Organizer and Chair: Margaret Meibohm, University of Pennsylvania
Discussants: Anita Weiss, University of Oregon; Akhil Gupta, Stanford University
In recent years, scholars of South Asia have paid well deserved attention to the construction and significance of identities and differences created along religious, linguistic, ethnic, and caste lines. This panel will identify and investigate contrasts between "rural" and "urban" which serve as another potent type of distinction and difference in contemporary India. These dichotomous representations of rural and urban create the village and the city as imagined discontinuous places (Gupta and Ferguson 1992) possessed of widely different types of persons, moral values and material conditions. Representations of the village and villagers in urban imaginations, our prime concern, often interact with other constructions of difference such as religion, gender, and class. They not only create rural "Others," either idealized or stigmatized, but also take on specific roles and meanings in particular contexts as, in our examples, they affect the valuation of commodities and services, inspire social reform strategies, and animate sacred journeys.
The papers in this panel present material from three linguistically, regionally, and ethnographically disparate Indian settings: chikan embroidery production in Lucknow; sex work in Calcutta; and religious pilgrimage in Tamil Nadu. In each context, imagined differences between city and village are created and influenced by material conditions and various types of urban/rural linkages-stages in material production, migration of labor, and movement of pilgrims-constituted by flows of persons, goods, money and knowledge which vary in distance, kind and temporality.
Each of our papers analyzes imagined places and dichotomies in relation to lived experience to reveal complexities and contradictions. Dell interrogates the validity of rural/urban contrasts that underpin middle class views of prostitution by juxtaposing a dominant social reform narrative with the life histories of sex workers. Wilkinson Weber discusses complications of labor skill, market demand, and historical change that belie the simplified urban view of chikan production, but that nonetheless allow urban superiority in the industry to be maintained. Meibohm proposes that idealized representations of rural landscapes and inhabitants associated with a sacred site may be partially transferred to new objects of nostalgia as modernizing changes diminish the site's rustic character.
Clare Wilkinson Weber, Franklin and Marshall College
This paper is about the ways in which goods and persons are regarded with respect to the places they occupy. Besides illustrating the economic as well as cultural implications of these judgments, I will also raise the issue of ambiguity and change in the identification and classification of place, specifically rural versus urban environments.
In the embroidery industry of Lucknow, place and distance have marked economic and cultural impacts. The industry is a dispersed one, whose only public manifestations are the shops in which finished goods are sold. Production is multi staged, workshop or household bound, and the key embroidery stage is lodged in the homes of many thousands of secluded women living both inside and outside the city of Lucknow. Concentrated almost entirely inside the city are all other productive stages, and a very large number of female embroiderers who are acknowledged by themselves, as well as merchants manufacturers and Lakhnawis at large, as being better skilled than their village counterparts. This skill differential manifests itself, first, in distinct phases of production-urban embroiderers typically "finish" the product with forms of embroidery unencountered in the village, and second, in absolute differences in the form of embroidery on the product as a whole. The practitioners of fine work regard their products as quintessentially urbane and sophisticated, and the work of villagers who are supplanting them as coarse and crude. The rural embroiderers are regarded as unintelligent, pliant and utterly ignorant of the original soil in which "genuine" chikan work was cultivated.
In the past half century, there has been an unmistakable shift in embroidery production from the city to the village, as merchant manufacturers have sought to minimize costs and cheaply produced articles have achieved their own aesthetic acceptance in nationwide mass markets. Rural embroiderers are isolated and separated from the city base of operations by as much as 70 miles. Obliged to remain in or close to their homes, the distance between these women and the city is bridged by agents, who control the flow of goods and knowledge about the market (and thus monetary rewards) across this distance. Some of the most highly skilled embroiderers, in the absence of demand for their kind of work, base their livelihoods on sub contracting work to villagers whose skills they disparage. The connection between rural and urban contexts is also complicated by marriages that permit women to move between village and city, either transporting or acquiring new skills with relocation. The utter distinction of rural versus urban in terms of skills is most insecure in the margins of the city, where male embroidery masters used to live during the earlier part of the century, yet where women today are restricted to a very limited range of marketable (i.e. simple) skills. Finally, with urban expansion, rural or semi rural locales have altered in status. One of the foremost settings for the production of fine work-now firmly within city limits-is freely described by present day inhabitants as having been surrounded by "jungle" just a generation ago, and was described in textual sources from the early century somewhat ambiguously as suburban.
Margaret Meibohm, University of Pennsylvania
Visualizations of the origin stories which establish the sacred power of the Catholic shrine at Velankanni in Tamil Nadu are the central focus of a commercial film which is credited with developing its widespread popularity in the mid 1970's. The movie, still periodically seen on television and closely imitated by a recent shrine publicity video, features bucolic landscapes and joyful villagers dancing in harmony. The stories depict appearances of the Virgin Mary to innocent rural children at a tank and at a banyan tree, powerful sites of nature. The sacred geography within the shrine complex is determined by these presumed sites of apparition and by a local ritual organization of wilderness and civilization that also implicates natural elements.
At Velankanni today, resemblance to the movie's images of pristine and peaceful landscapes and persons has been diminished, as has the character of the natural features which signify the most powerful sacred locations of the shrine. The substantial and continuing growth in hotels, shops, and transportation and other facilities at Velankanni in response to its increased popularity and to desires for modern convenience have transformed it from a simple "fishing village" to a town of 10,000. The sacred places of the shrine complex have been modernized, concretized, sanitized and "Lourdized." These changes in the town and shrine have produced in pilgrims and town dwellers a common nostalgia for the loss of the natural features which embody the romance of the village and the power of the wilderness, and have motivated the creation of new idealized rural objects. Over the last decade, group walking pilgrimages from Madras City have been instituted. These journeys, undertaken for spiritual and psychological benefits, also consciously recapture the rural in journeys through the countryside and in encounters with villagers constructed alternately as souls of generosity and objects of philanthropy. At the pilgrim's goal of Velankanni, a fishing village across the river from the shrine provides a romantic "other" for the town itself.
Heather Dell, Duke University
There is a temptation to see displacement as a specific social condition, a form of life that follows from some definitive break with a social life rooted in ancestral places. (Ferguson 1992:90)
What are the parallels and differences between the prostitute's lot as assumed by the urban middle class and as lived by Calcutta sex workers? This paper begins with Tapan Sinha's 1982 film "Didi." Based on Mitra's classic short story entitled "The Big City," the film contains some key elements of the dominant narrative of a prostitute's life in urban middle class imaginations. The viewer first meets Didi in the 'safe,' 'culturally authentic' space of her family in the village. But when she is raped by a stranger, she finds she cannot go home again. Instead, she is led inextricably into a life of sexual servitude and devaluation in the morally corrupting, exploitative urban underworld.
The story of Didi cannot be discounted as wholly unlikely. Research among sex workers suggests, however, that it relies on a number of reductionist assumptions that obscure the predicaments and accomplishments of Calcutta sex workers' lives (Dasgupta 1990; Mukherjee 1989). Drawing on the life histories of Kalighat and Sonagachi sex workers, I will seek to complicate and challenge this same dominant narrative; that of the prostitute's lot which has served for sixty years as the ideological underpinning of urban middle class social welfare programs designed to 'rescue' sex workers. The assumed disjuncture between the safe, virtuous family in the country and the exploitative urban world of waged sex must be problematized. Many sex workers leave or are taken from childhood and marital homes that are abusive and exploitative. In some cases, the migration of young girls and women into urban sex work is expected by the family. Like other migrant laborers, sex workers may send money home or, at the very least, be one less mouth to feed. This suggests that rather than being victims without agency, women sex workers are facing difficult, limited possibilities; that of hunger and abuse at home or heavy, invasive labor that, with growing experience and savvy, can be made to pay. It also suggests that the definitive break between village and city, family and sex work, does not occur as often as imagined. The two locations, moreover, may mutually reinforce the predicaments women face and attempt to resolve. This paper will trace out the routes Calcutta sex workers travel.
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