Five
The Anger of the Rishis

in which the voice of old age is given reason, body, and space

Hot Brains

What is left of' this body now? Only my voice remains.
KRISHNA SOBTI, AI LARKI

In her twentieth-century retelling of the Mahabharata epic, Kamala Subramaniam puzzles over the frequent anger of Parashurama, an ancient sage, or rishi: "The rishis, they say; have all their senses under control. But it is evident that anger is the one thing they have never been able to control. To think that such a great man as [Parashurama], a man who had practiced austerities for years and years, should have lost his temper so easily, is strange."^[1]

The puzzle is this: the rishi is a paradigmatic type of realized individual, of an ascetic relation to the world exemplified by the final "stages" of asramadharma: vanaprastha and Sannyasa . One moves, in the scheme of asramas , from discipleship to the household to forest retirement to complete renunciation. The move is away from the connotations of javani , of youth—hot and interactive—toward the colder and less interactive body. The scheme parallels the physiology of aging in the classical medical texts of Ayurveda, in which young adulthood is characterized by a surfeit of pitta , hot bile, with an increase of vayu , cool wind, as one ages. Old bodies, socially and physiologically, are colder and more controlled.

The body of the rishi, narratively placed high on mountaintops or deep in forests, is the acme of the cold and noninteractive body. Rishi-like figures become legitimating icons for widely disparate projects. The cardiologist and American popular author Herbert Benson drew on the calm and collected rishi in discussing the cardiovascular benefits of the relaxation response.^[2] Roy Walford offered the rishi's cooled down metabolism and dearth of free radicals as a sign of caloric undernutrition. Former Indian Prime Minister Narasimha Rao was often repre-

sented at the height of his power as a cool and withdrawn but exceedingly powerful figure, with the connotation either of Brahman or rishi, in political cartoons.^[3] Yet rishis are exquisitely prone to anger, which in the Varanasi neighborhoods was often experienced and described as a type of heat—hot brain.

Not only latter-day rishis and sannyasis but old people in general were often characterized to me in Varanasi as classically irritable and hot-brained; these typifications extend to local proverb and narrative. Uska dimag garm ho gaya (his or her brain has become hot), conveying a chronic state of anger, was frequently said of the old. Old people tended to dry up, and their decreased fluidity could be manifest as frictional heat and irritability. The dry and unyielding irritability of old people was often described in terms of the production of wind, the problematized voice.

The sort of categories and language games I highlight here—hot, cold, wet, dry, fluid, unyielding, interactive, not interactive—simultaneously open up and curtail forms of critical inquiry. To an anthropologist, they suggest the approach to language and myth developed by Lévi-Strauss, the analysis of paired oppositions like hot and cold as a means to imagine an abstract edifice called structure. Structuralist approaches of various sorts have been immensely fruitful in the analysis of society and of knowledge and practice in South Asia, but their misplaced concreteness, frequent awkwardness in engaging questions of historical process and of difference and hegemony, and uncanny tendency to reprise various colonial nuggets of misinformation lead one to tread cautiously.

Structuralisms tend to be foreign affairs; the two most trenchant structuralist engagements in Indian sociology have been first, the work of Louis Dumont, his critics, and those who have taken his program in different directions, and second, what one might call the Chicago School and in particular the work of McKim Marriott, the early Ronald Inden, and many of their students and colleagues. Marriott's later work, and in particular a set of writings and interpretations grouped about an interpretive device sometimes termed "the cube," is exemplary both as an impressive heuristic, structuralist analytics of a certain sort taken to their logical extreme and offering powerful and unexpected insights, and as an uncomfortably reductionist Rosetta stone promising the final cracking of the hitherto opaque code that is social behavior in India.^[4]

Among the many trained in this sort of approach to India, the response to a radically changed sense of the necessary and obvious in anthropological practice has ranged: from total disavowal to the turn to "ethnohistory" to ever more local and nuanced structuralisms to the shift from questions of continuity to the more productive ground of diasporas, modernities, conflicts, ruptures, and "public culture." My own approach has been to retain some of the crude but useful insights ú of a necessarily cosmopolitan reduction of continuity and difference to code, but here decentering rather than destructuring its claims to totality, in part through a perspectival language of first-, second-, and third-person accounts and in part by recognizing, as Margaret Trawick has suggested in an interesting synthesis of

Bourdieu and Lacan, that structuralist accounts offer not so much models of social life as models for (and against) it.^[5]

The positioning of the old person in the third-person terms of hot/cold and other oppositions points not only to the physiological but the social body of the abstracted elder. As Marriott and others have suggested, the polarities of hot/ cold, wet/dry, and windy/still reflect a deeper framework for structuring experience. The windy and dry person, blowing both hot and cold, illuminates a wealth of positioned information. Heat, particularly in the context of the life cycle, may be read as the externalization of power. These oppositional rhetorics of thermodynamic sociality were more useful glosses in some interviews than in others, among some households more than others, in ways that did not cut neatly across class, caste, gender, or family history.

The ascetic path classically advocated in the latter stages of life centers on practices in which one cultivates tapas, ascetic heat or power, through physical stasis and disengagement. Tapas is sometimes demonstrable as siddhis—as superhuman feats—the most significant of which in contemporary India is longevity. Devraha Baba, an ascetic who died in 1990, was said to be 140 years old. He seldom spoke, but when he did his words were raptly listened to by thousands of pilgrims. The words of ascetics and particularly of contemporary babas are powerful, and demand the listener's attention. The internalized power of the ascetic, evident in his or her impersonal and "cold" seclusion and detachment, is manifest as the externalized power of a hot voice. The paradox of the aging voice, noted by Subramanian when she wonders about the anger of rishis, is on one level the intrinsic thermodynamics of tapas: accumulated power of the cold person who does not expend it through social abstinence builds to explosive pressures. Such explosions are described textually in classical Sanskrit and local narratives both as the prodigious sexual potential of the ascetic, most notably the god Shiva, and as the ascetic's fierce anger.^[6]

Unlike the rarely emitted but destructive flame of Shiva's third eye, the hot ascetic voice can and should be heard, and, again in third-person humoral terms, is framed as relational, as part of exchanges between bodies. Relationality, in the recent analyses of Marriott and Daniel in other South Asian contexts, is often structured through the semantics of fluidity.^[7] Babas and rishis have communicative and wet voices that melt the boundaries between them and their listeners. These voices are by definition meaningful, however opaque their overt signification; the ascetic voice, though turbulent, is not characterized by the "windy" attributes of incoherence and meaninglessness. Ascetics, even when like the Tantric Aghoris of Varanasi who often violently curse passersby, produce meaningful sounds.

Against the hot but meaningful exemplary voice that can transform the listener through its wisdom, most hot old voices in the real time of second-person referentiality are heard as irritability, as inappropriate anger. In humoral terms, the angry voice of the exemplary elder dries up in the everyday context of family life. The

interpretation of the hot voice—the extent to which it can avoid desiccation, the sources of its hearing as inappropriate, humorous, threatening, or pathological—varies across class and gender and household structure and is changing with the globalization of Alzheimer's; I will take it up at length in the final four chapters. Here I want to locate the voice of hot brain in several more general ways: as emblematic of intergenerational conflict, as part of a set of old voices, as a particular embodiment of the family itself, and as a sign of what we might call a dying space.

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.

Oedipus In India

Nothing there is to lose,
Madam, if self there is none.
SUKRITA P. KUMAR, "MASSEY'S TALES"

We thus return to the Kesari Jivan ad: the young man, bent over, huffing and puffing, has just made it up onto the Bombay bus. The old man stands erect, to the side and slightly behind the younger man, his hand holding the younger man firmly in position, touching his lower back. A young woman laughs from a window. The text reads:

60 years old or 60 years young?

Have you ever wondered why the old man who lives down the road is still full of pep and vigour at 60, while you feel tired and run down at just 30?

Again, the paradox of sixty: is the old man the sixty-year-old senile sathiyanevala or the sixty-year-young powerful uncle? The mystery deepens: old men of sixty seem to have the strength of young men of twenty or thirty, whereas younger men are as weak as one would expect old men to be.

From the vantage of a century of Freudian interpretive thought, I find it hard

not to read the Kesari Jivan ad in the first instance through the figure of an erotic triangle,^[13] with the young man who can't stand up straight (and the potential consumer who may identify with him) at its point of articulation and the figures suggesting his father and wife at the other corners. This kind of reading makes several demands upon me: how does the Kesari Jivan triangle relate to other erotic triangles in the contemporary public culture of which it is a part? And, how does any acknowledgment of the usefulness of such an analysis draw one into debates on the appropriateness of crude psychoanalytic approaches to Indian material, and to the history of such approaches?

My approach here will be to begin by reading the erotic triangle as a structural figure irreducible to any particular narrative or stage of human development. In his classic essay "The Indian Oedipus," A. K. Ramanujan counseled reading erotic triangles about conflicts between parents and children as abstractions of adult experience as much as of childhood.^[14] The Kesari Jivan triangle can be contrasted with other triangular images framing the old body in relational terms in order to evaluate the limits of a universe of discourse in which the old body comes to matter in certain ways. The exercise must be seen as a playful one, its usefulness contingent upon the interpretive frames it may generate.

The tonic ad triangle differs from an earlier dilemma, that of the Ghar Kali painting of nineteenth-century Calcutta and of the twentieth-century literature on old mothers and aunts that succeeds it. Unlike either the classic oedipal sonmother-father or the Ghar Kali son-mother-wife groupings, the Zandu ad answers the question of "sixty years old or sixty years young," contrasting the weakness of father and son, in terms of the laughter of a young woman. In Ghar Kali the son and his wife represent a modern order against which the mother suffers; in the Kesari Jivan ad the son—weakened like the figures of young men in many Rasayana advertisements by the synergistic depletions of youthful excess and modern life—confronts a traditional order that separates him from his wife and that, through the tonic, he can aspire to embody.

In both cases, the predicament is the son's. In Ghar Kali, the babu-son is twice the size of his mother or wife, dominating the narrative frame; in the ad, the expected weakness of the old father is found to have afflicted the son instead. Within these frames, modernity is a pathology of an aging body in two different ways: as an order that functions by overturning generational hierarchy, generating a strong son and weak old mother, and as an order that functions by seducing the young and depleting their strength, generating a weak son and a strong old father. Within the limits of a structural comparison between a Bengali nineteenth-century image and a Bombay-based late twentieth-century advertisement, one might note that the old man here signifies strength and thus his son's abjection, the old woman weakness and thus her son's rejection.

Within these triangles, the young woman bears the blame for the breach between parent and child. The desire of daughters-in-law, many men and women advised me in Varanasi, can split families: brother against brother, parent against

child. Everyday narratives of daughters-in-law that acknowledged their political marginality within families were rare. However politically peripheral, young women were symbolically central to intergenerational relations. In the Kesari Jivan ad, male intergenerational struggle is not represented save as implied competition for the respect of the woman. The possibility of contested relationships between fathers and sons over prerogatives, property, and other household resources is elided, or rather is embodied as the weakness of the son. Sons "lack pep."

When the figure of the bahu (daughter-in-law) is framed against that of her sas (mother-in-law), most commonly in the parlor dramas of Hindi film, the conflict is overt and not framed as embodied difference. Whether the older sas is the victimizer of a guileless bahu or the evil bahu terrorizes her helpless sas , the son, unlike the laughing woman of the ad, is passive. Though sons were politically central to the structure of female intergenerational relations within the patrilocal households I surveyed across class in Varanasi, in film narrative they were usually hapless observers. In the 1989 hit film Chandni , a son is turned against his fiancée by the complicity of his mother; in the same year's Bivi Hai To Aisi , the son remains blithely unaware of his mother's frequent attempts to murder his wife. Contrary to the position of the daughter-in-law in son/father and son/mother conflicts, sons in sas/bahu narratives are politically germane but symbolically elided within the family narrative.

Mothers and daughters-in-law are interchangeable in these narratives. Intergenerational politics are not represented as a continually deferred engagement with the older generation but as an ever-shifting struggle. The contest by older women for the preservation of their control over the household is chronic and overt. In the polarization of sas and bahu , the ambiguity of sixty—old men as inviolable bodies versus old men as weak and powerless bodies, with no narrative mediation possible between the two states—is given explicit narrative form across the life course. The opposition of powerful/powerless works differently in differently gendered narratives:^[15] sixty points to the ambiguities of the old man's age and to the continuities of the old woman's.

Between mother and daughter a different sort of narrative emerges. Daughters, within the standard tableau of the patrilocal family, are married out and they become supplemental to the scene. Mother-daughter engagements, particularly between an elderly mother and a grown daughter, are more frequent in more highbrow literature than in popular texts or film. Perhaps the most arresting story of the old body in Hindi that appeared at the time of this research is Krishna Sobti's Ai Larki , a dialogue primarily between an old woman bedridden with a fracture who senses her imminent death and her unmarried daughter, an artist, with whom she lives.^[16] The daughter is available to the narrative and to the embodiment of her mother, in part because she has not married and had her own children. The daughter's very availability to her, the younger woman's not having gone on to love, to create life and in so doing to provide for her own old age, troubles the mother. Her son, reminiscent of Ghar Kali, is absent entirely; her hope

that at the least he would appear to discharge his ritual obligations to her dying body remains unfulfilled at her death.

The territory between mother and daughter here is open, not anchored by a stable third and its ensuing triangular logic. Provisional triangles appear and dissolve as the mother, in articulating both her difference from and similarity to her independent and unmarried daughter, remembers her life anew. There are memories of a husband, and worries about a husband her daughter never had. There is a doctor who briefly stands in for the missing son but who can provide only life, not the proper closure the son never brings. There is a servant, Susan, who offers a different triangulation, a necessary and benign presence against which mother and daughter together create the possibility of memory rooted in death. ^[17]

In Ai Larki , neither mother or daughter need embody weakness and death in the exclusive manner in which either the father or the son but not both must be the weak body negotiated at the site of sixtyishness. The Kesari Jivan image articulates one of the two generational possibilities: the father strong, the son weak. The choreography of the advertisement—its image of filial weakness with a soupçon of paternal penetration—is reminiscent of the psychoanalytic arguments for Indian adult male deferral to authority advanced by G. M. Carstairs and Sudhir Kakar and of the tales of paternal aggression collected and discussed by Ramanujan in "The Indian Oedipus."^[18] Carstairs and Kakar offer narratives of Indian male psychosexual development that make sense of ethnographic and clinical findings by construing the self in question as more hierarchical and more desirous of its subordination to powerful male others: "more," that is, in relation to an implicit Western self that is presumed to resist subordination and to engage authority. The difficulty with this Indian Oedipus is in its all-too-convenient validation of the colonial construction of the Indian as desiring colonization, as sexually dependent on colonial difference.^[19]

Carstairs's The Twice-Born illustrates the enormity of unrecognized counter-transference in the putative psychoanalysis of culture. Carstairs wrote within the mid-twentieth-century idiom of Culture and Personality; his effort was to study the "genesis of national character" in India through "events which occur in the earliest stages of psychological maturation."^[20] As in most studies of the "Indian self," the definition of "Indian" was limited to men of high status. Carstairs's argument engaged as scientific types figures with a lengthy pedigree: the split mother and the despotic father. He used careful ethnographic observation in a Rajasthani town to show that children, by which he meant boys, were pampered in early childhood in a maternal environment and then moved rather abruptly into a far more hierarchical world of paternal duty and demand, estranged from the mother. Thus:

I suggest that this relatively late reversal of a previously dominating (although emotionally inconsistent) relationship with his mother has a profound effect upon the child's later development. The underlying mistrust which seems to cloud so many of my informants' adult personal relationships may well be derived from the phantasy

of a fickle mother who mysteriously withholds her caresses and attentions from time to time.

By inconstant, Carstairs referred to his observation that neither parent, in the presence of their elders, could show strong affection toward his or her child. The child, he suggested, would therefore experience the temporary and unpredictable loss of the mother's love. The result of both the inconstancy of the mother and the ultimate shift from the female to the male world was the fantasy and ubiquitous symbol, in Hindu devotional practice, of the bad mother, "someone terrible, revengeful, bloodthirsty and demanding in the same limitless way . . . a horrific figure, decapitating men and drinking their blood." A child's mother, in short, was the goddess Kali, read as grotesque by Carstairs in a fashion more sympathetic to lurid missionary accounts of Thuggee practice than to the details of his own reported fieldwork. Her relationship to her son had to be contrasted "with the Western child whose familiarity with intermittent experiences of frustration and delayed satisfaction has enabled him to indulge his aggressive phantasies in moderation, only to be reassured by his mother's renewed affectionate attentions." Once the boy was deprived of maternal attention, his father became "intensely significant":

From this time on his father's voice will be associated with commands which must be obeyed. The pain of defeat by the father in the oedipal situation is greatly intensified by the frequency with which the child is an involuntary witness of parental intercourse. It is not lightened, as in the West by the creation of a warm relationship between father and son. This has been prevented by the taboo upon the father's giving expression to affectionate feelings for his child. Instead, it appears to the boy that he has no choice other than that of unconditional surrender before this strong intruding strangel, his father. He must not only submit before this rival, but must deny any wish to compete with him. This is clearly reflected in the Hindu's later attitude towards his fellow men. To his father, and to figures of authority in general he owes unquestioning obedience.

Fathers sapped their sons' bodies, demanding not only obedience but hot youth:

In effect all those who occupy the status of sons or younger brothers are required to enact a symbolic self-castration, denying themselves the right to lead an emotional or sexual life of their own so long as the father-figures still live and dominate them. This is implicit in the Hindus' willing subservience to autocratic Rajahs, to the rich, and to important officials.^[21]

Sons not only castrated themselves in the presence of powerful others, they longed to be penetrated. Under the heading of "paranoia," Carstairs observed that Hindus were not only obsequious and passive, but that they could not be trusted and trusted no one in turn. This finding, too, could be laid at the door of the father:

According to Freudian theory, paranoid reactions can be traced to one type of outcome of the Oedipus situation, namely that in which the boy assumes a passive role

and in phantasy has a homosexual love-relationship with his father. But while he longs to be possessed in this way, the child also fears and repudiates his desire; hence the transition from "I love him", through "I hate him", to "He hates me", on which delusions of persecution are based. . . . In my informants' phantasies . . . there is also a powerfully-repressed homosexual fixation on the father. This is shown not only in the ever-recurring paranoid reactions, but also, in indirect and sublimated form, in a man's feelings toward his Guru—the one context in which a warm affectionate relationship (although a passive and dependent one) is given free expression. Since this occurs at the stage of development when anal functions are the focus of keenest emotional interest, the conflict is usually expressed in anal terms.

Carstairs's vivid portrayal of upper-caste Rajasthani male Hindus as dominated by a singularly dysfunctional "covert pattern of irrational complexes"—stressing the "infantile" desire for authority and the "emasculate" desire for penetration—attempted to naturalize through a powerful and selectively applied rhetoric of child development a particular narrative of the Indian male self. The most well known formulation of this narrative is Dumont's Homo Hierarchicus ; one of its most provocative critiques is that of Nandy in The Intimate Enemy.

Nandy examined both "the homology between childhood and the state of being colonized which a modern colonial system almost invariably uses" and "the homology between sexual and political dominance . . . the idea of colonial rule as a manly or husbandly or lordly prerogative." Using the same psychoanalytic terminology of the defensive identification with an aggressor that Carstairs drew on in describing male generational relations, Nandy suggested that many Indians internalized their colonial construction as less mature and less "male" (Nandy's analysis, like Carstairs's, founders on the possibility of female subjects). Against the naturalized passive "homosexuality" and childlike dependence on authority Carstairs roots in local child-rearing practice, Nandy argued that the psychodynamics of the gendered and generational ego must be evaluated in terms of the macropolitics of the colonial and postcolonial engagement.^[22]

Juxtaposing Carstairs with Nandy, we are confronted with a peculiar absence in Carstairs's text. The Twice-Born presumes aggressive fathers who in the context of the bad mother transform their sons into virtual hijras , anal-receptive eunuchs,^[23] but we actually learn very little about the phenomenology or psychodynamics of being a father over time. Carstairs's constant identification of his male informants with their filial position echoes the way British colonial officers articulated their relation to their native soldiers as being their mai-bap , their mother and father. His effort to read experience through childhood precluded an attempt to make sense of the structure of adult male affection and aggression over time. The model he offers leaves little room for a coherent unfolding of male power, aggression, strategy, and heterosexuality; we do not learn how his informants get their genitals back and how, in the interim, they manage the appearance of masculinity in innumerable contexts.

For Nandy, the absent father is replaced by the colonial father, a position invisible in Carstairs's text as it constitutes the source of narrative, the position of anthropology.^[24] A colonial gaze constituted the Indian as a split subjectivity: the infantile, narcissistic, and effeminate son (the subject of colonial rule) and the senescent, softened, and despotic father (the essence of Indian culture). Depersonalized and dispersed as "culture," the position of the father vanishes as a coherent site in a psychological anthropology; we are left with the son as the overdetermined site of selfhood.

Kakar's treatment of the Indian family in The Inner World is far more carefully constructed; Indian selfhood, again gendered male, is not presented as maladaptive psychopathology but successful adaptation to lived experience. The fractured oedipal triangle—the son with an ambivalent relationship to the bad mother and a passive anal eroticism towards the father—still predominates. The connection to the sociology of India is more explicit; in a section entitled the "Ontogeny of homo hierarchicus," Kakar explores "this resolution of the oedipal conflict by means of a submissive, apprentice-like stance toward elder men in the family," a stance that leaves

a psycho-sexual residue in the unconscious that influences the rest of a boy's life; in the identity development of Indian men, this has generated a passive-receptive attitude towards authority figures of all kinds. The psycho-dynamic contours of this traditional and nearly ubiquitous stance towards authority become markedly plain in situations that reactivate the childhood conflict. Thus, for example, whereas in the West the unconscious passive homosexual temptations of patients that emerge at certain stages of psycho-analytic therapy invariably provoke intense anxiety, analogous fantasies and dreams among Indian patients have a relatively easier, less anxious access to consciousness.

Paralleling this observed difference between Western and Indian analysands in the degree of anxiety that "passive homosexual temptations" generate, Carstairs and Kakar differ in the concern they manifest about the meaning of such dreams and fantasies. For Carstairs, the Indian male psyche is envisioned as passively homosexual and coprophiliac to boot; no such "intense anxiety" or "analogous fantasies" attend Kakar's treatment of similar material. Men may dream, in the West and in India, about similar things; Indian men seem to interpret and experience one set of similar things with far less anxiety. "Homosexual" expression of male hierarchy is universal, Kakar suggests, extending to other primates. India is restored to the order of the normal; "the West" becomes an aberration:

The erect penis and the offer of the anus among human males, as among many other primates, are symbolic of an attempt to establish a hierarchical order in their relationships. The fantasy among Indian patients of anal assault by an authority figure reflects not so much the occult pleasure and guilt of anal eroticism as it does the (relatively unconflicted) acceptance of the dominance of "those in authority" and the wish to incorporate some of their power into oneself. The high frequency

among adolescent boys and young men in India of swear-words with the general tenor, "fuck you in the anus", is another index of the common masculine preoccupation with hierarchical status.^[25]

Kakar shifts the meaning of overt and fantasied references to anal sex away from discussions of sex and the body to a universal phenomenology of hierarchy. The move is far from satisfying—India is still identified tout court with hierarchy; the possibility of a psychology of women, identity and hierarchy remains at best murky; and critical questions of violence and of a multiplicity of desiring positions behind the language of "anal eroticism" remain^[26] —and yet Kakar's move from pathology to politics offers a powerful rereading of Carstairs. The invocation of the primate order and the reflex naturalness of anal display—though dependent upon the circular reasoning involved in using models of primate behavior rooted in assumptions about human behavior to explain human behavior, and though reducing the possibility of homoerotic intentionality to neural reflex—shifts the tenor of social analysis away from hierarchy as an essentially Indian phenomenon, something that must be explained by recourse to the primacy of structure (Dumont) or familial pathology (Carstairs).

Finally, Kakar, unlike Carstairs, takes somewhat more seriously the study of Indian adulthood: "culture" lacks the narrative presence it has for the foreign anthropologist, and the father correspondingly rematerializes as a distinct subject. Still, in his contribution to his edited volume ldentity and Adulthood , the adulthood discussed is the ideal model of asramadharma : the father's disengagement is framed as a reflective and soteriologic individual process rather than a contested and ambivalent interpersonal one.^[27] I will return to Kakar's model of normative Hindu adulthood; but to make sense of sixtyishness, we need yet to linger on the question of the exchanges between sons and fathers, between sons and mothers, and on the gifts entailed in these relationships.

Despite his significant interventions in reshaping the debate on Indian character, Kakar retains the young man's passive acceptance of older male authority as fundamental to the Indian male psyche. The logic of the tonic ad is consonant with such a retention. The young man feels weak, forgetful, and impotent at thirty and is attracted to the inviolable body of sixty. Through the purchase of the tonic, which alters young men's old age weakness through the transfer of old men's youthful strength, young men come to be as old men, sattha ta pattha , sixty therefore strong.

This narrative of trouble in male intergenerational relations as embodied in the son as opposed to in the political space between son and father assumes the son's infinite deferral of all conflict. The move from the construction of male self through the sixty-years-strong power of older men to the attribution of sixtyish behavior to older men happens only through a radical narrative break—the father's sudden development of serious physical, mental, and/or social debility—allowing the son to become the father unambiguously. Conflict between generations

over whether the father is "sixty therefore strong" or "sixtyish" is not representable within these tales.

But one can shift the primary locus of repression, from sons to fathers, to suggest that what is repressed in such narratives is not the possibility of intergenerational conflict but rather its frequent enactment. Rather than simply deny the developmental story of boys that is told by these analysts—though I share Nandy's suspicion of such sorts of narrative, alternative modeling awaits far more and better studies of psychological development across gender, class, location, and family size^[28] —I see it as but one part of a far more complex construction of the developing self. Conflict may well be deferred, such deferral may well be adaptive (after Kakar and against Carstairs), and such deferral may be more than the universal reflexes of homosocial relations (after Carstairs and against Kakar), but the importance of such deferrals does not legitimate the erasure of all contest. Such erasure may lie less in the psychodynamics of being a son and their basis in early childhood than in the political economy of patriarchal control in the propertied and landed households of the not-yet-gone-sixtyish.

Ramanujan observed that most Indian "oedipal" tales of same-sex intergenerational conflict are narrated from the intentional perspective of the father; that is, fathers hate sons and love daughters rather than sons hate fathers and love mothers^[29] More than Kakar, Ramanujan returned the father to the psychoanalytic family scene from which he had been deleted. Within the mythological literature Ramanujan cited, sons of course do defer engagement with fathers and willfully accept castration-like violence; the classic example is the origin story of the elephant-headed god Ganesha, who allows various older male figures (Shiva, Shani, Vishnu, Parashurama) to cut off his head and one of his tusks. Though this story has become a cynosure in the psychoanalytic study of Hindu myth,^[30] its analysis usually reads the repetition of Ganesha's actions, his continually entering conflicts and then accepting mutilation, as but an intensification of the primary deferral. Yet the point that passes without comment is that Ganesha constantly returns to the fray: his frequent bearing of the "castrating" blow must be read in the context of his continued engagement in the field of conflict.

The acceptance of the burden of the father in such mythological narratives, as in Ganesha's allowing Shiva's ax to cut off his tusk, does not presume the necessarily strong body of the father. To reclaim the importance of ongoing intergenerational conflict in the psychic structure of the family, I examine two stories of the relations between sons and their parents well-known in Varanasi: from the Mahabharata , the story of Yayati, and from the Ramayana , the story of Shravan (in folk tellings in Varanasi, Sharvan) Kumar.

Counting The Days And Hours

The central family plot of the Mahabharata —the horizontal and fraternal fission between the Pandava and Kaurava cousins—is preceded in genealogical time by

the vertical fission between King Yayati and his sons. For breaking his marriage vow and taking his wife's servant and rival to bed, Yayati is cursed by his Brahman father-in-law Ushanas with premature decrepitude. Ushanas, in cursing Yayati, is portrayed as the archetypical angry rishi: "So it befell that Usanas in anger cursed Yayati Nahusa. And he lost his previous youth and fell instantly to senility."

Senility is here the generalized decrepitude of the body. Ushanas curses out of the quick anger of the sage, and afterward attempts to mitigate his harsh words: "Such things I do not say idly. You have reached old age, king of the earth. But if you wish, you may pass on your old age to another. . . . The son who will give you his youth shall become the king, long-lived, famous, and rich in offspring." The play of generations is extended: Old Ushanas gives his son-in-law old age for disobeying him. But if Yayati's son will take on his father's old age in turn, Yayati can remain youthful, sattha ta pattha . The reward to Yayati's obedient son is the opposite of Yayati's punishment for disobedience: the son who takes on the father's old age will receive long life and the ultimate deferment of his own old age. The young who act young get old, the young who act old get young: again the logic of Geri-forte.

All but one of Yayati's sons, however, resist his request to exchange ages. They graphically cite the indignities and miseries of old age: their primary concern is the powerlessness of the old man. Only the youngest son, Puru, who stands farthest from the succession and therefore has the least to lose by deferring his youthful prerogative, is willing to take on Yayati's burden. Sons, the story suggests, do not willingly defer to the father, unless they have little to gain otherwise. Youngest sons, therefore, bear their father's old age more commonly than do their older brothers. Conflict, not deferral, is more likely to characterize the exchange of weakness between father and son.

Stricken with old age, Yayati repaired to his castle and addressed his eldest and dearest son Yadu: "Son, old age and wrinkles and gray hairs have all laid hold of me, because of a curse of Usanas Kavya, and I am not yet sated of youth. You, Yadu, must take over my guilt with my old age, and with your own youth I shall slake my senses. When the millennium is full, I shall give your youth back to you, and take over theguilt and old age.

Yadu said:

Gray of head and beard, wretched, loosened by senility, the body wrinkled, ugly weak, thin, incapable of achieving anything, and set upon by younger men and allthe people that live off you? I do not crave old age.

yayati said:

You were born from my heart, but will not render your youth to me. Therefore, son, your offspring shah have no share in the kingdom!

Turvasu, take over my guilt with my old age, and with your youth I shall slake my senses, my son. When the millennium is full, I shah give your youth back to you and take over my own, guilt with my old age.

Turvasu said:

I do not crave old age, father, which destroys all pleasure and joy, finishes strength and beauty, and puts an end to spirit and breath.

Yayati said:

You were born from my heart but will not render your youth to me. Therefore, Turvasu, your offspring will face distinction. Fool, you shall rule over people whose customs and laws are corrupt and whose walks of life run counter to decency, the lowest ones who feed on meat. They will lust after the wives of their gurus and couple with beasts; evil barbarians that follow the law of cattle are they whom you will rule!

Yayati's third son, Druhyu, rejects old age as well, drawing attention to the peculiar voice of the old person: "an old man enjoys neither elephant nor chariot nor horse nor woman, and speech fails him. I do not crave such old age." Anu, the fourth son, evokes the pathos of second childhood:

An old man eats his food like a baby, unclean, drooling, and at any time of the day. And he never offers to the fire in time. Such old age I do not crave.

Yayati said:

You were born from my heart, but will not render your youth to me. You have spoken of the ills of old age, therefore you shall inherit them.

Only Puru, the youngest, accepts and is offered the inheritance of the kingdom. He trusts that his father will only hold on to power as long as is proper, and, the epic narrative relates, so Yayati does.

When he judged that the millennium was full, after having counted days and hours, being expert in Time, the mighty king spoke to his son Puru: "I have sought pleasure, as I wished and could and had leisure, with your youth, my son, tamer of enemies. Puru, I am pleased, I bless you. Now take back your own youth and likewise take the kingdom, for you are the son who did my pleasure." Whereupon the king Yayati Nahusa took on his old age and Puru took on his youth.^[31]

The text asserts that fathers are expert in Time and that their counting of days and hours is impartial. Yayati's sons demur; for them, his request is an overstepping of his hours and days and an appropriation of theirs. Old men, they suggest, claim mastery of Time but have lost the ability to know it: they eat at random hours, they cannot sacrifice in time. The narrative does not allow them to claim their prerogatives, but hints at a world of contest in which sons do not wait for but overthrow fathers.

Unlike to the unsuccessful filial rebellion against Yayati's demand, the story of Shravan Kumar in the Ramayana offers the idealized image of filial devotion and deferral. Shravan's devotion, however, presumes the powerless bodies of his parents and points us to a far more nuanced understanding of generational deferral. The story is popular in Varanasi. Baidyanath Sarasvati, in a book on emblematic practices of Varanasi culture, includes a photograph of Shravan being portrayed by a young man during the Ram Lila celebration.^[32] In bazaars throughout the city, sellers of calendar art posters offer the image of the strong and youthful body of a young ascetic bearing his aged parents in baskets suspended from a yoke resting on his broad shoulders (see image on p. 152). The pair are calmly absorbed in reli-

gious devotion, counting their prayers on their rudraksas , rosaries of the same type that becomes a leash in the Ghar Kali tableau. Around this image are pictorial vignettes of the story of Shravan's accidental death at the hands of Dasharath, the man who will be the father of the hero and divine incarnation Ram.

In Valmiki's Ramayana , the young ascetic is unnamed. Dasharath, when still "an intemperate youth," was eager to use his skills as an archer to go hunting at night. Like young Yayati, Dasharath seeks forbidden pleasures, here encompassed in his desire for his arrow to hit home in the darkness. But Dasharath, mistaking the young ascetic for an animal, mortally wounds him as he goes down to the river to fetch water. Not yet knowing his attacker, the ascetic speaks:

It is not for the loss of my own life that I am grieving so. It is for two others I grieve that [I] am slain, my mother and father.

For they are an aged couple anti have long been dependent on me. When I am dead what sort of existence are they to lead?

My aged mother and father and I all slain by a single arrow!

The son bids Dasharath to find his parents, and dies. Dasharath leads the pair, both blind, to their son's body.

The wretched couple drew close, they touched their son and collapsed upon his body. And his father cried out:

"My son, don't you love me any more? At least have regard for your mother then, righteous child. Why don't you embrace me, my son? Speak to me, my tender child.

"Whom shall I hear late at night—how it used to touch my heart—so sweetly reciting the sacred texts or other works?

"And after the twilight worship, the ritual bath, and offerings to the sacred fire, who will sit down beside me, my son, to allay the grief and fear that anguish me?

"Who will bring me tubers and fruit and roots, and feed me like a welcome guest—me an invalid, without leader or guide?

"And how, my son, shall I support your poor mother, blind and aged as she is, wretched and yearning for her son?"^[33]

The desolate father curses Dasharath to die yearning for his own son; Dasharath recalls his deed when Ram has been exiled to the forest by his own unintended decree.

Shravan Kumar, as he is known to many who buy his calendar image, the son as perfect ascetic devoted to his parents, has become old not in bodily terms like Yayati's son Puru but in a deeper sense, of asramadharma . He is called a forest dweller and ascetic: in his devotion to his parents, he has assumed the appropriate dharma, or duty of old age. But Shravan's enactment of old age—the ability to take on the burden that most of Yayati's sons refuse—presumes the powerful body of youth. Shravan is the source of solace that he is in his father's lament because he can carry both his parents. The image of the poster is far different than the generational embodiment of the Kesari Jivan ad. Shravan is upright and strong,

and carries his parents easily. Their bodies, seated in the two baskets, are tiny in relation to his, almost doll-like. They are focused inward; the only sound the image suggests we can hear is the clicking of their rosaries.

Shravan is the epitome of Seva , devoted service, to one's parents. Far from a position of submission, the fantasied Seva of the Shravan Kumar image is represented as originating from a position of power that assumes the static, reduced, and silent bodies of the old parents. Seva , as embodied in Shravan Kumar, his parents, and the king, is the impossible gift by grown children of their body to aged parents while their superior position and the parents' passive and voiceless disengagement are maintained . Impossible, as parents are not the reduced and almost weightless bodies of the narrative. Like Yayati, parents not only want and need Seva , they want to control the family, embodied as the youthful body contested by Yayati, his father-in-law, and his children. The transfer of such authority emerges through an extended process of conflict and negotiation. Children have powerful bodies, and parents have voices. Old age is seldom silent; as parents grow increasingly dependent upon their children, they are perceived by the latter more and more as a singular voice: the request. Yayati asks the same impossible question again and again and again: let me be you . Sylvia Vatuk has noted how the elderly with whom she worked near Delhi combined a sense of self as an ascetic with strong expectations of and worries over maintaining their comforts and prerogatives and over the substance of their children's seva^[34] Siranji, in challenging her children's gift of the tonic, suggested that their Seva was but a performance. Her children, in protesting that they were doing all that they could for her, suggested that the performance may be generated not by callousness but love. The voice of parents, even those who perceive themselves as ascetics, grows ever louder as they age. Children can never be Shravan, whose success is framed by his parents' minimally transacting interiority. Like Ram and Dasharath, they are cursed never to be able to offer complete Seva nor to enjoy its fruits.

Old fathers cannot claim their sons' hot bodies for long. Their cooling and weak physiologies prevent them from exercising adequate control, and their demands for continued authority become empty and inappropriate, bakbak —so much nonsense or hot air. Sixtyishness points to the contested authority between generations, embodied as a disjunction between a cooling body and a will or brain that cannot recognize the process. From this perspective, the heat of old brains is a reaction to the reality of old and cold; it is the proverbial rope of Indian philosophy, mistaken for a snake along the road at dusk, the symptom of false consciousness.

Yet sons are no better counters of the hours than fathers. Parents resist handing over control of Time, knowing like the patriarch of the film Apne Begane that most children, despite the assertions of Carstairs and Kakar, are not Shravan. Sixty,, an age simultaneously old enough to convey the same inappropriate and hot-brained behavior as seventy-two and young enough to convey the powerful body of the paterfamilias, reflects neither only the reality of. the Bombay bus man

and Devi Lal nor that of Shravan's parents, but alludes to their superimposition and the contest, within families, involved in marking the body in time.

Old Women at the Poll

Sau dafe dadi kahen, bad men danda maren .
[A hundred times they'll say "Grandmother"; afterward they'll beat you]
OLD WOMAN IN DELHI, ON WHY SHE NO LONGER VOTED
("THE ELECTION CERTAINLY HAS ITS LIGHTER MOMENTS. . .," TIMES OF INDIA , 1989)

In Sobti's Ai Larki , the old woman and her daughter together mark her dying body: the space between mother and daughter, unlike those between father and son or sas and bahu , suggests that the contest over the old body can be a productive site of meaning and exchange. A pair of poems by the Indian English poet Sukrita Kumar suggests a similar distinction: in "Fathers and Sons," cited in an epigraph above, a father frames his son as replacing him, a relation of substitution in which only one man at a time can occupy the position of virility; in "Mothers and Daughters," a mother frames an analogous realization of her daughter's maturing body as a relation of identity : mothers and daughters seeing themselves reflected in the aging of the other, and vice versa.^[35] These ideal types of inter-generational dyads—mother/daughter, father/son, mother-in-law/daughter-in-law—structure a universe of discourse in which larger collectivities are continually materialized.

The relationship between an old mother and her son, as in the apocalyptic vision of modernity of Ghar Kali , may signify a larger frame than the intergenerational dynamics of substitution and identity. In this painting, later a popularly circulated lithograph, the old mother's abjection suggests the fallen present of the babu's Calcutta. The reality of the Kali Age, of the collapse of righteousness and dharma in the fallen present, is corporeally demonstrated in the figure of the old mother transformed into an alley dog, dragged along behind her son and bahu on a leash.

That the phenomenal universe ages, is destroyed and reabsorbed into the unmarked totality, of God or Brahman, and after a period of cosmic night is created anew is a central theme of the medieval Puranic literature in Sanskrit. Kali Yuga, the Ghar Kali of the Bengali image, is the last of the four stages of devolution, in which dharma or righteousness, imagined as a cow, totters on its final leg in humanity and the universe's last gasp before their destruction. Marriott has offered the most compelling discussion of the relevance of this temporal order of the yugas to a contemporary sociology, reading the temporal axis as an index of "unmatching," the tendency of relations in the cosmos—between cause and effect, signifier and signified, totality and individual or group—to become unglued, increasingly less coherent.^[36] Within the analytic frame of Kali Yuga, social and signifying relations will never be adequately encompassed by structural logic of culture as totality, be it that of Dumont or Marriott himself.

The relation between the aging of the current universe, which takes place in

four stages before its dissolution and rebirth, is not explicitly predicated on the aging of the person, in four stages before her dissolution and rebirth. Sannyasa is not explicitly identified with Kali Yuga in textual discussions of either. The third and fourth positions of asamadharma are after all steps or paths out of the illusory world of birth and rebirth, out of the cycle of decay: it is the old person caught by desire who fails to move on and leave the household, or the kingdom who decays and dries up, like the foolish king of the Kathasaritsagara , like the cosmos in Kali Yuga. Puranic descriptions of Kali Yuga and of the cosmic dissolution and reabsorption that follow often include descriptions of the aging of the body, in which old age is explicitly a sign of cosmic decay. Thus in the Brahma Purana , which the editors of the Motilal Banarsidass/UNESCO Puranic translation series assign to a period between the ninth and thirteenth centuries,^[37] a section on the "natural reabsorption" of the cosmos is followed by a section on the "ultimate reabsorption" of the human body, a rather unpleasant meditation of the embodiment of ignorance. In old age,

man undergoes many miseries as follows: His body is shattered by old age. His limbs are enfeebled and flaccid. His teeth are broken and loose. He is covered by wrinkles and protruding sinews and nerves and veins.

His eyes are incapable of seeing anything far off. His pupils are fixed to the sky. Clusters of hair come out of his nostrils. The whole of his body shakes and shivers.

His bones are laid bare. The bones at his back are bent. Since his gastric fire does not function, he takes but little food. He is capable of only a few movements.

He experiences difficulties in rising up, in moving about, in lying down, in sitting and in his movements. His eyes and ears become less keen. Saliva exudes from his mouth and defiles his face.

With his sense organs intractable, he looks up to his early death. He is not capable of remembering anything experienced at the very same moment.

In uttering a sentence even once he has to put in great effort. He spends sleepless nights due to the strain of ailments such as asthma, bronchitis (cough) etc.

The old man has to be lifted up or laid to rest with the help of another man. He is disdained and insulted by his servants, sons and wife.^[38]

The description continues, and is followed by a discussion of the sufferings of the deathbed, the sufferings of hell, and the sufferings of the fetus in the womb and during childbirth: the cycle rolls on. The description is naturalistic, the normative order unless one acts to end one's ignorance, and the body in decline is gendered male. The sufferings of the old man under the sign of Kali Yuga, and in particular his treatment at the hands of his sons and wife, are inevitable and point not to Kali Yuga as metaphor for immediate cultural crisis but Kali Yuga as soteriologic frame. The slippage between the body of the father and the dharma of the Father is comprehended under the sign of Kali Yuga.

The decadence of Kali Yuga often includes reversals of gender: in a later text, the Padma Purana , in the last age "all men will be subjugated by women":^[39] the figure of the babu's wife, astride her husband. But the image of the body of the

cosmos as an old woman is not a feature of the classic Puranic depiction. The abject mother, when she appears, points with immediacy to the neglectful son and an inexplicable lack and not, unlike the abject father, to the inevitable substitution of son for father.

Colonial rhetoric added additional dimensions to the decrepit old woman as sign of a lack. The Bengal Hurkaru depiction of the aged "houris of the East," mentioned in the introduction, is predicated upon the colonial observer's hope of glimpsing young native women in wet saris. All rots quickly in the tropics, and the old woman stands at the juncture of colonial desire and the senescent logic of the Other. Orientalist writing drew upon local figures of old women and repositioned them. Sir William Jones, founder of the Asiatic Society and of many of the institutional and discursive forms of Indology, prefaced his translation of Kalidasa's drama, Sakuntala , with a "modern epigram" that had been "lately repeated to me," concerning the great esteem in which the dramatist was held:

Poetry was the sportful daughter of Valmic, and, having been educated by Vyasa, she chose Calidas for her bridegroom after the manner of Viderbha: she was the mother of Amara, Sundar, Sanc'ha, Dhanic; but now, old and decrepit, her beauty faded, and her unadorned feet slipping as she wales, in whose cottage does she disdain to take shelter?^[40]

The source of the quotation and its exact age are not mentioned by Jones; whatever its antiquity, it is of significance that Jones was told it as a modern epigram, reflecting not just the decline of poetry under the general unmatching of Kali Yuga but the particular decline of language in the world after Kalidasa and his successors. Jones's informant may have meant the final question and its accompanying image as an unanswerable sign of contemporary cultural crisis, but in Jones's use of it within his own project of translation and reclamation a different sort of answer emerges: in the cottage of Sir William Jones, and the Asiatic Society he founds.

Such an answer has little direct relevance for the new urban world of Ghar Kali; the presence of the British provides a new urgency to the question, but the answer to the emerging dilemma of bhadralok culture took shape on different terrain. Partha Chatterjee has discussed the consequent development of a split between domestic and feminized interiority in which an authentic and uncompromised selfhood could be maintained and a worldly and masculinized exteriority in which the demands of colonial rule and cultural compromise could be sustained with minimal loss of self.^[41] The power of Ghar Kali may lie in its troubling of this gendered splitting, through its reconfiguration of the interior world of woman as a conflicted substitution of daughter-in-law for mother-in-law. Age challenges the seamlessness of gender.

The predicament of Modern India as the predicament of the aged mother awaiting the missing Seva of her inattentive son becomes instantiated as a central narrative of post-Independence electoral politics. Politicians in election years frequently have their picture taken while bending down to touch the feet of an old

woman, her body framed by the doorway of a slum dwelling. The image is of the politician as the good son, healing the suffering of the citizen-as-mother by reestablishing the proper flow of seva and thus undoing the wrongs of the Kali Age. On the front page of the Times of India on November 4, 1989, the powerful and by some accounts unscrupulous Congress politician Jagdish Tytler was pictured "seeking the blessings of an old woman by touching her feet during his campaign trail." As if to demonstrate its neutrality, the paper offered a candidate from the then-opposition Janata Dal party being "blessed by an elderly woman" the following week.^[42] The pranam , the respectful obeisance to one's seniors, becomes the populist gesture reminiscent of another society's kissing of babies.

Beyond their attempted appropriation by particular parties, old people and especially old women come to serve as symbols of the franchised citizen, of the electorate in itself. During the same national election, the Hindi daily Dainak offered a figure of a shrunken old widow in white sari and close-cropped hair walking steadfastly with the support of two young men toward a village polling place; her age was given as 120.^[43] A Times of India article showed a grimacing old woman being carried to the polling place by a young man, while young women in line to vote look on. The article suggested, in discussing voting by the aged and infirm, that "democracy in India has come of age, has in fact really become mature." The image, with the old woman in the arms of the young man and the younger women displaced to the side, is the reverse of Ghar Kali. The son has come back to the old mother; the early uxorious flirtations of the babu have been replaced by a return to the family through the old body, and democracy has "come of age" from its unstated Indian infantilism.^[44] Similar images and narratives circulated in the 1996 Lok Sabha elections.

One particular photograph of the old woman voting was frequently recycled in the Times of India : in 1989 she was the Muslim voter, in 1990 the archetypical Indian. Clad in the burka of a Muslim woman, she peers, bespectacled, over the ballot box and holds her ballot over the open slot (see photograph on p. 290).^[45] A disembodied hand from the side of the picture points to the slot, directing her attention and activity. The pointing finger directs our gaze as well, but we do not know who points. The multiply subordinate figure—old, shortsighted, female, Muslim—may signify modern franchise in two ways: it Suggests that even the weakest in society have the power of the vote, and conversely, that the voter is but an old woman, easily manipulated by interests dimly seen beyond the hand that directs one to the hole wherein one's future lies.

The Phenomenology Of The Voice

To locate the difference of old mothers and fathers more carefully, we move from vision to voice. When Banarsis in each of the four neighborhoods described what made a given old person different than before, it was often in terms of the quality

or quantity of their voice. I began to learn to take listening seriously. Hot brain and sixtyishness were less seen than heard in their recounting, and this hearing emerged within a complex but bounded typology. In the neighborhoods, voices were described most often as angry, as repetitive, or as the nonvoice of silence, sadness, or loneliness. Each of these voices had a moral quality, heard either as positive and fluid (generative, wise, or transcendental) or negative and stagnant (selfish, meaningless, or pathetic). In Marriott's terminology, the stagnant voice was "unmatching." It was a signifier that was increasingly dissociated from what it purported to signify, registering, like Aitasa pralapa , only as incoherence. Its opposite, the fluid voice, was not the more neutral everyday language of the young in which the voice more or less signified as its expected content but something superordinately "matching." A fluid and powerful old voice was not only heard as its content but it made incontrovertible demands upon a listener, interpellating all within range as subjects of a generational economy.

Anger was not just the selfish demands of the hot-brained individual who could not adapt or who was too weak to contain him or herself. The angry voice of an old person could be transformative, and its heat carried the force of its powerful truth. In Nagwa slum, I was once sitting with a group of regulars at Secchan's tea stall. Harinath Prasad, the local schoolteacher or Masterji, an old man with whom I spoke frequently came walking briskly by. He overheard the conversation we were having, one of those repeated discussions about how far away America was and how expensive it was to go there, and joined in, shitting the talk to a discussion of the earth and its spin. It was 1988, a leap year, and Harinath said that in this calendar year, "in 366 days" the earth completed a revolution around the sun. "You are mistaken, Masterji," said Secchan, that afternoon as most afternoons slightly drunk. "There are 365 days in a year." Harinath was delighted; someone had walked into his trap. But he looked furious. "Is that so? Are you contradicting me? Write down your claim. Write it down!" Which Secchan, illiterate, could not do. "You can't read or write! How can you know about these things?" A paper was produced, and Harinath asked everyone to remember how many days there had been in each month of that year. The tally totaled 366, and Harinath left in triumph.

"Why was he angry?" I asked, so used to hearing about angry old people. "He wasn't. He was sahi ," correct, I was told by everyone, generating an opposition between being angry and being fight. And Secchan himself, often an irreverent and mean-tempered drunk who had all but abandoned his own aged parents, said, "I am his son. He was teaching me. I know that a year has 365 days in it, but he somehow showed me that this time I was wrong." As an uncle with no claims on Secchan's earnings, Harinath could remain the counter of hours and days; the rectitude of the nonthreatening and the anger of the threatening speak with the same voice.

The voice was heard not only as hot but' as prolific . Old people in several of the neighborhoods were said to speak uselessly or to bakbak . Vatuk's informants noted

that when an old person could no longer contribute due to hath pair ki kamzori , the weakness of hand and foot, then they were heard only as babblers. Against babbling, the voice of old age was often framed as incredibly productive, a wise and inexhaustible source of experience and social memory. The classical figure of the endlessly productive wise voice, on television weekly that year, is that of the ancient warrior Grandfather Bhishma, one of the great heroes of the Mahabharata . Bhishma brings up three generations of Kshatriya warriors and is in the end killed through the agency of one of them, his great-nephew and the hero of the epic, Arjuna. But Bhishma, his body immobilized by the innumerable arrows shot through him and forming a bed upon which he rests, does not die. Gifted with the boon of choosing the hour of his own death, Bhishma remains alive to narrate innumerable matters of statecraft and cosmology to his great-nephew, the future king Yuddhishtara. Effectively bodiless, Bhishma becomes pure voice and takes over the primary narration of the epic. He offers a lengthy discussion of dharma culled from his superannuated experience. Bhishma outlives most of the warriors on the battlefield and dies when the contest is over.

The line between productive wisdom and bakbak , as Vatuk's and my own informants often suggested, depends not only on the content of the productive voice but frequently on the politics of the hearing. Bhishma himself, in popular media discussions of the epic during its presentation as a two-year-long television serial, was on occasion presented as the epitome of bakbak . In describing the universality of Bhishma's character, the magazine India Today noted that "almost every home has an old, despondent man blabbering away, whose advice the younger lot may listen to, but rarely follow."^[46]

The third voice of old age was that of silence . In third-person terms, old people in Varanasi were frequently described as lonely and depressed. The voice of the uncared-for elder could have been be sullen or tearful silence or a lament, but it was not heard by those for whom it was intended. Lonely voices were less heard than overheard, by others (relatives, neighbors, passersby) as neglected and pathetic markers of a lack of Seva . Yet the old person who was not heard might be spoken of by others as the old person who would not be heard, the latter-day forest-dweller. Silence, withdrawal, and a break in communication between young and old pointed as well to the transcendent voice of the jivanmukti , the realized in life, or in more everyday language, to an old person heard as religious, as a serious bhakt, or devotee. The silent voice pointed toward a different politics of relationship and of knowledge, but one capable of making its own powerful demands upon the young. Kasivasis who came to die and be liberated in Kashi were alternately heard in the transfigured speech of the silently knowing and otherworldly or the pathetic speech of the abandoned. The hearing of silence, like that of anger and prolificacy, conveys a split moral understanding of the relation of an old person to his family and surroundings, and requires interpretation.

The Familial Body

. . .recalling his mother in the kitchen, pottering. Jamun, the anger of parents is never anger."
UPAMANYU CHATTERJEE, THE LAST BURDEN

The old woman who lived across the road from a friend of mine in a middle-class Delhi colony frequently shouted and cursed at persons who were never there. Her voice was often heard by her neighbors as angry. I never saw the old woman in Delhi; my friend seemed reluctant to arrange a visit. I was told she was frail and that she lived alone, not with her family but with an attendant paid for by them. It seemed her late son had distanced himself from his parents and had brought up his own children with closer ties to their maternal relations. To the neighbors the old woman seemed clearly not well, sahi nahin as Banarsi friends might have put it, but what was at stake in this not being quite right seemed to preclude a certain public articulation of the meaning of her voice for those wishing to maintain a cordial relationship with her children. She was named neither as mad or diseased nor as the victim of a bad family, though both frames were implied in the silence in which all that could be acknowledged was some sort of unmatching, things no longer being as they should.

To understand what suffering entails, Kleinman and Kleinman remind us, we must understand "what is at stake" for all those who define and arc defined by particular moral worlds in which bodies are structurally fixed and intersubjectively lived.^[47] Very often during this research, what was at stake when an old person was heard as an unmatched voice was the moral coherence of her or his family. To address the body of the old person is to address that body as embedded in a family and in the transactions that structure and maintain a family. Unlike other generational positions, the old body is not only embedded in its family but is, in a very real sense, appropriated by and becomes its family. The old woman's voice in Delhi in its incoherence is an unmatching: the breakdown of signification occurs simultaneously as a crisis in an individual body and in its family. The two are indivisible, the same thing. Her voice connotes a variety of possibilities for her middle-class neighbors—undifferentiated "mental weakness" or "senility," some kind of disease, her refusal to adjust to the inevitable and thus a state of "imbalance," the denouement of conflicts played out over decades, an exaggeration of already existing personality traits. But it denotes, in the immediacy of its hearing, an unmatching in the family, a breakdown of generations. To speak of her voice is to address the state of her family and of families more generally; one therefore may defer from speaking. Again and again during my work, I confronted what at first I took to be a matter of stigma, the reluctance of those with much at stake to share their hearing of a sahi nahin voice, one not quite right. If it was stigma, it was not the stigmatized old body that was tainting its family by association. The old body was not stigmatized as "itself" but as the body of the family .

In writing of the familial body I reread the notion of the relational self in the

psychological anthropology of the "non-West," particularly India. The "Indian self" has been constituted through the central thematic of the sociology and anthropology of India as being relational, primarily and reflexively structured through its relations to other "selves" and not in terms of an autonomous and interiorized individuality. In the work of Dumont and Carstairs and in much of Kakar, this relationality is read as hierarchy. In the responses to Dumont by Veena Das and Frédérique Marglin and in the work of Marriott and his students, hierarchy is but one dimension of the relationality of a "dividual" or "fluid" self.^[48] In their discussions of Indian selfhood, Marriott, Valentine Daniel, and others extend this transactional framework to the body.

The consequences of this sort of rhetorical figures vary. Their limitations reside primarily in their oppositional and comparative origins. A "relational self" has little significance unless it is read from the position of a nonrelational self; the comparative anthropology of selfhood lumps together varieties of self-construction with little in common save their not being definitionally Western. In the case of India, despite the careful work of scholars like Richard Shweder,^[49] the literature begins to lose its usefulness the more one weans oneself from crude comparison as the primary epistemological framework of anthropology.^[50]

The "familial body" is in some senses a "relational" site, in which exchanges of material sustenance, medicine, and affection between generations constitute the lived body of the dependent elder. But I am neither interested in defining it primarily in contradistinction to the dynamics of age elsewhere, nor able to do so. If nothing else, there is an obvious comparative dimension to my use of the term, given the basic hermeneutic conditions of a suburban Jewish New Englander working in urban Varanasi. But I find the rhetoric I deploy here useful not because it helps me define aging in India against aging elsewhere; rather, the familial body, the old voice, and the dying space I write of below are offered as a shorthand that helped me understand and model relations between bodily experience, social dynamics, and particular universes of discourse in Varanasi and that may or may not be useful in other places. They are particularly useful in Varanasi and elsewhere in India given the centrality of the Bad Family as one of the key sites of a contested modernity, and indeed they may help explain the emergence of the Bad Family narrative. But they may provide tools by which to rethink the embodiment of old age in places where different narratives dominate, where rationalized terms like "care-giver" and even "disease" erase the centrality of the familial context of aging.

As a variant on the relational self, the familial body of the old and dependent person is not just constituted through "dividual" intergenerational exchanges. The welfare of the old body becomes a reflection of the welfare of family relations: it is less a relational body in itself than a signifier of relations elsewhere, between others. Old people become familial icons; their suffering, pleasures, and voice become increasingly exhausted in signifying the family and can point less and less to their distinct and separate needs, which become ever less signifiable and more and more identified with what I will term below a dying space.

Becoming one's family entails two linked processes: political marginalization and performative centralization. One must be unable or unwilling to assert a subjectivity that maintains a distinction between oneself and the family. Powerful old fathers and mothers-in-law are set against sons and daughters-in-law: Sons become fathers and daughters and mothers-in-law are opposed. Only when the old person can be politically encompassed by the family network, when there are no significant risks for grown children or gains in intergenerational opposition, does the old person become identified as not the superordinate but the symbolic center of the family

These processes are complex. First, they are contested: thus the ambiguity of sixty, composed of, on the one hand, the resistance by the aging person to being identified as inappropriate and the effort to hold onto authority, on the other the effort by children to assume control of household resources and family prerogatives while maintaining the image of a stable generational hierarchy without disruption. Second, they are played out differently by various children, given what's at stake for each. Like Yayati's five sons or the three sons of Apne Begane , older sons and daughters-in-law may seek to assume control and marginalize parental clout whereas younger children may ally with parents. In most of the neighborhoods of the study, old parents were more likely to live as part of their youngest son's household: older brothers successively fissioned off, taking whatever share of joint family property they could.

Though younger children may remain in positions of political alliance or subordination to parents, older children who have fissioned off—splitting entailing separate expenses and food and, rarely, shifts to new residences—may still request their parents' presence and support in circumscribed but symbolically dense areas in which the identity of family and household can be reasserted. These areas, in which old parents who have been left to younger siblings are reclaimed as familial bodies, center on the maintenance and commensal delineation of a ghar , a household: in rites of passage such as the Brahmanical samskaras , in other rituals of the household, in the training and surveillance of grandchildren, and in the greeting of (but not obtrusive involvement with) guests.

Old parents, within the logic of this ideal typology, are involved in two forms of ghar . the primary economic unit of the household, often with younger children, and the ritually reconstituted family. The division is a heuristic, a structural effort to delineate the substrate of political action. I use it to suggest that the familial body—and the social construction of old age debility—must be set within the context of the various strategies and overlapping structures of extended families and multiple households. The hearing of the voice, and the power of authoritative interpretation, are contingent on the community of listeners and their interrelationships.

For those on the periphery of a ghar , however defined, the sahi nahin voice of an old person in Varanasi was often the sound of a morally "not right" family. Throughout the neighborhoods of this study, across class, outsiders—neighbors, daughters or sons critical of their siblings, passersby—often heard neglect in these

voices. In interviews with me, they most often framed neglect as a transactional deficit: they do not give him or her enough food, enough clothing, or enough love: they do not offer enough Seva .

The perceived lack of Seva goes beyond the economics and attributional politics of households, families, and communities. If the self is relationally constituted, and if "family" becomes the monoglot index of relationality within the postcolonial context of the joint family story, then assaults on the inviolability of the family are particularly threatening. The assault, however, is unavoidable. Children, economically and politically and symbolically, eventually take on the position of their parents, but old parents do not necessarily disappear. No amount of Seva can reverse the process seamlessly.

"Respect" and "status" are ubiquitous and rarely examined constructs, either of social gerontology or of forms of local knowledge mandating filial piety. I suggest here that respect has two aspects: deferral to the powerful and performative deference to the no longer powerful. In the negotiated and contested forums of intergenerational life the distinction may not be so clear, but it is performative deference that the frequent and cross-cultural exhortations to honor one's parents imply. By performative I do not suggest "empty" practice, but rather that for the normative order of a family to be maintained, the emergent political hierarchy of children over parents must be reversed through symbolic action that generates a normative hierarchy of parents over children and yet does so without endangering the family's political order. By seeking parents' advice on decisions that they ultimately will not control, by placing their parents physically within shared family space or at the threshold as a sign defining ghar , domestic space, and the household, children identify their parents with the household and with authority over it. The elder is the household; his or her performative control over it signifies the moral integrity of the family.

Challenges to this integrity emerge through the familial body, heard as a voice of a neglected elder. Sources of the bad voice are multiple: they include the old-age weaknesses various actors in my story have called sixtyishness, hot brain, weak brain, senile dementia, senility, senile psychosis, and Alzheimer's disease. They also include more universal processes. Perfect Seva —the fantasy body of Shravan Kumar—is impossible. Shravan must die: in dying, he recognizes his failure: "I now see there is no reward for austerity."^[51] The order of things—here framed as the body of the king, Dasharath, who cuts the perfect son down—prevents the realization of perfect filial service. Children cannot simultaneously be ascetics and householders. Few adult children I interviewed could do "enough" Seva , and its inevitable deficit was an anxiety central to many discussions of aged parents.

The Dying Space

Isn't the classical codification of an individual life wise? Now and then I reflect on it—grihasthi is the eye of the storm, I suppose—though that isn't entirely correct, because the eye connotes

stillness at the heart of tumult, doesn't it, and grihasthi is anything but. No, grihasthi is domesticity, the family, and a mortal life'd be fragmentary without it; for sure, the three other rungs are also significant to integrate a life, but the years before grihasthi seem to conduct you to it, and the age after grihasthi winds away from it—it's the hub, the umbilicus, the skein of birth and death, and one's so enmeshed in it, in the bonds and responsibilities of family, that one doesn't ruminate on the central questions, not much, anyway—but there is isn't much spunk—oops, wrong word—left in the years after grihasthi, and vanaprastha and sannyas are euphemisms, aren't they, for rejection and dotage?
UPAMANYU CHATTERJEE, THE LAST BURDEN

The identity of family and body is mediated principally through the space of the home. Vatuk noted that "old people in India do most of their physical suffering, and ultimately their dying, at home."^[52] In Rajah Khosa's short black-and-white film Bodh Vrksa (Wisdom Tree) , a young woman lives in a large house with her father and bedridden grandmother. The film is silent, save for a voice-over of the young woman's thoughts. The father is distant, wrapped up in his own unhappiness; the young woman is entirely responsible for the grandmother's care. As the old woman's illness progresses, the image of the grandmother and the house fuse through lingering shots of the house, the old body, and the young woman's desperation at being imprisoned by both. The house is empty, shadows and wind. The grandmother remains silent, immobile. The stillness is broken by the voiceover (translated from the Hindi by Khosa):

Why is it so still? What is it that inhabits the wind? Perhaps it is like me, watching it all, in silence, in stillness. . . .

Within this windy, silent body of vayu and this windy, empty house, the granddaughter senses heat:

Sometimes I can see it, a kind of grace, something pure and holy, which seems to grow in her as her body withers away. Every moment the disease eats further into her: her legs are rotten stumps, her bowels a mass of decay. Slowly, steadily, the whole house is bathed with her presence. There is a power—I have seen it.^[53]

The grandmother continues to grow older and to decay, to die in a cold body and in a cold house, and yet, for her granddaughter, to wax more powerful: "[S]he burns in her pain with a flame of pure white heat."

By the end of the film, the granddaughter has left the house. The camera returns to empty rooms. Has the old woman died? Eventually, the camera approaches the deathbed. Grandmother is still there, silent. And then she stirs, slowly turns, and for the first time gets out of bed. Her immobility is somehow contingent upon the Seva of her granddaughter. Younger generations fix old bodies with their solicitude as much as they are fixed by the demands of care. The dying space, Grandmother's miraculous recovery suggests, is socially constructed and continually negotiated.

I was several times struck, in Varanasi, by children who spoke of taking care of their "dying" [marnewale ] parents, when to my eyes the old parents were not on their deathbed. But literally, of course, they often were: for the bed of old age is usually the deathbed, not the hospital bed, and without the intercession of the hospital or a machine, old age and death are structured as a continuity. These children defined a weak old age as a dying space, and to the extent that their parents could not or chose not to contest their reconstruction as old bodies, they defined it so as well.

The dying space may be an indoor bed, as in Bodh Vrksa . In Ravindrapuri Colony in Varanasi, Amita Mukherjee and her mother, both elderly widows, lived in a large flat. Amita, in her sixties, taught at the Anandamai Ma Ashram girls' school; her mother stayed at home and rarely left her room. She could get about, and although she agreed with her daughter that she was quite weak and immobile, whenever I visited them and found Amita-di not at home, her old mother negotiated the entire house with relative ease. A north Indian physician who moved to Bangalore moved a television into his parents' bedroom so that they would never have to leave their bed to watch a program; like Amita's mother, they were less bedridden than bed-gifted, the immobilized object of solicitude. Significantly, these were years when the weekly Mahabharata episode was televised each Sunday morning and was watched throughout the country by families and even entire communities crowded together; at the Bangalore doctor's house, the old parents sat on their own bed and watched apart.

The uncontested dying space is often spatially marginal to the household while remaining specularly central. The charpoy, the knotted rope and wood frame bed, is often placed near the threshold of the house or in a courtyard, and it suggests both the liminal and the exemplary position of its aged occupant. Not quite part of the household, the old person on the threshold was yet the first thing one would encounter in visiting. The "threshold function" of the family elder: for Sudipta Basu's family in Calcutta, the fact that despite his anger, confusion, and forgetting he could still greet visitors appropriately was very important. The charpoy was a ubiquitous and narratively elaborated site of the liminal old body: outside small dwellings in Nagwa slum, on the roofs and in the hallways of wealthy homes in Ravindrapuri, and in local representations of the village elder or elderly mother-in-law on his or her charpoy, the image is simultaneously that of confinement and repose, restriction and respect.

Another paradigmatic image conveying the spatial ambignities of Seva is the malis , the massage, classically by a dutiful daughter-in-law of her mother-in-law's hath pair . A remembered image: I am sitting, up on the roof after a hot day in Varanasi, enjoying the urban delight of rooftop breezes. Around me flit the myriad kites of children; on surrounding rooftops, the hour of the malis has arrived. The sas lolls on the charpoy, and her daughter-in-law squats next to her, massaging her leg. The older woman's arms and legs ache: hath pair , the critical site of generational weakness. Seva as malis mandates an immobile body and tired limbs

even as it marks the hierarchy of the superior older woman giving her feet to the younger and inferior.

Taking Voices Seriously

But dying spaces are contested, and we need to move from third-person frames of angry rishis and sixtyishness and second-person positioned accounts of the familial body to the first-person construction of experience, to the voices of old people, in and of themselves. Questions postponed must now take precedence: Do individuals experience their own aging as sixtyish or as powerful? As hot or as cold? Are these rhetorics of attribution relevant to the experience of old individuals? Do normative cultural frameworks like asramadharma map onto personal experience? Ultimately, do individuals experience themselves as old in the first place? What does it mean to be "old"?

I have until this point evaded these questions, those of the phenomenology of the old body and the meaning of old in itself. They are important issues, sometimes neglected in the cross-cultural study of old age, but in posing them as distinct inquiries one may ascribe to the experience of old age a concreteness and distinctiveness it may lack. Sharon Kaufman has made the point, in her work with middle-class American elders, that

when they talk about who they are and how their lives have been, they do not speak of being old as meaningful in itself; that is, they do not relate to aging or chronological age as a category of experience or meaning. To the contrary, when old people talk about themselves, they express a sense of self that is ageless—an identity that maintains continuity despite the physical and social changes that come with old age. . . . Being old per se is not a central feature of the self, nor is it a source of meaning.^[54]

Kaufman's elegant assertion challenged the tenor of the phenomenology of old age, of projects like Cole and Gadow's edited collection What Does It Mean to Grow Old? , of solicitous tomes like de Beauvoir's La Vieillesse,^[55] and more generally of efforts to track the aging subject as a set of distinct selves through the life course. In the next chapter, one of my informants will help me take issue with the universality of Kaufman's particular conception of the self; here I would note that in pointing out rather frequently that they do not feel old, Kaufman's informants seem to structure self against if not through old age: as the Other to selfhood here, old age remains critical to a phenomenology of the body and self in time, ever more the negative space as one ages, against which a continuity of lived experience asserts itself.

Kaufman's resistance to the meaningfulness of old age is suggestive of the ambiguity of the term within the American academy. Like the enumerative obsession of geriatrics with "normal aging," old age in American gerontology is organized as a paradox: the unmentionable object of discourse. Books often replace old age with aging , a term that rarely refers to the process of aging across the life span and far more often is a euphemism for old age. Thus Bernice Neugarten edited an

early anthology in the field entitled Middle Age and Aging , in which the parallelism of "Middle Age and Old Age" is abandoned for a tropaic structure in which the whole must stand for the unspeakable part.^[56] Gerontology as a field of knowledge presumes the importance of old age and old people as things to be studied, yet the professional language of social gerontology is structured around its erasure: thus the "World Assembly on Aging" and the "Aging in India" series.

For a generation of gerontological anthropologists, a corollary of the will to euphemize was the difficulty in articulating "old age" as anything other than a positive experience: against this difficulty, some of the current calls for a "postmodern life course." In her early work, Andrea Sankar contrasted what she found to be the "it's just old age" strategy of the Western medical tradition with traditional Chinese medicine, which she argued avoided using old age as an excuse not to take suffering seriously.^[57] Sankar's discussion of old age, embodiment, and social networks among Buddhist nuns is among the more critically engaging work on old age in a Chinese community, but it was of necessity narrated through contemporary gerontological and medical anthropological critique of a "biomedical" straw man. Similar comparisons abounded in the medical anthropology of the 1970s and 1980s, as in Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock's classic article "The Mindful Body." The article elegantly demonstrates the ways in which the body as simultaneously experienced, social, and political should ground the social analysis of bodily phenomena, but then goes on to suggest that "Eastern" medicine does just that, easing in a sense the anthropologist's critical burden. A haiku and a tertiary-care hospital are offered to demonstrate the Kiplingesque division between aesthetic and holistic East and mechanistic and alienating West.^[58] The apples and oranges comparison in the case of the Sankar article is similar, contrasting the tertiary care medicine of the West against the social milieus of Buddhist nuns of the East.

Beyond the comparison lies a central assumption: societies that label the experience of suffering, debility, or change within an old body as "old age" are necessarily distancing themselves from experience and healing rather than confronting the experience itself. In the Varanasi neighborhoods, "it's just old age" was a way frequently used by relatives and others to make sense of old people, as frequently used as the assertion that "in the West, you don't care for old people." Not only their relatives but old persons themselves throughout the neighborhoods of the ú study made use of statements of the "it's just old age" type. False consciousness awaiting gerontological pedagogy? Perhaps. Yet in denying the power of speaking "old age" as a personal and performative source against as well as for meaning, anthropologists may elide a dimension of the performative utterance (and nonutterance) of old age, its dialogic construction as both the expression and denial of experience and of suffering.

In rethinking the familial body and the dying space from first-person perspectives, we need to follow Kaufman and question the "obviousness" of being an old body, and to continually query the relation of the body in time to lived experience. Sylvia Vatuk shows in her discussion of the anxiety her informants expressed

about becoming old, useless, and abandoned, that old age in the processual sense of becoming is critical to self-construction.^[59] But becoming is not quite being. In the case of John Kingery, the old man who was "granny-dumped" at the Idaho dog track, the fact that the sympathies of the AARP spokesperson were more with the daughter who abandoned him than with the Alzheimer's victim suggests this. Like dependency anxiety, the social elaboration of Alzheimer's reflects the drawing of a boundary by younger adults to deflect the perceived transformations of their own old age.

It is difficult to address being old as a universal phenomenology or, pace Kaufman, as its absence. Kaufman's model presumes the possibility of role continuity, a possibility itself differentially available across class, gender, and other less predictable correlates of life experience. Widowhood may create dramatically different challenges for women than for men. A routinized form of retirement and the possibilities of pension are an option only for a minority of elderly; the effects of old age on those who must work as agricultural or construction laborers or who, like Dulari's cousin, pedal rickshaws until they literally drop dead may mitigate the possibilities of an ageless self. The various meanings of the charpoy for its occupant-repose, retirement, confinement, neglect, peripheralization—depend less on old age itself than on the varied conditions for the uninterrupted flow of Seva and the continued usefulness of the body.

Asramadharma is similarly limited in anchoring a universal phenomenology of old age experience. Kakar offers its last two stages as an alternative to a psychoanalytic typology of maturity, with the accent on yogic desocialization as a rational response to mortality.^[60] Few elderly informants, however, valorized disengagement from other persons as part of their sense of ideal self. Kakar's citing asrarmadharma is reminiscent of a similar controversy in social gerontology in the 1970s over disengagement versus activity theories of first-person experience. The advocates of the former position suggested old people "naturally" disengage from social and other ties and turn inward; advocates of the latter held that old people when given the chance diversify and expand their sense of self once the limiting tasks of work and family have been passed on: ties and involvements should increase, not decrease.^[61] The controversy prevented analysis from focusing on the ways individuals both disengage and broaden their ties and interests, on the importance but insufficiency of the forest as a model of old age. In Non-renunciation , T. N. Madan suggested that adulthood is characterized less by a movement from the dharma (duty), kama (pleasure), and artha (profit) orientations of the householder to the moksha (liberation) orientation of the renunciate, than that the polarity of the bhogi (the hedonist) and yogi (the ascetic) frame the extremes between which individuals fashion life and self.^[62] Repose, the position of a good old age, remains as much a celebration of bhoga as yoga.

In spatializing the adult life course as a move from the household to the forest to the peripatetic unmarked space of the sannyasi, asramadharma legitimates the ambivalence of repose through its reconstruction as an ascetic state; like disen-

gagement theory, it also provides a normative rationale for the enforced marginalization of the elder by others. Kakar suggests that the system offers the romantic possibility of the quest in old age against the more ironic constructions of old age in European thought, particularly psychoanalysis. Yet for old individuals, the dying space as the forest within the household is laden with irony, the same irony that follows the lengthier quest of the old person who travels the length of the country to die, transfigured but pathetically alone, in the holy necropolis of Kashi.

The Philosopher's Mother

He was one of my idols; I had found his book Lokayata while a college freshman, wandering through the India stacks (Ind and IndL ) in the subterranean recesses of Harvard's Widener Library, an imposing edifice gifted by the mother of a victim of the Titanic who had collected books. Thomas Wolfe, in Of Time and the River , had written of coming from the American South to Harvard and trying to read all the books in Widener, an attempt to master the place or at least to come to terms with it. But knowledge had continued to expand, and so did the numbers of books in the Widener stacks. Sir Henry Maine had observed that these were the conditions of empire. He advocated cramming. Too softened perhaps from television or suburban liberalism, I went instead for the particular and tried to come to terms with Ind and lndL, and did so not through cramming but by becoming a flaneur of the stacks.

I don't remember how I came to find the book. It was a very different sort of thing than either the Orientalia of my first year of college reading or the postcolonialism of my last, a dense amalgamation of Marxism, Hindu myth and philosophy, and nineteenth-century anthropology, a working through of Lewis Henry Morgan and Frederic Engels to reread Vedic and later philosophical texts for the remnants of an Indian materialism, a people's religion rooted in totemism and Mother-right. It was messy and anachronistic, but it brought together in a dizzying synthesis all the diverse knowledges necessary to being a Bengali Brahman and Marxist theoretician in the 1950s in Calcutta.

His name was Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya. He lived in Calcutta, in a large and drafty old house a few blocks south of the Victoria Memorial. His office was on the first floor, full of books and files, and he and his wife lived on the second. He was a scholar of the history of Ayurveda and of various schools of Hindu philosophy, and he had spent years learning about the botanical medicine of the San-

tal "tribals" not too far from Calcutta and the object of both bhadralok and Marxist nostalgia. I went to see him to ask about Rasayana and its history, and as I mounted the stairs to his first floor office that first time, I saw her, an old woman in a white sari in a room next to the office, sitting on a bed and staring at the wall.

I wanted to ask about her, as the great historian and philosopher tried to answer my questions about Rasayana and senility, but felt a bit embarrassed. Each time I came calling, I would pass by the door of her room, hoping for something. What? Some days she was lying down. Some days like that first one she was sitting up. She never said anything, never seemed to do or notice anything, not me, anyway. It was very quiet in the big house. Her son the philosopher would be speaking, the sounds of the street muffled by all the books in the office. My mind would wander, listening for a sound from the next room.

He had written, in the book that I had come across in the library, about the relationship between voice and desire. He was analyzing a story from the Chandogya Upanisad in which dogs chanted for food like Brahmans chanting the Vedas. Against the usual interpretation, that the Upanisadic authors were mocking Vedic ritualism, he suggested the chanting dogs revealed the totemic origins of high religion, its rootedness in the desire for food and other material needs. Voice—the chanting as both language and song—was a magical means to fulfill desire, here for sustenance.

In Varanasi old people and dogs were seen to have a lot in common: abject dependence and a voice whose desire was no longer heard, so that it became more and more desperate and repetitive in its demand: ultimately, barking. The philosopher's particular critique of what he called idealism did not allow him to hear the chanting as an antinomian parody of this-worldly ritual. The dogs' chant was the innocent though desperate desire of the primitive collective, for survival.

In the next room, never a sound. The clock on the wall ticked, the philosopher spoke, from time to time the horns and yells from the street came through the curtains.