Three
Knowledge, Practice, and the Bad Family

in which the old body is constituted as a site of national welfare, as an embodiment of the bad family of middle class modernity

On Gerontological Objects

It is high time for the basis of discussion in these questions to be broadened and thickened up.
WILLIAM JAMES, A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

Against the taken-for-granted necessity of senile dementia, the anthropologist of northeast India in Zagreb offered the equally taken-for-granted declining status of the joint family as an index of senility. When families fall apart, children no longer respect and take care of their elderly parents. When old people are ignored or abandoned, their bodies, including and encompassing their minds, decline. About a dozen social scientists from India had come to Zagreb to give lectures on old age, and they shared the concerns of the ethnographer of the northeast hill tribe. The strength of the Indian contingent was indicative of the growth of social gerontology in India. To approach the construction of the senile body in Varanasi, I begin with an examination of Indian gerontological practice and some of its discursive and political milieus, to place the relation between the senile body and the structure of the family within the ongoing production of the taken-for-granted.

I start with the words of N. L. Kumar,^[1] a Delhi-based activist for the elderly, spoken to me in an interview in 1989 at his home. I use Mr. Kumar's words to explore a different sort of gerontological paradox. I was struck by what, from my perspective, appeared as a set of ironies in Kumar's practice; I therefore want to note, at the outset, my respect for what Kumar has almost single-handedly accomplished, setting up what is by now a well-known nongovernmental organization (NGO) with unceasing passion and determination. This respect extends to Dr. S. K. Nayer, Mr. J. P. Sharma, and Mrs. Aloka Mitra, whose work for the welfare of the elderly I discuss below. I have tried to keep respect for their individual accomplishments, character, and visions distinct from a critical analysis of discourse and practice.

"You see, first, people did not know what a senior citizen is."

We were sitting in Kumar's living room having tea, and I was taping the interview. Kumar was noting the difficulty that he had initially in arousing interest in old age as a social issue. Searching after his own retirement for a cause to advocate, Kumar had chosen work in gerontology. He put the matter succinctly: "When I retired, I had the whole time. So I said I should do something. So, all of a sudden, this idea struck me. Because at that time, there was no aging in India."

Kumar's lament, which eventually led to his founding of the organization Age-Care India and of the journal The Elderly , is for the lack of "aging" as a field of knowledge. But it is expressed as a lament for a lack of categories. India lacks senior citizens and India lacks aging. Kumar thus formulated his cause: India needs senior citizens and India needs aging. The primary task of an Indian gerontology is here not to study aging but, notably, to create it.

This act of creation merits reflection. Since the early 1980s there has been an efflorescence of research projects, articles, books, projected welfare schemes, and commissions concerned with the experience of old people in India. Much of this emergent discipline of gerontology has shared the irony of Kumar's words. That is, it is a field that has erased its ostensible object, allowing for the paradox of no aging in India.

By object , I mean here not only an object of analysis but also the implicit beneficiary of an applied social science. The ostensible object of the new gerontology is the typical old Indian. Many recent gerontological reports offered this figure and his or her needs as their raison d'être. The face of a wizened old peasant or of an urban slum dweller has graced book covers.^[2] Gerontological activists have invoked urban poor or rural elderly. HelpAge India, the country's premier gerontological social service organization, christened this object "the less privileged elderly" on the back of its 1989 Christmas cards.

This object is erased when, despite a plethora of state-sponsored studies suggesting that many old people fall between the cracks of self, family, and government assistance, the only significant form of state support remains a pension for a minority of relatively privileged elderly. It is erased when private gerontological institutions that constitute themselves as serving the needs of a lower-class majority in fact distribute most of their resources to an urban and often middle-class clientele. It is erased most profoundly when the structure of the scientific discourse of aging limits social analysis to the needs of urban elite elders and their families. The pensioner, the "senior citizen" whom Kumar searches for but will only find when he abandons the slums of Delhi for its wealthier colonies, remains the primary object of academic and applied gerontology in India.

How does the science of aging in India erase its object? Gerontological writing and practice is dominated by a powerful and seldom challenged narrative of the decline of the Indian joint family and the consequent emergence of old age as a time of difficulty. The narrative runs somewhat as follows: (I) Indian families were all once multigenerational "joint" households; (2) in such households, old people

had all their needs taken care of, were listened to and respected, and had few complaints—old age was a pleasure; (3) with the advent of Westernization, modernization, industrialization, and urbanization, families began to break up, and the social support and respect for the elderly declined, along with their quality of life.

Far from a universalizable object of analysis, the old person who inhabits such a narrative maps primarily onto the experience of elite and urban middle-class elderly men. The object of gerontology is split between the "disadvantaged elder," who is the disciplinary icon, and the pensioner, who is the ultimate index of analysis. Analyses of the sociology of aging or proposals for government spending, usually constructed out of the experience of the pensioner, inevitably invoke the figure of the disadvantaged elder to legitimate their universality and claims for patronage. The pensioner and the disadvantaged old person come to stand for one another—through the denial of local disjunctions of class and power—in the constitution of a seamless gerontological object.

Most of the literature in English or Hindi on old age in contemporary India is organized around an imminent "problem of aging": more old people and less desire and ability—given the taken-for-granted decline of the joint family—to take care of them. This problem is deemed not only relevant but critical for immediate address in India: the language of gerontology is alarmist, almost apocalyptic. In both the studies on old age and the formal and informal charters of the institutions considered here, the problem of aging is taken as an originating point. It is assumed, not demonstrated.

The "Aging In India" Series

The issue that brings him to a halt is nothing more or less than repetition.
KIERKEGAARD, REPETITION

I focus here on two texts. Aging in India , K. S. Soodan's sociological survey of urban Lucknow elderly, was published in 1975. The Aging in India , edited by A. B. Bose and K. D. Gangrade, appeared in 1988. The fact the two works share a title is not surprising: other recent English-language books on gerontology include the 1982 Aging in India and the 1987 Aging in India , as well as variants on the theme—the 1982 Aging in South Asia , the 1987 Aging in Contemporary India , and the 1989 Aged in India .^[3] Even if we concur with Kumar that prior to the 1970s there was no aging in India, there seems to be naught but Aging in India since.^[4]

The repetition merits analysis. "Aging" implies a universal, the idealized object of international gerontology, a thing that can be in India. Yet "India" is not a universal. "Aging in India" is oxymoronic. India is an Other that must be encompassed; the phrase sustains a relation between totalizing and subordinate universes. There are few gerontological works in India titled simply Aging : by itself, "aging" cannot articulate the relationship to an Other central to these works. "India" or "in India" is thus the requisite coda for gerontological formulations. The three most prominent organizations devoted to the elderly and based in New

Delhi are named HelpAge India , Age-Care India , and Age Aid India . Kumar, the founder of the second of these, described the genesis of its name:

See, the name always matters.... I said, "Look here; this sort of organization, we don't have a proper name for it. Let's go, let's go out somewhere. We went to a restaurant, we went to a park, and we were relaxing. We walked over the grass. It was cool, you see, evening. And he suggested some names, I suggested some names. Then later, I suggested this name. Why not make it Age-Care? And we added India , to give it a specific.

Like Adam and Eve's naming of the animals, this garden idyll generated a universal category, with the "specific" of India an essential afterthought.

HelpAge India, the most prominent of these social service agencies, is more explicitly predicated on the legitimacy of internationalist universals. It began as a subsidiary of a British organization, HelpAge, which was spreading the message of caring for the aged worldwide. In a replaying of colonial experience, the Indian organization began with a Company phase, a few adventurous British social workers out to understand the problems of the aged in India. It moved into an imperial phase, the emergence of an organization modeled on British lines and run by an Englishman. And it matured into a neocolonial phase, an Indian-run organization, but still dependent for much of its funding and thus inspiration on several European HelpAges.^[5] In moving from being a branch of HelpAge to independence as HelpAge India, the agency's one-way ties to British knowledge are not abandoned. By appending "India," HelpAge, Age-Care, Age Aid, and gerontological authors all claim local autonomy from internationalist discourse, but do so through a reassertion of epistemological subordination.

The Aging in India books share not just a title but the narrative of the Fall. To demonstrate an imminent crisis, their authors rely exclusively on numbers. There are no detailed case studies demonstrating the crisis, nor any historical analyses documenting change. Any documentation of experience is lacking. Like a geyser, the crisis lies beneath the surface of things; its explosive power cannot be seen before the fact and must be inferred. Projective demography thus lies at the center of this gerontology. The earliest of the series, Soodan's 1975 study of urban Lucknow elders, opens with a demographic demonstration of old age being a problem: "any person completing 55 years at the time of the survey was considered an aged person for the purpose of this survey. The number of such persons in India is now increasing at the rate of . . . 9.07 per cent for the decade. This rate of growth is likely to further increase as a result of longer survival ages enjoyed by elderly persons. The resulting problems posed by the increasing number of the aged now and in future [sic ] will have to be faced by us sooner or later."^[6]

The book begins by assuming "problems," but what they are remains unspecified and their timing is vague: "sooner or later." The numbers themselves are the principal signifiers here. Throughout the Aging in India series, demographics are used not to supplement but to represent the meaning of old age and the con-

dition of old people. Despite this impressive rise in the number of old people, only near the end of the chapter does Soodan reveal that for the same decade (1951–61) the proportion of old people actually "fell slightly from 8.3 per cent of the population to 7.45."^[7] The use of demography as legitimation of the a priori problematicity of old people is selective. Soodan goes on to cite figures reflecting a proportional increase of those over fifty-five in coming decades, but these again are offered as an affirmation of what is already assumed.

Most of the Aging in India books include chapters on demography; these tend to repeat one another. Implications are seldom assessed. As an example: the effect of a "gray wave" is examined through parameters such as dependency ratios. These assume that most young people are working and that most old people are not, neither of which is a tenable assumption in many Indian contexts. Further, the idea of "dependency" as a parameter of a problem rests on a set of culturally and historically located rules in which autonomy defines selfhood and individuals are responsible for the maintenance of their autonomy. Dependent old people break these rules, and lots of them challenge the playing of the game. Different rules mandate careful consideration to different challenges. Gerontology, by taking its problem for granted in structuring analyses, rarely asks which demographic information is useful or how it should be interpreted.

Soodan randomly samples households throughout the city of Lucknow, using an elaborate schedule that solicits residential, occupational, medical, familial, and emotional data from informants. He utilizes these data to suggest that old people have multiple problems: residential, occupational, medical, familial, and emotional. That Indian narrative and medical texts have made a similar point for millennia is no bar to Soodan Wing these problems to a new problem of aging. A new problem mandates a new solution, and Soodan advocates financial assistance and professional attention for each of his classes of problematicity. His suggestions include a universal pension, increased funding for gerontological research, and the provision of health services, old age homes, clubs, day care centers, homemaker services, meals-on-wheels, and "friendly visits" by the state.

The complaint and the suffering Soodan documents are real. But the catalogue of needs he generates in his zeal to document multiple sources of distress, complaint, and suffering as The Problem is so broad as to approach the tautological. Soodan's "solution" ignores the economic limitations of state spending, the politics of state assistance, and the setting of welfare priorities. In proposing interventions like meals-on-wheels in the context of endemic undernutrition and limited access to potable water across generations, Aging in India approaches the absurd. Like the books that follow it, Soodan's detailed and well-intentioned study reinforces the bureaucratic equation of gerontology with a utopia beyond practical consideration. The generation of gerontological utopia legitimates the silence of the state.

The 1988 avatar of Aging in India develops the same set of themes. Its jacket alerts the reader to the fact that "the aging of populations is taking place in both

developed and developing countries due to the lowering of birth rates and death rates and increased life expectancy. In India, too, the numbers as well as the proportion of the population 60+ are showing a rising trend. This gives an indication of the tasks that lie ahead, specially since about half of this population belongs to vulnerable socio-economic groups." Again: the demographic proof of an unspecified problem, the requisite positional coda "in India, too," and the legitimation of the field in terms of "vulnerable socio-economic groups." The protagonist is the disadvantaged elder, incarnate as the village peasant on the book's cover.

Yet gerontology's split object is evident. The volume is based on the proceedings of a seminar held jointly by the Citizenship Development Society and the Bombay-based Association for Senior Citizens (the latter group does not append "in India" to its name, but describes itself as "acting as the Indian chapter of the International Association of Senior Citizens based in Los Angeles"). Funding for the seminar was provided by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation of West GermanS dedicated to Naumann's faith in the "self-reliant individual." Articles in the volume—as they move from general exhortations nominally sensitive to both of gerontology's objects to specific proposals—presume individuals and families with economic resources sufficient to afford subsidized elderly housing and attend geriatric clinics and with a desire to identify themselves or their parents as senior citizens and initiate political action as an interest group. They presume, in other words, the pensioner or senior citizen, not the disadvantaged elder in whose name the volume is legitimated.

Thus C. Subrahmanium notes in his introductory remarks to this volume: "Among the aged there are two categories. The first category consists of men retired from active life—from Government service and other organised sectors. . .. Organizations to utilise the services of these senior citizens will have to be established." The pensioner is presented as active and as male, and his presence mandates the establishment of gerontological organizations. In contrast, "a different approach will have to be made for those who have become weak and disabled." For them, "family as an institution will have to play a crucial role in taking care of the aged."^[8] The figure of the disadvantaged elder glides into that of the frail and weak body, and this latter, gender-neutral figure does not generate the promise of new institutional development but of recourse to the family—whose terminal decline is suddenly and mysteriously forgotten—with no mention of state patronage.

A third component of the Aging in India series, along with routinized demographics and the utopian response to the apocalyptic Problem, is an elaboration of tradition, contained within the obligatory narrative of the Fall. The 1988 Aging in India begins with appeals to demographic crisis and goes on: "By tradition, religious and cultural, the elders are given a high status in Indian society. . . . In the past, joint family was the common pattern that existed with the head of the family enjoying rights and responsibilities and commanding obedience and respect." However: "Under the impact of the Industrial Revolution the joint family system is fast breaking down."

The use of the image of a devastated joint family remains selective. But as the primary object of most of the Aging in India series is the pensioner, the references to the decline of the joint family are ubiquitous. Another article in the volume, a sociological analysis of intergenerational conflict, assumes that the premodern family was "a self-sufficient unit, socially and economically, the centre of the universe for the whole family, the arbiter of life's important decisions," and so forth.^[9] The article proceeds with an analysis of "change" in family structure, with no data whatsoever on the presumed "before" of the picture.

Throughout the genre, the "traditional" family is conceived in idealized terms as an indivisible unit free from conflict and existing outside of the contingencies of time and space. A Golden Age is uncritically assumed. Normative exhortations to honor one's parents and the filial piety of moral cynosures such as Lord Ram or the devoted son Shravan Kumar are taken as evidence for an unambiguously gerontocratic society stretching from ancient Vedic days to the fondly remembered childhood of the author in question. Other traces of "tradition"—the elaborate descriptions of the decrepitude and humiliations of the old body in the texts known as Puranas, the stress in Ayurvedic medicine on the avoidance of old age altogether through longevity (rasayana ) therapy, the extensive soteriological use of the figure of the old person within Buddhist and Epic texts as sign of the materialist fallacy at its most pathetic—all are ignored in these readings.^[10] Or, as we will see below in the case of Ayurveda, the location and meaning of decrepitude are extensively reworked. In closing inquiry to the richness and complexity of ritual and text as responses to, rather than merely injunctions about, aging and to the history of the family as more than a process of decline, gerontology denies itself the use of this history in its own creation. With the sealing off of the past, the discipline defines itself as having recourse only to "the West" for models to interpret a Fallen present.

Internationalist Science

I have to thank you of America for the great attempt you are making to break down the barriers of this little world of ours . . . it has been given to thee to march at the vanguard of civilisation with the flag of harmony .
SWAMI VIVEKANANDA, CHICAGO ADDRESSES

The United Nations declared 1982 the International Year of the Aged. Representatives from around the world met that year in Vienna for a World Assembly on Aging. This meeting has come to assume near mythic status in Indian texts on gerontology. Its continual invocation^[11] is reminiscent of the symbolic power of the 1893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago where the Bengali religious leader Swami Vivekananda is said to have put Hinduism on an equal footing with the world's other great religions. But no such explicit counterhegermonic move came out of the Vienna conference. The structure of the World Assembly was less interactive than didactic, and its message—aging as a global problem—permitted no variant interpretations.

American gerontology texts of the same period as the Indian texts cited above seldom mentioned the World Assembly, unless they were by authors in the business of writing authoritatively about aging in non-American societies. "International gerontology" (as opposed to the specific citation of European and particularly Scandinavian experience) has had relatively little impact on American gerontology, yet American and European authors continue to dominate the field and set its agenda.

The unidirectional flow of information was illustrated by the appendix to the Assembly's report. Letters from four representative world leaders were included. Ronald Reagan was there for the developed West, Henryk Jablonski of Poland stood for the Eastern Bloc, Indira Gandhi spoke for the developing world, and the Pope held forth for Christendom. While Jablonski and Reagan extolled the virtues of the gerontological experience their respective systems of knowledge and power have produced, Mrs. Gandhi was more modest: "The pooling of experience and ideas from different countries will be useful in helping us to tackle our own problem."^[12] Knowledge was neither produced nor transformed at the conference but transferred along well-rutted paths.

In preparation for the 1982 conference, both India and the United States produced status papers on the condition of old people. The American paper was implicitly constructed as a vehicle of foreign policy: it was produced by the Department of State.^[13] The Indian paper was structured as a vehicle of social policy and was produced by the Ministry of Welfare.^[14] The theme of the American document was success in meeting the challenges of the problem of aging, a theme reflected in the narrative structure of its system of classification in which old age is held aloft on pillars of "Health," "Income Security," "Social Services," and "Personal Fulfillment." The Indian document reflected two contradictory orientations: an openness to the importation of foreign gerontological technology, yet an adjoined critique of age-specific policy efforts. The paper suggested that gerontological concerns in India are being and should be met not through gerontology but through integrated planning for the welfare of the entire population. Kumar's "no aging in India," the acknowledged lack of state involvement in old age, was perceived simultaneously as a vacuum to be filled by the West and as a sign of a generationally indivisible familial self and polity in contrast to those of the West.

Yet the Indian document, with its ambivalence toward the relevance of a specifically gerontological epistemology made no impact on the Vienna Assembly or its sequelae. The primary document to emerge from Vienna, and one to which the Indian Ministry of Welfare has had to devote considerable attention, was an "International Plan of Action," a set of recommendations (each beginning "Governments should . . . ") with the provision for follow-up questionnaires to examine individual governments' compliance with them. These questionnaires are composed of questions in the form "Does the Government have policies . . . ?" "Has the Government adopted a policy . . . ?" and so forth: they demand adherence to a single ideology of gerontological practice.^[15]

The form of the Ministry's response to the questionnaire has been that of the confessional. Despite the partial critique contained within their own status paper, ministry officials I interviewed in 1989 interpreted their inability to answer many of the responses mandated by the International Plan as gerontological failure or, at best, as due to a lack of resources. Again and again, the questionnaire demanded "Does the Government . . .," to which the ministry officials could only respond in the questionnaire they returned to Vienna: No, No, No.^[16]

The American status paper stood in sharp contrast. A record of continuing successes, it pointed out the congruence of "international" and "American" gerontology. It offered a history of gerontology as a deepening recognition of the problematicity of "aging" and as a movement toward the standardization of a response. This movement was figured as a series of symposia, councils, and conferences. One reads that an emerging "awareness of aging as a national challenge . . . at the end of the nineteenth century" was formalized in 1938 through a symposium and companion volume, Problems of Ageing .^[17] American institutions were offered as templates for international interventions, including those proposed by the World Assembly and its Plan of Action.

The knowledge to be gathered under this new movement, according to the status paper, assumed a division between the informed and the ignorant. From the outset, gerontology in the United States was framed as a missionary specialty. Thus, in the 1950s an "Inter-University Council on Social Gerontology [met to] further professional training" through "two month-long indoctrination programs for 75 college and university faculty members who had developed an interest in aging."^[18] Conversion was followed by routinization; gerontology formalized its identity as an increasingly bureaucratized aging enterprise, and the direction of assumed rationalization was toward a merger with the state.

The 1982 World Assembly on Aging shared the two primary goals of the archetypal gerontological conference of which it is structured as an extension: naming old age as problem and inculcating the need for a uniform response among the ignorant. "International gerontology" was thus the effort to universalize through one-way communication a culturally specific epistemology: the invocation of a global community of knowledge to advance the claims of truth of a particular worldview we might term internationalist .

The epistemology underlying the World Assembly and its "collective" expertise is internationalist rather than international. It can be represented as a set of assumptions:

Universality : The old person and the old body are legitimate foundational points for a science whose assertions are universalizable. There is a universal old person, a universal old body, and a universal way of talking about them, and a gerontology is—and should be—about such universals. These universal objects of gerontology are not located within culturally and historically specific discourses.

Problematicity : The old person and the old body—rather than old age—are conceptualized and signified a priori as problems. This problematicity can not be deflected onto other frames such as the family.

Moral Imperative : To talk about old people and old bodies as problems is a moral and necessary act.

Threat : The old person or old body as problem is not only essential and analyzable but inherently threatening. This threat is met by a metanarrative of "normalcy" or "functionality" that is superimposed upon the root problematicity of the old person or body, partially rendering that problematicity invisible.

That this epistemology and its claims are in point of fact not universal is read by international gerontology along evolutionary lines as legitimation of its civilizing mission.

Precisely what is at stake for international gerontology becomes clear in a charter of its goals created by one of its premier exponents, Donald Cowgill. In a 1979 article, "The International Development of Academic Gerontology," Cowgill and Rosemary Orgren noted that gerontology as a scientific discipline emerges only in certain social and historical contexts and its development is conditioned by further social and historical changes. More concretely we may posit that societies which have small proportions of their populations in advanced ages . . . will not develop a self-conscious analysis of old age and will not be concerned with the problems and conditions of aging."

Cowgill posited five stages of gerontological thought:

1. The absence of gerontology within "developing societies," for example, Brazil or Iran.

2. A "beginning interest," often a "transplanted interest stimulated by contact with gerontology elsewhere," for example, Thailand (where, as luck would have it, "a former student of mine is planning to study the inmates of their old folks residential homes") or Taiwan.

3. An intermediate stage of "research under way" where "few if any faculty describe themselves as gerontologists," for example, Australia or Japan.

4. "A full range of academic programs in gerontology," for example, most of western Europe.

5. Formal state-sponsored gerontological research, the transition to which the United States is undergoing.^[19]

The gerontologist must not only study the old person at home, but should encourage gerontological transformation abroad. Cowgill's scheme of the evolution of gerontological knowledge paralleled his more well known evolutionary schema, presented in the 1972 volume he edited with Lowell Holmes, Aging and Modernization . In the 1960s and 1970s, Cowgill and others applied modernization theory—a powerful body of Cold War scholarship cutting across social scientific disciplines,

which charted the progression of formerly colonized societies from "traditional" to "modern" guided by the controlled infusion, through market penetration, of foreign capital and expertise—to the study of old people. The theories of Parsons, Redfield, Rostow and others correlating the increased penetration of the United States into "developing economies" and the predicted rise of the socioeconomic conditions of the formerly colonized, were used to predict a corresponding decline in the status of old persons even as their societies advance, the fly in the modernization ointment.^[20]

The sources of decline within this theory are multiple and overlapping. Industrialization and consequent urbanization lead to the migration of a younger generation away from villages; joint families are split and children, the traditional supports of their old parents, are displaced. Traditional knowledge and thus the legitimation of gerontocratic authority is rendered increasingly obsolete; intergenerational conflict rises and children come increasingly to identify themselves against their parents. Parental support is increasingly perceived as a burden. The lengthening of the life span and a decline in birth and mortality rates lead to more old people, numerically and proportionally; the burden is not only subjective but objective. Women move into less ascriptive roles and are less able to be home to care for an older generation. Aging and modernization theory, reads these changes as iatrogenic side effects of an otherwise beneficent process: international gerontology becomes the prescribed treatment for the prognosticated ills of modernization.

Talcott Parsons himself articulated the transformations of old age with modernization:

By comparison with other societies the United States assumes an extreme position in the isolation of old age from participation in the most important social structures and interests. . . . Two primary bases of the situation . . . [are first] the isolation of the individual conjugal family[:] . . . the parental couple is left without attachment to any continuous kinship group; [second] the occupational structure. As an individual's occupational status centers in a specific "job," he either holds the job or does not, and the tendency is to maintain the full level of functions up to a given point and then abruptly to retire.^[21]

In Aging in Western Societies , Ernest Burgess developed these ideas at length, arguing that urbanization and mass production undermined the economic basis of the extended family, resulting in less family support and greater isolation for longer lived elderly.^[22] That modernity was responsible for the "scandalous" position of the elderly achieved widespread intellectual and popular support through works like Simone de Beauvoir's La Vieillesse . Beauvoir argued that the dehumanization of the elderly could occur because modern society had no use for them. Old people are increasingly "defined by an exis, not by a praxis"; that is, they are seen as being objects and not actors, as being nonselves, persons without subjectivity.^[23]

Aging and modernization theorists were more optimistic. A potential crisis of legitimacy for the foreign expert—the deleterious effects of development for old

people—was transformed into a further rationale for their practice. International gerontology offered the West as both problem and solution, Hope in a Pandora's box of gerontophobic demons. The underdeveloped naif was falling and required the experience of the fallen to learn to cushion the blow. The decline in elder status with modernization was offset by the growth of formal gerontological knowledge.

Thus Erdman Palmore and Kenneth Manton could write: "When societies 'mature' the rates of change level off and the discrepancies between aged and non-aged decrease. There may be other factors such as the growth of new institutions to replace the farm and family in maintaining the status of the aged such as retirement benefits, more adult education and job retraining, policies against age discrimination in employment, etc." Modernization is redeemed. "The aged need not fear the advanced stages of modernization, because their average occupation and education status should no longer fall as in the early stages, and it may even begin to rise."^[24]

Palmore and Manton attempted to quantify status and modernization in an effort to demonstrate both this rise and fall. Defining status as the "relative socioeconomic position of the aged" (measuring the employment status, occupation, and education of those over sixty-five and comparing it to those twenty-five to sixty-four) and modernization in terms of increased productivity (measuring the per capita gross national product), the shift away from agriculture, and education (measuring literacy, the proportion of youth in school, and the proportion of the population receiving higher education), they presented data to suggest status does not simply decline with modernization but begins to improve. In defining aging and modernization not as a linear decline but as a "J-shaped relationship," Palmore and Manton argued that with the emergence of what Cowgill and Orgren would have termed a stage five level of sophistication (with its corollary of total state involvement), gerontology would eventually raise the status of old people to potentially unlimited horizons.

Palmore and Manton's and Cowgill and Orgren's constructions of the evolution of gerontology had to remain vague on origins. Gerontology was represented both as a natural function of the proportion of elderly within a society and, paradoxically, as a sophisticated technology requiring foreign insemination. Ultimately, the field is structured as an enterprise whose interests are tied to the state and whose members should advocate the continual expansion of its boundaries. Gerontology comes down from above, here in the person of the fifth- (and highest) stage American scholar sending his students around the world to spread the true gospel.

What makes this manifesto frightening is the absolute sincerity with which it was presented. That stage one and stage two societies might have elaborate, functional, reflexive, modernizing but different theories of aging and the life course (against the gerontological assumption of universality), that isolating and professionalizing these processes of thinking about aging—let alone allying them to the

state—might have untoward effects on the lives of old people (against the gerontological assumption of the moral imperative), and that the process of knowledge production Cowgill offered is rooted in political inequities were not considered.

The center-periphery structure of international gerontology was evident in the "Plan of Action Questionnaire," which assumed the universality of aging as a problem and of the state as definer of problems and agent of solutions. The schedule of needs implicit in its questions maintained the hierarchy of gerontological development by defining the success or failure of local responses in terms of the acquisition of Euro-American gerontological technology. The Vienna office's demands included the following:

2.9 If the country has no research centre dealing with the aging of populations, does the Government contemplate establishing one or more such centres?

4.1 Has the Government adopted a policy concerning the protection of elderly consumers?

7.2a . . . please indicate which of the following social welfare services have been developed for the elderly?

Financial assistance

—— Senior centres and day-care centres (with health services)

—— Distribution of basic foods to needy elderly

—— Meals in group setting (soup kitchens, etc.)

—— Home delivery of meals (i.e., "Meals on Wheels")

—— Distribution of clothing and other basic items to needy elderly

—— Clubs

—— Home help (i.e., to assist in housekeeping, cleaning, shopping, personal hygiene, etc.)

—— Laundry services

—— Volunteer services for the aged

—— Friendly visitors (for promoting social contact)

—— Telephone contact systems

The document presumed a state that ensures the provision of basic resources to its citizens but may neglect to pay attention to the specific needs of the aged. Like the Aging in India series, it presented a utopian gerontological universe that in its incommensurability with Indian political economy marks the internationalist imperative as both a superordinate asymptote for gerontological striving (guaranteeing the need for an infinite production of discourse) and an avoidable impossibility for the state.

Other possibilities do exist. Against the utopian gerontology that emerges in the meeting of a local sociology of old age with a globalizing mission practice, the vigorous debate on social security begun by. Amartya Sen and continued by Bina Agarwal, Marry Chen, and Jean Drèze, among others,^[25] addresses the specific needs of the elderly generally and old widows in particular without isolating them from broader questions of entitlement, scarcity, the state, and public action.

Against the construction of the Indian elder as a unitary object within the narrative of the Fall, the efforts begun by Alfred De Souza and others at the Indian Social Institute in Delhi to address the class-specific needs of urban elderly and in particular the elderly poor offer the beginnings of a different sociology of old age.^[26] But such possibilities will remain incoherent as long as state and global interest in utopian rhetoric and inexpensive inaction collude with the disciplinary structures of international gerontology.

The "Golden Isles"

It is reported, that upon the Hills by Casmere there are men that live some hundreds of years, and can hold their breaths, and lye in Trances for several years together, if they be but kept warm .
JOHN MARSHAL, "A LETTER FROM THE EAST INDIES," PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS

Peter Laslett, offering a historical critique of aging and modernization assumptions in Britain, noted that these theories posit a typology of before and after: the elderly before modernization were treated well; the elderly since modernization are treated poorly.^[27] A second typology of there and here is superimposed on that of before and after. Corinne Nydegger termed the before and there stories gerontological myths: the "Golden Age" and the "Golden Isles"; they are united by the theme of the "Rosy Family" providing strength, love, and sustenance to all its members."^[28]

Critiques of Aging and Modernization approaches have tackled either the before/after or the there/here versions. Dependency and world-systems critiques of modernization theory—which examine how neocolonial and core-periphery economic relations continue colonial processes of surplus extraction and collective impoverishment and intensify the marginal existence of the nonmetropolitan majority rather than "boost" underdeveloped economies—have been applied in a gerontological context by Peter Townsend and others. Townsend does not reject the central tenet of classical Aging and Modernization theory, that old age has become a bad age, but rather shifts the emphasis from status decline as an unfortunate epiphenomenon of an otherwise beneficent and natural process to decline as socially engineered:

I am arguing, then, that society creates the framework of institutions and rules within which the general problems of the elderly emerge and, indeed, are manufactured. Decisions are being taken every day, in the management of the economy and iii the maintenance and development of social institutions, which govern the position which the elderly occupy in national life, and these also contribute powerfully to the public consciousness of different meanings of ageing and old age.^[29]

The decline in the quality of life of older people does not just "happen" with modernization; societies actively and continually produce dependency.

Sheila Neysmith and Joey Edwardth place Townsend's idea of the social dependency of the elderly into the context of Third World economic dependency.

They suggest that "the manner in which Third World nations respond to the human needs of their old is subject to the relationship that entwines Third World and capitalist industrialised nations," such that "social policy and human service models are nurtured by the ideology underlying these economic relations." The resulting institutions "at best support an elite. . . . This social structure, however, means that most people will never benefit from such programmes." Neysmith and Edwardth conclude:

Third world countries must develop indigenous responses that reflect the needs of old people in their countries. Retirement and family policies as conceptualized in countries with developed market economies may be totally irrelevant; other programmes may not be. At a minimum, the assumptions behind service models must be critically examined. Our critique goes beyond the question of transferability of services. Service models merely reflect theories of aging, all of which are ideologically based.^[30]

Most criticisms of Aging and Modernization challenge its universal typology of social change. Cowgill and Holmes culled material from a variety of decontextualized sources and ignored or explained away inconvenient data in their pursuit of universal patterns.^[31] Palmore and Manton's work has been criticized for a similar tendency to use data selectively.^[32] David Fischer has argued that their correlation of modernization and status decline is tautological, given that variables like educational status are used as an index both of status and of modernization.^[33]

Sociologists and historians of aging writing primarily about the United States, Britain, and France have challenged the uniformity, of the premodern before, the unambiguous valence of social change, and the correlation of the status of the elderly with industrialization. Georges Minois, in his comprehensive Histoire de la Vieillesse en Occident , traced the gerontophobic representation of the elder in Europe from Mediterranean classical antiquity through the Renaissance.^[34] Fischer and Andrew Achenbaum, writing on the United States, did not challenge the existence of a Golden Age in itself but argued that declines in status were not necessarily a product of urbanization and industrialization.^[35] For Fischer, the decline of a gerontocratic "cult of age" occurred early in the history of the republic and was tied to social and ideological changes associated with the American and French Revolutions. For Achenbaum, significant change came later, after the Civil War and on into the twentieth century, with "the impact of science and technology of industrial innovations and bureaucratization, and of heightened age-consciousness and age-grading." Peter Stearns argued against the existence of a Golden Age in France.^[36] Quadagno summarizes many similar studies: "The extended family household of traditional society is not universal but varies significantly over time and space. Retirement is not solely a phenomenon of modern society. Increased reliance on large-scale organizations is not necessarily a symbol of the breakdown of the family network. Further, some of the changes that did occur may have been operating in different directions at different times."^[37]

Quadagno suggests that the empirical indicators used in this literature to assess status make multiple ethnocentric and historically located assumptions about what constitutes the physical and emotional security of old people, and she calls for a redefinition of what sociologists mean by "status" sensitive to local political and moral worlds.

Aging and Modernization theory projected the Golden Age onto Golden Isles even as it ironically forecast their destruction. Critiques of Golden Isles approaches have come from gerontological anthropologists. In writing of her fieldwork in Samoa, Ellen Rhoads did not question Samoa's status as a Golden Isle but suggested that different constructions of family, work, and intergenerational support seem "to have inhibited development of some of the more negative effects of modernization cited by Cowgill and Holmes."^[38]

Janice Reid challenged both before and after in her work with members of the Australian Yolngu community. Cultural ideals, she argued, have far less to do with the fortunes of individual elders than do "their personalities and their differential location in the economic, political, and social structures." She stressed the variable effects of social change: "Some old Yolngu today have been able to take advantage of the direction of social change to enhance their status and material security; others have been bypassed or marginalised by the forces of modernisation and seen their forces dwindle with age."^[39] Nydegger pointed out that the majority of studies on "the status of old people in . . . "have confounded "professed attitudes" with "actual treatment" and respect for parents within families with the provision of physical and emotional security for old persons as a group by society as a whole.^[40]

Sociological and social anthropological studies of old age in India reflect both the initial enthusiasm for Aging and Modernization and the later emergence of a critique. Three of the early advocates of the decline of the joint family were Aileen Ross, E G. Bailey, and Scarlett Epstein. In The Hindu Family in Its Urban Setting , Ross documented the opposed forces of "Break Down" and "Unity" within rural families. She was unable show a simple movement from one pole to the other, yet still concluded that with further modernization the forces of dissolution would prevail. In constructing a story of there-before, she conflated Sanskrit prescriptive traditions with social reality: "In the village they will have been largely brought up on the idealized conceptions of adult roles found in the Mahabharata and Ramayana ." Her conclusions, like those of the Aging in India series, were entirely anticipatory: "These changes will bring older people many frustrations and anxieties. They will experience a loss of self-esteem, and may even feel intense social isolation. They may find it difficult to understand the revolt of their children and grandchildren against them."^[41]

Bailey and Epstein both noted a significant decline in the joint family, despite the paucity of historical data they drew upon. Bailey, working in Orissa, attributed fission to economic diversification, secondary to the differential income of brothers.^[42] Epstein found that only 8 to 10 percent of the families in the two Karnataka

villages of her study fit her definition of "joint" as opposed to "elementary" families. She admitted that for poorer families without significant landholdings, a subsistence economy would have always mandated small family size. For landholding peasants in her initial study, however, family size had declined, probably secondary to the transformation from a subsistence to a cash economy.^[43]

When Epstein returned to these villages a decade later, she further qualified her hypothesis. The families of wealthy farmers did not appear to be dissociating, and she concluded dissociation was a phenomenon of "middle-farmers."^[44] Part of the problem may have lain in her definitions, which she adopted from I. P. Desai:^[45] "I treated as joint families only those where all the following conditions in a unit larger than the elementary' family were observed: 'common property and income, co-residence, commensality, co-worship and the performance of certain rights and obligations.'"^[46] The definition, which makes unwarranted historical assumptions and which does not take into account local and regional variations in household structure and the definition of "family,"^[47] may have contributed to Epstein's initial finding. Her 1973 data led her to complicate the picture with the description of an intermediate "share family" of multiple dwellings but shared income pooling and expenditure. Behind the share family lay her later finding that despite economic diversification, no villagers were ready to part with their land, "however unproductive it may be."^[48] Her data eventually pushed Epstein beyond the predictions and models of Modernization Theory.

Multiple studies exist that suggest the joint family has not declined in any simple sense.^[49] Studies of the Indian household have shifted away from the debate over before and after.^[50] Yet, within the field of Aging in India , study after study repeats the same uncritical and unsubstantiated conclusions. The Golden Age and the Golden Isles thrive as the dominant figures of discourse. Neysmith and Edwardth called for an "indigenous" gerontology as a response to what they saw as knowledge and institutions produced by and through the core metropolitan location of international gerontology. But Aging in India , and the story of the Fall into the Bad Family it relates, is complexly local and reflects more than the global interest of the core and the class interest of the local metropolis.

Gerontology As Cultural Critique

I hear that in America the old people are all abandoned.
MAN SITTING ACROSS FROM ME IN DELHI-VARANASI RAILWAY CARRIAGE, OR ONE elf SEVERAL HUNDRED OTHER R CHANGE INTERLOCUTORS.

Aging in India demands more than a hermeneutic of suspicion. The constant iteration of the decline of the joint family as the master trope of Indian gerontology against the evidence of historical and contemporary diversity is more than the domination of neocolonial modernization theory and its institutional correlates. It is more than the hegemony of the pensioner as the ultimate object of analysis and patronage. The endless repetition of the narrative of the Fall suggests that its

telling is a powerful act; gerontology may convey at least as much performative as mimetic truth.

To locate the power of the narration I turn from the narrative's overt catalogue of signifiers to its metonymic structure, to examine the narrative after Barthes for the vacancies it exposes. Vladimir Propp's structural analysis of the folktale, despite the anthropological naïveté of its claims to universal employment, is helpful in viewing narrative as the.elaboration of an abduction. Propp delineates a morphology, which I simplify here: (1) A victim is abducted from home; (2) a hero is (a) tested and passes the test, (b) receives the magical gifts of a donor, and (c) locates the victim; (3) the hero and the villainous abductor struggle until the villain is defeated; (4) the hero is rewarded and married.^[51] In the gerontological narrative of the Fall the abducted victim is sometimes the old person, but more generally is a vague narrational presence we may call the imagined Indian self. The authors of articles in the Aging in India series, and the hundreds of middle-class persons who have related the decline of the foint family story to me in interviews, combine the old person with their own first person voice: "We no longer have the support of children; our families are breaking apart." One does not have to be old to experience the sense of loss. What is at stake may not be only the abduction of a good old age but that of the known self.

This abduction is from a state of wholeness marked as the joint family. The telling of the narrative presumes that the victim-narrator experiences his or her distance from this state of wholeness as an episode of violence in both space and in time. The villain who abducts is, in the oral narratives I collected, often modernity but more often "the West"; in the Aging in India series, the villain is unambiguously the latter. The originating point of the narrative as a temporal sequence, then, is located with the violent action of a villainous West.

To read the repetitious quality of Indian gerontology's insistence upon the Fall against "the facts" as but collusion with or mimicry of internationalist gerontology's Aging and Modernization paradigm is to ignore this centrality of the West as villain in the narrative. Gerontology in India is predicated upon a sense of Kulturkampf and of a consequent threat of the loss of self. Its movement both tracks this loss and challenges it through the reification of a morally superior Indianness, represented as the inclusive and embracing family

Against both an imagined West and an experienced Here and Now, the family's internal relations are constituted not as shifting in time and potentially fractious but as anchored in a stable tradition and characterized by equipoise, love, and respect. The social memory of the joint family signifies a powerful alternative to the inferiorized self Ashis Nandy has posited as the enduring legacy of colonialism.^[52] In The Intimate Enemy , Nandy, like Frantz Fanon, is concerned with the internalization of colonial difference by both colonizer and colonized and with the possibility of psychic decolonization, of a "recovery of self." Nandy's focus is upon the individual, and he uses the genre of biography to examine both the possibility and the pathos of individual efforts of decolonization. Many of his

biographical subjects are critical figures in projects of religious and national construction, and the site of both loss and recovery of self in The Intimate Enemy tacks between the body and the nation.

For many individuals—for most of the adult residents of the two wealthier colonies of Varanasi and many in the Bengali quarter, and for many hundred middle-class interlocutors I have happened to meet in living rooms, clinics, coffeehouses and train compartments—the family rather than the autobiography or the vision of the nation was the site of loss and recovery in Nandy's sense. And if that which was lost and recovered is the "self," then it was very much a self en famille , the relational or "dividual" self psychological anthropologists and cultural psychologists continue to offer.^[53] Yet unlike the telling of this anthropological story of India and its essentially familial self, I find the repetition of' the decline of the joint family suggestive of familism (or relationlity, fluidity, dividuality, and so forth), not as a static quality of "Indian culture" or "the Indian self" but rather as a site of anxiety and conflict, of the simultaneous maneuvers of loss and recovery, in the construction of personhood and community within the space of an urban India modernity. Against history, against the particular experience of postcolonial modernity of an urban middle class, this repetition sustained the maintenance of an oppositional space of affect, memory, and wholeness called the Indian family.

That the self identified with this idealized joint family is "lost" within the temporal sequence of the narrative, abducted by Western modernity, is not a challenge to its authenticity: Even as the narrative charts this loss it affirms through its continual reiteration the ultimate equation of the Indian self with the joint family. The decline becomes less a loss than a superimposition of inauthentic Otherness.

By positing a decline from an idealized joint family, Indian gerontology maintains its critical difference from the West by keeping the "essential" India, where old people are never problems, apart from the actions of history, conceptualized as a progressive alienation from this essence. Through this exteriorized history, the move from a Golden Age in which old people never experience old age traumatically into the present—where families do undergo fission, generations do compete for control of authority and family resources, bodies do experience debility, and psyches do have difficulty negotiating these changes—never challenges the essentiality of the ideal family and of the enriched selfhood it sustains.

Thus, to read the repetitious and antimimetic quality of Indian gerontology's insistence upon the Fall as but collusion with or mimicry of internationalist gerontology's Aging and Modernization paradigm is to ignore the centrality of the West as villain in the narrative. As Susie Tharu in a different context has noted: "To suggest that . . . collusion is a total or adequate characterization of what takes place is to let the contestatory nature of . . . subaltern discourses slip through a theoretical sieve too gross for such fine gold." One must therefore be sensitive to "the subversions, elaborations, hybridizations, transformations, realignments or reappropriations that do take place within oppositional discourse."^[54]

Obviously, the framing of the postcolonial Indian middle class as "subaltern"

can be a troubling maneuver, and it has garnered its share of critics.^[55] The ubiquity of the joint family narrative did not extend to lower-class families in the Bengali quarter and Nagwa slum, for whom it was virtually absent from discussions about old age. Still, in some strong sense I find it valuable to read Aging in India as "oppositional discourse." Gerontology in India is predicated upon a sense of difference that is mapped onto a polarity of India versus the West. Its originating point asserts the moral superiority of Indianness through its representation as the inclusive and embracing family. The continual invocation of the ideal joint family subverts both external and internal discourses of the inferiorized Indian self.

Even among the middle classes for whom the critique offered by Indian gerontology has relevance, its subversion of the unidirectionality of internationalist discourse can only be a partial one. On the one hand, the narrative implicit in Cowgill's vision of gerontology (the villain as native ignorance, the hero as the international gerontologist) is inverted. The West assumes the role of villain. On the other hand, the hero in the Aging in India narrative relies on a magical girl to defeat the villain: the gift is gerontological technology and its donor the international gerontologist. What is unique about gerontology as fairy tale is that the villain and the magical preceptor are one and the same. Despite the origins of narrative in a sense of the radical inappropriateness of Western experience, this very difference generates a preceptorship that assumes the universal applicability of a Western gerontological epistemology. As the narrative proceeds the role of the villain consequently shifts, from the West to the Indian government who will not fund these wonderful programs. The Aging in India series leaves us midnarrative: the hero now has the magical means to return the abducted victim home, but faces further trials as the victim's royal father (the state) has yet to relent and to allow a marriage between our hero and the victim. We are left with the hope that the king will relent and the victim will live happily ever after—but note—no longer defined by and for him or herself, but rather bound forever to a gerontological husbandry leavened with Western magic.

In two of the four institutions whose emergence I trace below, the founders soon discover that American gerontology doesn't work. But they do not turn to local models or epistemologies, for their narrative of the Fall erases these. Against the logic of the joint family narrative, they come to conclude that what is wrong with their practice is neither the technology nor its implementation but the errant nature of the Indian disciplinary object—the old Indian. Their response, interestingly, is to abandon her, to construct a gerontology without the contradictory presence of the old.

Bp Checks: The Volunteer Agency

Help Age India and its less prominent fellow agencies Age-Care India and Age Aid India have been among the most vocal advocates of the need for a response to the Fall. I focus here on Age-Care India and its founder N. L. Kumar. Kumar was a

social worker by training, but his specific interest in gerontology was sparked by years spent living near the hill station resort of Mussourie, with its large expatriate community.

I was in touch with some of the foreigners—mostly Americans, I would say—because Mussourie is, uh, their headquarters. So then what happened: I used to get literatures through them, about the old age homes and the old age social security measures abroad. I used to contact the embassies also to get some literature from the countries, and got interested. . . . I said, "This is a new field and a very pertinent area, to do the work for the aged, which is not looked after in our country"

Kumar, in the interview from which I am quoting, went on to offer a dismal picture of the condition of most elderly in India. The narrative flow here is not from the perception of a problem to the examination of the solutions others have found; rather, the admiration for the Other leads to the perception of not measuring up at home.

Kumar's first project was originally to be an old-age home. Though he and his colleagues could not acquire the land they wanted for the home and abandoned their plans, their choice of the old-age home, which they understood to be the exemplary site of gerontological practice in the United States and Europe, was noteworthy. The home, to have been built in the city of Dehradun, was not intended for impoverished old widows or other elderly destitutes but for wealthier retirees who were not wanted at home or who found living with their children difficult. The gap between Kumar's rhetoric of radical action and the intended beneficiaries of his early projects reflects the same duality as the Aging in India series.

Whereas Kumar's rhetoric was heartfelt, the founder of Age Aid India A. S. Bawa recognized that his organization is not structured to aid the poor and destitute. "The destitute receive assistance from the government and other quarters. But old people who are settled, who are middle class, may be entitled to a pension or other funds but lack the physical means or ability to get them. These old people are invisible. No one gives them much attention." Of these three Delhi-based organizations with the coda "India," Age Aid has been the least concerned with rural, poor, informal sector, and destitute elderly, and yet of the three its rhetoric most closely matches its practice. Age Aid's downplaying of the needs of the destitute suggests a denial rather than an erasure. Interestingly, of the three groups Age Aid is the least self-consciously modeled on a Western institution. Its literature has used the organization's Panjabi name "Birdh Sahaara" as often as the English title, and, not surprisingly, in the vernacular there has been no need for the "specific" of "Birdh Sahaara India." A Sikh-run organization at a time when Sikh identity does not suffer from a dearth of signifiers, Age Aid has incorporated both Western and Indian referents into its charter and practice, its origin narrative linking the exemplary actions of both the Petits Frères des Pauvres of Paris and the Sikh Gurus Nanak and Amar Das.

Kumar and Age-Care's next effort was designed specifically for lower-class el-:

derly a "mobile health checkup" aimed at those persons most deprived of health services. But the class specificity of the effort was signified more by Kumar and colleague's self-representation than by their actual intervention: "We went by the Delhi Transport Bus Service, because we didn't have any other means of communication. We were actually like Chinese barefoot doctors. And we adhered to that. We did everything on our two legs." The invocation of the imagery of rural-based populist health care was offered for an intervention planned around neighborhoods accessible to major urban bus lines; the aesthetics of mobility obscured questions of need.

The checkup was limited to a blood pressure test. Blood pressure, frequently referred to as BP , was central to middle- and upper-class narratives of aging and health for many of the people I interviewed. Men tended to "have BP" (whereas women tended to "have low BP"), and this having was frequently linked to the tensions associated with success. BP, when it appeared at all, was peripheral to lowerclass narratives of illness in old age, and not the least because cardiovascular complaints were not as significant as the various manifestations of "weakness" in understanding the poor aging body. Debilitative complaints—what Djurfeldt and Lindberg have described as a coherent "poverty panorama"^[56] —anchored the experience of the aging body in Nagwa slum and parts of the Bengali quarter. Such complaints suggest that the language of BP—the risks of accumulation, of the need for balance, of the hidden threats lurking within mandating a constant vigilance, thus "checkups"—may reflect a misplaced preventive effort. In contrast, the language of weakness brings out themes of hard lobar by aged persons, of undernutrition, and of other forms of deprivation that might have informed a different understanding of aging. But to quote Kumar: "We sat down, decided that we should do [it] this way to reach the public and have our sort of educative awareness among the masses. . . . The people were ignorant. They did not know." The goal became convincing Delhi's poor elderly that they should be concerned about their blood pressure.

Once the mobile checkups began, along busy Delhi thoroughfares, two surprises confronted the Age-Care volunteers. First, few of those passersby who stopped for the checkup had high blood pressure. As Kumar indicated, "You'd be surprised—many cases were fine! Moneyed people or traders or businessmen would not come to us; they are more prone to these things. These—those that did come—are the people that are never checked by anyone. So when they came, we found generally these people didn't have much problem. Because they are physical workers, and they can stand any stress and strain."

Second, the few detected cases were not elderly persons but those in their thirties and forties. "We did not discriminate at that time because you could not find an old person on the roadside," said Kumar. This was not, in retrospect, such a tragedy: After all, Kumar concluded, "You can't do much to the old. Because they are having multiple problems. If you take care of the younger generation at that stage, you are doing a very useful work for the society.

The project was caught between conflicting interpretations of its object: an intervention designed for wealthier bodies indicated unexpected good health among the poor and confirmed the morality of their erasure; more salient criteria are ignored. An intervention located in a space traversed by younger bodies affirms the irrelevance of the old as gerontological object. Kumar realized that blood pressure checkups, roadside interventions, and age-segregated campaigns were inappropriate measures in Delhi. But rather than redefine the gerontological armamentarium, he blamed his failure upon the inappropriateness of lower-class elderly in and of themselves. As workers, "they can stand any stress and strain," and Kumar legitimated the narrowing of aid to that segment of Delhi for whom blood pressure was a critical sign of debility and control. And if "you can't do much to the old," old age itself is at fault, the impediment to successful gerontology. Thus the paradox for volunteer agencies searching for the signifiably deserving: barefoot doctoring for the middle class, Age-Care for the young.

Free Radical Exchange: The Geriatric Clinic

Geriatric clinics and research centers have begun to appear in several cities across India, most notably in the South, in Madurai, Madras, and Bangalore. In the history of the north Indian clinic I discuss below, the founder had a similar experience to that of N. L. Kumar and reached similar conclusions about the prospects for geriatrics in India. S. K. Nayer returned to India after more than twenty years practicing medicine in the United States, hoping "to make a difference" in India given his experience abroad. In his years among the old-age enclaves of southern Florida, he had become proficient in geriatric medicine. A geriatrics clinic seemed to make sense for Dehradun, the city where he settled, with its military and other enclaves with many retirees. Nayer had a large and well-appointed clinic built; a sign announced its specialty prominently: "Disha Geriatric Clinic."

As Nayer began to build a reputation as a highly competent physician, Disha's clientele slowly grew. They were not an exclusively or even primarily elderly group, however. "Geriatrics" was no more relevant to most patients' choice of a clinic than was "Disha." "People don't know what it means," laughed the clinic receptionist, referring to geriatrics. Yet the name is not meaningless, and even in Dehradun it has a local context. In nearby Mussourie, a physician's billboard that announced a bevy of degrees from Ayurveda to acupuncture to several spurious allopathic ("Western medical") certificates (but not the M.B.B.S. or M.D., the basic allopathic qualifications) had at the bottom of the list "geriatrician." Geriatrics has come to assume a particular authority in the signifying of medical competence. Throughout India, there are physicians who display the distinction M.A.G.S. on their billboards, acquired by joining the American Geriatrics Society. For most, it is a dubious qualification, but the frequency of appearance of M.A.G.S. suggests that even in legitimate contexts, the power of geriatrics may lie as much in the authority of the esoteric as in the discipline's specific content.

Treating a significantly younger population than he expected pushed Nayer to rethink his goals. In offering care to terminal cancer patients whom other medical institutions view as hopeless, he has maintained a commitment to defining medical care not in terms of cure but function, a central tenet of geriatrics. For the elderly and their families, however, he has realized that the medicalization of functionality is not marketable. Nayer has come to interpret this question of marketability in terms of the "practicality" of Indians, which he contrasted to the "always intervene" strategy of Americans. Indian practicality, he reflected in one of our conversations in 1989, masks the stinginess of an "agrarian personality." Yet the money spent by the families of terminal cancer patients in his clinic is at least as "impractical"; Nayer's analytic of medical realism is restricted to the elderly. Furthermore, though not all of the Disha patients were wealthy, most had means. "Making a difference" notwithstanding, this was an elite medical institution. Practicality as an explanation for the lack of old patients in a wealthy retirement community seemed insufficient. Like Kumar, Nayer discovered the resistance to a therapeutic practice exclusively for old people but did not question the relevance of his goals. Here again, the realization of the lack of aging as category led to self-blame and its displacement. For Kumar, the displacement was onto the mechanical invulnerability of the worker or the troublesome intractability of the old person; in Dehradun, Nayer invoked the shortsightedness of the agrarian personality.

Nayer's own interests suggest a different conception of the aim of geriatrics than that which he learned in the United States and was attempting to transpose to India. His office shelves were lined with a half-dozen geriatric medical textbooks, but with over twice as many American books on prolonged life extension: The 120-Year Diet, Maximum Life Span, The Secrets of Long Life, Life Extension Reports, Prolongevity II, How to Live to Be 100, Anti-Aging News , and the like. The authors of these books have sometimes represented their subject as geriatrics, but the self-help longevity genre runs counter to a central tenet of geriatric ideology, that the quality more than the quantity of life should be the physician's aim. Nayer was a good geriatrician in the strict sense of the term, but his heart lay with this alternative tradition of radical life extension and fin particular with the theories of caloric undernourishment and free radicals of the American biologist Roy Walford.

Nayer's interest in Walford brought the imagined Other as possessor of the ideal technology of aging full circle, for Walford himself looks to India for inspiration. In brief, Walford has advocated a severely reduced caloric intake as essential for reducing free-radical damage to tissues on the molecular level.^[57] He developed his thesis through laboratory research, but has offered as potential proofs of the preservative effects of undernutrition the superannuated yogis of India. Walford journeyed around India, and his travels culminated in a mountaintop rendezvous with an ancient guru. For the California scientist, the secret of successful aging was present in India's timeless customs.

Extremely well-read, Walford has cited Susruta and Caraka —the classic Sanskrit

medical texts—on Rasayana therapy as further evidence for his claim. Rasayana , classical alchemy, is one of the eight traditional branches of Ayurvedic medicine and is concerned with therapies for extraordinary longevity. Given moves over the past century, to legitimate Ayurveda by mapping each of its terms and concepts onto Western biomedical and folk categories, Rasayana has been labeled the "Indian geriatrics."^[58] Because of the frequent appearance of Ayurveda and of Rasayana in texts and institutional settings that engage old age, I have devoted considerable attention to it in this book. But Walford's mention is brief, and the purging central to Rasayana and its associated pancakarma therapy differs significantly from the long-term caloric undernutrition he advocates.^[59] Walford uses Indian terms rather like some Indian physicians profess membership in the community of geriatricians—as signifiers of legitimation by and through the unknown Other. Western "alternative science" in the 1970s and 1980s, most notably the writing of Fritjof Capra^[60] , frequently has used simplified and decontextualized images taken from Indian philosophy and religion to signify the universality and hermetic truth of its assertions. The signifier here is the superannuated Eastern Master, ubiquitously imagined with an undisclosed and powerful secret. From the Grand Abbot of Shangri-La to the Ancient One in Doctor Strange comic books to transplanted gurus like Muktananda, Maharishi, and Swami Bhaktivedanta of the Hare Krishna movement, the Eastern Master is a minor archetype in American popular culture. His secret stands for the true meaning of Eastern esoterica, inevitably lost to the Easterners themselves and only rediscovered through Western rationality. Thus the Grand Abbot, himself a European, waits until an Englishman lands in Shangri-La before handing over his reign; the Ancient One passes on his lore to Dr. Strange in Greenwich Village; and the late Bhaktivedanta's disciples founded a popular and beautiful temple in the holy town of Brindavin, where some gave lectures on the Bhagavad Gita when I visited there in 1983, proclaiming that only through its marriage with Western practicality can the esoteric truths of Hinduism be reclaimed. Similarly; through the power of physics and biochemistry, Capra and Walford offer their own disclosures of The Secret. Walford applies years of work with laboratory rats to offer his reader the philosopher's stone.

The lore of the Eastern Masters is more ambivalently perceived at home, and not because of a mythic lost essence. Though Walford cites Rasayana as a core element of Indian tradition, the creation of superannuation through medical therapy' is "traditionally" viewed with considerable suspicion. Though they are prescribed for a long life span or extraordinary mental or physical powers, Rasayana tonics and other regenerative therapies in Ayurveda are frequently declared unsuitable for the elderly due to their extreme purgative or emetic effects. Many popular Rasayana medications, even one called "Geri-forte" and initially marketed for an older clientele, are primarily used by younger individuals for memory, virility, and strength, a point I will come back to in the next chapter. R. H. Singh of Banaras Hindu University, a prominent Rasayana scholar, noted both the difficulty in calling Rasayana geriatrics and the psychoactive properties of many Rasayana drugs

in declaring, during an interview with me, that "Rasayana is not geriatrics; it is psychiatry."

Singh's contention builds on the ambiguity of the old body as legitimate medical object in classical medical and narrative traditions. As often as the fantastic restorations of Rasayana cures are described—the classic case is the restoration of the ancient sage, or rishi, Chyawan through a Rasayana preparation, the ubiquitous Chyawanprash subsequently named after him—so too are these cures portrayed as worthless panaceas.^[61]

What is at stake in the "tradition" so insouciantly cited is well illustrated in Somadeva's eleventh-century compilation of tales, the Kathasaritsagara , in the story of the king Vinayashila. The king wants to remain forever young; he knows that as long as he remains youthful, the life of his kingdom will be happy and prosperous. When gray hairs appear, he summons his ministers to provide him with a longevity medicine. They demur, suggesting that in this fallen age such tonics can no longer be found, that any doctor who promises an end to old age is a quack, and that the physical changes of old age need not be viewed as decline but self-transformation and a path towards liberation. The king will not listen; he summons a duplicitous physician who promises a cure. Dr. Tarunachandra, or New Moon, places the king in a dark cave and feeds him strong purgatives that cause him to waste away from accelerated old age, jara; eventually, the doctor kills the old king and replaces him with a young man who resembles him, and the story continues.^[62]

The morality of geriatric intervention remains contested. At the session on Rasayana during the 1990 meetings of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Asian Medicine (IASTAM) in Bombay, the possibility of rejuvenating the elderly (as opposed to the middle aged) was a central and unresolved issue for delegates. Both in Somadeva's text and in Bombay, doctors with vested interests in the expensive transformations of Rasayana were certain of their geriatric applicability while others were more worried.^[63]

The challenge in the Kathasaritsagara is not to the possibility of rejuvenation, but to its moral implications. Tarunachandra the doctor can kill the king not because the fruits of Rasayana are always iatrogenic but rather because seeing the primary task of aging as the denial of decline and death is unwise and unhealthy. In bringing geriatric knowledge to India, Nayer unintentionally assumes the role of Tarunachandra, who in claiming the old body as medical object denies the soteriologic power of old age. His interest in the latter-day Rasayana of Walford suggests that, like Kumar's, Nayer's heart lies with a preventive geriatrics aimed at the young; the old, like King Vinayashila, are ambivalent clinical subjects. The contours of Nayer's practice are split, between a desire to maximize function, treat those thought untreatable, and add life to years—the ideology of mainstream geriatrics—and the hope of adding years to life, of extending youthfulness by decades. Both the challenges of his clinical experience and his circuitous return to Rasayana , via California, offer Nayer the materials for a transformed geriatrics. In

moving toward an intergenerational practice, Nayer takes up the challenge; but in his sense of failure and search for blame we confront again the split and unreconciled object, here the agrarian-minded peasant reluctant to medicalize old age, set against the hypergeriatric yogi, dedicated to the care of the aging body with superhuman results.

Into The Woods: The Retirement Ashram

Not far from the Disha Clinic, a sign points one down a back lane to a "Vanaprastha Ashram" cum "human development centre." The sign, unlike that of the clinic, is in Hindi, and suggests an institution less immediately dependent on an imported universe of discourse. Ashrams, here connoting forest settlements of male and female sages who have renounced urban life, call to mind the isolated communities of elders visited by Ram and by the Pandava brothers during their years of exile in the Hindu Epics. Ashram here has a second meaning, a stage of life; the vanaprasthaasrama is one of the four stages of life (the order of asramadharma ) elaborated in the legal dharmasastra texts, the penultimate stage when individuals or couples leave their homes, having fulfilled their household obligations, and take up lives of renunciation in the forest.

The Manav Kalyan Kendra envisions itself as a refuge, a forest removed not only in space from the family and the life of the city or town, but in time, from the compulsions of modernity. In defining itself explicitly as a vANaprastha ashram, it draws on other "vanaprastha ashrams" founded in the colonial and post-Independence period, such as the large Arya Samaj ashram in Hardwar not far from Dehradun. The ideology and practice of the founders of the Manav Kalyan Kendra are in large measure rooted in Arya Samaj. This Hindu reform movement founded by Dayananda Sarasvati in 1875 quickly became popular among an emerging merchant-caste elite in Punjab and western Uttar Pradesh. In a series of handbooks, Dayananda had earlier offered his vision of renascent Hinduism to the urban middle classes of western India through a focus on the family and its ritual construction in space and time;^[64] one important part of Arya Samaj practice was a close attention to the life course sacraments, or samskaras , and another, paralleling other contemporary reform movements, was attention to the plight of widows. The movement began building schools and other institutions in the 1880s; the building of widow houses, the forerunners to the vanaprastha ashrams, began in the early twentieth century.^[65] The Hardwar ashram occupies a large physical plant, with both permanent residents and visitors, elderly women and men. Like the Manav Kalyan Kendra, it is a retirement ashram, a place of retreat and relaxation for urban middle-class pensioners and other elderly apart from their children, framed in terms of an ideology of a strong traditional family.

Retirement ashram: the phenomenon of fixed retirement for government servants and other formal sector workers is central here. The Manav Kalyan Kendra is a place to visit after retirement. The architecture of the human development

proposed by the religious guide of its founders rests on the possibilities and expectations available within the formal sector. The ashram is an elite space, a resort in some ways similar to the Sun Cities of the United States but differing in its organization as a didactic, rather than recreational, community and as a place of retreat rather than neolocality. These vanaprasthis have not irrevocably disengaged from their families in Delhi and Bombay; their life in the forest is a sojourn rather than a departure. The ashram implies a mobile old body.

The charter behind the ashram frames it as a response to the decline of the joint family and the dangerous ascendancy of the West. The ashram was principally founded by Dr. J. P. Sharma, who runs a small homeopathic drug company. Sharma set up the Kendra as the embodiment of the ideals of his lifelong guru, Panditji; Panditji lives in the ashram and is supported by Sharma. In describing his vision for the ashram in an interview with me, Panditji enumerated the six principles that structure the practice of those who visit and stay there: devotion, contemplation, humanity, all are one, serve all, love all. The discipline he teaches, and its mode of enumeration, shares much with Arya Samaj practice.

When I spoke with Dr. Sharma, he was as much concerned with what Panditji represented as with the explicit content of the six principles: "You know, along with our country's improvements in industry and technology; etc., there is a dark side: the loss of values, of our religious heritage. India used to be a beacon to all. We are trying to preserve that tradition." For Sharma the central lost value is respect for the aged, the inverse benchmark of Westernization. Sharma and Panditji tried to approach the loss in two ways. First, they created the Vanaprastha ashram, a refuge from valueless modernity, for pensioners. Next, they created a second and parallel ashram, which was then being built next door: a Vriddhashram, or old age home, for the pensioners' parents. Old people will not come to this second home, they will be placed there. Side by side, the two ashrams call to mind two different images of the old body and two different responses to the "problem of aging." Sharma envisioned them, together, as a response to the lost family. Old people who have the option would leave their families and come to the Vanaprastha Ashram to study and develop. Other old people with different options would be taken care of in the Vriddhashram. Families, attracted by the Kendra's message, would settle nearby. Traditional values would radiate outward from Panditji and his aging disciples to infect the community—imagined as a large joint family—and the seed of a new Hindu renaissance would be planted. The disparate generational elements Sharma saw as characteristic of contemporary urban middle-class life—estranged old parents, nuclear households, and unwanted elders—are gathered in distinct spaces (development center, old age home, periphery) and placed in close proximity. Each of the spaces is justified as a metonym for the new family.

Thus, though a distinct alternative to family care and coresidence, the old age home can remain as a signifier for the strong Indian family. Against the experience

of its residents, the ideology of the old age home offers them the inviolable and desirable family as the only legitimate gloss on identity. The family achieves a new hegemony at the moment it is perceived as being in decline; its inherent limitations, central to earlier constructions of old age, are no longer represented. The stage of vanaprastha is no longer an abandonment of the family, a moving beyond it to more essential truths appropriate to later life, but a return to "the family" as the very content of soteriology.

The neoorthodox Vriddhashram is distinct from the familiar institution of the widow house usually located in pilgrim towns like Brindavin and Varanasi. Such institutions still exist and will be discussed in chapter 8, but they differ from the Dehradun home in drawing meaning against—and not through—the family. The widows, beggars, and other poor elderly who live in or receive rations from charitable homes live the ethos of Sannyasa , the renunciate fourth stage, and not grhasthya , the familial second stage of the householder, or vanaprastha , the liminal third stage. In the stories they tell of their own lives and in the stories neighbors tell about them, their lives are made sense of in terms of a simultaneity of abandonment—the Bad Family, the travails of this world, the cruelty of God—and disengagement—the deeper truths of pilgrimage and prayer, the fruits of death at a tirtha , a sacred place of crossing-over. The ambivalences of the widow house are brought out in Pankaj Butalia's film on widows in Brindavin.^[66] Whether the stories of inmates are heard as tales of rejection by the family of the widow, or by the widow of the family, they suggest that old age is a time essentially in conflict with the values of younger family members, that the disengagement of the old body is predicated upon a rupture of familial continuity. The widow houses and charitable institutions of Varanasi are not reconstituted families: they are explicitly constructed as alternatives, whether understood as places of grace or wretchedness.

Seva , or service to and respect for aged parents, is a domestic duty. Renunciation, the move away from the household through vanaprastha and Sannyasa , is in the Epic and Puranic texts framed as a move away from loving family members and from the comfort of receiving Seva . In setting up an old age home as the locus of Seva , the Manav Kalyan Kendra legitimates the dissociation of the dependent old body from the family. In claiming this old age home as an equivalent space to the family, the kendra denies the old person the alternative moral frame of disengagement through which to make sense of the alienation that it paradoxically demands. The only legitimate renunciates at the kendra are the mobile elderly, the pensioners who come on vacation. The object of gerontological solicitude is again dual: the aging self, the pensioner who leaves his or her family temporarily yet who is framed through the semantics of vanaprastha ; and the aging other, the aged and dependent relative who becomes the embodiment of a revived ethic of Seva and is framed through the semantics of grhasthya , of the household. The order of the four asramas is inverted and collapsed as the totality of the family becomes the only legitimate narrative of the life cycle and its denouement.

Mothers Versus Aunties: The Old Age Home

Actually, she had no identifying mark on her. In fact, she was just an aunt. One of innumerable aunts. Not anyone's mother or father, just an aunt .
BANI BASU, "AUNTY"

Aloka Mitra has been instrumental in the creation of institutional environments for old people that are exemplars of the ideal old age home in American and European gerontological writing. At the two institutions—both called Nava Nir, or new nest—founded by the Women's Coordinating Council (WCC) of Calcutta in the early 1980s, the residents plan their own meals, discuss allotment of the budget, balance the books, control their own medication-taking whenever possible, and sometimes teach in neighborhood schools. The Nava Nir homes are highly permeable and decentered and do not resemble the total institutions described by Erring Goffman.^[67] The decisions by staff and WCC members to allow residents to run many of the day-to-day affairs of Nava Nir are not an effort to create the "illusion of control" advocated in American old age home literature and social psychological research.^[68] The old masimas , the aunties, of Nava Nir must administer both the institution and their own lives; there is no one else to do it.

There is an irony in the juxtaposition of Nava Nir and the ideal geriatric institution in American professional literature. The latter suffers from the variant of the geriatric paradox discussed by Carroll Estes in The Aging Enterprise : interventions and institutions for old-age welfare offer a vision of normal and independent aging. These interventions are predicated upon the growth of an old-age welfare service sector. Such a sector of necessity demands dependent old bodies, and an "aging enterprise" emerges that maintains the very relations of dependency that its ideology challenges.^[69] American gerontological efforts to produce old age homes that are less coercive and more open are often crude examples of the aging enterprise. A 1987 article in the American Journal of Alzheimer's Care and Research , "Design for Dementia: Re-creating the Loving Family," discussed how a "homelike environment" could be architecturally created that simultaneously offered patients "greater independence" and the staff"total control."^[70] The design in question—multiple independent rooms ringing a central station from which staff could observe everything—is a literal translation of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon prison design and is reminiscent of Foucault's discussion of permanent surveillance and disciplinary normalization in Discipline and Punish .^[71]

In the Nava Nir homes, a different sort of economy of regulation and surveillance operates with the same surface effects as the panoptic institution. The disciplined order of Nava Nir is maintained not by a planned withdrawal of repressive institutional controls and their replacement by internalized and productive controls—the masimas regulate their own movements, bodies, and lives and have no need of a staff to maintain their inmate status—but as a fiscal and social compromise by a welfare organization (the WCC) that could not afford to provide enough staff to take over many regulatory functions. One could read the almost complete

absence of external regulation in the Nava Nir homes as the acme of either the "greater independence" the gerontological literature attempts to offer institutional inmates or the productive power of the welfare regime of Foucauldian modernity, but neither reading is sufficient.

What would be missing from such readings is an analysis of the sense of absence that permeates both the narratives of inmates and the interpretations of outsiders. For many persons of the Calcutta bhadralok , or middle class, who knew of the homes or who listened to my descriptions of them, the greater independence of residents was read as an abdication by a management that they felt could afford more staff and by children who had abandoned their parents. There was a strong contrast between my own initial perceptions of the Nava Nir homes and those of Calcuttan acquaintances: having long worked as a nursing aide in Boston in a home where inmates were routinely infantalized and in another where they were frequently physically restrained, and having worked to promote the concept of shared and interdependent living of groups of older persons, I was and remain enthralled by the independence of Nava Nir residents and by the openness of the institution. Mitra and her colleagues had created the fantasy home of mainstream gerontological literature, and had managed to do so without disciplinary training in gerontology. Social life within the home was not characterized by the redundancy and dehumanization found in more total institutions. Yet for the Calcutta residents whom I interviewed in 1989 and 1990, the Nava inks were pathetic places precisely because of the perceived lack of total dependence. The "independence" of residents pointed to the fact that they had no one to offer them proper Seva . Each of the multiple choices available to residents invoked their absent or uncaring children; their institutionally intensified individuality signified abject solitude.

This local critique assumed that the residents were put in Nava Nir, that they moved from a position of high to low dependency. The story Mitra told me of the homes' founding suggested a move in the opposite direction. During the United Nations Year of the Woman, Mitra related, she and several others within the WCC decided to create a refuge for poor old women "who had no one." Nava Nir would become a new family for homeless widows. Immediately, the institution was framed within an internationalist imperative and legitimated in terms of a triple-layered subordination: old, poor, and female.

The Nava Nir residents were almost all in their sixties or above, and from 1988–1990 all but one of the residents were women. But they were not the destitute widows Mitra's origin story envisioned. Two-thirds of the thirty I interviewed lacked sons to depend on. Only one resident out of the thirty came from a background of agricultural or urban labor; the others were all from middle- or upper-class families. Despite Nava Nir's subsidized costs, it remained out of reach for lower-class Calcuttans and rural Bengalis. The one exception, the only man at Nava Nir at the time, was sponsored by a kind employer. Yet this man was anything but sanguine about his good fortune when I met him: "Old age is a cursed

life," he complained. "Go and talk to the man on the street. Why am I here? Very high accommodation here! Men like me are dying in the street!" He then glared at the superintendent. "Ask her!" She responded, "No, no, Dadu, that's not so."

The superintendent prided herself on establishing close kinlike ties with the old residents. They are not just addressed as her aunts and mothers, she noted, but think of her as their daughter. The old man rejected the institution as family: "If my friend didn't send money, do you think she would take care of me? Others live, they die, and their bodies are dumped into a handcart!" The old man's denial of Nava Nir as family differed from that of the middle-class Calcuttans whom I interviewed. For him, the rhetoric of the family was criticized not for disguising a lack of care for the old person and thus the decline of the joint family, but for disguising its rootedness in inequality and in the garbage bodies of the poor. He is lonely, the superintendent later confided to me. Yet in the old man's personal loneliness, the irony of his class position and the limits of any rhetoric of concern were manifest.

In another interview, Mitra offered a different charter of the institution, in which the initial impetus for Nava Nir preceded the International Year of the Woman. A WCC colleague of Mitra's was looking for an institution in which to place an elderly aunt but discovered that all available decent institutions were run by Christian orders like the Little Sisters of the Poor. She and others in the WCC began to consider the establishment of a nonsectarian home. Thus the second and underlying reason for the Nava Nirs: the need for an institution to house those elderly relatives of WCC members who lacked close family to support them.

These elderly relatives were all women. Nava Nir was founded primarily as a home for women; there were no undomicilable old uncles to generate a less gender-segregated institution. Old age presented different challenges to men and women, as the emergence of Nava Nir indicates; yet the Aging in India series and the agendas of most of the new Indian gerontological institutions have paid but passing reference to gender as critical to their field. In maintaining the polarity of the ideal and essential gerontocratic Indian past versus the fallen and inauthentic gerontophobic Indian present, the decline of the joint family narrative generates all difference from a single historical movement. Encompassing forms of difference such as class and gender that might suggest alternative readings of history are erased within the grand narrative of modernization and Westernization.

Who are the masimas , poised between an external narrative viewing them as the cast-off mothers of the fallen joint family and an institutional history representing them as old aunts with less of a domiciliary claim upon their nephews and nephews' wives? Are they mothers or aunts, and what is the significance of this dichotomy? Both mothers and "aunts" are represented in Nava Nir, but the majority of residents had no sons: of my sample, one-third had living sons and two-thirds lacked them. Despite the narrative of the Decline, most of the "unwanted" residents are thus aunts, old women without sons who must depend on daughters who may be constrained by their husbands' families or upon more distant kin, and

the rise of homes like Nava Nir suggest less a sloughing off of parents than the emergence of a different response to old people with weak claims upon family support.

Widows with and without sons are important markers in popular discourse, represented as mothers and as aunts. The needy old aunt is a prominent figure in Bengali and North Indian literature, classically in Banerji's Patter Panchali and Premchand's "Burhi Kaki ."^[72] In each of these texts, the complex pathos of the family with an unproductive old woman is heightened by the absence of the figure of a selfish daughter-in-law. The nephew's wife, though she shares much of her persona with the daughter-in-law; is a more empathetic figure, struggling to support a family on threadbare wages with the added insult of an endlessly hungry old person who lacks a clear moral claim to a share of the food. Old-mother narratives, in contrast, are unforgiving in stressing the meanness of the daughter-in-law who abuses the old mother and the weakness of the son who lets her. In nineteenth-century Calcutta, this far less ambiguous narrative was visually represented in the art of the patua school of painters and woodcut printers as Ghar Kali, the End of the World: a wife riding on her husband's shoulders while his mendicant mother is dragged along on a leash held by her son (see frontispiece).^[73]

These two figures embodying pathos—the old mother and the old aunt—are not only models of but models for making sense of aging within the family. The women of Nava Nir come from both groups; but the external critique envisions them all as mothers while the internal charter claims them all as aunts. Naming the old woman as aunt recognizes that old age is inherently a time of family stress, stress heightened when the moral claims of the old person upon the next generation are attenuated by distant kinship; the blame of imperfect Seva is deferred. Naming the old woman as mother, conversely, roots the difficulties of old age in the inadequacies of children.

The primary narrative of Indian gerontology, as I have stressed, elaborates the latter figure in a male or ungendered form: the neglected old parent. The errancy of children is displaced onto the West and its corruption, and is universalized. But the figure of the old mother has a more complex pedigree. Ghar Kali, the End of the World, bespeaks an apocalyptic consciousness. The young couple in the image neglecting their mother are not universal but located: the babu—the parvenu Indian government servant under the British—and his wife. The neglect of the old mother, the foppishness of the son, and the selfish disrespect of the modern wife together constitute a central image satirizing the emerging urban elite as emblematic of Kali Yuga, of the most corrupt last moments of the most corrupt age of humanity. Sumanta Banerjee has linked the patua folk art of mid- to late-nineteenth-century Calcutta to a broader critique of the babu in lower-class urban popular culture.^[74] Following his argument, the figure of the old mother enters public narratives in the nineteenth century as a subaltern or proletarian symbol of elite excess.

Sumit Sarkar cautions against identifying the work of the patuas and associated

genres with an exclusively or even primarily lower class level of culture. He suggests that "their patrons and consumers could include many of the bhadralok [the emerging urban bourgeoisie]. . . . In so far as a specific strata can be distinguished at all—always a problematical venture in matters of culture—it would be rather the world of genteel poverty, depressed upper-caste literati within a kind of preindustrial lower middle class."^[75] Ashis Nandy, in arguing that the upwardly mobile bhadralok —"made psychologically marginal by their exposure to Western impact"—turned to a reactionary defense of traditional prerogatives and in particular to an elaboration of "the fantasy of feminine aggression towards the husband," similarly suggests a Kulturkampf in which the satire of the Ghar Kali appealed to the parvenu bhadralok as well as to lumpen and marginalized groups.^[76]

The appeal of the ironic trope in which the narrative of the abject old mother is popularized thus extends across class within the growing urban space of nineteenth-century Calcutta. The old mother is a complex sign upon which several distinct stories are superimposed: at the same time a mocking of upper-class morality, a lament for the decline of precolonial constellations of power, and a framing of the elite self against the corruptions demanded by a new politics of culture. However, within the uniformity assumed by the modern gerontological logic of a single universal problem of aging, the polysemy of the old mother is reduced to a monoglot narrative. The Ghar Kali image, sensitive to the cultural transformations of colonialism but rooted in a sense of internal difference and disequilibrium (of gender and social class), comes to signify the uniform aging of the theoretically classless and ungendered old person. The lower-class readings Ghar Kali that Banerjee documents are echoed in the old man's frustration at being in Nava Nir—the rejection of the rhetoric of universal care for the aged as upper-class self-interest—but find no place within the contemporary images constituting internationalist gerontology or Aging in India .

The modern discipline of Aging in India does not create the suffering old person; as the old mother and aunt, the figure was and is ubiquitous. What is created is an effort at hegemony, a universalization of a particular set of interpretations of the figure, rooted in the responses of urban elites and petty bourgeoisie to questions of identity within the colonial milieu. What is erased is the old woman as a signifier of social difference. In the social milieu enveloping Nava Nir, the old resident signifies the universal old mother, pointing to the callousness of children. In the informal charter of the institution discussed by Mitra, the threatening old mother is replaced by the more ambivalent old aunt, pointing to the existential dilemmas of aging. In the science of aging as constituted by Aging in India , the old woman is replaced by the putatively ungendered old man, pointing beyond the particular needs of real old persons to the search by elites and rising middle classes for a stable Indian identity, embodying crisis and absence and yet, in the sensibility of familism and Seva he invokes, offering the possibility of totality.

Aitasa PrAlapa

The Atharva Veda, the fourth of the ancient Vedas whose authority grounds Brahmanical practice, has a section of its twentieth book termed the Aitasa Pralapa . Ralph Griffith, at one time principal of the Sanskrit College in Varanasi, published an Atharva Veda translation in 1895 and 1896. Of the Aitasa Pralapa , Griffith noted: "Regarded as uninspired productions, these hymns are hardly susceptible of intelligible translation or explanation."^[1]

A later Vedic text, the Aitareya Brahmana, offers a story explaining the origins of these verses' inexplicability. Aitasa was a sage, of an important lineage. When he began to speak the words that would become the Atharva Veda hymns, one of his sons heard only incoherent sounds, prattle, pralapa . In the terms of Nagwa slum, bakbak . The son tried to stop the father from talking, believing him mad. Aitasa cursed his son for murdering his speech. Aitasa's words were then spoken, and have been spoken by generation after generation ever since, in the monumental act of remembering, that is, learning to repeat the Veda.

Aitasa, if he lived at all, lived long ago, and neither his words nor his story are necessarily paths toward thinking about parents, children, voice, silence, and madness today And yet the story sticks. A father's speech, a son's inability to hear it as carrying meaning. An intergenerational conflict over the authority of interpreting the word. Accusations of madness versus the possibility of a sacred speaking. Anger giving coherence in the form of the curse versus pralapa giving only a contested and feeble voice. The father defeating the son's efforts at reinterpretation and silencing, and generation after generation remembering and repeating the contested speech of the father. Until, for a far later generation, a Britisher teaching Sanskrit in Varanasi rereads the contest as a problem of philological science against obscurantism, erases the predicament of the Indian father amid his nation's own paternalist claims, and discovers the sad truth of pralapa: "uninspired productions."