Shiptown. Ann Grodzins Gold

I now turn my back on those historic portals for a chapter and portray the place where I lived, ate, slept, and got to know my neighbors. What I did for large parts of my days when I wasn’t occupied with research and/or shopping forays into town will also emerge. Whether hanging out my hand-washed laundry on the roof, chatting with women or kids on the roof or in the street, taking tea with a shopkeeper when their business was slack, or watching TV with Bhoju’s serial-addicted daughters, I felt no qualms in asserting I was conducting valid fieldwork. But there’s always a catch, and here is where ethnographic self-doubt lurks and clutches me: I lived outside the walls. In a way, my Santosh Nagar life felt organic and real, while my more formal “research” life—recording interviews, documenting hectic religious processions, photographing sites of historical importance, observing practices of commerce, and so forth—always made me feel a bit like a poseur.

      This chapter has several related aims, but all are thoroughly embedded in the residential colony of Santosh Nagar, and all are inflected by gender—my own, my helpers’, my neighbors’, my friends’—all of us female (discounting Bhoju Ram, who was rarely present when I was hanging out in Santosh Nagar). Women’s roles, preoccupations, and limitations are not the entire content but certainly compose the ballast of this chapter. My portrait of Santosh Nagar cannot claim to be wholly balanced. Much of what I say about the place comes through the mouths and experiences of women.

      If this seems an unjustifiable skewing in a book that is after all about Shiptown and not about women, I have two rationales. The first of these is simply experience. The Santosh Nagar life I shared was largely life as experienced by women. This extended to my similar dependence on men for any transportation other than my own two feet. The second rationale for this chapter’s focus must give away in advance one of its main conclusions. This is that men who live in Santosh Nagar believe they live in Jahazpur, while many Santosh Nagar women feel that they do not live in Jahazpur. It was April, well over halfway through my stay, before I finally admitted to myself that Suman (as cited in one of this chapter’s epigraphs) was as usual correct in her insistence that I recognize that neither she nor I actually was a Jahazpur resident.

      It took me that long to hear what these women were telling me: that it was foolish to ask them how they liked living in Jahazpur when they did not actually live there. Why was I so dense? I suppose because I knew I was doing an ethnographic study of the town of Jahazpur. My neighbors’ distinction between qasba and colony was peculiar to their gender, with its limited mobility. The men of Santosh Nagar were far more integrated into town life for a very evident reason: they could jump on their motorbikes (as Bhoju did multiple times every day) and be at the bus stand or inside the qasba walls in just a couple of minutes, negligible time, no distance at all. Women in these parts still didn’t drive or bike.¹ To get to the qasba women and girls must either walk or be passengers, dependent on male drivers: husbands, brothers, and fathers. If there were no husband, brother, or other trusted grown male around to ferry them, they might easily walk to town in nice weather, and get there in about ten to twelve minutes. But rain (which produced mud), cold, and heat all rendered this walk less appealing at various times of the year. For those who had small children in tow, of course, the distance was magnified at any season by the weight or whines of an infant or toddler.

      It is not a long or difficult walk between Santosh Nagar and the bus stand, but women have their modesty, their vulnerability to think about every time they go out. Girls prefer to go in pairs or larger groups if they do walk. And there are spaces they rarely enter. I was really shocked when early in my stay, I had to mail something, and I still didn’t know my way around town very well. Bhoju’s middle daughter, Chinu, an educated college girl, accompanied me to the post office. I sensed an aura of nervousness in her normally poised and confident demeanor; later she told me she had never before been there! In my own subsequent trips I rarely saw other women inside the post office; certainly there were none working there. Old behavioral constraints die hard; every public space offers a challenge, an unwritten rule or a rule no longer posed blatantly but built into habitus. Going to the post office would hardly brand a woman as brazen or out of control; still you rarely see women in the Jahazpur post office. This is quite unlike Jaipur, Rajasthan’s capital, where not only many of the patrons but many of the postal workers are themselves female. Thus it bears noting as weighing on the village side of qasba life.²

      This chapter has three sections with particular aims. In the first part I aim to characterize Santosh Nagar as colony—a different kind of place in contradistinction to the qasba, although intrinsically connected with it. Second, I aim to bring to life fieldwork days spent in the context of Santosh Nagar, and especially to describe the ways that Madhu and Chinu Gujar, Bhoju’s two elder daughters, helped me learn. Madhu and Chinu “officially” worked for me on and off during my fieldwork, assisting me in getting to know the neighborhood women, including scheduling and conducting interviews. Together we probed the dynamic intersection of gender and place in a relatively newly settled neighborhood. How do women in such a new kind of place reinvent some traditions, choosing styles in which to enact stability, or even to break free (if covertly) in some limited fashions? That is, how are changing gender roles in changing times produced in a very particular kind of setting? Here, acknowledging inspiration from Doreen Massey, and using language borrowed from her, I describe a ritual and translate a ritual narrative to get at some crucial fragments of the whole.³

      The final segment of Chapter 3 explores the rather different ways a different young woman taught me about life in Santosh Nagar. This was Suman, whose voice and views are present in Shiptown. Her judgments of me and of her surroundings had a strong impact, if a gradual one, on my subtler understandings. Suman lived between my home and Bhoju’s and often detained me as I passed. She asked me many questions, while actively resisting being a subject of my research. In spite of her deliberate recalcitrance vis-à-vis my formal fieldwork, Suman became a force in my mind; her voice often echoed in my head, and was transcribed in my field notes.

      What Kind of Place Is Santosh Nagar?

      Santosh Nagar seems like a place of many random paths crossing; what makes a neighborhood? what gives a feeling of neighborliness? (11 August 2010, journal)

      If you don’t count Chavundia (once numbered among the twelve hamlets but now more like a mohalla or qasba neighborhood, in spite of being outside the walls), Santosh Nagar is Jahazpur’s oldest and most populous “colony.”⁴ Colony is a loanword from English, used to refer to a planned suburb or housing development. Santosh Nagar was both and neither.⁵ It was neither distant enough, nor bounded enough, from the center of town to feel like a true suburb; and it wasn’t planned enough to feel like a “development.” Some referred to Santosh Nagar as basti (a broad term applicable to any human settlement), but it was never called a neighborhood (mohalla). Those were inside the qasba.⁶ In Jahazpur municipality’s electoral rolls, Santosh Nagar counted as Ward #3 (among twenty wards all told). Our elected ward member was a politically savvy Khatik, Babu Lal, who won easily in the 2010 election limited to Scheduled Caste candidates. At the far end of Santosh Nagar where I lived there were just two SC households: one mochi (shoemaker; originally refugees from Pakistan) and one dholi (drummer, from inside the walls).

      The rather bland appellation Santosh Nagar (Satisfaction City) was bestowed at some relatively recent point in time. Santosh Nagar is a straight shot from the center of Jahazpur. Its fuzzy boundary begins just past a large complex of government offices (all those that had previously been located at Nau Chauk), somewhere around the Muslim cemetery. This proximity to a graveyard is why the locality was initially known as Bhutkhera (Ghostville), a designation still used by many old-timers who live in the qasba. Bhutkhera was the area’s name when no one resided there (except for the dead). Santosh Nagar as a populated colony came into existence gradually over the past thirty years through a combination of officially authorized land auctions leading to deeded ownership, and squatters’ encroachments that, once a house has been constructed, appear thus far to be seldom if ever challenged.

      The colony has mostly grown up along both sides of the main road. Between the graveyard and the last homes of Santosh Nagar were lateral