How does one define an 'expert' in the field? This question has been on my mind since I've got here, and is nowhere close to being answered. So many times, my informants in the field have treated me as the expert. Being more than well-acquainted with the core texts, concepts and debates in Islam and, more specifically, Sufism, I can hold my own in most conversations on Sufi Islam, and also answer questions posed to me about certain topics with reasonable ease and confidence. But I still find these instances of being the expert quite disconcerting. As an anthropologist, being positioned as the expert seems to be at odds with the idea that it is the "native interlocutor" who is the person in the know. I'm here, or at least that's the script most ethnographers tend to follow, to learn what local informants have to teach me...even though many of my local informants feel that I know way more than them about Islam.
This hierarchical valuation of the "little tradition" and the "great tradition" (to borrow Robert Redfield's terms from old-time Anthropology), understandably makes me uncomfortable. Where I value what the subaltern has to say, I find that the subaltern sometimes sees little worth in its own knowledge-production.
Where my subaltern informants are willing to speak, to tell me what they know and feel about Sufi Islam with enough self-assurance, there is also the internal hierarchy among those in the field that I must contend with--the hierarchy between the lettered folk with textual expertise in Islamic theology and Sufi schools of thought on the one hand, and those who transmit and/or adhere to folk-Sufism or Sufism for the masses (if I may use such terms) on the other. Ask a member of the former group and they usually tell me that any time I spend talking to those of the second category is time wasted, that I will learn nothing about Sufism or Islam from them. To them, my informants who are not well-versed in the textual dialogues of classical Islam are wholly ignorant.
While it is true that most of these people, who are members of India's Islamic Intelligentsia (I adore accidental alliterations), could tackle the nuances of theological and philosophical debates within classical Islam with ease, they don't know jack about the ways in which ordinary people's life-ways are fundamentally altered by these larger intellectual debates; they could hardly give me even an idea of the kind of religious transformations that Sufism and the lack of it renders in the contemporary Indian setting.
So who then is the expert? Me? My scholarly interlocutors? Or my lay informants? And who among us is ignorant? And of what?
It's been nearly a month since I got to Delhi and unlike in Gulbarga, where I was before, here I feel a little lost. There is nowhere that I have to be everyday, no one I have to meet regularly. Things have to be accomplished, but not necessarily in any particular order, or by any soon-to-arrive moment. I am master of my own schedule, and I'm not sure I'm entirely comfortable with it. The past few years on campus have been so goal oriented--working towards term papers, exams and proposal deadlines. I chugged along happily for the most part then... a little tug-boat on her way to some not-so-far port. Now I feel like a sail-boat adrift on some windless ocean.
It's quite common, I'm told...this ethnographic ennui...this feeling that nothing is happening when all sorts of liminal-taboo-transgressive-totemic-PoCo-PoMo-metareflexive moments were promised in all those fascinating ethnographies written by others who went before you. I guess I just need to dig my own little groove here; set myself tasks that need to get done everyday. Else, this spiral of unaccounted hours and days threatens to overwhelm the next six months.
Here's hoping for some structured sanity.
I am a nomad. Born of a father who "escaped" to Bombay from his home in the heart of Kerala at the age of 16 and a mother who herself was reared in Bombay, far from the place of her birth in the hinterlands of Karnataka. I was raised in the United Arab Emirates: an ocean away from Bombay, where I was born (itself a place far removed in space and life-ways from the points to which I trace my cultural and linguistic ancestry). The United Arab Emirates was a land full of nomads like me, and the country was understood by most who had travelled there to be but a caravanserai in the grander enterprise of making a living and a life. And though home was past some distant shore to many of us--whether Cairo, Khartoum, Manila or Bombay--we all found in that little oasis called Dubai some measure of home. We made of those who lived and travelled with us friends and family, created and recreated the familiar amidst the foreign and dug our heels into the drifting sands of that desert port.
And just as I was metamorphosing into some semblance of a grown up, I found myself again in an alien land. And here in the United States too, I made for myself a home, where for the past nine years I have woven strands of my past lives and my present world into a complex and ever-changing cultural fabric.
Now, for the fourth time in my life I am transported--but this time I am back in that elusive Leviathan of a home called India. And I find that in these 23 years since I left its shores, I have arrived back with many more homes than I left with, with many oases that I dwell on fondly and yearn to return to. India is of course a beast of many colours and aspects, and Delhi, where I am at present, is not much like Bombay or Bangalore, where I have lived before. But I know that here too I will find bits of the familiar in places I least expect to, and I will come to find comfort in things newly encountered. And so it is my task once more to find a measure of home.
The last two months have been spent gallivanting ... first in the UAE for a week and then as a TA with a study-abroad programme in North India. It's been exhausting, but fun; and I've encountered things relevant to my research in the most unexpected of circumstances--cantankerous men placing some Muslim reformist groups on the same continuum as the Taliban, Mahatma Gandhi's grandson giving a speech at the Aligarh Muslim University in which he speaks of Sufism as the only hope against religious extremists, tour-guides at various Indian monuments praising the Mughal emperor Akbar for his syncretic religious beliefs... It's amazing what you hear when you're actually listening. Aside from sweet serendipity, which seems to be the mainstay of us Anthropologists (can serendipity be serendipity if one looks forward to it?), there have been other interesting moments worthy of mention. - My students ask me odd questions about India: "Are AA batteries available here?" and "Is there a pharmacy in Agra?". Add to this a student who brought along a 4 month supply of shampoo with her to a land that gave the world the word 'shampoo' and you have me rolling in laughter.
- I avert disaster by pointing out to my student that when she says the Hindi word for "bangles" it sounds more like the Hindi word for "pussy".
- I saw more horny animals in the past six weeks than I care to remember (is it mating season?)
- On my 27th birthday I went to a monkey-infested temple in a gorge, climbed up Jaipur's highest mountain wearing a sari and flip-flops, watched the sun set from a Sun Temple at the peak of said mountain, descended its slopes singing Clementine, got a delivery of roses and chocolate cake from my man across the oceans, then went to dinner where there were live ghazal singers, was then surprised by my students in the hotel bar where I imbibed some awesome scotch, and then danced to Bollywood music till the wee hours. Life can be sooo good.
- I communed with elephants and swayed with some snake charmers (don't let anyone tell you there aren't any of those in India).
- (Very) Briefly drooled over a poster of a hot guy in my room only to realize moments later that it was Jesus.
- Grooved to some amazing Qawwals at the Salim Chishti shrine in Fatehpur Sikri...that white marble island of tranquility in an ocean of burning red sandstone.
- Bathed in the icy waters of the swift-flowing Ganga at dawn and felt the rising sun warm me. I was thus technically sinless for at least a day.
- Heard peacocks call out to each other across a desert valley.
I was at the madrassa a few days ago for my usual week-day Quranic exegesis class with the Maulvi. There were two other female students in the class with me (the number of students, aside from me, who sit in on these classes varries considerably). At the end of the class the Maulvi asked if anyone of us had any questions. One of the other women asked the Maulvi what were the consequences if a Muslim in jest and without thinking declared themself to be a non-believer (kafir). The Maulvi thought about this a bit and said that declaring unbelief was tantamount to regecting Islam, and that one would have to formally accept the faith again if they wished to avoid eternal hell-fire. The woman grew visibly distressed at this--she flushed, tears trickled down her cheeks, she began to mumble that she had spoken without thinking, just for fun, and had not realized the enormity of what she'd done. She had clearly been thinking about this for a while and had come to class solely to pose this question to the Maulvi. And now her anguish at the thought that she had somehow rejected her faith, that she had risked being relegated to hell, was palpable.
For those brief moments that I was witness to this ordeal I was suddenly made aware of that great chasm that lay between us. It was not the divide between belief and disbelief, between an unreserved faith in the existence of something and an unerring faith in its non-existence. The chasm was one between faith and indifference. Here was someone who was so vested to her identity as a believer, and so intensely feared the consequences of disbelief...her fear, her repentence, and genuine sorrow at her error were so raw and visible. And here was I, who did not even give these notions the dignity of disbelief. I thought about them in academic terms, as things others believed in, as concepts that moved others, but not me. At a personal level, I care little about acts of faith and disbelief, of how things spiritual and supernatural shape me and my life. How could I care so little about something that meant literally everything to someone else? Never has my indifference towards the sacred left me in a state of such disquiet.
The past week has whizzed by at break-neck speed. I was acting as RA for a Professor doing research at a shrine in Karnataka. As part of the assignment I had to interview a member of the Bajrang Dal, one of the more popular Hindutva outfits in India. I can safely say that this has been by far the most infuriating and frightening experiences of my adult life. We sat at a table in a restaurant in the middle of town--my prof, Anil and I. He seemed like a normal, mild-mannered guy, speaking in tones so soft they were barely more than a murmur. And there he sat across from me speaking so casually about intimidation, violence and hatred. He smiled wistfully as he spoke of the early years of his involvement in the group when their violent mobs were subjected to laathi charges and shell-firing from government authorities. He grew more intense as he spoke of how Muslims lived in "our" country, ate "our" food, breathed "our" air, and about how "we Hindus" had to reclaim what was ours by whatever means. "If a mosquito bites me, I am not willing to sit there and let it suck my blood. I will do whatever is in my power to rid myself of the pest," he said. And then he took on a proud and smug air as he talked about the group's current and future plans: of spreading "awareness" among the public about the threats to our "Hindu nation", of how they "educated" the community and urged them to keep an eye on the Muslims who lived around them, of how they would reclaim Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh to form an undivided and Hindu India.
What was so infuriating was that he presumed that just because I was a Hindu, I had some natural empathy for his worldview and his cause; that all that he was doing, he was doing on my behalf, for my sake. And equally frustrating was that I could do nothing to correct this grossly incorrect assessment on his part; had I revealed my politics to him, he would not have been as candid as he had been thus far, thus denying us access to his chilling rhetoric. This encounter has made me very glad that I did not take up Hindu-Muslim issues in India as the core of my dissertation research. The horror of each encounter, each interview, each new ethnographic relationship, would have driven me quite literally insane. And I do not think I could have dealt with the constant and vivid reminder that this kind of violence and hatred was so close to home, and took on a guise that was so deceptively normal.
My greatest joy every week is my trip to the vegetable market. It's located in an alleyway on a bustling street called the Super Market. You get off the auto at the auto stand, make your way past the green and white mosque, past the plastic-walah and his hoard of scrubbers, combs, little boxes, funnels, marbled red and white buckets and toothbrush holders, and then left between the flower-sellers' carts with their gorgeous marigold and tuberose garlands, and their mountains of rose and jasmine. Walk down a few steps and you're in a world that assaults your senses. A make-shift arcade, the vegetable market is cobbled together with bamboo poles and jute sacks as roofing, a few dry goods and vegetable stores made of more solid stuff holding the whole thing together. The moment you step into the market you're hit with the smell...the pungent smell of people and peppers--hundreds and hundreds of people walk past, crushing underfoot green and red peppers that have dropped from the vegetable carts onto the paving. And then as you walk past each , you're nose is seduced by something new, something different...curry leaves, mint, bell-peppers, daikon raddishes...and oh! fenugreek! I stop and buy two bunches of lush green fenugreek leaves for five rupees, their sharp, fresh smell already conjuring visions of methi parathas and aalumethi.
The air is buzzing with the white noise of a thousand voices; here and there you can make out a boy calling out the price of his curry leaves, or a woman hawking garlic...but otherwise, it's a gush of human sound, incoherent and chaotic. And the colours--the colours of people, of clothes of fruit and flowers and vegetables and spices and intermittent patches of blue in the midst of the jute-brown roof.
Then down to my fruit-seller. He sits in the same corner every day. His store is just 3 feet squared--him in the middle (the lord and master of his fruity court), wearing the typical white button-less shirt and pajamas of a marathi merchant, his sacred thread peeking out by his shoulder. I'm a regular here now and he asks: "Apples again today?" But I'm distracted by the pile of fresh figs at his side. They're expensive...fifteen rupees for around seven or eight of them...but I don't care...they're fresh figs! "They're really sweet", he says, and hands me one to eat. I bite into it and only twenty-six years of breeding stops me from moaning in sheer delight. He wraps half a kilogram in newsprint and drops it into my bag. Then finally to the dry grocers. He too sits surrounded by his wares--lentils and rice, nuts and spices. He peers at me through his glasses. His eyes are small and beady through those glasses as thick as coke-bottle bottoms. His silvery beard is chest-long and he wears an embroidered skull-cap. I ask for rice and he produces, seemingly out of thin air, a gigantic ladel. It's bowl is as large as a wall-clock and it's handle around 4 feet long. He stands up, leans over and dips the ladel into a sack of rice miles away, then pours it onto the weighing scale at his side and finally tips it into a bag. I buy 10 grams of cardommom from him, say "shukriya" and head out into the open air.
I cram into an auto with two other women and head home. I stare at my bulging bag...I have rice, lentils, cardommom, raddishes, bell-peppers, grapes...but best of all, I have my frankincense and myrrh--fenugreek and fresh figs.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an anthropologist new in the field must be in want of interlocutors. However little known the feelings or views of such interlocutors may be on her first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the mind of the anthropologist, that she considers the subsequent drought of interlocutors decidedly unacceptable.
Here I am, starting week two in the field; I have set up lessons with the Maulvi at the shrine so I may be able to interact with him a few days every week; I've been given permission to interview folks who run shrine-related institutions and I speak to the Head Honcho here occasionally. But all these interactions are so formal. So I sit in my house here and wait. Wait for some invitation to a soiree with cucumber-sandwiches and lemonade...well, with kababs and Rooh Afza. I sit in my parlour reading the Urdu newspaper or embroidering whatnots, hoping that the phone will ring and I will be invited to tea. The youth of my fieldwork is in wane...will my interlocutors never ask me to call upon them?
I was getting ready to leave for the field a couple of days ago and popped down to the pharmacy to buy some allergy medicines...So, in India, things generally get reused--newspapers, magazines, milk cartons, syringes...
But seriously, we have an awesome recycling culture here. So when the dude at the pharmacy handed me a little packet made out of a page from some magazine, I thought little of it. On the drive to the station, I happened to glance down at this little receptacle, when Lo! I saw that it had the question "Is it fair to compare Muslims with terrorism?" followed by the resulting statistics for various Indian cities on it! I immediately noted down the details I could read from the snippet of this magazine, as my mum-in-law's suspicions that her son had married a loon were reaffirmed. And then it happened again! I bought some pakodas on the train and there, wrapping these oily confections was an article on Sufism. I have a whole new appreciation for wrappers and packets.
In other news: A moment of dissonance resulted in what I now consider an altogether improper greeting on my part. I called the head of the local shrine to ask for an appointment. The voice that popped up on the other end spoke English in an accent almost identical to mine. I was so taken aback, I said, "Hi!"... I said "Hi!" to someone with the title of Hazrat! I cringe at the very thought. He's really kind and gentle, so it's all ok...but cringe-worthy nonetheless.
My quest for that holy grail of urban Indian existence has finally borne fruit. Profane in its seeming ubiquity, yet sacred in its strange elusiveness...I speak of unlimited wi-fi access. So many hoops to jump through...one passport sized photo, one address proof, one ID proof, moolah and the severed head of a bull-frog pickled in brine. Apparently, Bank statements don't count as address proofs anymore. And my passport has an American address (won't do). Only utility bills count; but all utility bills in India arrive under my man's name. So they said I could bring a marriage certificate to show that I'm with the man who pays the bills (hell yeah!). That sounded easy enough. Only, my better half's name has been chronically misspelt in all the bills. So who is to say that the man paying the bills is the same man I married? So instead of a marriage certificate, I just brought along a mother-in-law. I got the account opened in her name. End result: I will most likely have internet access any time of the day, every day, this year. Why "most likely"? Rumours have it that the wi-fi deities have been a little petulant off-late (as with most of our gods). The pickled bull-frogs only help so much.
A conversation I had with a relative today:Auntie X: Why are you going to Gulbarga? Gulbarga has so many Muslims!Rachana: uh...that's sort of the point.Auntie X: Baffled silence.
So I'm in Bangalore now. I suppose Bangalore is my base-camp before I head out to the uncharted territories of small-town India. It's my equivalent of the Jesuit missionary shack on an island full of natives...except that my mother-in-law is making something yummy for me to eat in the kitchen as I write. (We "native anthropologists" are spoilt silly, aren't we?!)
I arrived here 3 days ago. I'm still horribly jetlagged, though. I tried to go to bed last night. Managed to fall asleep at around 1:00 AM. Then at 3:00 AM the neighbourhood mutts started howling and I couldn't go back to sleep. Then my allergies kicked in today with all the desi dust. But all said and done, it feels good to be in India. It's nice to turn on the TV and see men in blue pajamas running accross a strip of dirt; it's nice to open the newspaper and see that the Karnataka women's Kabaddi team is on a winning streak; it's nice to be able to eat Chickoo and wear jasmine in my hair. Things will be less comfy once I head out to Gulbarga next week. The weather is guaranteed to be terrible...goodbye gentle Bangalore breezes; hello heat.
In other news, a newly founded group, the Sri Ram Sene (right-wing Hindu moral policing club) has been overactive this month in Karnataka. The group allegedly kidnapped and harrassed this girl in Mangalore for being chummy with a Muslim boy. They're also getting super excited about the opportunities to moral police on Valentine's Day. I plan to keep a low profile and studiously avoid men who call me "sister".
As my plane took off from Raleigh-Durham International, I was drowned in a deluge of sentimentality. I thought back to the last poem I'd heard and remembered the godawful verses read at Obama's inauguration. Thus inspired, I penned these wholly unremarkable lines.
(To be recited in a stilted fashion...in the manner of a history teacher reading roll-call ...Bueller... Bueller...Bueller...)
Goodbye.
Goodbye fresh air.
Goodbye my wide expanses of green.
Goodbye my quirky friends
Who come bearing scotch and baked brie.Farewell my men.
Farewell my wenches.
Farewell my oracles, my God, my Godot.Somewhere, Asad is mocked,
A post-processualist cursed, bones sexed,
Soroush probed--I am not with you.
Somewhere, someone unscrews a bottle,
Chops some celery,
Makes a Bloody Mary--I am not with you.
Somewhere, a party is missing its jester, it's bearded lady,
A man is missing a wife,
A cat has one lap less--I too am alone.
I must not say goodbye.
The dot and feather shall reunite,
And I will walk again with you.
--Feb 5, 2009
Coursework: CHECK; Comps: CHECK; Dissertation Proposal: CHECK; Grant Proposals: CHECK; Funding: CHECK! Fieldwork: Almost there. So, I'm finally on the threshold of Anthropological initiation: fieldwork. I am not quite packed, but I am ready to head out to India to start what I hope will be a year's worth of productive research. Will be starting off in the South, then heading due North in August.
I've decided to use this blog to write of my adventures as a novice anthropologist. I will name no names and will keep details of "data" out of my posting. I'd just like to use this space to talk about the little things that I might encounter in these the salad days of my anthropological career. (Lions and tigers and bears! Oh My!)
It's day One of the Obama administration, and it's time to return to our democratic duties in earnest. I speak of critique, lampooning and mockery . And I am serious. To be able to make fun of those in power is a keystone of a healthy democracy--it keeps them honest, it keeps us sane (or at least that's the intention).
Obama may be the darling of the masses right now, the hopes of us left-wing liberal sorts pinned on him. We wait, our tongues lolling, for him to enter a phone booth and emerge with a flowing red cape and a spandex suit. But let's not ride too long on this sentimental hobbyhorse. There will be mistakes and foibles and not-so-sound intentions, and it is not for us who voted for him and supported him to now also defend him. Foibles must be pilloried, mistakes speared and intentions prodded. To do any less would be to renege on the social contract of democracy that for centuries has rested on the expectation that those in power must be held accountable.
So it was with great joy that I welcomed the Daily Show's scathing remarks on the Obama inauguration. Bush may be gone, but hey! we have someone else to mock now!
Where my subaltern informants are willing to speak, to tell me what they know and feel about Sufi Islam with enough self-assurance, there is also the internal hierarchy among those in the field that I must contend with--the hierarchy between the lettered folk with textual expertise in Islamic theology and Sufi schools of thought on the one hand, and those who transmit and/or adhere to folk-Sufism or Sufism for the masses (if I may use such terms) on the other. Ask a member of the former group and they usually tell me that any time I spend talking to those of the second category is time wasted, that I will learn nothing about Sufism or Islam from them. To them, my informants who are not well-versed in the textual dialogues of classical Islam are wholly ignorant. 
