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Chapter 1

Legends

Of Names, Snakes, and Compassion

They say that on a dark night in the month of Asharh, at the start of the monsoon, a chieftain of Tughlaq, Saiyid Masood Ghazi, crossed the swollen Ganga and attacked Gadipuri. Accordingly, the town changed its name from Gadipuri to Ghazipur. The roads are the same, the lanes too, and the houses—just the name changed. Perhaps names are outer shells which can be changed. There is no unbreakable bond between names and identity, because if there were then Gadipuri too should have changed when it became Ghazipur. (Reza 2003:4)¹

Like Ghazipur which was once Gadipuri, as my epigraph taken from Reza’s novelistic memoir of another qasba explains, Jahazpur also experienced a name change of which it is fully conscious. But while Jahazpur’s name change is associated with a period of history—“Mughal times”—it differs from Ghazipur’s in that no specific ruler or event precipitated the transformation. Moreover, at least until very recently, Jahazpur’s name was locally meaningful only in its provocation of curiosity. Jahazpur is a landlocked place, and a town by definition is set on the ground; so why “Shiptown”?²

On a brief revisit to Jahazpur in 2013 I had one short encounter with a young and visionary Jain nun, an outsider who had taken up residence there in the wake of a miracle (see the Epilogue). She showed me a poster with her design for a new temple to be built on the outskirts of town.³ The temple would have the form of a stylized ship so that, as she expressed it to me, people from elsewhere would come to distinguish this special place, would learn, easily recognize, and recollect its name. This Jain nun’s design and her vision marked the singular instance of reference I ever heard in Jahazpur to the literal meaning of the town’s name, and of course it comes from someone who arrived from some other place. The name does indeed have a story, or stories, but the stories have nothing to do with a ship.

Figure 2. Site of new Jain temple under construction, showing poster with design in the form of a ship, 2015.

The story of Jahazpur’s name, which I first heard casually on a brief visit in 2006 when fieldwork there was not even a gleam in my eye, offers no explanation for why the place is called Shiptown. Rather, Jahazpur origin legends project into the past a wholly different name replete with meaningful stories and witnessed by stone shrines—if you know where to look for them (one is in the jungle; one is in the penumbra of larger, more beautiful structures). These legends perplexed and intrigued me, becoming ultimately the seeds of this book (or to sustain nautical imagery, my tugboats to fieldwork).

Jahaz means ship, but there is no large body of water anywhere in sight in this semiarid region of central Rajasthan. It is only natural to ask how the name arose; Jahazpur residents are therefore well accustomed to this very question. They have a pat and ready answer. They explain that their town was the site of the mythic snake sacrifice performed by King Janamejaya in Mahabharata times, and they offer an etymology of the town’s name having nothing to do with a ship. Common lore has it that, although today it is spelled and pronounced Jahazpur (jahaz “ship,” from the Arabic, -pur “city”), it was originally Yagyapur (yagya “sacrifice,” from the Sanskrit, -pur). Whatever its facticity, this etymology appears in the government-issued District Census Handbook (Census of India 1994:lxxii).

The shift from Sanskrit y to vernacular Hindi j does not necessarily involve the influence of Urdu or Perso-Arabic vocabularies. For example, yatra for pilgrimage becomes jatra in Rajasthani without losing its Sanskritic origins. However, the word jahaz is an Urdu word, and it really doesn’t sound all that much like yagya. In short, the linguistic transformation operative here is not simply the common y to j shift from classical to spoken tongue. Rather the substitution is of an entire meaningful lexeme. There are no stories about a ship because it seems the name “ship” was an expedient accident.

It took me about four years post-fieldwork to realize that my initial question—“Why is your town called Jahazpur, Ship City, when the sea is nowhere in sight?”—had perpetually gone unanswered. In relating the story of Yagyapur as the town’s origin tale, Jahazpur residents simply left it as self-evident that Yagyapur had morphed to Jahazpur. No one ever pinpointed an episode or exact moment in history when an official renaming occurred. We might speculatively fill in the blanks and assume that jahaz was easier to pronounce and to write, perhaps for revenue collectors in the Mughal period who would have kept their records in the Arabic script used for both Persian and Urdu.

In any case, the question of how Jahazpur got its name always led directly to Yagyapur. Diverted by the strangely negative stories associated with “Sacrifice City” I simply forgot to keep wondering: why “Ship”? Yagyapur is an immediate jumping-off place for two compelling and puzzling place legends—each linked to, but departing from, one of India’s great epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. As we arrive in Shiptown, I present these brief, perplexing tales of Yagyapur. Their foundational significances for the town, and for this book, should be self-evident. I relate them with scraps of performative context and in the translated words of diverse tellers rather than simply in synopsis. How and where stories are told matters. And conversational follow-ups sometimes add depth to simple narrative content.

In the indirect nature of this passage to meaning—from “Why a ship?” to “Let me tell you about the ancient sacrifice”—I also would suggest an analogy to some of my fieldwork methods, which rarely involve a single-minded or persistently linear pursuit of specific information. In the incomplete nature of my grasp of Jahazpur’s name transformation, my ethnographic style is foreshadowed. Throughout this work, I try to acknowledge at least some of what I did not learn, or forgot to ask, or did not care to know, or could never find out. Moreover, and importantly, these stories obliquely provide a bridge between an agricultural economy and a market economy—a transition congruent with the subject of Shiptown, the book.

The two brief tales of Sacrifice City, taken together, I will call for convenience the “pitiless land” cycle. These begin with a king who appears in the prologue to the Mahabharata. Janamejaya, the son of King Parikshit, is descended from Arjuna—one of the five Pandava brothers who are the epic heroes. Although Janamejaya ruled four generations after the events of the epic, his tale is related in the prologue as part of a frame story. After his father is killed by a snakebite, Janamejaya determines to hold a great sacrifice during which, by the power of verbal spells (mantras), all kinds of snakes are drawn into the fire pit to perish. Although ultimately thwarted, Janamejaya’s intention is to destroy the entire snake species.⁴

Many Jahazpur people relate this basic opening, embellished with greater or lesser detail and names from the epic. The locally salient tale, which to the extent of my knowledge appears in no published versions, begins with an inserted premise: because of Janamejaya’s vengeful intentions—basically snake genocide—his sacrifice requires a “pitiless land” (nirday desh).

Bhoju and I had sought out Ram Swarup Chipa, a man in his sixties who belonged to the community of cloth makers—dyers and printers. We asked him, “How old is Jahazpur?” Here is his reply:

Once there was a King, Janamejaya, and his father was Parikshit. A snake king bit King Parikshit. So his son went to Sukhdev Muni and asked him to find some pitiless land, where he could hold a sacrifice.

He wanted all the sinful souls [that is, snakes] to come into this sacrificial fire.

So, King Janamejaya came wandering this way with his companions. Near Jahazpur is Nagola and a man there was irrigating with leather buckets, and in his wife’s arms was a six-month-old child. So the water kept overflowing and she thought, “The water is overflowing and the child is crying,” so she thrust her child in the place where the water came flowing through.⁵

King Janamejaya thought there could not be any place on earth with less compassion than this—if a mother could do such a thing. So this is the place where they held the snake sacrifice.

And nine lineages of snakes were wiped out in the sacrificial fire (havan). In that place is a stone image [of a snake].

We elicited and recorded another telling from a retired teacher who reported his age as seventy-six. Asked what he did, the man replied with much dignity: “I am old, I sit and sleep.” His father had been a fourth-class peon for the Jahazpur court before Independence; he himself had been posted as a teacher four times inside the town of Jahazpur. I asked about the transformation of the town’s name, “I heard it was Yagyapur—how did it become Jahazpur?” He did not answer the question even in a cursory way but simply launched into the heart of the “pitiless land,” skipping over even the epic king and his father:

It is said that some people wanted to do a sacrifice (yagya) and they thought, “where is this pitiless land where we can do a sacrifice?”

Thus wandering on their quest, they came to a place, [now called] Nagola. At this place, the people who were looking for a pitiless land, saw a man who was irrigating his field; his oxen were pulling the water from the well in leather buckets and his wife was building mud barricades to channel the water.

But the water kept breaking through her mud barrier and flowing into the beds [instead of through the irrigation channels as desired]. It just wasn’t stopping. When she saw that the water wouldn’t stop, she picked up her baby and thrust him into the gap, to block the water.

The people decided this had to be the pitiless place. Everyone thought, “How could a mother use her child to block the water? There couldn’t be any land more pitiless!”

Figure 3. Snake shrine in Nagola said to be site of King Janamejaya’s sacrifice.

In this sacrifice, they recited spells (mantras), and from the power of the mantras, all nine lineages of snakes arrived and dropped into the pit of their own accord, into the sacrificial pit. This place’s name was Nag Havan [Snake Oblations], and from that came the place name Nagola, and also Nagdi, the name of the river today.

This version omits all epic references but provides more detail about the agricultural laborer’s work and her extreme frustration. It charters not only the town’s name but the name of Jahazpur’s river, the Nagdi (Chapter 6).

The problematic attempt to exterminate snakes (normally revered if also healthily feared by rural Hindus) seems a fertile generator of additional stories set in the recent past. These stories might be categorized by folklorists as a Rajasthani version of “urban legends.” I found compelling an insistence on redress for the ancient violence perpetrated against snakes. We gathered several tales about a regional taboo on preparing the soil with a cultivating blade called kuli (which I’m told is particularly dangerous to snakes). In the stories, snakes themselves enforce the taboo, with sanctions ranging from fear to death.

An elderly Mina man in Borani, one of the outlying hamlets that belong to Jahazpur municipality, related the main tale and concluded: “This is why they used to call Jahazpur Yagyapur.” Bhoju Ram asked him if there existed any “proof” that the ancient sacrifice took place right here.

Here is how the old man answered that challenge: “Right now, even today, at Sarsia village, whenever the people were plowing their fields with a kuli, and not with a plow, snakes obstructed their kuli. The snakes do not bite, but they don’t let farmers use the kuli. So the farmers got together and made a golden kuli and did a sacrifice (yagya), and after that they were able to use kuli in their field. This is proof.” This puts a satisfying “nature bats last” coda to the snake sacrifice tale, allowing us to see it as ecological parable. It shows that humans ought to negotiate rather than exterminate, even to negotiate with a compensatory sacrifice. Note this is a sacrifice offered to snakes, a complete reversal of the prior sacrifice of snakes.

In the heart of Jahazpur qasba we interviewed a very old Vaishnavite priest, Mohandas Vairagi, and his grandson Ram Charan, who looked to be in his twenties. I began by asking about the origin legend of the Nagdi River, telling them I heard it was created “from the blood of snakes.” Ram Charan agreed to the truth of this. He went on to speak of current problems with snakes in the fields. This urban priestly family still cultivates farmland just outside Jahazpur town. “We don’t plow our fields with the kuli; if we do, then we have trouble and see lots of snakes…. One year I used the kuli, and I saw snakes every day. The next year, I stopped using it and we didn’t see nearly so many snakes.” I asked if this problem with the use of the kuli was true only in the area around the Nagdi Dam, but Ram Charan said it applied to the whole region.

Ann: So, is the kuli “forbidden?” [I employ the word pratibandh, which I learned when researching the prohibitions kings put on peasants such as “don’t wear gold” or “don’t eat white sugar.”]

Ram Charan: No, this [taboo] is something we embrace as moral duty (dharmik maneta).

Bhoju: Was there some event when someone tried to use the kuli?

Ram Charan: Yes, yes! There was someone who died! He was bit by a snake and died. And maybe five or seven years ago I tried myself to use the kuli and so many snakes appeared, beyond counting! I saw a black snake this thick [he demonstrates expansively with his fingers] after plowing with the kuli.

Bhoju: So after that you stopped using the kuli?

Ram Charan [an excitable fellow]: No, no, no! We don’t even say the word kuli!”

Bhoju [always persistent]: So now you never see any snakes?

Ram Charan: Well, yes, sometimes we see one; but at that time [when he had dared to employ a kuli] we sighted a snake every single day, one at least. I’ve seen these things with my own eyes.

The second tale in the pitiless land cycle has nothing to do with snakes or farming. It propels us directly into the urban realm of the market, by definition a realm of monetary transactions. This story draws on one figure, the well-known Shravan Kumar, who appears briefly in Hinduism’s other major epic, the Ramayana. Shravan Kumar’s story was often told immediately after the snake sacrifice story.⁶

In the classic Ramayana epic, Shravan Kumar’s story constitutes a fatal intervention in the plot. His figure remains revered as a model for filial service. He is known as the devoted son who carried his blind parents on pilgrimage and who was accidentally killed—mistaken for an elephant—by Lord Rama’s father King Dasaratha while on a youthful hunting excursion. Shravan’s parents curse Dasaratha to die in sorrow separated from his own beloved son—the same unhappy fate the young king’s misplaced arrow has forced upon them. In the Ramayana this curse, which Dasaratha relives in a dreamlike state on his deathbed, serves to determine the karmic necessity for Ram’s exile and his father’s mortal grief.⁷

The first individual to tell me about Shravan Kumar’s Jahazpur moment was an elder in the Khatik community. Durga Lal Khatik had been instrumental in founding the Khatiks’ Satya Narayan temple—a watershed in their history as well as in Jahazpur’s (Gold 2016). He told us that Jahazpur was known far and wide as a pitiless land because when Shravan placed his foot within the town boundary, the young man halted in his tracks and demanded kiraya or “fare” from his parents. They said, “Wait, son, the ground beneath your feet must be what causes you to speak in such pitiless fashion. Just keep walking until you have passed once again outside the border of this place.” Sure enough, as soon as Shravan Kumar stepped outside of Jahazpur territory, he once again became a model of filial devotion.⁸

If Jahazpur’s mythic snake sacrifice charters both name and character of place, Shravan Kumar’s story builds on and reinforces the notion that Jahazpur ground is somehow stamped with, or programmed for, primal violations of moral order: the ascendance of business over kinship. To me this story brings us to the heart of things. A market is a place, so unlike a family, where everyone must pay their way.

Individuals occasionally add a few narrative embellishments to their tellings, but there is little significant variation. A few examples suffice to show the ways a particular teller may inflect the basic story.

Kamala Dholin—a woman from the community of drummers, who serve as bards and whose verbal skills are renowned—located her telling of the Shravan Kumar story in Nagola, which, as we just heard, is reputed to be the actual site of Janamejaya’s sacrifice and which is a bit of a way out of town. But she quickly merges the two places in her story:

In Nagola, Shravan Kumar was carrying his parents. Then he stopped and said to them, “I have taken you on a pilgrimage around the entire world. Now you pay me the fare (kiraya)!”

They said, “You didn’t ask for the fare before. Why do you ask for it here in Jahazpur?”

Shravan’s father told his son, “Pick up some of this soil (mitti) and take it with you.” After they crossed the Banas River, his mother said, “All right, so you want your fare now?” But he had no idea what she was talking about.⁹

Then his mother put down the Jahazpur soil and as soon as he put his foot on it he began all over again, demanding from his parents their fare.

But the moment he moved his foot to the actual soil belonging to that far side of the Banas, he said he didn’t want the fare.

Kamala concluded: “Such are the qualities (gun) in Jahazpur’s soil.” Hers was the most explicit and dramatic telling in that the son does not even remember his demand once his feet are no longer touching the soil of the pitiless land.

Chittar Gujar belonged to one of the few Gujar families rooted in Jahazpur. He was among the first elders we visited in 2010, due to Bhoju’s feeling comfortable with Gujars.¹⁰ Historically, of course, Chittar’s community was associated with herding and dairy production, as are Gujars throughout Rajasthan. But he had successfully developed a truck transport business. As does Kamala’s, Chittar’s concise telling establishes a precise boundary for the pitiless land: “Shravan Kumar was carrying his parents on a pilgrimage. When he reached Jahazpur, he asked them—his mother and father—for the fare. They said, ‘OK, we’ll pay you the fare if you want it … but in this place there is no compassion. Between Jahazpur and the Banas River is the pitiless territory. So just go a little farther.’ ” And of course, no sooner do they cross the Banas River than Shravan Kumar becomes the perfect son once again.

Satyabala, a vivacious Brahmin woman who lived in the qasba, had rented rooms in her house to Bhoju Ram and two of his children for several years before Bhoju purchased his own property in Santosh Nagar. I had also stayed with her on one of my earlier visits. She was therefore one of the people we knew best in the qasba. Moreover, Jahazpur was both her natal home and her in-laws’ home, making her a lifelong Jahazpurite and a nice resource in that regard, as many women I interviewed had only moved here after marriage. On one visit I asked her about Jahazpur being a pitiless land, and she launched into the Shravan Kumar story without even mentioning the snake sacrifice. She told it like this:

Once Shravan Kumar was serving his mother and father, by taking them on pilgrimage. He took them throughout Mewar, but when he came to Jahazpur, he asked them for money: “Give me my fare (kiraya).”

His mother and father were both blind and they had nothing to give him, so they said to go forward, and he did, and when they came out from Jahazpur he didn’t ask anymore—and that is why people say this is sinful earth (papi dharti).

One Santosh Nagar neighbor, Ayodhya Vaishnav, was about forty years of age and had scant education. I met her in the company of Bhoju’s two daughters. Ayodhya surprised me by stating early on in our conversation that people like me (that is foreigners, non-Indians) had “more love among yourselves than we do here.”

She then without prompting launched straight into the story of Shravan Kumar or, as she called him, Shravan Beta (Son). “He took his mother and father everywhere,” she told us, “but only near the Nagdi did he ask for money. He asked for it when he came to Pander Road.” Thus embroidering the story in maplike local geography, she related the basic episode and concluded with a flourish: “It is a true story.” I asked her then to go back to the topic of love and explain what she had said earlier. She answered firmly, as if the Shravan Kumar narrative had served to prove her point, “You see, there is more love in your country than there is in Jahazpur.”

Ayodhya’s reference to America serves my purposes as this opening chapter’s final pitiless land telling (we return to Shravan Kumar in Chapter 8). I wish here to emphasize another effort and motif running throughout this book: the two-way gaze, and two-way passages of understanding—or at times misunderstanding. Looking back, I recollect during my first research three decades ago that people in the village of Ghatiyali (less than thirty kilometers from Jahazpur) were sometimes naive enough to believe that American streets were made of glass. At the same time they were severely critical of American culture that shunned its duties to the elderly as well as to children (and that I put my son in boarding school was perfect proof). Many people I met during my earlier village research claimed that my land so rich in possessions lacked love, a quality they insisted was more abundant in India.

So why would Ayodhya, in Jahazpur in 2010, idealize relationships in America? Possibly she wished to emphasize her own bitter assessment of the local: even in the materialistic USA she might have met with more kindness than in pitiless Jahazpur. I learned that Ayodhya had her private troubles, as was the case with most interviewees who agreed with the legends and attributed a genuine harshness to human relationships in Jahazpur. Such people were, I emphasize, in the minority.

By beginning with the pitiless land cycle, and by taking it not only as origin tale but as a kind of chartering mythology, I do not intend in any fashion to take it as valid judgment. Neither do most Jahazpur residents. Interviewees generally related the pitiless land cycle without a lot of reflection or reflexivity. It was simply part of a ready store of local lore, and a query as to whether it were true that Jahazpur had such a nature, or was any worse than other towns, would meet most often with dismissive replies.

However, there were a number, such as Ayodhya Vaishnav, for whom the pitiless land cycle served, as does the Mahabharata itself, to provoke pondering what Gurcharan Das has called “the difficulty of being good” (2010). That is, some people use the tales to rethink their own life experiences and even their own actions. Some people may conclude that snake slaughter is not the answer after all. As the young Vaishnav man was so determined to make us understand, snakes demand respect; if humans ignore this, retribution follows. Moreover, one’s aged parents must not be charged the fare even though it taxes you—financially, emotionally, and physically—to care for them.

Most of the time the following chapters engage the everyday. Jahazpur’s origin legends and the ways people interpret them reveal that the everyday may be stippled with troublesome snakes, heartless relatives, vengeance, and cupidity. Except for the snakes, we could say the same about anywhere on earth. My intention is to emphasize throughout this book that the everyday is equally wondrous in manifestations of concern, curiosity, hospitality, solidarity, integrity. This is my ethnographic version of the free newspaper I sometimes pick up in Ithaca called Positive News.

In Ghatiyali in 1980 village people often told me I was far too bholi—naive and gullible. Many anthropologists in these turbulent times provide accounts of violence, conflict, and suffering, and I read and teach their work with enormous admiration and even awe.¹¹ In claiming my calling to report on easier matters I certainly acknowledge my lack of aptitude and appetite for painful stuff. But I also argue simply that it is good to know not only the worst of which human beings are capable, but to document some of the ways and modes humans’ everyday actions resist or temper the influence of pitiless soil on which we all may find at times that we have (inadvertently or deliberately) placed a foot. One remedy, as the old blind parents advised, is to lift that foot up again. There is some comfort in knowing that the land without compassion is bounded.