Day One

I'm thoroughly enjoying my garden perch in Lucknow. I have several sources of comfort in this first twenty-four hours of field work, luxury-style:

1) My Hindi actually seems functional, making my Rickshaw rides and negotiations much more interesting.

For example, from roadside billboards I've learned that बहिनजी मायावात्ति (sister Mayawatti) understands the country's future. (!) Additionally, I had the heartening experience of using my Hindi not only to negotiate my way to meet my old translator, Priya via multiple forms of transportation, but also to gain major support from an elderly shopkeeper. The last leg of my trip required private rickshaw and was much shorter than I expected. I tried renegotiating the price with a very displeased driver. Right then, a kindly shopkeeper approached me. I used my basic Hindi to explain my problem. He verified the facts with the driver and me and then proceeded to castigate my driver for ripping off a foreigner. The shopkeeper went so far as to agree to take the man to the police for overcharging me, luckily something we all avoided!

2) I've found secondhand support for my upcoming research from a few sources.

Given that it's a lazy Sunday in the big city, I made my way to one of Lucknow's shiny new malls (Waves). Thanks to Priya's advice I found a big chain bookstore (Landmark) and sat down to enjoy their selection. After a few hours of browsing with puzzled clerks in tow I've now amassed a small library on caste, fieldwork in India, Indian bureaucracy and Hindi dictionaries. These wonderful books tell me a few things...

MN Srinivas's (1973, c.f. Srinavas, Shah, Ramaswamy 2002: 26) "The Field Worker and the Field" gives me more faith that I'll be able to delve into disputes once I actually settle into a few villages. He writes: "Every society and culture has its own preoccupations, and in Rampura [Karnataka] and perhaps also in myriad other villages, it was disputes. Disputes were frequent and they arose over many things. There were, for instance, disputes over partition over property among brothers which dragged on for several months. In a sense, such disputes never ended. They took new forms.... Stories of ancestral feuding were part of a family's heritage."

Oliver Mendelsohn's (Shah 2002: 167-205) "Transformation of Authority in Rural India" makes me excited to search for the elusive "social institution" given his argument that a dominant caste no longer exists in villages. This counters Munshi and Rosenzweig's 2008 paper on "The Efficacy of Parochial Politics," where they make the case that a (numerically) dominant sub-caste (jati) acts as a superior selection and commitment device for local politicians. The argument reassures me that theories about the connections between caste, dominance, and politics in India are most certainly open for debate right now.

3) The music!

Although it's unfair to claim Hindi music as my own in any way, I love the fact that I now recognize a subset of Indian pop. don't love everything, but I do get a kick out of recognizing the lyrics to songs from Rang de Basanti and Chake De. They're just so catchy (and I'm a sap for movies with any uplifting message about contemporary politics).

4) I'm feeling pretty good about a choice of districts to venture into: Yamunanagar, Haryana (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamunanagar) and Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saharanpur). I'm hoping to rustle up some contacts in Haryana during my coming week of work at the Lucknow High Court and then head there at the following week's start. At the moment I'm just enjoying the fact that Indians read the Manusmriti from 100 AD alongside contemporary legal scholarship.

That's it for now!