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.”