Distance Away from 'the City of Djinns'

First. apologies to anyone regularly checking this blog (though I can't imagine there are many, some how?). I think the thing with fieldwork is that after a certain point, motivation to do anything but the daily grind slowly leaks away. Thus the frontier paper, which I was happily and confidently revising, is now languishing in my hard drive, this blog hasn't been posted in for almost a month, nor has www.passtheroti.com... thinking about it, I definitely need a vacation of some sort. Going to Islamabad in less than a month, so that'll be it.

The hidden cost of shorter and shorter time in research is that every day spent in the fieldwork site must mean something. If you're away for two years, you can build roots in a place (typically one), and if you get two or three things done a week, that's fine.

Relatedly, I'm almost finished reading William Dalrymple's first book, 'City of Djinns', which has a soothing quality to it -- I like it more than I expected. But part of that calmness is how his historical sketches of Delhi City are interlaced with sustained encounters with assorted characters (interviewees) in the Old City and descriptions of the trials and delights of daily life experienced by him and his wife during their year living there. I find it unsurprising that Dalymple and his family now divide their time between England and India -- they have established ties here, a niche that, while elitist and founded on success in Western writing and publishing, is as real as any South Delhi Punjabi emigre elite. The basis of this niche is the open-ended curiosity of archetypical outsiders: a Scotch couple with little knowledge of Hindi (initially) but with amazingly good connections, and with naught to do but explore, talk to people, read, write, paint. I don't mean any of this as a criticism: this open-endedness allowed him to write a book that is both evocative and interesting. It's not academic history or cultural critique, nor should it be. To my sensibilities, admittedly more than a little English, it's a wonderfully crafted narrative of a person's experiences in a city over a year, over-laid onto a folk historiography of nostalgia and decline.

Mini-book review aside, the point I wanted to make is this: it's interesting to contrast Dalrymple's year in India at 25, in 1991, to mine at 27, in 2007. The occasional complaint Dalyrmple has in his narrative of the faster pace and the crass commercialism of South Delhi is now a dominant pace of the city -- reading the book, everything from his housing situation to his transportation has a quaint air to it. Life in Delhi, and in any metropolis in the country, has a cut-throat commercialised feeling to it. I argue with auto rickshaw-wallahs about fares several times a day, I'm staying in a PG room for probably four times as much as William and Olivia paid for a barsati, and roads are getting more and more choked with traffic. This is not surpising -- liberalisation occurred in the same year as Dalyrmple's research, and Delhi-wallahs are getting richer and richer.

Consider what he was and I am researching. His book is about Delhi's history, from the Tughluks to the Moguls to the British to the Partition and the riots of 1984, along with other more meandering topics from eunuchs and the Anglo-Indians to sufi saints. Together, these form an air of nostalgia as the grandeur and sophistication are undone by the quotidian nature of thepresent Indian state (I told you it was elitist). His researches are almost always accompanied by learned and personable characters who enliven history and narrative and serve as translators between dense culture or archeology and the reader. I am, by contrast, studying manufacturing in the industrial areas and districts of Indian urban and peri-urban space. There is little beauty and nostalgia for me comes from old ideas (say, that of industrialisation) rather than old civility. And there isn't any kind, wise old gentleman, like Dr. Jaffrey, to show me the way.

Lastly, and most importantly, look at differences in personal life. Dalymple was accompanied by his partner. I have no partner. He spent a year in Delhi, traveling to Ajmer and Shimla and the Maharashtrian hinterland but essentially living in one place. I am going to be based in two of the major metros and will travel out a fair bit from them.

Dalrymple's year in India produced a highly successful travel book that I like despite all its faults. My eight months will, I hope, eventually lead to a book, but I can guarantee you it will be less successful by all accounts. I'm certainly engaged in a different project: my eventual audience will be academic, and I will in the end live or die by theoretical contributions rather than readability or attention to detail. As a result, I need to keep variation going, I need to treat interviews as data collected rather than interesting stories. Ultimately, this is an eight-month long research assignment -- I got research grants on the strength of fairly specific activities, and while there is no oversight what-so-ever, I still feel like I'm here for a job. I don't know how Dalrymple funded his year, but it would've been a) a great deal cheaper, and b) infinitely more flexible.

And yet, I guess I miss the world, now gone, in which fieldwork meant both living and working, and most importantly being stable enough to start enjoying yourself as who you are in this weird context, rather than treating it as a means to professional ends.

Research is hard. Harder still when you're on a two and a half week trip to Madras, a place where you know hardly anyone and can't speak the language at all. If there's a point at all in this rambling self-pitying stram of verbiage above, it's to bemoan the leisure of soaking up life in a new place with people you love, and have work that complements that soaking. 'Sukha' actually means dry in Hindi / Urdu, and I'm afraid that life is getting a little too dry and brittle at the moment. I hope good interviews tomorrow will alleviate that a little.

I'll write a more traditional 'Madras splendour ' tomorrow or the next day, I promise -- idli and coconut chutney, the beach and the ever-present lungi, the beach and the suburban rail system... 10ish more days here, and then I return to late autumnal Delhi, 'the City of Djinns', for three weeks.