Sixtyishness And Seventy-Twoness

be on this side
of the chasm,
with you
on the other,
son,
is a lie .
SUKRITA P. KUMAR,
"FATHERS AND SONS"

I begin with the third- and second-person frame of sathiyana , which might be literally translated as "sixtyishness."

Dictionary definitions of sathiyana , a Hindi word, stress its cognitive and performative implications. The 1987 edition of the Samksipt Hindi Sabdsagar dictionary defines it as follows: "1. To be sixty years old. 2. To be old [burrha ]. Due to old age, to have a diminished intellect [buddhi ]." Sath is the word for sixty; sathiya jana is, literally, to go sixtyish. Other textual definitions mention a loss of vivek , discrimination, or of judgment. None explicitly mention forgetfulness or memory loss; though arguably encompassed in buddhi , they are not stressed.^[8]

Despite its abstract definition as a loss of intellect, sathiyana was seldom used as a descriptive term in third-person terms in any of the neighborhoods of this study. It was used more commonly about specific old people, humorously or derisively marking them as willful or stubborn. In this second-person spoken context, sathiyana suggested less an abstract cognitive status and more the irritable and often hot-brained behavior of a known elder. Younger women and men might call friends of their own age sathiya : you're acting like a stubborn old person. When I would attempt to describe someone who had been described to me as weakbrained or hot-brained as having gone sixtyish, the person to whom I was speaking might laugh or frown: I had changed the trope of the discussion.

In its semantic fluidity, its potential for insult or humor, and its link to chronological old age, sathiyana shares features with the Indian English term "senility," into which it was on occasion translated by English speakers. But sathiyana , unlike senility, was seldom used as an abstract signifier. It linked the thermodynamics of hot brain to the age of sixty and to a relational context: stubbornness, willfulness,

and hot brain ali suggested a struggle over authority within a household or, less frequently, a public or exterior space. Unlike other frames for describing the behavior of old persons, such as weakness and madness, sixtyishness was embedded within the contested forum of intergenerational relations.

The linkage of chronological age to the hot brain through sathiyana is noteworthy. Other Indian languages similarly link the senile body to age-specific language. Among Panjabis, Haryanvis, and Himachalis in the city; to go sattar bahattar (seventy-seventy-two) was described through affectively loaded language similar to going sixtyish in Hindi. In the Bengali quarter, the language of sixtyishness was again displaced a decade; in Bengali, people got "caught by seventy-two"—bahatture —connoting foolishness, willfulness, and inappropriate behavior. The Bengali term bhimrati has a similar slant; in its etymology there is the suggestion of the oversexed and inappropriately youthful elder. Bhimrati is not age-linked in itself, but a proverb told to me on a few occasions placed it at "seventy-seven years, seven months, and seven nights." Unlike sathiyana but perhaps like sattar bahattar jana , these phrases are endpoints, indices of willfulness and foolishness against which one can be measured. Thus a conversation, overheard by a friend in Calcutta:

She: I have got bhimrati .

He: Well! Are you seventy-seven years old?

She: Yes. Seventy-seven years, seven months, seven days, seven minutes, seven seconds . . .

And Sushil Kumar De's Bangla Prabad^[9] quotes Dijendra Ray: "Has the old man reached bhimrati or not?"

Sixty is a far more ambiguous marker. Though Banarsi friends joked that the difference between sathiyana and bahatture was that Bengalis preserved their brains by eating fish, sixty connoted far more than mental weakness and angry willfulness. An oft-quoted proverb in many local languages and dialects is some variant of "Sattha ta pattha (Sixty, thus strong)."^[10]

The proverb evokes an important figure, the powerful patriarch; his structural forms are legion—the tau (father's elder brother), the zamindar (the feudal lord), and the dada (literally grandfather or elder brother, but here connoting political boss or gang leader). The power of age was critical to political image-making during the years of this study. The septuagenarian Haryanvi politician Devi Lal styled himself the nation's tau , "uncle" here denoting not gentle advice so much as firm control. During this time, while Devi Lal foisted himself and his family—implicated in a variety of murders and at least one massacre—upon the nation through the Janata Dal party's dependence on his kulak vote bank, I could not help reflecting on the overdetermined sets of taus with which several friends were contending. One friend was forced into a marriage against his and his parents' will by his tau ; another friend's family was evicted from their home after his father and his tau

were estranged over the sharing of household resources and space. In styling himself the nation's tau , Lal drew on a semantic network associating age and firm control.

Unlike the former prime minister Morarji Desai, whose rejuvenative Rasayana experiments with urine did not put the semantics of old age to the most effective political use,^[11] Lal used his age carefully. His seventy-fifth birthday party in Delhi was an elaborately scripted and staged event. Ritually elaborated rites of passage for the elderly were not common in north India, unlike the south. Lal's birthday party was a masterful piece of invented ritual, reminiscent, for an anthropologist, of Barbara Myerhoff's discussion of old people fashioning ritual in a southern California senior citizen's center.^[12] But the stakes in Devi Lal's birthday party were massive. Drawing on traditions of the experienced world-conquering monarch, it presented Devi Lal to the nation as its cosmic center, the master of all he surveyed.

The ambiguity of sixty centers on issues of control. In ideal typic terms, the sixty-year-old is at the height of his or her control of kin, household, hearth, and other resources. The pressure from the next generation to transfer control is at its most intense as well. Sathiyana —typifying the stubbornness and willfulness of the older adult—is not only an assessment and criticism of certain kinds of behavior by useless old people but it also expresses resentment against the perceived mindset of those who hold power. At sixty, the figures of the powerful parent (sattha ta pattha ) and the weak and useless parent (wah sathiya gaya ) coincide. More than the weakness of old brains, sixtyishness reflects the contested space between generations. In the figure of the angry old person, these frameworks come together.