Shiptown. Ann Grodzins Gold
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Название: Shiptown
Автор: Ann Grodzins Gold
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Учебная литература
Серия: Contemporary Ethnography
isbn: 9780812294125
isbn:
In Jahazpur it is quite common in polite conversation to employ the government designation SC (Scheduled Caste) to refer to persons belonging to birth groups (jati) that elsewhere are known collectively as Dalit (oppressed). The SC designation originated in colonial times but has gained increased significance with post-Independence India’s affirmative action efforts. Speaking generally, SC encompasses all those communities once discriminated against as “untouchable.” In Jahazpur the most visible SC groups would be Harijan, Khatik, and Regar. Members of communities identified as indigenous peoples may be called ST, which stands for Scheduled Tribe. Around Jahazpur the largest ST population is Mina. Minas have a fair measure of local clout and dignity; no euphemism is required when naming them so ST is heard less often. The ST designation is nonetheless of high salience for Minas, as it too is linked with advantageous government programs (Moodie 2014).
Introduction
This book is about a small town in Rajasthan called Jahazpur (literally, “shiptown”) and the people I met there in the second decade of the twenty-first century. What kind of a place is Jahazpur? First, it is a qasba, a market town that not so long ago was walled and gated. As a qasba Jahazpur united mercantile and bureaucratic functions—a common pattern in this region of North India.1 Jahazpur is a bounded place, an expanding place, an environmentally endangered place, a communally “sensitive” place, a peaceful and beautiful place with a motley but attractive built landscape rendering fragments of its complex history visible. To me it is, most importantly, a peopled place.
I sustained two simultaneous aims while composing Shiptown. My primary aim is to offer descriptions of, and insights into, small-town life in provincial North India. I especially seek to convey the ways a town is both distinct from its rural surroundings and a dynamic hub where businessmen and farmers are in near constant interaction, where two-way passages between two symbiotic but quite different modes of life are normal and persistent processes. Shiptown does not claim to offer a comprehensive portrait of qasba life, but it does attempt to portray some pervasive textures of society, materiality, and popular imagination in such a place at a particular time.
This work’s secondary aim is to contribute to an ever-growing body of literature on ethnographic practice. While not a fieldwork memoir, the text provides more self-disclosure than is usually the case: struggles, trials, errors, inner turmoil, and dependence on the kindness of others. While I do not propose methodological models, I do try to display the ways in which my Jahazpur research was fruitfully collaborative.
Just as Jahazpur qasba is multifaceted, Shiptown the book is a hybrid product. Composed of diverse viewpoints, snapshots, routes, events, and explorations, this text offers a patchwork of descriptive prose, images, journal entries, narratives, conversations, and even a poem (I began several during fieldwork but finished exactly one). Different chapters reflect different approaches to understanding and different interpretive modes and moods; they are voiced in subtly varying tones and composed in varying styles.
Figure 1. View of Jahazpur from hilltop, showing mosque with tall minaret and many small temple domes.
This introductory chapter sets the scene for what follows, drawing on my earliest interviews (August–September 2010) to sketch the nature of Jahazpur qasba as articulated by its residents. Readers should be able to gather gradually, as I did, some of the ways people in Jahazpur talk about where they live. How shall we think about a qasba? Is it no more than a glorified village or merely a plotted point on the less citified end of an urban continuum? I argue that it is more helpful to see the qasba as a particular kind of North Indian place with characteristics all its own. If the view from the big city deems Jahazpur only dubiously urban, the view from the village understands it as a place with urban amenities (suvidha) both domestic and public. Rural people know Jahazpur as a place where you can “get your work done”—whether it has to do with shopping or with relatively minor bureaucratic negotiations. With numerous government offices and a hospital, Jahazpur is a hub for services unavailable in villages. You cannot obtain a driver’s license in Jahazpur, but you can get a ration card, open a bank account, file a police case, register a land transfer, and conduct similar business.
Qasba comes into English (as casbah) from Arabic via French colonial usage in Algeria. It arrived in Indian languages from the same origin but along a different route. The Arabic term is often translated “citadel,” while the South Asian gloss becomes simply “town.” In Hindi usage I found qasba roughly defined—both by dictionaries and by people I interviewed—as a settlement “larger than a village but smaller than a city.” With its population around 19,000 in 2001 and 20,586 in the 2011 census, Jahazpur fit that bill.2 The semantics of qasba in North India evidently engages more than demography. Not every small town of comparable size is appropriately referred to as a qasba—a designation comprising some ineffable and some very concrete qualities. These have to do with a richly plural cultural heritage, administrative functions, trade, and indeed walls.3 To my mind qasba is a genuine and distinctive third category—neither mini-city nor overgrown village.
Writing of the “globalized city” worldwide, Bayart observes that it “is not anathema to the countryside. The city remains attached to the countryside through rural migration, supply lines, leisure activities, family visits, election campaigns and the political mobilisation of notables” (2007:24). In a sweeping study of Indian cities, through the ages and across geographies, Heitzman states: “A large percentage of the small and middle cities in South Asia existed primarily as marketing nodes and, to a lesser extent, as administrative hubs for rural hinterlands” (2008:208).4 Both observations are precisely true of Jahazpur qasba, and the village/town interface is absolutely crucial to Jahazpur’s market economy. There are constant and multiple exchanges—physical, psychological, political, economic, and social—between town and country. Many qasba families still own village land even if they have lived for generations inside the walls. Marriage ties send city girls to villages and vice versa, sometimes with unhappy homesickness resulting. Every interviewee testified that people from surrounding villages constitute the majority of customers in the market which lies at the heart of the qasba’s very existence.
Jahazpur’s bus stand and streets are crammed with shopping opportunities. I was fascinated by what Jahazpur market sold and equally by what was not available. For example, toilet-bowl cleaner (much advertised on TV and copiously applied to porcelain “squat-latrines”) was on display in every little shop; toilet paper was nowhere. A single brand of preservative-infused white sliced bread could be purchased at a few places in the central market; but in most grocery stores bread came only as hard, cold pieces of toast, sold by the slice and considered good for upset stomachs. As for jam—a legacy of colonialism that has become a drearily gelatinous red staple throughout urban India—it was nowhere to be found. Our simple toaster, purchased in Jaipur, was a curiosity even to wealthy neighbors.
Most of the literature on the North Indian qasba is historical.5 One of the few contemporary sociological approaches to an urban center comparable in size, diversity, and several other features to Jahazpur is K. L. Sharma’s extensive work on the qasba of Chanderi in Madhya Pradesh. Sharma vacillates on ways to describe the mentality of Chanderi. In his monograph published in 1999 he asserts that the town exhibits “true urban consciousness” (16–17). In a later article, Sharma states emphatically that Chanderi may be urban, but “village-like ethos and culture” are “hidden within it” (2003:412). Far from accusing Sharma of contradicting himself, I point out these alternative assessments as illuminating affirmations of the impossibility of characterizing a qasba as either rural or urban. It is definitively both and equally neither—a characterization around which pretty much all interviewees concurred.
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