Near Fatal Fieldwork Flaws An Excavated Essay, Current Designation Former Professor, JNU

Fatal fieldwork flaws To be a good social anthropologist, one must be ready to live life to the extreme. I would often tell my students at Jawaharlal Nehru University, of the time that Michelle Rosaldo fell off into a ravine, and died while studying the Illongot tribes in the Phillipines. It used to distress them and me, but we understood the nature of the craft, the exacting definitions of being objective social scientists, inspite of the dangers and the risks. My own experiences in the “field” have been marked by placidity except for occasional turbulence. Physical discomfort is ofcourse a byword for the sociologist at work. Insect bites have been frequent, though I must admit it was surreal when a scorpion climbed up my leg in the vice-regal lodge, IIAS, Shimla while I was researching on Lord Dufferin. Then there were also handbells that rung all through the night without reason and I could make no sense of it, since I was the only person occupying that particular wing of the mansion that night, and pages need not be written on the matter, so long as the technical data collected in the fields or the archives is relevant. The first time I went to the “Field” I was 23 years old, and while I was quite despondent at traveling alone for the first time in my life, my uncle met me at the station. It was four a.m in the morning, it was pouring rain and my compartment was so far out from the main station hall, that all my books and my typewriter ( my father’s Remington) got soaked. The next day, I swore independence, and set out with my luggage to catch a bus by myself. The porter put my luggage in the bus, and it took off without me, while I was paying the auto driver. We chased the bus, with me yelling myself hoarse, and luckily, a police van passing by, with fiercely mustached officers, stopped the bus, and I got in. The conductor sternly castigated me for being slow. Recently while traveling in Kerala over potholes which delayed our journey by three hours, a similar conductor asked my sister and me, paternally whether we were not in the habit of reading newspapers. There were only four passenger in the Pallakad Trichur section, others not daring to go by road after the monsoon had destroyed the metalled roads!(“Paper Vayakathillae?”) We also climbed one hour up a mountain in the night and then came down for the plain reason that no passenger was waiting for the bus at the top. A huge plaster of paris imitation of Michael Angelo’s Pieta was visible from various sides of that hill. The driver was efficient and taciturn and drove at break neck speed, refusing to answer our diffident query, “How much longer?” The most startling of travel episodes was when my uncle dropped me to the station to catch a train to Katpadi in 2005. He was now twenty seven years older and so was I, since my first field trip in 1980. At that time, he had said laughingly, “You must have committed some grave sin to be caught in such a down pour at 4 o’clock in the morning!” He had, since then, spent many years in the Gulf, and was accustomed to fast cars eating up the distance, so he told my aunt and me, that we needed just six minutes to get from their home to the station. Since all my life, he had always turned up to meet the trains I was on, and had waited hours at stations for my children and me to disembark, I believed him, though I was a little anxious. However out of courtesy to my father’s brother, I waited for him to finish his phone calls. My train was at 5.40 p.m. He started the car at 5.30 p.m, and we reached the station at 5.36 p.m. He said “ I’m 70 now, so I’ll walk with your suitcase a little slowly, you climb the bridge and wait for me on the platform.” Since he is grand- patriarch to all of us since my father died, and I’ve always obeyed him, I shot up the bridge and came down in nervous haste, idly wondering how he would come. Platform ticket and a suitcase...maybe he knew some short cut. Just then a train came in, and I thought it was mine. I was carrying my handbag which had everything significant in it like tickets and money. I got into the train. The whistle blew. My uncle appeared with my suitcase. It was now 5.37 p.m. The train began to move, my uncle said, “But that’s not your train!” I can still remember the expression on his face, puzzled and annoyed just like it used to be when I was five and did not count in sequence...Ofcourse being a local resident of Alwaye, he knew that trains are usually late, and had never imagined I would jump into the first one that chugged in. The train picked up speed and kind Malayali men going to Bangalore (which was where the train was headed, not to Katpadi where I was going!) begged me not to jump off. Any way there was no point, since it was a Superfast. In minutes we had crossed the Periyar river.We could not find the chain to pull either, so I gave up, and rang my aunt,on my mobile for advice. My uncle had already told her on his mobile what to tell me if I called, which was to get off at Trichur and catch the right train this time. On my next field work trip I collected my suitcase from my aunt and uncle, remembering gratefully that the previous time, when my uncle had met me at the busstop on the road outside his house and taken my suitcase from me he had laughed and said, “Travelling Light?” That’s what I do. The sequence of events which terrify me when I think about it,( which is not often,) is the time, when I had with many professional commitments behind me, gone to a book launch and then caught the 10 o’clock train to the South. It was on Sufi Inayat Khan’s daughter, a resistance warrior in France during the second world war. I bought a copy of the book, and was looking forward to reading it on the 36 hour journey. My taxi dropped me at the station, and I sat down to wait two hours for the train, which can be so boring unless one is truly tired, like I often am, and then it is quite therapeutic.. Atlast the train trundled in. I waited for the lights to come on in the cabin. They did not. Everyone was busy putting their luggage in. So I did too, in the pitch dark, with only the station lights for illumination. My bag was next to me on the seat. I was shifting my luggage under the seat, when I felt a slight presence behind me but I thought it was someone putting his luggage on the berth above. Then suddenly I looked, and my hand bag was no longer next to me. So I leapt out of the train, and looked, sure enough there was a man running. I ran after him, and he jumped into the next compartment. There were two army jawans who barred his way as he tried to disappear into the aisle. He was holding my hand bag clutched against his chest. I took it from him, saying “Why did you steal my bag?” and he replied “I did not!” and kept repeating it in a staccato tone. I felt sorry for him, he was such a weevil, a drug addict with runny eyes and very small (generations of starvation there) and hungry and mean. Immediately people appeared from nowhere and started beating the man. I said, “Don’t beat him, call the police!” but the citizens wanted to teach New Delhi Station train- robbers a lesson, and just kept on beating him. The train attendants and the police guards and the ticket checker stood there with odd expressions on their faces. Why were the cabin lights not turned on? Why did the Railway police not act? Why did the attendants look bemused? I went back to my compartment, none of the other passengers seemed to have noticed that I had been gone ten minutes. The only time that I went by bus to Tiruvannamalai from Kerala was also very traumatic. I had longed to miss that three a.m disembarkation which is one’s lot if one goes by train from Kerala, and which is so exhausting, though I must admit that as a station Katpadi is very safe. I had presumed that the lovely tarred roads from Chennai to Thiruvannamalai would be found everywhere else. Alas the truth is that the peasantry is served awfully by the most demented pothole roads. In the next installment I will describe that journey. 11 I caught a bus from Pallakad, a lovely town on the border of Tamil Nadu and Kerala. I got to Coimbatore in comfort, in an express bus. I presumed that it would be connected to Thiruvannamalai, but I am disappointed. I must travel to Salem. In Salem the bus was rolling along well enough through the congested city, where suddenly the bus stopped. Tyre puncture. Fortuitously, or was it intentional? The bus stopped directly near a tyre puncture repair shop. The driver and conductor had been setting off on a five hour journey, without a stepney or a spare tyre apparently. So we all got off. And there we stood helplessly in the sun. Finally it was fixed and we took off again. We passed the most marvelous forests, mainly bamboo, which were dark and sullen and in some odd way, pristine and prickly. I’d never seen forests like that before and the Annamalais rolled into view with the lovely agricultural land around it. Tamil villages are verdant in winter with rice and fruit and flowers and vegetables riotous in the fields, amassed in the markets. Half the population goes to build roads in metropolitan towns, and the other half grows food. At Harur, some three hours from Tiruvannamalai, and 50 kms from Salem, the road was piled with granite, rubble and full of potholes, and the tyre which had been patched up with water and glue and spit and hope, gave up again. Once more we were close to a tyre repair shop. Clearly, punctured tyres are great business in small hamlets. Immediately a mechanic came, efficiently unplugged the huge tyre and rolled it off. We sat in front of a locked- up temple, dedicated to Durga and ate our lunches. The bus- driver put us in a country bus and with difficulty we all got into an already packed bus. I put my carry- all bag on top of a sack of rice blocking the alleyway. Two hours down the road, the rice merchant picked up his sacks, roaring at every one in the way, and in the melee, threw out my bag as well. I clambered off the bus and got it back. Frightened to death I sat quietly next to the sweet faced swami, ancient and creased in his new white clothes, going to Arunachala temple for the first time. The bus went on for hours, since country buses have no fixed route. And atlast at 6 p.m when it was night, and all the lights of the temple town were lit, we got off at Arunachala temple. All the people struggling in these over packed buses, what do they hope to achieve? The theorists of pilgrimage have always argued that the journeying is the most important ritual. To me it seemed that losing my bag was a moment of sheer fear, (loss of identity). I love carnival and market, and much of my work in the last twenty seven years has been marking these in descriptive terms, first for a Christian hamlet, and now for Hindu ones in Tiruvannamalai and Pallakad. However there are elements of this carnival space in ritual towns which can be quite disquieting. I will close this reminiscence with one such encounter. When I first visited ‘Thiru’, as it is called by frequent visitors to the town, it was a “small” town. Now it has burgeoned by the influx of pilgrims (5000 visit the temple every day, according to the local chemist who has a shop next to the Arunachala Temple ) and the numbers multiply geometrically as the years pass. It seems to have become the hub of priestly and commercial activities. Television has contributed much to the missionising appeal of Saivism. The descriptions of market, temple and pilgrims remain fairly constant in the anthropological literature whether it be Christian, Muslim or Hindu. Religion and Commerce, with the possible yeast of politics, makes a town what it is. In Tiruvannamalai, there is faith, but fortunately no communalism. To me as a theoretician of dialogue between religions, non-dualism is the answer to varieties of discord which we see as everyday occurrences in a globalised world. Non- dualism is the space in which everyday pluralism surfaces. It is an existential quality, which allows the myriad nature of the world to be ever present. As individuals we enter a space of communitas, as Victor Turner argues, and this involves both respect and sharing. On the other hand, technological imperatives (such as the megaphone) can be very rude interruptions in the quiet and sacred spaces that Nature allots us, and which is confirmed by cultural or theological formulae. Tiruvannamalai, eleven years after my first visit in 1996, provides such a sense of shock and rupture. Trucks bringing agricultural produce and other merchandise, buses bringing pilgrims by the hundreds veer through a traditional street with enormous noise in its wake. The Gods during carnival time are taken around in tractors which spew the most horrible smoke. The pollution levels, because of diesel and firecrackers during festival occasions has to be seen to be believed. In December 2006, the sound of firecrackers and megaphones disturbed ashramites so much that being present in that hallowed spot seemed to be a mistake which only says something about one’s nerves and not one’s ability to transcend or record. The woman in the room next to mine was a publisher’s wife from Germany, who had come to visit Ramanasramam in memory of her husband who had been a devotee of Ramana and whose works on Ramana were well known to the Librarian. Yet within three days, inspite of commitment to theology and her nostalgia for her first visit decades before, she left looking for a quieter room. The previous nights neither of us had slept, having been kept awake by a megaphone, where a piping child’s voice yelled continuously for hours and hours “Pathu rua Pathu rua pathu rua!!” a cry which never stopped. “What are they saying?” she asked me the next morning, looking haggard. She wanted to know if it was a political speech. “Ten rupees.” I said. It’s the cost of a packet of puffed rice and dates which the merchant wanted pilgrims to buy before setting off on the circumambulation around the Holy Hill. On the third night, my patience having worn thin, and fearing a nervous breakdown, I went downstairs at eleven O’clock. The ashram’s inner compound was dark and silent, only one pilgrim was returning from the circling of the hill. “That noise! Can’t anyone do anything?” “What to do?” I went and accosted the merchant. ”Put that off!” He nodded smilingly. He had not heard a word of what I had said. His ear was next to the megaphone. “Is money the only mantra you have?” I yelled. He still could not hear, and smilingly, serenely pointed me to his assistant who was packing the dates and puffed rice. “It’s illegal to have a megaphone in a residential street. I’ll call the police tomorrow.” The word ‘police’ seemed to penetrate, and he lowered the volume, so that he could hear me. “I’m from Delhi, and megaphones are illegal, and you must switch it off!” He smiled and nodded and agreed. It went off that night, and Beatrice was relieved, “I was praying and praying that you would go, since you know the language, and could speak to him!” she said in the morning. For her it was a miracle of Ramana Maharshi, that I had gone off, coincidentally, just then to bellow at the merchant. Next day however the megaphone was on again, and consequently Beatrice found a room far away from the main commercial road on which Ramansramam is now located. From being part of a jungle to being now in a road lined with gemshops, hippy clothes, junk and fastfood, foreign currency-changing shops, ticket offices, inter- net offices; it’s a very great change. The rustic road with its local shops of bananas and tea and newspapers has now been replaced by the kitsch and mélange of the post modern and the traditional. And every day is a festival in this ancient town, because every day is a holy day. Every day brings to pilgrims, honours and rewards, both material and spiritual. And who can be exluded? The numbers only increase. As a result there are problems of discipline and order. Residents of the Ramana asramam are forced to become aggressive bouncers who keep the crowds at bay, using only their eyes, linked arms or speech to keep the crowds from hurting each other or damaging the shrines. But I’ve resolved the dilemma about crowds by telling myself that each person in the crowd thinks the “other” makes up the crowd, but indeed, I too am part of the crowd. Susan Visvanathan Professor of Sociology, JNU