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!”