Shiptown. Ann Grodzins Gold

minded hearing them repetitively recite their school lessons in a charming singsong lilt. The adults were a retired teacher and his wife; their son and his wife (whose first child was born after our time living there); and their divorced daughter, mother of the children, who together with her brother and father worked in a small store they owned. Sometimes two additional married daughters, each with two somewhat older offspring, came to visit, and at those times the noise and rowdiness level could get overwhelming. But we grew very fond of the boy and girl who regularly lived below us and who would bring up our milk and our newspaper each morning, melodiously and exuberantly announcing their arrival by calling, “Auntie-ji!, Uncle-ji!”

      In contrast to the more homogeneous neighborhoods in the congested heart of Jahazpur’s old walled center, Santosh Nagar is a locality with a radically mixed population. Castes are mixed: persons from the top, middle, and lowest realms of the Hindu ritual hierarchy live in Santosh Nagar, including priests and butchers, shopkeepers and drummers, herders, farmers, and artisans. On one street with which I was familiar, right across the main road from our own street, three houses in close proximity belonged respectively to a Brahmin, a Rajput, and the neighborhood tailors mentioned earlier who belonged to the SC Mochi or shoemaker community. The Khatiks (butchers by hereditary identity) are clustered at the other end of the colony, closer to the bus stand and the qasba, forming Santosh Nagar’s most homogeneous area caste-wise. Judging from the few interiors I saw in that part of Santosh Nagar, these were upwardly mobile, middle-class Khatiks by and large.

      Economic classes are mixed: Santosh Nagar residents pursue a variety of livelihoods: some hold salaried government positions; some run small businesses; others might be shopkeepers, truck drivers, or day laborers. At our end of the street a wealthy patriarch, a self-made businessman, owned four huge houses, one for each of his four sons; he was building more for his grandsons. Origins and years of residency are mixed: recent migrants from the surrounding countryside in pursuit of economic and educational opportunities live next door to families deeply rooted in Jahazpur town, who have shifted to Santosh Nagar to escape uncomfortably close quarters, both physical and interpersonal.

      Religious identities in Santosh Nagar are distinctly less mixed. Predominantly Hindu, Santosh Nagar’s population did include several Jain families. While the vast majority of Hindus belonged to families rooted in the immediate region, there were also a few whose immediate forebears had migrated from Pakistan around the time of partition. There was one family of Sindhis who held themselves apart from other Hindus in various ways including dress (even adult women wore kamiz-salwar rather than Rajasthani outfits).⁹ I interviewed several women in the Sindhi family, as well as several Jain women. Interestingly, although Hindu, Sindhi women like their Jain neighbors spoke of themselves as different, and explicitly expressed their sense of lack of community. Nonetheless, the same individuals regularly joined other Santosh Nagar women’s rituals and in that sense were well integrated. No Muslims had moved to Santosh Nagar. Jahazpur’s well-off Muslims possessed considerable property inside the qasba and nearby farmland outside of it. Possibly they had no need for the kind of added space that attracted Brahmin and merchant families, as well as former butchers, to shift from cramped quarters within the walls to more spacious dwellings in this colony outside the qasba. Or there may be deeper limits to residential pluralism than were ever articulated to me.

      Many of my neighbors in Santosh Nagar were financially secure but far from affluent. They were at a far remove from that cosmopolitan middle class that ostentatiously consumes global brands. However, many did possess motorcycles, color televisions, and fridges.¹⁰ One thing that struck me was how carefully the people I knew cared for their possessions, protecting them from the constant accumulation of dust and cleaning them diligently and frequently. Summer heat was intense, but air-conditioning was not practical in Jahazpur due to power cuts as well as architectural design. Many homes in Santosh Nagar did possess “coolers”—large, noisy machines that created powerful blasts of blissfully chilled air in a very limited space and had to be frequently fed with water (often in short supply). Dan and I purchased a small one on wheels at the peak of the hot season but it was of disappointing efficacy. We had to take turns positioning ourselves directly in its air flow to benefit from it.

      While I was living there, the bourgeoisie of Santosh Nagar were just beginning to acquire “inverters”—large cells capable of storing enough power when current flowed to keep some fans and lights running for up to six hours during electricity cuts. Usually cuts were not that prolonged.¹¹ At night, of course, it was easy enough to see who had one of these, and to desire to join that privileged company (although we never did). On my three post-fieldwork visits, I observed that inverters had rapidly proliferated—a substantial investment that doubtless pays off, improving quality of life in multiple ways. Bhoju was motivated to acquire one largely to prevent computer crashes, as well as avoid the hassle of intermittent darkness; his TV was not hooked up to it. I noted in other households that inverters keep the television going for those who do not want their favorite programs interrupted.

      If rural and town lives intersect commercially inside the walls, in Santosh Nagar the meeting of town and village was most evident in domestic configurations. I met many village-born persons who lived there. While quite a few of these were women moved by marriage, others were men moved by jobs or business opportunities. All those who had recently shifted to Jahazpur maintained strong connections with rural origins. While it was an exception not the norm, there were a few women (among my acquaintances, notably Saraswati Sindhi from Kota and Asha Jat from Ajmer) who had grown up in more urban areas but whose marital lives deposited them in this backwater. They both articulated interesting and distinctive perspectives on the qasba and its suburban periphery (Gold 2014b).

      I learned so much by living a woman’s life in Santosh Nagar, I must acknowledge in advance that when I write about the qasba in later chapters, my insights into the gendered nature of experience are more limited. It isn’t just the disproportion in numbers of interviews, although that is striking: I have about forty interviews recorded with Santosh Nagar women, and not more than a dozen with women inside the walls, where my female helpers had fewer connections and where it was far easier for Bhoju Ram to make appointments with men. The difference in interview numbers hardly reveals the real difference based on everyday encounters and experiences—a difference beyond reckoning.

      Gendered Days, Gendered Methods, Gendered Visions

      The girls think of their studies, of relationships, of child marriage and love marriage and nata [remarriage]; they all have their eyes on the prize of “sar-vis” [service, that is, a job] without a lot of faith but with a lot of hope and I don’t know, Karuna’s word, aspiration.¹² Yes, aspiration. this generation is doing tuition, coaching, big time. almost as their parents are doing vrats. spend money for the future and the future is to succeed in the competitive examinations, to get scores that put you in the running for the next competition. a girl whose marriage has gone bad may be returned to the world of education. a girl who never married must find her match in the world of education. (23 August 2010, journal)

      As related in the preceding chapter, Bhoju and I began to work almost immediately after my arrival in order to gather some foundational knowledge about the town that would help me start to focus in, to transform my unwieldy subject of identity and place into manageable chunks. At this early stage, when I knew virtually nothing, anything I learned was useful. When I was not out with Bhoju and not at my desk alone, I was in the company of women.

      Given Bhoju’s taxing schedule and my wish to gather women’s viewpoints, it made sense to both of us for me to hire his daughter Madhu (whose schedule at this time had relative flexibility) to work with me when Bhoju was otherwise occupied. Madhu and I did considerable research together from August through October. Chinu began assisting me after that, when Madhu was preparing for a crucial examination and simultaneously ill with a diagnosis of typhoid fever requiring a strict regimen of diet and behavior. From the middle of December to the middle of April neither Madhu nor Chinu was much available due to the compelling preoccupations of both their weddings (in late January) and their schooling (ongoing). As is common, they both did return home after their marriages, and we did work together again, sporadically but very fruitfully, in the hot season.