Generation And Weakness Revisited

When were old voices heard as mentally weak in Nagwa? When did angry voices become willful and selfish, and silences become lonely and pathetic? In the histories of the families with whom I spoke, two transitions marked shifts in the perception of the old person's voice and weakness: the loss of authority and the loss of usefulness . Both were gradual and contested processes, but each marked, fitfully, a shift in how an old parent was heard. The first, the loss of authority over household decisions and resources, was associated with the emergence of anger and a hot dimag . The second, the loss of usefulness, that is, of any significant interpersonal role within the household, was associated with emerging criticisms of the old person babbling meaninglessly—bakbak, pat pat, barbar .

"If you have property," many across the four neighborhoods informed me, "or if you have money, your children will do your Seva ." Few in Nagwa had significant property or savings to guarantee filial obedience. As in the colonies but more quickly and not necessarily for the same incentives, brothers tended to fission off one by one starting with the eldest, ultimately leaving parents with the youngest son. Thus Ganga Jali lived in a single room, literally a hole in the wall, with her youngest, a repairer of bicycles and tires who some said was himself weak-brained and who could barely earn enough to feed himself. Across the lane lived Ganga Jali's two married sons and their wives and children. Their households would occasionally feed Ganga Jali but were not responsible for her daffy support.

Residents in Nagwa, unlike those in the colonies, did not seem to think that such families were recent or unusual phenomena. Nor did they look to the modern or to the West to ground a rhetoric of why families collapse. The rural villages in neighboring districts to the south of the city from which many families had migrated were not remembered as places where the politics of intergenerational support were that different, and these memories are consistent with Bernard Cohn's data for Chamar family size thirty, to forty years earlier in a village similar to those that Nagwa residents or their recent ancestors had left, where the majority of households were nuclear and several composed of a single aged individual.^[23]

Vishwanath lived with his wife Juguli and three sons and their families in one of the larger houses on the main road. He told me he was about seventy. As usual I asked my series of questions about floods, marriage, kids, and Partition, and estimated he was in his mid-sixties. He no longer worked, but owned the family house and had some savings. His sons drove or pedaled rickshaws or worked as day laborers: none were financially secure, and all remained dependent upon their

parents' property and savings. They had not separated into separate ghars ; Vishwanath was proud of this fact. "I am the head of the household. They give me their earnings." His pride, unlike that of families in the colonies, did not rest on being a "joint family"; the concept, as such, was rarely articulated in Nagwa. Rather, the unified house was testimony to Vishwanath's strength, to his ability to fend off weakness.

Yet his sons fought among themselves. Why? "Because sons want to take over." Intergenerational stress, among the majority of families in Nagwa, was usually manifest as horizontal stress, particularly between brothers. The narrative of the consequent theodicy—of the effort by parents to comprehend the bitter fighting of their children—ran as follows: "If I had property, I could keep my sons together." Without such imagined property, fathers could not become the powerful bodies of the Kesari Jivan ad, sixty therefore strong. The ubiquity of the Carstairs-Kakar construction of oedipal deferral, generated within their theoretical formulations from a figure of the powerful Father, is delimited by class and inheritance. Vipat experienced his family's torment through the fighting between his sons, not in their construction of his marginalized dying space. Vishwanath repeatedly articulated the fact that if he did not have sufficient property, his sons would break apart, making him politically marginal. "They would take power forcefully If one has property, he is obeyed out of fear; if not, he is not." Would he, like Vipat, have transferred his property to his sons? "No. If I had no more money, my sons might no longer take care of me."

In reality, Vishwanath was not as autonomous as he claimed. His sons were not giving him most of their wages, and they were making separate purchases for their families. "But they tell me whatever they buy." His authority had already shifted, from active control to performative validation. Vishwanath could still maintain himself as ghar ka malik , as the boss of the household, but the meaning of boss had changed, giving his sons greater autonomy—from him and from each other—while preserving a sense of common purpose and coherence by maintaining the father's centrality through performative Seva . Given the limited resources of Vishwanath's sons, the lack of a significant differential between their incomes, their father's property, and the old man's unreadiness—unlike his neighbor Vipat—to lie down on his charpoy, there was more to be gained by staying together.

Juguli, his wife, was about a decade younger than Vishwanath. She had two daughters-in-law at home; her middle son's wife had died. Juguli no longer had control over all domestic purchases, but she still organized the labor of her bahus , her daughters-in-law. Vishwanath said: "When she is too weak to work, the daughter-in-law will take over. When, for example, if she were to make roti and to do so would kill her." There was no single contender for Juguli's authority: she had two daughters-in-law, not one, and as long as the households remained together Juguli was not the primary rival to her daughter-in-laws' control. She and Vishwanath were both concerned about quarrels between the bahus , for they felt that family fission was rooted in daughters-in-law fighting. Juguli's role as a grand-

mother was heightened by her two motherless grandchildren. Given her ability to work, but more important her central role in running the household and in acting as a surrogate mother, Juguli's voice, angry at times, was not heard as useless, hot, and weak.^[24]

Next door, Tapeshwara's four sons had already split: each along with his family occupied a small room in the house. A widow, probably in her late sixties, Tapeshwara ate with her youngest son, Gulam, and his wife. There was little room in the small house, and Tapeshwara would say that she wished her sons would move away. But more, she wished they would stop fighting with one another. "We don't think she is a burden," her youngest daughter-in-law, with whom she eats, said to me. Tapeshwara looked upset, and remained silent, I thought a bit sullen. Her bahu looked at her, and then said: "Her sons have grown up and left their mother." Tapeshwara sighed, and spoke after some time. "In the old times, old people were respected. Not now. If you have money, they pay attention. If not, they don't." Tapeshwara was lamenting a decline not so much in an institution (the family) as in a more generalized set of relations. The reciprocity of the gift relationship had been replaced by self-interest. Tapeshwara's lament is the history of Nagwa, in which relations of weakening replace those of true Seva .

Tapeshwara experienced her sons' fighting with one another, their denial of her pleas for unity, as feelings of weakness and worry. Her dimag "runs from here to there." She, and the daughter-in-law who had invested the most in feeding her. said that these feelings were directly attributable to the behavior of the other sons. Tapeshwara, more than her daughter-in-law, blamed the local version of a declining cosmos in which people came to act for their individual interest and others get weak, and not just her own sons per se. Her relatives deny bad-family explanations: She feels weak because she is old. She is weak because we are weak. Look at how many rooms we live in, look at how many chapatis we can give our children.

In Chittupur, another Harijan settlement not far from Nagwa but slightly wealthier, the old patriarch Mausaji lived on a charpoy in a little wooden shelter constructed in the middle of the family courtyard. His sons had long ago separated, and his wife was still receiving a steady income as a housekeeper. I learned of Mausaji through his wife's niece, Tara Devi, who sometimes cooked for me.^[25] "What do you ask old people?" Tara once asked me. I told her. "Well," she said after a pause, "my uncle is like that."

TD: Durga [his daughter-in-law] used to give him food. When she gave him a roti, he would always ask for more: Aur do! and at first she used to give it to him. But he would keep asking, and she saw that he was hiding them under his bed.

LC: What does she do?

TD: They don't want to give him food. It is expensive! The other sons don't give him any, it is only Durga who gives him. She says, he is my father. . . .

LC: What about Mausiji [his wife]?

TD: She says, "I do not know this one."

LC: And if they don't give him [food], that is, anything more than is necessary?

TD: Then he will keep asking for more. And he will get angry. . . . And he swears a lot.

Tara began with food and its transaction. Food was given by some but not others, food was demanded when there was not enough, food was hidden under a mattress. The currency of measuring food transactions—for what she was addressing were moral challenges to a domestic economy—was the chapati. Hiding food was here less importantly a sign of cognitive loss or of maladjustment and imbalance, and more obviously a challenge to who wields authority over basic resources. On the one hand, Mausaji unfairly demanded more chapatis when others should have had them. He was the old fool of the Ravi Das poems who has not gotten beyond ego; he was weakening his family by demanding more than his share. Yet his sons had split and had in consequence forsaken Mausaji. His demands for roti could alternatively be read as the hot dimag of the abandoned elder, weakened by the Bad Family, the poor old man of the Ravi Das poems whose wife screams "Ghost!" or in this case, "I do not know this one."

Tara was enough of an insider in Mausaji's family to know what Durga and Mausiji might have said, but distant enough to broach the subject with me. What she had at stake was different from what was at stake for the other women, who heard Mausaji's demands as the weak mind of the Bad Family. "He is treated," she said at one point, "like a dog." Mausiji, however, put things differently: "This happens with age. Yes, I'm fine now, but in time. . ."—she bent over like a hunchback and felt her way along as one who could no longer walk or see. Invoking the general weakness of old age, Mausiji shifted the terms of the question I had put to her, which had been about matha (brain, mind), turning it through the figure of the blind and crippled hunchback to one on the nature of kamzori . When I first visited Chittupur, after I had met Mausaji, Mausaji, his wife, was eager for me to meet another old woman, their neighbor Shanti. Despite her name, she was presented to me as a bakbakvali . "She has no one," Mausiji said. Shanti was offered for the anthropologist's gaze as an example of true degradation and as a matter of voice and of dimag , versus the understandable eccentricities of the frail old age of Mausaji.

Mausaji told me he was born in 1906; but given his children's ages and their recollections, I felt that he was probably born some ten to fifteen years later. Over a decade ago he could no longer work as a laborer and he opened up a small shop selling pan, or betel leaf. Six years ago he had to stop selling; he "got a wind" (hava laga ) and could no longer lift things with his left hand. "Getting a wind" might be expressed in American lay culture as "having a stroke," but conveyed more in its utilization of the semantics of hava , air or wind. For the old person in particular (for getting a wind was not restricted to the old), wind and breath were key markers structuring the experience of extremely weak old age. Mausaji's family framed

his weakness as hath pair ; for Tara and for others who knew Mausaji from a greater distance, his kamzori was embodied through an angry voice and a hot dimag . But Mausaji himself experienced his weakness as a disability of breath and wind. He had difficulty breathing; he coughed; and hava had wasted his arm. The identification of wind with the experienced old body and its narrative elaboration is not surprising in the context of undernutrition, endemic tuberculosis, heavy tobacco smoking, urban air pollution, ineffectively regulated workplace hazards, and the increased cardiopulmonary complaints of later life. The experience of hava was rooted in the economic, environmental, and epidemiologic conditions of working-class Varanasi.

Wind, vayu or vata in Ayurvedic and folk traditions, is the humor that predominates in old age. It is associated less with pulmonary complaints than with ailments often translated in allopathic terms as "nervous diseases." Vayu is the agent of motion and direction. "It is so called," the god Dhanvantari reveals in Susruta , "from the fact of its coursing throughout the universe."^[26] Zimmermann has reexamined Aurveda as a science of cooking, the therapeutic manipulation of the relations between classes of terrains, plants, animals, humans, and disorders in terms of the food chains that link them and transmit and transform certain essences or flavors, rasa . "What the Rishis, the seers of Vedic times, quite literally saw was that the universe is a kitchen, a kind of chemistry of rasa."^[27] The function of vayu was conceived of in Susruta as moving food and its successive incarnations through the cooking vessels of the body.^[28]

Excesses of vayu are disorders of motion and are suffered as such: as convulsions, paralyses, and problems with the feet,^[29] and as changes in mental state. Mind, manas , in several of the darsanas , or classical systems of philosophy, is that which moves between sense organs, objects perceived, and the stuff of consciousness. Like hath pair ki kamzori , the weakness of breath and application of wind for Mausaji concern his inability to move about in several senses. Mausaji, however, did not root his weakness and wind problems merely in his old age. "Khana nahin hai ," he said bitterly, there is no food, referring both to his marginalized present and specifically to his getting wind six years earlier. His family immediately objected to this accusation of bad Seva : he lost his memory then, they told me, and thus he wrongly thinks that he did not eat. Memory loss was thus invoked long after I was successively reintroduced to Mausaji's weakness by Tara, Durga, Mausiji, his sons, and Mausaji himself. And it was invoked to explain a discrepancy between Mausaji's and his family's memory of a history of food transactions. Memory loss in Chittupur was a second-order problem, not central to weakness like angry voice, hand-foot loss, or wind and breath trouble, but an obvious symptom of weakness that need only be mentioned to deny the Bad Family, here indexed by chapati counts.

The relationship between the hearing of hot brain and the loss of authority in the family was clearest when there was a generational divide of the old parent or

parents versus a single son, daughter, or daughter-in-law. With these cases the contest for control of the household was more vertical than with the successive splittings off of multiple siblings. Kapura, in her sixties, lived with her son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren. She took care of the grandchildren and kept the house clean. Her daughter-in-law saw Kapura as a weak and meddlesome fool, harshly calling her such—"Cutiya! " [a term of abuse]—whenever Kapura ventured to interrupt. Kapura was terrified of this rather mean-tempered bahu , but the latter heard Kapura as a willful and meddlesome voice. In the case of Siranji, whose resistance to taking a tonic has been discussed, family relations were less of a caricature.

Siranji was "not less than one hundred," as she put it; her grandchildren's guesses ranged, but centered on about eighty. My own guess was that Siranji was in her mid-eighties. She was, in short, quite old, vying with Vipat for the distinction of the oldest person in Nagwa. She had lost three sons older than Babu Lal, the only one left alive and then in his fifties. Siranji lived with Babu Lal, his wife Parbati, their five sons and their unmarried daughters, the sons' families, and a young village man who worked for Babu Lal in exchange for room and board. She had a grandson from one of her older sons, but according to this man, Lakhan, Siranji and Babu Lal cast out his widowed mother after his father died. The two compounds, Babu Lal's and Lakhan's, were adjoining, but there was no matlab , literally meaning or significance and connoting relationship, between them. Both were among the larger households in Nagwa Basti, especially Babu Lal's with its two courtyards, animal pens, and vegetable shop. Babu Lal and his sons were involved in several small enterprises, had some land, ran the vegetable shop, and worked as drummers as did several Chamar families in Nagwa. The household was large and, as a result of Babu Lal's success, has remained joint. Parbati managed the household with the aid of three daughters-in-law and their children, as well as that of her remaining daughters.

With the emergence of Parbati's role as sas , as the mother-in-law of this joint family, her ongoing role as bahu to Siranji became increasingly redundant. Siranji still attempted to direct many of the household's affairs, but Parbati increasingly paid her no heed. She did not cross Siranji openly, and in some ways still maintained the deference of a bahu , but there were no domains of the household not under her firm control. Siranji knew this, and over the years, the forum of contesration shifted from the ghar and the culha (the hearth) and increasingly to the body of Siranji itself. This shift was that of Lear , of the progressive compression of the king's domain from England to his court to a few retainers to his body and wits.

More and more, the primary item of contestation was dava , medicine. Siranji lived in pain, which she described as an intermittent fever or a hotness in her stomach and a chronic difficulty in breathing. She interpreted these experiences as sickness, bimari , and felt that with proper medicine she would be cured. Proper medicine consisted, for Siranji, of powerful pills from a good private doctor. It did not consist of injections or of the big bottle on the shelf. She recalled with anger and

some fright her visit "a long time ago" to the free clinic at the BHU Hospital, when the doctors gave her "saline IV," which she hated. Siranji's constant demand—to her family and of me—was for good medicine, and when I tried to take her to a doctor friend of mine who saw patients at the hospital, she got upset: "They will make me stay at the hospital. If I go, they will give me an injection and I'll die. So I will not go there."

The big bottle of vitamin tonic sat on a shelf in the small outer room that Siranji and her grandchildren slept in and where the drums were kept. Pointing to the tonic, she told me, "It burns me." In a stage whisper, Siranji added to me, about Parbati, "She wouldn't care if I die. She abuses me." As Siranji pointed to dava as an index of transactional inadequacy, her son and grandchildren (Parbati as the good bahu never openly criticized Siranji) pointed to the chapati count. Siranji, Babu Lal, his eldest son Amarnath and Amarnath's wife Gita, Rajesh Pathak, and I were in the outer courtyard where the animals were kept and where, in winter months, Siranji would sit outdoors. She was fixing a basket as we others were talking of types of food and of her illness. "I eat one chapati [daily], sometimes two," said Siranji. Gita laughed and turned to me. "She eats four!" Babu Lal, Gita, Amarnath, and Rajesh all found this image, of the old woman and her four chapatis, of the hypocritical abstinence of the hungry old, exceedingly funny Siranji denied eating four, angrily, but her son kept giggling and telling me, "Ask her if she eats four! Ask her if she eats four!"

Gita's joke was of a common pattern, the frequent teasing of Siranji by her granddaughters-in-law and especially her granddaughters. Whereas Gita and her fellow bahus were quiet in Parbati's presence, around Siranji more of a joking relationship prevailed, echoing the anthropologist Radcliffe-Brown's classic observation.^[30] For the granddaughters, teasing Siranji was an art. Controlling her granddaughters' demeanor was one of the domains Siranji had no intention of relinquishing. When they would thus provoke her by acting "unseemly," Siranji would get upset and begin abusing them: "Cutiya s! I'll break their teeth!" and so forth. Getting Siranji to produce her hot and weak-minded voice was a favorite pastime in Babu Lal's house. Within the walls of their compound, the family joked with Siranji. She responded with her curses and mutterings, sometimes in anger and, sometimes, it seemed, in disguised good humor. Through her weak and hot persona, Siranji could take center stage and criticize her family for perceived neglect. Her complaints were ignored but her cursing was warmly received.

Outsiders differed on the causes of Siranji's hot brain—the ever-cursing voice that could be heard from the lane—beyond the definitionally obvious, that it was due to the weakness of old age. The central explanation, again, was the Bad Family, her family's not giving her medicine, "especially when they have so much money." Economic difference played a central role in neighbors' perceptions of Siranji, for Babu Lal was among the richest men in his part of the basti. Siranji, from this perspective, was not only a member of a rich family and therefore, given the logic of weakening, not really all that weak, but as a superannuated old woman

she stood for her family and was an icon of its social and political position. Many, therefore, identified her with Babu Lal's various political and factional ties, and in general, with a perception that this family was not weakened. Despite its literal presence, day and night, in the lane, her voice was not really heard all that often, unlike the often less heated voices of other elders like Dulari and Ganga Jali who "had no one" and were thus unambiguously weak-brained. Siranji, for such outsiders, was weak to the extent that her weakness suggested the wrongness of Babu Lal's family.

For the family, their hearing of and love for Siranji shifted frames outside of household space. When my efforts to get her to go with me the BHU Hospital continued to fail, I took Siranji one morning to a private doctor in the city. Her granddaughter Hoshila, then unmarried and still Siranji's chief tormentor in the household, carefully dressed and wrapped a shawl around Siranji and led her outside toward the rickshaw I had hired. I was struck by the pair of women, within the household "madwoman" and "wretch" to each other, slowly and lovingly making their way through the lane out to the main road.

Unlike Mrs. Mishra in Mussourie, Siranji was only hot-brained at certain times and from certain perspectives. Her heat could be selectively produced by her family by joking with her, and Siranji was aware of this process. But both women were called weak and hot-brained. Both engendered certain threats and certain responses. Where Siranji's "weak brain" differed was in the fact that her family was able to keep it within the household. Siranji for her part knew when not to speak. Her battle was within; she did not challenge her children by shaming the household. Her voice usually did not present the same threat to meaning. Mrs. Mishra's weak brain, however, could not be contained. She wandered; she made accusations to strangers; she had hit strangers on occasion; and perhaps more important, her strained relations with her son and daughter-in-law were well-known. The weakness of her familial body could not be convincingly reframed. The challenge of old people like Mrs. Mishra, whom I would have identified as demented, did not demand a new set of categories, meanings, or models; she was encompassed within the same idioms of distress as Siranji. What differed was in how and when these categories were used, and in the implications for the quality of familial relations. ú