Introduction

From July 1981 to April 1983, I kept a diary in the field, making entries whenever loneliness and frustration seemed to reach a peak, or I was consumed by self-pity at the hopelessness of my task, or less often, when I simply wanted to express myself about something remarkable, or rarer still, to exult in a special triumph. I should add that scribbling is a habit for me—diary-like, essay-like scribbling—but one which constitutes an end in itself. To make it public needs some justification. I harbor an academic bias against the tendency toward “vulgarization,” the notion that a personal experience can be elevated to the status of a universal one. I am usually suspicious of others’ impulses to confide, whether as autobiography, as thinly disguised fiction, as sentimental journalism, or as reflections on one’s work. Yet what I have produced here are memoirs, and I am not too distressed by them (if they are considered readable, perhaps even amusing) because as I surveyed the diaries from which they were compiled, I realized that they were not so much about “me” as about “fieldwork,” that brash, awkward, hit-and-run encounter of one sensibility with others.

The purpose of these memoirs is to describe the process of fieldwork, not as a philosophic experience, with afterthought, but as a practical experience, in all its rawness and candor. There is afterthought, to be sure, in that I have arranged my observations into chapters, provided headings, and peppered them with comments—very few, everything said and done, because I am impressed at how far I have come since then. But I have refrained from rewriting and crafting a fresh narrative that explains in retrospect the complexities of the encounter between Self and Other. My purpose is served by leaving my story as it stands: a narrative that objectifies the fieldworker by focusing on the initial shock of realization that the encounter is a sensitive, creative process calling into play latent, unacknowledged facets of personality as well as more deliberately cultivated professional talents, and that in this difficult process the researcher is surprisingly unprepared.

How much more I would have liked to know on exactly this subject back in 1981: that there was something inevitable about my feelings of intimidation and excitement, ignorance and confidence, and later, alienation and infatuation; that fieldwork is by its very nature an ambitious, optimistic, very personal effort to woo over indifferent strangers through a series of bumbling steps. Like every other graduate student about to hurtle off to the field, I had been educated in many good theories and methodological perspectives and was adept at analyzing the accepted masterpieces. But that primary phase of ethnography called fieldwork had not been part of the curriculum, largely because it was considered something incommunicable. Like others in the same situation, I had a mental image of fieldwork that derived chiefly from half-secret incursions into the prefaces and introductions of contemporary ethnographies; for the rest, my seniors and teachers assured me that “it would work out,” as it did for everyone, that I would know magically what to do once I got into the field, that nothing could be fixed or laid down in advance.

They were only partially correct. Now, after ten years of fieldwork, if someone were to ask me exactly how to go about it I would probably give the same answer that my colleagues gave me in 1981, namely, that it depends on who you are, where you go, and how you choose to deal with what you encounter. But I would also recommend that the potential fieldworker read up on the subject and be prepared to be unprepared. Fortunately, there are volumes available now that had not been produced in 1981. I am not referring to fieldwork manuals with chapters on questionnaires, using a recorder, and so forth—though they are valuable as well^[1]—but rather to the genre of self-questioning, reflexive anthropology that seeks a better understanding of every step in cultural studies. My memoir joins this genre and attempts to dissect one stage of ethnography, fieldwork.

Every experience is unique. Some anthropologists report that their fieldwork has not been difficult at all—or that the difficulties have not been significant enough to remember or comment on. I would say that in most such cases time has erased etchings that were once much sharper. There are three excellent reasons why fieldwork experience is worth sharing.

First, the “person-specific” nature of fieldwork, to use Geertz’s phrase, the “highly situated nature of ethnographic description—this ethnographer, in this time, in this place, with these informants, these commitments, and these experiences, a representative of a particular culture, a member of a certain class”—needs as much elaboration as ethnographers have the time, patience, and talent to give.^[2] The trend of publishing “reflections on fieldwork” is clearly emerging in anthropology. I am calling for an extension of the genre called by that name.^[3] The important books and articles on “reflexive anthropology” published in the past two decades, particularly in the 1980s, are still rare enough to barely cause ripples on a deceptively smooth surface. As these works remind us, anthropologists have always warned about subjectivity and have offered ways to control it, but these reflections are overshadowed by the sheer monumentality of the edifice they have created. My point is simple: the ethnography is the goal, of course, but when so much of what comprises this final product is directly related to the situation of the investigator, it should no longer be regarded as narcissism or a waste of intellectual and publishing resources (both positions which I have taken in the past), to dwell on that aspect of the discipline more directly. Although sophisticated deconstructions of both the fieldwork and the writing process exist, we lack sufficient actual records, the meat to sink our teeth into.

Second, fieldwork memoirs are worth sharing because of the very uniqueness and diversity of researchers, a point not sufficiently acknowledged. Patterns can be identified: the Lone Ethnographer,^[4] riding off into the sunset, nostalgic for the pure and unspoiled while himself “innocently” contributing to the despoliation of that which he seeks. I can readily identify another: the Solicitous Indigene, uprooted from her birthplace, yet inevitably and gratefully one with it at various unexpected levels. As long as there is the West on the one hand, and “natives,” “ethnics,” and “indigenous people” on the other, she is one of the latter, and her developing understanding of her subjects therefore is much more crucial to her self-definition than to that of the Lone Ethnographer, who has his adventure and departs.

All the literature I have perused so far on the question of the anthropological encounter unreservedly portrays it as one culture’s clash with another, or by a similar, if less violent, metaphor: one culture, the people’s, is translated for, is made comprehensible to, is heard by, another, the scholar’s. The notion that the studied culture is static, traditional, homogeneous, and so on—a notion that derives, it seems, from anthropology’s unwitting collusion with colonialism— has been quite successfully challenged by the most astute recent writing on the subject. Now that we are clearly in a “post-colonial” world, “it is ever more difficult to predict who will put on the loincloth and who will pick up the pencil and paper.”^[5]

I would like to make the record clear here: a cultural encounter can and does also take place between classes, and the difference making, conflict, domination, and objectification that go on within “a” culture are as resounding as those between “a” culture and “an” other. As an “ethnic,” I have long been uncomfortable with “ethno”-sociology and “ethno”-musicology, and all those unreflective linguistic habits that blur spatial and temporal distinctions in the Third World. For example, some refuse to recognize that even in ethnic-land there are classical belief systems as well as popular belief systems. Now that the “Third World” has “imploded into the metropolis,”^[6] the West is again adopting a posture of domination through excessive penitence about underrating and underrespecting the dynamics of this Third World. At both moments, the colonized are being treated as One.

The issue of colonialism is being simplified and made all-inclusive, because if the problem is or has been colonialism, it is unlikely to disappear through self-reflection or self-flagellation, or anything short of a new world order. But if the problem belongs rather, as I see it, to the terrain of the discipline itself, in its solipsism regarding class, its overdetermined notion of culture, and its ahistorical stance toward everything, including its own past and present, then much can be achieved through self-reflection. These seemingly new writings by Third Worlders need to be incorporated into the body of texts meant to educate students in a universalist mode. And more social scientists like me need to speak about our discomfort regarding this polarization of the world into (ex-) colonizers and colonized, as if these categories always took precedence over all others. We can then look forward to a state of knowledge where every American who read a book like this would not necessarily remark (as did all the American readers of this manuscript): “I didn’t know Indians could feel so outside in their own country.”

If the equation is simply (Western) anthropologist dominating (Third World) subject, it can be demonstrated as faulty in a minute. No one could deny that enough domination, objectification, and simplification can be practiced by an (Eastern) anthropologist studying a (Third World) subject or even a (Western) subject. The weight of historical experience is on the first of these three possible relationships, of course. But having struggled in the field and kept a diary out of frustration and pleasure, I returned to find in the following years that this burgeoning field of reflective, deconstructionist studies excluded me (yet again) by posing West against East. So I naturally ask: What about within the East or the Third World, class against class, subculture against subculture, one kind of historical sensibility against another? And what about other equally potent problems of defining subject and method? the personal problems of sheer adjustment? To continue the borrowed image: not only the ethnographies but also some of the reflections on them are being produced more and more by those in loincloth. In both genres there are similarities and differences worth noting between the Lone Ethnographer of the West and the Solicitous Indigene of the Third World.

We have to strike a careful balance between these similarities and differences. A native like me, privileged, alien, discovering her other-ness and her one-ness simultaneously, remains nevertheless the anthropologist and scholar, one who inevitably undergoes the usual trials and tribulations of fieldwork. This introduction, on the one hand, will be attractive to those interested in “identity formation,” particularly in the Third World as opposed to the postmodern West. The text, on the other hand, is full of the nitty gritty of fieldwork and is likely to seem exceedingly familiar, maybe even repetitive, to anthropologists. But the two aspects, the personal and the professional, have to be seen as coexisting. Fieldwork consists of experiences shared by all anthropologists; the personal and the peculiar are significant as qualities that always but differently characterize each individual experience. While this introduction discusses what was important in my “identity formation,” the book itself, in its preoccupation with getting things done, tells of yet unaccepted facts: that life in India is as full of contradictions, pain, and beauty as elsewhere; that post-colonial upper classes are, for all their confused sensibilities, the same as other upper classes; that Eastern/Oriental/Asian scholars have most of the same worries as Western ones; that one may forget one’s personal and historical identity for certain purposes but must remember it for others. In short, my emphasis on the personal arises from my recognition of its importance in my professional development as a social scientist, not in an awareness of myself as a “Third World scholar.”

Last, fieldwork memoirs are worth sharing because for other specialists studying the region they are as accurate as more rigorously planned investigations. A society can never be wrong, and all experiences in the field are to be taken seriously. Given the limitations of any study’s perspective, a reflection on one’s behind-the-scenes, mundane field experiences allows both researcher and reader to refine their understanding of the way things work. I find my memoirs enlightening, for example, on such subjects as middle-class versus poor Indians’ stand on hospitality and servility to office, or on the pragmatic value of hierarchy, reciprocity, and exchange. Such insights comprise an ethnography (albeit incomplete and unpolished) that tells in turn of how a Western-trained Indian intellectual adapted to the field and built relationships with strangers that affected her greatly as an individual but, more important, enabled her to talk expertly about them—and how all such expertise has inbuilt limitations.

Scholarly Locations

I attended school and college in India; in 1970 I went abroad (Europe and the United States), returning, after an unbroken stay of five years and the formative experience of two graduate degrees. The following three years of trying to discover India through living there and doing a master of philosophy degree in Indian history prepared me to go abroad again.

In 1978, on the eve of my second departure, from Delhi to Chicago to do my Ph.D., I put down Phanishwar Nath Renu’s novel about a Bihar village, Maila Anchal (“The Soiled Hinterland”).^[7] His enticing, remote pictures of rural life left me aching with pleasure and desire. I was acutely conscious of leaving my country in order to return to it with freedom, the freedom that I had found so elusive while living in it. This was only partly the physical freedom to travel to villages and backwaters; it was even more the freedom of being aware and equipped, of having the equivalent of the doctor’s training with which the urban protagonist of Maila Anchal goes off to the village, as well as the independence of mind to use the training for village work. To go abroad thus was a rash and impulsive step, suddenly to leave my job (I had an excellent appointment in the history department of the best college in Delhi), my husband (though he was to act with equal rashness and follow me shortly after), and a pleasant and quite satisfactorily organized home. I had no physical bars to my freedom, only cultural and psychological ones, or to put it less grandly, those of ignorance and of a restless, awakened imagination that would not be satisfied. I felt bound by my job, my university, the closed intellectual circles of peers, my background, and my prospects. I felt bound by the history I had studied, was teaching, and would do future work in. I needed new dimensions for my interests, new concepts to supplant my well-worn ones, the expanse to set my agenda anew. I needed a freshness of vision, some theories to exercise my mind with—as it turned out, what I largely needed was cultural anthropology.

Once at Chicago, it took me at the most a week to discover my direction and to plunge into coursework, library research, and interaction with colleagues. I was not the average student (whatever that might be) in that I had been out of college for eight years, held three graduate degrees (in Russian language, Russian history, and Indian history), and was too old and too experienced as a teacher to suffer the intellectual strains and psychological terror that confronted many of my classmates. I also had a private agenda. With an eye for the needful uncharacteristic of me, I completed the core requirements in history within a year and took my preliminary exams.Then I concentrated on studying anthropology, something I had already started dabbling in, untroubled by the confusion of administrators, teachers, and peers as to whether I was actually a historian or an anthropologist. When I got the funding for my field research in 1981, I was satisfied that my quest was headed toward its close: I was going to India to make a historical-ethnographic study of the popular culture of the artisans of Banaras. While each aspect of the proposal had been worked out gradually and painfully over the years in Chicago, the project as a whole aimed to do exactly what had in the vaguest terms always been on my mind: to interact with actual people that I knew nothing about, not merely to engage with them through written documents; to discover, with the heuristic device of a perspective, the world view(s) that lay beneath their actions; and to understand and represent them with theoretical categories chosen self-consciously from among many possible analytical modes.

But, however aspiring and sincere, I was a marginal figure to anthropology, and suffered less from the “faith in Monumentalism,” as Rosaldo calls it,^[8] than my classmates. That is, I did not take classic ethnographies as models to be emulated nor imagine that, like the father figures of anthropology, I would write a representative account of another culture under certain predictable chapter headings. As Van Maanen puts it, I lacked “the proper respect for our ancestors and the comfort their representational devices might provide.”^[9] Nor do I think I suffered from the illusion that I was going to capture another culture and objectify it within a communicable structure, since this culture was “my own,” and, as individuals know instinctively about their own culture, was too complex, dynamic, and incoherent to allow me to do more than slice out a tiny segment for analysis. Nor was I in grave danger of colluding with colonialism, having been colonialized myself, and having been sensitized to the workings of the colonizer-colonized mentality both from study of an intellectually nationalist Indian history in India and from an academic tenure in Moscow. To be sure, I was bristling with prejudices that belonged to a class closely associated with colonialism, but in India these prejudices are pre-colonial.

Not to overrate the other side, historians usually promised much more than they delivered, and I had problems with the data, the approach, the concepts, the ideology, and the very subject matter of history, the past, a construction that I could finally own to having little interest in. I was acutely conscious that archival work left yawning gaps in comprehension: how do you talk about weavers without ever encountering one face to face? How do you effectively describe rituals without witnessing the power of one? Conventional historical research in archives and reading rooms left me clumsy and immature in talking about real people and real events. But most of all I was excited by cultural history, ideas in enactment, so to speak. I felt, along with others, that the discipline of history gave inadequate control over theoretical categories and was guarded in its borrowings from others (I am thinking here particularly of the anthropological “solidarity” and “communitas,” as well as “liminality” and “exchange”; what a strain they caused and what a stir they made when finally applied variously by historians).^[10] The economic historian, it was coming to be recognized, must know economics. So the cultural historian must learn…cultural anthropology, of course.

What pushed me into ethnography as I describe it here was my preference to write about the present—not quite the present of anthropologists, but rather the present as a shifting, forming, changing set of actualities and possibilities—as well as about the agents responsible for all this movement, agents usually located in the (narrative) past. To anticipate the next section and interject a personal comment here, it was partly my Indianness that made the importance of history incontrovertible to me. As many novels, short stories, and lay conversations—but not academic writings—have brought home to me, it is difficult for the South Asian to underestimate the importance of history, so omnipresent is change on the subcontinent; if anything, its vehement swirl can be overwhelming. An understanding of self, family, subculture, social phenomena, and naggingly intense contradictions and confusions can be achieved only through reference to history. Intolerant, resentful, and defensive about the present, the educated and self-conscious Indian is, moreover, uniquely aware of its historical dimension. Confronted with “problems”—poverty, disease, communalism, discrimination, and exploitation—the Indian cannot accept a merely cultural explanation: things are that way because they are; we do what we believe and we believe what we believe. Self-love necessitates historical thinking: what are the causes? the agents? the explanations? An indigene studying his or her own society is engaged not only in a more activist project, and in more of a voyage of self-discovery, but also in a more holistic project, one that is more generous in its methodological approaches and more liberal in its scope.

Personal Locations

My own very particular circumstances are often alluded to in the course of the book, and I shall highlight the most important of them here. I am an Indian doing research in India, an Indian—though based abroad and at home abroad—by birth, nationality, and choice (“In spite of all temptation…To belong to other nations…”). For the West, “Indian” is an oversimplified category: either you fall into certain stereotypical classifications of caste, class, location, and so on, or you are simply “western” or “westernized,” that is, not quite Indian. For me, there are worlds and worlds in India, both within and alongside one another, and I have failed to hit on the essence of what makes one “Indian.” As Abdul Bismillah puts it in the beginning of his evocative novel about Banaras weavers: “There is a world which is universal. There is a world that is India. There is a world that is Muslim. And there is a world that belongs to the weavers of Banaras.”^[11] For the last two, I can substitute and append any number of similar discrete worlds, and from the point of view of experience, and equally of scholarship, the distance between any two of these worlds is equal.

I lived in India the first nineteen years of my life, yet I knew almost nothing about it until I left it after college and then returned for various purposes, including the three-year period of teaching and married life in Delhi. Childhood and adolescence left lasting impressions on me. I was in two senses secluded: first, we lived in the Civil Lines or the Cantonments, where the population is two per square mile or thereabouts: these are the extraordinary suburbs created by the British to be interned at a safe distance from the Natives. Second, ours was a small family of four, and my parents preferred me to keep to my own devices. Like any good guardians, they wanted to protect me from the filth, crowds, and disease of the city, and the nature of their work and life-style made this simple. As soon as I started worrying about what I was going to do with my life, I thought of reaching the city, with its filth, crowds, and disease. There may be a discernible cycle to this. My father had grown up next to the bazaars; he escaped the city for the Cantonments. Bred and, as I saw it, suffocated in these remote areas, I plotted to escape them for the crowded city.

A concrete example of seclusion comes to mind. I had been to Banaras before 1981, even before my reconnoitering trip to North Indian cities in 1979 to select a suitable research site. My earlier visit had been as a college girl in 1967, with two cousins and my brother Sunil, to spend the summer with my parents, who were “posted” there. We lived of course in the Cantonment, in the gracious and totally isolated bungalow of the Senior Superintendent of Police. Our day went like this: 6 a.m., riding; 7 a.m., when sufficiently sweaty, a swim at Banaras Club; 9 a.m., breakfast, on the coolest foods of May and June; 10 a.m. to noon, arts, crafts (I was experimenting with batik that summer), books and games; noon, a snack and iced Cokes; till lunch, more of the forenoon activities; 2 p.m., lunch, topped with mangoes and ice cream; 3 to 5 p.m., siesta in a dark room kept cool by khas curtains; evening, badminton, another swim, cousinly games and conversation…The one time that Banaras impinged on our consciousness was when, in response to the cavern-dark, gloomy, and eerie Banaras Club swimming pool and our amusement that there were many Shiva (Mahadev) temples in Banaras habitually called Maheshwar, Vireshwar, Kapileshwar, and so on, we invented our own god (Ishwar) of the haunted swimming pool, Kut-kuteshwar Mahadev, He who keeps the teeth chattering.

As a child I kept to my own devices, living a progressively rarefied life whose only other denizens were characters from books and whose landscape was created of the black-and-white symbols of letters. The only people I knew in any sense at all were my immediate family and, very unidimensionally, schoolmates and some servants. One person who disclosed a totally different world intersecting with mine in uncertain ways was Shankar. Putting all euphemisms aside, he was our servant. He had been attached to my father from when both of them were nineteen or twenty and had therefore been my nursemaid and surrogate mother from birth. He was as much a part of our home and family as were any of the actual family members; yet, of course, he was an outsider. He had left his village and would go back now and then for visits, from which he would return having forgotten his “clean” Hindi and relapsed into village dialect. The language change—language signaling as it does one-ness or other-ness—left a great impression on my mind. He had a son and daughter, the latter the same age as me, and sometime when I was twelve years old, I discovered that she had been given in marriage. Shortly after, she died in childbirth. Shankar did not hide his tears from me, and the combined impact of seeing an adult mother figure cry and of wrestling with the strange knowledge of the cause of the tears opened up another vista to me. As I matured, I came to accept that Shankar had his own home and family, although we mutually pretended that he shared ours, and my first faint stirrings of humanism and egalitarianism were the realization that I must relinquish my earlier possessiveness. I wanted to visit his village and meet his people and know him as a person, not as a role, our servant. Of course I never did; it was all too difficult. But Shankar’s existence in my life contributed to making me an anthropologist.

A large part of the pleasure that the reader will detect in my accounts of roaming around in narrow lanes, as well as some part of the difficulties posed by my shyness and ignorance, is a product of my secluded past. Other feelings that surfaced during my fieldwork were also legacies of the past. My persistent love-hate relationship with poverty arises from a familiar middle-class attitude: let them be simple, ignorant, unhappy, in revolt, whatever, but let them be clean. I had never found filth or garbage an issue before, but suddenly, overwhelmed with it, I found it repulsive, and by extension, the attitudes of the people who tolerated it equally so. I suffered from the unarticulated expectations of those who grow up with servants waiting on every whim—the expectation of comfort provided by the loyal cooperation of all—and condemned any situation that would make it impossible. My India was one of ease; I had never really accepted that poor communication, inadequate supplies of necessities, the discomforts of dampness or drought, or the unpredictable personalities of others could adversely affect me. Although eleven years of living away from such a life-style, including eight years of economic independence as an academic, had sufficiently declassed me that I felt little but repugnance for the administrators of India, the deeper proclivities that had been cultivated by living in the Cantonments and Civil Lines remained. Yet I continued to strive to understand this instinctive shrinking from the poor, and to understand the poor themselves, in ways that I never strove to understand anyone with money or power; the latter I mercilessly condemned because they had the stigma of familiarity.

Banaras was such a mystery to me when I arrived there in 1981 ironically because I was an Indian and expected to have a privileged insight into it. In fact, from Banaras I was thrice removed: through my education and upbringing, than which there is no greater molder of attitudes; by language and linguistic culture; and by region and regional culture.

My education, like my mother’s, had been conducted within the four walls of various Catholic convents, the longest stay being in Lucknow, from which there were never field trips to other neighborhoods, other institutions in the city, to encounter urban life directly. We were fed on the bread and butter of Shakespeare and Thomas Hardy, and I imagined myself akin to those who roamed the English countryside and rhapsodized on “Seasons of mist and yellow fruitfulness…” This great polarity between internal and external worlds has been eloquently described by countless ex-colonials, both at home and expatriated.^[12] Talk of it makes me uncomfortable because it is so much a part of the mental makeup of us Western-educated Indians that it is never discussed by us among ourselves. It is reserved only for a Western audience, and when we attempt to communicate it, it is ironically oversimplified and problematized by both parties. Space does not permit me to deal at length with this matter; even by broaching the subject, by rendering it as a possible East-West conflict, I feel I am doing it an injustice. Banaras is not the issue; thanks to my education, I would have been a stranger—or rather, an observer—anywhere in India, cultivating as I did attitudes of pity and distress at the practice of caste, of disgust at patriarchy, of scorn at ritual, and of noncomprehension (tinged with romanticism) at poverty. None of these observed facts were part of me—necessary to study, impossible to live with—but, as I have since discovered, they do not have to be for one to be Indian. How many educated, self-conscious, activist Indians suffer this unnecessary distancing from what they believe must be their “real” culture!^[13]

I was also an outsider to Banaras because of language and linguistic culture, since Hindi was only my second language and in Banaras, while Hindi and Urdu were known and widely used, especially in my presence, everyone by preference spoke Bhojpuri, which I acquired only gradually and partially. English was my first language—the language of my dreams (as far as one can know) and thoughts, the language I could express myself in, and the language my parents could express themselves in. The standard of Hindi imparted in my school days had been abysmally low—it has risen several notches since—and had left us schoolfellows with an effective language barrier. We could communicate in Hindi with servants and older relatives in a rudimentary way and among ourselves not at all. I improved greatly in Hindi when working in Delhi, but conversational fluency I acquired only in the field in Banaras, sensing that my mere adequacy in simple conversation was not enough, that I should achieve the level necessary to both transmit and understand complex thoughts. My efforts were intense and unflagging, a combination of reading newspapers, journals, and fiction; of conversing whenever possible; of keeping my ears constantly attuned to any nuance of speech; and even of executing laborious exercises in composition. Although progress in a language is difficult to mark, there came a point at which, even if I could not understand every spoken word, I could understand the sense. In my own speech, especially, I could note the change: I could gradually deliver myself of more and more complicated thoughts or propositions and emerge from the trial panting but victorious. For Urdu, which differs from Hindi in script and partly in vocabulary, the path I followed was the same, although progress was much slower.

Finally, Banaras was unknown to me because of what textbooks call the “regional diversity” of India, eastern Uttar Pradesh being culturally distinct from western or central Uttar Pradesh, whence my ancestors had come. This diversity legitimated my otherness: every Indian grows up with the experience that regions, cultural styles, classes, and intellectual approaches and ideologies have little in common with one another; that “natural” practices and attitudes—child rearing, treatment of elders, behavior toward guests—vary dramatically from subcaste to subcaste, even from family cluster to family cluster; that in meeting a new person seemingly as Indian as you, you may actually confront a culture distant from everything you take for granted.

Even within a family, encounters with “the Other” can be severe. I had never in my various convent situations read any religious text but the New Testament. But I had one grandfather who was steeped in abstract Upanishadic philosophy and another who was a passionate devotee of the incarnation Rama. The former meditated three hours in the dark every morning, sat on the bench of the Uttar Pradesh High Court during the day as M’Lord, and played tennis in the club in the evening. The latter was a specialist on the Ramcharitmanas and had published his own version of it. My own father recited English poems as if they were Vedic hymns, that is, with regularity and dignity, and also wrote English poetry in the tradition of the Romantics. Living abroad for five years starting at the formative age of nineteen, I became certain that I would marry a foreigner and I felt my prophesy fulfilled when I chose to marry a Bengali. My first visit to Calcutta as a daughter-in-law was a hybrid of images: unfamiliar humidity; the swollen Hooghly; cone-shaped “Vietnamese” hats on men with strangely Chinese features; odd syncretisms of a suddenly unfamiliar British race working on another unknown race who pointedly (owing to the muddle of their peculiar language) separated themselves from “Hindustanis”—syncretisms that found expression in striking notions of cleanliness and safety, and equally in amusing habits like drinking morning tea only if accompanied by Thin Arrowroot biscuits.

All this was foreign, the Other, yet it was all me, India, my history and society. Size, cultural diversity, preference for exclusivity, a colonial experience that made many scratches while leaving many deeper levels untouched, and finally an acceptance of all this untidiness as natural and right make Indians like me very aware of many worlds and the shifting positions of Self/Other. This results not so much in a feeling of uprootedness or homelessness as in a widening of the sphere one can call one’s own. When educated South Asians live abroad, they feel not lost or uncertain about identity but rather at home and comfortable (at least if they have a positive outlook as I do) in a progressively greater number of locations. One condition for the making of a good anthropologist is potentially fulfilled here: the creation of a mind attuned to diversity, variation, context, and change. In addition, unlike most U.S. ethnographers whose personal accounts I have read, for me there is finally no “home” and therefore no privileged vantage point.^[14] The experience of fieldwork can often be more formative, as Cesara records it to be for related reasons.^[15] The culture being discovered has an immediacy and a power to convert that may form new personal locations. Whether this makes for “better” anthropology in any sense depends on other factors that may be quite unrelated to these personal ones.

I did not then discover my “alien-ness” through anthropology; I was overly aware of it already and could “overcome” it through anthropology in favor of a more intellectually satisfying consciousness. I had deliberately discarded the “return of the native” mindset in 1974 when, returning to India after a five-year stay abroad, I quickly realized that I would not be satisfied simply to record my impressions of and responses to India as creative literature or as journalism. I wished to do something more directed and precise, more trained and professional, toward understanding my society. The choice of historical anthropology, then, was a first step toward activism of a sort, though anthropology is hardly regarded as such. I did not wish to remain simply a sensitive individual, with luck maybe an eloquent writer. I wanted to have a technique, a theory, a clear-cut method, rigorous ideas. Foreign as I felt to Banaras, I am very “Indian” in an emotional sense apart from the accident of my birthplace, and, as I grew to discover, “Banarasi.” I adore the monsoons and early, early mornings in summer. I empathize with mauj and masti (the Indian versions of passion, lightheartedness, and joi de vivre), although never having discovered myself enough, I have not myself experienced their abandon. I instinctively “think higher of” the person who cares little for tomorrow and can fully participate in something today for its own sake, without worry about the fruits of this action, than I do of those who plot and plan, chart their actions and guard their options. As for the extravagant hospitality which bears no rational relationship to the host’s ability to pay, the people of Banaras completely won my heart. Though my mind condemned the waste, and my stomach protested the oppression, and my expression doubtless reflected both, I loved the madness of it. At a more self-conscious level, the dialectician in me rejoices every time a scholar testifies to the wedding of extremes, the union of opposites—that grasping for balance symbolized in the “ascetic erotic” image—that supposedly characterizes Hinduism and that I thought I found in the field.^[16]

Because I was identifiable as an Indian, everyone in the field inquired after my caste, class, region, and marital status. Regarding my social status, many quickly discovered that my father was a person of some eminence, then Inspector General and Director General of the Uttar Pradesh Police, that is, the head of the police force in the largest state of India. I was often reduced to “his daughter.” Among my artisans, this categorization did not hinder me; my father’s position was immeasurably remote for those to whom the local head constable was the lord of the land. What mattered more for them was that I was obviously well off, well educated, well traveled, a metropolitan person who could presumably not understand their jokes (this always irks, because it is what you wish to understand first). The fact that I had a child made me easier to approach and to empathize with; that the child was a daughter almost compensated for the wealth and good fortune I otherwise had. Then there was this husband who was obviously not a native; he lapsed into Bengali and referred to things far away. That I was “given in marriage” to him indicated customs in my family so different from local ones as to be almost foreign. This was all relatively predictable and simple to deal with. What I had not quite expected was the existence of a vocabulary that “explained” strangers like me so efficiently, with no room for disagreement or amendment. At the first mention of writing, for example, there would be knowledgeable nods: “Shayara hai. Lekhika hai” (“She’s a poet. She’s a writer”). At any allusion to handicrafts or artisans, the looks would be even more knowing: they recognized the “type”—the arty lady of means who took a fancy to collecting bric-a-brac and even did something helpful for the manufacturers in the bargain. Most sweeping but least troublesome was the response to all my other meetings and wanderings that they found difficult to categorize: “Shauk hai” (“It’s her hobby, her fancy”).

What did I actually go to research? It would be appropriate to append a copy of my research proposal here, because I stuck closely to it, considering it a strong anchor in my turbulent sea. In my worst moments I could look at it and remember, “Ah yes! That’s what I’m supposed to do.” My topic was “popular culture,” that is, “leisure” and “entertainment” activities, whatever people claimed was their “fun” and “pleasure,” all terms that I was awkward with, while perfectly confident of the method of discovering the proper terms upon questioning informants. My subjects were the artisans of Banaras, about whose existence and numbers I knew a fair amount from census reports. Of Banaras itself, particularly its history and geography, I felt that I had read everything available when I was in Chicago, but this knowledge receded rapidly as I stepped into the field. My approach was to combine history and cultural anthropology, which in my mind meant, pragmatically speaking, two things: work in the archives until your eyes fall out and hang around with the subjects of your study until you know everything there is to be known about them.

I remember pausing with dismay on the very eve of departure for Banaras—a village ethnography in my hand, no doubt—and asking uncertainly of my husband, “I haven’t made a good choice, have I, planning to study Banaras? I should have chosen to do villagers, that’s what would have been a challenge.” And my husband, dependable crutch and tonic as always, stated what may be regarded as the enterprise’s epigraph: “Your artisans will be sufficiently like villagers. Challenge enough.”

Notes