India Fieldwork

I first went to India in 1971 as an undergraduate student on a semester abroad program at the University of Mysore. Four months, just enough to find India to be fascinating.

An opportunity to join Dr. K. C. Malhotra in his research on nomads led to fieldwork in Maharashtra on the nomadic Nandiwallas in 1975. The Nandiwallas were performers with trained bulls, also bull traders. Though illiterate, they were very shrewd businessmen. They gathered during monsoon season every three years to arrange marriages and settle disputes in their caste panchayat (council), which was my interest, as a topic for a dissertation in anthropology of law – I had started a joint JD/PhD at State University of New York at Buffalo. My summer breaks were thus incommensurable with those of my law student colleagues – they worked in law offices or for judges, while I was in the middle of a hot, dusty rural part of central India, as part of an Indian anthropology research team.

The team was a wonderful example of the secular Republic of India that Nehru had designed, since it included a Punjabi Jat, a Bengali Brahmin, a Maratha, a Muslim, a Dalit, several other Hindus including a Lingayat, a South Indian Christian, a Parsi and a Sri Lankan Buddhist, as well as me; and was half male, half female. On the other hand, the week before I got to India, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had suspended the Constitution of India in an “Emergency” declared to keep herself in power, which gave me some insight into how democratic institutions could be subverted, under a constitutional coup, the PM using constitutional provisions to subvert the constitution and enable her and her younger son to run the country as an autocracy.

I returned for more fieldwork with Dr. Malhotra in 1976 - the heart of the Emergency, which made it all the more interesting, as deepening my experience in a police state in which Americans were regarded with suspicion. And not just political suspicion. That year another grad student from Buffalo, Pamela Erickson (who became a distinguished medical anthropologist and Latin Americanist at U Conn) was part of the team. Indira Gandhi had used the Emergency to impose laws, including one in Maharashtra that required sterilization of one member of any couple who already had three children. When we would approach a village, people assumed that I was a doctor and Pam a nurse, and that we were coming to castrate the men, other means of sterilization not being known to them. So we would enter a village filled with women, children and elderly people. Fortunately, the Emergency ended in 1976, restoring democracy to India.

The Nandiwalla panchayat was carried out in Telugu (mainly), so training in that language took me to Andhra Pradesh, and finally dissertation fieldwork on the panchayat of the Nandiwallas brought me to back to Maharashtra in 1978-79, under my first NSF funding, a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant.

Through Marc Galanter I was able to work with the leading scholars of law and society in India, Rajeev Dhavan and Upendra Baxi.

I went again to Maharashtra with new NSF funding in 1992 to study caste councils, fieldwork that produced little on caste councils but revealed 1990 changes to a saint’s shrine at Madhi, Ahmednagar District that we had observed in 1976.

Analysis of these changes led to the “Antagonistic Tolerance” project, thus my third NSF grant, and I did research in Goa for that project in 2009. In 2013, I was able to return to Maharashtra to do further research on the Madhi shrine. To my delight, Dr. Malhotra, with whom I had done fieldwork in 1975, 1976, 1979 and 1992, was able to take part in the research in 2013. Our 38 years of collaboration is unusual in anthropology, and it has been an honor and pleasure to work with Kailash so many times.

Unfortunately, Nehru’s secularism has been increasingly displaced by Hindu nationalism, turning India into the chauvinistic Hindustan that the Republic was not supposed to be, and this was clear at the Madhi shrine. By 2013, what had been visually shrine to a Muslim saint had been Hinduized, with only a few remaining signs of its original identity.

Significant publications from these projects include:

Book: Disputes & Arguments among Nomads: A Caste Council in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Articles:

"The Cultural Ecology of Service Nomads." The Eastern Anthropologist 32:297-309 (1979).

"Excommunication as Everyday Event and Ultimate Sanction: The Nature of Suspension from an Indian Caste." Journal of Asian Studies 42: 291-307 (1983).

"A Note on Caste Panchayats and Government Courts in India: Different Kinds of Stages for Different Kinds of Performances." Journal of Legal Pluralism 22:43-52 (1984).

"Turn-Taking, Overlap and the Task at Hand: Ordering Speaking Turns in Legal Settings." American Ethnologist 14:271-290 (1987).

"Conflicts and Relations of Power between Peripatetics and Villagers in South Asia," pp. 267-289 in Aparna Rao, ed., The Other Nomads: Peripatetic Minorities in Cross-Cultural Perspective (Koln: Bohlau Verlag, 1987). Reprinted in A. Rao & M. Casimir, eds., Nomadism in South Asia. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003.

"Antagonistic Tolerance: Competitive Sharing of Religious Sites in South Asia and the Balkans." Current Anthropology 43: 205-231 (2002)

“Shared Spaces, or Mixed?” Oxford Handbook of Religious Space, Jeanne H. Kilde, gen. ed., Oxford University Press, Sept 2022.