Shiptown. Ann Grodzins Gold

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.

      Perhaps symbolic of Jahazpur’s dual nature: goods arrive on huge transport trucks from manufacturing centers all over the country and world, but must be delivered to shops in the old city by handcarts. Motorcycles clog the qasba lanes; cars improbably manage to negotiate passage when the need is imperative; large transport trucks are altogether out of the question. Jahazpur is undeniably and self-consciously a “provincial” place: mofussil, or—as people there frequently told me, using English words, a “backward area.”⁶ Before passing through the gates, as we shall do in Chapter 2, let us listen to Jahazpur describe itself.

      Kalu Singh, a Mina man in his eighties, grew up in Jahazpur but has seen a great deal of the world. He served in the army and was stationed first in South India and then in Kashmir. After the army, Kalu Singh worked for years in both Mumbai and Ahmedabad, returning in his old age to settle in his hometown with his wife—with whom, he confided, he had a “love marriage.” (Still unusual today in Jahazpur, love marriage was practically unheard of for his generation.)

      Eager to elicit his comparison between the cosmopolitan places he had sampled in his long life and Jahazpur, I posed this question: “Mumbai is the biggest and most modern [sab se bara, sab se adhunik] city in India, so what is Jahazpur?” Kalu, echoing my simplistic locution with gentle mockery, replied: “It is the most *backward! [sab se backward].”

      During my first months of fieldwork I often began with simple questions either about Jahazpur as a place, or about the meaning of qasba. Something which puzzled me during this initial period was the way so many town residents were quick to express a negative assessment of their