Part Four
In which various kinds of introspection and retrospection are indulged in: we see what Banaras feels like from a distance rather than from the inside; what the different archives in Lucknow and Banaras yielded as experiences; and most of all, we judge the many kinds of selectivity that exercise influence on what comes to seem singularly successful and impressive research.
21. A Break from Banaras
In May, according to plan, I packed up and went to Lucknow. My husband, who had been in Chicago since March, was going to be absent another two months. I was not so much afraid of the heat as aware that, no matter how immune to it I attempted to be, work was impossible half the day. For most of April I had followed the schedule of leaving home early in the morning, say at eight, perforce to return at noon or as close to that as possible. One to three o’clock in the afternoon were by common consensus the hottest hours of the day, when everyone stayed indoors. Even at three or four, it would be difficult to find people moving about. Although I could go to well-targeted places, that part of my work which still consisted of nabbing the unwary and jumping on my prey from behind the bushes suffered. I had more than enough work to do in the archives of Lucknow, and it had been my long-term plan to see out the worst of the summer in the shaded retreat of the U.P. Archives.
When I made the transition from Banaras to Lucknow, I first of all took many steps backwards in mental image making. After all those days of building intimacy with Banaras, the pictures conjured up by the city’s name were definitely not the stock tourist ones of giant umbrellas at Dasashwamedh ghat, beggars lining filthy lanes, Kachauri gali with its treasures of deep-fried foods and pilgrims gorging on them…It is not difficult to understand why: I had never had much to do with these things. But I do acknowledge their reality as suggestive images. I was far more unjust to Lucknow and even consciously permitted myself to wallow in once-upon-a-time dreams and unfounded characterizations. For instance, the term “nawabi” always attached itself to the name of the city for me, together with images of wizened Muslims in their long sherwani coats wagging their beards and flourishing their arms to say “Pahle aap!” (“After you!”), the compliment that supposedly indicates the peak of culture and civilization—in one version the train steams out of the station leaving two Lucknowites thus demonstrating their refinement on the platform. The images are pure legend and feed into one another: dolls in emporia, programs on television, anecdotes and reminiscences. I have known Lucknow all my life, and I have never met a pseudo-nawab there such as my imagination insisted on associating with it. I had partly reached a point where I could only do justice to a place upon studying it. Lucknow is still an unknown entity for me and will remain so until I incorporate it into a future research project.
My purpose in Lucknow was to use the archives, but the city began to attract me in many other unforeseen ways. After my first few days there in the summer of 1982, I almost felt as if I could never go back to Banaras. I had not realized how much the galis, the overbearing traffic, and the intolerable filth had affected me. Suddenly, outside them, I felt free. Every feature of Banaras was reversed: no loudspeakers, no cow dung, no bumpy rickshaws, no same old people with the same old ideas—that is, no same old investigator with the same old queries. Although I came to Lucknow to work, I was in fact on holiday—from Banaras. As I discovered the differences between the two places in more detail, the feeling of freedom became more pronounced, and I guarded it jealously. There were restaurants in Lucknow, a marketplace in which to stroll and window shop, a zoo to which to take children, movies to see, wide roads on which to drive, people with whom to exchange visits, and the comfort of knowing that you could enjoy things without straining all the time to understand. Lucknow became such an escape for me from Banaras that I actively refrained from trying to understand it.
Banaras had been a prison in many ways. For a long time we had wondered where we could ever go out to eat. I am a fan of the South Indian dosa, a lightly cooked lentil pancake with a potato and onion stuffing. Dosas can be had in the smallest and most backward parts of North India nowadays. But in Banaras even the dosa was transformed, including in name; it was called not “masala dosa” (spicy dosa) but “mashal dosa” (the fiery torch dosa—?!). It had dozens of variations—with stuffings of cheese and minced meat among the more extreme ones—but none close to the simple original version. There were two or three comparatively respectable establishments labeled “Coffee House of South India,” “of Kerala,” and so on, and I could have my fill of Banarasified dosas there. My husband sought more exotic fare: European, Chinese, or simply Mughlai. There was nowhere to go. European food was nonexistent save at the so-called five-star hotels, where we did splurge once in a while, but even there the interpretation of dishes was too Banarasi for our taste. We once complained of a fish platter being oversalted and overspiced, at which the chef himself arrived, apologized, and offered to make us a fresh one immediately. We awaited the new dish expectantly, only to find it equally oversalted and overspiced. We should have known: the people of Banaras would never subject guests to bland food. As for Chinese food, there were a couple of famed places that served as our last recourse for celebrations and outings, but if we ever made the mistake of ordering a Chinese dish in any other place (Chinese dishes figured on almost every menu), we could be sure of being rewarded with a heartily spiced, oversalted, and dripping with grease local version of chop suey, egg foo yung, or whatever.
Banaras had many obvious shortcomings, and I tried to ignore them for a long time, developing, as I was, a defensive and protective attitude toward the city. But the question of food was difficult to overlook even for one with simple tastes. My very favorite going-out food was chat, that inimitable concoction relying heavily on flour, lentils, yogurt, and tamarind. Even in this, I had to confess, Banaras floundered. What you could get on every street corner in Lucknow you had to search out in Banaras and then wait your turn at the sole source, “Kashi Chat Bhandar” (The Banaras Storehouse of Chat).
We never went out for pleasure to a market or a park in Banaras, because every place was simply too dirty and too crowded with people. Temples were wonderful places, especially those with gardens and open spaces, but they were also overcrowded during all the important occasions. A zoo was unnecessary in Banaras, since the whole place was like a living zoo, with at least ten different species of animals visible on the streets at any given time. What was special there was the boating on the river. I found sufficient excuse to round up the family for an early morning boat trip every second or third day, and no one ever protested.
The difficulty of developing a circle of friends was also a sore point with us. After a year there, it was still characteristic for us to drop in on people without their ever returning the visit. We thought we had found a fair number of like-minded or potentially compatible people—writers, journalists, lecturers at the university, musicians, and professionals—but they apparently did not think the same about us. It was pathetic sometimes how we hung on to them when we did meet them, how we organized dinners and sought their presence, how we made repeated trips to their homes, leaving messages when they were out, none of which were ever acknowledged or responded to. We naturally started feeling that we were doomed to be outsiders no matter how long our stay or how friendly our feelings toward the denizens of the city. There is no doubt in my mind that the people whose friendship we attempted to cultivate, middle-class, educated, professional, were—in spite of their excellence in their fields—very closed in their outlook and suspicious and intolerant of anyone from outside. They preferred to keep to their own tight circles and were not particularly well versed in common courtesies.
My own special “friends,” my artisans, were not like that at all. They shamed us with their sincere affection and hospitality, and I had never any reason to blame them for anything but an excess of warmth. But people stick to their classes. When work was over, when my family and I relaxed and lived for ourselves, we sought other middle-class people. There was no question of seeking the company of a Tara Prasad or a Mohan Lal, or of their seeking ours. Our social life therefore was a total disappointment. However I may succeed in understanding it sociologically from my privileged insight into the functioning of Banaras, it was no fun.
When I praise Lucknow on this and other scores, the reader must understand how hard this praise comes to me. It would have been difficult for me to acknowledge the superiority of any place over Banaras in those days. Yet to go and live in Lucknow after exactly ten months in Banaras was to submit to a luxurious rest-cure.
22. Ethnography in the Archives
After a week in Lucknow divided among “resting,” nursing a cold and cough, and getting Irfana settled into a new environment, I resolved to plunge into work at last. That there would be no letting up once I started I knew, and I felt oddly reluctant to begin. Another aftereffect of Banaras was the need to reduce the pace and lower the intensity of work.
Once at the archives, however, I realized that my reluctance had been justified. The building was new and spacious, but the rooms, including the reading room where I sat with several others, were bare and dusty, a tribute to poor design and insulation. The furniture was of uncomfortable dimensions. I was constantly compromising between leaning forward in an elbow-grazing position on a table a trifle too high for comfort and sitting back in a too-large chair, my book balanced on the edge of my desk.
Nor did the archives seem any less reluctant to take me on. I sat on the edge of my seat in the assistant director’s office as he scrutinized my papers. Then he scrutinized me and decided that I was lacking. “We need your passport,” was what he finally hit upon, followed by, “You need to get permission from the government.” I vacillated between two smart ideas I had: one, that as an Indian citizen my passport was quite unnecessary in my country and I could engage in whatever research I wished; and two, that as a student from Chicago, I had, of course, obtained a clearance from the government along with my grant. The contradictoriness of these two arguments did me in, and I was dismissed with the direction to get a fresh letter from the University of Chicago certifying that I was myself and no other, that my research project was thus and no other (in my conversation I had made the major error of phrasing it somewhat differently from the way it was described in my papers), and that my funding was from x but my citizenship was y, so help me God.
I got heated up, having come equipped, as I thought, with all requisite proofs of identity. I demanded to see the director and was politely escorted to him. I was not allowed to hold my papers in my hand as I covered the distance from the one xsoffice to the other, in case I tampered with them, I suppose. As I entered the director’s office, his phone was ringing, and I thought, “They’ve beaten me to it!” I was right. It was the assistant director on the phone, setting the director up to date about me. The latter was looking amused—as he would continue to look all through his subsequent conversation with me. “So what was your decision?” he was asking with fond paternalism on the phone, looking into the distance, not too concerned. “If you are going by that, what do I need to do here?” I thought angrily and desperately. Sure enough, it was a close battle. I ended up writing an application asking for special permission to use the archives till my “proper” documents arrived, for the absence of which I professed abject sorrow. My notes, in turn, were going to be held in the archives as I made them. When I began to protest about this, I was subjected to the avoidance of eye contact and vigorous shaking of the head that signify unalterable rules in government offices and that I find more infuriating than any arguments.
Well, work began. Sometimes I gave my notes to the officials and sometimes I did not; they never remembered, it seemed, though I always half expected them to jump up and nab me when I left without offering the papers to the officer in charge of the reading room. My file got thicker and thicker. As with research in general and archives in particular, plots and subplots began unfolding as I kept at it, till I wanted to go on and on. This was fortunate for me, since the physical discomforts of the place had been heightened by the arrival of the rains in June, when the place turned into a virtual steam bath.
I used to wonder why Indians expressed distaste for, even fear of, government offices. In my own limited experience, as with “Eve teasing,” I had always been either lucky or right. After my experiences with the Lucknow archives, I no longer needed convincing that distaste and fear were the appropriate feelings for all government institutions. Many trifling events brought me to that conviction.
After several weeks of close scribbling, I left some pages for photocopying at the archives, a service provided there, unlike the Nagari Pracharini Sabha of Banaras. Having given my request to the facility, I went home and boasted in a letter to Sombabu, “I don’t need a typist here. I’m having things Xeroxed. I just give them the page numbers and the file, and I get them back in one day. It’s all very easy.” Where I developed that conviction it’s difficult to say, apart from my innate optimism and tendency to first accept everything at face value—that is to say, from my inexperience.
The next day I was asked to write a “proper” application, addressed with proper dignity to the director of the archives. I did so. The application was returned to me after two days for lack of the crucial words, “I agree to pay the requisite amount.” I added the words. The next few days saw no further problem reported with my application, and I was certain that I would see my bundle of photocopies any moment. Confident in that hope, I continued noting down progressively less and marking off more, making, as I cheerfully thought, faster progress. The course of my photocopies proved the worst torture I have ever been subjected to. For months, the machine was out of order, the operator sick, the paper supply used up, even the record room burgled; as a last desperate stroke, even the visit of Indira Gandhi to Lucknow was cited as an excuse for delay. I could have sworn that I saw other people’s photocopies being handed over. As befits a conspiracy, everyone was polite and reassuring whenever I pursued the matter. The key question was, when was I finally leaving the country? Only a few months later? Oh, they would certainly be done before that.
All that remains to be said is that the photocopies were done literally at the last moment, and I had to come to the archives after I had finished packing for my departure to the United States just to pick them up. By that time I had become so nervous that I had ceased requesting any copying and had resorted to taking down in longhand the notes I wanted and skipping over the data that I could possibly do without.
With regard to the Lucknow archives, I felt the delays, the obstacles, and the humiliation of smiling excuses so strongly partly because my expectations were inordinately high. Something about the businesslike building, the amused director, the vast holdings, and the good-naturedness of Lucknow in general, after the eccentricity of Banaras, had fooled me. In Banaras, I had visited a half-dozen archives apart from the Nagari Pracharini Sabha and had neither expected anything nor been disappointed. They had acted, one to all, as excellent ethnographic sites for me, providing data not only in the written records but also in the goings-on of the places themselves.
Very early on I had made a visit to the Banaras Collectorate, the center from which the collector, alias the district magistrate, rules. The Collectorate is a kind of courthouse for civil disputes and revenue hearings. As is appropriate for the seat of the highest civil authority in the district, all the servants are exquisitely uniformed in long coats, sashes, and turbans, holding scepter-like poles. Those were the epic days of generous police help, and since the Collectorate was in the far north of the city, an inconvenient distance from where we lived, I reached there in the police “VIP” car. The driver bounded in ahead of me and whispered my introduction to the collector’s decorated doorman, so that when I entered, everyone in the office was ready for me and on his feet.
I had gone partly because I had been curious to see how the king of the land, the civil magistrate and arbiter of individuals’ destiny in my place of research, functioned. As it turned out, I spent the day in his office, ostensibly poring over books and manuscripts but really keeping a close watch on everything he did. However, my story is not about that, and I must move on to the description of the archives. To call them “archives” is a fond exaggeration. They were variously called archives and library by the people in the office, but they are better labeled a storeroom. The large room had cupboards all along the walls, and bookshelves in parallel lines along its length, all of which were laden with papers. Even the books had become papers, having lost their bindings and many pages. There was no discoverable system to these piles, chronological, thematic, or otherwise. The librarian or archivist—I forget what he was called—who came in with me had an even vaguer notion than I of what could be there or how it could be stacked, and he refrained from comment. He stood to one side and coughed as I raised dust. I thought it probable that the drafts from Banaras toward the ten-year census reports would be placed together. With the help of my sharp wits and roving eyes, I found a pile of materials that I could use.
Meanwhile there was a small whirlwind as the honorable collector himself breezed in with three men in tow. He had arrived on an “inspection.” He walked around, looked up and down, and shouted, “Humph, humph, what is this, what is this? This place must be all cleaned up and organized, you hear me, librarian?” He departed, and the materials returned to their repose, to be undisturbed, I can vouchsafe, for the next decade or longer. Clearly the collector had been awakened by my arrival to the fact that this storeroom was also part of his jurisdiction and responsibility and that, if he did not create at least a semblance of careful supervision of it, I might be capable of anything, such as writing about it for the public to read.
I knew there were wonderful things to be found at the Nagar Mahapalika (the City Municipality). I went to obtain permission to use the records from the administrator, as he was called, the government officer in charge of city affairs while the elected municipal committee was suspended, which it had been in Banaras for many years. This officer also had a grand office, though no bedecked doormen, and was also busy with petitioners when I entered, though his work I was not much interested in. I had my own notions of what municipal work consisted of, and in my mind were images of drains, taps, and streetlights that did not function. This time I had come on my bicycle, my letter of purpose from Chicago in hand. One might suppose that the treatment I would receive would be very different from that at the collector’s. In one way it was—no one rose to greet me—but not in any substantial way. When I saw the sizable crowd outside the administrator’s office, each man trying to be the next to go in, and threaded my way through it to the door, my heart sank for a minute. But as soon as I said, “May I see the administrator?” and the doorman raised the chik (split bamboo) curtains for me to pass in, I realized that my fear had been unjustified. I had been privileged before the thirty or forty people waiting simply because of the way I looked and, more remarkable still, aroused no comment or criticism from them for the same reason.
No woman comes to the Nagar Mahapalika as a rule, just as she does not go to a police station, unless she is destitute of all brothers, brothers-in-law, and sons. I was there, and I must be someone special, since I did not look destitute of anything. My clothes, coolness, and confidence in going up to the doorman immediately marked me as someone from the top rather than from the bottom classes, and everyone in such circumstances is judged by these things. I thought, as I entered, of how far I actually was from my artisans. They would have had trouble in any office they went to, and they could barely have approached the concerned officer, leave aside be understood or sympathized with. I would have had no trouble whatsoever; I could use my face, my clothes, my manner, my confidence, even if I never resorted to my family connections, to approach whomever I wanted. As with fasting in order to experience hunger, I could never approximate the helplessness of poor people in India because I always had a past and a future different from theirs.
The record room I worked in in the municipal office had two windows that faced the bicycle parking and refreshment cum socializing area under a generous banyan tree. The window screens were opaque with age and dust, but I could hear a great deal of what was going on outside, particularly the pan sellers. Every panwalla has as part of his establishment bright little pots of brass for his condiments, which he spreads on the betel leaves with little brass spatulas. As he replaced each, there was a tinkle of pure metal striking metal, very sonorous and soothing. This sound came in from the outside every few seconds and made my hours in the record room very pleasant.
It was an interesting time for me otherwise as well. While I pored over scores of administration reports, thirstily absorbing facts of the budgets for sanitation, water supply, and drainage over the preceding century, I also observed the workings of the municipality at close quarters. The record room was not meant for researchers like me. It was the repository of all the records of the city, and its main business was giving out information about ownership and location of houses to those interested in selling, buying, and construction. This information did not come free. Sometimes the record seeker was charged two rupees, sometimes, four, sometimes six: the decision was made on the basis of what he was considered capable of parting with. The payment was openly demanded and made, and it was divided among the officer in charge of the records and the clerk who brought out the files from the huge hall in which they were stored. I had always wanted to observe CORRUPTION at close quarters, and that is what I could now do for many days. I must say it was a big achievement for me, for so far I had been unsuccessful in actually putting my finger on it. The closest I had come was when, after being judged a completely crazy researcher for whom all information was invaluable, I had requested Inspector Tripathi with as good a semblance of naivete as I could muster, “Could you actually show me how you take bribes?” He was too taken aback to even deny that he took bribes, and simply asked, “How can I show you that?” I pointed to the empty space behind his desk in the police station, “Well, if we hang a curtain here, I could hide behind it the next time someone comes…” We both refrained from actually trying it. I mentioned earlier that his motives in being ever ready to help me in my research were suspect, and I should explain and perhaps qualify that. I knew right away that he indulged in various dealings far more profitable than an inspector’s pay; there was an easy proof of this in his very way of handling money. He was also “corrupt” in the sense that he immediately wanted a payoff from me, asking me to get him a particular transfer order from Lucknow. I realized slowly that he was unexceptional on all these scores and that everyone functioned on a quid pro quo basis in Banaras. Almost every police officer of middling rank wanted a transfer or a stay of transfer. While that sounded harmless enough, what irked were the gifts of grapes and mangoes—always the more expensive fruits— that came to our home. We were annoyed not with them but with us, that we did not quite realize what was going on and innocently accepted and ate up the mangoes. Then, in a fit of compensation, we toyed with the idea of hanging a sign on the path leading to our house: “Yahan ghoos, rishwat, ityadi liya jata hai” (“We accept bribes, under-the-table payments, et cetera, here”).
The Banaras archives, already mentioned in my accounts earlier, were a source of both pleasure and dismay. They were hopeless in that their holdings had little relevance to my topic. After days of battling with information on land and property transfers in Banaras, I simply gave up. I was glad to do so, because the archives consisted of three small rooms, the electricity was frequently out, the windows provided no cross ventilation, and the director, who had to authorize the use of records, was absent, while the other workers were such a gang of cronies that they chattered incessantly. In all fairness I should add that I got my photocopying done very expeditiously here; the moral is only that there is little method to government functioning. If you expect the worst, you will be pleasantly surprised half the time.
I used three other archival-type places in Banaras which need to be described briefly. One was the office of Aj, the local Hindi daily, of venerable age and circulation. It was convenient to go there for specific old issues of the newspaper, rather than to Nagari Pracharini Sabha, which had the issues too but where they were unnumbered and where a request for one volume necessitated the displacement of a dozen more. In the Aj office, I was the only researcher, and I had a room and a person all to myself. All went well for me there except for two passing experiences. Because of a fire or some such mishap, there was a hole in the middle of the Aj building. Climbing up to the top floor, as I had to, I would suddenly come across a sheer unprotected drop to the floor below; a whole chunk of the building in the middle had totally disappeared. I almost fell to the bottom at the sheer fright of it. Then, for lunch, I would climb to the roof of the building, which was very high and offered a splendid panorama of the city. While I was busy piecing together the different parts of it from my acquaintance with them on the ground, a monkey would sneak up behind me, neatly grab my sandwich or tidbit from my very hand, and slouch away. This was not as frightening as the hole, but it did leave me hungry with nowhere to go but teashops.
Another place I discovered was the private library of one Mr. Morarilal Kedia. An old-time resident of Banaras and a cultural patron, Mr. Kedia had collected all the periodicals of the city and even of other parts of U. P. for the twentieth century. He had set aside a hall and a room for them and had appointed a smart young graduate as librarian. Mr. Kedia was too proud and self-sufficient to be approached, but his library was truly impressive. I only visited it about five times, however. I felt overwhelmed and decided that to go through all that literature would take the rest of my life.
Last of all, in terms of both chronology and the benefits I derived from it, was the Kala Bhawan, the Museum of Art, at the university. This had choice periodicals from the past, including some not available elsewhere, such as the magazines edited by the famous Hindi literateur Bharatendu Harishchandra. I cycled to the university dozens of time to use them, but I got stuck at a certain stage and never progressed beyond it. The keeper of the literature section was a sickly man with many family responsibilities. He was often on leave and chose particularly those days that I went there. Since I would go at random, I don’t know how he found out which days these would be, but he was eminently successful in timing his absences. Three directors of the Kala Bhawan came and went. I sat in their office and wept my tale of woe. How could I go back to Chicago without studying these precious magazines? Each promised to “look into the matter,” and each undoubtedly did so, but how can you fight sickness and the demands of family? And of bureaucracy and bad organization, I should add, because I repeatedly requested that someone else be given the responsibility of administering the periodicals when the main keeper was away, but, no, only he could do it, and no one else could touch the volumes. Although the best-located of all the archives and libraries, the easiest and pleasantest to reach, and in the top category of importance, the university literature holdings remained the most inaccessible to the end of my stay. My book consequently has only very limited references from Bharatendu Harishchandra’s magazines.
23. Patterns of Selectivity
When I returned to Banaras from Lucknow in July, I found it in flood. The monsoon that year was the “best” in years. The river had risen above the danger point, and all the riverside areas of the city, as well as other low-lying areas, were under water. Boats had replaced rickshaws as the mode of transport, people habitually folded up their garments to their knees, ready for wading at every step, and a minor exodus had begun from less safe to safer localities.
I realized very quickly that here was another chapter for my book. The floods were an entertainment, a pleasure for the people of Banaras, not simply a hardship. Everyone knew the best places from which to observe the swirling waters, and I went to check them out. Young men and children and women of all ages came to these places to “see the floods.” Adventurous young men dived from the balconies of submerged homes and swam endlessly in the sheltered pools provided by the buildings under water. To reach the Sankatmochan temple was a particular sport, for it was separated from dry land by several hundred yards of water. But topmost on the list of entertainments was an excursion to the Malaviya Bridge, where one could see the whole vista of the river extending beyond either bank for miles, a field of water in between, seemingly still, but in fact rushing on with fury, carrying trees, huts, animals, and unidentified objects along with it. I even succumbed to the Faustian temptation to know everything to the fullest, taking a motorboat tour around the swollen river—a dangerous activity that I did not enjoy too much.
Our house itself was separated from the main road by an expanse of water several feet wide and equally deep. Although also referred to as “flood,” it had not been caused by the overflowing river but by the accumulation of rainwater every time it rained for over half an hour, which it did several times a day. Nothing could be planned, for we were not people to wade through water of unmeasured depths. I myself regarded the floods around our house as impassable, though when they were absent or I crossed them on a rickshaw that had already been brought across to our side, I did so only to go and observe more flood waters!
This was the lighter side of things. More serious was that, now that it was July, I was completing one year of research. There could be no more “excuses.” Nor did I need any: all my earlier problems of where to go, how to meet people, what to say or do, and what sense to make of it all in the process were in the past. I knew the annual cycle of events in the city, which meant that I could gatecrash all those I had already seen or heard about the first time around and could discover all those I had been forced to miss the first time for various reasons. In the former category were the major Hindu festivals—Diwali, Dassehra, Holi, Vishwakarma Puja, Durga Puja, Ganesh Puja, and so on. In the latter category were the major Muslim ones. In 1981 I had known that Moharram was celebrated in October, but I had had an actual fear, apart from simple timidity and uncertainty, about observing it. Some interesting activities took place around the taziya on certain Moharram nights, but could I have just walked into an unknown neighborhood at night and mingled with the males gathered there to become part of their celebration? I could not. I needed familiarity with lanes and mohalla patterns, and I needed friends, preferably a family, on whom I could press myself as a guest. As long as you are sturdily allied with at least one person in the course of such proceedings, you are all right. If you are an utter stranger, the event remains strange for you, and you for the people taking part in it. I have spoken at length here only of Shaukatullah, Jameel Sahab, and Abdul Jabbar, among my developing relationships with Muslim artisans, and but mentioned Alimuddin and Nazir Akbar, but in my second year there were dozens more besides from different mohallas with whom I could hang around.
Sometimes it was not so much a question of people to help me out as a general broadening of the capacity to assimilate. Many events in Banaras, as I have said somewhere, sounded peculiar to my ears when I first heard of them. The Ramlila, yes, but something called the Nakkatayya (the cutting of the nose)? Nati Imli ka Bharat Milap (the reunion with Bharat at the dwarfed tamarind tree), Nagnathayya (the churning of the serpent), Katahriya Mela (the fair of the jackfruit)—all seemed bizarre by virtue of their very nomenclature. The best example was something called Duldul ka Ghora (the horse of Duldul). My husband and I laughed at the images it suggested, and no matter how serious I became, I could not imagine what the thing represented by such a name could be. Nor did I find out in the first year. The procession of the Duldul horse passes through most of the city, in a journey taking over twenty hours, but the most dramatic episodes occur in Chauk. So much I had been told. I repaired to Chauk on the evening that the Duldul horse would pass through there and inquired politely about its whereabouts. People gestured to a neighborhood called Dalmandi, saying, “There.” Dalmandi is a tortuous lane with many tributaries. Because it is a market, it is relatively dark and forbidding at night. Somewhere within it was this procession—how large? Going in which direction? Doing what? I could not have plunged into the darkness, armed only with my camera and notebook, to track down this incomprehensible procession somewhere in the maze of lanes; I simply knew too little about it. Was the horse tame or wild? Bound or loose? The people sane or drunk? Peaceful or in a frenzy of shouting? How did women figure in it; what would be the men’s attitude toward me? Once in, could I get out? Where would be “out”? Dalmandi was an especially tricky proposition because, apart from being a maze and a marketplace, it was the traditional home of courtesans. With flowered curtains in upstairs windows from which emanated the sounds of tabla and singing, this was a stage where different rules prevailed from the rest of Banaras, and I for one certainly did not know what my lines should be or how to enact them. On the Duldul night my first year, therefore, I quietly put my tail between my legs and went home to sleep.
It haunted me, though, as did Moharram, Barawafat, Akhiri Budh, and Shoberaat. To detail how I was able to participate in them all the second year would be too much, but I will give the idea in brief. By September 1982, when it was Duldul time again, I had visited Dalmandi many times and been inside homes and shops. I knew, in fact, the most important grandee of the place, Hakim Mohammad Kazim. I had met with two courtesans through mutual “brothers” and knew what the inside of those curtained upstairs rooms looked like. I had interviewed musicians who made their living by accompanying these courtesans, and I had discovered a guru bhai among them, that is, a brother by virtue of sharing the same guru, Mahadev Mishra. Most of all, I knew to a reassuring extent what the layout of the region was. I had a rough map of the whole of Chauk and could sense where one mohalla connected with another. To get a grasp of the geography of a place is really the first step to feeling comfortable in it.
All this fed into my participation in Duldul, as did also the fact that I had a fair number of Muslim informants by then and was attuned to their domestic arrangements, their life-style and practices, and even their conversation and colloquialisms. The main characteristic of my second year in Banaras was that everything I did fed into everything else. So, at Duldul time, I walked right next to the horse for a large part of its journey (I even thought of petting the beautiful white creature a few times but didn’t, because on that occasion petting was also a ritual—one I was not that up on); entered homes and courtyards along with the horse; scribbled down, without embarrassment, the words of the marsiyahs being sung; and made new acquaintances left and right. Duldul was in my pocket.
Most of Banaras was in my pocket, it felt. On this note I shall end the narration of my exploits because a litany of successes is not particularly edifying. Nor am I sure how to measure “success,” since I for one firmly believe that the proof is in the pudding, that is, in my book The Artisans of Banaras: Popular Culture and Identity (1988). Logically, also, my diary became thinner and thinner as frustrations turned into fulfillment. I would like to use my penultimate chapter to describe rather the shortcomings in my fieldwork procedures that troubled me much of the time and that will probably ring a familiar note to other researchers.
The main limitation was that no matter how I strained, in however many directions, my effort remained a selective one. Even as I widened my circle of informants and interviewees, I functioned within a small universe: a dozen each, say, of weavers, metalworkers, woodworkers, milksellers, and pan sellers; even fewer potters, painters, goldsmiths, with one blacksmith, silversmith, and jeweler thrown in for good measure; and copper wiredrawers and motor parts repairers on the fringes. Was it not likely, I constantly asked myself, that I was getting only a part of the story, given the limited number of people I talked to?
My defense in the face of this damning evidence of numbers came from my growing confidence that what I was constructing, even from the tales of a few artisans, was a correct picture. There were many other discoveries that lay behind the in-depth conversations: observation and participation in activities as part of a crowd, familiarity with details of the urban landscape, random exchanges with people all the time, and of course my archival work. I felt part of my surroundings; I was like a finely tuned instrument from which a complex sound could emerge and all the resonant strings vibrate—in analogy with the sitar—when the correct note was plucked. Reports confirmed one another, facts were buttressed by more facts, interpretations rallied to one another’s defense…I was interacting with only a few informants—on one level—but on many other levels I was interacting with other components of the city. I felt beyond the shadow of a doubt that I was interacting with the city itself.
More of the time I worried not so much about the methodology that called for intimate contact with only a few people, but about my own limitations as a fieldworker, limitations of gender, domestic situation, and personality. I continued to feel guilty about living comfortably in a proper house, devoting my after-work hours to family relations, even of having after-work hours, rather than living in an artisan neighborhood and spending day and night only with my informants. I did spend thousands of hours with them, enough to claim that I was drained and incapable of any more, but the selectivity of the procedure remained—selectivity of day over night, as I call it. My knowledge of what went on in daylight hours was far superior to that regarding nighttime. I traveled to many music sittings and temple celebrations, all in the dead of night, but these were events. What happened quietly on an everyday basis, I never did seek to discover. I place the blame for this wholly on my infant daughter and commonsensical husband; neither would have seen the rationale of my sacrificing a normal domestic routine for an undisturbed immersion in my subject of study. In this context, I think of Baidyanath Saraswati, resident anthropologist-in-chief of Banaras. When I first went to visit him in his monkey-infested apartment, I was told by his wife that he was out. “When will he return?” She didn’t know. “Where has he gone?” She had no idea. “What time should I try tomorrow?” She couldn’t be sure, even of whether he would be back. With each answer, the apparently rural, non-English-speaking lady added, “Woh ‘field’ men gaye hain” (“He is in the field”). I left with a sense of envy and vague dissatisfaction with myself for not being able thus to disappear into “the field,” to become so totally lost there that no one would know my whereabouts, time of return, or anything.
As it was, I had a difficult time with my husband. Although he would have preferred to know where I was at any given moment, he did not because I did not. However, he served to launch me into the first round of organization of my rapidly accumulating materials by advising me to have an index card for everyone I met or interviewed, with the person’s basic description and the dates of my interviews. Every morning, as I left, I was supposed to put in the front of the index card file the card(s) with the name(s) and address(es) of those I would be seeing that day. I couldn’t keep to this demanding plan, but the basic idea, I felt, always remained the opposite of Baidyanath Saraswati’s: circumscribe yourself and keep to the domestic routines as far as possible.
The selectivity of day over night was related to another kind of selectivity that was the product of my interests and preferences—that of public over private. One of the few things I had always found distasteful about the discipline of anthropology was its concentration on kinship. I simply failed to get aroused by the subjects of marriage, family, kinship, and domestic ritual. Something about the four walls of a house stifled me. One reason I kept happy in Banaras was that even where four walls circumscribed one, the number of people within them was so large that it was like being outside. I began to feel that the Banarasis and I shared the same set of preferences. They preferred to do everything in the open, from drying their yarn to pounding their grain to displaying their wares to relaxation and entertainment. But perhaps I thought this partly because I both looked for and saw only activities of this nature. I noted down very little that went on inside the house, unless it was a work activity or puja that was possible only within or it was there for some interesting historical reason. When people got together in large groups unrelated by blood or marriage ties, that was great, that was fascinating. Mushairas (poetry reading), music sittings, handicraft work itself, women’s gossip sessions were all like that. These were for me “public” because they included many people. On one level this selection was justified because I had defined my topic as popular cultural activities, and popular culture is supposedly the culture of “the people,” not of small groups within them. But I had prejudged the issue. In my book I emphasized that the public cultural life of Banaras is an especially rich one; this is partly because I looked selectively at it and never cared for the private.
Even within popular or public culture, I found certain themes much more compatible than others. Another person could write a wholly different book on the popular culture of Banaras, emphasizing the “dirty” aspects: the liquor, drugs, prostitution, gambling, politicking, thuggery, deceit, cheating, and other fully entertaining activities. I didn’t write such a book because I preferred to close my eyes to these aspects of life; I was like that, and the people I drifted toward, Tara Prasad and his family, Markande and his family, were like that as well. I heard indistinct references to many kinds of sleazy goings-on but refused to pursue any of them with the vigor I employed for topics that fascinated me, like seasonality and body building.
One day as I was sitting doing nothing in Tara Prasad’s home, his wife Lilavati brought me his latest wood carving to show. Giggling, she uncovered it. It was a miniature of a large four-poster bed in which a couple was making love. Everything was quite graphic, and Tara Prasad’s genius had succeeded in depicting the couple as both entranced and enthusiastic. Interesting and appealing touches included a plate of laddus (round sweets) by the side of the bed, for when they took a minute off, I suppose, and a hand fan, for when they got heated up.
I was deeply curious and quizzed Lilavati. She had always been shy and noncommunicative with me, and moreover spoke Bhojpuri at a terrifying speed. I gathered that such wooden toys were among the presents to the bride and groom at a wedding, an old Banaras custom no longer very conscientiously observed. I realized, and I know for a fact, that there is in Banaras a whole system of attitudes toward sex, I mean as part of public belief and entertainment, not the domesticated aspect that I find boring; that they are expressed in crafts, in the performing arts, in speech and celebration; and that these attitudes are very alive, clearly articulated, and close to the people. I was sometimes very well placed to observe them, as at the Holi procession and again at an event called the Mahamurkh Sammelan, the Great Fools’ Conference. At the latter, the poems and jokes were what would be called cheap and dirty in another context but were artistic and intellectual on that occasion. The main style of dancing in Banaras, which I had also witnessed at Holi, was used everywhere all the time, in wedding processions, at parties, and on happy occasions, and it was suggestive in a way that few popular dances are. Banaras was a crude, hearty, earthy place, its males very aware of physicality and sexuality and not reticent about depicting their interest in these things on every occasion and through all the media. The females were very likely the same; I never found out, though the giggling Lilavati gave me a clue. When I met the courtesans in Dalmandi, both they and I emphasized the performative aspects of their craft, preferring to pretend that that was all there was to it. I didn’t ask them about their relations with men, only about their song and dance, and they didn’t volunteer the information. Not clear or comfortable about sexuality, my own or anyone else’s, I barely made a note of this Banarasi feature and wrote nothing about it at all. Similarly, I had no idea what to do with drunkenness or drug use, finding the subjects distasteful and myself ignorant. Nevertheless, I don’t want to overplay the selectivity at work in all this, for every researcher categorizes subjects as appropriate or inappropriate in all contexts, and I did so in Banaras with relation to myself, excluding everything I regarded as “sleazy” or “dirty.”
There were two other kinds of selective processes I was aware of that I would like to mention. One was that of Hindus over Muslims, and the other of the poor over the rich. The Hindu preference arose from the fact that I was a born Hindu, though not a practicing one, and knew a great deal more about the religion than about Islam. With Hinduism, right from the beginning I could pick up clues and follow innuendoes in a way that is essential for research, but only in my second year did I even begin to do so with Islam. One of the signs of my developing maturity in research was how much more time I gave to Muslims than to Hindus in my second year, in inverse proportion to the first, achieving a final balance of sorts. My earliest notes with weavers are quite garbled and are punctuated with desperate comments: “Who’s he?” “What does that mean?” “Huzur ki miraj?” “Did she say that?” All these were sorted out and deciphered quite promptly, but meanwhile they created an undeniable bias in favor of working with Hindus, who were familiar, comprehensible, and as easy as a, b, c. My language abilities in Hindi also far exceeded those in Urdu, particularly in reading and writing. I would tire very quickly of an Urdu paper or document and set it aside to read later in consultation with an Urdu-speaking friend—which sometimes happened and sometimes did not—but I needed no special patience or motivation to read Hindi language materials.
I worked so hard to overcome these shortcomings that I was largely successful in doing so. Toward the very end of my stay I was rewarded by repeatedly being taken for a Muslim in Muslim mohallas, often as a lady from Pakistan. I did not plan the deception but did not try hard to undeceive the deceived either, simply taking even greater care with my Urdu vocabulary and pronunciation. This greater ease in Muslim contexts was relevant not merely to my personal satisfaction and sense of balance but also to the materials I could pick up—apart from the oral data that I could record—which increased many times over. Muslims would pull out old books and papers, calendars and wall hangings, diaries and manuscripts because they thought that I was capable of perusing them, and, as a good Muslim, cared to do so and could be trusted not to defile the name of Allah, which was everywhere. They would say as much and look inquiringly into my eyes, and I would look back at them with a steadfast, clear, honest gaze that neither denied nor affirmed, because I did not feel I was lying about being a Muslim; of course I would not defile the name of Allah.
The poor were naturally to be privileged because I had written my research proposal like that. I do not mean to say that I was at fault for deciding on a research focus, because that everyone has to do. I am saying I was biased toward poor people in ways that can only be called emotional or sentimental, and that bias served my research ill. I had developed the method of asking a large cross-section of people about the same thing, to surround and attack it, as it were, on all fronts. Thus, on the question of temple going, I learned all about my artisans’ ideas; then I looked up the information on all these temples in my various written sources; I had Nagendra Sharma scouting around temples collecting a random set of interviews with temple-goers; and finally I went to each and every mahant (temple head), chief priest, and assorted minor priests. In such cases, if the people I wished to interview were rich, as undoubtedly most mahants were, that was fine, because they belonged to my arena of activity. But in any other context, rich people seemed like rude interruptions to be shrugged off as distracting. I sensed that they were valuable sources of information and that I should not harbor such strong prejudices against them. I did so out of sheer immaturity, naivete, and rebelliousness. Maybe it paid off in some unsensed, unobvious way, such as making me think only of the poor or seeing life only from their point of view, but I am not sure. I know that toward the end of my stay, I suddenly got knots in my stomach thinking of all the gaping holes in my information, and made quick trips, among others, to some of the wealthiest businessmen and traders of the city. But these were again people to “use,” so that was all right.
Since I was myself so clearly “wealthy,” that is to say, not suffering from the shortage of any necessity, or even of most comforts, of life, I had to struggle very actively to keep other well-off people away and the poor close to me. To have dressed differently would not have been the solution, because I actually wore rather cheap saris and sandals, usually old, sometimes even torn. Raja Ram, our King Canute, scorned them in his inimitable way. “If you wore these in our village,” he told me once, overseeing my check of laundered saris, “even the dogs would bark.” But other things marked me as well-to-do: the shine of my hair, the well-creamed look of my skin, the well-fed and well-watered look of me altogether, the matching blouses, the watch, bag, sunglasses, the lack of reluctance to pay rickshawallas certain amounts…I could have taken care of one or two of these characteristics, but not all. It would have taken years for my face to develop the thin, pinched, worried look that marks many of the poor. Nor do I consider such physical alignment necessary. It comes up because I was constantly accosted by well-off people with invitations to join them and their kind rather than to hang around, as I was seen to be doing, with the poor and the backward. One of my favorite places in Banaras was the teashop of Lallan Yadav. It was not deeply recessed in the building, so it lacked the dark, cavernous quality of all those other teashops that remained closed to me. It had rows of photographs of wrestlers on the wall, benches and tables with fresh newspapers, and a clientele that by its look seemed to consist of artisans and laborers, but included in fact writers, poets, philosophers (I mean professional ones—everyone was a philosopher in his own right), and priests. I went to this teashop many times a week and sat many hours, talking to Lallan Yadav and whoever else was willing. It was always rewarding and also relaxing, and the only thorn in my side was the special tea that Lallan sardar kept pressing on me, the kind that has a dollop of cream floating on top.
Opposite this teashop in Brahmanal was a silk trader’s, a business run by many brothers. Unknown to me, they had kept a watch on my activities, and one day they finally signaled me over. I was made comfortable on the white sheets and bolsters of the gaddi and given some tea. “Why don’t you sit here and do your work?” they asked me solicitously. “It doesn’t look seemly for you to sit around in that teashop.” I was in agony and didn’t know how to get away, short of being rude. Now if I had been calmer, I could have talked about the silk industry with them, the mohalla of Brahmanal, the subject of teashops and tea drinking from their perspective, and a host of other things. But my ire had been aroused by their class, their protectiveness, their assumption that they were superior, because they had money and education, to those like Lallan Yadav, who had little of both, and by all those other qualities that I lumped together as “middle-class” conservatism and puritanism. So, not only did I suffer needlessly, but I also failed to seize an opportunity and aroused their hostility by my obvious discomfort in their company.
Similarly, Tara Prasad often passed on to me the requests of his rich neighbor, an oil presser’s family, that I visit them. They were prosperous, with a large house and actual furniture; all the members dressed smartly in expensive, modern clothes. The whole idea was unappealing, and I resisted it for days. When I finally had to succumb, I gave an object lesson in how to be an awkward guest. Now these people were patrons of the Khojwa Ramlila, and I doubtlessly could have learned a lot from them about the Ramlila, about the oil-pressing business, and about Khojwa in general. But happiness for me was Tara Prasad’s house, and this comfortable furnished place with its well-dressed inhabitants was close to a torture.
If I could do the whole thing again, I would be open, I think, to people on the basis of their merit as providers of information and not have blinders on my eyes to everyone who appeared affluent or successful. But then, as I also think, I might be subject to the danger of having a more mixed reportage on what the lives of the poor are like, and that deficiency might reflect the distance of the rich from the poor.
24. Departure
It was only the poor who came to see us off as we left Banaras in early 1983. We were taking the overnight train to Lucknow; our luggage had been sent on ahead, and we carried only sleeping bags and hand baggage. Abdul Jabbar cycled over to the station, Tara Prasad came with his daughter, Nagendra, who had been helping us, came to the station with us, and Markande stood shyly on one side. No one had any farewell speeches to make, nor had I a word to say. All I could think of was how to give each a little cash in parting without disrupting the mood, for sisters may give money, even to elder brothers—anything at all is possible. But it had to be done in the correct way and with the properly selected words. I finally chose the easier way of giving my niece, Tara Prasad’s daughter, a doll and a few rupees, to her consternation. With Markande, it was easier, for he was much younger anyway and did not yet have the veneer of courtesy that characterized older adults in Banaras. Abdul Jabbar had once had his son-in-law, a tailor, stitch some pajamas for us, so I could squeeze a fifty-rupee note into his fist with a mumbled injunction to pass it on to his son-in-law. As for Nagendra, he was also a younger brother, but my research assistant as well, and I had learned the importance of keeping the two roles distinct. It would never do to have given him money because he was a poor brother. He would have simply returned it with a flourish, saying something like, “I may be poor, but I am proud; I do not accept money from my sisters.” But I could press a hundred rupees into his hand, saying, rather, “For your transport this last week, for your going up and down by rickshaw all over the place…”
They all stood quietly and waited—still no farewell speeches. Finally Tara Prasad gave a toothless grin, “Be sure to write!” I pointed to ten-year-old Mangra by his side, now in class 4 in school. “I’ll write to her. Make sure she writes back.” That made the others wake up a little. “Alright, jijji, come back soon!” said both Nagendra and Markande, using the familiar, affectionate term for older sister that was so loaded with intimacy for me—my brother Sunil used it all the time—that it made tears come to my eyes. Abdul Jabbar wagged his beard with a weak smile.
I looked at my informants-brothers-friends, realizing that I had at some point, without having planned it, erased the dividing lines between these categories. That may be called the first lesson of my fieldwork for me: an informant, no matter what my plans, could strain at my restrictions and alter my efforts, and in all honesty I had to acknowledge the person’s right to do so. Once I realized an informant’s equal power to influence the relationship, I came to a second realization: equality could tolerate difference, and this was not a matter for guilt or regret. By freeing myself from the limitations of my inherited world and broadening my definitions of self, I saw that I could both consider others my equal and hold on to my preferences and beliefs without apology. Those values I chose to retain were now tested and conscious ones and not simply the identification marks of a class or a period. I was less of a cog in the machine of history.
Closely following on this was a third realization: being the person I was, I had to interfere in my subjects’ lives, as they had indeed expected. But although my ethnography had to be influenced by this recognition, the activist project was necessarily separate from the anthropological one. It required, as did any well-conducted activity, proper training, planning, and fund raising, not merely a general feeling of goodwill toward humanity.
I also came to realize that ethnosociology, as commonly understood, is a dubious proposition. It was feasible and desirable—in fact, essential—to understand and represent with empathy people’s own versions of their actions. But this empathy disappeared rather dramatically when an issue directly affected the anthropologist’s work, comfort, or family—particularly baby. There were as likely to be two distinct versions, yours and theirs, and if you continued to write of theirs while maintaining silence on your own, it was at best a very mechanical anthropology, at worst blatantly hypocritical.
The last lesson of my fieldwork then was to shun passivity with conviction. Of course, as I have made clear, I consider scholarship a form of activism too if an informant is seen as a person, not just a provider of information, which means actually widening the horizons of academia in ways every scholar has to discover individually. For me the people of Banaras had become more than informants, not so much through any effort of mine but rather through the strength of their personalities, the power of their generosity and love, and the possibilities inherent in the methods of ethnographic fieldwork.
All these thoughts jelled slowly, with time and many influences, including that of my husband to whom this book is rightly dedicated. On that April evening at the train station, I thought rather of how I had come with vague purposes, then become proud of my swelling notebooks, believing that I would capture these people of Banaras and take them away with me, but how in reality they had captured me and forced me to leave much of myself behind. The sweetness of accomplishment was accompanied by a stab of pain: one more place to belong to, to think about nostalgically, to plan returns to; one more set of people to ache for.