Shiptown. Ann Grodzins Gold
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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,