had expected something more “artistic” and creative. Ram Chandra then unrolled some calendars for my benefit and boasted particularly about one that he was going to order the craftsman to make next: the Panchmukhi (Five-Faced) Hanuman. I seized on the mention of the craftsman: where was he, how could I meet him? And immediately another young man, Kailash Kumar, who had meanwhile wandered in, volunteered to take me around to the craftsmen’s homes the next day.

That was how I was introduced to Tara Prasad, though I had to keep him too for another day because of Kailash Kumar’s priorities.(see fig. 5) Kailash’s uncle had a factory of stone goods in Khojwa, and, as often happened, Kailash saw me as overimpressed by Ram Chandra’s products and wanted to overwhelm me with his own. He was also educated, and doubtless full of vague ambitions, some of which I vaguely seemed to touch, being from some vague faraway place in his vague mind. I inspected the stone products: a seemingly unvarying array of candlestands, incense holders, ashtrays, oblong and round boxes for unnamed things. I tried to reason that this apparent sameness was explained by the lathe they depended on, which could only whirl the stone around rapidly like a potter’s wheel while the workers scooped with different files to mold the stone. But inwardly I accepted that it was for sheer lack of imagination. I saw some more “factories” according to Kailash’s taste, had tea and pan repeatedly, and extracted promises from everyone for hosting my further visits, all necessarily after Diwali. Most people offered to tell me the whole history of carpenters, toymakers, and stoneworkers in Banaras when I was ready (that is, after Diwali), and one grand man, Ram Khilawan, father of the ten sons, directed me to a publication, Singh Garjana, for enlightenment. This, as I immediately guessed, was the laudatory mythological history of his caste.

Tara Prasad (right) performing a pinda ritual

I went to Khojwa again the next day, though I almost never went to the same place two, leave aside three, days consecutively. Feeling like a thief, I took a different route, afraid to bump into those who had already assured me my work was over. Of course I lost my way and found myself returning to Ram Khilawan. It turned out to be no problem at all to meet him again, and I took one unplanned step forward in overcoming my diffidence and tendency to shy away from sudden familiarity and contact. During a brief chat he told me of what local people had drunk in the past, something called madag, made out of opium, but I felt utterly ignorant of the realm of drugs and intoxication conjured up by his talk and intuitively wished to ignore the whole subject.

When I knocked at Tara Prasad’s door, hungry and despondent, I discovered that he wasn’t in. His wife was illiterate and spoke only Bhojpuri. I for my part spoke “pure” Hindi and had always assumed that I would be able to follow Bhojpuri—or for that matter any “dialect” of Hindi—when the necessity arose. But this particular speaker showed me the fallacy of my simplistic and arrogant beliefs. Lilavati was crusading in her own way for the cause of those who resisted the categorization of Bhojpuri as a mere dialect and had plastered Banaras with posters, usually erasing notices in Hindi, urging, “Kewal Bhojpuri!” (“Only Bhojpuri!”). She spoke fast, with the unconcern for listeners that those little experienced in public life particularly have. Every time I tried to slow her down or to translate her words into mine, she either froze into uncomprehending silence or steamrollered right over me with her own thoughts. I had to admit to myself that I could not follow her and that she had no idea what I wanted, but I was determined to make it work. I sat ensconced on the wooden seat, she before me on the floor, and we talked to and fro for an hour, repeating much, and mostly at cross-purposes. A few things became clear, however. Tara Prasad was very sick. There was no money in the house. It was near Diwali and the wages for past work had yet to be collected. But how? Tara was too ill to go anywhere. His wife never stepped out, she did not like to meddle in all this. Why was he not resting then, where was he? He had decided to make his way to the doctor, resting and going, stopping and walking, as she put it, which I thought was wonderfully descriptive.

Very soon I was on my old track again, pleading with her to let me somehow help them. She resolutely warded off my offers, vague as they were. I’m not sure what I had in mind— perhaps finding out which route Tara Prasad had taken, following him, and helping him by the elbow to the doctor’s. I knew I didn’t have the courage or the confidence to take out some money and hand it to her. Thinking over the scenario many times in my mind, I concluded that giving her money would seem the height of insult, sitting there as I was, an uninvited and uncomprehended guest.

Even as my heart grew heavy at the hopelessness of poverty, and no less at the physical seclusion and resignation of this woman, as an anthropologist I was mentally noting “useful” facts, such as the name of the doctor patronized, one could say, by the woodworkers of Khojwa, or the economic, educational, and gender divisions that characterized Bhojpuri and non-Bhojpuri speakers. To file away information thus, even while expressing and indeed experiencing sympathy for a plight, always aroused in me the anxiety that I was reducing the situation to a drama, even a farce. Can one be detached and concerned at the same time?

Empirically speaking: yes. I was often both. I realized, however, which attitude had precedence for me. I obviously had a proclivity for detached observation: I was making a profession out of it. It took me a few more years and some well-intentioned but misguided efforts to grasp how I could also mark a well-defined space for acting on my other proclivity: to interfere in areas I designated as problematic.

My next visit to their house witnessed Tara Prasad properly medicated and restored. Displaying his unlabeled bottle of violet mixture to me like a trophy, he greeted me hospitably and in the right state of mind to take time off for conversation. As all further visits revealed, he was as busy as only the grossly underpaid piecework wage earner can be: he had to get through the first stage of carving at least ten statues every day. I could only sit by him and watch, calculating that one question per five minutes was all I should subject him to.

Tara Prasad’s home was approached by a narrow gali—six feet across—that branched off the main road of Khojwa about two or three hundred yards after the bazaar began. I could take a rickshaw till the gali; indeed I felt it was essential. The main road itself was not too broad, and walking on it could be positively dangerous, with its bullock carts, hand-pulled carts, and speeding rickshaws, all piled high with heavy sacks, heading toward the grain market of Khojwa. For Khojwa’s importance did not lie in its being the residence of woodworkers; it was known and feted as the second most important wholesale market for grain in the city, after Visheshwarganj.

The market was in South Khojwa, and I kept a distance from it for the longest time—traders and so on, after all, with their Vaishya (trading caste) values and brazenly economic motivations—until I realized what a unity a mohalla constitutes. Most of the points of interest that Tara eventually led me to, such as akharas, wrestling matches, Ramlila stages, temples, and meeting places for late night music, were located in the market, as were scores of articulate and culturally active men, all traders. I confronted yet another prejudice I had grown up with: a trader, I suppose I had imagined, was only half a real person, being engrossed in profit maximization; I discovered rather swiftly that traders were, in spite of their profession, as impressive as my artisans in their preference for living well.

No rickshaws entered Tara Prasad’s gali, nor could I bring myself to stay on my bicycle in such a narrow space—even after I started riding a bike everywhere—though everyone else in Banaras could do it to perfection. I always walked, which itself needed the elaboration of certain techniques. If a bell-ringing bike announced itself as you were walking along, you had to turn to the wall quickly and hug it, hoping that the pedals wouldn’t scratch you or the bike squish some fresh cow dung on you. Or, if you were near a step, you simply ascended it and waited at the front of a house for the bike to pass. As in Chauk, every house was raised a few steps, which helped when the place was full of rainwater, slime, mud, and washed-up garbage, but what other purpose this feature served I could not discover. A few Banarasi informants told me that it was the “seat” of the house, that houses were always built with “chairs” to sit on.

As I approached Tara Prasad’s house, I always had moments of trepidation, for just there were three or four viewing galleries: a woman selling cheap packaged foods on a little platform, a man carving in a windowless room open to the street, and a housewife and mother inevitably massaging her children out on her verandah. These would all inspect me thoroughly and, seeing me often, must have felt they had a certain responsibility toward me, for as I appeared they would announce, “Go on, they’re at home” or “Tara’s out, but Mangra’s mother is in.” If I, whose job was to meet strangers, felt the neighbors’ inquisitiveness so keenly, what did my hosts themselves feel? I sometimes wondered. Were they subjected to taunts, cross-questioning, accusations of accepting money, of being in league with the government, or simply of being made fools? All these were problems mentioned obliquely by less-willing informants; of my closer ones, none ever complained that my frequent visits caused them any trouble.

The neighbors, in any case, were clearly not malicious, simply torn by curiosity. Why did I not incorporate them into my widening net of informants and settle the matter once and for all? Even if I had done so, there would still have been “neighbors”: for every person you get to know, there are a dozen to watch you. You also have limited resources; if you concentrate on one person or family, you cannot make an equal effort to become intimate with others simply because they appear along the way, so to speak; it is a draining proposition. Most of all, I would say, I could not summon up sufficient intensity to overcome the hurdles their different personalities and situations threw up. To make one conquest itself produced a certain relaxation of tension (“Ha! I am moving to Phase II”) and weakening of effort. Then there was the element of chance—Tara Prasad had drifted into my orbit quite without planning—and the still-larger element of compatibility. Mohan Lal, Tara Prasad, and all those I got to know equally well were ordinary people in most respects but different from others in one: they had the imagination and the generosity to extend to me their friendship. By some trifling mannerism or characteristic, they had stuck out in an anonymous crowd in the first place; through some further qualities they made it possible for me to get to know them well. I did not feel the same way about most of their immediate neighbors.

I did make a conscientious effort to keep up the momentum, pushing my courage and aggressiveness to their limits. At Mohan Lal’s, my earliest visits were enough to make passers-by pause, stare, and try to overhear what this short-haired, smartly dressed young woman and the blind and deaf old man in tatters could have to say to each other. The shop itself, with its front overhanging the lane, was almost part of the public space. As for neighboring shopkeepers, it always seemed to me that they had far more leisure than was normal, and they inevitably assumed various poses in their shops that gave them the maximum view of me. Mohan Lal minded none of this, and, adding to my embarrassment, we both had to shout because of his partial deafness.

The next family I tried to get to know in Kashipura took much longer to accept me. I turned into a little lane—three feet wide—at random, and there before me in a cobbled square was a well and a chabutara (brick platform), that excellent device for outdoor recreation. All around were houses opening to the square. The one directly in front of me was the largest, and in its front room, the workshop, squatted half a dozen men working on silver, an earthy sight, if there ever was one. Their smooth-chested, muscular bodies glowing in the embers of their own fire, which rose and fell with the bellows, their bare-floored workshop with tools of all sizes on the walls, and nothing but metal in different degrees of readiness all around—no matter how I have tried to squash this crude association, the memory has always left me with the aesthetic satisfaction of having seen something totally picturesque.

I was in the uncomfortable position of standing on the ground a few feet beneath them, trying to interrupt five or six working men with no very precise query. They played deaf and dumb for a while, then I think asked each other, “Who is she? What does she want?” I was totally intimidated and would have run away if I could have, but it was easier to hold my ground. Finally, I said, “May I come in?” I was given a folded sackcloth to sit on, but work continued on all sides as usual. That first day I got little information from them, but I was content simply to sit and watch them while they decided whether it made any sense to take a few minutes off to talk to me. Meanwhile, a crowd of children repeatedly gathered at the doors and were shooed off incessantly for blocking the light and wasting the men’s time. That the males in the family were less irritated by my disturbance of their work than simply shy and distrustful of me became clearer when I started photographing the children. My camera worked as a wonderful icebreaker. The men began to laugh, joke, and talk, and though they did not look at me directly, they made me feel welcome.

It was even more difficult to get to know woodworkers because the lathe operators worked in groups in shops that were open to the street and were busy, crowded, dusty, and noisy with whirring lathes. It was always more difficult to approach a group of men than an individual, and it was nearly impossible to interrupt a group at work, especially with the deafening machines nearby. I began seeking introductions. For every person I knew, I would ask to be introduced to one more. Tara Prasad became my assistant as well as my informant. Not only did I peep into all the processes of his and his family’s life but also I could come to him with any question and, for all his resistance, pester him for an answer. Often I would simply show up and say, “Take me to so-and-so.” He would hem and haw but was irretrievably amicable enough to do it.

To the end he was uncomfortable at my “interviews.” When I requested, “Take me to your sardar, the head of the Vishwakarmas,” he literally jumped. “What do you want to ask him? What are you trying to find out?” On another occasion I asked him if he could take me to the widow of a man mentioned in my records as an important cultural patron. His dismayed, by then familiar, reaction: “What shall we tell her? What will you say?” It was useless to remind him of my project or to explain that I needed to know others as I knew his family, because he thought of me as nothing but a friend. My project had never been that clear to him to begin with, and he had relegated all knowledge of it to oblivion. Once, telling him that I simply must speak to more woodworkers but was unable to do so, I asked, Would he please introduce me to four friends? There followed an old-style anthropological encounter. I sat on the single wooden seat in Tara Prasad’s house, his friends squatted on the floor, and I asked them questions as everyone else listened in. I have never used the information I gathered there. It was a silly tactic that turned out all wrong, nor did it make Tara Prasad understand that part of me better.

It must be said that Tara was a wonderful person whom I grew to love, but he was too stubborn and taciturn and, as I was always aware, far too busy to be a good informant and assistant. The lesson I was learning with Mohan Lal was reinforced: the reluctance of people to talk, to be interviewed, to be pinned down, was really their reluctance to be objectified. I measure my growth by my increasing ability to see the validity of their side of it, to drop the effort at outright objectification, to think of my informants as friends, and to accept that most of the time my information gathering had to be indirect. Tara Prasad revealed his specialness in wandering around the city, attending music programs and such events, pursuing his own activities with me in attendance. With him I came closest to fulfilling my somewhat neurotic and perverse dream of simply following an informant around everywhere without being seen or heard.

Tara had two rooms in his house, apart from the covered nook where he carved, the little bit of space that was the kitchen, and the tin shed with swinging door that must have been the toilet. In one room lived the family: the craftsman, in his sixties, perhaps; his Bhojpuri-saber-rattling wife; and the ten-year-old daughter, at the peak of pre-adolescent shyness. The second room was kachcha, of clay and thatch, and was rented out to a young migrant latheworker from the village, together with his family. The great thing for me was that this couple had an infant daughter exactly the same age as mine, giving me an honest, un-self-conscious topic of conversation right from the beginning. I could even bring my offspring along with me, and with these credentials in my hand, they had so much less distance to cover in formulating an image of me that they could accept.

Tara worked at home except for the necessary trips to the potters-painters who garnished his toys with paint and varnish and to the shopkeepers to barter for a few pennies his strenuously crafted, magically lifelike things of pleasure and worship. His home, accordingly, became one of my “centers,” to which I could head from any place in the city, to breathe easily, talk slowly and at leisure, enjoy the restfulness of knowing that the family accepted me and had ceased questioning my purposes. My daughter took some of her first steps there and visited them at all times of the day and night, eating every kind of meal and grabbing her compulsory naps. Something about the clean-wiped, bare floor, the emptiness of the room, and the fact that everyone there did what children find preferable anyway, that is, conducted all activities on the ground, made Irfana feel in harmony with Tara Prasad’s home. I remember her sitting crosslegged on the floor, around the age of one-and-a-half, being directed by her hosts to eat from a plate in front of her. She addressed the rice and was told, “Eat the vegetables! The vegetables! They’re on top.” And little Irfana dutifully looked up at the ceiling, wondering what other surprises her mother’s friends had for her. It was only just and fitting that she should have returned to Chicago, at the age of two, fluent not in English, Bengali, or Hindi, the languages of her parents, but in Bhojpuri.

8. Weavers

My success with woodworkers and metalworkers was not easy to match with weavers, and I made four abortive attempts to enter their world before I finally succeeded.

First attempt: I had decided to eschew the deceptive mohalla of Madanpura, which people in their ignorance insisted on calling the center of silk weaving, but I was not sure where to go instead. Meanwhile I was broadening my circle of archival investigation. One October morning I visited Bhelupura Police Station to track down the police festival records I knew existed. The station officer was not in and others were not in a mood to be obliging, so I started my customary stroll in a randomly chosen direction. Immediately I saw a painter painting signs in his wooden stall, getting all the spellings wrong, with some finished portraits of local politicians and grandees standing behind him. “A painter!” My brain, as Sombabu claims it does on such occasions, started whirring. I ordered a nameplate from him and began talking to him about his work and his family. My purpose had to be explained, and as soon as I did so, he introduced me to a stout old man with a Muslim goatee in the shop of Diwali firecrackers next door. Clearly “hanging out,” this man was sitting on a wooden ledge in the sun and swinging his legs; he was exactly the kind of man I wanted to meet. He took me to his home in nearby Gauriganj, where his sons and grandson wove saris. On the way I noted other weaving establishments, including a barely visible sign deep inside a lane that would be my next stop: Hai Silk House.

With the friendly Muslim, Kamruddin Ansari, I had the old problem of not knowing where to begin. Now I asked the family about their work, how long they wove, how much they earned, and so on. Now I asked them about their family life and what it had been like in Kamruddin’s youth. “We exercised a lot in those days, daily, and ate raw chanas [chickpeas, lentils] soaked overnight after we worked out,” he said, looking at his sons. “These youngsters don’t do anything. Look at their health!” Now I asked about their festivals and was informed that Hazrat Shish Paigambar (whoever that might be) had started the craft of weaving. The most titillating information was that they were, all weavers were, Ansari. They were not Julaha (the caste name for weavers, both Hindu and Muslim, in written sources and popular usage); Julahas did “coarse work.” Some days previously Mohan Lal had told me confidentially that they, the metalworkers, were Kasera, not Thatera, as some people believed. Thateras only did “coarse work,” he had whispered in my ear.

The sons at first largely ignored me as a friend of their father’s; Kamruddin, it was clear by their demeanor, they barely tolerated, thinking him old-fashioned and simply old. After a good hour of eavesdropping on our conversation and placing me in some way, they aroused themselves from their indifference and brought me their “family” albums to survey. It turned out that they had arrangements with rickshawallas and taxi drivers, who brought loads of tourists to their doorstep to be given an inside look at silk weaving and almost certainly to make some purchases. Kamruddin’s sons had fat packets of photographs sent them by their foreign friends and a diary crammed with addresses from Japan to Hawaii, traveling westward. It was Kamruddin’s turn to look amused and indifferent.

I did not stay long after that. I didn’t fancy having my name added to the crowded rostrum of foreigners, which would probably soon have happened. As I walked away, I heard a shout, and Kamruddin caught up with me. “Don’t forget,” he panted. “Don’t forget to write in your book that I used to eat raw chanas every day in my youth!”

Second attempt: Hai Silk House was a complex of three or four houses joined together, one used for dyeing, one for weaving, and so on. Mr. Abdul Hai sat in his baithaka, literally “sitting room,” on his gaddi, literally “seat,” the term used for all those white sheets and bolster pillows set out in every place of sale and reception. Mr. Hai was a middle-level businessman, not important enough to dismiss me offhand but hopeful that there might lurk a possible business deal in our exchange. He had a Hindu accountant whom I was itching to question about what it was like to work in a Muslim establishment, but I could only get enough of his name to gather it was Hindu and could come up with no ready excuse to include him in the conversation.

Mr. Hai claimed that thirty years back he had been an ordinary weaver and by the sheer skill of his hands he had risen to his present position of owning fifteen to twenty looms. He could describe the looms and the composition of the raw material in accurate detail. Then we came to “society and culture.” “Our work was started by…” he began; “Hazrat Shish Paigambar,” I finished, peeping at my previous page of notes and thinking again, whoever he might be. Abdul Hai did not take kindly to this display of knowledge on my part. “You seem to know all about us!” he exclaimed, not amused, scrutinizing me closely. “Hey, munshi!” he brought the accountant into the conversation; “How does she know everything?” Like me, he had been aware that the munshi and I formed some kind of a twosome, both being Hindus.

I was startled, to say the least. What did he think I was? A Muslim from a weaver family, disguised as a Hindu? A government agent? A foreign spy? I couldn’t guess, but the interview was over.

Third attempt: I made at least two other misdirected attempts to penetrate the weavers’ world. The first was through the agency of a sari businessman called Seth Govind Ram (different from Govind Ram Kapoor), who invited me to the satti, the wholesale market for saris, between 4:30 and 6:30 in the evening, when dozens of weavers would come to him, as to other middlemen in the satti, to sell their wares. I went, and sat on his gaddi, and saw the weavers come. He would recall my presence occasionally and jovially announce, “And here’s a bahanji (respected sister) from Chicago who wants to find out about weaver society! Tell her something!” And a few weavers would be directed to me. Red and hot and in deep pain at the whole proceeding, I would mumble, “Where do you live? What do you celebrate? How long have you been doing this?”

Fourth and penultimate attempt: My last unsuccessful foray followed a disappointing encounter with some potters at Reori Talab. It was the eve of Diwali and the wrong time to speak to them, as I should have known. So I breezed into a shop of firecrackers on the other side of the street which had a good display and where a team of three brothers and their uncle were putting the final touches on more explosives. I thought I was collecting data on the firecracker industry until I discovered that the work was seasonal. Two of the brothers did weaving; the third carried on a trade in mutton. The youngest, as I guessed him to be by his looks and energy, escorted me inside to see his loom. None of them seemed to be married, nor did they have a mother or sisters or any kind of a “proper” family or home, but all were exceedingly extroverted. I was uncomfortable with all the obvious evidence of bachelor existence and their readiness to welcome me into it, but in those days the last thing I could do was voice my thoughts or clarify a doubt plaguing me. I just went away and never came back.

In fact, both Gauriganj and Reori Talab are weaving areas, as is Madanpura, but the real centers are in the north of the city, the wards of Adampura and Jaitpura. I finally reached Jaitpura with the help of the “contact” of a “contact.” Like Govind Ram Kapoor, he was a silk yarn dealer, but one who actually knew weavers. He himself lived in Nati Imli, and next to his house, conveniently, was located the Bunkar Colony, or Weavers’ Colony, a government-subsidized housing scheme that had made about fifty homes available to poor weavers through lottery. We went to the house of Shaukatullah, a heavy, balding man, with thick-rimmed glasses through which he peered shortsightedly, a light-hearted, amused man, and a true patriarch. He himself had retired from weaving, though he was perfectly fit as far as I could make out and evidently seemed to prefer sitting in the sun, shouting at his grandchildren, and going to the market for every little thing. The weaving was done by his two sons and a hired hand, and after a cursory look at the workshop I was handed over to “the family.”

This was no small challenge for me to face. There were at least a dozen small children, half a dozen bigger ones, and as many adults. I settled down for the morning; in those days, so aware was I of my own limitations, I saw it as essential to give four hours where one was needed, recognizing that it was not only my informants’ natural reticence that had to be overcome but my own shyness and ignorance as well. In a household setting, I was particularly lost. As soon as I had an answer to one question, I would simply nod and look sympathetic, not quite sure how to follow up. Matters of child rearing and child care? No, that subject did not quite appeal to me. How did they cook and what did they eat? Mildly interesting, but not terribly so. What work did the women do? That was clear enough: every stage of nursing, feeding, teaching, cleaning up, getting bobbins ready, and sewing and embroidery besides was before me to observe. They, in fact, asked me more direct, meaningful questions. “Where is our brother-in-law? How many nieces and nephews do we have? What do they do when you go out to work?” I am ashamed now to report that I could not even understand in the beginning that they were asking about my family, having accepted me as a sister, so unversed was I in Banarasi, and Indian, conversational rules, but as their meaning dawned on me I rushed to take advantage of the opportunity to establish rapport. They had me all figured out by the end of the morning, whereas I needed another four visits to have their “case history.” In the process, through the familiar anthropological situation of role reversal, where they were the inquirers, I the object, they guided me in necessary ways. I paid close attention to their style of conversation, their Bhojpuri-Hindi lingo, topics that startled them and those they assumed to be natural, and I assimilated and adapted rapidly.

Three things dominated my impressions on that first visit. One was the fact of overpopulation and the related fact of filth. We sat in the courtyard, a cemented ten-foot-square space between the workroom, two family rooms, and the outer wall. All around it was a narrow open drain where the children were encouraged to pee, and at least one small child to defecate. Where the older ones relieved themselves I did not discover, then or ever. The rest of the courtyard was littered with spilled food, garbage, and what must have been urine. There were flies everywhere, and I was the only one conscious of them. I was determined not to let one alight on me, seeing as I could where it must have visited the minute before. When sweets were ordered and set before me on a freshly washed platter, I became engaged in a battle with the flies to keep them away and with myself to decide what best to do with these greasy sweets. Should I gobble them up before they could be further contaminated; refuse them with the excuse that I was unwell—“But these are made of chhena (cottage cheese); they’re good for you,” was the response I had learned to expect—; or distribute them among the children in a swift, decisive move. Incapable of the last, I nibbled and suffered, eating far more than I need have because I chose the disastrous course of saying that I could not tolerate much sugar and that tea and pan instead would be “just fine.” So, I ended up being plied with the sweets and deep-fried salty snacks—since tea could not be drunk after sweet but only after salt—and tea, with an extra layer of cream on top for my special enjoyment. The second impression, then, closely linked to the first, was of overbearing hospitality.

The third, by contrast, was the impression of perfect order, as I saw the rest of the rooms. The floors were bare, without furniture or objects, everything neatly folded and stored up on ledges, grain and other food in huge tin canisters, things of daily use in rows on shelves in the wall. Every woman knew her job, no child could touch or play with anything, and there was an obvious pride in housekeeping. “How beautiful!” I could not help exclaiming.

What kind of space was the courtyard then? It seemed that a bottle of quinine or some other household disinfectant was not beyond their budget but that they simply did not care. When I recollect that I did not mention those terribly unsanitary conditions in the middle of the house when I finally wrote my book, I wonder whether I cared either. Or rather, I forced myself to care less since I was helpless to do anything about it, and maybe that was true for the women as well. Perhaps there is a direct relationship between observation of certain problems and one’s ability to do anything about them, including report on them meaningfully. I remember one informant’s words, as I stood at the head of a repulsive, stenching lane and exclaimed, “This is impossible; this will have to be cleaned up!” “This will not get cleaned up, sister,” he replied mildly; “but your eyes will get used to it.” To write on the issues of filth and the indifference to it has been on my agenda from 1981, but I have been attending to easier tasks first.

At Shaukatullah’s I was for the very first time in the middle of a huge—blossoming, blooming, they would have said—family, as opposed to being among the men in their workplace or with one or two members in a specific context. I made it very clear that I did not want concrete information on this or that; I just wanted to get to know them, to become intimate with them, to get to understand them. There were three or four girls seated on the ground beside me, the older women moving in and out of the rooms as they minded the cooking and children alongside, the children all surrounding me and staring, being pushed away for touching me or my bag, and the men busy with their jobs. They were the ones I really wanted to catch, but they were too elusive. The oldest son, Majid, had ordered the refreshments and stood by me to supervise their consumption, and the father, who had nothing to do, still preferred to sit apart in the sun rather than to meddle in the women’s chatter, directing occasional sallies at me: “You want to know about Ansaris. Well, even among Ansaris there are many castes!” Or: “We start working from the age of ten or twelve. We really get to know life!” All of this was delivered in a teasing, bantering way. To make the most of a situation like this, one needed the skills of a politician, or at least the experience of someone used to addressing and controlling numbers of people together—a police station officer, a school principal, or even my mother on her large estate with her staff of sixteen.

I was acutely conscious of being in a Muslim household— not awkward or nervous but simply extra-sensitive to nuances of word and gesture, again an admission of my own ignorance. I felt I had an “in” on Muslims by virtue of my Lucknow background (distant but useful to evoke), thanks to which I spoke in a way that made all language-conscious Indians exclaim, “Your Urdu is so good!” My father’s oldest brother, my tauji, who lived in Lucknow, looked in his younger days like a maulvi, and he and his brothers had all been educated in Urdu, Arabic, and Persian in madrasas. Our Kayastha family was acculturated into “Muslim” ways of speech, dress, and civility from the days when “Hindu” and “Muslim” were not distinct cultural categories at all. In times of diffidence, tauji’s image comes to mind and I feel encouraged that I can be trusted to know how to act in Muslim company. I had never actually been put to the test. All these feelings of closeness to Muslims were vague ones. The Muslims I had actually known were either nonpersonalities like government bureaucrats or those otherwise neutralized by education and life-style. As a child, my closest friends were Muslims, Shani and Tashi, whose house I visited frequently. Their food was distinct, but then so was that of every Hindu family I knew. The main difference I remember is that in their home the grandmother used the spittoon, whereas in ours only the males did.

In Shaukatullah’s family, there was much to make a Hindu observer feel at ease. The women were dressed in the “rural,” or old-fashioned, style of sidha palla, the loose end of the sari being draped over their head and right shoulder. Their jewelry was rustic and their speech was predominantly Bhojpuri, the language spoken by every caste and community in Banaras. The terms and phrases I noted down from them and other such informants bore little resemblance to the Urdu originals, and for months I did not discover the precise reference for the less familiar ones. They used Hindu imagery freely, speaking, for example, of “Lakshmi departing from the house” to mean destitution or of “filling the parting with sindur” to refer to marriage—none of which was necessarily helpful, since I was not a typical “Hindu.” I was not a Hindu observer; I was simply a naive observer. The more closely someone fit a stereotype, the easier it probably would have been for me, but these people fit no stereotypes at all. Yet, upon reflection, the fact that we moved toward mutual acceptance so quickly surely had something to do with Shaukatullah’s simple notions of brotherhood and love between all and with my vague identification with Muslims from my family’s past.

The question of the “actual” and the “proper” feeling of Hindus and Muslims toward each other continued to haunt me throughout my fieldwork. I wished to discard all idealism or romanticism about this relationship and see it for what it was. Adopting an inductive procedure of the crudest kind, I observed every instance of interaction carefully and asked everyone with whom I had dealings what their reflections on the matter were—which were also then observations to be interpreted. I usually learned more about the person questioned than about Hindu-Muslim relations. One good example of this was the owner of a watch shop whom I happened to be interviewing on the same day I had talked at length with musicians and had realized how irrelevant religious categories were in the realm of music. This timepiece expert was a sort of aristocrat, a patron of the arts, avowedly fond of music, and of course from an old, established, and wealthy family of Banaras. He told me about contemporary organizations and the patronage of music. Toward the end of our conversation, I threw in carelessly, “And how would you describe Hindu-Muslim interaction?” “Sister,” said he in his quite memorable way, “as far as I know they are not interacting at all!”

In a matter of weeks I was given the status of a daughter of Shaukatullah. When I finally took my husband to meet my new family, a ripple went through the house: the son-in-law had made his first visit. My “parents” made a ritual farewell (vidai) that day, giving me a sari, blouse and petticoat piece, and sweets, and Sombabu a hundred rupees. To cover his embarrassment, he gave what I thought was a good line. “Why me?” he asked. “She is your daughter. Give it to her.”

9. Categories and Units of Observation

In November I started tabla lessons with Pandit Mahadev Mishra. I had already planned to do so in Chicago, thinking, like Ernie on Sesame Street, that I had rhythm in my bones but that vocal music would not be such a good idea, since I had given it a try for three years with mixed success. The lessons were for fun, of course, though with tabla I had the half-serious notion of giving my sitarist husband accompaniment to practice by. I also imagined that learning something would give me access to a musician, his family, and perhaps the whole community of musicians.

This was also around the time that I became determined to nail down those elusive quarries, kajli and chaiti. These were buzz words that you heard in all kinds of situations, and I gathered that they were names for two genres of folk music. Kajli (or kajri, the l and r being often interchangeable in colloquial Hindi) was the more familiar, being alluded to in sundry written sources as a genre popular with women, a phenomenon of the monsoons, an activity associated with swinging merrily on swings hung from sturdy branches. Only the second characteristic turned out to be relevant to Banaras. I had never actually heard either kind of music, nor did I know where I might. By that time, I was spending a fair amount of time in artisans’ homes, was very close to some informants and developing other relationships further, increasing my circle of acquaintances steadily. But to know them or to visit their homes was not necessarily to discover their music—as it was also not to discover their gymnasiums, the akharas, or their picnics, the going out to bahri alang.

My other informants were bad, but Pandit Mahadev Mishra was the very worst informant a researcher could imagine. He was imprecise, did not believe in fact or detail, thought it boring to stick to a subject for more than a minute, let his mind wander where it would, and often stopped talking altogether to reminisce and smile privately to himself (see fig. 6). Apart from going to his house thrice a week, I also liked to bring him home on a Saturday, partly to offer him hospitality. That evening in November, as we were sitting at the tea table, the electricity went off for a long time. We sat in the dark and talked. He was relaxed and seemed pleased with the atmosphere. Pressing him gently, I asked for the umpteenth time, “Tell me about this Banarasi kajli and chaiti.” He did not, for once, brush my question aside as irrelevant—either you know it in song or you don’t; what is there to say about it? In fact, he did, in a way, because instead of saying anything, he sang some examples for me. I couldn’t recognize or differentiate them for my life. Then he told me, in one of those rare inspirations of his that always meant a major breakthrough for me, “I’ll take you to a disciple of mine. He’ll tell you all about kajli.” I promptly fixed time and place.

Pandit Mahadev Mishra singing the Ramayana

Pandit Mahadev Mishra was old even then, though it was difficult to remember that he was in his mid-seventies. He leaned heavily on his cane and walked slowly, but he was braver than I—as is every Banarasi—in trafficking a gali about three yards wide fully occupied by a fierce black buffalo. We reached the long, extended side of a one-storied house with many doors, and he called out for his disciples. There were two brothers, Dadu (Kshamanath) and Santosh Kumar, to whom I was introduced. I promised to return the next day.

Dadu and Santosh were tailors, urbane and mild-mannered young men, reserved and refined. They had both learned a little from Mahadev Mishra and had natural talent. Their father was an amateur poet and composer and so were they. To my eye they looked westernized, with their bell-bottomed trousers and styled shirts, but then I recalled that so had Gauri and Kishan at Vishwakarma Puja, and every other young man I had met outside his workplace or the courtyard of his home. There was in fact no question about any of these men being westernized. They were quite the opposite. The clothes they wore were part of Banaras and did not signal westernization to local people as they did to me. Dadu and Santosh quizzed me for hours about my purposes, and even then I had not awakened a sympathetic gleam in the eye or earned a nod of the head from them. We sat there cementing our relationship, chatting about Chicago, old and new times, coming back to how great a musician Mahadev Mishra was as a kind of refrain. With the sheer passage of time, I became a familiar sight at least. When they sent out for sweets and persuaded me to eat up, I thought I had become accepted. But I was no closer to discovering the meaning of chaiti and kajli.

When they did start talking about the music, I realized that there was something wrong with my phrasing of the question. No one can tell you “what” chaiti or kajli is. They would not even agree that it was “folk music” and complicated the whole issue further by telling me of half a dozen other forms that were “actually” folk music—chhaparya, purbi, bhojpuri, biraha, qawwali, ghazal—and labeling them in passing as “uncultured” and “of poor taste.” They did tell me of music akharas (“clubs”), however, of their famous leaders, and of their father’s akhara, called Jahangir. And they invited me to their Monday evening get-together in a room opposite the Hanuman temple in Khari Kuan, a few yards from where they lived.

I went the next Monday, entering after the singing had begun, and was mesmerized. It was dramatic, exciting, emotional, and very, very charming. The room, about ten feet square, was bare except for an open Ramayana, a garland, and an incense stick next to it. Two main singers faced the book, and the dozen or so other men in the room were divided roughly into two groups, one on either side. Each leader had a harmonium, a lanky and short-cropped fellow had the dholak, the two-sided drum, and the rest had cymbals (see fig. 7). I entered in the middle of a loud, uncontrolled burst of singing, exposing a dozen pan-red mouths.

An informal folk music gathering with Brij Mohan, a wooden toymaker and dholak player on the right

It was the first time that I had heard live folk music close up and in the very making, and the new experience contributed to the excitement. But far more exciting was the countenance and emotion of the singers themselves, their eyes closed, their bodies swaying, their voices eager to follow the lead pitch. That Monday turned out to be the first stop in a long odyssey which took me to byways and alleys, basements and rooftops, teashops in busy lanes and even temples on hilltops outside the city, all to hear and record this music. I began comprehending what chaiti and kajli and holi were and appreciating the fine distinctions within each. Finally came a time when I felt that I knew what Mahadev Mishra had been talking about when he had said to me, “Chaiti makes the hearts of Banarasis skip and beat with excitement,” but, in all honesty, this understanding came much later, when I was back in Chicago, my headphones glued to my ears. I understood biraha less, then and now, and certainly enjoy it far less. I discovered, totally out of the blue, the other genres of khamsa, ghazal, and Ramayana (as they used the term, to designate both book and genre). The mildest thing I can say about it all was that it was never boring. Even when the tunefulness was not impressive, the circumstances certainly were. On one occasion, piles of little hand-crafted brass and copper vessels, called lotas, were piled against a wall as the two teams chorused under this gleaming backdrop. On another, a still summer rooftop was filled with woodworkers and their families from all the surrounding lanes of Khojwa to hear Mohan the pan-seller sing and Brij Mohan, the same close-cropped young latheworker I saw in my first encounter, play the dholak. In yet another instance, I was placed on a bench over a drain facing a tea-shop transformed into a clean baithaka where panwallas and chaiwallas (pan and tea sellers) congregated. Always at ten or eleven at the earliest, always too late to make my pleasure unadulterated.

I felt little surprise upon discovering how dedicated and talented so many of my brass worker, coppersmith, carpenter, and toymaker informants and their peers were. I was getting used to this cultivation of excellence by seemingly unremarkable people. Strange to say,until this time I had heard the poor spoken of at best with pity and condescension, but never with respect. Their varied interests and their attitude toward life as something to be lived to the full were my discoveries in the field. I was perhaps quietly testing to see at which rung of the economic ladder this independence and spirit ended, and beneath which were only helplessness, suffering, and subsistence, where the frail structures built by the mind, so to speak, started relating one-on-one with physical impoverishment. I rested the case (with respect and gratitude) the day I visited a rickshawalla through the agency of his artisan son. Expecting a wretched hovel, I was stunned to meet this dignified widower leading a meticulously planned existence, obviously rich in the middle of his absolute poverty, his spare time devoted to musical renditions of the Ramayana.

How I organized my late-night trips to musical performances is a matter of wonder to me today, because I don’t think I now have the energy, enterprise, and sheer daring to chase things thus to their end. I had to find escorts, of course. Coming back would be no problem, I was always assured; one of the singers could be persuaded to see me home. But to go at ten or eleven, or even at midnight, very likely to cold, dark, sleeping neighborhoods, usually by roads and lanes only halfway decent even by the light of day—all this needed determination. I formed, over the months, a platoon of “brothers,” young men like Markande the stoneworker, or Nagendra, clerk in an unknown office, who were themselves totally uninterested in the events I proposed to witness but who, having declared themselves my brothers, could not say no to me. So the person in question would bundle himself up, find me a rickshaw, and then cycle along to the destination. I would not let him go, and he had to sit, or slouch, or sleep, or whatever he could allow himself to do, till I was ready to leave. I should add that I was always conscious of my high-handedness and cut my visits to music gatherings shorter than they would have been had I been on my own.

I was always the only woman on the scene at the regular gatherings; the exceptions were the annual celebrations of shrines, called sringars, and special programs, such as the one on the Khojwa rooftop, when women and children formed the outer rings of the audience or made themselves comfortable on adjoining rooftops. I do not remember ever minding my solitude or suffering any discomfort from it. Either people ignored me—though they did not ignore my tape recorder, treating it gently and reverently as it was “filled up”—or they treated me with respect and protectiveness. “A chair, a chair! Get a chair!” was one way of expressing this, though no chair would appear out of the darkness. There was no teasing, bantering, joking, or even questioning. I think the assumption was that of course their music was special enough for me to come a great distance, leaving family and home, to hear and record it. I had not known of this great music for many reasons; my informants uniformly put it down to India’s regional diversity. Native Banarasis clearly understood that “Indian” is a term needing qualification. They matter-of-factly attributed my ignorance to my origins at variously conceptualized points lying in westerly directions. In their more euphoric moments, I was often flattered by informants: “It’s really miraculous, how you can come from outside and understand the music [or whatever other thing at the moment it was] of this city”— where “outside” for them meant not Chicago or New York but Lucknow.

10. Among the Police and Administration

I have neglected to mention my ethnographic adventures at the beginning of our stay, when we got to meet the high society of Banaras. Within our first week we went for dinner to Mr. Rishi Pratap Singh, a prominent businessman; for dinner to the Senior Superintendent of Police; and for lunch to the Superintendent of Police, Intelligence. The first was a family friend of many years’ standing, the second a subordinate of my father’s, a lively and likable person who had worked hard to help find us a house, and the third was the husband of an old school friend I had met again after many years. The reason for all these social gatherings was the transfer of the District Magistrate, the kind of event that occasioned farewell parties. The dinners took place after midnight, the lunch at only 4 p. m., all preceded by long hours of formalities, high-flown declarations of friendship, and very poor jokes. The food was the most elaborate conceivable, unbeatably expensive, and lavish, with almost every delicacy that was available in the market served at the meal. There was always soup for starters. Now if I were to serve soup with Indian food, I might hope that it would fill people up a little and make my food go further. But the guests needed no such consideration; there was always one vegetarian and one nonvegetarian table laden with dishes, and the hostess circulating: “Bhai Sahab! Bhabhiji! (Brother! Sister-in-law!) You are not eating anything!”

We were alternately revolted and saddened by it all: the poverty of taste, the vacuum of interests and purposes, the wastefulness and underlying degeneration. Yet we went to every one of these functions, without ever feeling kinder toward this society, because I reasoned to myself that my curiosity about it all could be satisfied only by personal participation. We also found it difficult to say no and could never think of satisfactory excuses in time. Yet each degrading experience made us despise ourselves for attending and resolve never to do so again.

I had perhaps an easier time of it than I could have had, because I was not obliged to sit in the drawing room in a row of ladies, enduring the jovial pressure to “finish my drink.” With the excuse of a little baby, I could retire to a quieter room to nurse Irfana, put her to sleep, or sit with her. At the Singhs’ house, the youngest daughter, Meena, was doing her lessons in the room I retreated to. She was learning by rote answers to certain questions for her General Knowledge test on the morrow. “What are stockings?” she kept asking restlessly. The subject, apparently, was festivals, and the question was “What happens at Christmas?” In that warm bedroom draped with mosquito nets, I concluded there was little connection between children’s curriculum and the social or historical reality around them. As for the problem of the language itself, Meena did not need to have trouble with “commemorate” for me to feel that there was no connection between the medium she was learning in, English, and her consciousness.

At the S.S.P.’s house, our hosts were so thoughtful as to arrange for a woman to watch our baby during the party, the wife of one of the servants, who came in occasionally to massage the mistress, help out with guests, and so on. I was delighted to have a person to talk to. Finding out about her was simple enough, but when I learned that she was a Banarasi, I grew more ambitious. “There was this Burhva Mangal mela that was held in Banaras years ago,” I told her in a confidential tone. “Tell me about the Burhva Mangal fair.” She absolutely denied any knowledge of the fair, as if the confession would jeopardize her in some way, and, shutting up altogether, sat in a bundle, probably tired and dozing. I was nonplused. Everyone else seemed to know of the fair. Was she too young? Had she been too secluded? Was she a moron? The meeting pricked in my mind as an unresolved riddle until I decided, after other similar encounters, that it was impossible to turn servants into informants. Or, for that matter, informants into servants.

I had occasion about a year later to use an informant in a serving capacity, with the idea of helping her out and saving her from worse drudgery in uncaring homes. What I discovered was this: the master-servant relationship could not be reconciled with the empathy and closing of distances aimed at in fieldwork. Once you were familiar with another’s values concerning food, spatial and temporal preferences, and devices for maintaining individuality and freedom, you could not, without considerable agonizing, order the person to conform to a different set of values. But you had to do so as a master, and indeed to condemn these very freedom-preserving devices as lazy, dishonest tricks. My quarrels with my informant-turned-servant were about things as petty as teamaking. Being perfectly attuned to the sweet, cooked tea served all over Banaras, I proceeded now to dictate the terms under which tea could be made in our home: always in a teapot with a tea cozy, leaves steeped in freshly boiling water, milk and sugar on the side, and so on. Nor could I stand it if my new maidservant brought anything preserved on a platter, in ordinary Banaras style. The very same habits I accepted as rational, legitimate features of another life-style were intolerable in my own home: it was oppressive to be made to eat and drink in ways not of my choosing under my own roof.

My poor ex-informant could not fathom the dilemma and proceeded as cheerfully as ever to supply me data regarding Banaras customs through her behavior. For example, she habitually took a couple of days off for any festival, major or minor. I knew perfectly well about the leisurely pace of Banarasis, their lightheartedness and love of holiday celebrations. But when victimized (as I saw it) by these otherwise admired characteristics, I threw a tantrum: “How can another person (me) work if the first doesn’t stick to the rules? Don’t you have a modicum of responsibility toward the task you are committed to?” and so on. Thus addressed, my subject sulked, suffered, and degenerated into a still more imperfect servant and informant. This was during my first stay in Banaras; in later visits over the years I had the good fortune (it would seem) to be in close daily contact through domestic service with men and women from weaving, woodworking, stoneworking, carpenter, biri (cigarette) making, and rickshawalla families. I learned to close my eyes to their occupational backgrounds and cultures and to acknowledge that the roles of servant and informant were not complementary. But my first round of fieldwork had such a long-term formative influence on me that I was doomed to have only inefficient control over my servants ever after that.

To return to the high society of Banaras, I was constantly trying to calculate whether the officials we supposedly knew were of any use to us at all or whether they were leading us up blind alleys all the time. They seemed utterly sincere when they promised help, as they did at the drop of a hat. Yet their offers for housing, gas, service people, introductions to informants, and shots for our child had only delayed us, and finally we obtained everything without their help. Sometimes we had actually suffered from their help, as when, through their mediation, we would meet a musician or other important person who would prefer to ignore us, classifying us as members of a despised officialdom. Then we would make an entirely new approach, in our own capacity, and woo the individual back to a neutral stance regarding us. The outstanding case was the tabla player Kishan Maharaj; he became so incensed at what he imagined were arrogant demands on our part to come and play in our house that he threatened to write about it to a local daily. We had a showdown and developed an excellent relationship after that. Most people in India, even when they pretend to be allies of the administration, harbor a deep and just distrust of officials; simple people like my artisans do not even need to pretend. If one appears on the administration’s side in class or status then one suffers the same distrust automatically. So, for us the job was clear-cut: disassociate ourselves from the rulers, not only because it made sense culturally but because it was a pragmatic research need.

In some matters, however, our police contacts were fortunate. As soon as I would ask about a particularly crowded mela or celebration, a jeep would be offered. Sometimes the offer would materialize and sometimes not. One did appear, at least, to take me to the Ramnagar Ramlila in Sombabu’s absence and to show me the Durga Pujas around the city. The immersion of the Durgas in the river the next day, a festival in its own right, was happily planned for me by the S.S.P.’s wife. My name was added to the guest list of a motor launch fitted out for Banaras VIPs, and we chugged up and down the ghats in the dusk for two hours. All the ghats were silent, dark, and primitive, except for Manikarnika, bright with funeral pyres, and Dasashwamedh, a sea of figures, where the Bharat Sewa Sangh sadhus (monks) were dancing before radiant images. I would never have guessed what it was like had I not seen it, and seen it from the boat, because I would never have found a place in the dense crowd on the ghat. The following year I used my contacts again. The police had a camp on the highest point of Dasashwamedh ghat, and with little Irfana I sat in the best spot on the promontory the whole evening, both of us soaking up the spectacle of various-sized boats carrying their Durgas out and unloading them into the river. All other immersions—Kali, Vishwakarma, Ganesh, and Moharram—I have witnessed from yet other perspectives, and I readily admit that police help has been unnecessary for them.

The first day that Sombabu was away for a prolonged time, the inspectors (station officers) of Bhelupura and Maduadih thanas visited me in quick succession to offer their assistance in my time of solitude. They could not have guessed how desirous I was to meet police inspectors in Banaras. An inspector seemed to me, before I learned differently, to hold the key to what goes on in his circle (his kshetra) and to be eminently interviewable regarding the crimes, events, persons, and general character of the area he is in charge of—a living document, as it were, a nicely detailed administration report of the present that you could cross-examine. My plans for interviews were never realized. There was always something more immediate to ask of the inspectors when I could meet them. That in itself was not easy, as my repeated visits to Bhelupura thana proved to me: the man would always be out on “tour” or unavailable for unspecified reasons. I suspected that as I grew less novel and more familiar, and also less impressive, perhaps even ludicrous because of my childish interest in ordinary, daily, common things, the inspectors concluded that it was not worthwhile to pay attention to me. On my part, I came to realize that there were people far more knowledgeable than police inspectors to interview, even regarding a kshetra, and I no longer found time to chase them. I had made some advances to likely individuals, such as the Circle Officer II, who sat in the Dasashwamedh thana, but none of them—neither he nor other officers, not even the husband of my old school friend—ever responded to my gestures of friendship. The one exception was Krishna Chandra Tripathi, but his motives were not above suspicion, as I shall shortly describe.

I do not recall exactly how I discovered the existence of police station records important for my topic, except that it was in my early 1979 foray, when I also discovered the Nagari Pracharini Sabha, pandas’ (pilgrim priests’) records, periodicals, and Dr. Suryanath Gupta. In 1981 I was finding it difficult to start work on the police registers and was unable to catch the Bhelupura inspector in his office or to improve my poor relationship with the Chauk inspector. When the latter was transferred, I thought I could make a fresh start. I entered the inspector’s office and, without any allusions to police connections, introduced myself to the new person, offering him a copy of the letter from Professor Akira Iriye vouchsafing that I was a research scholar from Chicago. He was polite and had me sit—I kept chattering out of nervousness—while he thought. Before long I saw his eyes widen with recognition and knew that he had guessed my identity. The grapevine in Banaras police circles was more efficient than I had given it credit for. His initial reaction was the closest I came to finding out how he would have reacted to a “mere” research scholar. He was an extremely nice person, one whom I could joke with later about our first meeting, but on this matter he always became serious and claimed that he would have treated me the same no matter who I was.

I have tried the same tactics with other police officers. No one gives you special consideration unless you are in some way an important person, though how the importance comes to be understood is, fortunately, flexible and unpredictable. When we had alighted at the Banaras train station the second time around in 1981, still homeless, with nowhere to go, and found all the telephones out of order, I betook myself to the Railway Police Office. “I need to use the telephone,” I commanded the armed constable at the gate with what was a superhuman effort for me. “I am the daughter of the I.G.” The man was a fresh recruit and didn’t grasp the meaning of what I said, but he took me through to the inspector’s empty office, nodding at questioning countenances on the way, “She’s a big person.” In fact, it wasn’t the “I.G.” that was crucial; any two or three initials would do. As for reaching closed places, if we had a jeep all we needed to do was to put a large plate on the front reading “R.S.C., Varanasi City” (Research Scholars from Chicago) to match such signs as “A.D.M.” (Additional District Magistrate), “C.S.C.” (CivilSurgeon City), “C.E.E.” (Chief Executive Engineer), “U.P.S.E.B.M.D.” and the plates of other VIPs who could reach places.

My Chauk Police Station experience was the most pleasant, although it became progressively awkward. I had to sit in a dignified manner at the chair and table provided for me, could not dream or doze, could not leave for tea at the nearest teashop, and had nothing to eat. The first couple of times Mr. Govind Ram Kapoor wandered in to improve my knowledge of my chosen topic in general; I kept pulling him back to the subject of the Citizens’ Committees and his role in them, which he tackled with enthusiasm. The registers more than compensated for all this; they were bursting with information, and I laboriously sifted through them, full of excitement, greed, and jealousy that someone else might discover them at any moment.

The Bhelupura inspector believed that no one on earth was superior to him, a belief that the undiluted despotism in their kshetra breeds in many inspectors. To preserve this belief intact, he avoided all contact with me. So difficult was this R. S. P. Srivastava to find, so many unanswered notes and unreturned messages did I leave for him, that he quickly became Mr. R. S. V. P. Srivastava to me. I saw the Bhelupura registers last of all.

In the police registers I noticed references to public meetings of Hindu and Muslim leaders on the subject of possible communal tension during Durga Puja, Moharram, and other festivals. To attend one I had to learn the venue, time, and purpose from a police officer. For months I kept losing this battle to those I talked with; they would simply shrug me off with “It’s not for you” or “We’re not sure about it yet” or “I’ll let you know about the next one.” Only when the next round of festivals began around Holi did I know how to insist and get results: humbling myself totally, striding into the inner courtyards of police stations, not merely sitting politely in the inspector’s room; waiting on cold benches for him to return, arguing patiently with underlings, knowing it was not their cooperation I sought; and even walking into the shaving session of the Dasashwamedh inspector to ensure his not escaping before he said yes to me.

On balance I would say that involvement with the police taught me a little more about life in the city but slowed me down at times as much as it helped me. After a few months the novelty of my presence had worn off. The police became used to me and were finally convinced that I was more a student than a memsahib; I stopped requesting anything from them other than an occasional escort, which could have been wrangled from them by any other researcher given sufficient tact. My father retired within a year, and then there was nothing but mixed memories of when I had been bahanji (sister) to the whole police force, and Sombabu the brother-in-law.

11. The Researcher at Home

In November Irfana was going to be six months old, and we had had our share of baby care problems. We had arrived with no knowledge of where to get domestic help and had turned to neighbors for advice on all matters: finding cleaning help, a newspaper man, a supply of milk, and a carpenter, electrician, plumber, and washerman, the last of which curiously was the most difficult for us to get and to keep. A rapidly growing pile of laundry, of all things, makes me exceedingly nervous because I—unlike Banarasis—regard washing clothes as the worst form of drudgery. The neighbors had been pleasant and helpful and always positive. One finally directed an ayah toward us to look after the baby. Being an ayah meant, in our minds, washing diapers as well as all the other clothes, sweeping and mopping the floors, doing the dishes, and then, after bathing thoroughly and putting on one of the two fresh saris we had supplied, keeping the baby cheerful and occupied.

But looking at our cherubic three-month-old, we hesitated to entrust her to a perfect stranger. Miss Malti, our new find, did not excite our confidence either. Dark, ugly, and pockmarked, she sported what I labeled “a false smile” and walked with an elephantine swaying of the hips. We decided that she was “not too clean” but could not agree on the reasons why. My husband thought it was her half-painted nails, which indicated careless personal hygiene; I always considered her dry, dusty hair suspect. I was biased against her from the beginning because she took every opportunity to reiterate that she was a “Srivastava” from Bihar, implying an originally high status that had now befallen hard times. Instead of sympathizing with her misfortune—and in a remarkable denial of my anthropological role, I never pursued the matter and always changed the subject instead—I was irritated at the sheer ordinariness expressed in this passion for social mobility.

I was out for approximately six or seven hours of the day, the nursing schedule ensuring my presence at home at 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. at the outer limit. I quizzed Sombabu on what went on the rest of the time. Malti was not allowed to hold the child or prepare her bottles. She sat near Irfana while the baby took her naps, rocked her nice cane cradle that we had inherited, and made faces and sounds at her when she awoke—for the five minutes that elapsed before Sombabu came bounding in to her. I might have made a compromise with her “dirtiness,” but since Sombabu did not, I couldn’t interfere. This was not our only problem. She was sloppy with all the other work entrusted to her as well and would simply not respond when the call went out, “Malti!” —usually for a glass of water or some other simple chore. I confronted her about that. She assumed a tragic expression: “Bahanji, I am not used to being called, and I do not go out in front of men very readily.” Given that she and the man of the house had to share the premises most of the day, this was an impasse.

In early October, on the eve of Dassehra, Malti decided she wanted to go on leave for the festival. We were relieved and helped her pack up comfortably with gifts and food. She swayed off and, as we expected, never came back. But she had the last laugh, for one of our neighbors asked us the next day: “Did you give your maidservant a lot of stainless steel to take with her? She had bowls and spoons in her basket when she left.”

For a month we had no one. I worked like a slave—at everything except the laundry, at which my husband is fortunately very handy. The morning began with the newspaper, our cups of tea, and a cutting board, knife, and lauki or torai, the watery monsoon gourds we were fond of eating, partly because they were so easy to chop and cook. Three things would be cooked together in the three compartments of the pressure cooker, and we would feel very heroic. Meanwhile Irfana’s orange juice would be squeezed, her bottles sterilized, her bath water heated, the beds made, the apartment swept…Within a week the housework had caught up with me and defeated me. I would leave home already exhausted when practically half the day was over (not a great loss in objective terms, for my first destination was usually Nagari Pracharini Sabha, which did not open until 11 a.m. and where work began a little later). I tried different devices to maximize the returns from those days. For my ethnography, I decided to venture only around the route to the archives. In the neighborhood of Sonia near Sigra there were potters and painters galore. I wandered through their lanes and stood and looked at their work; they all wanted me to come back after Diwali. At a pan shop nearby, I spent long hours with the panwalla, Mahant (Head Priest) Ramdev, so called because there was a small temple nearby and he was its caretaker. The temple also had an akhara, a wrestling pit, on its premises. Those were my pre-akhara days, when I had not yet realized what an akhara was, so I toured it with Ramdev, noted the latrine in a corner—a couple of bricks on the ground, judiciously placed—and filed the information away. At his pan shop, too, because I sat around so much, I also overheard a fair amount of seemingly irrelevant talk, thrilling inwardly at certain exchanges, as when two customers could be overheard saying, “What is your mood today? Should we go outside?” “Yes, let’s go to the other side.”

I had also realized that the U.P. Regional Archives, Banaras, were right next door to Sonia, in the shopping center called Shastrinagar. On most of my visits there, the director, who had complete control over requisitions, was missing. Undaunted, I went through all the indexes and noted the items of interest to me. I was not the least eager for him to be present, for the first time I had met him he had completely wasted my afternoon with insufferable tales of his own heroics in different research contexts. I could wait for these noted items, since they all sounded distant and vague in the context of the Banaras I was getting to know.

Another kind of day would start off like this: “Irfana is almost asleep. Maybe we can all go.” So we would pack up bags and baby and depart for whichever place one of us had work, say Banaras Hindu University. We bounced around, being pedaled laboriously through the sunshine in a broken rickshaw over a broken road through a broken city. At B.H.U. there was some shade from mango trees, but the pedaling was just as laborious. Even after stopping at two or three buildings, we failed at the first job on our agenda: to get our library cards. The students had closed up the administration building so we couldn’t pay our deposit. We clung to our rickshaw as if it were a lifebuoy in the middle of this sea of a campus. The second project was to meet Anand Krishna, professor of art history and a slight acquaintance. This was also accomplished only after two or three stops. He was gratifyingly hospitable and took us home, where we rested, fed Irfana, and packed away snacks and sweets ourselves. He made gracious promises of help, which always cheered us up.

The worst of my domestic experiences promised to begin when Sombabu was suddenly called away to Bombay in early October to clear our shipped goods through customs. Said he as he departed, “Maybe you can take the cradle to Nagari Pracharini Sabha, and push it while you work” (with one toe, I imagine he meant, like the pankha-pulling boys of yore). I wondered what my ingenuity would cook up to beat that, and I wasn’t disappointed.

First of all, informants came to me instead of my having to go to them. Number one was Sidhnath, whom I had met after a weary walk in Vishwanath gali. That particular marketplace is so frequented by tourists that the artisans and vendors seem to have lost their naturalness. After many frustrating attempts I found this man to sit down and talk to. Sidhnath painted the faces and the folds of garments on otherwise blank marble icons. Perhaps I was overenthusiastic, sat too long, and drank too many helpings of tea because no other person I ever talked to reacted the way Sidhnath did after only one meeting. Sidhnath arrived the next day at my place with a one-year-old child in tow and gifts of grapes and biscuits for my own child (she had not matured enough to appreciate these, needless to say). Whereas I had found it easy to be friendly and talkative in his surroundings, I was awkward and at a loss in my own. But, thought I to myself, this is excellent, this is how it should be. I should be able to bring these two facets of my life together. I realized in retrospect that it had indeed been special to witness a dimension of his life very important to him, that of father, filed as he was under “painter,” cross-referenced “miscellaneous artisans,” in my scheme.

Another visitor was Markande, a stoneworker in the factory of Kailash’s uncle in Khojwa. I had met him along with a dozen other young workers on my visit to the stone factory; all wore rags over their nose and mouth to keep from breathing in the dust, all were yogi-like in their bare-chested thinness and their white coats of stone dust. They all heard me announce my name, address, and purpose, but only Markande had decided to follow up on that information, which definitely marked him in my eyes as more interesting than the average. He had absolutely nothing to say when he came over, however, and sat there, shy and dumb, admiring the odd vase and lamp in the room (both of stone, coincidentally) and deciding he could copy them if he tried. We then talked about his job. He was immensely proud to be a craftsman. He presented me many creations through the rest of my stay, and I kept packing them away quietly, so heavy, nonutilitarian, and nondecorative were they. His big question that day was, Would I visit his home? This was truly the water coming to the thirsty horse.

While I was ruminating on my good fortune with useful visitors, there came to my doorstep a neighbor whom I was quick to welcome as a potential informant. Nandlal was the watchman employed by our landlord, a small, wizened man of unguessable age, except that he could always be found resting in the sun and was arguably quite old. He squatted in front of me and declared that he had a request. I was filled with a sense of helplessness and pity as I listened to his tale of land and property being snatched from his family through a trick document signed by one who did not know what it contained. I was both powerless and unwilling to do anything about it. Already in my experience, such vague and hopeless requests poured in at any attempt to get to know anyone. All my acquaintances so far were embroiled in lawsuits or preparing for one. Mohan Lal’s brother had lost his house to a scheming tenant; Tara Prasad’s old tenant owed him many months’ rent and would neither pay up nor respond; Shaukatullah’s second plot of land was illegally occupied by some Ahirs…and so on. The only thing I could decide in my own naive and anxious mind was that as soon as possible I would study law (it being too farfetched to aim for medicine, the other service everyone seemed to need) so that the next time around I could actually do something for my informants.

After a few mildly productive days at home, I decided to be bolder, and I packed up baby and baby things. My destination was Bengali Tola, literally the Bengali locality, the natural center for the celebration of Durga Puja, the Bengali version of the U.P. Dassehra, celebrated with a pageant of the goddess Durga rather than with the theater of the Ramlila. I saw some Durga images right away in a courtyard, entered and met the craftsman, Prafulla Kumar Dutta, originally from Calcutta (see fig. 8). His mother and sister worked with him, and the whole visit was quiet, happy, and—productive, I was going to say, but in those early days, I could not even have said what I meant by the word. They took me around the maze of lanes, and I learned to see Bengali Tola as a normal place humming with activity, not as “dirty” and “puzzling”—the simple difference between seeing it from their point of view and seeing it from my own, uneducated, one. Prafulla’s family reminded me of Moscow acquaintances in their “socialist” manners, the way they welcomed me, observed no distance, stood on no ceremony, made no speeches about high and low—even though there was no denying their poverty and absolute lack of security. I had been shown their home, whose ceiling had collapsed in the monsoons; they were being allowed by the kind owner of a vacant house to work and live in its courtyard.

Durga image maker in Bengali Tola

Prafulla’s mother had immediately reached out for Irfana as I had come up, before we had even started talking. I was willing enough to part with her, and my daughter, who shines on occasions like this, chirruped and looked laughingly around. Later the thought crossed my mind: this woman touches mud and clay, the ground and dirt, as does her sari, and she does not wash. Although she is far less clean than Malti, I hesitated to give the baby to Malti but not to this woman…? The unalterable difference between servants and informants aside, I was progressively sloughing off my own trappings and entering informants’ worlds on their own terms, accepting that to measure others’ choices by my standards was both unworkable and undesirable. And while I continued to scheme and plot to ingratiate myself on each occasion, not averse to using even my own baby as a tool, I no longer found this plotting and scheming shocking or guilt-ridden, but a natural, adult way of building relationships, and therefore not scheming at all.

In my remaining days of solitude I did a different kind of fieldwork: I went to see the many pageants of the Durga Pujas and the enactment of the Ramlila at Ramnagar. For all my long residence in India, I still imagine the unseen to be far different from what it turns out to be. I think I expected the Ramlila—never having been to one—to be a feast of color and romance. The Ramlila field at Ramnagar turned out to be a vast, dusty plain, ill-lit with gas lanterns, and dotted with men and women squatting, gathering, waiting. Little trucks of parched rice and rewri (a sesame seed candy) stood among them. Other foods consisted of round baskets of peanuts, carts of overripe bananas, and an occasional chana seller. Other entertainment consisted of nothing.

Three sparse structures were proudly pointed out to me: one, Chitrakoot, when Rama lives in exile; two, Lanka, Ravana’s “castle”; three, a flat stage, on one side of which Rama and Lakshmana were seated on a throne, surrounded by their managers and PR men. As I approached them, someone whispered an introduction of me to them, derived from my policewoman companion, upon which Rama innocently asked, “What is an I.G.?” The priest attending him replied, “Shhh…He is a very big man.” “Well, isn’t she going to give us something?” “Shhh…” The drama, when it began, was painfully slow, crude, clumsy. But it sent shivers of excitement down my spine as, after every speech by Rama, the crowd roared, “Bho-o-o Rama!” It was because of the audience that I wanted to keep seeing more, because of the evidence of their acceptance of God on earth. I had bagged a little space on the edge of the stage and sat holding my baby, no doubt making myself as comfortable as I could. A woman constable came up and told me strictly, “Cross your legs please! This is God’s play.”

The Durga Pujas, by contrast, were clean, bright, well organized—altogether modern. I heard their number was on the increase, and that made sense to me. It seemed more satisfying and more relevant in some sense to decorate a deity according to your taste, as elaborately as you could, have everyone file by for darshan, an auspicious sight, and vary your entertainment according to the year’s taste, than to stage a complex tale night after night and to arrange for huge crowds to see and hear it well. The Bharat Sewa Sangh monks had a demonstration of lathi (pole) wielding at their Puja; the Diesel Locomotive Works, a movie; other places, all-night plays or movies. Deeper observation would have to wait: as I made the rounds to scores of events, I kept taking the addresses of the young men who were apparently the organizers, judging by their busyness in putting last-minute touches on the show.

Sombabu returned in good time, and we could hardly believe our sudden streak of good fortune as we found not only a new ayah, but a cook and an odd-job man besides. Our new trio was wonderful, ensuring order and harmony at home but keeping routine resolutely at bay by virtue of their personalities. They were the cook, Lal Mohammad (Dear to the Prophet); the maid, Shyam Dulari (Beloved of Krishna); and jack-of-all-trades, Raja Ram (Rama the King). To prevent little islands of recognizable sound bobbing up on the smooth surface of the otherwise incomprehensible sea of our strange language, English, when we discussed them, we preferred to call them Red Prophet, Christ’s Lover, and King Canute.

Lal Mohammad was retired from the police; he had served all his life as a “follower,” one of those men in the background who knead, chop, fry, ladle, and maintain. He was a professional cook and baker trained in British times, and the touch was evident. His expertise encompassed the most exotic fare of the British Isles, and he could not be challenged or corrected on any point. Nor, as a true chef, would he deign to touch any work but his immediate specialization, no matter what the emergency—not the dishes, or the kitchen sweeping, or preparation of the baby’s juices or formula. We loved the feeling of endless horizons that Lal Mohammad’s presence gave us, though we never came close to exploring his potential to its fullest. His presence also ensured that some self-conscious Brahmans could never eat at our place, being prisoners of the coded substance theory that forbade their accepting food from outcastes such as Muslims. We sometimes pretended that what we served was store-bought, arguing to ourselves that such food would have been cooked by people like Lal Mohammad under other roofs in any case. Or we served it anyway when we knew that the guests couldn’t say no, and we would enjoy their discomfiture slyly as they sat eating with obvious reluctance. Lal Mohammad, as befitted his Imperial heritage, acknowledged or cared for none of this. The only distinction he knew was between high-brow and low, and his own brows often furrowed as he quizzed himself as to where we belonged. He was old, too, like many of my informants, and he gave me my first nomenclature for them. I had discovered that words like karigar, the Hindi equivalent for “artisan,” did not work, and when I told our new cook what my subjects were, he said with proper derision, “Oh, the nich qaum, the chhote log (the lower orders, the smaller people)?” He was himself a Pathan, one of the original Islamic conqueror-invaders from the northwest who had strenuously kept their lineage pure, and made it quite clear that all poor Muslims were not equal.

Shyam Dulari, a modest, unpretentious Harijan, was a breath of fresh air after the upwardly mobile Malti. She was quiet and efficient, so silent in fact as to be unnatural. She had worked for a foreign academic couple before, and we discovered that through her experience of noncommunication there had simply forgotten that she could talk and be understood in a work situation. Shyam Dulari came from a community occupied at rolling biris, those poisonous pointed cigarettes wrapped in leaves with which rickshawallas are always shortening their lives. She smelled of tobacco, the dusty, wholesale kind, and because she chewed it habitually, of the aromatic, masticated kind as well. But she was impeccably clean, and—the highest virtue any child watcher can have— she had boundless energy. Around the time that my husband went to Chicago in March to teach spring quarter classes, I started leaving Irfana, now nine months old, with her for half a day at a time. The two hit it off perfectly. I would return at lunch time to find them rollicking on the carpet, jumping, tossing, rolling, and tickling, always activities that signaled health and good spirits and left me with a twinge of jealousy as I thought of my own relatively barren and lonely work.

Raja Ram, finally, the most solemn of the three, kept us the most amused, as we, in some private recess of his mind, did for him. He frankly found our personalities, life-style, professions, and lists of tasks for him absurd, and he had unusually expressive ways of showing it. If we suggested that he go to the railway station and buy tickets for the Punjab Mail…Before we could quite finish, his mouth would fall open: “The Punjab Mail? Why, it’s left already!” He was agape most of the time, not because he was stupid so much as because his mind worked in a precisely different, alternative, parallel way to ours, and there was no possible meeting of the two. He did not care for the vegetables we chose to eat, the spices we preferred, the clothes we fancied, the furniture we owned, the language we spoke, or the people we mixed with. Raja Ram was indispensable for the greater part of our stay, battling his distaste to shop for our groceries, arrange for the services of washerman, tailor, and carpenter as needed, deliver our messages, and fetch, carry, and find whatever it was that we required. He was not particularly knowledgeable about the city, being from a village on the outskirts, but he had a decent bicycle, youthful energy, practical common sense, and plenty of time—all qualities that we felt we would never again possess.

12. Death

We decided to stage a function of our own on the occasion of Irfana’s annaprasana, her ritual first solid food in the seventh month of her life. On the 26th of November, we planned, there would be a puja, accompanied by the singing and drama of a gaunharin (folk singer), the way these ceremonies were traditionally done. In the evening we would have an open-air music program with Mahadev Mishra and Kishan Maharaj, followed by a catered dinner. Ravi Shankar was on our guest list, as were some of our informants and new friends, and the grandparents were coming from Lucknow and Calcutta.

I added another interesting activity to my daily rounds, visiting presses, finally choosing the Royal Press in Godaulia to print the invitations. I was aware of the satisfaction I got from merely walking through crowded places, noting the details of shops and billboards, of people’s clothes, expressions, and actions, and best of all, exchanging a conversation with someone, anyone. That pleasure never wore off. The whole of Banaras was like a universe, and every person opened the door to yet another world. What I wanted, I suppose, was to understand the lives of all the people—of, let us say, one mohalla, to be modest. How did the pickle maker’s business work? What was the life of the printer and binder? Who comprised the family and what was the family life of the basket maker? What were the “cultural activities” of all those who had little stalls at Dasashwamedh ghat? What went on in their minds? What did they think of when they were silent?

My parents-in-law, whom I called Ma and Baba, arrived three days before the event. I had a particular affinity with Baba, though I had never talked at length with him, because he was a member of the Communist Party of India and treated me with respect for having lived in Moscow. He was also a very shaukin person (a person of taste and passion), fond of music, politics, conversation, and food. The journey had not been too comfortable, and his meals had gotten off schedule. He complained of a chest pain, such as he occasionally experienced owing to gas. He took to bed, and we sent for a doctor, who came only the next day.

That same evening our custom-cleared goods arrived from Bombay on a truck. Sombabu got busy having them unloaded, I in making a place for them. We both felt guilty later: if that distraction had not occurred, would we have responded more sensitively to Baba’s complaints? He often had gas, however, and we were all used to the routine for treatment. The summons to the doctor was repeated.

At two in the morning, Baba arose to use the bathroom, found himself unable to make it, lay down again, and closed his eyes. We banged on the door of another doctor close by, and he came immediately. He peered at Baba’s pupils with a torch and when he looked at us to ask, “How long has he been like this?” I knew it was all over. We rushed the patient to the B.H.U. hospital, but it was too late, “fortunately,” as everyone said, because B.H.U. is outside the sacred precincts of Kashi—the original Banaras—and therefore does not guarantee moksha, supreme and absolute release from rebirth. This active Communist who cycled miles daily on party work and was admired for his unflagging energy and strong heart had come all the way to sacred Kashi to have a heart attack.

The rest of the night and the next day are a series of impressions. We took the body to Harishchandra ghat, one I had read much about as being the place where Raja Harishchandra had displayed the force of his sacred word and sacrificed both son and self to Truth. The place united ancient centuries with present-day Kashi/Banaras through such tales, which everyone could tell you. Its appearance mirrored this image: it looked like something that had been undisturbed for millennia. Another funeral pyre was being lit, and I saw for the first time how a body could be consumed, the skull crack and the brains ooze out. When it was Baba’s turn, I sat a distance away and left Sombabu to do the circumambulation, lighting, and stoking. Suddenly I felt activity near me, and turned to stare at what certainly was a vision.

The Dom Raja, representative of the oldest royal lineage in the region, was sitting on a throne right there in the middle of the sands. How he had arrived there and had arranged the props so efficiently was impossible to say. No doubt it had been reported to him that the D.I.G., S.S.P., and sundry other police officials were all members of a funeral party and had decided to supervise it in person. He was wearing a crisp, freshly gathered dhoti and a ceremonial cap cocked on his head, and he carried a scepter. His mouth was red with pan, and his eyes were equally bloodshot, all adding to a picture of royal terror.

He signaled to Sombabu to approach him, which Sombabu, surprised, naturally did. What the details of the exchange were I do not know, but he demanded a proper tribute for the honor of using Dom territory and the Dom fire to ignite the pyre. This was a procedure I knew about from previous anthropological work on the subject. Sombabu said something to the effect: “You had better forget it. I have nothing with me, nor do I believe that I owe you anything. Can’t you see what this occasion is for me?” The majestic raja looked around at the uniformed police officers and policemen standing at ease, staring straight ahead with severe gazes, and decided to forget it. Whether it was their presence or whether he simply had no way of dealing with a “No, go away” answer, the Dom’s stature seemed to shrink visibly. He sat on in a semi-dignified manner and at some point disappeared in the same mysterious way he had arrived.

The Dom Raja is one of the legendary figures of Banaras, but those who know the place know that he has strong competition. His claim to fame is that he is head of the lowly caste of Doms and of the cremation ghats, the unwritten law being that only the Doms may give fire for the pyres, making theirs the second oldest profession for the Hindus; as their leader, he therefore comes of the oldest lineage in the district, one far more venerable in age than that of the nouveau royalty across the river in Ramnagar. Moreover, the Doms charge heavily for their services, reducing to penury many villagers who wish to give their deceased the benefits of a Kashi cremation, and he as their king is heir to vaster treasures than the average raja.

The Dom Raja at that time was a fat, greasy, reportedly lecherous personality who sported all the explicit trappings of royalty, such as gargoyles and tiger skins in his home and on his private fleet of boats. He was renowned as intensely Banarasi in his passion for music and boating and simultaneously stigmatized as “Dom” for his pastimes of drinking and patronizing dance. Before and after the Harishchandra ghat encounter, every source in Banaras described him to me in roughly the above terms, but I never spoke with him, preferring to preserve a distant image of him.

This was only one of many ethnographic items that interested me during the death and cremation, and that is a very telling admission. I left the cremation ghat earlier than the men because my mother-in-law was alone at home, but when I arrived I discovered that she had been joined by a Bengali neighbor. “Now that the cremation is over, chew some bitter nim (margosa) leaves and spit them out,” she told Ma. I immediately became curious about the significance of this practice and restrained my urge to question her with difficulty; it would hardly have been fair to Ma to get engaged in an intellectual discussion. So, throughout, I was sharply aroused by this or that custom that was declared essential, as well as by the overall assumption of an inalterable, accepted discourse of practices that had to be performed. But I kept swallowing my questions, recognizing that the researcher’s detachment was inappropriate in the actual family tragedy in which I was participating. I even remember thinking that it was “just as well” that I was not “interested” in death, because I would have made no progress in understanding it anyway. I felt that I was indirectly confirmed in my choice of a topic far from this one, because death did not arouse in me what I was coming to recognize as “ethnographic emotions”: indefatigable curiosity, an obsessive greed for explanations, a thick-skinned facility to withstand any discouragement in the quest for information, and the conscienceless ability to disassociate self and family from the object being studied.

What was largely the case was that I felt guilty, such as only the relatively inexperienced can feel, at being emotionally less involved in the tragedy than other family members, rather than accept that as only realistic and proceed to be true to myself. I was tense at the realization that my mind was also working anthropologically when it had no business to do anything but grieve. This, when I was really saddened by the sudden end of a busy and creative life and angered further by the tireless reiterations all around of his peaceful look and his peaceful end and how peacefully he went—because of course Baba did not want to go; he was not seeking peace. The event of that death brought me to the realization, then in embryo and later in full form, that on some matters I was not going to compromise my autonomous thinking in favor of what informants believed. Let them chorus “peace, peace” as much as they liked, shaking their head in that inimitable way denoting resignation and inner harmony. I would continue to carp about the highly unprofessional behavior of the doctor who had disregarded two urgent messages, and I would continue moreover to express regret at the departed’s untimely death rather than come to see it as “all for the best.”

My feelings, hesitant as they were, were sound ones. By the end of our stay, we had lost two more relatives; within the next couple of years, two more; and then I lost my guiding spirits Tara Prasad and Shankar. All the deaths—Baba’s, Virendraji’s, Meera chachi’s, Nani’s, Baldev mausa’s, Tara Prasad’s, and Shankar’s—were, according to me, untimely and avoidable, testaments to the poor training and even the callousness of Indian doctors and the deficiencies of the Indian medical system. If bereavement provided Rosaldo the key to the comprehension of Ilongot rage, the shock of Tara’s death in 1985 gave me a clear vision of my distance from the world view of my informants, or, as I called it in my book three years later, of “the limits of ethnosociology.”

In a few days we left for Calcutta to complete the pinda (death) rituals, for the oldest son was there. The baby was given another occasion for becoming the center of attention when we had her mundan, the ritual head shaving, three months later. Some such rituals, including some fasts, I found acceptable for myself, either because they satisfied my curiosity to know them from the inside, or because they had an aesthetic appeal, or because they seemed to have a “scientific” basis. A first food ceremony was colorful and pretty, but a head shaving was absolutely necessary to make sure the child’s extra-fine hair was replaced by an invigorated, plentiful crop.