River Town Chronicles

M
Y FAMILY AND
I first went to India for a year during 1962–1963. At the time, I was a graduate student in Cultural Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley and had received a research grant from The Social Science Research Council to study the merchant castes in a small town in northwest India. The Chairperson of my PhD Committee at Berkeley, Professor Gerald Berreman, suggested that I might want to consider River Town (pseudonym) as a possible place to do my research. I had completed several years of intensive conversational Hindi at Berkeley and later an additional year of Urdu at the University of Chicago, which provided me with a reasonably good foundation in the spoken language of the area of River Town. I was also fortunate that the brother of my Hindi language instructor at Berkeley happened to be from a nearby town and kindly offered me letters of introduction to his family members who assisted me in getting set up in River Town.

I returned to India for a year in 1967–1968 under a grant from The American Council of Learned Societies and again for six months in 1972, with support from The American Institute of Indian Studies, to continue my work with merchant castes and small towns in the same general area. This book chronicles the pleasures and perils that my family and I experienced during that time, more than forty-five years ago. It is based largely on notes and memories of the people, places and events of the time. In that sense, it is part history, part anthropology and part memoir. All of the people, places and events described in this book are real, but I have taken the liberty of rearranging them in significant ways in order to condense and chronicle as many of our experiences as possible.

There are no heroes or villains in this story. My work was never intended to be a critique of the way of life of those who live in River Town nor simply an account of our attempts to survive what might be considered the perils of living there. Rather it is a portrait of an encounter between people with differing cultural assumptions and social practices that reveal themselves in the course of the events of everyday life. It reflects the needs, the triumphs, the illusions and tragedies that we all experience when faced with the unfamiliar and unexpected. It is an encounter that has made our life much richer and more meaningful than would have been possible otherwise.

M
Y FIRST GLIMPSE OF
R
IVER
T
OWN
was from the back of a horse drawn
tonga
as we inched our way against a crush of humans, animals and bicycles. The rain poured down making forward progress even more difficult. I wondered if this was why the place was called “River Town!” The
tonga walla
reined in his horse next to a group of men huddled together in front of a sweet shop. I couldn't see anything, but heard a dull
thump
and then an angry howl. Suddenly I saw a dog's head snap back, as a huge man swung a thick, six foot wooden pole against the bony structure of an emaciated looking dog.
Thump
…Again the man swung the wooden pole, only this time with more force and the dog collapsed in front of the sweet shop, foam drooling from the corners of its mouth. Why was this dog being punished in such a brutal manner? The
tonga
moved ahead and I could see the lifeless dog sprawled out in front of the sweet shop. The
tonga walla
turned his head towards me.
Pagal. Wo kuta pagal ho gaya.
(Crazy. That dog has gone crazy). This was my introduction to River Town. A rabid dog sprawled out in front of the sweet shop, directly across the lane from where my wife, Pat, and I and our three children would live in an unoccupied shop in the bazaar.

x

T
HE TONGA MADE ITS WAY
to the
chowk
(center of town). I paid the
tonga walla
and walked down a narrow lane to Lallaji's office. He was dressed in a white cotton
dhoti
and a loose fitting
kamiz
and sitting cross-legged and barefoot on a small wooden platform. I handed him a note of introduction from Vinod, his nephew and a friend of mine from graduate school in Berkeley. He seemed pleased to receive the note from Vinod and insisted I join him for a cup of tea. His servant raced out to the bazaar and returned with brass tumblers filled with delicious hot tea mixed with milk and sugar. After inquiries about Vinod and another round of tea, I explained to Lallaji that I wanted to live in River Town and learn about its history and culture. He remained expressionless as if lost in a deep meditative state. I told him that I had a wife and three children who would be living with me. He smiled and softly remarked that it would not be possible. “The women in town would not like it.” He was generalizing about all the women in town, though I was pretty sure he was talking about the women in the merchant neighborhoods, the keepers of purity, who would not like the smell of cooked meat contaminating the strictly vegetarian Hindu neighborhoods of the merchants. But I persisted until Lallaji reluctantly offered to rent me an empty shop in the bazaar (away from the merchant neighborhoods). Still, he insisted it would not be suitable for an American and, furthermore, a small courtyard out back would have to be shared with another family. He was sure I would see the stupidity of such an arrangement but I was happy to hear that someplace, anyplace, was available. Apparently the bazaar was a neutral zone, sealed off from the inner neighborhoods of the merchants, a suitable place for mad dogs and anthropologists. We settled on the rent. Seven dollars a month, including electricity.

S
OON AFTER NEGOTIATING
a place to stay in River Town, I took the train back to Delhi where Pat, my wife, and our three children, Tim (6 years old), Brian (3 years.) and Lori (2 years old) were staying in a bungalow at Fonseca's, a residential compound in New Delhi owned by a Portuguese gentleman who had lived all of his life in India. Pat had decided that they would stay there until I found a place to live in River Town.

The atmosphere at Fonseca's was an odd mixture of traditional Indian habits and British colonial pretense. The Indian help lived in small huts next to the bungalows. In the main building there was a dining area with a veneer of formality, where servants dressed in white tunics, plumed turbans and immaculate white gloves squatted on their haunches waiting patiently to serve up bad British food and afternoon tea and biscuits.

There was another American academic staying at Fonseca's, a frustrated economist on a Ford Foundation grant who shuffled off each morning in good spirits only to return each afternoon disheveled and disillusioned by his encounters with the Indian bureaucracy. “We never get anything done,” he complained. “All I do is sit around and drink tea and try to explain to everyone why I'm not married and have no children.” The economist had learned the hard way that there is no middle ground for a foreigner in India. You either love it or hate it. His futile struggle against the rip current of Indian culture ultimately spelled doom for him. He had had enough and soon returned empty handed to the U.S.