"Muddy mediaevalism"
Rupchand, whose role seems to be that of Dr Kishan's right-hand layman, is head-to-toe an unintentional comic with a serious approach to life. Everything he says to me, in Hindi, is spoken with emphasis and loud repetition of the “I’m talking to a foreigner” type, and accompanied by exaggerated gestures and mimes. His facial expressions are wonderful: frequent extreme surprise or shock, desperate incomprehension, an “oh, isn’t that adorable” face – reserved for occasions such as when I told him that there were lots of domestic cats in England – and a general beaming expression. All are outrageously magnified to cross the chasm of potential misunderstanding between us, but apparently without a hint of conscious self-parody. He is tremendous fun, but I don’t think I’ll ever get to know him well. His wife is surprisingly beautiful and, contrary to what I had earlier supposed, not at all shy. Their child, who I am sure is a girl, but strongly remember being introduced to as a boy and now feel to embarrassed to ask, is pretty, strong-willed and very engaging[8].
Rupchand and Hitanshu
Aditya, in charge of the medicines, is quite interesting and sweet but absolutely uncurious, in stark contrast to Rupchand, for whom no detail of the habits and customs in my country is too small to be of the utmost fascination. I made a howler when talking to the two of them earlier about English marriages, referring to them not as pyaar ki shaadi (love marriages) but pyaaz ki shaadi (onion marriages).
*
En route from Udaipur on Monday, Satish and I made a trip to the Forest Department in Kherwara in order to clear up some of the mysteries of land ownership. I only partially understood the Hindi conversation and so far have only discussed the skeleton of it with Satish, but he assures me that the meeting was a triumph and has helped him hugely with his own field project. It appears that all land – which I suppose means all rural land – belongs to the Revenue Department, who lease it out to the Forest Department, to panchayats or to individuals.
I spent Tuesday and Wednesday in Maal trying to find out about labour migration patterns. Satish and Karan were working back in their assigned village, and Ellen is now doing some research for Dilip in Udaipur, so amateur dramatics and frantic scrambles through the dictionary were the only tools at my disposal. As usual, Amratlal and Suraj had to bear the brunt of this, alongside Bhagwanlal, who is one of the village teachers. It appears that two Maalians are based in two different Gujarati towns acting as contractors for various cotton and wool factories. They come back to Maal at times, and return to Gujarat with as many new workers as are required. They recruit people not only from Maal, but also from other neighbouring villages. Similarly, other villages have their own contractors working for various industries in Gujarat (or elsewhere) who get work for Maalians as well as their own villagers. Unfortunately, neither of these thekadars, as they are known, are in Maal at the moment, so I had to content myself with talking to a couple of the migrants themselves, young guys who were about to go and work in Gujarat.
Minor theatrical research triumphs aside, week three hasn't been as productive as I had hoped. Tapan, whose status as saviour seems to grow with his continued inaccessibility, has been ill all week, making it very difficult to really move anything forward. I was luckily able to coax the hospital telephone into making a call to Kherwara, and had a brief conversation with him in his office. Poor thing, he sounded really unwell and I masked my frustration as well as I possibly could. He assures me, however, that he will be going to "Head Office" in Udaipur tomorrow, and that I should come back a day early to meet him.
He also outlined the next steps of the project which will inevitably form a process of formalising my Maalian inquisition, specifically through setting up a village meeting and implementing a survey. The aim of the latter will be to gain a fuller understanding of the context - that wonderfully all-encompassing term that embraces wells, pumps, goats, encroachments and migration patterns - and fill some of the gaping holes as yet untouched by my hand-waving, chai-swilling research methods. The former will partly be an exercise in PR - explaining what we are doing in Maal, and why we are doing it - and partly another medium through which to clarify some of the confusion that is the legacy of my first few weeks. There will be a strong focus on prioritising the village's main needs, an exercise which I understand forms a core part of the microplanning exercise. Since talking to Tapan, I have managed to convene a meeting at 2pm next Monday with the Forest Protection Committee and a number of others (such as Dolat Ram and Suraj) that I have invited personally.
Footnotes
[8] He was definitely a boy!
Next Post - Friday 27th October 2006: Udaipur (will be posted Thursday 27th October 2011)
No comments:
Post a Comment