Sensorium

by Numpie
B.A. in Anthropology (University of Virginia 2011); M.A. in Folklore (UC Berkeley 2019)
Instagram: @thenumpie

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The comic zine you are about to read is a kind of experimental, still-frame ethnographic film. Drawn (literally) from my master’s field research on raw milk in the state of California, I produced this in the hopes of productively expanding upon the more recognizable forms of visual anthropology: photography and film. I join a rising wave of interest in the potential for comics and graphic novels to convey the findings of qualitative research in the social sciences, signified by the launch of University of Toronto Press’ EthnoGRAPHIC imprint in 2017. Interlocutor follows my efforts to conceptualize and execute a multispecies research project in which I situate non-human participants alongside my human interviewees as equitable contributors to the project. It asks questions about the field of anthropology by exposing practical limitations in performing this research, all while depicting my messy meetings with three warm, breathing beasts: the goats Lapis, Jasper, and Copper.

During my research, I had a daydream of making a short film exploring these issues, but lacked both skill and experience in filming and video editing. Instead, I turned to my longtime illustration and cartooning practice, which became a viable and intriguing alternative. When my committee chair responded enthusiastically to my side-project with the comment: “in a comic, the goats can TALK!” I immediately hated the idea. I was aiming for a tone more akin to serious, nonfiction graphic novels, like Joe Sacco’s famous “comics journalism” (Palestine, Paying the Land). As I sat with this tension, however, possibilities unique to the comics form began to reveal themselves to me. Instead of English-speaking goats that undermined the very points I was trying to make in my research, I ended up with goats that occasionally speak with pictograms of their desired treats, or with a dotted-line speech bubble that subtitles the meaning of their actions as I clearly understand them. As the complete piece developed, the designs took on a playful, rude, and spunky aesthetic that was inspired by spending time with the goats, and would look at home on shelves alongside indie comics and punchy, D.I.Y. zines.

I turned to folklore for my master’s degree in part because the discipline contains an established tradition of public folklore, and I am interested in conveying anthropological research to broader audiences. Similarly, comics allow me to leverage a vernacular form: the American public is generally more versed in its conventions than those of, say, the academic conference paper. Illustration, graphic novels, and similar mediums offer a great deal to the ethnographer for the purposes of “writing up,” allowing information to be presented in vivid, multisensory ways. Such projects also raise challenges inherent to addressing multiple audiences simultaneously: how should I employ jargon that is specific and useful, without alienating the reader? How can I remain compelling to theorists, while also engaging the curiosity of bookstore passers-by? For the non-anthropologists, I hope you read this and experience a pleasant sensation of “being tricked into reading a school paper” (actual feedback I received on a draft). For the ethnographers, I hope Interlocutor kids you a little, nibbles at your shirttail, and invites you to imagine wilder possibilities for future publications.

I’ll meet you there,
Numpie

Please note: This comic is best viewed full-screen (second icon from the right in the below taskbar). 

 

Suggested citation:
Numpie. 2021. “Interlocutor.” Sensorium, February 21. Accessed September 26, 2023. https://cultureandagriculture.americananthro.org/2021/02/interlocutor/.

by Andrew Flachs
Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Purdue University
http://andrewflachs.com

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Most of my days begin with a cup of coffee. Sometimes I grind my own, sometimes I go to my local hipster cappuccino place, and most days I drink pre-ground Folgers because it’s free at the office. The rich smell and the warmth of the cup help me ease into the morning, as I am decidedly not a morning person, while the lingering buzz gives me an extra hour of focus after I come home and put our baby to sleep. When I am feeling fancy, guilty, or otherwise aware of my consumption choices, I go for organic and fair-trade shade-grown coffee. The rich smell and warmth of the cup is the same, but the packaging reminds me of the various plants, animals, and humans who might benefit from this process. Paige West, along with others like Sarah Lyons and Daniel Jaffee, have shown how some of this alternative agriculture branding can break down in practice, failing to provide the remunerative benefits it promises or exoticizing the people who grow coffee. In other ways, the coffee trade opens up new possibilities for sociopolitical power by bringing farmers into new relationships with money, resources, or ownership. I began learning from South Indian farmers participating in fair trade and organic agriculture in 2012, with my first lessons coming not from coffee but from cotton. Yet I have found surprising links between coffee and cotton – most importantly, such programs are always complicated and locally variable.

This initial project compared farmers’ experiences planting mutually exclusive genetically modified (GM) cotton and organic cotton seeds in Telangana, South India. After months of walking through GM cotton fields, I had learned to see the beauty in uninterrupted rows of chest-high green stalks, to smile at nectar-drunk bees playing amongst the pink and yellow flowers. Like cotton growers, I began to appreciate the way the sun catches cotton hairs when you look from the right angle across rural India’s neoliberal capitalism. Annual hybrid cotton, the Gossypium hirsutum that Telangana farmers plant, has a vibrant green for much of its life cycle. If farmers apply fertilizers at the ideal moment, just before a gentle rain, the fields will beam, verdant against the black earth.

I never quite got used to the mingled smell of diesel and pesticides that lays across fields recently sprayed for whiteflies and aphids. The combination of urea, diammonium phosphate, and bug neurotoxins has always reminded me of A1 steak sauce, a thick and sinister umami that lingers in my nose long after I leave a field or fertilizer shop. Raised on the border of protected state hunting lands in Pennsylvania, I never truly grew accustomed to the bags of GM cotton seeds, sacks of fertilizer, pesticide bottles, plastic bags stamped with shop brands, and innumerable other bits of litter that blow like tumbleweeds on Telangana farms. As a former Enviro-thon middle schooler, these bits of garbage in the cotton monocultures rankled me.

And so I was immediately struck by the diversity of plant life when I stepped onto an organic cotton farm in 2012 sponsored by a private company based in Hyderabad. I later found that organic cotton farmers here managed more than twice as many useful plants in their fields than the GM farmers of Kavrupad. This is not an inherent feature of organic agriculture itself but an explicit design through which these farms meet regulatory demands for a diversified agriculture. Farmers are subsidized by the program to plant more biodiverse fields, with special areas set aside for food crops. Rows of cotton are interspersed with lines of pigeon pea, a nitrogen fixer and a food. Trap plants like castor lure bollworms away from the cotton while ornamentals like marigolds serve double duty as festive garlands that attract predatory wasps and deter nematodes. A1 steak sauce does not linger in my nostrils in these places. Instead, the smell of the earth mingled with cow manure dominates. Farmers do not wash out fertilizer bags and pesticide bottles in the streams where children (and sweating anthropologists) swim and fish, because they don’t use them here. I am professionally cautious of being too optimistic about organic agriculture. All interventions make certain kinds of demands on farmers, require audits, accumulate capital off the farm, and contribute to agrarian imaginaries that are not always in farmers’ best interests. But if I were guided by my nose rather than a close reading of agrarian political economy, I know which farms I’d rather support.

India is home to more certified organic farmers than any other country, totaling more than a quarter of all certified organic growers on the planet. Every crop and production system is different, though. The search for a good comparison to the ways of learning and managing socioecological relationships in dryland cotton brought me to certified organic coffee forests in the Eastern Ghats, a mountain range a few hundred kilometers east of the cotton farms. When I visited Araku’s coffee gardens in summer 2018, organic coffee farmers were still recovering from the Hudhud, a cyclone that devastated these forests in 2014. It would have been the perfect moment for skeptical farmers to abandon the project, throwing up their hands at onerous regulations and constant surveillance of watchful project managers. Yet they didn’t. For some reason, this system passed a real-world test of resilience, and coffee farmers were expecting their first full crop after waiting four years for the forest to regenerate.

Organic cotton is grown under the open sun. While measurably more biodiverse, those fields reads to this US American (used to maize monoculture) like a farm field. These conditions would kill coffee bred to grow under the shade, and so coffee agroforestry feels more like a managed woods to me. The harsh summer light on a hot July day vanishes as we step into the hills. We are immediately engulfed in dark green, reflecting off coffee’s thick, waxy leaves and down again from the snakes of black pepper vines above. The temperature drops ten degrees and birds, rarely seen on cotton farms, chirp warnings at us. Organic coffee gardens are literal forests in the hills, and stepping into these spaces during a sunny day turns my vision emerald. Like organic cotton farms, biodiversity is built in by design. But the options multiply in coffee agroforestry, where agricultural plants are grown in accordance with the niches afforded by a forest ecosystem. One typical farm might have pineapple and ginger on the ground, chest-high coffee trees, a mid-level canopy of papaya and banana ten feet above, followed by silver oaks that provide shade and a straight pole for black pepper’s vines ten feet above that. Interspersed in this forest are mangoes, figs, Pongam oil trees, gooseberries, and other useful crops, to say nothing of hilltop meadows and lowland farms where grains and vegetables grow.

All of this habitat, especially because it is managed without chemical fertilizers or pesticides, provides space for birds, insects, reptiles, and a wide array of non-economic plants that farmers see no need to destroy. The tree cover traps moisture in the soil while the underbrush drops dew onto our sandaled feet. Instead of fertilizers or manure, this forest is alive with the funk of rotting leaves and humus. In the wake of the cyclone, many of coffee trees are new and young, next to decaying stumps. The alternative to replanting is clear when we reach the top of the hill and look across the landscape – forests cut down for timber and mountainsides ripped open for mining.

Although much forested land is owned or claimed by state agencies like the forest service, or the integrated Tribal development agency, Adivasi, members of India’s Scheduled Tribe communities, managed these areas long before and after the Indian government and extractive industries took an interest in the bauxite under Araku farmers’ lands. The Eastern Ghats, where Adivasi farmers have lived for generations, received new attention when veins of bauxite, the world’s primary source of aluminum, were discovered under the hills. Adivasi farmers have faced an uphill battle for socioeconomic mobility across India. Displaced from optimal farmland in India’s ancient past, the British colonial government considered many tribal communities to be inherently criminal and restricted their access to land and other rights. After independence, many Adivasi communities fought with the forest service for control over land, timber, and minerals until a series of reforms culminating in the Forest Rights Act of 2006 strengthened their tenure. Growing coffee and staying on the land is one way that Adivasi communities can secure contested territory for themselves, assembling political power and forcing the state to honor regulations that prevent non-tribal landowners from taking forested land and resources.

The added value of certified organic coffee as a commodity pales in comparison to the value of land rights and enduring tenure for current and future generations made possible through organic farming as a relationship. Farmers risk losing titles and jeopardizing bank loans when this land is incorrectly registered, a bureaucratic hurdle that favors extractive industries with legal expertise but one that can be overcome when organic programs certify farmers. Organic certification and enduring land rights give these farmers a way to imagine a future as coffee farmers, on their own territory, managing their own forests. Noting how many of the younger generation and those without land seek wage labor in urban centers, one farmer explains, “as long as you have your own land, you can make money. You can get money each month and you need not leave.”

Farmers and project officers complain that some banks would prefer to cultivate more lucrative mineral or timber extraction contracts, and so regularly delay or deny financing for Adivasi farmers thought to be wasting these resources with subsistence livelihood activities. Organic programs help farmers work through this bureaucracy and diminish the risk that outsiders will seize land because of misfiled paperwork, creating value for farmers not just through the recognition of hard work but through the recognition of formal land tenure. Farmers with connections to outside institutions like the organic coffee cooperatives have an easier time persisting in such legal and financial struggles.

When I admit that I prefer the cool hills, the green light, the smell of humus to the sensations of Telangana’s cotton farms, farmers laugh. Of course the environment’s better here, the air and the water are cleaner here than in the cities, one young man explains to me. Cradling his newborn daughter, he says that he hopes to send her away to better schools in the nearby city, but makes it clear that she should return, away from the smoke and dust. Ultimately, we all want to live here, he says, gesturing at the hills. If, today, organic agriculture is a way to stay among these sights and smells, he’s for it. Understanding the nuances of aspiration and valuation on organic coffee farms helps us understand what drives long-term commitments to alternative agriculture and design programs better suited to improving life for historically marginalized people. But it also helps us understand how parallel values – what I value as a picky organic consumer holding a steaming cup, what farmers value, what project intermediaries value when they audit farms, even what the ecosystem seems to value – might all reinforce one another even as they offer their own directives for the future of farming.

All photos by Andrew Flachs.

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Further reading

Flachs, Andrew. 2016a. “Redefining Success: The Political Ecology of Genetically Modified and Organic Cotton as Solutions to Agrarian Crisis.” Journal of Political Ecology 23 (1): 49–70.
———. 2016b. “The Economic Botany of Organic Cotton Farms In Telangana, India.” Journal of Ethnobiology 36 (3): 683–713. https://doi.org/10.2993/0278-0771-36.3.683.
Flachs, Andrew, and Sreenu Panuganti. Forthcoming. “Organic Aspirations in South India.” Economic Anthropology.
Jaffee, Daniel. 2007. Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival. 1st ed. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lyon, Sarah. 2010. Coffee and Community: Maya Farmers and Fair-Trade Markets. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.
West, Paige. 2012. From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive: The Social World of Coffee from Papua New Guinea. Durham: Duke University Press.

by Anabelle Suitor
PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology, Brown University

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Amir Khasru carried on forward with a hustle, so that his body kept up with his rubbish cart, as he drew it down the smaller hill that was unavoidably central to the neighborhood. I call this neighborhood where he works Bithar. It is one of the most elite neighborhoods in Chittagong, Bangladesh’s second largest city and primary port-city.

He passed a number of homes and turned down one of the neighborhood’s streets. He and three others were employed as waste-collectors by a neighborhood komiti, a group of elite homeowners who rely on dues from other community members for the upkeep of the neighborhood.

Amir Khasru is in his fifties. He’s a thin man with a long beard, and a disposition that I thought was quietly devout. I was not surprised, then, when he told me that he used to spend his Thursday nights in devotion at the mazar, shrine, of Shah Amanat—one of the most well-known saints in a city known throughout its history to have been visited by a great number of saints. Amir Khasru originally moved from Comilla—the most populated rural district of Bangladesh—to Chittagong around 40 years ago. He previously had what was, for Chittagong’s urban poor, enough wealth to perhaps even leverage him into a different class. This loss of wealth was central in bringing him to his current occupation.

He moved into the neighborhood 14 years ago. After his loss of wealth, the komiti hired him as a night-guard. When they were looking for a waste-collector he offered his labor. The pay was better. He’s one of the oldest day-laborers in the neighborhood, and he complains often about constant pain in his calves from climbing up and down the neighborhood’s hills everyday for work.

He tucked his cart into an unpaved side road. His journey throughout the neighborhood was always punctuated by cigarettes, lit routinely at certain points. He lit one here.

Hearing his whistle, the almost always male caretaker, guard, or driver of the home would open the gate, and either carry out the garbage for him, or allow him to enter and bring it to his cart. They would often dump smaller bins themselves.

As Amir Khasru picked through his latest haul for recyclables, the guard of an apartment complex approached him. They conversed, glancing at a large red trash bin carried beyond the gate by another worker. Amir Khasru was offered extra money to take care of its contents, and so he approached it. They pulled off its lid. The smell struck me at some distance in a way that was almost disorienting. It was completely full of cow-dung, with a few coke bottles floating on top. The dung had originated from cattle sacrificed days ago for Qurbani, the popular designation for Eid al-Azha, the Islamic festival commemorating Abraham’s near sacrifice of his son. Qurbani occurred days ago, and the dung must have been sitting in the bucket for that long.

“There’s no water in it, is there?” Amir Khasru asked. The apartment’s caretakers said that there wasn’t. Amir Khasru returned to his nearly-full cart, resettling the garbage, so that there would be space for this new addition. The three men then lifted the bin together and dumped it into the garbage truck. Pouring it, dung-water spilled onto Amir Khasru’s shirt and lungi.

“You said there wasn’t water in it!”

He re-packed the older waste on top of the dung, to mask the smell. A trail of water leaked out from his cart. The caretakers brought out other buckets of waste, including pails of beef biryani. I had never seen so much food-waste in one place. They dumped those on top of the dung, as Amir Khasru reconfigured the space of the cart.

Bithar is in possession of what the geographer Asher Ghertner¹ calls a “world-class aesthetic,” an aesthetic that aims to appeal towards the aspirations of urban elites, but incidentally earns the aspirations of non-elites. It can only embody this aesthetic because of the labor expended and exhausted by non-elites like Amir Khasru. For the working poor of the neighborhood, this labor constitutes the means and method of belonging in a space owned entirely by others and classed as elite.

Mehreener Amu, a former domestic worker, articulated this quite sharply. “They (the homeowning elite) don’t love us, they love our poroshrom, our toil. We stay here because they love our work. If we didn’t give them our work, they wouldn’t love us.” Poroshrom, toil is the embodied, felt, excessive and often painful avatar of shrom, labor. Because toiling is both made manifest in the body and is, as Anand Pandian² illustrates, cultivated as an ethical disposition, it brings certain histories, actions, and self-imaginings into the body of the worker. A history of development—i.e. the future of the nation and the elite neighborhoods which represent it—can then be found in the laborer’s body.

Bithar’s laborers have toiled to build and maintain multi-story apartment complexes, perennially stalled construction projects, and massive single-family mansions. Forested hills still linger in the background of certain locations, though some have been scarred from the toiling that precedes the neighborhood’s expansion. Behind the gates of Bithar’s large residential complexes, hidden from the streets, lie single-family servants’ quarters. Much flimsier gates or doorways protect circles of tin homes and single-story multi-room concrete homes. These smaller dwellings belong to those who are employed by Bithar’s elite residents, though not every household contained a member currently employed by them. It was common to see the older female member of the household employed as a domestic worker, and the male as a driver or caretaker. Rickshaw driver husbands were also common. These men often waited in a certain intersection of the neighborhood, charging their customers fares fitting of class status, something they could easily visually identify. Most of these laborers are rural-urban migrants, often from districts within the Chittagong division: Comilla, Noakhali, or elsewhere.³

Bithar was developed into this world-class space at the start of the 2000s. Many of its working poor residents have lived there since and prior to that time-period. At that time, it was characterized simply as a land of hills and forests—words used interchangeably to denote wilderness. Much of the land on these hillsides cannot maintain dense inhabitation, and thus, remains heavily forested. “Hill-cutting”—the leveling of hills—made this space, like many other locations in Chittagong, habitable. Bithar Hill has been cut to death. Elites and non-elites alike, now consider this space to be particularly beautiful and modern—always coupled, and modern always stated in English.

This contrast came up in a conversation I had with Shaful, one of my closest friends in the field. He was the best friend of Shorif, a driver whose family hosted me. Shaful initiated a story about his life and struggled to bring the others in Shorif’s home to attention, evoking the first word of his narration, again and again. Eventually, he carried on, despite the fact that conversation rang on behind us.

“In those days, I used to have to walk all through the hills collecting cow-dung. I’d bring them to my mom and put them on sticks to make firewood. That’s what we used for fuel because there was no electricity here at the time…. Now there’s electricity, now it’s “Digital Bangladesh.” That’s what Sheikh Hasina says.”

Digital Bangladesh is the ruling Awami League party’s vision for Bangladesh’s technologically advanced future. Yet, for Shaful, it is an amorphous symbol of development and futurity—of which the modern Bithar obviously fits within.

Shaful and I had this discussion only after he said in a teashop down Bithar’s steepest hill, “You should interview me.” The location of this teashop marked the end of Bithar. It was where it met Narikelbari Bazar—the neighboring marketplace.

“Why?” I asked, drinking ginger raang cha—tea without milk.

“I have onek itihash—a lot of history.”

This is the second time that someone in the neighborhood insisted to me that they had a lot of history. In both cases, the expression struck me as odd. They were directed towards lower-class youths, who did not, to me, seem as if they were in possession of radically unique histories. It brought to mind a phrase that so significantly framed Nayanika Mookherjee’s The Spectral Wound.⁴ In this book, her interlocutors, Bangladeshi victims of rape during the liberation war against Pakistan, insisted that they were in possession of “mela itihash, chorom itihash, a lot of history, a severe history.” Throughout this book, she investigates just what it means for someone to claim possession of “a lot of history.” She finds this history embodied in the everyday—imagined into and intertwined with broader narratives of national history. From my conversations with Shaful, I view this history of digital Bangladesh to be embodied within him.

The laborer on the elite’s behalf, must deal with the dirty, fleshy, and bodily—the things that, as Radhika Govindrajan⁵ makes clear, can physically and ethically mark their bodies. By mediating between elite and fleshy, the fleshy can become invisible to the elite. These bodily things unfold on and through the body of the laborer, and thus, bring the laborer into possession of the history that precedes the nation’s future.

Amir Khasru’s labor mediates between animal body and elite resident. Bithar’s elite residents can engage in what is considered an elite lifestyle. They can have feasts and waste good food. They can purchase giant, often foreign cattle for Qurbani. They can consume so much meat as to be a physically distinct class. Although materially dependent upon the animal, they do not have to deal with the unusable, undesirable and fleshy parts of the animal itself. Amir Khasru deals with that. Yet, by taking on the development of elite space in his pained calves, his soiled shirt, Amir Khasru can situate himself in a space that is classed as elite. He was the only person I know in Bangladesh who claims to not know how to use a phone, but he is not outside of the bounds of Digital Bangladesh.

It was Shaful’s work in his childhood to collect dung to power his home that allowed the first settlements of Bithar to be maintained. These settlements then, provide the groundwork to make Bithar a place that could be leveled, developed, electrified, and thus, part of “Digital Bangladesh.” Following a series of unfortunate family situations, Shaful now lives with his brother in a small cement home that they rent in Narikelbari’s Bihari—“stranded Pakistani” colony—a location for the descendants of Urdu speakers who left India during partition to join East Pakistan. He resents living there. He socializes and works in Bithar, in a Western-style bakery that he did not have the education qualifications to be employed at, but through persistence, got the job. Toiling to make Bithar has made Shaful a possessor of its history, and, by extension, of Digital Bangladesh’s history.

It is significant that futurity in Bangladesh is articulated as a process of digitization. We often imagine the digitized as possessing the ability to transcend physical form, finding no use for the bodily and the fleshy. Yet, Digital Bangladesh’s body has felt, amongst other things, cow-dung. Laborers toil to hide such undesirable materials from elite view, and that embodied encounter allows for self-aware claims to progress’s history.

I complained to Shaful on Facebook about the process of writing up the paper that this research produced. He asked me, “amar history niye ki korlan,” “What did you do with my history?”

by Usha Rao, PhD Scholar, Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi

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The notion that cities are built on sacrifice is a theme that I explore in a literal and figurative sense in this piece.

My research is set in Ulsoor, a neighbourhood with a hoary past that nestles in the heart of Bangalore, merely a kilometre away from the ‘new Bangalore’ hot spots. Bangalore is one of the fastest growing cities in Asia and continues to be pitched to global investors as a ‘world class metropolis.’ The city has spread rapidly into the hinterland, its agricultural fields now in the process of being subsumed into landbanks for business parks and special economic zones (SEZs). The ever-shifting boundaries confound any attempt to define where the city ends or begins.

Ulsoor has a five-hundred-year-old history and a time-less mythical past. The neighbourhood and its boundaries are re-produced annually through its jatres (festivals). These performances anchor collective memory and histories of its inhabitants within the landscape of the neighbourhood. The metro, a symbol of the city of the future, thunders on over the neighbourhood unhindered by the annual performances that unfold and flow in the street beneath its grey, concrete shade. While the city at large is in a state of flux, the idea of Ulsoor as an ooru (as site of collective identity and belonging) endures for many of its inhabitants, past and present.

Bananas

Kavanaa¹

The city swallows everything, they say. It creeps into the countryside where once grapes glowed in the afternoon light. Between cool green wells and muddy tanks.

Groans and shrieks of earth movers syncopate with the thud of borewells running dry.. Grey pillars rise. Concrete does not hold if the water is not pure enough to drink, they say. If not it bubbles and breaks and will take down 100s of bodies with it..²

Stones are held with thickened blood, they say. Else they fall apart. Like the South Gate of the mud fort from long ago. The Red Man³ despaired. The gate stood strong after she poured her blood and that of her unborn child. In the dead of night. Was that a sigh of death or a curse that was heard as the last drop soaked the earth?

Oorus are built by the rhythmic pounding of feet pushing down on the heavy planks of wood, egged on by cries of Govinda. Govinda. The gigantic wheels heave and move.⁴

 

 

It’s streaming rivers of sweat. It’s raining bananas. Bananas pierced with fragrant ‘dhavana’, flung at the gods, at the copper kalasha atop the temple Car in thanksgiving. Or are they bearers of fresh prayers? The wheels don’t roll unless the air is soaked with the heady smell of mashed bananas. Their smashed bodies ease the clunky wood over the rough road. Even hangmen use the white pulpy flesh to smoothen the rope, they say.

Purple flowers and curving stems drooping with green and yellow. Leaves flap like gigantic ears with every hiccough of the Car. The Lord’s seat is festooned with ripe toddy fruit. The essence of soma⁵ for Someshwara.

The Car is followed by the moonlit festival of flowers. The stately white swan waits while someone fixes a plume on his head. Mountains of white jasmine buds to decorate one pallaki.⁶ Look, there are more than a hundred tonight winding their way slowly towards Bazaar Street to meet Kamakshi, the One with desired filled eyes. The flashing red fire from the Red One’s⁷ mount threatens to singe the delicate blooms. How much does a thousand kilograms of summer fragrance weigh?

 

 

Boundaries are made on the fruits of the land. Fecundity feeds boundaries. The ‘kshetra’ (territory) marked by the bounty of another kstetra (agricultural field).

But where have all the bananas gone? The whirring of cement mixers drowns his answer.

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“The fourth is the most important and the main one. This is done around 1 or 1:30 am at the temple of M where all the goddesses gather. The mari (sheep) is decapitated and dismembered. The madiga⁸ – the grave digger blows into the intestines. They bloat like balloons. He wraps it around his neck. He mixes the blood into cooked rice and eats some, like this (hand passes over the mouth). Then, he carries the pot and runs through the old ooru shouting ‘bali bali’’ and flings the red rice into the air in all directions, The boundaries are now sealed. The ooru is protected. Red palm prints on doorways will keep death and disease at bay.”⁹

Sacrifice keeps the ooru safe and the lords of the ooru strong and brutal. “It was so much work cleaning the blood on the walls of the old toti mane.¹⁰ Ayappangay tumba kopaa..yappangay kuri beku enanu saldu – that chap has a terrible temper – he wants sheep and nothing else will do to cool him down.” His fire burns down all obstacles. The men need to remain strong if they need to build a city.¹¹ She said.

Fields of produce are ingested into men and become sinews. Building a city takes sweat and muscle. Digging, breaking stone, laying bricks, dressing those archaic slabs from the earth’s belly. Stones are cemented by blood, they say.

The city devours everything. It demands bodies, blood, oorus, streams and fields rich with ripe fruit, to be placed at the altar. Like the red tongued dark goddess of Time who devours entire worlds, its belly is forever caved inwards. It consumes and is never nourished.

From up in the air, I look down at my city and see a thick, brown scab forming.

Where have all the bananas gone?

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Vyakhyana¹²

Ulsoor has had a historic link with the building of Bangalore. It emerged as a dense neighbourhood towards the end of the 19th century with the growth of Bangalore as a British Civil and Military station. Settlers, most of them migrants from the hinterland and villages of the then Madras Presidency, either established themselves as contractors to the British government or found work as construction workers, carpenters, stone cutters and other tradesmen in work gangs. Much of the British Civil and Military Station – the colonial city of Bangalore – its barracks, administrative buildings and clubs were perhaps built by construction crews from the Ulsoor area. Post-Independence (1947), prominent Ulsoor contractors carried on the project of building modern Bangalore.

Masculine vigour, strength and ability to work together are values held high among the older residents of Ulsoor. This plays out in the performance of the annual Car Festival during which the Car is moved through physical exertion of its residents, its path re-producing the space of the neighbourhood as a ‘landscape of memory.’¹³

The Ulsooru Car is modelled on ‘archaic’ technology that demands muscle power to move and turn its axle-less wheels. The Car is moved along the path that circumscribes the oldest part of the neighbourhood – a square around the temple of Someshwara (Siva). The festival takes place soon after the commencement of the New Year of the Hindu lunar calendar. Lord Someshwara follows a retinue of smaller cars and rides his wooden Chariot with his newly wedded bride and consort Parvati. Although the gods are seated in the Car, it is the movement of the Car itself which is the highlight of the festival. Men stamp the heavy wooden planks to turn the wheels, while others place wedges in the path to control its direction. Men and women of all ages pull the heavy iron chains to keep it rolling. All of this is orchestrated and monitored closely by the older residents who have lived through this over the years. While many other temples in Bangalore have chosen to motorize their ceremonial cars, Ulsooru residents have chosen to retain the old technology as it brings bodies together. Older residents of Ulsooru claim that the Car Festival is what holds the neighbourhood together and gives it a unique and enduring identity in a city characterized by flux.

Rituals are tied to fruits of the earth. In the Car Festival, bananas are essential ingredients. Stems with flowers and fruit (pendulous and phallic in appearance) are tied to the four pillars of the Car.¹⁴ Fruit with fragrant herbs are ritual offerings made to the gods by all those who participate in the festival. Ripe fruit come under the wheel as lubricants and are key to moving the Car itself. Not so long ago, at least 20 varieties of bananas were used in the festival. In the recent past, the varieties have dwindled while prices have shot up. Salt, cheap and abundant, has come to replace the fruit as a ritual offering.

Banana stems and the toddy fruit (dates from a palm that is tapped for liquor) are getting harder to procure with the conversion of farms and common lands into real estate at the fringes of the city. The current source of stems is a farm in Hoskote, 21 kms east of Ulsoor. This area is fast being developed into special economic zones (SEZs) and industrial parks.¹⁵

Bananas were sourced from farms from agricultural belts in the periphery of Bangalore, Marathahalli to the East of Ulsoor, being one prominent site. Over the last decade, Marathahalli has grown into one of Bangalore’s largest tech parks (ITPL) which houses tech giants and multi-national companies like IBM, General Motors, GE, Xerox and IGATE. The extension of the metro line into areas like Whitefield (that abuts Marathahalli and Hoskote) has spurred real estate development. High rises have emerged where grape fields and orchards once stood.

The *Po Pallaki* (Jasmine Palanquin festival) follows the Car Festival, in the early part of the summer month of Chaitra. There are several myths tied to the festival. The most popular one claims that the procession is taken out to appease Siva’s primary consort who left his side annoyed by his dalliance with goddess Ganga.

More than a 100 jasmine decked palanquins from temples around Ulsoor set out after midnight and wend their way towards Someshwara temple. They fill the main streets with carnivalesque celebration – dancing, drums, wolf whistles and fire crackers. The parade continues through the early hours of the morning.

The festival is woven around the jasmine bloom – its materiality and symbolic meanings. Its whiteness and heady perfume evoke feminine sensuality, a metaphor for Siva’s consort, Kamakshi (the one with desire filled eyes). She rides an ornate swan-shaped palanquin to be united with her lover and husband on this warm summer night.

The Po Pallaki festival consumes hundreds of kilograms of jasmine flowers and buds. These are used in elaborate ways to decorate the palanquins of gods around the Ulsoor area. Historically, Ulsooru has drawn its steady supply from the farms around Hoskote that have been known for their floriculture. Over the past few years decorators have had to depend on large distributors in the centralized market in the city. The number of palanquins have dwindled in the recent past – flower prices are high as supply has dipped.

The Kempamma festival is strictly an ‘insiders’ event.’ After the Po Pallaki, residents gear up for the annual rituals in honour of the boundary goddess Kempamma who stands at the south-eastern edge of the neighbourhood. Fierce and powerful, she is feared and loved by residents who believe she protects their children from disease and epidemics. The key rituals take place in the dead of night and are out of bounds for women, children and those who are not directly involved in them. Sheep are offered to her in return for protection of the boundaries of Ulsoor.

Families are watched over by family deities who are propitiated for power, abundance and the perpetuation of the bloodline. Often this takes the form of sacrifice. Mrs Reddy, a woman in her late 80s, came to Ulsoor as a bride of 12 years. Her grandfather-in-law, migrated to Ulsoor had established himself as a building contractor for the British in the early 1900s, at a time in the city’s history when there was opportunity for those who could survive intense competition. In order to succeed contractors needed to keep a tight control over work gangs while also establishing trust with the Colonial administration. Mrs. Reddy recalls that the men in her family were ‘tough, strong and hardworking.’ Considerable wealth and status flowed into the family over the years. Mrs Reddy was the mistress of a large toti house in the heart of Ulsoor. She recalls that the inner courtyard of the old home had witnessed the sacrifice of many sheep which were offered to appease the family deity. Power and prestige were expected to flow from these gestures of devotion.

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Ritual staging of the jatres are dependent on the agrarian hinterland and its fertility. Fruits, flowers, leaves of specific varieties, and animals are all critical elements in the ritual production of the neighbourhood. The erosion of the agricultural hinterland and its ecology is now a source of anxiety for the inhabitants of Ulsooru.

The metro line that flows above and away symbolizes the expansion of the ‘world class city’ of the future. The relentless process of ‘urbanization’ and city evokes the image of the open maw of the goddess of Time who swallows entire worlds in an act of absolute destruction.

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About the Author and Research

Usha Rao, PhD Scholar, Dept. of Humanities, Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi

This work is based on ethnographic research I conducted in Ulsoor, Bangalore 2016-2018 towards my dissertation. Part of the research looks at festivals and their connections to the production of the neighbourhood as a site of collective memory and identity. A metro line now bisects Ulsoor’s main street. The relationship between the metro and neighbourhood is also part of my study.

I have used Kannada, one of the local languages, through the text.

Email: ugreentara@gmail.com. For details on my film project: www.ourmetropolis.in

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Gautam Sonti and Kunal Deshpande for their collaboration on video material.

Thanks to Shreyas Sreenath for conversations on the notion of the sacrifice.

Video 1: Camera and Edit Kunal Deshpande (Work in Progress)

Video 2: Camera Gautam Sonti; Edit Kunal Deshpande (Work in Progress)

All still images are the author’s.

References

Carol Upadhya et al. “Urbanism: Land, Livelihood, and Life on the City’s Edge.” Working paper presented in Oct 10, 2018 at National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore.

Ghertner, Asher D. ‘India’s urban revolution: geographies of displacement beyond gentrification.’ Environment and Planning 46 (2014):1554 – 1571.

Goldman, Michael. “Speculative Urbanism and the Making of the Next World City.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35, no.3 (2011):555–81.

Goldman, Michael. “Speculating on the Next World City.” In Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments in the Art of Being Global, edited by Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong, 229-258. U.K: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.

Government of Karnataka. Bengaluru Rural District Human Development Report. Bangalore: 2014.

Hasan, Fazlul M. Bangalore Through the Centuries. Bangalore: Historical Publications, 1970.

Nair, Janaki. The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s Twentieth Century. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Rice, Benjamin. Mysore a Gazetteer Compiled for Government. Westminster. London: Archibald Constable and Company, 1896.

Searle, Llerena Guiu. Landscapes of Accumulation: Real Estate and the Neoliberal Imagination in Contemporary India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Srinivas, Smriti. Landscapes of Urban Memory: The Sacred and the Civic in India’s High-Tech City. Orient Longman, 2004.

by Shreyas Sreenath
PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology, Emory University

1.

I want to tell you what people say to each other in my mother tongue—Kannada—as they share and squander food. I use daily sanitation work in Bangalore, sweeping and garbage collection that starts at the break of dawn, as the setting for my narrative.

While Kannada is the most spoken language in the city, dense pockets resonate with Tamil, Dakhini, Telugu, Hindi, and English. The majority of Bangalore’s sanitation workers speak Telugu as their mother tongue, although there are some that speak Tamil. A growing number speak Hindi and Kannada with a heavy North Karnataka accent.

One’s mother tongue places one in the city. In doing so, it shapes what s/he eats, and how s/he eats.

2.

How do the tongues we are born with become organs of power?

The tongue (naalige) is a double edged sword.

It tastes with deliberation so that we can wisely sort out nourishment from poison. But when desire grips us, when we need its wisdom the most, it lashes out impulsively. Devara Dasimayya, a 11th century Kannada poet from a modest weaving caste, illuminates this paradox in a vachana (mystic utterance):

In A.K. Ramanujan’s translation:

Hunger the great serpent
has seized the vitals
and the venom is mounting
from foot to brow

Only he is the true Snake-man
in all the world
who can feed this hunger food

and bring the poison down,

Ramanatha.¹

You may have missed Dasimayya’s riddle in translation. The serpent he names in his verse is a python (hebbaavu), a creature that kills its prey not with venom but with constriction. However, it gladly uses the venom already brewing within us, squeezing and secreting it to full effect.

An emaciated mother tongue is like a hungry serpent. Once it tastes desire on our lips, it reaches out of our mouths and strangles us, turning the food we put in our belly into venom.

3.

“It feels like someone is squeezing my stomach (hotte kivuchdangaagutte) when I have this food,” says Taiamma to me, “they don’t wash the rice (anna) and vegetables (tarkaari) before putting it in the pot. I eat this fearing the supervisor’s (mesthri) tongue.”

Taiamma works as a contract sweeper for the Bangalore Municipal Corporation. She speaks to me with a plate of coagulated rice and vegetables in her hand. In 2016, the state government mandated that all sanitation workers be provided with hot late morning meals (bisi oota).

She wonders if it is another opportunity for her supervisor to siphon off money. “In the end, they throw gravel into the rice that we eat (konege namma annake kallu hakodu)”

“Is he looking?” she asks me, as she empties her plate into a nearby gutter. “son of a dog, (naayinanna maga) he says whatever comes to his mouth (baayigebandange) when he works us. I’m his mother’s age.”

4.

“She is from Penukonda in Andhra, just like us” Narasimha says, flashing a smile at me and the woman who owns the street cart. She smiles back at us as she spreads dosa batter on her sizzling pan. We are sneaking away from our morning route to have breakfast at a corner food stall. “Try the gongura chutney,” he says, “it will light your tongue on fire. You can’t handle the chili we have back home.”

The woman cracks an egg on the dosa, now roasting to a fine crisp. The smell of ghee fills our nostrils. One look at Narasimha and I can tell that his mouth is watering like mine. “I’ll just have one egg dosa, I have to stomach some of that rotten food (haaladdoota) later,” he says with resignation, “our supervisor knows that we’ve been skipping our meals. The rumor is that they will cut 25 rupees a day from our salary to fund the meal scheme.”

I reach to pay for our breakfast but the woman refuses. When I insist, Narasimha remarks, “don’t bother, she won’t take money from us. Every cart on this street feeds me for free, so long as I pick up their garbage. Besides, she doesn’t understand Kannada.”

He signals me to get into his tipper-auto and we drive off to the next street.

Morning garbage routes are one of the few public instances when the city’s inhabitants share food outside of religious occasions and private charity.

5.

Garbage disposal is also the most public, acceptable, and routine means to squander food.

Some days later, Ranga stands in the courtyard of a women’s hostel. He slogs through buckets of putrid biriyani with his bare hands, separating plastic liners from heaping piles of rice and meat. The city has mandated that all household waste be segregated. “Sir, do you speak Hindi?” he asks me. I nod. “I need you to tell the warden lady that this is too much work, and it reeks of week old mutton. Either she pays me a tip or I’m leaving this to rot here.”

We walk up to the warden’s quarters and ring the bell. Her assistance answers the door. He tells us in broken Hindi and Bangla that she is not around.

Bangalore is a city of many mother tongues. You often have to speak in another tongue to get your next meal. But you can always squander another’s meal in your own.

6.

It’s close to the end of the work day as Krishna drives into the ward compound with a tipper auto filled with wet waste.

“Vegetables, vegetables, come on over, madams (medamgula),” Krishna yells, teasing the women sweepers as he brings in a load of produce from the local Big Bazaar supermarket. Soon, a crowd gathers around his vehicle as he pours his collections onto the floor, picking out fresh onions, tomatoes, radishes, and brinjals from rotten ones.

“The boss wants us to put all of this produce into the new biogas chamber. He gave out the contract to some NGO,” he says.

“Put a fire in his mouth! (avana baaige benki haaka),” mutters Pavitra, as she picks through the pile, “he hasn’t paid us for months.”

7.

“Eat it, it’s actually good”, “it’s good”, “it’s still good”, or if all else fails, “take it, it’s holy sacrament (prasaada).” This is what Raju hears each time residents toss him a polythene bag filled with leftovers.

One day, a resident tossed him a polythene bag of prasaada twelve days after Ugadi.² Raju threw it in with the rest of the garbage as the resident watched. He turned to me and said, “who does that bastard think he is? He tosses the damn thing to me, without touching me.”

8.

On his route, Adi picks out a takeout menu from the garbage and stares at it. “Look at how much this costs!” he remarks, “it’s probably for those returning from Gulf countries.”

“Hey Adi,” says Murthy, who sits precariously next to him in a moving auto, “how about you blow this month’s salary and take us out? No? Then chuck it.”

“It probably tastes bland anyway,” Adi remarks, still examining it, “those people can’t take chillies.”

9.

Bangalore has grown substantially in the last few decades. The tongues of the wealthy and the worldly sound out its name. They utter it to mark the city as a destination for low-cost solutions, for back-end support, for offshore expansion. They use these terms to signal that, when they arrive, they will not speak in our mother tongues. But they compel us to speak in theirs. Some of us learn their tongues to get a taste of their world, to move closer to it, forgetting our own.

Others don’t. Still, they can taste what has changed.

10.

We are in Adi’s village in Penukonda, Andhra Pradesh. We sit out on a mat to face the wide open twilight sky, relishing spicy buffalo curry and local brew (henda).

There is a windmill in the distance: chronic drought clears the path for wind-power.

Chewing on a bone, I ask Adi, “how do you say bone (moole) in Telugu?”

“Emuka”, he responds. “Do people in your jaati eat buffalo? I thought it was only us.”

“No they don’t,” I respond.

“Well, if my mother was around, you would have gotten a taste of some good cooking.”

Our mother tongues have yet to learn the words ‘late capitalism’. But their deep, serpentine histories have been shaped by the sound jaati (caste).

[In this contribution, Rebecca Richart from the University of California – Irvine uses video from the backside of a Kentucky horse-racing track to examine rapport building between racetrack workers and their horses.]

 

By Rebecca Richart

 

“We are observing the best groom on the racetrack.”

“I believe you. Fifty years right? He’s been doing it.”

“Well, there’s many people that’s been 50 years, but they don’t know nothing. They just never learned. But he’s a guy who’s got something to show and there’s nobody to listen.”

 

Every morning, every day of the year, the area of the racetrack known as the “backside” bustles with activity as workers and trainers care for the daily needs of Thoroughbred horses and train them to race. The world of the “backside” is hidden from the “frontside” where guests enjoy watching the races, betting, eating, drinking, and socializing. On the backside of the track, the daily labor, which involves intimate interactions with the horses, is performed by people within a particular labor hierarchy. Each trainer is the boss, in charge of the horses under their care and determines the training regime. The trainer hires exercise riders to ride the horse on the track every morning to train them for racing. In addition, each barn’s workforce includes grooms who muck out the stalls, give the horses their feed, wash the horses, brush them, pick their feet, and bandage them. After each horse comes from the track, the hotwalkers walk them around the barn to cool down following their daily exercise. All of this labor is hidden from the guests but is nevertheless essential to the horse racing industry.

One morning I visited a barn on the “backside” of the track where I do my fieldwork in order to capture on video some of the tactile work performed by the grooms. All of the horses had already exercised on the track, work that begins at 5:30am. As the last horses were being washed, brushed, and bandaged around 8:00am-9:00am, I recorded a groom’s work with a focus on his hands to show the importance and consistency of touch when working with racehorses. As I recorded, grooms and hotwalkers chatted with me about other tracks, joked with each other, whistled, and recounted TV episodes. Unprompted, a hotwalker approached me while I was recording and said the quote included in the text above, as we both watched the groom perform his work. Hotwalkers and grooms often mention that their work and those of others goes unrecognized for the industry; however, within the backside community, they do recognize the skill of those whose abilities with horses are well known.

 

 

These video clips focus on the work of a groom whose labor often goes unrecognized but who has incredible skill. He is known in the barn where he works for his ability to calm even agitated horses. This skill is not only based on the technical tasks performed, but on the way he subtly touches the horse, interacting with its body. To protect the privacy of workers in these videos, I have chosen to not show their faces but only their hands as they perform their work. While conducting fieldwork for my research on social and labor relations in the horse racing industry, I have learned about the high degree of skill required in the work that grooms perform. The trainer—who is this particular groom’s boss—told me that the way this groom works is beautiful to watch, because it is almost like he is caressing the horse. The type of touch and the way it is performed is a key part of a groom’s skill. As shown in the video, the groom works smoothly and calmly with additional caresses to the horse and offers of peppermints.

As evidenced in the video, the groom is constantly touching the horse. Through this series of video clips, we see a groom bathing a horse in soapy water (00:00-00:13) and combing the mane (00:14-00:25). Then inside the stall, the groom brushes the horse (00:26-00:30). He constantly feeds peppermints to the horse, holding his hand flat so that the horse can find the treat with its lips (00:20,00:37,01:48,04:46). The horse returns the tactile interaction. Sometimes the horse reaches its head to nudge the groom, or to explore the lens of the camera with its nose and lips (00:42-00:59, 01:35-01:38). Noting a hotwalker in the shed row, the horse stretches its neck in search of another peppermint (01:05-01:21). The groom picks the horse’s feet and packs the hooves (01:52-02:38). The groom then rubs the horse’s leg with alcohol (02:39-03:23) and wraps them in bandages (03:24-04:00). He combs the mane (04:02-04:08) and brushes the horse until it shines (04:09-04:42).

Grooms learn and practice skills that are enveloped in a very tactile experience. They must not only perform the technical tasks of bathing, brushing, bandaging, and picking feet, but they must touch the horse in more subtle ways. These tactile interactions provide a basis for building rapport with individual horses. The groom touches the horse in a way to build trust and provide security. Horses are easily spooked, so the grooms must consistently interact with them in a way that puts them at ease. Grooms constantly give out peppermints as rewards and to create a bond with the animal (00:20,00:37,01:48,04:46). They stroke them and interact with them, indicating with a touch that they are present, how they want the horse to move, or that they are about to perform a particular task (02:13). In their work, grooms observe and draw meaning from the nuanced bodily interactions with the horses. The groom is using his sense of touch to note any changes with the horse. He runs his hands over the horse’s body (01:33-01:42) and especially its legs (02:39-03:22) every single day. If he notes any heat, cuts, or swelling for example, he will immediately report those changes. Considering that the horse racing industry depends on a labor hierarchy, grooms’ observations of any subtle changes with the horses are key to the horses’ health and training. Grooms are the ones who touch the horses every single day. They will most likely be the first to notice small changes and report any problems to the trainer, who depends on their skills and conscientiousness with the horses under their care.

This particular groom has perfected his skill through fifty years of work and practice in the U.S. horseracing industry after first immigrating from Mexico as a teenager. While it is not true for all grooms, this particular groom describes his work as his passion and says the horses are his family. Through touch he is communicating with the animal, building rapport, and intaking information in ways that are highly skilled based on years of experience and diligence in his work.