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Friends, Brothers and Informants: Fieldwork Memoirs of Banaras

University of California Press

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...