Friends Brothers Inform: Fieldwork Memoirs of Banaras - Hardcover

Kumar

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520071387 ISBN 13: 9780520071384

Publisher: University of California Press, 1992

Synopsis

"Why was Banaras such a mystery to me when I arrived in 1981? Was it ironically because I was an Indian and expected to have a privileged insight into it?" In this unusually personal, evocative account of her fieldwork experiences, Kumar tackles the dilemma of how a Western-trained Indian intellectual adapts to the field and builds deeply affecting relationships with strangers. She discloses what it is like to be a native researching her own culture, offering her fieldwork memoirs in all their spontaneity and candor. We see Banaras through her eyes when she first arrives: throngs of people, cramped and dark lodgings, unappetizing food, mischievous monkeys, and almost overwhelming filth. But as she establishes friendships, we are treated to her discoveries not only about the city and its people, but also about her place in this society.The familiar problems that face most anthropologists conducting fieldwork - of Self versus Other, objectivity versus bias, familiar circumstances versus new and dismaying ones - are given a surprising and complex dimension. Through a narration of her own experiences, the author demonstrates how personal locations - habits, preferences, expectations deriving from childhood memories, and areas of ignorance - impose themselves on the process of selection, observation, and interpretation in research.

About this title

About the Author

Nita Kumar is a Senior Fellow at the American Institute of Indian Studies in Calcutta, India.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Friends, Brothers and Informants: Fieldwork Memoirs of Banaras

By Nita Kumar

University of California Press

Copyright © 1992 Nita Kumar
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520071387
Physical and Cultural Shocks

Our introduction to Banaras was not a happy one. The drive we undertook from Lucknow—some 180 miles of technically metalled road—was deadening. Because it was monsoon season, I had voted for going by car, thinking that the long drive in the rains would be beautiful. But we had a spell of dry weather at exactly that time, and dust poured into our speeding car. The road, already broken up by the rains (which happens with annual regularity and arouses speculations about dishonest contractors), was full of potholes. What with the bumps and the dust, life did not seem worth living over the eight or so hours that constituted the journey.

Our baby, Irfana, then two-and-a-half months old, was the most cheerful passenger for a long time. Then she got upset as well and would not nurse. We stopped, and I walked her up and down, cooing and singing by the Lucknow-Banaras road for much of an hour. We then gritted our teeth and covered the last lap of the journey. The Banaras we entered seemed part of the general misery we had experienced the whole day. There was not a lonely temple spire or sign of a mighty river to be seen, only more dusty roads and the typical low-lying vista of an unambitious North Indian city.

We stopped at the guest house of the Varanasi Development Authority, a well-equipped, empty, and apparently little-used place. I collapsed with a fever. Sombabu got busy, as he especially does in crises, bathing the baby, washing dozens of diapers, festooning them on our mosquito net poles. The room was air-conditioned, and all slept peacefully except feverish me. I remember the dignified look of my daughter as she lay on her side, wrapped in a white sheet, her fists curled into balls, not budging an inch all night. And such a nice rest did she have, so much had she needed it, that upon awakening the next morning she spent the first hour lying on her back, exercising her limbs up in the air, chirruping and singing with the birds outside. It was the happiest and most vocal that she had been since birth. And so in the months to come: whatever misgivings we harbored about Banaras, she was always sure that she loved it. This was significant for young, first-time parents: a sure test for the acceptability of surroundings is whether the baby responds favorably to them.

As for me, I remember burning with a fever, then swallowing some pills that miraculously cooled me down, so that when the doctor came he didn’t have much to check. He prescribed bananas, yogurt, dry biscuits, and a pale lemon compound called Electral (to become a household word for us, as it was for every other family in the city). A little later marched in a procession: the driver, the guest house watchman, the police sub-inspector who had shown us the place, and an unknown recruit, each carrying one of the prescribed foods. The driver, as befit the head of a procession, looked the most solemn, swinging on a knotted string a clay cup containing a half-pound of yogurt covered with a leaf. I looked at the cup, leaf, and string with aesthetic appreciation, and noted, “This is how they do it in Banaras!”

Our initial trip to Banaras was for the single purpose of finding a place to live. Friends in Chicago who were in different degrees alumnae of Banaras research had given us three names in a city of approximately one million. One of the three contacts was a drugstore owner who directed us to a bank manager who, it was rumored, was having a house built. Our urgency then, and always, was awkward to people in Banaras. They would, one and all, respond to a request with, “Ho jayega” (“It shall be done”). We would counter with an impolitic “When?” or, worse, “How about now?” The bank manager had many visitors, many cups of tea, and many flies in his office. I sat with my permanent little bundle of baby on the only seat available, and Sombabu stood next to me. We looked and felt uncomfortable, out of place, and desperate. The bank manager abandoned his crowded office to show us his house. It struck us as highly desirable judging by its design and its convenient location in the central ward of Bhelupura, on the grounds of the old Vijaynagram estate, which was being partitioned and sold off for commercial development. But the house had many months of work to go, and the owner was not even sure that he didn’t want to live in it himself. Goaded on by our interest, however, he not only promised it to us but assured us that it would be ready by the end of the month. We pretended to believe him; we needed to.

Our initial impression of the city did not change on that visit: dusty, dirty, architecturally unremarkable. One could not readily feel any interest in it, leave aside love for it. Perhaps the only remarkable thing in that trip was that the manager of our guest house turned out to be a Sanskrit scholar whose speech was peppered with syllogisms. He also stands out in my memory because of the prolonged stare he gave us as one of our party (my cousin Manoj from Chicago) asked him for a fresh roll of toilet paper. “Has it all been consumed?” he asked, disturbed. The stress was not on all but on consumed. What disturbed him was the same realization reported by the famed vocalist Subbalakshami, who in the middle of a performance abroad found herself unable to continue singing because the thought suddenly came to her that “all these people in the audience use not water but toilet paper.”

Trivial enough at the time, this exchange was an effective forewarning of two things: one, the cultural importance of water in general and of cleansing in particular; and two, my ambiguous position between two sides, the toilet-paper-using and the water-using sides as it were, which was seen as such. Clear as I had been until then that both sides were valid and that I could empathize with each, I realized then that I did not have the ingenuity to express this position and could only seek to avoid any controversial issue, itself a limitation in inquiry.

When we showed up in Banaras two weeks later, we were no closer to finding a place. More people knew of our search, so we were taken around more regularly to a greater number of progressively unacceptable places. This time we stayed in the guest house of the American Institute of Indian Studies, which had many advantages compared to our first stopping place. Food was cooked on the premises and had a homey flavor. In our previous lodging it had been brought over from the neighboring Ashoka Hotel in covered china bowls, every dish the same and garnished similarly, everything outrageously expensive. But this guest house was in the south of the city, off the main thoroughfare and unconnected to it by a proper road or lane. The monsoon season was much advanced, and instead of dust we had floods. Sombabu took a rickshaw out one day and it promptly overturned in a ditch. I desisted from going out with Irfana for a long time, but when we were loaned a jeep, I began to risk it. I remember the wettest of such trips. It rained continuously and the whole vehicle dripped and leaked. We were looking for a neighborhood called Navapura, but since we did not even reach the ward it was in, we did not find (on that trip) a single person who had ever heard of it. I punched the canvas roof of the jeep to push away the store of water that regularly collected directly over my head. Passionate self-declared lover of the monsoons as I was, I decided, “This is the worst.”

Diapers would not dry in the humidity. We were marooned in the guest house. We had been invaded by monsoon insects and other creatures. All of this made us look harder for a place of our own, but the prospects of finding something remained as distant as ever. We had exhausted our two or three acquaintances (in both senses of the word), the bank manager’s house was of course no closer to completion, and with self-sufficient smugness, Banaras nowhere displayed advertisements or notices for apartments to let.

At this point in the story we have to learn of the mechanisms of the state and local police.

Banaras had eight police stations, or thanas. We were currently staying in the territory of one, Bhelupura, and had earlier been in that of another, Maduadih. Over the inspectors, or station officers (S.O.’s), of these thanas was the Deputy Superintendent of Police, of which there were actually two in the city: Circle Officer (C.O.) I and II. The senior C.O. was more popularly known as the Kotwal, a position that dates from Mughal times or such and one that I instinctively treat with respect (these persons shall figure in our story later). Over them was the Superintendent of Police, and over him the Senior Superintendent, known to all as the Ess Ess Pee (S.S.P.) and equally as the Supri Tandon Sahab, who was the powerful executive and de facto head of the police in the district. He was the man who had arranged for our stay in the first guest house, and Maduadih’s inspector had arranged for the doctor and the unpalatable, expensive food. Over all these officers sat the Deputy Inspector General, the head of the police in the range (there are ten or twelve ranges in Uttar Pradesh). He was the man supplying us with the dripping jeeps.

We had never met nor did we know by name any of these personages. Why were they going out of their way to befriend and assist us? Because we were distinguished scholars from Chicago? No. My father was at that time Inspector General of Police, the head of police in the entire state of Uttar Pradesh. He had one daughter and that was me. We never did figure out to what extent our status as distinguished visitors was due to his explicit directions and to what extent to inherent ideas of service in the different echelons of a government bureaucracy. But judging from the inconsistency and spontaneous nature of the service and from my father’s general ignorance and indifference regarding our activities, I would say the explanation was largely the latter. My father’s mind worked on a grander scale anyway. When I was stuck in Lucknow a year later because of a thirty-hour train delay and was ready to explode with vexation at missing a crucial event in Banaras called Ghazi Mian ka Mela, he calmed me: “Just tell me what you wanted to go and see. I’ll have the event organized for you here.”

We quickly learned of the police hierarchy in Banaras, and responded appreciatively to offers of help. However, all the attentions of all the police officers of Banaras could not alter our basic circumstances: we had no place to live and no idea how to find one; we were isolated by the lack of a telephone in the guest house and physically stranded by the monsoons; and the discomfort of our own damp clothes and lack of clean, dry clothing was only slightly less than the inconvenience of our dozens of permanently wet diapers.

After looking at scores of houses, parts of houses, rooms partitioned and sub-partitioned, we understood a few things about Banaras. One realization was that the taste of the local population—I mean here the middle class—and especially of those who showed us around was appalling. Without batting an eyelid, they would point out impossible bathrooms and kitchens created out of the dirty undersides of staircases, leaving us speechless with agony. The other realization was that my dream of living somewhere on the banks of the river, looking down at its lapping waves and smelling its sweet, rotten smell, had been unrealistic. Somewhere in this dream had been the old narrow galis, the congested lanes, of the city, within which I would do my research all day, even as I shopped for vegetables or turned to go upstairs to our apartment by the riverside. The galis were there, as were houses by the river, together with congestion and age. But living in those parts was a decision I referred to in those days as “fatal.” The ground there was thick with steaming turbans of cow dung, the leaves of plates and shards of clay cups used for fast food, the filthiest and smelliest of domestic refuse, and even, I believe, human excreta. The air was equally thick with flies and those unidentifiable particles occasionally visible in a lone shaft of sunlight, but, deep in the Banaras galis, visible all the time, looking not mysterious and graceful as they can at other times, but positively threatening. To share one’s living space with flies that bred on the refuse littering the streets was a possibility soon rejected, though for months afterwards I continued to feel betrayed by Banaras’s filth.

I had mentally admitted defeat regarding my vague dreams of where to live before we ever found the place we did: the first floor (in Indian parlance) of a solid cement fortress in a nondescript part of the city called Sigra. It was solid because its owner was an engineer in a government concern from which he had diverted all the cement possible; that it was a fortress we discovered as we tried to hammer some nails into the walls for pictures and whatnot. It was painted in one hue and trimmed in a grotesquely contrasting one. With its two dying palm trees, it looked ugly and inhospitable from the outside. Inside it was a daily reminder of the tastelessness of a certain class of Banarasis. Each room had three large wall cupboards with polished wooden doors mounted on the walls, all protruding outward. Two rooms were connected to bathrooms and might have served as bedrooms, except that one also contained the entrance way. What was perhaps the living room had five massive cupboards and could be reached only by going past the kitchen and the other bedroom. The sole explanation for the floor plan was that the owner had intended to rent each room out separately, an explanation confirmed when he showed surprise that we wanted the entire five rooms.

Our main worry was how, particularly with its collection of cupboards taking up all the wall space, to make the place livable for the next eighteen months. The crowning touch was that the central corridor was doorless; if we wished to secure the house, we would have to lock up each room separately. On a practical daily basis, this meant that certain creatures like monkeys had access to every room. We eventually got used to coming upon them, about once a week, cleaning up the food on the dining table, ransacking the fruit basket, sneaking into the kitchen, even playing with toys, as well as destroying whatever was left on the front porch and the back roof, of course. What was unforgivable was that they regularly depleted our water supply by taking elaborate drinks from the tap on the roof and then royally leaving it open. We tried securing the tap by every means short of ball and chain, but their godlike agility (the Bengali part of my family actually called them, to my consternation, Hanumans, or monkey-gods) outmatched our merely human striving. I never even forgave them for their more general sin: to make it impossible for us to have a civilized cup of tea in our own outdoors, to grow plants there, or arrange a sitting space; in short, together with the landlord, to conspire to prevent us from living the way we preferred.

We were perhaps choosy regarding our domestic conditions. We did not care for wet bathrooms or for visitors—of whom we had an unusual assortment—strolling through our bedrooms; we liked to maintain a constant temperature as far as possible through the extremes of the seasons and to keep bugs out. In retrospect, our stay seems to have been a constant fight to achieve all this. At the time, every effort seemed absolutely indispensable, particularly with an infant. When our truckload of possessions arrived and we set up our curtains, stove, refrigerator, desks, and bookshelves, we began a virtual odyssey of experimentation with the rooms. One room was too hot for a study in summer, another too noisy for a bedroom in the monsoons; a third got the wrong winds (which carried the fumes of a neighboring carpet-dyeing yard) in the morning, and so on. The cupboards turned out to be an unexpected boon: they came to be used as dust shields for books, stereo, musical instruments, and toys.

We looked, perhaps unconsciously, for like-minded people to share our feelings of discomfort and injury. But no local visitor, from the poorest of weavers to the S.S.P. himself (he happened to be from eastern U.P.), ever voiced anything but deep appreciation for this crazily designed ugly fortress of a house. It was a matter, then, of both class and culture. I may have thought that charpoys were more Indian than sofa sets or that open windows were essential for some kind of oneness with nature (an idea our landlord also tried to conjure up when we requested a back door for the central corridor). But the issue, I realized once in Banaras, was not an authentic versus an imitative life-style at all, but mosquito screens, hygienic toilets, and proper places for things (our preference) versus disease, discomfort, and lack of control over space and time (the eastern U.P. version). My mind was effectively cleared of all mists regarding Indianness and non-Indianness, and I had no desire to compromise my instincts regarding how to live nor any qualms in characterizing them as being as Indian as any rival instincts.

I also began reflecting on the anthropologist’s “urge to merge” with the native. Many academic friends patronized lodges and guest houses of dubious comfort, studding deep galis never free of garbage. Why did they have such a double standard? Daily they looked upon, and lived surrounded by, refuse they would never tolerate as individuals. Did it not give them a skewed vision of India? One did not have to re-create the Mughal Gardens, but certainly, given the royal stipends of U.S. researchers (mine was being liberally taxed by the Indian government), they could choose a more comfortable life-style than most did. They could afford good Indian cottons for the summer, a refrigerator, a cooler, a servant or two, proper furniture, and space. I saw very few scholars in Banaras who were giving India a fair chance by accepting the adaptations to climate and urban living that were available.

I remember my anger at visiting an American friend in the heat of July. He was clad in his synthetic U.S. clothes, sitting on a string cot and eating warm watermelon; the approach to his guest house stank with the garbage of the whole neighborhood, and he was without a properly cooled room, chilled drinks, suitable utensils, or anything he would undoubtedly consider necessary back home. Well, I thought, they were necessary in India too—if you could afford them. I felt resentful that he was returning to the United States with the notion that filth, discomfort, heat, and sweat were inevitable in India when these things were at worst problematical, and I suppose I resented also that in the process of harboring and then projecting this prejudiced image of India he was also saving so much money.

I perceive my distance from Gandhi, close as I have always felt to his philosophy of service and indigenization. You do not have to live poorly in order to understand or to work for the poor, with a vengeance that implicitly claims that the poor prefer to live that way. From our search for a house, and thanks to our baby, who necessitated direct confrontation with these issues, I realized that I could not choose to live in dirt and discomfort at the expense of productive work and mental peace.

Continues...

Excerpted from Friends, Brothers and Informants: Fieldwork Memoirs of Banarasby Nita Kumar Copyright © 1992 by Nita Kumar. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520071387
• ISBN 13: 9780520071384
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 250