Eight
Dog Ladies and the Beriya Baba

in which the gendered old body is heard differently at home and in the interstice

Dogs And Old Women

Mashima, Auntie, lived in the Bengali quarter. Early each morning she left her small rented room with a bag of just-baked chapatis, made with flour bought from her monthly allowance. She stopped at the homes of several families in the quarter, Bengali Brahmans like herself, and collected a chapati or two from each. Thus armed, she would proceed slowly along the long lane running the length of the quarter. Her hungry companions would begin to follow, but Mashima was not yet ready for them and kept a steady pace. At Sonarpura crossing, she emerged from the network of lanes and crossed the main road to a well-known sweet shop, the Ocean of Milk. The owner was fond of Mashima and would give her sweet curds leftover from the previous day: "But they're not for humans, Mashima." Mashima reentered the lanes where her companions awaited her eagerly: they were all dogs. They followed behind her in a growing pack and growled furiously at any passerby who appeared in their dog's-eye view to threaten Mashima. When she reached her destination, a small clearing deep within the lanes where more dogs were waiting, Mashima sat down for a moment to catch her breath. Then she began her day's work, feeding the dogs of Varanasi.

Dogs were not beloved in the city. My friends the Banerjees, one of the Mashima's sources for chapatis, then had two pet dogs that they had trained; the family was considered eccentric. For Mr. Banerjee, a civil engineer who had insisted his wife attend graduate school against her initial wishes, and who then decided to raise his two daughters like sons so that they would always be self-sufficient, training purebred dogs was part of a consciously modernist fashioning of life and family. But for his neighbors, dogs were dirty—skulking in dank and odorous corners, barking incessantly at night, wandering over the cremation ghats, feeding on whatever they might find there—and not worth the effort. Chil-

dren in the quarter played with dogs, learning from their siblings and friends in early childhood to elicit yelps by hitting, kicking, and stoning them. Dogs were interstitial creatures, essential inhabitants of the space between households, and as such had no strong claims to domestic support.

Dogs, Mashima told me, were her children. She would talk to, scold, and comfort them. She was always enlarging her route, waxing ever more powerful in old age by including more lanes and more dogs. "She has no one," noted her neighbors, framing her as the pathetic kasivasi woman whom the professors at the Vasant College luncheon had once told me was the typical old person, the abject figure who comes to stand for the old age of others. She was a child widow, one who had lost her husband when she was fourteen and already the mother of a baby daughter. The daughter had been married for many years and lived in Calcutta. Mashima herself had lived in Calcutta until the early 1970s when she came to Kashi. She was now in her seventies. Her family was wealthy and, she told me, its members were cultured bhadralok . she had nephews in Canada and other foreign places and had met the filmmaker Satyajit Ray Some of her brothers and her daughter sent her small monthly remittances, and she received a Central Government pension (minus five rupees to the postman to guarantee its delivery). Altogether, it was enough to live simply and pay the rent, with some funds left over for the dogs. Still, Mashima described herself as a religious mendicant oblivious to gain and surviving off the daily kindnesses of others.

"Why not feed . . . the cows?" a neighbor who objected to the daily parade of dogs once suggested. Other people fed cows, Mashima responded, but dogs too had claims upon us. Dogs, she used to say, were also mendicants, like the old people of the city. But most neighbors to whom I recounted the story of the Dog Lady resisted the explicit connection of old people and dogs that Mashima put forth. Dogs did not explicitly anchor the discourse of old age in the quarter or in the other three neighborhoods. Others besides old women and dogs shared the interstice; the neighbor's comment about cows suggested a more meaningful association. Like the old, cows were in theory objects of veneration found throughout the sacred city. But in practice both cows and widows were obstacles that blocked one's path. Banarsis frequently recited a couplet on the things visitors trip over when they reach the holy city:

Rand, sanr, sirhi, sannyasi
Inse bache Seva to Kasi

Widow, bull, steps, sannyasi,
Avoiding these one can enjoy Kashi.^[1]

Varanasi was the city of holy things in painful excess—liberated renunciates, steps descending to the Ganga, auspicious animals, and pious old widows—but it was also the city of a cultivated insouciance and joie de vivre. Widows, classically inauspicious in Hindu India, did, like cows, steps, and holy men, become part of the

spiritual capital of Kashi as pilgrimage center. But for those who had to live in Varanasi everyday, the couplet suggested that life was more pleasurable to the extent that one avoided the claims of the pious and pure and their self-appointed protectors. The ambivalent image of widows in excess was perhaps more extreme in the temple town of Brindavin in western Uttar Pradesh, where a tout once accosted me and urged me to make a contribution to his family's temple where every night "ten thousand Bengali mothers" were fed. Fortified by my contribution, he promised, this gargantuan mass of widowed mothers would sing bhajans, hymns, to God, and garner me the resulting merit.

Mothers had to eat: thus the tour's claim upon me and the source of his not insignificant income. Mothers and cows were never of the interstice but belonged to someone and somewhere. Bhajan ashrams, homes for upper-caste Hindu widows where their voices could be collectivized and routinized as maternal blessing through the bhajan, transformed the threat of the individual widow's voice. Whatever limited resources such widow houses offered, old women who lacked even the slender protection of the domestication of their voice as bhajan were seldom heard as mothers. In the lanes of the old city, the voices of old kasivasi women were heard less as mothers than as madwomen. Mashima did not mind the children who taunted her and cried "pagli , she told me; she could talk back to them. The adults who made fun of her, who pulled at her clothes, or who accused her of being a witch and giving the dogs poison were less easily dismissible. She could talk back, but her Hindi was poor and in any case she tended to be misunderstood. As much as the conditions of mendicancy, this inability to make her voice heard as other than degraded or repetitive noise grounded Mashima's dog metaphor.

Like other elderly widows and old men of the quarter, Mashima spent the early mornings visiting friends and aiding those less mobile. The maintenance of these networks required considerable effort and mobility. The kasivasi was constantly between households as she worked to domesticate the interstice. As the Dog Lady, Mashima was the most vivid example of an interstitial elder I knew, because in domesticating the interstice she attempted to transform its most pathetic signs—alley dogs—into a family Her economic security, her Brahman and bhadralok status, and her personality all contributed to her fragile success. But most kasivasi widows, and other widows whose caste did not privilege kasivasi as a solution to the threat of destitution, were in danger of becoming Dog Ladies in a different sense, of being read through the interstice as embodiments of not only pathos but of a threatening bark and complete degradation. The genius in Mashima's eccentricity was in this: that she explicitly spoke of the condition of the kasivasi elderly in refusing the lure of the bovine and claiming kinship with dogs.

Though not self-consciously invoked by most old people, dogs were powerful signs of the interstice and were frequently juxtaposed with figures of interstitial old women. The juxtaposition was sometimes iconic, that is, dogs and old women

were associated because they appeared to share certain qualities. Thus on the occasion of the United Nations-sponsored "Elders' Day," an internationalist holiday locally advocated by groups like HelpAge India, the Times of India in 1988 commemorated the occasion with a large photograph of three old women clad in the white saris of widows and shown next to a sleeping dog, seemingly white in the picture (see photograph on p. 262). One of the widows has her back to us, the second has her mouth open, and the third is severely hunchbacked and holds a small cane. The sleeping dog was one more marginal white-clad figure in the gutter.^[2]

The Elder's Day image also conveyed a symbolic juxtaposition, that is, a connection between dogs and old women based upon particular cultural associations. In both classical Hindu and popular local narrative, dogs were one of several archetypical denizens of the ultimate dying spaces of the Hindu polis, the cremation ghats. In Varanasi, necropolis par excellence, the fierce form of Lord Shiva known as Bhairava was an important and powerfully transgressive deity and was closely associated with dogs.^[3] Each night, alongside the Ganga, dogs howled and barked in menacingly lupine cadences: Bhairava was wandering the lanes and ghats, seeking expiation for his sin, the death of Brahma, the old man of the gods. David White, in his essay "Dogs Die," examined the dog as hellhound in Vedic and other Indo-European traditions.^[4] In Varanasi, dogs signified degradation and putrescence as much as death: they not only frequented cremation grounds but ate what they could find there. To be "treated like a dog" thus conveyed a complex set of associations suggesting both iconic dependency and noise and symbolic pollution and threat.

Old Women And Madwomen

As the story goes, the king died and the queen lost her mind and the kingdom turned into a wasteland .
BHISHAM SAHNI, "RANI MEHTO "

Mashima recognized and could contain her dog-ness. She received family assistance and could afford to accept no cooked food for herself. She took chapatis—and in doing so maintained a social network—only for the dogs. By refusing food for herself and by transforming dogs into cows, she challenged what it meant to be old and dependent on the interstice. If dogs could be cows, then Mashima through her practice was not the abject aunt but the good mother, daily distributing the largesse of the Ocean of Milk.

Still, for most passersby she seemed pathetic. One neighbor was my friend Bijay, through whom I had first met Mashima. He told me that he knew that I was on the lookout for crazy old people. "She's been in the lane just outside my house every morning for years," he told me one morning, "I wouldn't have noticed that she was quite mad but for you." The powers of the imported gaze aside, however, many local kids didn't need me to tell them the Dog Lady was a mad old pagli . The frequency with which local children sought out and teased old women—calling

them madwomen—-was one of the masons the project of studying senility in Varanasi had evolved in the first place. In 1983 during an earlier stay in the Bengali quarter, I was sitting outside my rented room on Pandey Ghat while five or six children were playing nearby. A hunchbacked old woman wearing a dirty white sari appeared in the lane and quietly set about collecting some dung patties that were not her own from a wall on which they were drying. One of the children saw her, motioned to his friends, and the whole gang ran over, shouting "Pagli! pagli! " and pelting her with small stones. The woman began cursing the children. Strong and archaic curses from the frail old hunchback sounded funny to the kids, and they laughed and laughed. The pagli left off stealing dung patties and limped away.

Koki, the old Bengali widow who lived in the Ravindrapuri stairwell, was similarly an interstitial elder at high risk for becoming a pagli Though she called her stairwell home, Koki spent her days going from house to house and from institution to institution—visiting friends, receiving foodstuffs, going from the Ganga to the Durga temple. Continually on the road at a vigorous gait, Koki brooked no interruptions. Whenever I tried to talk to her in motion, she would tell me that she was busy: "Get lost!" Dogs and children were her other bêtes noirs. If a dog followed at her heels, Koki would turn and begin scolding it. Children, both those in the colony and from the slum across the road next to the abandoned cinema hall, would come running to watch the mad widow talk to dogs. Children found Koki—with her busy gait and sharp voice—a delight to mock and call pagli Koki, unlike genteel Mashima, would quickly let loose with a string of Bengali curses that few of the children could understand. The heteroglossia of the old voice—its incomprehensible and varying cadences of class, rural life, region, and level of education—added to the pleasures of its elicitation.

Years after the Bengali quarter stoning, I asked many of the younger brothers and sisters of the erstwhile Pandey Ghat gang what was the reason for stoning a pagli . The kids all said that you teased a pagli because of her voice. In particular, they hoped for the following sorts of things: galis, or abuses, often quite obscene and usually in the form of a curse; errors, which widows—often from distant regions of India, Bangladesh, and Nepal—made when they spoke quickly in Hindi or Bengali; and bakbak , or utter nonsense.

Paglis would curse, but their curses were empty and powerless. They were mad, but mad in the way usually only kids could see. Bijay and his neighbors saw Mashima as eccentric, but it took the transposed gaze of the ethnographic moment—"I wouldn't have noticed that she was quite mad but for you"—to transform pathos into pathology: Children, not yet mature enough to hear the familial body or its lack in the old voice, tended to hear its humor. Small children were sometimes frightened by such old women, and their older siblings and playmates might tease them with the threat that the old witch, like some lakarsunghva , would get them. But for most kids, most of the time, old women's voices were not threatening in Varanasi. The madness heard by children in old voices was gendered; there were also pagal, madmen, in the lanes of the quarter, but they were usually

far younger men. The old men or babas who wandered the interstices of the city were heard differently. And yet the 1996 lakarsunghva murders suggested that the hearing of interstitial voices in moments in which the familial and domestic appeared critically under attack could transform the usual scaffolding of gender and age in what rendered voices crazy, dangerous, and witchlike.

Madwomen And Witches

The uncanny effect of epilepsy and of madness has the same origin. The layman sees in them the working of forces hitherto unsuspected in his fellowmen .
SIGMUND FREUD, "THE 'UNCANNY' "

Stolen dung, the voices of old women, and the movements of children mattered differently in Varanasi's rural hinterland. On the rare occasions when such things happened, suspected witches or lakarsunghvas were attacked less as strangers whose voices could not be heard as meaningful other than indexing menace, and more as neighbors or relatives whose voices made demands that challenged shifting configurations of land, capital, and Seva .

Martha Chen and Jean Drèze's work on the survival and quality of life of Indian widows and Bina Agarwal's examination of the relation between land ownership and the survival and quality of life of women more generally have drawn attention to the correlation of witchcraft accusations and the contested ownership of land by unmarried, separated and widowed women.^[5] Witchcraft has flourished in areas that have been rendered marginal through the intensification of a cash economy, the Sanskritization of practices of land tenure and patriarchal authority, and the delegitimation of women's rights in land. Earlier ethnographic work on rural witchcraft accusation and death in north India, such as Carstairs's Death of a Witch , has been reread by Chen in terms of the contested land ownership of the suspected witch.^[6]

Such economic interpretations of witchcraft accusation have been lacking and are critical. Broader socioeconomic reasoning may also be useful to analyze why periodic intensifications of witchcraft and child-stealing accusation—as in 1996—occur when they do. Several social facts may lie some distance behind the lakarsunghva rumors: the everyday violence, to use Nancy Scheper-Hughes's phrase,^[7] when parents and other family members feel they are forced to bond or sell not only their children's labor but the rights to their bodies; the widespread knowledge, in eastern Uttar Pradesh, that there were brokers to whom one could sell one of one's kidneys for a relatively high price, thus the knowledge that the global market had an interest in separating one into salable parts; and the recent rise in the cost of numerous basic commodities with the decline in government controls and subsidies in the wake of neoliberal "structural adjustment," and its potential effect on people's sense of vulnerability within a growing space of marginality.

The question for us here is why and how certain old people become representative of the forces that seem to impinge upon households and communities, in

both the normalized theodicy of everyday misfortune and violence and the extraordinary theodicy of social panics. How witchcraft may work as a way to confront misfortune has been one of the central themes in the anthropology of suffering.^[8] My approach here will be to ask what is it that in extraordinary times makes the voice and appearance of certain persons not humorously or abjectly witchlike but frighteningly and uncannily so, and, moving in the other direction, to ask how the possibility or social memory of the uncanny may structure the everyday abjection of the interstitial dying space. How does the repetitive request of the elder for support become heard as a dangerous curse, and how do memories of the curse structure more everyday hearings?

In his essay on the experience of the "unheimlich " or "uncanny," Freud begins with two observations. First, after the philosopher Friedrich Schelling, he describes the class of things that tend to provoke an uncanny feeling in us as follows: "Everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light." Second, he notes that the word's contrary heimlich (and the same is true in different ways for "canny" and the more literal translation "homely"), can suggest not only the comfortable, trusted, and familiar but also the secretive and unpleasant, "so that 'heimlich' comes to have the meaning usually ascribed to 'unheimlich .' "^[9] The familiar is suddenly strange: a rupture appears in the taken-for-grantedness of things. The old woman's everyday bakbak is suddenly weird and threatening.

This return of the repressed works on the usual two levels for Freud, suggesting both an earlier developmental stage of infantile narcissism and an earlier societal stage of primitive animism. Freud goes on to question why "the phenomenon of the 'double' "—the perceived repetition of events, likenesses, and experiences—often generates an uncanny feeling. For readers of Freud less committed to his specific narratives of child development and cultural evolution, the experience of the uncanny and particularly of the uncanny double has come to suggest a rupture in the symbolic order and a conflict between the meaning of a sign and its materiality.

The unexpected strangeness of the old body is rooted in the disruption of its familial significance. The familial body of the old person, whether literally displaced from its expected charpoy or hearth into the liminal space between households or discursively displaced from its familial context into a new administrative science of old age, regains a voice and is no longer the unhearable inhabitant of a dying space. For the urban middle class, over the past century, this displaced and suffering elder has periodically embodied a colonial and postcolonial predicament of culture in which the familiar and foreign form shifting hybrids.

For the rural and urban poor, we have seen how the politics and phenomenology of everyday weakness diminishes the unique significance of the old body. If the rupture of the familial itself is to an extent normalized, suffering old bodies may have less apocalyptic significance for the poor than for the bhadralok and structurally similar groups. Old bodies that bespeak millenarian promise—such as, perhaps, the old woman of the Balua affair who took no food for five days and

nights—seem to do so by radically renouncing any familial dependency. Within the transactional networks sustaining persons and families in communities like Nagwa, the bodies of vulnerable children more than those of vulnerable elders may become metonyms of family and ghar and of their transactional health. For Siranji's family, the old woman was a far more ambivalent vehicle of the adequacy of their gifts than was her grandson Raju. Throughout Nagwa, old people were at risk for being perceived as useless mouths continually demanding chapatis destined for the equally vulnerable but far more promising young. When as in 1996 the relation between a marginalized community's health and the well-being and survival of its children appears radically threatened, particularly given the chapati counts that frame the young and old as contestants for survival, old persons may be at greater risk of becoming strange threats: witches, lakarsunghvas .

In gerontopolitan Varanasi, the ubiquity and ideological centrality of interstitial old bodies and voices renders them part of the normalized topography of the urban exterior: rand , sand , sirhi , sannyasi. Like cows and steps, widows and babas are familiar and only occasionally irksome features of the landscape. Interstitial old voices in the city do not threaten any but the youngest children. These are often teased by their older playmates—see the old woman, she's a witch, a dain —and are shushed into bed by the admonitions of mothers and aunts: hush, or the lakarsunghva will get you. Such scary tales might be seen to evoke and rehearse the crises of child development, after Freud, but in the context of everyday and extraordinary concerns surrounding child survival their ubiquity takes on a different cast.

The figure of the old baba or witch of play and bedtime fantasy, ready to devour or steal young children, recalls an uncanny circulation between the very old and very young, offering a grammar for a different sort of intimate enemy than the alienated familial bodies of Ghar Kali. In everyday play, the monstrous elderly are invoked to stabilize differences of age: the old but not very old tell of them to their children; the young but not very young tell of them to their younger siblings: young is to old as innocence and vulnerability are to knowledge and danger. But witches recall the fragility of the familial. At critical moments when the hegemonic obviousness and necessity of the social order threaten to collapse—when the strangeness of the order of things overwhelms its functional content—the order of generation itself is rendered unstable and opaque.

Michael Taussig in The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America described how Bolivian peasants in the context of the introduction of tin mining, the intensification of wage labor, and the commodification of body, time, land, relationships, and life, "captured" the transformations of commodity fetishization by "subjecting [them] to a paganism." The devil in peasant narrative is monstrous but not terrifying, an ambivalent figure reflecting the conflicted yet critical consciousness of peasants regarding the source of their growing affliction.^[10] Witches and dangerous old babas are ambivalent in a different sense, humorous figures of everyday generational difference periodically transformed into monstrous figures

of emergency. The oscillation between these may reflect an effort to capture a set of social processes by which both rural peasants and urban slum-dwellers are constituted as subjects through intensifying forms of commodification—of one's children, of one's body parts—that explode the borders of both the family and the body.

In the everyday play of children as well as in the literature of affliction of the region around Varanasi and more generally in north India, the relation between terror and abjection circles around the female witch,^[11] Old men as babas, as I will discuss below, draw upon the dense field of the renunciate and the rishi. The ambiguity of the doubled figure of widow-witch specifically indexes the ambiguity of mother-aunt in the narrative of the Bad Family. Dogs, ghouls, and Bhairava are joined on their cremation ghat perambulations in urban folklore by the figures of dains and curail -like vampiresses; the old woman as dog and madwoman draws upon the stock figure of the dain .

The psychoanalytic readings of Carstairs and Kakar identify the ubiquity of witches and demonesses in north Indian folklore and mythology in terms of the bad mother so central to their analyses: the demonic or witchlike bad mother is an oedipal archetype of the Indian child's perceived rejection by his inconstant mother when extended family pressure forces her to relinquish him to his father and uncles.^[12] Such bad-mother explanations are impoverished, ignoring the experience of girls and women, the cross-societal frequency of witches and their historical transformations, the relation of witch accusations to land disputes, and the oscillation between the everyday and the monstrous. Even from within a psychodynamic framework—one attentive to the relation of sociocultural dimensions of child-rearing to the constitution of local worlds, to what Gananath Obeysekere has called deep structure^[13] —the bad mother narrative avoids more interesting questions. Old witches are grandmothers or aunts far more than mothers. To exhaust their meaning within the framework of kinship in terms of the mother or her transformations is to elide the importance of other kin in family structure and particularly in the raising of children.^[14]

In his discussion of the accused "witch" Dhapu in a Rajasthani village, Carstairs attempted to suggest that the old woman's aggressively angry voice—of which other villagers had long been resentful and sometimes afraid—laid the seeds for her eventual accusation as having caused various severe illnesses and misfortunes and her being hacked to death. Dhapu looked out for her own family's interests to an extreme; she was resented by all the other women and men of the village. Dhapu may have been at risk because she had "acted in such a manly fashion" throughout a series of land disputes. Chen has reinterpreted this material, showing the centrality of these land disputes to Dhapu's accusation and death.^[15]

The relation between the exploitation of interstitial old women and the contested hearing of their voice emerges sharply in a 1911 short story by the Hindi writer Premchand, Garib ki hai , "The Lament of the Poor." Premchand often

wrote of life in the villages near Varanasi where he grew up. Manga, a Brahman widow like Mashima and Koki, entrusts her late husband's pension to the wealthy village advocate, Munshi Ramsevak, for safekeeping. She discovers only too late that he has spent much of it and has no intention of returning any Manga goes to the village council for justice, "but a poor widow's anger is just the sound of a blank bullet that may scare a child but has no real effect at all." Manga stops working, stops keeping house, and devotes herself single-mindedly to her hatred of Munshi Ramsevak. Her progress from anger to bakbak to silence, culminating in her death, is narrated by Premchand as a chronicle of the metonymic voice.

This voice is at first barely present: there is no one, Premchand reminds us, who will listen to the voice of an old and poor widow. But her obsession transforms Manga dramatically, from a weak and unheard body into one increasingly identified entirely with her voice: "All day and all night, walking or sitting, she had only one idea: to inveigh against Munshi Ramsevak. Seated day and night at the door of her hut she fervently cursed him. For the most part in her pronouncements she employed poetic speech and metaphors so that people who heard her were astonished." Manga's voice moves from a direct language of complaint, which cannot be heard, to a rich and bloody use of metaphor, which is. As she shifts into a metalanguage in which she conveys her anger through the poetry of madness, Manga as voice finally gains an audience. There is, however, a price in becoming just a voice. Adults are astonished, children make fun of her, and "gradually her mind gave way. Bare-headed, bare-bodied, with a little hatchet in her hand, she would sit in desolate places. She abandoned her hut and was seen wandering around the ruins in a cremation ghat along the river—disheveled, red-eyed, grimacing crazily, her arms and legs emaciated."

The repetitive voice is located within the social marginality of the interstice, and precedes the fact of madness. As she becomes increasingly demonic, Manga moves from object of derision to one of fear: "When they saw her like this people were frightened. Now no one teased her even for fun." Manga becomes like a female ascetic, immersed in the signs of death; she is like a bitch, scrounging around the cremation ghat. And these transformations are expressed through her voice: "She had earned the title of the local mad woman [pagli ]. She would sit alone, talking to herself for hours, expressing her intense desire to eat, smash, pinch and tear Ramsevak's flesh, bones, eyes, liver and the like, and when her hatred reached its climax she would turn her face toward Ramsevak's house and shriek the terrible words, 'I'll drink your blood!' "

Manga's voice is now that of the vampire witch. It is no longer the old person's lament for food: like the old woman of Balua, Manga refuses all transaction. "Manga ate nothing. . . . Even after a barrage of threats and abuse she refused to eat." All that remains is the primal voice—as witch, as beast, and as that epitome of inauspiciousness and danger, the owl: "More terrible than her words was her wild laughter. In the imagined pleasure of drinking Munshiji's blood she would burst into laughter that resounded with such demoniacal violence, such

bestial ferocity that when people heard it in the night their blood was chilled. It seemed as though hundreds of owls were hooting together."

Manga lies on Munshi Ramsevak's threshold. Only one child—Ramsevak's own wayward son Ramgulam—continues to torment her. Eventually her cry subsides, she retreats into the last, silent voice of old age, and she dies on Ramsevak's doorstep. The advocate is ostracized for the murder of a Brahman, but for him and his wife a greater torment than the now-angry villagers is Manga herself, bodiless but still present as a voice. "Several times a low voice reached them from within the earth: "I'll drink your blood. . . ."^[16] Ramsevak's wife dies of fright, Ramsevak ultimately immolates himself, taking on the classic fate of the abject widow, and Ramgulam, the mocker of old paglis , winds up in the reformatory.

Premchand as social critic transforms the pagli from object of derision into agent of retributive justice. He does so through her voice, drawing on a heteroglot complex of interstitial voices contained in the lament of the pagli : dog, owl, fearsome ascetic witch. Yet Manga's victory requires her death: only the killing of a Brahman on his doorstep explodes the fiction of Munshi's reputation for Seva , the source of his moral standing. His family unravels. Manga's voice, previously discountable as that of the interstitial old woman and then bewildering as the curse of the madwoman, is ultimately located on the threshold of a bad family—which explains and redeems it. Again, Ghar Kali.

The old woman of Ghar Kali is bare-breasted, a complex sign of her disengagement from material concerns and of her degraded treatment. The sexually explicit old widow also draws upon the erotic connotations of the widow as the unhusbanded woman and as the prostitute. A common word for "widow" also connotes whore. Saraswati, in his study of kasivasi widows, noted the association frequently made by his Varanasi informants between widows and prostitutes. Young widows in particular were seen as having few other sources for meeting their economic needs and sensual cravings.^[17]

The threat of both the young widow's body and the old widow's voice was mediated through its institutionalization in bhajan. Bhajan was central to middle-class piety in the colonies. Amita Mukherjee and many of her neighbors attended groups of older women and sometimes men who sang hymns together, daily or weekly. For indigent widows, bhajan was not only a site of community but a source of livelihood.

On Mir Ghat, not far from the cremation pyres of Manikarnika Ghat, a beautiful old red brick building that had seen finer days housed one such bhajan ashram. Here both young and old widows stayed in exchange for their voices. They sang bhajans throughout the day, financed by patrons who accumulated merit through both the gift itself and the praises of God sung. The threat of the widow's body was inverted: in the ashram, nonwidows threatened. The building was well-guarded by neighbors and the widows themselves. On an early visit, a widow who decided that I was up to no good chased me up the steps of the ghat with a stick. The separation of the bhajan ashram from the dangers of the interstice was aggressively maintained.

The production of bhajan transformed the repetitious voice from bakbak to divine rhythm, and offered a space to contain the simultaneously dangerous and endangered body. The voice of the body—the complaint of the destitute or uncared for or sexually ambiguous widow—is silenced; it becomes the voice without a body, or rather, is given a new body, the divine body of Krishna. But constant disembodiment was a burden for most of the ashram widows; they tended to grind through their bhajans soullessly. Their rather mournful noise, early in the morning on Mir Ghat, was occasionally punctuated by the voices of women on pilgrimage—as the boats of the latter drifted by the windows of the room—chanting bhajans joyously. For its hearers, there was irony in the institutionalized bhajan; it could not but point elsewhere. "How is their health?" I asked a young man who lives behind the Mir Ghat Bhajan Ashram, about the widows. He shrugged, "They are old." "And how are their minds?" I continued. He shrugged again, "They sing bhajans." Safe from being heard as doglike or witchlike, these voices of God still spoke to the absence of family and to the unhappy mind of the interstitial old woman.

Dogs And Old Men

In his well-known story "Burhi Kaki " ("Old Aunt"), Premchand tells of an unnamed elderly aunt, a childless widow, whose nephew Buddhiram ceases to care for her once she makes over her property to him. Like Manga, the old aunt suffers because she has "no one," but though she is treated like a pagli she does not become one. Her two grandnephews persecute her because "children have a natural antipathy to the old": "One would pinch her and flee; the other would douse her with water. Auntie would shriek and start to cry. But it was well known that she only cried for food, so no one would have paid attention to her grief and cries of distress."

The aunt is reduced to a voice identified solely with her demands upon her family for food; she is not heard otherwise. She is treated like a pagli but her voice, within domestic space, never threatens to become inhuman. The conflict between the sas and bahu is lifelong. Though the aunt is marginalized, she remains conceived by her relations as an active combatant in the chapati wars, in the contested economy of the hearth. The domestic old woman is here less a dog than a child. In the context of the old aunt, Premchand notes that "old age is often a return to childhood." Childhood is here a return to a less abject orality than that of the dog, to the mind's identification with the mouth and its paired functions of eating and lament: "The old aunt had no effort left for anything save the pleasures of the tongue, and to attract attention to her troubles she had no means but to cry."^[18] The child suggests the inversion of power and of role, but it remains within the language of kinship, within the space of domestic logic.

Buddhiram organizes a feast to celebrate his son's engagement ceremony, or tilak. The old aunt is beside herself smelling all the food being prepared. But she is afraid she'll incur her nephew's wife's wrath if she should step near the hearth.

She cannot control herself, however, and twice comes out of her room at inappropriate times to ask for a puri , a piece of bread. Both times she is soundly scolded and sent back without anything, and in the end she is forgotten about. Her grandniece, the one family member sympathetic to her, leads her during the night to the soiled plates of the guests, where the old Brahman aunt stuffs the polluted leftovers into her mouth. She has at last become a beast. Her nephew's wife discovers her there, and at last recognizes the Bad Family in the unexpected image of the dog. The story ends not in the chaos of the voice and then death, but in the return from second childhood toward a reclaimed adulthood. The voice of the old aunt comes again to represent her reasonable needs and claims to status and is no longer art icon of an infinite desire. Once transactional flows are restored, once the nephew's wife allows the Bad Family to heal, the question of second childhood recedes.

As old kasivasi women are more frequently the dogs of the interstice than are old babas; old men are more frequently the dogs of domestic space. Mausaji was frequently described as a dog by his family in Chittupur: eating, shitting, pissing, barking. The identification of the old man with the dog recurs in classical Puranic and Ayurvedic descriptions of old age. When the old man—who had symbolically maintained his youth, "sixty years young," against the weakness of the son—finally does fall into powerless decrepitude, the move from head of household to supplicant conveys a far more abject reality than the cyclical politics of bahu and sas . Old men who give up household power are described in the Bhagavata Purana :

Being unable to maintain his family, the unfortunate fellow, whose all attempts have ended in failure, becomes destitute of wealth and miserable. Being at a loss to know what to do; the wretch goes on brooding and sighing. Just as miserly farmers neglect old (and hence useless bulls), his wife and others do not treat him with respect as before, as he has become incapable of maintaining them. . . . He is now nourished by those whom he had brought up. He stays in the house like a dog eating what is contemptuously thrown to him.^[19]

In the Bengali quarter, an old friend of mine had announced along with Bijay his interest in helping me find crazy old people. Bijay "realized" the appropriateness of the Dog Lady within several days, but my friend Bishwanath waited six months before suggesting one day that I visit his maternal grandfather, his dadu who talked funny in a way he thought I would find interesting. When the invitation came, I had already developed my little symbolic interactionist tool kit and decided without too much reflection that Dadu's sahi nahin voice had of course suggested the threat of bad Seva to his family, and my being introduced to him thus carried some risk. I was less interested in plumbing the violence and grace surrounding a friendship.

There was another issue. That I was introduced to Dadu at all may have had to do in part with the different connotations within domestic space of the weak old voice across gender. I was introduced by friends to far more "not right"—voiced old men than old women. A family was more often on the defensive about the nature

of an old woman's voice. Much might explain such an "observation," but within the sorts of differently gendered semantic networks I was exploring I found the more naturalized state of domestic old men being-the-dog at least a partial way into thinking about their slightly diminished threat of bad Seva . To frame the difference another way: old men were less ambivalently placed within a dying space than were old women.

At a friend's anniversary party in New Delhi, a rather drunk businessman in his fifties from Chandigarh told me a story about aging and becoming a dog. He approached me and asked me what I studied, and I answered "senility." He said: "You know what we call this here. . . ."

"Sathiyana " I finished his sentence for him, eager to demonstrate some cultural legitimacy. "Yes," he said, although he was about to offer a different answer and tried the question again. "But in Punjab, do you know that we say . . ." "Sattar-bahattar ," I jumped the gun again. "Yes." He paused. "And why do you think there is a twelve-year difference between the U.P.-walas and Biharis and the Punjabis . . .?" A group had gathered by then, and we laughed at the joke, although we never did articulate just what that difference might be. The man went on to bring up the Bengali term "bahatture " as well, and the group played with the ethnic distinctions the terms allowed. A Bengali man joined the group and began to explain the distinction between the Bengali and Hindi terms through elaborate references to astrology and the life cycle. His explanation went on for some time, and people began to drift away until the first man jumped in with a joke:

When God was handing out life spans to all the creatures of the world, they all stood in line. Each animal was handed a packet of forty years. For this animal, for that one. All received the same amount. Last in line was man, and God handed him a packet with forty years in it, too. I'm sorry, said God, but that's all I have left. You're last in line. I'm all out of years to give.

But the ox said to man, "I really don't want forty years of hard labor. I'll be glad to give you twenty of mine.

And then the dog said, "And my life isn't worth forty years. I'll give you twenty, too."

Finally, the monkey too decided that forty years of hopping about trees was more than enough and gave twenty of his years to man.

So now man had a life span of one hundred years.

For the first forty years of our life, therefore, we are truly men—the years God gave to us.

Then, from forty to sixty, we are living the years of the ox, working for the wife, for our sons, supporting everyone else in the family, nothing for oneself.

Then, from sixty to eighy, we are a dog! [He laughed.] The son asks us to mind the house, mind the children—"We're going out." And so we stay at home, guarding the house. And barking: Always asking for this or that, again and again and again. Like the dog.

And then, from eighty to one hundred, we're living the monkey's years, without teeth, without speech, just making the motions of being human.

A man's aging is illustrated through a bestiary. Against the cosmic theories of asiramadharma the other man was offering, the first man offers a refiguring of the life course in terms of three distinct but each unpleasant forms of dehumanization. Adulthood here peaks at forty, envisioned as the burden of carrying along one's wife and weak sons. Sixty. remains the time of political inversion, when the meaning of debility shifts from the burden of the powerful (the father as ox) to the subordinate duties of the grandfather (the father as dog). After sixty, the voice becomes central, the abject request of the man forced to beg from his own son. At eighty, a different meaning of senility is offered, not the political abjection of the dog, but the far more embodied decay of the voiceless old man, for whom the request has degenerated thoroughly into meaninglessness: the monkey.

Dogs, within the bestiary of human abjection, draw upon particular genealogies of the gift. In a lengthy enumeration of the duties of the mature householder, the Bhagavata Purana places the food-giver at the center of the cosmos. All creatures are his children: "One should look upon beasts, camels, donkeys, monkeys, rats, serpents, birds and flies like one's own sons." One should allow, the text suggests, these animals access to one's house and fields. Rats and snakes and monkeys, like sons, take. Beyond taking, the text goes to define a specific category of those who must be given to: "He should duly share his objects of enjoyment with all down to dogs, sinners and people belonging to the lowest strata of the society."^[20] Dogs are the embodiments of those too degraded even to take, within a gendered mode of exchange between fathers and sons in which the gift does not rehumanize, as it does for Premchand's Old Aunt, but marks the end of manhood and thus one's humanity.

Old Men And Babas

Near my house in the Bengali quarter, an old East Bengali Brahman schoolteacher lived alone in a small room. "His family didn't want him," my neighbor told me, her story thoroughly unsubstantiated. The room was dark and only four feet in height, and the old man would crouch inside, making his food, his voice eerily projecting from his little cave. Unlike the old kasivasi women in the area, the old saffron-clad man was seldom teased, though he seemed to have all the ingredients: no apparent family, an eccentric manner, frequent requests for raw foodstuffs, and a funny voice. Two doors down from this man lived another former Bengali schoolteacher, in his seventies, with his family. Unlike the saffron man they called Baba, the children of neighbors made fun of this man for his frequent and pathetic complaining. In hearing Baba, however, kids and passersby drew on a more complex hermeneutic of generosity: Baba seemed to be a sannyasi, and his voice was many things to different people—beneficent, guileful, hypocritical, transgressive, or enlightening—but seldom meaningless or strange.

The old man in the little room was not attached to any sampradaya , any particular ascetic order. In the late 1960S, Surajit Sinha and Baidyanath Saraswati studied the sannyasis of Varanasi and calculated that the number of ascetics residing

more or less permanently in the city in monastic institutions called maths was 1,284. About 300 ascetics were not attached to a math, but maintained ties to a sampradaya while living on their own. Sinha and Saraswati suggested that of the total population of the city during their study in the 1970s, 1 in 240 persons was an ascetic.^[21] This ratio did not include the considerable numbers of sadhus (holy men) of various sorts who arrived and stayed in the city seasonally; nor did it include individuals like this old Baba, who did not belong to any religious order but dressed the part, participated with friends in any of a number of the myriad devotional, educational, and recreational opportunities of Kashi, wandered the lanes of the city, and worked the foreign "hippies" for a living.

The last task was one of Baba's more challenging but remunerative. He spent time on Dasashwamedh Ghat, the busiest and the most central of the ghats, striking up conversations with the many young foreigners who arrived each day in the city. Varanasi remained one of the principal stops on another latter-day touristic, that of "Asia on a shoestring" budget travelers, for whom the city's yogis, musicians, and cremations—along with Goa's beaches, Mother Teresa's Calcutta homes for the dying, Dharamsala's Tibetans and treks, and Kathmandu's evergreen psychedelic scene—reworked the colonial grand tour Cohn has described. Within the narrative of the budget tour, Varanasi was a microcosm of India, particularly in being a "love it or hate it" kind of place, the mother lode of the negative currency of the young traveler, "the hassles." An inveterate teacher and relatively fluent English speaker, Baba delighted in introducing interested young tourists hassle-free into the mysteries of Hinduism. The challenge was to make the foreigners, who tended to take Baba along with the river, the cremation fires, and the cows as a found object, and who got nervous at the hint of a quid pro quo, lighten their own material burden a bit without losing their feeling of control.

Banarsis heard the voices of sannyasis with some ambivalence, either as the wheedling of charlatans or the blessing of the god-realized, or both. The former hearing dominated; Banarsis, who contend with sannyasis on a daily basis, were apt to be jaded. Like old widows, old babas were part of a topography. But the interstitial location of their voices redeemed them. Sannyasis and other sadhus and babas who lived throughout the Hindu neighborhoods of the pakka mahal had voices that were hearable as benign and on occasion positively transformative: those of latter-day rishis. One could make fun of Baba on Dasashwamedh, with his hippies, but in the neighborhood he was neither a figure of derision or pity. And the hearing of his voice drew upon more famous, and archetypal, voices, of renowned old holy men in the city or the state whose voices were distinguished by their radically unusual tenor. Some of these men blessed through swears, sexual language, and curses; some spoke on rare occasions only; some never spoke.

On Assi Ghat, a few feet from where the woman from Nagwa would come to sing by the Sangameswar Temple, was a small Saivite math, a place for sannyasis headed by Ramu Baba. Like most strangely voiced babas, Ramu Baba was said to be superannuated by the men from the community who frequented the math's

nightly arati , the worship service, in the small shrine adjoining his room. He was eighty, ninety, one hundred, or more. Ramu Baba remained in his room all day in meditation. He came out publicly once a day, in the evening after the arati , to give these men a darshan, a viewing of him. He would say nothing; he never spoke. His nazar , his gaze, seemed all the more powerful. His eyes burnt into you; they seemed to know all that needed to be known about you. They were joking, thoughtful, deadly serious. Ramu Baba was an archetype of the silent voice, of the jivanmukta , the realized in life.

Samne Ghat was on the Ganga bank just south of Nagwa and east of the sprawling BHU campus. At that time, it was the staging point for the passenger ferries across the river to Ramnagar during the monsoons; the rest of the year, a pontoon bridge linked the city to Ramnagar via the ghat. Since the mid-1990s, a bridge has been built spanning the river; its pylons were, according to a persistent but usually humorous rumor, build on the bodies of children collected by the state through its lakarsunghva agents. In the late 1980s, one took a ferry, or hired a small boat. A Banarsi friend once cryptically told me that halfway between Ramnagar and Samne Ghat, on the water, I would meet someone "for your project." Later, after I had met the Beriya Baba, I returned and asked the friend why he thought to mention him to me. I got an answer similar to the one Bijay gave me about Mashima; contemplating my project, this man for the first time decided that the Baba might be mad.

I went down to Samne Ghat, that first day. Across the water I saw a small wooden houseboat. "Who lives there?" I asked the tea shop regulars presiding over the coming and going of boats.

"That's Beriya Baba.'
"Who is he?"
"He's an old baba."
"How old?"
"I don't know . . . about eighty?"
"Can I visit him?"
"He doesn't ever want to be bothered. He'll just curse you."

But one of the boatmen agreed to take me across. On the way, he told me to be extremely respectful.

"Make sure you greet him very politely [pranam karna ]. He's very old."
"How old?"
"Oh, at least a hundred."

"Where does his name come from?" I asked. "From a ber (plum or jujube) tree," said the boatman. "He uses it for his worship." Another friend later said that Beriya Baba used to live up a tree, and had vowed never set foot on the ground. That was why he now lived on a boat, neither on one shore nor the other. The image of King Ajara's former sannyasi body in the Kathasaritsagara story, hanging from a tree, came to mind. Several superannuated babas were famed for their

never having touched the ground in recent memory. The most famous was Devraha Baba, at 140 the oldest of them all. Devraha Baba lived in small stilted huts, and when he was transported was lifted into the car or boat by which he was transported. Both babas structured their practice as radically disjunctive from the material world through their literal embodiment as luftmenschen.

The Plum-Tree Baba was sitting crouched in the small enclosed deck that doubled as bedroom and kitchen. He was naked except for a sweater. "Pranam , Maharaj," I perhaps too obsequiously intoned, trained less by the boatman's admonition than by my frequent watching of the tv serial Mahabharata in which all old rishis as well as kings were so addressed. "Sister-fucker," Baba immediately replied. He showered a variety of curses down upon me, and then began a discourse on proper dharma, punctuated by references to sex and illustrated by frequent obscene gestures: his continually simulating sex with his fingers and his panting out "thrust, withdraw, thrust, withdraw." For Beriya Baba, material reality without God was bestial, just eating and having sex.

If people don't sing bhajans , if they don't keep their mind on God, they are no better than a dog or a bitch. Thrust withdraw thrust withdraw. The government—the police and the inspectors—are just hungry animals. Thrust withdraw thrust withdraw. They rape everyone's daughters. They like to fuck their own daughters. Thrust withdraw thrust withdraw. All the government wants is cunt, is ass. Sister fuckers. Ass fuckers. Split everyone's ass right open by the fucking inspectors. Thrust withdraw thrust withdraw. Just dogs. Bitches.

Somewhat taken aback by the force of Baba's discourse, I nervously changed the subject. "How old are you, Baba?""120 years." I looked at him; he didn't seem a day over 80. Perhaps sensing my questioning gaze, he downplayed his age. "But that's nothing, Devraha Baba is 140!"

Young at 120, Baba resumed his lesson, describing citizens as policemen's daughters, seeking incestuous liaisons with power. I left some money as my gift, and Baba gave the boatman and me some sweets as prasad, the materialization of his grace, in return. We returned to shore. I asked the tea shop crowd why Baba swore so much. "Well, to keep people away," one man answered. But some had other ideas. Baba used insults to tell us: You are a bhogi , a seeker after pleasure. I am a yogi. So you should not come here. And you should give up acting like animals if you want to discover God.

But why; I persisted, if Baba is indeed a jivanmukta , one liberated in this life, is he so obsessed with sex? The men in the shop concurred in their answer: "It's because you are the bhogi that Baba is goaded to challenge your right to be on his boat. He is a mirror of yourself." Baba combined one of the great ascetic archetypes of the city, the aghori baba, the transgressive ascetic who curses, drinks, lives and meditates in the inhuman and impure space of the cremation ghat and eats the ashes from cremations.^[22] Like an aghori, Beriya Baba cursed to bless. His

words were transformative, cutting through the fondness for pleasure that deafens one to reality. Like the anger of the rishis, the curses of the babas give .

I left Samne Ghat, and went home to Nandanagar colony where I was then still living. I mentioned meeting Beriya Baba to Mrs. Sharma; she doubted that he was 120 or that his words were of any spiritual import. He was a fake, "not the same thing as Devraha Baba," she concluded. Beriya Baba was not always heard as a spiritual cynosure. But though he was considered a charlatan by quite a few, his interstitial role cut off any connection to a familial body and its associated critical hearing. One did not say of any of the many babas, big or small time, in the city: "He has no one." Old men were heard differently in the interstice. And every local fake pointed to true ones. Beriya Baba might not be 120, but Devraha Baba's 140 years were seldom challenged.

Babas and the State

Though Beriya Baba criticized the sarkar, the government, and its representatives the police, he proudly told us that the Prime Minister Indira Gandhi herself had sent him a letter. The tea shop men told me that another prime minister, Charan Singh, had visited Baba years back. "He swears at all of them," they assured me. Baba's curses are not only heard to be powerful, they are powerful. Politicians come to collect them.

Stanley Tambiah, in his study of the Thai Buddhist cult of amulets, broadened the Weberian notion of charisma to include its objectification and translocation through economies of force or exchange. In concluding, he notes that ascetic masters claiming supranormal powers "have been taken up and assiduously visited by the country's politicians, bureaucrats, and intelligentsia—especially from the metropolis." Like the amulets in which a saint's charisma is recognized to be embedded, the visit to a saint itself becomes a fetishized commodity, which ruling elites with increasingly questionable legitimacy collect. Tambiah indicates: "The political center is losing its self-confidence, but it has not lost its might; it searches for and latches onto the merit of the holy men who are the center of religion but peripheral to its established forms."^[23]

The visit, in Uttar Pradesh in India, to a superannuated saint allows for the transfer of charisma through the several sensory pathways through which the baba and the political visitor mix their substance, and the various media record and disseminate the transaction. Intergenerational charismatic transfers increasingly depend upon the image of the transfer, suggesting that the process Tambiah records is dual: the politician's personal need for a renewable source of old age charisma, and the necessary production of simulacra of the transaction for its effectiveness.

Each of these sensorial modes can be thus approached both in terms of an anthropology and a political economy of the senses.^[24]Seeing the baba, in the first instance, is a form of darshan. As Eck has noted, darshan can be a central act of

Hindu worship; seeing and being seen potentiates a transfer of substance between deity and devotee, and the act extends to holy persons:

When Mahatma Gandhi traveled through India, . . . they would throng the train stations for a passing glimpse of the Mahatma in his compartment. Similarly, when Swami Karpatri, a well-known sannyasi who is also a writer and political leader, comes to Varanasi to spend the rainy season "retreat" period, people flock to his daily lectures not only to hear him, but to see him. However, even an ordinary sannyasi or sadhu is held in esteem in traditional Hindu culture. He is a living symbol.^[25]

The examples of Gandhi and Karpatri are instructive in other, quite different, ways. Shahid Amin has explored the complexity of Gandhi darshan in eastern Uttar Pradesh, suggesting that peasants and landlords took away different and often opposed forms of charismatic empowerment from the phenomena of massive Gandhi darshan rallies in the early 1920s.^[26] The darshan of the late Karpatri, whose house I chanced to rent and who haunted the memories of Marwari Mataji and of the Tambe brothers discussed above, differently helped to realize the various projects of his urban anti-Chamar supporters and his royal patrons. Similarly, the charisma of the politician's Devraha Baba darshan became an increasingly contested site in the 1980s, and the effectiveness of living symbols came to depend upon the effectiveness of media management.

Tasting as a mode of charismatic transfer establishes a symbolic hierarchy between the charismatic source and the recipient who is willing to accept the theoretically polluted but auspicious leftovers of the deity or saint. In the commensal transaction of a puja, the worshipper offers appropriate foodstuffs to God, who consumes the essence of the gift and allows the giver to partake of the seemingly intact but now "leftover" portion as the grace of prasad. Beriya Baba offered me his own food—literal leftovers, in his case—as prasad. The transaction was more complex because as a patron I had given him money. The hierarchy established through an exchange of coded substance, in the sense of Marriott and his students, which confirmed my willingness to accept his pollution, rhetorically extinguished the traces of a different hierarchy in which Baba was a client. When one gave to widows, the gift was unidirectional, save in the collective institution of the bhajan ashram through the mediation of a management who kept most of the gift, and here food was exchanged solely for voice.

Touching is similarly a mode of establishing the unambiguous direction of the flow of charismatic power. The tea stall men and the boatman reminded me to stay off of Baba's boat. To step aboard would have been to lift myself above him as well as to bring to earth, in a sense, his distanced position. Central to the embodied performance of hierarchy was the polarity of head and foot. For Devraha Baba, given his position on a platform on stilts, encounters with visitors were more easily managed. The main practice for the politician taking darshan of Devraha Baba was to have Baba place his feet directly on the politician's head. The image—simultaneously that of extreme obeisance and powerful legitimation—

appeared in newspapers throughout the country whenever an important politician came to Devraha Baba for darshan. More than any other sensory mode, the choreography of the touch translated into the national darshan of the aged saint with his feet on the prime minister, an image akin to the politician-son touching the feet of the old widow-mother but with one critical difference: no matter how opportunistic politicians might try to stage-manage their encounters with Baba, he remained a source of charisma whose presence was never exhausted by the hypocrisy of the filial scene.

Finally, charisma is transferred through its hearing. Beriya Baba cursed, and his supplicants took away blessings. Devraha Baba would sit silently in front of his little hut during those festivals when he was available for darshan, and would not speak. The tension for the listener would grow, until Baba would suddenly begin to offer a discourse, usually on Krishna devotion as a path opposed to the pleasures of this world. Like Beriya Baba's voice, Devraha's voice challenged in its unpredictability: he would withhold his presence and voice, sitting hidden inside his aerial hut and then would suddenly appear, sit silently in view, and then suddenly speak.

The importance of the voice draws more on generational than divine transaction. The old body becomes a source of powerful charisma when it no longer constitutes a threat to children seeking legitimation of the morality of their appropriation of the household. Like Buddhist amulets, old bodies enshrined in well-kept dying spaces become powerful icons and indices of the moral legitimacy of a family. The old body, in a sense, is fetishized, and as such becomes available as a critical marker within the legitimating discourse of the nation-state and its discontents.

But familiar old bodies degenerate, provoking the continual crises of Seva anxiety. The charisma of older male authority—among politicians, figures from Devi Lal and Laloo Prasad Yadav to the late N. T. Rama Rao and M. G. Ramachandran before their final decline come to mind—must eventually give way to the abjection of the weak old father forced to beg like a dog. The baba out there—as a sannyasi already ritually dead, as a latter-day rishi living apart from society—offers a voice that cannot devolve into lament. When babas threaten, as in the nursery stories of child-stealing babas with large sacks, told to children, or as in the collapse of the language of witchcraft, international conspiracy, and childlifting babas into the 1996 lakarsunghva panic, they threaten in an uncanny conjuncture of the domestic and interstitial old man, as a double to the father. As authority and charisma out there, they mirror the father as a site of male authority; as the domestic old man, they are a simulacrum of male authority, its pale shadow—"without speech, just making the motions of being human"—save for the sound of an infinite and ever more impossible desire, the bark.

The old "babas" beaten in 1996 were often with children, usually their grandchildren or other relations, when they were seen and heard to be uncanny and dangerous, and what was very hard to read was the nature of their desire. For most old men with access to the rhetorical possibilities of Sannyasa , even a partial relocation of their identity from home to interstice was insufficient to transform their

relations with family and neighbors from the pathetic request of the old grandfather to the inviolate liminality of the luftmensch.

Every sixteen years, the great astrological festival the Kumbh Mela is held in Allahabad, the closest city of similar size to Varanasi and also a pilgrimage site of long standing. Sannyasis and other interstitial holy men and women from throughout the country gather along with millions of pilgrims in what has become perhaps the largest single assemblage of persons in human history. A city is erected for the sannyasis and others, a literal center out there in Victor Turner's sense.^[27] In 1989 as in previous Kumbh Melas, Devraha Baba would not camp within the bounds of the interstitial city, this decentered center. A sannyasi's sannyasi, he maintained his separation even during the festival's collapse of the boundaries.

I attended the Allahabad Kumbh Mela that year along with my friend Pankaj Mishra and an estimated 15 million others. To visit Devraha Baba, we had to walk for several kilometers away from the tent city at the confluence of the Ganga and the Yamuna, along the sandy banks. Hundreds of pilgrims formed a line across the sand ahead of us, making the same trek. Baba's management had set up a corral of sorts, into which we pushed our away. Inside, I saw Baba's familiar hut on stilts; I had seen it at other pilgrimage centers, but had never had the chance for a Devraha darshan. Baba was inside the hut, not visible to us, when we drew as close as we could. Hundreds of villagers were waiting for darshan and a sermon. Closest to Baba's hut, several well-dressed people in suits and fashionable saris waited with photographers in attendance. Someone nearby told his companion: "Politicians." They too were part of the expected scene.

While we all waited, a man in a politician's pressed white pajama-kurta and paunch gave us a long talk on the message of Devraha Baba and Hindu dharma. The talk was uninspiring, save for the fact that already by 1989 any linkage of the importance for the nation of "Hindutva," or Hindu-ness, particularly in the presence of politicians, suggested the then-coalescing rhetoric of the recently revitalized populist Hindu right. Despite his offering his feet, with detached equanimity, to Congress, Janata Dal, and Bharitiya Janata Party [BJP] supplicants alike, Baba's superannuated charisma was coming to signify the meaning of tradition in very specific ways. The man exhorted the audience to go and buy a three-volume set on the life and worship of Krishna, available at the edge of the enclosure, which Baba would then bless with his feet. A line of peasants formed by the book counter.

Baba's head briefly stuck itself out the door of the hut and then disappeared back inside. He looked, I thought, far older than Beriya Baba. Many Banarsis with whom I talked about Devraha Baba told me the same routinized narrative of how old Baba must be:

When I was a boy, my grandfather took me to see Deoria Baba [another name for Devraha, who is said to come from the town of Deoria]. He looked the same then as

he does now. And my grandfather told me that when he was young, he was taken to see Baba, and was old then, too!

Grandfathers take grandsons who become grandfathers themselves; Baba remains the stable icon anchoring this narrative of skipped generations. The visit to the baba suggests a framing of time—the infamous "cyclical time" of the non-West^[28] —distinct from the proximate temporality between father and son dependent on the father's ageless—sixty but strong—body; A. R. Radcliffe-Brown long ago suggested that the social reproduction of culture and time worked through these two modes, parents to children and grandparents to grandchildren.^[29] Each mode presumes a certain sort of body in time: the relation between father and son presumes the ageless body of the father, able to carry its hegemony agelessly without the signs of decrepitude locating and delimiting its power; the relation between grandfather and grandson presumes the body of the ageless—but aged —baba, not that of the grandfather himself who may relationally framed as weak and in decline but of Old Age out there, transfigured. Devraha Baba's old age is the sign of a different order of culture and power, and it is an order intensely appealing to politicians constituted by a different order. I heard the grandfather story frequently, its details seldom varying from telling to telling. As an urban folk tale, it reflected both the importance of Devraha's really being old—against the easy suspicion lavished on lesser figures like Beriya Baba—and the power of the interstitial old man as a sign of an alternate masculine order of age and power than the dynamics of generational domesticity.

Devraha's authenticity was maintained by his firm colonization of the periphery. Not only Indira Gandhi but members of both Congress and the various opposition parties in the 1989 national elections sought out Baba's feet, photographers on hand. The home minister in Rajiv Gandhi's cabinet, the Sikh Buta Singh, came to Devraha Baba in search of Hindu legitimacy. BJP politicians brought bricks for the Ram temple to be built on the site of the disputed mosque in Ayodhya; Baba placed his feet on these, too. In the year following the Kumbh Mela, the last year of his long life, Baba became increasingly identified with a "pro-Hindu" political stance, less and less of the antinomian center out there. Brought down to earth perhaps, in the end, by the colonization of the forest as explicitly Hindu, as opposed to antinomian, space, Baba died in 1990.

Until the end, many besides the powerful continued to take Baba's darshan, his voice, his books, and if fortunate, his feet. Baba's longvity, I was frequently told, came from his mastery of yoga. Many yoga masters in Varanasi were known to have lived for generations through both their accumulated siddhis or "mind-overmatter" powers, and more specifically through breath control. As the number of one's breaths in the course of a lifetime is fixed, a venerable yogic idea, a key to longevity is learning to breathe less often. Even if one didn't attempt the practice of yoga, the charismatic transaction with the master of his or her body was itself an embodied encounter. Devraha, the master of the body, offered its gifts as so

many siddhis: health, fertility, potency, power, wealth. Unlike the hegemonic order of the politician and father, which worked time by denying its effects—like the agelessness of the "sixty years young" adult able to defer the claims of old age—the order of the charismatic baba insisted on its elaborated embodiment: the 140 year old visage, the matchstick limbs, the feet gingerly lowered, the careful location in a tree, or on a boat.

The Age of the Anthropologist

The problem, said the Friend, one of the closest I had made during the years of No Aging in India , is that we have grown up. It was over a decade since both project and friendship had been conceived, and I was back in Delhi writing another final draft. New timetables had intruded: a job, a relationship, changes in the economy, the imponderabilia of life. Things seemed different, and we waited for a sign from one another across the minor embarrassment that was our sense of ourselves in time.

Barbara Myerhoff wrote that to be an anthropologist in the country of the Old was to study the Other that is one's future self.^[1] Myerhoff died of cancer before becoming the old lady of her imagined future, and the tragic irony of her effort to number her days—-to see how the self and the world were unmade and remade in time and therefore to know oneself in it—gifted us with a sense of the gerontological sublime. A teacher of mine once said we become doctors because we are afraid of death, and something similar could be argued for gerontologists and more generally for moderns. Gerontology in this sense may be the quintessentially modern social science, marking off the shifting limits to interiority and to life. The failure of its sublime for me may lie in being part of a cohort of persons hard hit by AIDS, many of whom did not or will not live to be old—-and thus the fears I seem to carry with me each day and which inflect and infect my sense of a horizon—though I distrust my sentiments here. This book has charted some of the many other places and reasons for the failure of such a sublime, the "No" of its tide.

But it is not just as a body set against death that one does and writes, but as one set against time, and change, and decay. These are obviously related but distinct things, and the book has been centered on the last of them. The decay of the body, the social and material fact against which modern gerontology was organized and around which "postmodern" gerontology is being articulated, has presented a crit-

ical problem to anthropology since its origins. One of the discipline's charter narratives was that of the dying and regenerated god-king of James Frazer's The Golden Bough . Primitives and tropicals make tropaic errors, in Frazer, and confuse the wellbeing of the social body with that of the individual body of the king or priest totemically standing for it. At the first sign of physical decay, the individual body must be replaced by a younger one: the struggle in the sacred grove, the regeneration of the social body through the killing of the king and his replacement by a body once again ageless, like the substitution of Ajara for Vinayashila in the Kathasaritsagara .

Frazer can be read as more than an armchair anthropologist brandishing a theory of primitive error; his category of "magic," the nexus between the decay of the individual and the social body, becomes the realm of the symbolic for both later anthropologists and for psychoanalysts. The story of the Golden Bough, of the violent rupture at the heart of the sacred, offers a way to think about the relation of the body in time to the totalization of social relations as a seamless, purposeful, and atemporal hegemony, the anthropologist's Culture. The position of the king, priest, or god—in psychoanalytic terms the position of the father—is not only a position in and of language (as it was for Max Muller and would be for some Lacanians) but is, for Frazer, a fundamentally embodied stance: when the body reveals its temporality with the first recognizable signs of old age, the king/god/father must die. The body of language and culture is not simply the body of the powerful but of the powerful able to stand outside of time, a body hegemonic in not revealing its temporal contingency but appearing just so. The powerful individual body and the social body are metonymically linked as presences out of time, obviously and necessarily just so, totalities whose comportment and configuration are maps of the self-evident relations between their parts.

But the "ageless" individual body becomes marked : age comes to matter. The recognizable signs of decay—the white hairs that alert Vinayashila to the collapse of his world, framed as his ability to hold onto his subjects and to younger women—create a scene in which the hierarchical relations between king and subject, man and woman, and old and young become palpable and contestable. A younger body, one not recognizable as aging , must be substituted so that the seamless continuity of the social world can be maintained.

This need for the continuity of the world in time is formally a matter of primitive error for Frazer, but one that as cultural critique he implicitly extends to his own modern Christian world. Primitive error in The Golden Bough —the desire for the maintenance of a totalized world in space and time through signifying practices of metaphor and metonymy—suggests the potential for an analytics of culture that recognizes the problem of history—of change, death, and time. If culture is the possibility of the coherence of things in time, the story of the dying and regenerated king in Frazer locates the violence at its heart. The act of suture, which preserves the order of things through a substitution of bodies, is an act of destruction, the heart of darkness that for Frazer ultimately lies not in the nature of primitivism or civilization or the desire of the child but in the possibility of

meaning, of the move from time to totality, hegemony to culture, body to sign. And if modernity and coloniality replace this possibility of the coherence of things in time with a normalizing reason and a frozen metanarrative of absence and loss, then the decaying body moves from its secret place in the sacred grove into the full light of day, and the body of the king and the father is replaced by the new corporeality of the citizen, of the old woman at the polls.

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Old woman voting. Reproduced by arrangement with The Times of India Group.