Shiptown. Ann Grodzins Gold

Chipa, for example, told us that Ganesh’s place was once a meeting hall built by Jahangir. Another Hindu man from an artisan community speculated for us that Hindus had installed Ganesh there in order to claim it for themselves, as a preemptive move against Muslim ownership.

      However, a Muslim interviewee told us explicitly that Ganeshji was put there deliberately by a Mughal ruler to ensure that no ordinary mortal being could ever sit on the same spot where the emperor had held court. A different Muslim interviewee had told us in 2008, “Shah Jahan was sitting where Ganesh is now. He thought, ‘after me, no one can sit on my chair,’ so he himself installed the Ganesh image.” Shravan Patriya, a Brahmin journalist, told us that Ganesh was installed in this courtyard “to keep the place pure.” In all its variations, the installation of Ganesh would seem to mark an amiable delegation of power from Muslims back to Hindus in Jahazpur’s past.

      A number of persons from different communities referred to Nau Chauk in interviews as a site of significance to the history of the town, or of their own families and trades. Some further tidbits about Nau Chauk are compelling.

      Kailash, whose caste identity was wine seller (although this was not his current business) told us that the liquor storehouse maintained by his community had been located in Nau Chauk. To measure out the liquor, he said, “they used a little brass pot, and distributed it straight from a small storage tank.” He told us that his great-aunt would “measure out liquor with the brass pot and sell it there.”¹⁸ Another man, from the leather-working community, spoke of his grandfather who was a “tantric magician.” Once, one of the great kings of Udaipur came to Jahazpur and summoned our interviewee’s grandfather, demanding that he perform his magical arts. Where did this take place? In Nau Chauk. The man asserted that his grandfather did not disappoint the king; he took a broom and transformed each one of its straws into scorpions.

      As they piled up, Nau Chauk stories began to remind me of Bob Dylan’s Highway 61—an ironic venue for every kind of weird, game-changing performance in the history of humankind. Even today, many ritually significant events take place at Nau Chauk. The taziya, symbolic tomb of heroic martyrs whose deaths were a turning point in Islamic history, spends the entire night on the edge of Nau Chauk, before both annual Muharram processions (separated by forty days). Although Jahazpur had many Holi fires in many different neighborhoods, a major Holi effigy is staked and burned at Nau Chauk. This was the only Holi where I saw a Brahmin priest perform a worship ritual before igniting the demoness wreathed in firecrackers. On both Hindu and Muslim festivals, demonstrations of physical prowess, commonly called akara by both religious communities, took place at Nau Chauk.

      Figure 8. Children drum at Nau Chauk on Muharram procession morning.

      Note well that these things do not happen inside the fenced square, although presumably Sukh Devji’s recruitment into the British Army did. All the other events of public import described here take place around the edge of that park. The actual space within the square offers another complicated story from recent times of which I am certainly missing some key elements, but which nonetheless I shall attempt to sketch. The fenced center of Nau Chauk was somewhat unkempt during most of my fieldwork. There were some trees and other greenery including flowering vines inside, but the ground was dry and brown and the space unattractive. Sometime in 2011 all that began to change. While I was still living there the town chairman (mayor), influenced doubtless by some patronage group, had the interior spruced up and planted with flowers. He had a decorative fountain and a stone lion’s head on a pillar installed there. Later a cardboard image of Maharana Pratap (ruled Mewar 1572–97) appeared.

      Over a year after I departed, a proper stone statue of Maharana Pratap was installed inside Nau Chauk with festive pomp including rains of rose petals. Although locals such as Bhoju Ram were drawn to participate, the event organizers and sponsors were part of a statewide organization of Rajput patriots; few hailed from Jahazpur where, as already noted, Rajput power has thoroughly dwindled. The entire transformative process was marred (I heard after the fact) by minor but prickly “communal” incidents expressive of rancor. These included small vandalisms to the new fence followed by disputes over who would pay the cost of repair for said vandalisms.

      I confess that Maharana Pratap, as an icon of Rajasthan’s glorious martial history, has never warmed my heart. I would prefer to refuse ethnographic responsibility for reporting on a development that happened, after all, more than a year beyond my fieldwork’s conclusion. But there are two things I must add to update my account of Nau Chauk. First, on my most recent visit in 2015 the space inside the fence was very nicely maintained, with green grass and colorful flowers pleasing to the eye. Yet it is hardly a public park in the Euro-American sense, designated for democratized enjoyment of its pleasant features. Nau Chauk is fenced and the gate kept locked. Second, in spite of the local Muslim community’s objection to the statue, and Hindu rebuttals, there has been a kind of reconciliation, at least on the surface. The taziya continues to spend the nights before Muharram in its usual place near the small park with its new statue. For the time being, Jahazpur’s inner spirit of “live and let live” prevails.

      Bindi Gate: Sociological Passages

      In late August 2010, well before my systematic tour of the gates, Bhoju and I made our first foray into the leather workers’ neighborhood inside the walls.

      Then we drove through Bindi Gate and into the Regar mohalla, where firewood is stacked in huge piles, where fans don’t run, where I sweated for the hour of the interview. There was arati [ritual of circling lights before an image] going on at the Ram Devji temple, and the children crowded round me in an amazingly non-Jahazpur way, more like village children. The arati was extensive and beautiful; I took pictures, the children wanted to be in the pictures and nearly wrenched the camera from my hand in their excitement to see themselves in the small screen.

      Then we want to the home of a Regar teacher whose old father talked to us. I appreciated the respect the younger man gave to the older, letting his father’s interview finish, before he began speaking to us with eloquence about the disadvantages faced by his community, even in recent years: the slights they suffered in schools, as workers, when bridegrooms go to villages, at tea stalls, and worst of all the story of the Ambedkar statue purchased 6 years ago but not yet installed due to high caste objections.¹⁹ (field journal, 29 August 2010)

      Bindi Gate may be the most dilapidated of the old doorways, and its part of town feels the most “villagey,” as my journal exclaims. Children are more numerous and more of them are wearing torn T-shirts, while few dress in the ornate, costly jeans favored by the qasba’s middle-class youth. The Regar children’s excited behavior was likely indicative of less training in the disciplines of the schoolroom, where the first lesson taught is how to sit, that is, how to submit their small bodies to an ideal of order (doubtless inherited from the British; see Kumar 2007:25–48).

      When I initially inquired what the name “Bindi” signified, people told me that the gate once led to a village called Bindi that “no longer existed.” As it turns out, Bindi village still does exist in Jahazpur tehsil (subdistrict). The 2011 Census records it as inhabited by seventeen families with a population that is 94 percent Scheduled Tribe.²⁰ Although Bindi is not numbered among the twelve hamlets incorporated into Jahazpur municipality, it shares with them a preponderant Mina identity. Yet not that long ago, before Independence when Jahazpur belonged to Mewar, Bindi was a “revenue village,” defined as an administrative unit of the smallest order. At that time, members of the ruling Rajput community lived there, doubtless in order to collect taxes and perform other low-level administrative functions. Even in its heyday, and despite its giving its name to one of the three qasba gates to the exterior, I suspect we might safely presume that Bindi was never a plum posting.

      Looking out from Bindi Gate you can see the old fort on the hilltop. Turning inward you find that those neighborhoods nearest to this gate belonged to leather workers (SC), lathe-turning woodworkers, and boatmen (the latter both categorized OBC, “other backward classes”). Among these communities, unlike the former butchers with their reputation of collective improvement, it seems only a few of their members have prospered