Muslims And Other Saints

"What things characterize old age?" I would ask during interviews in Nagwa as elsewhere. Sitting with Bageshera, Narayan the poet's elder sister, and her family; a volley of responses came from both the old woman and the younger people. Bageshera began by listing problems:

their eyes
their teeth
they can't work well
their minds don't sit quite right.

Her grandchildren joined in, their responses less embodied:

they get agitated
they are weak
their minds rot
they just babble, pat pat pat pat .

Bageshera looked vexed: "He writes all this down. Say some good things about old people!"

Like Bageshera's family, in focusing on imbalance, anger, and weak mind, I offer a skewed portraiture of old age in India. The problem is heightened in Nagwa, where old age is almost inevitably called burhapa (the embodied and rather decrepit state connoting weakness) and seldom vrddhavastha (experienced and more disembodied old age) and where weakness is the dominant metanarrative of social relations.^[18] Yet bur;hapa , in its privileging the hearing of old voices as bakbak or pat pat , does not exhaust the experience of being old or knowing or loving an older person. "Use buzurg ," Masterji the tailor suggested when I called someone vrddh , offering me the Urdu for the Sanskritized word, as "people will understand." I seldom heard buzurg used in informal conversation, but in my more abstract discussions with Masterji, Ram Lakhan, and other ideologues of the neighborhood, buzurg like vrddh suggested an ideal and sahi , correct, old age.

A sahi old age was often linked to Islam, through the turn to a more Urduized

or Persianized construction of utterance as well as in narrative. "You should talk to Muslims," I was repeatedly told in the poorer Hindu neighborhoods of the city, as during that boat ride early on. "Their dimag remains sahi ." Muslim friends, I should note, were either amused by or suspicious of this generalization but they rarely concurred with it, seeing in it the potential deployment of a Hindu strategy of the differentiation and ultimately dehumanization of the Muslim body. But the women and men in poorer neighborhoods who offered the Muslim dimag as a gold standard in old age were not being disparaging. They did not know why the difference occurred ("You're the doctor, you tell us!") but it was somehow obvious. When I asked people to speculate, their answers varied. In Nagwa, a man named Lakhan had this to say: "Hindu minds tend to deteriorate in old age but Muslim minds tend to expand. Muslims are richer, more successful. They have less worries, thus less mental problems. They are more hard-working, and single-mindedly devote themselves to the task at hand. We are too gregarious, too outwardoriented." Another response to why Muslim old people don't get weak minds was that their family relations were better. Always implied was that Muslims did Seva to their elders, that they preserved their izzat , their honor. The Muslim self was more directed and less selfish, and the Muslim family tighter.

T. N. Madan has argued that Indian male householders position themselves dialectically between the poles of the renunciate yogi and the libertine bhogi . To the extent that his argument is relevant for poor men in Varanasi, the Muslim occupies the discursive position of the yogi. He is a paradigm of the "worldly ascetic" that Khare suggests is the exemplary actor in the ideology of Lucknow Chamar. To be ascetic in domestic relations, the invocation of the Muslim suggests, is to preserve oneself and one's parents from mental weakness. The Muslim as sign of the exemplary elder and family again suggests the anxiety surrounding the impossibility of true Seva . As other, the Muslim can occupy a position against the construction of the self. Why Muslims? In the question, I sensed an unspoken narrative of Seva anxiety: "I am a creature of desire and selfishness; I am the imperfect family. In perfect families, composed of ascetics, there is perfect Seva , there is no weakness in old age. Look at the other, look at the Muslim." The Muslim can be placed outside the opposition of weakening and weakened; his Otherness is in theory exchangeable with one's imperfect selfhood. Unlike Brahmans, Thakurs, and Banias, who achieve a reprieve from weakened mind through their weakening practice, which guarantees them access to good food and medical care and the absence of worries, Muslims escape the economy of weakness (and become rich) through a process of renunciation, not of taking but of not taking.

Muslims are ambiguous signifiers in Nagwa. Some persons would speak of the sahi mind of the Muslim, most had no opinion, and some, like Muslims, felt the whole question was ridiculous. Sannyasis, ubiquitous in Varanasi, are viewed less ambivalently. True renunciation in old age in Nagwa is seldom identified with the Brahmanic ideals of vanaprastha and Sannyasa . The classic renunciate is rejected as the idealized self for four reasons: (1) Sannyasa is an option by and large open only

to upper-caste Hindus; (2) Sannyasa is morally ambiguous for all householders, of high and low caste, in its challenge of household morality;^[19] (3) in Nagwa, uppercaste renunciates are held to be false claimants to local patronage who appropriate the gift from the deserving weak; and (4) all Banarsis have the jaded locals' experience of numerous "false sadhus," faux holy men seeking easy money or on the run from a criminal past. Against Sannyasa —neither available to nor desired by Chamar—the ideal self is described as a person of restraint and self-sufficiency. This worldly renunciate does not abandon—literally or symbolically—the household. Renunciation is not in opposition to householdership, but rather is the ethos characterizing the ideal householder.^[20] The life stage model of asramadharma folds into the constant asceticism of the weakened. Old age, as buzurg , is not a break with material pleasure but a distillation of a lifetime of restraint into a powerful voice. This voice is seldom heard—the silent voice of the ascetic—and when it is heard it is as the legitimate anger of the rishi. Angry rishis, along with the Maharaja and Baru Baba, populate the history of Nagwa and of other slums and villages around Varanasi. A rishi's curse, after all, had dried up the once mighty Assi separating Nagwa from Varanasi, turning the river into a small stream.

In examining the ideology of worldly asceticism of Lucknow Chamar, Khare helps us to place the transformations of age in political and ideological contexts. Appadurai has summarized Khare's argument:

Instead of playing the impure foil to the Brahman, the Untouchable becomes his civilizational critic and his moral conscience. No longer a product of some sort of "karmic" Fall, the Untouchable becomes a brutalized representative of the ascetic ideal in ordinary life. His degradation and oppression are no more regarded as a just working out of the joint scheme of dharma (social law) and karma (cosmic causal law) but of the blindness of the Brahmanic social order to the axioms underlying its own existence. . . . In Dumont's own evocative usage, here is an Indic conception of equality and individuality that "encompasses" Brahmanic notions of hierarchy and social categories.^[21]

Through the directed learning or hearing of the message of a guru, many men and some women in Nagwa spoke of themselves as this-worldly ascetics, both framing their lives and struggles within a meaningful and spiritually directed discourse while embodying a direct critique of "Hindu" ideology and practice similar to that which Khare outlines.

The position of ascetic engagement glided into the dying space. Vipat, the father of the two slightly higher-caste Dhobi men who lived in adjoining households on the edge of the slum facing wealthier homes, was said by many to be the oldest person in Nagwa. He was very weak, lying most of the day on his charpoy outside the house of his younger son, and he was seen to be so. But he was not heard to be so—that is, his mind was sahi Vipat seldom spoke, and when he did, in measured and quiet tones, he rarely complained or asked for much from his family. He lay out on the bed all day and all night, his time punctuated only by meals and long, slow walks the half a kilometer or so to the banks of the Ganga to relieve himself.

Vipat's charpoy was an unambiguous dying space. He was a marnevala , a "dying one." Neighbors and family said he was very old. "Over one hundred," claimed an adult grandson. Using the age he remembered himself to be during famous floods and Partition, my usual method, I had figured him to be in his late seventies or early eighties.

Vipat's two remaining sons were from his two sequential marriages, and he was again a widower. His sons had split, according to Vipat, some ten or twelve years ago. The elder, Hiralal, had had his own job at the time while the younger Lallu had none, and economic "tension" between the brothers had mounted. Hiralal had wanted Lallu and his other half-brother Motilal (now deceased) to obey him. They refused; and when Motilal got married he and his wife began eating separately. After Motilal's death, Hiralal separated completely from his brother. A wall was built dividing the house and the few square meters of land in front of it roughly into halves. Vipat remained with Lallu, as his youngest son had no work at the time; Vipat supported him and his family. Six years ago, Vipat gave over ownership of the house to his sons.

Vipat cried when he recalled to me the split between his sons. Their feuding and public split provided the context for the Bad Family that explains the weak mind and angry voice of other old people. But Vipat did not have a weak mind, and neighbors and relatives pointed to his sons' Seva —he was receiving food and drink, he was not wanting. Bodily weakness and the Bad Family were central to the construction of weak and hot mind, but they were not sufficient.

Vipat had achieved a state of shanti, of repose. He did not allow himself—nor was he impelled to by existential or neurophysiological crises—to be interpreted as empty, heat or bakbak . He was weak, but he interpreted his weakness as consonant with his great age and the pain of his sons splitting—facts of life that must be accepted. He would sit on his charpoy, talk to the handful of other Nagwa residents who had reached their seventies and eighties, eat, and walk to the Ganga. He embodied, in his shanti, his household as a still-unified entity; he was an emblem—in front of the two halves of the split house, linking them on his charpoy—of the rightness of his family. Through Vipat, they were, against the inevitability of their history, also sahi .

Though family fission did not generate weak mind, weak mind pointed to family fission. In Nagwa, challenges to shanti were rooted in the economics of limited family resources and the often bitter family splits and debilitative and untreated chronic illnesses that emerged in the context of these economics. Out of the seventy-five households in Nagwa in which I did interviews, there were at most a dozen "old old" persons, those whom I then estimated were about or over seventy-five years of age. Assuming an age-related peaking of clinical dementia in the ninth decade of life, similar to that of Europe and the United States, there were fewer old people in Nagwa who were likely to become demented, unlike in the residential colonies. But the voices of old people whose minds were not sahi —the hearing

of anger and bakbak and even outright madness—were integral to the phenomenology of old age in the slum. There were many threats to shanti.

Earlier I offered Harinath Prasad's besting of the tea shop owner Secchan as an example of the explicitly sahi anger of the experienced elder. Harinath was Narayan and Bageshera's younger brother. He was sixty-two when I first met him, a fact that he stated emphatically, daring me to challenge him. My age-estimation questions about marriages and floods had become well-known. Mr. Prasad had been a "Masterji," a school teacher. He continued to "give tuitions" full-time after retirement, to offer Memory Bank–style supplementary tutoring to petty bourgeois families somewhat wealthier than most of those in Nagwa. These were students trained in "Hindi-medium" institutions, not those schooled to remember in the more bankable English. Like Vipat, his mind was sahi , though he seemed the antithesis of the other man in terms of personal style. Forceful, direct, and proud, he did not back away from argument. He was an angry old man, but his hot voice was taken at its worth, as the mildly funny but deserved chastisement of one of the most educated older men in Nagwa. His mind was not weak.

Harinath controlled this resource, staging infrequent and impromptu displays of his mastery over time and space. Secchan, who when he got married told his own father that he could not afford to contribute his income to that of his parents—effectively denying them any significant support in their old age—heard the anger of Harinath Prasad as undemanding and useful. He could call himself Harinath's son; his own father's angry voice, however, structured as the demand and the lament, was too demanding and could only be heard as Jhandu , all used up.

Harinath's wife died, and one of his two sons found a good job in a different part of the state. His other son, Chandan, was unmarried and an intercollege (preuniversity) student. Chandan had worked as a dancer in a troupe like Ranji's; he may have been a male prostitute as well, and sometimes dressed like a woman.^[22] Chandan was devoted to his father. Harinath long ago had had a fight with Narayan, and the two brothers were not on speaking terms. With a distant son and daughter-in-law, with the need to work because Chandan brought in no income yet, with his anticipated difficulty in ever getting Chandan married, and with an alienated brother and his family, Harinath was not seen to have a peaceful old age. He was denied the repose of a charpoy.

But Harinath's learning, his having amassed some measure of symbolic capital and his effective management of it, was not suggestive of repose denied. For neighbors who did not know him so intimately, Harinath's continual activity demonstrated his continued mastery over his world. He illustrated the proverb sattha ta pattha , sixty therefore mighty, and not the sixtyish mind. He gave neighbors no cause to invoke the Bad Family.

Mangri, a widow in her sixties, lived with her daughter, who was separated from her husband, and grandson in a small, one-room house. Her daughter worked to support the family and her grandson was in school. Mangri managed

the household, as well as much of the communal affairs of her part of the slum. Her voice, criticizing municipal workers who didn't do their job, neighbors who stole from other neighbors, or anthropologists who wasted people's time, was wellknown. But she leavened her scolding with humor and self-deprecation. Her requests, the substance of her angry voice, were rarely phrased as threatening complaints or outright demands. She interrupted me one day as I was talking to someone else, about old age: "This old woman walks naked. You should give me some clothes." Young teenagers in the lane would joke with her, calling her Jhandu . But her angry voice was often listened to; it meant something. Mangri lacked Harinath Prasad's learning and was poorer and less powerful than he. She had bouts of weakness, and her neighbor Father Paul brought her five "bottles of strength," vitamin tonics, which she said helped a bit. Though an old widow, like Harinath she was able to maintain a powerful and sahi persona through the manipulation of an angry voice. She was somewhat less successful than him in being heard as a useful and therefore meaningful voice; Harinath was never called Jhandu . As in the colonies, the voice of the marginal widow was at greater risk for being heard as not sahi .

Most old people in Nagwa who could no longer work as laborers or who feared being considered Jhandu in the household attempted to develop new sources of income. One of the more common routes, for those who could advance the necessary capital, was to open up a small shop, often in a doorway or window of the family house facing out onto the lane. There were several such shops in Nagwa Basti, stocking biscuits, matches, cheap bidi leaf-wrapped cigarettes, paper kites, and so forth. Raghu Ram ran one of them. He was, according to one of his sons, ninety-five years old; he himself was unsure, and extrapolating from the ages of his children I estimated that he was in his seventies. Like Vipat, he was a widower whose sons had split. Of Raghu Ram's nine surviving children, five daughters married and moved to their husbands' homes, and the families of the four sons lived separately in adjoining compounds. Raghu ate with his second-youngest son, Lallan. Like Vipat, Raghu Ram was represented as a superannuated icon of auspicious old age by his family. Still, Raghu felt compelled to work to avoid being a potential burden to Lallu's family. Vatuk has noted in her discussion of dependency anxiety that the elderly feared the consequences for themselves of their physical incapacity and resulting burdensomeness to their children. In Nagwa, old people with some savings forestalled the possibility of becoming a burden as long as possible through small enterprises or outside labor.

Shanti, here as for Mr. Agrawal in Ravindrapuri, was continually deferred. Raghu Ram's son Ram Lakhan, in speaking of his father and old people in general, located their dimag , or brain, between cool shanti and hot anger: "There is neither a lot of peace, nor a lot of heat. It is like India. Sometimes the weather is hot, sometimes cold, and there are the monsoons." Raghu Ram avoided being considered Jhandu , but at the same time he relinquished his claims to a charpoy to a position of repose. But his tiny shop, where he eked out a token income, was in

a sense a dying space. He was identified with the shop, could always be found there, and was in a way restricted to it much as Vipat was restricted to life lived from the charpoy. His position, for his son, the elegantly philosophical Ram Lakhan, was one of ambiguity, neither the voice in repose nor that of anger. Still, as long as he could maintain his shop, Raghu Ram remained sahi .