Nagwa By Its Residents

Hori folded his tattered jacket carefullyand placed it on the cot. "So you consider me an old man, do you? I'm not even forty yet. And men are still lusty as bulls at sixty."

Not ones like you. Go look at your face in the mirror. Just how are you going to be lusty when you can't even get enough milk and butter to make a few drops of ointment for your eyes? It scares me to see the condition you're in—makes me wonder how we'll manage in our old age? Whose door will we beg at?"

Hori's momentary mellowness vanished as though consumed in the flames of reality. "I'll never reach sixty, Dhaniya," he said, picking up his stick. "I'll be gone long before that."
PREMCHAND, GODAN ^[1]

If the meaning of a bad old voice is deferred in cosmopolitan discourse and in the residential colonies through the invocation of the West as the origin of the Fall and the parabolic geometry of balance as the mapping of the life course, in Nagwa Harijan basti processes of deferral invoke the imposition of caste order as the origin of the Fall and the linear movement of weakness as its geometry. Weakness, kamzori , is central to local experience and ideology in Nagwa. I again begin by locating a neighborhood within a particular cosmos through the narratives of its residents.

Varanasi got its name, according to a popular if dubious etymology, from the two tributaries of the Ganga—the Varuna River to the north and the Assi stream to the south—which form one version of its sacred borders. In between lies the city of Lord Shiva, held aloft on his trident and safe from cosmic dissolution, with its promise of liberation for those who bathe, live, die, and who are cremated there. Just south of the Assi the ground rises; on it sits the slum. Even when the course of the Assi was shifted, splitting the neighborhood in two, the part of the

slum officially known as Nagwa Harijan basti remained outside the land between the rivers. Nagwa overlooks the field of liberation from the wrong side.

Most of the low-caste residents of the slum are Chamar, nominally a leather-working caste; fronting the slum on the Panchakosi Road are the homes of the relatively higher status Dhobis and the Catholic Kristapanthi ashram. On the opposite side of the road are a few homes, a small mosque, and fields that run along the Ganga. Further south and to the west lies an area of middle-class homes and a few wealthy estates.

The Panchakosi Road rings Varanasi and marks the route of pilgrims on a five-day seasonal circumambulation of the city. It is an alternative and more inclusive framing of the boundary of the sacred city.^[2] Most city dwellers living beyond the greater circle of the Panchakosi Road were not particularly troubled by their location beyond redemptive space. For several slum residents, however, the question of boundary was more of an active challenge. They stressed their location within the Panchakosi Road—as opposed to beyond the Assi—as part of a move of inclusion and totality consonant with the political language of the slum, its ubiquitous plaint that "all people are the same."

Caste more than geography distanced Nagwa Chamar from the religious resources of their city. Residents did not feel comfortable at most temples, festivals, or processions, despite the successful struggle several decades earlier to open the city's important shrines to them. Through the cult of the fifteenth- or sixteenth-century poet saint Ravi Das, a Chamar who lived in and around Varanasi, Nagwa slum dwellers recreated the city as an accessible yet oppositional sacred center. His purity and virtue challenged by Brahmans, Ravi Das demonstrated his inner worth to the common people and to the king through a series of well-known miracles. In the most famous of these, when asked by his high-caste interlocutors where he kept his sacred thread (which as a Chamar he had never been invested with and could not wear) Ravi Das cut open his chest and produced not one but four threads, internalizing the fourfold caste order within the body as a sign of sameness.

Ravi Das's birthplace and the river ghat where he spent his days (and cut open his chest) are the sites of new temples. These were linked to low-caste bastis throughout the city on Ravi Das's birthday by a parade that wound its way through city streets to the site of the birthplace, just beyond the BHU campus. Nagwa, as one of the southernmost of the city's Chamar slums near the end of the parade route, would greet the floats, trucks, elephants, and tractors from throughout Varanasi district as they approached the final stretch. One of several competing "Ravi Das Committees" from the slum would raise funds for a floral arch, draped with a broad banner welcoming participants on behalf of the Nagwa committee. The subscription of funds and erection of the arch linked Nagwa slum with other Dalit communities^[3] and appropriated the elaborate and Brahmanic sacred geography of Varanasi as authentically Chamar through the figure of Ravi Das.

Ravi Das was represented on posters in homes in Nagwa, along with images of a mother and child, the goddess Durga, and Dr. Ambedkar, the untouchable architect of the Indian constitution. There were two poster representations of Ravi Das: a vigorous black-bearded man and an old and emaciated white-bearded rishi type. The younger man tears open his chest to reveal his visceral caste and lots of blood; the older man sits in a meditative posture, a world-weary expression on his face.

A small shrine of the younger Ravi Das sat in an open area in the center of the slum, across from a government-erected pump and latrine. To the east of this clearing, the slum rose toward the Panchakosi Road. On the other three sides, the ground sharply descended: to the Assi on the north; to a water-filled gully and a field to the south, which until 1989 served as the slum's dish-washing pond or "tank" and its recreational space; and to the other half of the slum, spilling over into low-lying and periodically inundated land, on the west.

Between the summer of 1988, when I first began to interview residents, and the spring of 1990, when I left Varanasi for the United States, the physical environment of Nagwa changed significantly. A developer won the contested rights to the slum's common land—its tank and field—and the high brick and plaster walls of a new middle-class colony began to rise several meters from the Nagwa slum dwellings. The dense basti lost its commons; all that was left of the tank water were several small and stagnant pools. Overnight, the geography of Nagwa Harijan basil was transformed, from a poor urban village into something more closely resembling a Bombay or Calcutta slum.

Other physical transformations occurred in the basti during those two years. The urban administration of Varanasi freed up funds for subsidizing the building of household latrines, although the drainage system necessary for them to become operative was not repaired. Still, unusable latrines began to appear in most of the wealthier homes of the slum. Change came from other sources as well. The European priest and scholar known as Father Paul had lived in the slum since 1980, forsaking the comfort of the Kristapanthi ashram. Paul raised European funds to buy a plot of land a kilometer to the south of Nagwa basti, build a pump house for irrigation, and set up a vegetable growers' cooperative of slum residents. His efforts stressed self-reliance and communal control of the gardens. Residents who joined had to commit to a periodic membership payment and communal labor, but received the perpetual use of an irrigated garden plot.

Many residents were distrustful of his motives; several questioned where the cooperative dues went. Despite his years of service in the community, Paul was an ambiguous figure, seen by some to enjoy elite prerogatives—travel, university study, connections in high places—without giving any gifts. Unlike the periodic gift-giving of the ashram Fathers, his projects were not based on explicit gifting but rather on the creation of autonomy and a different kind of local reason. Yet as he was a foreigner, Paul's visa was continually subject to reexamination and to the

potential refusal of another extension. He could not guarantee that he would remain in the community to ensure residents' invulnerability from the claims of the powerful and to protect the security of their investment.

The fear that the community garden would go the way of the commons drew upon the experience of time and social structure in Nagwa. The history of Nagwa, for its residents, was that of a Fall from greatness into a state of dependency characterized by unstable sources of patronage. The destruction of the commons, the latest incursion into the Nagwa slum by persons locally identified as Thakurs, members of several land-owning and latter-day baronial castes, was but the repetition of a historical pattern. The Fall of Nagwa took shape within a local ideology of Chamar and other Dalits as the autochthonous bearers of authentic religion and polity, of an Adi Dharm. Several residents claimed that Nagwa's sanctity antecedes that of Varanasi itself. Adi Dharm is literally the original dharma. It was described as the true Indian religion and polity, before the foreign invasion of the Vedic Aryans and the imposition of caste and its naturalization. The lowest "scheduled" castes and tribal groups were thus the true heirs of a pre-Aryan and pre-Brahmanical Indian religion.

Local versions of Nagwa's sacred geography demonstrated the area's claim to precedence over the superimposed sanctity of Kashi. Several hundred meters south of the basti along the Panchakosi road was a stone worshipped as a protective demigod, Baru Baba. Ram Lakhan, one of the most articulate ideologues of the slum, suggested that Baru Baba was a naga, a snake deity. He suggested that naga worship was central to Adi Dharm, and furthermore that the name for Nagwa itself came from naga. Ram Lakhan envisioned Nagwa as a forgotten center for naga worship. The woman who ran the tea stall across from Baru Baba concurred. One day, she noted, a motevala (afat man, here a pejorative term connoting power and position) came by to look at Baru Baba. The Fatman pointed to the local mosque, located next to where her tea shop now stands. He told her that Baba originally came from the top of a former temple, the site of which is currently occupied by the mosque. Muslims, the motevala was suggesting, were responsible for the destruction of Nagwa's heritage.

The indexicality of the Fatman's finger was resisted. Muslims were seldom invoked as the agents of decline in the history of Nagwa; they were viewed ambivalently On the one hand, they were competitors for limited state and private patronage for the poor, not as truly deserving as the Nagwa residents. On the other, they were seen as living sahi correctly, as having good families and not getting weak minded in old age, and as bearers of an egalitarian ideology. Efforts by characters like tea-shop Fatmen to pin the decline of Adi Dharm on Muslims begged what for most residents was the primary source of their debility, the upper-caste triad of Brahman, Kshatriya, and Vaishya, who destroyed Adi Dharm and enslaved and dehumanized its adherents. This original Aryan colonization was continually relived in local narrative: people spoke of the collusion of "Brahman,

Thakur, Bania" (priest, landowner, merchant) in the ongoing appropriation of their rights and resources.

The relationship of Nagwa residents to powerful others that emerged from collective memory was not just a simple opposition of us versus them. The antiquity of Baru Baba notwithstanding, few in Nagwa were certain that their grandparents or great-grandparents lived there; most had family ties in villages south of Varanasi across the Ganga or northwest toward Jaunpur district. Several families who rented in the colony were migrants from Bihar or Bangladesh. An alternative origin story stressed not the antiquity of the area but its historical founding by Bula Babu, a Bengali who built a grand house on what had formerly been only fields. Jhalli Ram, an "old man" (burh ) in his early sixties who continually shuttled between the households of two of his sons, told me that many of the large mansions near the Ganga had been built by Bula Babu and sold to various princes, including the King of Nepal. These rajas gave great gifts to the poor, who clustered nearby. Jhalli Ram thought that the emergence of Nagwa basti occurred in 1931.

Jhalli told of Bula Babu willing one of his mansions to his gardener, a story suggesting the extent of Bula's largesse. But opportunists—again, rich Thakurs—wrested the house from the gardener. Jhalli Ram tied the founding of the community to the gifts of outsiders, here Bengalis and Nepalis, and its decline to local elites. The theme was repeated in other sets of narratives. Jawahar, a vegetable seller in his sixties, noted that Nagwa's land was originally owned by the Maharaja of Varanasi, but that the new Indian state took the land from him and sold it to rich Thakurs. The Maharaja had given the land where the slum and its tank and common field were to the Harijans. But just as the Thakurs secured the other royal lands, they have managed to appropriate the commons.

Narayan, a laborer and poet in his seventies, recalled that he used to work a plot of land near the Assi River that was owned by the Maharaja. When the government took over the land, he said, "the Congress Party workers urged me to press my claims to the land. But I wanted [the land] to go over to the Rani [the queen]. When my father came here, this was all jungle. They came from M.P. or Haryana to Banaras on pilgrimage, and felt that they should stay here. They built these homes. Others came from elsewhere. The Maharaja gave them the land." Narayan suggested that through his fealty, to the family of the Maharaja, his family's initial benefactor, he lost control of his former plot. Now, in his old age, he could not depend on owning land and was far more vulnerable. He summed up his state in one of his ballads, which he would sing to fellow patrons at a tea stall in Lanka crossing. In the ballad a bull butts the narrator from behind when he is not looking, knocking him down. Oh, Bull, went Narayan's refrain, why did you hit me? The bull in Narayan's ballad reflected the two "bulls" in his experience, old age and his declining resources, both of which caught him unawares. He paralleled the physical kamzori of old age with the economic weakness of being both old and Chamar.

Others of Narayan's songs were less ironic. He sang heroic ballads about Dr. Ambedkar and Indira Gandhi, the latter whom he, like most other older people in Nagwa, considered a hero in contrast with her son, then prime minister. With Mrs. Gandhi's policies, he would sing, the proud Thakur became a rickshaw puller and the lowly Chamar a moneylender. Like the Maharaja and Bula Babu, Indira Gandhi was the paradigmatic giver, but like these others her gifts were appropriated when different rulers came to power.

Given the instability of gifts and the self-interest of the powerful, political and religious ideology in Nagwa stressed self-reliance and strategies of minimization. Political machines were distrusted and local party affiliations would continually shift. As in R. H. Khare's study of "worldly asceticism" among Lucknow Chamar,^[4] politics in Nagwa were often framed in terms of a self-reliant asceticism. Many men and a few women in Nagwa had a guru, a teacher who trains and counsels one in both political and religious matters. Gurus were usually older men from outside the slum, often from other Dalit communities. Gurus were also teachers from the past. Religious life in Nagwa centered on a quartet of four historical and saintly gurus: Kabir, Isa Masi [Jesus], Guru Nanak, and, most of all, Ravi Das.

As related by Nagwa disciples, the message of gurus—contemporary and historical, ethical and exemplary—challenged not the fact of low-caste weakness but its meaning, suggesting that weakness demonstrated not the necessity of hierarchy but the identity and, consequently, equality of all people. The gods of Vaisnavite and Saivite Hinduism and the pretensions to authority and purity of Brahmans, Thakurs, and Banias were but the legitimation of exploitative practice. Local celebrations of the historical gurus included the lampooning of caste Hindu piety. On the day before Ravi Das's birthday in 1989, the local leader Seva Lal and several friends acting as a Ravi Das Committee organized a performance in another Dalit neighborhood, that of Seva Lal's guru. Secchan, the ever-inebriated tea shop proprietor, was transformed into Lord Shiva; in leopard skin and colored deep blue from head to toe, he held court over a celestial audience of prostitutes and dancing boys.

As leather-workers, Chamar were called upon to drum in the celebrations of many other groups in the city, events of varying sanctimoniousness. Part of Chamar performance often included satiric skits, in which reversals of age, gender, and sexual desire along with those of caste and class offered social satire ranging from barbed to highly muted, depending on the audience and occasion.^[5] In another skit, the weaver and part-time musician and comic Ramji played an old and deaf village man, newly married to a young girl, who undertakes a pilgrimage to the holy city of Varanasi with his bride. They meet an unscrupulous Brahman panda , or religious guide, on the road, who offers to take them around the city with hopes of bilking and even cuckolding the old man. The deaf old man misunderstands each of the Brahman's instructions, praying "Jai Murga Mai " (Hail Mother Goddess Chicken) instead of "Jai Durga Mai " (Hail Mother Goddess Durga) at the

Durga temple, and so forth. The temples that the mismatched couple visit are those that many of the Chamar audience work outside of, guarding the polluting shoes of worshippers.