When your interlocutors can google you

Over the past year in the field, I've googled myself assiduously. This I've done not out of vanity, but to make sure I knew and managed what information about me was out there.  To have control over what is to be known about me is an entirely reasonable thing to want. But out in the field, where one hopes to share confidences with one's interlocutors, the willful withholding and management of information about myself enters an ethical grey zone.  One begins to tread that fine line between being a private individual and being disingenuous.

I’m not being naive here. I really don’t believe that my interlocutors, as close as my relationship with them may have become, share every detail of their lives with me.  I am not even presuming that they always tell me “everything” that is relevant to my area of research. And that is their prerogative. 

But I approach them as an ethnographer knowing that they are part of a certain social/economic/political/religious/linguistic group. And most likely, it is their membership to any or all of these groups that has led me to them.  So while I may not claim certain knowledge of their inner motivations, I do know a great deal about who they are in these milieux, what their backgrounds are and, in many cases, what their public activities in these spheres are. They, on the other hand, cannot claim the same. Most of them only know that I am a student from a university in the United States who is doing research in India on Sufism; they know of course that I am an Indian Hindu.  Some who have heard of anthropology would know that I am one of that breed; some would know I am married, have no children, and have relatives who still live in India. They may have a faint idea about my economic and social, but would really have very little idea of my political and social views, my hobbies, my friends…unless I choose to tell them.  It is clearly an imbalanced equation. 

I am sure that they have constructed and deconstructed me. I’m sure they have imagined what my life in America must be like, and what my routines and motivations might be.  But on many accounts, their imaginings would be off the mark by miles because they only see me out of the context of my usual life.  I change my mores and lifestyles so that I may fit in better with them and learn more from them by not being a jarring presence in their midst. And it is this “modified me” that they know and construct their imaginings from.  And it is with this “modified me” that they interlocute, and in so many cases accept within their homes, their families, their sacred spaces.  And all of this makes me wonder…would they tell me the things they tell me, permit me the kind of access they do, consider me an equal in many measures, if not all, if they knew all they would if they saw me in my “natural habitat”?

I work with people who are for the most part, socially conservative.  They are wonderful people who are extremely generous and kind to me when they really have no reason to be; they get nothing much out of my research, and yet give me so much.  But these are also people who quite clearly believe that homosexuality is a sin, or that drinking alcohol, wearing clothes that don’t cover you from neck to ankle is a sign of moral lapse.  And so I again wonder: How would my interlocutors react if they saw photos of me carrying supportive banners at a Queer Pride parade, or knew that I drank and wore sun-dresses?  Would they still think me worthy of the information they give me?  And this is especially pertinent since my research is on issues of religion and spirituality—topics deeply entangled with questions of morality.

     We no longer live in an age where what biographical details we wish to disclose is entirely within our control. Doing research in urban areas among folks who have access to the Internet means that your interlocutors can google you.  And as it stands, I certainly don’t want them to have access to those photos from the Pride parade or that picture of me with the tankard of beer!

But I struggle with this.

Of trees and forests

Gaining an empathy for trees is perhaps an occupational hazzard (I use the term quite loosely) for most socio-cultural Anthropologists. I speak metaphorically, of course. We work with and within relatively small groups of people, gaining confidences, building long-lasting relationsips and bridges along the way. We get to know the people we work with not just as members of larger communities, but as complex personalities with complex desires and aspirations. Is it any wonder then, that Anthropologists make for very bad liberals, and worse liberal reformers? Revolutionary reform requires one to look at the big picture, to think of change en-mass, macroscopically. If the lived realities of a hand full of people have to be sacrificed for this "larger good", some great and much-needed reform, so be it. If one concerns oneself with the minutae of human existence and the violence inherent in sudden change, one is not meant to be a reformer or a revolutionary...in the conventional understanding of these terms. 

Think of the veil, for instance (I know, I know...cliched). But really. I'm not talking about the hijab (a scarf of some sort worn to cover just the hair and ears), which frankly is a non-issue made disproportionately political. Think of the full-body veil--the naqaab or the burqa. Bluntly put, I don't like it. I honestly feel that it robs women of their person-hood in many ways, and places the onus of moral regulation too heavily on women's shoulders. This is an old and oft-made argument. And I know enough people who think that it should be banned, or that the movement for "liberating" Muslim women should be focussed on throwing off the burqa, and that only a revolutionary act of that nature can bring any change to the warped person-hood created by the full-body veil.  But as much as I think the burqa is a form of violence against women, I cannot bring myself to join this revolutionary cry and equate unveiling to liberation. I know too many women who are able to exercise agency in some measure simply because of the burqa. They are mobile because of the burqa; they have access to education and employment because of the burqa; they are able participate in public spaces (and public spheres) thanks to the burqa. In communities where "female modesty" is taken very seriously, the burqa allows them to leave the confines of their homes and become a part of a larger world. And while I am aware of the feminist discourses on patriarchal hegemony and a need to reject them, I cannot but conclude that any law, any mass and imposed effort or discussion to do away with the burqa would be an act of immense violence against these women for whom the burqa ensures a measure of freedom. *
Even in terms of the anti-sweatshop movement in the US, I find myself often on the "wrong" side of the debate. For as much as labour reform is needed, as much as labour conditions in sweatshops are dispicable and need desparate change, boycotting certain manufacturers can mean loss of much-needed unemployment, penuary and starvation for real people in the short-term. The long-term goal of labour reform requires the sacrifice of the basic requirements of human beings somewhere in Indonesia and Vietnam right now. And my conscience cannot entirely abide by this. 
Someone once asked me, "But isn't reform good? Isn't it necessary? How can you be against reform?" I'm not sure what the solution is. How can macro-changes be effected while ensuring that individuals caught up in these revolutionary moments of "reform" are not victims of violence, that their agency is not stripped from them for the "larger good"? Maybe the solution is the lack of one--that is, not that one side is conseded to be the right one and the other, the wrong, but that the battle is ensured continuance. That for every person who wants to ban whaling (or veiling), there is someone willing to stand up for traditional whaling (or veiling) communities; for every radical revolutionary who wants to reconfigure the forest, there is a naiively empathetic tree-hugger. Both sides may be nuts, but someone's got to do it. For descending into solipsism is not a happy option, methinks. 


* I personally think it's a good move when criticism of the burqa becomes part of the religious discourse and debate among Muslims themselves.  As with this example: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8290606.stm. This means that the anti-burqa discourse is framed not in third-wave feminist terms, which has so many problems of its own, but in terms of the worldview of those who veil or support veiling. 

Of ignorant informants?

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?

Yearning for order

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.

Finding a measure of home

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 long overdue update

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.

Discomfort in indifference

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.