Weakness As Structure

The figure of the decrepit old man played by Ramji is as central to Nagwa ideology as it is to Brahmanical and Buddhist thought. In Ramji's depiction, the old man's weakness symbolizes both the perversion and ultimate failure of elite desire, its object here the young woman. Elders, no matter how powerful, cannot hold onto youth forever, and eventually confuse goddesses with chickens. Chicken, murga , is a dense signifier in Nagwa, suggestive among many other things of the humiliating and painful position the local thana policemen may have one assume as a milder weapon from their armamentarium of torture. In the end, the skit insists, it all comes down to chicken. The weakness of the aged is a double sign in Nagwa ideology, both part of the overall weakness of Adi Dharm people generated by an exploitative society (the overdetermination of suffering in Narayan's lament, the allusions to the police in Ramji's potted panegyrics) and proof of the equality of all beings (the decline of generational power in Ramji's portrayal). In the poetry of Ravi Das, both figures (the old person as tragic victim and as humbled victor) are brought together:

As high as you can build, as low as you can dig,
your size will never swell the dimensions of a grave;
Those lovely curls, that turban tied so rakishly—
they'll soon be turned to ash.
If you've counted on the beauty of your wife and home
without the name of Ram, you've already lost the game.
And me: even though my birth is mean.
my ancestry by everyone despised,
I have always trusted in you, King Ram,
says Ravidas, a tanner of hides.
The house is large, its kitchen vast,
but only after a moment's passed, it's vacant.
This body is like a scaffold made of grass:
the flames will consume it and render it dust.
Even your family—your brothers and friends—
clamor to have you removed at dawn.
The lady of the house, who once clung to your chest,
shouts "Ghost! Ghost!" now and runs away,
The world, says Ravidas, loots and plunders all—
except me, for I have slipped away
by saying the name of God.^[6]

Old age and death, framed as a unity, give the lie to the pretense of social difference claimed by the powerful, the signs of an ephemeral world that "loots and

plunders all." The old body is presented simultaneously as sign of exploiter and exploited, of the strong and the weak.

Weakness, kamzori , was as central to descriptions of aging and of particular old persons in Nagwa as it was in the Bengali quarter and the residential colonies. However, weakness attributions in Nagwa conveyed something additional and quite different, for statements like "Look, he's old, so he's weak; his hands and feet (i.e., his ability to work) are weak, his mind, too, so what?" were enclosed within family weakness narratives: "We are poor folks, not rich; we are weak; we cannot give (our children, our parents) decent food." Transactional deficits central to narratives of the family and the familial body elsewhere in the city were here linked more forcefully to kamzori and quantified. The quantification was usually in terms of pieces of bread, roti or chapati: we can only give him so many chapatis. Bodies were approached through chapati counts. A never-adequate rhetoric of self-justification soaked up all other difference. The experience of old age, the narratives of family members implied, is encompassed by the experience of being poor and Chamar.^[7] She is weak because we are weak. Far less often families looked to failed processes of adjustment, adaptation, or balance to explain bad voices. And to explain them away: weakness, like balance, worked as much against meaning as for it, against the moral threat of certain kinds of old voices. Weakness encompassed difference and diverted the need for intrafamilial accountability.

Old age weakness was linked to caste weakness both causally and essentially. Causally, old people were understood to be weak because they had not eaten enough good food in life, because they did not have access to real medication as opposed to tonics, and because they had to work until they dropped, like Dulari's cousin the rickshaw-puller. Essentially, old people were said to be weak because of their inherent social weakness as Chamar. Again and again in my interviews and discussions in Nagwa basti, mention of hot dimag and other voices would glide into old age weakness, which in turn would glide into social weakness. Lost in this seamless glide was the familial body and the role of intergenerational politics in the emergence of the aberrant voices of weak old people.

Before we can turn to individual families, to examine the relationships between generations and individuals and the negotiation of the weakened body and its meanings for different actors, we might explore further the ideology of weakness in Nagwa, to see what is at stake in this glide. I suggest that "weakness" is the structural principle that both generates the order of castes for the residents of Nagwa and provides the structural basis for its critique. In so doing I respond to a central debate in the sociology of India since the 1960s regarding the relationship of individuals to the social order, and respond in particular to a more specific debate about the relationship of "untouchables" to this order. These debates have a routinized and somewhat cathartic form: the ongoing and perhaps compulsive need to undo the work on India of the French sociologist Louis Dumont, principally his Homo Hierarchicus .^[8] Thus the myriad critiques of his position that continue to

emerge long after the beast.was thought dead. My brief comments here are no exception.

The Dumontian analysis placed the pure/impure opposition at the center of the analysis of society in India and considered the discursive practices of Brahmans as the sole authoritative source for a reflexive Indian sociology. Earlier critical responses to Dumont emerged on at least two levels, either as criticisms of his privileging of the "ideological" against the material basis of caste ideology, or, for those accepting the role of cultural structures as determinants of history, as criticisms of the limits Dumont placed on what constituted the ideological. Discussions centering on low-caste groups often have tended to ignore or dismiss Dumont, the assumption being that his domain of Indian society is a crude reframing of the dominant ideology.^[9] Discussions of middle and higher castes and particularly of dominant and baronial castes have argued that the "political" domain of the state is as central to the underlying ideological structure of Indian society as is the "religious" domain of purity and pollution, and that this structure has a history.^[10] These post-Dumontian structuralist accounts of caste concern themselves with the relationship between elites, their competing ideologies, rationalities, and transactional styles, and their underlying epistemes. The central problèmatique is the relation between king and Brahman and between princely and priestly authority, with attention to the colonial delegitimation of non-Brahmanic ideologies.

Both sets of critiques are of limited appeal in approaching the body and society in Nagwa. Materialist objections to Dumont are powerful but frame the poor and marginal as speaking truth to power with little effort to grasp the texture of necessity by which dominant and dominated ideologies and practices are reproduced. Language and practice in Nagwa slum were layered and complex; their structural contours pointed to more than infrastructures all the way down. Here I focus on two opposed but ubiquitous themes explicit in local discourse and implicit in practice: identity , the frequent assertion that "all persons are the same," and weakness , the tendency for people in Nagwa to rank others in terms of their ability to weaken or be weakened by them.

In so doing, I attempt a strategy in some ways parallel to the alternative critical position on Dumont, focusing on the normalization of social difference through a set of competing or, to paraphrase Charles Malamoud,^[11] "revolving" hierarchies rooted in complementary figures of totality and gift. This alternative critique has had widely differing formulations,^[12] but few of them have been of particular use in exploring the possibilities of this expanded and post-Dumontian play of structure for the religion, politics, and embodied life of the socially marginal and outcaste. Following R. S. Khare,^[13] I want to look at the Nagwa Chamar language of strength and weakness in structural terms, as an ideological generation of a hierarchical world from a moral opposition rooted in a particular class of transactions.

In noting the centrality of kamzori in the perception and negotiation of social

difference and political relations in Nagwa, I want to suggest how hegemonic constructions such as the naturalization of hierarchy as organic difference—pollution—simultaneously determine the position and experience of bodies and are fundamentally reworked by them. Weakness takes shape, like pollution, as organic and embodied difference, but as difference that preserves the moral integrity of the weakened against the weakener. Residents are weak, kamzor , in opposition not to the wealthy or powerful as individuals but as the triad of Brahman, Thakur, and Bania, who as corporate groups challenge the individual moral relationship of the gift between patron and poor. The Maharaja's sense of feudal obligation and the Bengali Babu's gift of his own home to his gardener narratively evoke an ideal transactional frame in which class and weakness are not synonymous. This frame is disrupted by Thakurs, by Brahmans, by petty bureaucrats and by the police in the stories residents tell of where they live and who they are. These disruptive actors reverse the moral order of society: they take rather than give, and they weaken the poor.

Through the imposition of new transactional orders creating weakness within a local version of the Fall, Chamar narratively come to have bodies different from others. To speak of weakness constituted the recognition by basti residents that their bodies were different from those of Brahmans, Thakurs, and Banias, more than their identities tout court. Kamzori was not only weakness but thinness; all states of weakness were embodied as lack. Kamzori is a depletion of bodily substance—semen and menstrual blood, but more particularly the coarser primary tissues: food juices, blood, flesh, and flesh. Weak bodies were thin, dry, and cold, in contrast to the motevale , the Fat Ones, who came and made pronouncements on Nagwa and who stole its land and its water and offered in their place toilets. Weakening challenged the moral order of caste by substituting for it a different moral order, one equally rooted in the inevitability of organic difference. Difference was embodied as weakness, not pollution: caste was a medical condition.

Upper-caste differences were reconfigured within a field generated by the differential strategies of each caste group as weakeners, drawing on stereotyped local transactional strategies of Brahmans, Thakurs, and Banias. Banias demanded high interest and siphoned all one's earnings. Thakurs appropriated land and intimidated residents through thugs or the police, particularly the infamous Lanka thana. Brahmans controlled academic and service positions, maintained the image of Harijans as ganda (dirty, polluted), cloaked all action as moral imperative, and were more effective claimants of Thakur, Bania, and state patronage.

The ideology of weakness disguised as well as disclosed relationships. First, the language of kamzori reflected the performative dynamics of fieldwork. Like the police, I came to take something: I was, and remain, another motevala . "The old woman is weak because we are weak" was dialogic, referring not only to the old woman and the "we" of the formulation but to myself: "She is weak because we are weak—are you a weakener or a patron?" The language of weakness forced me to remain aware of what was differentially at stake in an interview, and pushed

me to define myself transactionally. "We are weak—what do you intend to do about it?"

Thus I initially came, in the course of fieldwork, to discount the significance of kamzori , reading it as a rhetorical strategy on the part of those I interviewed, an expression of need, dependency, anger, and at times suffering, but not as central to experience as its frequent mention seemed to suggest. But rhetorical strategies draw upon a limited universe of discourse. The more time I spent with families and the more exposure to both daily life and social dramas that I gained, the more I came to accept the language of weakness as indicative of the structure of lived experience in Nagwa and to recontextualize my initial interpretive anxieties within an unfolding social world.

Second, beyond these issues, the ideology of weakness blurs distinctions of class and gender within Nagwa basti. The experience of rural migrants who pedaled rickshaws versus established petty functionaries who worked for the municipal administration or the Banaras Hindu University differed vastly but drew upon the same language of weakness in framing the body in time. Ram Nath and his brother and cousin had each recently rebuilt their houses; the houses were larger and more frequently whitewashed than others in the area. Ram Nath addressed the question of dimag ki kamzori —brain weakness—through continual reference to "them," the illiterate others of Nagwa: "They cannot read or write—they are all bevakuf [stupid]—so their minds go quickly. I am older. I have survived severe injury [he detailed getting an electric shock and falling off a roof, and surviving], but my mind and my health are still correct." In speaking of the worries of old age, Ram Nath and others like him were more likely than others in the slum to frame a discussion of weakness in the supplementary moral terms of tension and balance. Literally, in Ram Nath's case: he lost his balance, falling off a roof and injuring his head, and yet through tenacity has survived both weakness and imbalance.

Third, kamzori was differentially constituted as a threat to men and women, a distinction men tended to discuss in terms of the paired losses of semen and menstrual blood. This androcentric discourse in Nagwa took male fluid loss as a threat to oneself and female fluid loss as the necessary control of women's heat. The elaboration by men of these losses—in personal narratives, in restrictions against menstruating women, and in the experience of semen loss anxiety—was more muted than in middle-class and higher-caste neighborhoods.^[14] Like the weakening of old age, the weakening of sexual fluid loss was framed within a broader context of diminished substance. For men, kamzori as impotence was overshadowed by kamzori as thinness. Both men and women downplayed gender differences in discussions of old age weakness, framing it primarily in terms of limited roti and bad families.

However, even in Nagwa differences between men's and women's care of their bodies bespoke a differential concern with the maintenance of the bounded male body—but not the female—from threats of diminution and weakness. As in the

Bengali quarter and more often than in the colonies, men bound themselves, and gurus and women bound men, with varieties of protective amulets, strings, vows, spells, and rings.^[15]Asli Bara Indrajal ("True Great Magic")—the primary text of Chaman Lal the ojha , the charismatic exorcist who was the guru of several men in Nagwa—contained numerous spells to protect men from the diminution caused by their enemies and by women, but few protective charms for women.^[16]

Menstruation, some men in Nagwa argued, was necessary to let out a woman's heat. Secchan, who played Shiva on Ravi Das' birthday, noted that the process was necessary for women's daily health and that amenorrhea, the absence of menses, led to an accumulation of heat and thus fever, jaundice, tuberculosis, or eye diseases. Other men at his tea stall disagreed, stressing that menstruation weakened women incrementally and that they aged more quickly as a consequence: "They are old by fifty. Have you noticed?" Women in Nagwa reversed the male gloss, from a loss of heat or strength to a process of removing fatigue. Several women in Narayan's family contrasted the takat (strength) of women and men. His daughter-in-law told me, "Women get more tired. They give birth, raise children, and worry about them." I responded, "But men work . . . ?" to which she said, "But they eat more; they fill their stomachs. . . . Men are built stronger. Women thus have their monthly [period], when their fatigue comes out. With the blood. So they won't become too weak." Weakness does not come to women as some "natural" consequence of menstruation, these women suggest, but rather is a constituent feature of their social situation and its physical ramifications—chronic undernutrition and constant labor. And weakness for women unlike men is not just a lack, a diminution of substance, it is rather a quantity that can be excreted. Both the nature of a woman's life and the prerogatives of men maintain her as weak, but the body and its fluids are claimed as a (quite literally) empowering response.^[17]

What of the cessation of menstruation in the slum? The menopause as either a pathologized or simply a marked category of experience did not seem to exist in Nagwa in 1988 and 1989, in dramatic contrast to Sharma and Saxena's data for the colonies. Despite the elaboration of menstruation as the excretion of weakness, the end of menstrual bleeding was described jokingly by most women as a time of relief. Men sometimes had a different perspective. Secchan, in suggesting that amenorrhea led to illness, was concerned with the premature cessation of bleeding and the buildup of heat. Old women, he noted, were inherently colder; they did not need periods. The men who felt that strength was lost during the menses viewed old age and the mental weakness of old women as a cumulative effect of earlier menstruation and not due to a climacteric period such as the menopause.

In my earliest discussions with men and women in Nagwa, including those about menstruation and weakness, I worked with a BHU student, Rajesh Pathak, who would come with me to Nagwa from time to time and would afterward editorialize. Rajesh felt that more was at stake for the women discussing the cessation

of menses than they were letting on. "This is a difficult time," he said, "when a woman thinks, 'I am no longer a woman' and gets upset." Like Sharma and Saxena, Rajesh expected a gendered embodiment of the imbalance of old age. In Nagwa, however, older women were amused when I tried to press the question of a menopause against their assertion that if anything they experienced a relief at the cessation of much fuss and bother. If these women's experience as women changes, as Rajesh insisted, the change was not keyed to a bodily event like the menopause. For women and men in Nagwa, my discussions of gender difference obscured the centrality in old age weakness of being Chamar. Burhe hain, kamzor hain, garib hain , they are old, thin/weak, poor. Flesh and fat, more than blood and semen, were at stake in kamzori and in old age.