Of Varanasi
I worked primarily in the city of Varanasi; I had lived there on several previous occasions as a student of comparative religion and was familiar with its neighborhoods. Varanasi is among other things a sacred city, built along the archetypically sacred Ganges, Ganga in India. From the river, Kashi is Shiva's city—that is, a unity, the oft-described and continually researched "sacred city of the Hindus." The river anchors the pilgrim's construction of Kashi as the most famous of tiirthas : "crossing over" places, junctures with the transcendent experiential order of moksha, or release. It has anchored as well the colonial construction of Varanasi as the essence of the imagined Hindu. Our understanding of its sacredness is filtered through its importance as a sign of the essential India in colonial representations of the touristic, Cohn's observational/travel modality: "a repertoire of images and typifactions that determined what was significant to the European eye.[57] Cohn points to depictions of the Varanasi riverfront as a central image within the commodified portraiture of the essential Hindu, alternately exotic, docile, threatening, superstitious, bestial, and otherworldly.
The riverfront offers an overdetermined reading within the Indological construction of India as "the one and the many," "unity in diversity," and so forth. Its imaging out of time and beyond commerce and politics allows its continued representation as the confrontation of a teeming plurality with a negative oneness. Thus its primary icon, the line of stepped quays, or ghats, which stretch along the river's broad curve studded with mandirs (temples), maths (monastic communities), palaces, and the two cremation ghats, and flanked by the empty sands and distant tree line of the opposite bank of the river, us Par . On the one side, majestic, hierarchical, labyrinthine, and ultimately redundant dharma, or righteous action, divisible into myriad identical units (the ghats), each of which stands for and replicates the whole. On the other, the emptiness of us Par , the sandy and desolate ex-
panses of the uninhabited other bank. Foreign constructions of Varanasi in particular have tended to read the city through the perceived logic of its riverfront and its unambiguous religious meaning. Apologists see the glories of the inhabited bank and the solemn realities of the other; critics see the crowd (and sense communal frenzy), hear the clamor (and sense spiritual infantilism), and smell the filth (and sense bestial humanity) of the inhabited bank, and espy the fatalistic "life-negation" of Hinduism on the empty other.[58] It is the great Orientalist scene.
Within such a context, Nita Kumar's reinterpretation in The Artisans of Banaras[59] of the riverfront, the "other side," and their significance through a localized culture of pleasure—the language and practice of "Banaras-ness"—is radical. She reveals a different self-consciousness of the city, one alive to sensuality, to craft and commerce, and to Indo-Muslim culture, located within networks of trade and artisanship and the interpellation of its citizens within local and national discourses of their being bhaiyas and Banarsi thugs: North Indian rednecks, cheats, and ruffians. Following her lead, I will examine one of the stock characters of Varanasi, the devout and often destitute old person on the ghats, but only by placing this body within the context of the myriad other old bodies of the city, rereading the touristic.
Varanasi is a particularly interesting place to study old age. One of the key signs in the iconic representation of Varanasi is the old person and particularly the old widow, who has come to Varanasi and the Ganga to live out her last days or to die or at least be cremated here. The motives of these "dwellers in Kashi," or kasivasis , are ambivalently structured by many Varanasi natives with whom I spoke: on the one hand, they are said to have come out of great devotion (bhakti) to God to die in this sacred place; on the other, they have been cast out by unloving families or have lost their kin through untold tragedies. Might some of the kasivasis , I initially wondered, be demented as well?
Varanasi as sacred center is also home to hundreds, at times thousands, of sannyasis, renunciates, and other sadhus, or holy men. Sannyasa is the last stage of asramadharma —the idealized four-stage life cycle in the ethical and legal tradition of classical dharmasastra —and is conceptualized as a time of complete renunciation of secular life and pleasures, with one's mind focused on God and on the numenal world beyond appearances.[60] The goal of this fourth stage is the fourth of the classical goals of human existence—righteous action, pleasure, profit, and liberation from suffering. Moksha, or liberation, is often conceptualized as radical cognitive transformation in which one learns to forget the illusions of the phenomenal world. Old age as a radical cognitive transformation involving a practice of forgetting? Is Sannyasa , I initially wondered, ever a radical rethinking of senility?
Finally, Varanasi is an important center for medical and textual research and practice, with several colleges and universities. Scholars of biomedical (or "allopathic," as it is known in India, having no exclusive claim to being either biological or medical) and Ayurvedic medicine abound, and there are several notable practitioners of homeopathic and Islamic Unani medicine. Pandits who could
lead one through medical, legal, philosophical, and narrative texts are many. The presence of other forms of expertise not as localized to Varanasi—particularly in social work and law—also drew me.
I organized my fieldwork in Varanasi into three overlapping spheres: (I) a study of old people and their families over two years in several neighborhoods, roughly stratified by class: (2) a study of formal and informal institutions—ashrams, monasteries, widow houses, government homes for the aged, charitable homes for the dying, local support networks—1for kasivasis and sannyasis, and extensive work with individuals; and (3) a study of local institutions and practitioners, including allopathy (neurology, psychiatry; general practice), Ayurveda, exorcists, the civil courts, and political and religious associations.
I spent several months outside of Varanasi doing research in other types of institutions. In Delhi I worked with volunteer-supported old-age advocacy and fundraising groups, with the Ministry of Welfare, with police missing-persons bureaus, and with several additional families of friends and acquaintances who told me their parents or grandparents were or had been senile. In Bombay I worked with a multinational pharmaceutical company marketing a drug to ameliorate dementia. In Calcutta I worked in two old-age homes founded by a women's volunteer association, at the missing-persons desk of the local news department at the national television network of Doordarshan, and, as in Delhi, with the families of friends and others. In Madras, Bangalore, and Madurai, I met with several physicians and researchers working on old age. In Dehradun, I visited two very different institutions, a wealthy retirement ashram and a geriatric clinic. I spent several clays each at ashrams in the religious centers of Brindavin and Hardwar, sacred sites with somewhat different institutional relationships to older persons than found in Varanasi. Finally; in Allahabad, I visited the camp of Devraha Baba during the great convocation of ascetics, the Kumbh Mela; Baba, who has passed away since that time, was a famous superannuated saint then said to be at least 140 years old.
Despite the breadth of this ethnography, it centers in four neighborhoods of Varanasi. The city is spread along the west bank of the Ganga as it briefly courses northward. The older neighborhoods of the city, the pakka mahal , lie closest to the river. The pakka mahal consists of a narrow strip of neighborhoods, primarily Hindu, stretching for many kilometers along the river; another strip alongside the first one, which is mostly Muslim; and beyond these a patchwork of neighborhoods. Farther out from the lanes of the pakka mahal is the kacca mahal with its hodgepodge of slums, or bastis, middle-and upper-class "colonies," urbanized villages, large estates, the former British cantonment, and to the north the village of Sarnath, sacred site of the Buddha's first teaching.
Ravindrapuri colony is in the south of the city, just south and west of pakka mahal Muslim and Hindu neighborhoods, north of a low-caste Chamar slum, and east of other similar colonies. Its inhabitants are the families of higher level government bureaucrats, professors, doctors, engineers and other professionals, busi-
ness executives, and families with other sources of income. Nandanagar colony, where I lived with the Mishras from 1988–89, is on the southern outskirts of the city, on the western rim of the vast semicircular campus of Banaras Hindu University, bordering a low-caste area of the village of Karaundi. It is smaller and less wealthy than Ravindrapuri, but its residents are similarly primarily the families of bureaucrats and other government officials, professors, and professionals. I treat these two communities together in the fifth chapter.
Nagwa Harijan Basti is a low-caste slum near the river just south of the southernmost of the major ghats, Assi. On its north is the stream of the Assi and beyond that another poor, though more mixed-caste, neighborhood on the east fields and the river, and on the west and south wealthier colonies. Unlike the colonies, which are primarily inhabited by upper-and middle-caste Hindus, the slum is almost exclusively Chamar, an untouchable jati, or caste group, whose low status is "explained" by its traditional and polluting occupation of working with leather. Some residents of Nagwa do work with leather, running the shoe-and sandal-checking stands outside some of the city's many large temples; most are involved in numerous other jobs. Women work as domestics, running small shops, selling vegetables in the Lanka market nearby, in construction, as midwives, as possession healers, and as beggars; men may do these, midwifery and usually beggary excepted, and also work as teachers, rickshaw pullers, petty bureaucrats, students, and migrant laborers. Some residents work seasonally on their family's land or on land to which they have obligations, in villages to the south and west of the city. The sixth chapter focuses on Nagwa slum.
Bengali Tola—the Bengali quarter—lies deep in the pakka mahal along the river, between the major bathing ghats of Kedar to the south and Dasashwamedh to the north. Many Bengalis live here, as well as local Hindi-and Bhojpuri-speaking Banarsis and a significant community of Telegn-and Tamil-speaking south Indians. The area is cosmopolitan, crowded, and complex, with large homes known as havelis and small hovels, remnants of erstwhile palaces and water buffalo pastures tucked away around a corner, and dotted with numerous religious institutions. Many kasivasi widows, kasivasi old men, and superannuated sannyasis live along the lanes of the quarter, and it was here, during the year 1989–90 when I lived in the quarter below Marwari Mataji, that I did most of my kasivasi interviews.
The interdisciplinary site known as South Asian studies has changed considerably since I was a college freshman. Nowadays I pause before admitting that I have chosen to work in Varanasi, and not in other, less conventional and less touristic places. Whenever I return to the city and board at one of the several guest houses catering to visiting scholars, the variegated combination of expatriates I always run into presents an unpleasant reflection, perhaps one too close for comfort: religious seekers complaining about the locals, would-be sitar masters doing the George Harrison thing, students seeking the real India in the city's narrow and seemingly timeless lanes, and budget travelers counting the days until they can escape for the "hassle-free" vistas of Kathmandu.
For all the international attention and the prodigious literature it has generated, "Banaras" continues to be framed as a cultural domain unto itself, paradigmatic yet exquisitely local. In part, this localism originates in the Orientalist imagination, in part in parallel maneuvers to render the city timeless and unique, undertaken by Brahmanical pangyrists, national and international tour operators, and increasingly the so-called Hindu right. Bombay film has circulated depictions of "Banaras-ness" widely through films like Banarsi Thug and Banarsi Babu . Anthropologists like Jonathan Parry, Nita Kumar, and Joseph Alter have produced careful, complexly theorized, and richly textured ethnographies of the city, all of which have chosen to highlight practices understood as unambiguously traditional and particularly local.[61]
I began this book trained to do something similar, but in confronting the limits of my initial endeavor and in being forced to ask in different ways what was at stake in studying old age in a given place and time, I came to redefine the boundaries of my "field" in its dual sense: where and who I study; and how and for whom I write.[62] Varanasi has receded from its position as the center of this book, figuratively and literally, and has become a site in a different way as a set of linkages from the intimate to the global, but particularly in between.
Flexible ethnography for a fallen age: use Netscape to get on the Web, get into the database of the Alzheimer's Association, and wait for a prompt.
Enter keyword(s):[ ] [Search] [Reset]
Type "India ," to be disappointed with a polite no. "Sorry, I didn't find any documents that matched your search for India "! Play around a bit; collect bits of the words and pictures filling the screen. An ad for A Long Good-bye: Reflections on Dealing with Alzhaimer's , accompanied by photographs of its author, Dr. Linda Morrison Combs, as a little girl, a photograph of Linda's mother before she developed Alzheimer's, a "Personal message from Linda," and a Secure Online Ordering form. A collection of media releases: "Ronald and Nancy Reagan join forces with Alzheimer's Association," followed by "Government Abandoning Alzheimer Families through Medicaid Cuts." The ICD-10 description of Primary Degenerative Dementia of the Alzheimer Type. And the Alzheimer Page from the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center in St. Louis, which offers another prompt,[1] Again, wy "India ." This time, success, even after weeding out the majority of references to the other (Native American) Indians.
Two threads—"thread" being the term for a set of related postings on an Internet newsgroup—appear most promising. Both are culled from a newsgroup devoted to online discussions about Alzheimer's. The first is a debate on the relationship of Alzheimer's to a core New Age term, "oxidation," and subsequently on the antioxidant effects of a vegetarian diet. The debate leads one contributor to ask: "What is the incidence of AD ... say in India ... where 900,000 peo-
ple are vegetarian?" The thread concludes, "A medical web site in India would be the one to check, I suppose?"[2] Oh yes.
The second is an appeal from one Austin Lobo at rpi.edu in the United States, whose mother-in-law is in Bombay, diagnosed since 1993 with Alzheimer's ("later confirmed by a thorough exam at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in NYC"). Back in Bombay, with her husband "as sole care-giver," the mother-in-law "paces about her house, hiding things and accusing everyone around her of stealing from her." Mr. Lobo laments the impossibility of institutionalization and the lack of support groups: "In India, the social conditions are such that putting a parent in a nursing home is almost unthinkable. And AD or any other mental condition is treated as 'madness in the family [sic ],' with as much of a stigma as leprosy in biblical times."[3]
In response, a sympathetic poster notes that "with the awareness of Alzheimer's disease and dementia expanding globally, even in traditional societies such as India there is some recognition developing of the enormous strain placed on the family unit and the additional burden of social ostracism";[4] she goes on to recommend a contact person in Bombay. In India: site of the biblical, hundreds of millions of vegetarians, medical Web sites for the curious, the "unthinkable."