No Aging in India

Ghar Kali satire. Woodblock print. Courtesy Victoria Memorial Hall, Calcutta.
No Aging in India
Alzheimer's, the Bad Fami!, and Other Modern Things
Lawrence Cohen
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley Los Angeles London
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
1998 by
The Regents of the University of California
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to quote James Merril's "River Poem" from
Selcted P 1946-Ig85 by James Merrill. Copyright 1992 by James Merrill. Rprinted by
permission of Alfred A. Knopf Inc.
Thanks is also made for permission to quote the poetry of Ravi Das from Sons f!te Saints f!India,
edited by John Stratton Hawley, translated by John Stratton Hawley & M. Juergensmeyer.
Translation copyright 1988 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Used by permission of Oxford
University Press, Inc.
In addition, chapter 3 is reprinted i revised form from the author's "No Aging in India: The Uses of
Gerontology" Culture, Medicine and Pschiatr 16(2), 1992, with kind permission from Kluwer Academic
Publishers. Portions of other chapters appeared in an article by the author and are reprinted by
permission of the Aerican Anthropological Association from Medica/Antropolg Qart( 9(3), 1995
Not for further reproduction.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cohen, Lawrence, 1961-
No aging in India : Alzheimer's, the bad family, and other modern
things I Lawrence Cohen.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references and index
ISBN o-520-08396-2 (alk. paper)
1. Aging-Anthropological aspects. 2. Ethnology-lndia-Varanasi.
3 Aging-Anthropological apects-India-Varanasi. 4 Senile
dementia-lndia-Varanasi. 5 Alzheimer's disease-India-Varanasi.
6. Varanasi (India)-Social life and customs. I. Tide.
GN4a5.C64 1998
305.26-DC21
Printed in the United States of America
9 8
7
6 5 4 3 2
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National
Standards for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
AlSI Z3948-1984.
Thi old man had lvender skin, a handkerchie
Tpplin.om hi breastocket li an ir.
W on the riverbank watched the gracin rowers
uavin the shore and watched him watch tem leave,
And Charls said: I wonder i the mean to him
As much as I can imagne the mean to him.
Charls was li that. But as evenin became
A purple element we stayed there wondern
About the old man-talin o oter tins,
For althouh te old man b te time we all went home
Was gone, he kept in view, meandern
As wit the current, tinkin o rivery thins
( supposed) well into the twiliht. W woul never
Know, thi we knew, how much it had meant to him
Oars, violt water lauhtr on te stream.
Thouh we knew, Charls said, just how much he meant to the river
For he fnall lf us alone, the strange old man,
But the river stayed at our side, and shone, and ran.
JAMES MERRILL,
"
RIVER POEM
"
When everone i dead te Geat Game i fnihed.
Not bere.
RUDYARD KIPLING, KIM
For " grandparent
and especiall in memor o my gran4ter Joseph Glick
rqati sai:
! my didain fr God, seers, and Gandarvas
Has brouht these worls to an end .r me, Indra
Then, deprved o t worl o t Gd, I hanker
0 kin o the Gods, t fll with the honest.
MAHABHARATA
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS X!l!
CONTENTS
THE GROUND OF THE ARGUMENT XV
ACKNOWLEDGMESTS xi x
NOTE ON TRANSCRIPTION, TRANSLATION, AND TRANSLITERATION XXV
INTRODUCTION 1
The Ma Ol Jman o t Millnnium 1
The Age q Alzheimer' 5
The Vzew fm te River 9
Dular 13
l. ORIENTATIONS 1
5
The Zagreb Tmasha 15
What' Wron with Thi Pcture? 18
The Better Brin 18
Topical Sotnin 20
Embo din Pobat 24
A Medical Eplnation 25
The Senil Bo d 32
An Antropological Pcaresque 34
OJ Vranasi 39
Jrld Wide Hb 45
2. ALZHEIMER' S HELL
47
No Aging in Aerica! Leading Scientists Reveal 47
Alheime's, Sufectivit, and t Ol st 5
The Griatric Parado x 6o
x CONTENTS
Oublier Postmodern Agin 70
A With' Curse 72
The Senil Climactc 74
Aldeime' Fami! 79
Nuns and Doctors 85
3
. KNOWLEDGE, PRACTICE, AND THE BAD FAMILY 8
7
O Gnto lgal Obect 87
4
.
The '! in India" Sers 89
Intrnationalit Scince 93
T "Glen Isls" 100
Gntolog a Cultural Crtique 103
BP Check: The Vlunter Aen0 106
Free Radical Echane: The Gt Clinic 109
Into t Ho d: The Retireet Ashram I I3
Mother vesus Aunties: The Ol Ae Home I I6
Aitafa Palipa I2I
MEMORY BANKS 123
T Embodiment q Anxr I23
The Pomise q Rasayana I27
The Marktin q Meor IJ
Memor and Capital I37
Forgettin a a Pat to Tut I42
Men Lt Mahan I49
5 . THE ANGER OF THE RISHIS 1
53
Hot Brains I5
Sirihness and Sevenr-twoness I 56
Oedius i Indi I 58
Countin t Das and Hou r I66
Ol Hmen at t Poll 17 I
The Phenomeno lg q t Vice 174
The Familil Bod 177
The Iin Space I8o
Takin Vice Smous! I83
T
he Philosopher' Mother I8
7
6 . THE MALADJUSTMENT OF THE BOURGEOISIE 189
Civili r and Contst I 89
Balnce and Atustment I93
Snilir and Madness I99
lneliness and Menopause 206
Balnce and Cartsian Possibilir 211
The Detia Clinic 214
T
he Wq to the Indis, t the Fountain o Yut 221
7. CHAPATI BODIES 22
3
Nawa b It Resient 223
Jaess a Structure 2 29
Muslims and Oter Saint 235
Gneration and Jakess Revitd 241
JhaQ<O and t Sound o -in 248
The Position o Repose 250
A Chil Is Bein Ld 257
8. DOG LADIES AND THE BERIYA BABA 26
3
Dogs and Ol Umen 263
Ol Women and Madwome 266
Madwomen and Withes 268
Dogs and Ol Men 274
Ol Men and Babas 277
Babas and t Stt 281
T
he Age o t Antropologit 287
9. THE BODY IN TIME 291
M Gando ter's utt 291
No One Here Cares about Abheime's 297
Lst at t Fair 302
A Lst Fw
T
rips up the River 307
NOTES 309
GLOSSARY 327
REFERENCES 329
INDEX 353
CONTENTS XI
ILLUSTRATIONS
Ghar Kali satire I 11
The dying space, by Bishwanath Bhattacharya I xzv
Shravan Kumar carryng his parents I 152
Elder's Day I 262
Old woman voting I 290
XIII
The dying space. Pen-and-ink drawing by Bishwanath Bhattacharya.
Collection of the author.
THE GROUND OF THE ARGUMENT
This book is about age, and about its appearance and disappearance in the mak
ing of knowledge. It is rooted in a sense that our practices of thinking about soci
ety culture, the body and the nature of our times would beneft from sustained at
tention to age as a kind of diference, one particularly relevant to how individuals,
groups, and events are imagined and articulated as things in time. Age as dif er
ence has long been a dimension of certain kinds of contemporary critical and in
terpretive work, notably a phiosophical concern with the relation of death to
meaning and value and a psychoanalytic concern with the formation of subjects.
But these are fairly singular narratives of age, defned through particular junc
tures, endpoints, or stages, and I have in mind a broader and more sparse con
ception.
I wite as a medical anthropologist, and the way I wl work toward such a con
ception of age is through a study that focuses on how people comprehend the body
and its behavior in time. The focus wl be on loss, and decay: decay of the body its
reason, and its voice, its abiity to be heard as a speaking subject. The focus, in other
words, is on seilit, and by that I mean a process rooted in the material changes of
physiology and political economy and in a diverse set of social practices that de
termine how generational and other sorts of diference come to matter. Language
here is critical. To call things deta, a clinical term, presumes a focus on the
pathology of the individual. To call things Alheme', a pathophysiologic term,
presumes a focus on a particular set of cellular and subcellular processes resulting
in a certain neuroanatomical picture. Calling things seilit leaves open the hier
archy of relations between the varieties of material and social process at stake in
understanding loss, voice, and the body in time.
Most philosophers and scientists are compelled by the nature of the questions
they ask to choose between these varied processes, or at least to order and to rank
XV
XVI THE GROUND OF THE ARGUMENT
them. Is senility best understood in terms of neuropathology and genetics; nor
mative understandings and expectations of old age, dependency and individual
ism; or the economics and politics of families, nations, and the world system? Put
crudely, the choice is usually framed as being between biology and psychology, on
the one hand, culture and language, on the other, and economy and society, on a
third. Three-handed things are fairly monstrous, and most ofen one of these
drops out of the explicit contest and lurks in the background, leaving the job of
the scholar the resolution of what appears a weighty dualism. The anthropologist
Marshall Sahlins once suggested that for the truly great divides there could be no
fence-sitting. 1 Much of contemporary medical anthropology with its iterative calls
for moral inquiry adopts a similar stance. One must choose, throwing one's lot in
with medical rationality or its holistic or feminist critics, with cultural autonomy
and distinctiveness or world systems theory and the deserving poor, with medicine
as a resource or as an ideology.
For some kinds of critical inquiry, techniques of exaggeration and even parody
that present the world as clearly dualistic and demanding a choice do indeed seem
necessary if one is successfully to challenge received wisdom or practice. But my
sense, for the inquiry on seniity I have put forward, is that hierarchies of efcient
causes-the fate of neurons versus the local knowledge of the person and the fam
ily versus the political economy of the aging body-ofer false clarity This sense
comes frst from my ethnographic practice itself, second from my graduate train
ing in a program that set itself up at the uncomfortable border of medical prac
tice and anthropological critique, and fnally from the work of such scholars of sci
ence as Paul Rabinow, Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour, who in diferent ways
have investigated processes of reason and life so as to avoid either such easy du
alisms or the usual alternative, romanticized, and empirically vague nondualisms. 2
In thinking about senility, and in using senility to think about the world, I have
tried for the most part to stay away from formalizing such hierarchies of rele
vance, or my resistance to them, as "theory. " My response to such grand theoreti
cal debates has been a sort of thick analysis, to paraphrase Clif ord Geertz by
shifing the locus of ethnographic depth from "the feld" to the process of inquiry
I have attempted a form of what social scientists call snowball sampling but on a
diferent scale, continually adding diferent sites and methods of inquiry to my
project until these juxtapositions ceased to produce interesting challenges to the
main arguments.
This process has led to a book full of detail. Lie the voices of some of the older
people I write about here, it may seem to some to be too full, too stocked with un
solicited memories, opinions, and stories. For me, both the pleasures and the re
sponsibilities of ethnography lie precisely in such excess, in a mode of writing and
of engaging the world through continual juxtaposition and repetition. Kierke
gaard called this kind of engagement recollctin, and he suggested that it was fre
quently utilized by the elderly and others for whom remebering had become
THE GROUND OF THE ARGUMENT xmz
difcult. 3 Recollection seems an appropriate mode of engagement for a book on
senility
Two broad questions have organized my recollection and writing. The frst asks
about the processes by which the age of a body comes to matter: specifcally how
are those practices constitutd b which bodil deca i expernced, named, measured, treated, and
drawn into law and hitor and science? And when relevant, how do such practices difer
across time, space, and the varieties of human diference we attempt to capture by
terms like nation, class, and gender?
The second question emerged from my eforts to answer the frst. Wi i it in
terestin to pose "questions about senili! in t .rst plce? This type of questioning has led
to what will be the argument behind much of the book: that our understanding of
the decay of the body is never only a matter of the techniques at hand. Again and
again, I will suggest that the way senility marks a body as being irrevocably in time
suggests a relationship between fgures of the old body and temporal or political
ruptures in the order of things. Senili! becomes a critical idiom throuh which collectivitis
imagine and articulte a consciousness i such rupture and i the possibili! i some sort i re
cuperation.
To ask about seniity in India, as anywhere else, is therefore not only to pose
some variant of the frst question-which if isolated would degenerate into a set
of neocolonial binaries or banalities-but to ground one's argument in what mat
ters, at a given moment, in the fgure of decay A anthropology of senility must
turn to the consciousness of particular social groups, of regions, and of an emerg
ing colonized bourgeoisie. It cannot isolate the study of "old age" as a singular
object awaiting scholarly appropriation and celebration and must avoid, to para
phrase the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern, "the manufacture of a subdisci
pline. "4 I have tried, therefore, to think about age less through the solicitous elab
oration of some category of "the old" and more through an examination of how
age engages larger debates in and out of the academy, particularly those relevant
to contemporary India and its political economy and public culture.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ROOTS
I am grateful to my parents and sister for their love and support, and to my four
grandparents, whose discussions with me were the genesis of the project. This
book is dedicated to the memory of my grandfather Joseph Glick: a runaway at
thirteen in search of modern things in the feshpots of Poland and the Ukraine, a
makl and would-be Kabbalist, an immigrant to Quebec as one of two surivors
of an extended famiy of some two dozen, and, among his many other avatars
from baker and fur trader to garment worker-a magician. His sense of growing
older and his talk with me linking memory, doctors, religion, pleasure, and work
shaped my eventual interests in gerontology and anthropology He died when I
was living in Varanasi; my landlady Mrs. Sharma watched my face come apart
when she handed me the telegram and said in her particularly brusque form of
deep concern: "Here we'd be happy because he lived so long. What are you cry
ing over?"
TEACHERS AND COLLEAGUES
Arthur Keinman, Byron Good, and Veena Das have been both distinguished
mentors and friends, and it is from the discussions and ephemera of years together
that this book has been fashioned. I am grateful for their guidance, and for that of
Mary:o DelVecchio Good, Robert and Sarah LeVine, Sally Falk Moore, Leon
Eisenberg, Jerry Avorn, Diana Eck, and John Carman. Paul Rabinow, Nancy
Scheper-Hughes, and Sharon Kaufman-colleagues and friends but also very
much mentors-have each in diferent ways had a great impact on how I have
worked through the ideas here. They and all my colleagues in anthropology at the
University of California at Berkeley and in the Joint Program in Medical Anthro-
XIX
xx ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
pology, have been supportive of this work. My writing group-my colleagues
Marianne Ferme and Liu Xin, and Janet Roitman-made many useful interven
tions. Other colleagues whose time and suggestions have been of great help in
clude Aditya Behl, Robert Goldman, Linda Hess, and especially Tanya
Luhrmann. My classmates in anthropology were the inspiration and touchstone
for much of this book: in particular Rosemarie Bernard, Paul Farmer, Lindsay
French, and Linda Hunt, and a few years ahead of me, Norbert Peabody
Participants in graduate seminars in medical anthropology that I have facili
tated over the past fve years have helped me work through several of these ideas,
and I am grateful in particular for the close readings of Joao Biehl, Liz Hers
kovits, and Cheryl Theis. There are a lot of remarkable graduate students at
Berkeley, and consequently a lot of very smart people have pushed me to rethink
parts of this book.
I have benefted from the work of others who have written on old age in India,
in particular Sangeeta Chattoo, Marty Chen, Sarah Lamb, Baidyanath Saraswati,
Sylvia Vatuk, and A. K. Venkoba Rao. I am grateful to other scholars, activists,
and professionals I was fortunate to work wth during this research, many of
whom became my good friends: Bina Agaral, Aniket Alam, Paola Bacchetta,
Bettina Baumer, J. S. Bawa, P B. Behere, Roma Chatterji, Uma and Ashin Das
Gupta, Rohan De Souza, Tara Doyle, Rita Gupta and the staf of the Nava Nir
homes, Steven Harwood and his staf, Meena Khandelwal, Jamal Kidwai, N. L.
Kumar, Nita Kumar, David Lawrence, Rachel and Scott McDermott, Rahul
Mehrotra, Deepak Mehta, Diane Mines, Pankaj Mishra, Awadesh Misra, Aloka
Mitra, D. N. Nandi, Ashis Nandy, Harish Naraindas, Sharda Nayak, Sudhir
Nayer, R. K. Nehru, Michael Nunley Tulsi Patel, Somita Pathak, Martha Selby,
Sagaree Sengupta, Anuradha Shah, Gajendra Singh, R. H. Singh, Virendra
Singh, Amrit Srinivasan, Eugene Thomas, Sarojini and Uma Varshney, and Shiv
Visvanathan.
RESEARCH ASSOCIATES AND ASSISTANTS
I am grateful for the assistance of Rajesh Pathak, Swapan Chakraborty, Allison
Yoh, Amanda Kang, Cheryl Roberts, and Hector Gandhi . Ratnesh Pathak's crit
ical ideas and advice, as well as his research support, were invaluable.
MATERIAL SUPPORT
Periods of research and writing between r g83 and r gg6 were funded thro1gh a va
riety of sources, principally the Fulbright-Hays Program, the American Institute
of Indian Studies, the John D. and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation, and the
Mellon Foundation, with additional support from the Ofce of the Chancellor at
the University of California at Berkeley, the Townsend Center for the Humanities
at Berkeley the Michael Rockefeller fellowship at Harard College, the Smith-
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Kine Beckmann Medical Perspectives fellowship and the Travellers' /National
Council on Aging fellowship. The staf and scholars of both the Wellcome Library
and the Indian Ofce Library in London were wonderfully helpful and gracious
during a month I spent on archival work in 1994. The fnal draf of No Agn in
India was written during a summer as a guest of the Indian Institute of Advanced
Study in Simla; I am grateful to the liAS director Mrinal Miri and his staf as I
am for the hospitality of the good friends and adopted families who guided and on
many occasions housed and fed me during this work: Devraj and Devdatta Basu
and their family Chris Bhaskar, Bishwanath Bhattacharya, S. P Bhattacharya and
family, Rskin Bond, the Dutt Thapliyar family, Amita Ganguli and her large and
welcoming famiy, R. N. Mishra and his family, Neena and Mano Ranjan, Dewey
and Caroline Weatherby and the Zutshi family
REVIEWERS AND EDITORS
Chapter 3 appeared in a somewhat diferent form as an article in Culture, Medicine
and Pschiatry 16 (2): 123-61; portions of several chapters appeared as an article in
Medical Antropolog Qartrr 9 (3): 314-34. I am grateful to the editors and review
ers of both journals for their suggestions. I am particularly grateful to Stan Hol
witz of the University of California Press for his long and patient support, and to
Sue Heinemann and Bonita Hurd for their editorial wisdom.
PEOPLE I INTERVIEWED
Over the past decade, in each of the
aranasi neighborhoods and institutions, in
institutions in several other cities and towns across India, and in institutions in
Boston, Montreal, and Miami I interviewed and hung out with several thousand
persons in the name of research, for cumulative periods of time ranging from a
few minutes to hundreds of hours. These exchanges represent several diferent
sorts of debt. Many people were longtime acquaintances, some were close friends,
and a few were relatives of mine. To all I iterate both my gratitude and my apolo
gies for an insistence on translating life into feldwork. In the neighborhoods at the
heart of this study I had fewer acquaintances or friends to begin with, and those
that have since developed have usually been mediated by the fact that I came into
the relationship \Titing a book. In one neighborhood, this mattered far more than
the others.
There is a story I once heard, in the Varanasi slum of Nagwa Harijan Basti,
where I worked from 1988 to 1990, about a young man wandering the neighbor
hood's lanes and asking too many questions. Some residents are fearful of the in
cursion; others get angr Interrogation by the state or its self-appointed proxies
might mean a redistribution or at the very least a contest over local resources. One
worried resident fnally approaches the stranger and demands to know who he is.
"I'm a BHU student, " comes the response, "preparing a thesis. " The enormous
xxzz ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
campus of Banaras Hindu University lies a kilometer south of Nagwa. "Oh, a the
sis, " says the relieved resident. "I thought it was something important. "
Theses abound, not only on Varanasi, paradigmatic space of Orientalist en
counter, but nailed to the doors of Nagwa slum itsel Residents tell of many soci
ology theses from BHU, of enviable careers built on the enumeration of their own
more marginal experience. On the road that leads from the university to the slum
one can fnd several dissertation binding shops.
The fow of obserers is not only from the university. International luminaries,
from American presidential candidates to members of the Vatican curia, have
wandered this untouchable slum's muddy lanes in search of a truer India, coming
to view frsthand its poverty and the grassroots eforts of Father Paul, a Dutch
priest, to create change. Bernard Cohn has described "the obserational/travel
modality"-India structured as points along a tour uncovering its varied and shif
ing essences-as an important form of the British construction of knowledge
about its colonies. 1 Within the late twentieth century touristic, Nagwa is counter
posed to the city's other indices of essential lndianness: the burning ghats, the nar
row lanes, the "monkey temple," the mysterious yet flthy Ganges, and the peace
of the Buddhist shrine of Sarnath. Amid this density of images, Nagwa points to
the essences of caste and poverty and to the location of social change as external ,
in the person of the exemplary foreigner. Like a wizened peasant encountered
amidst the wild in a Wordsworth poem, the untouchable Chamar of Nagwa slum
are the icons of sufering and of the earthy rootedness of human experience that
allow the transcendence of Varanasi to persevere, still one of the great sites of the
Romantic for the European and American imagination. Recendy I discovered a
Web site devoted to photographs of Varanasi slum Chamar.
My own research is not "about" Nagwa, nor is it the only neighborhood in
which I worked. But it is here that I sense the ironies of my own practice most
strongly Books and theses are not that threatening in Nagwa, because they are
"useless"; they do not seem to change anything. Like old people, they are called
jhaTti, a local word meaning "wasted" in the sense of a losing lottery ticket afer
the contest is over. Like old people and lottery tickets, they are full of strong
sounding but empty promises, so much bakbak or nonsense. They glide over the re
alities of the desiring body and the material world.
My earliest response to the ethics of what I call anthropological desire-the de
sire to spend time writing about both friends and strangers, often in vasdy diferent
and ofen more marginal circumstances than oneself under the sign of realism
was to start training to become a physician. Arthur Kleinman, Byron Good,
Mary:o DelVecchio Good, and Leon Eisenberg introduced me to new ways of
thinking, through anthropology, about health and the roots of sufering. I began a
Ph. D. , and ultimately was "caught" by this new feld enough to abandon a med
ical career. That particular decision made it still more difcult to defect the accu
sations from Nagwa, imagined and real, of beingjhaTti. I wrote No Agin in India
as an efort to participate in a critical medical anthropology in which the exigen-
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xxzzz
cies of the body and of material conditions inform as well as are informed by the
powe1ful bakbal of what we sometimes still call culture. But so what? If cultural
narratives, as I will suggest, are constructed and sustained as much against as for
meaning, so my own theoretical project and moral posturing may be written
against my lack of a good answer to the question of one woman in Nagwa slum:
"What does writing do for us?"
Many of my colleagues in medical anthropology seem to be struggling with
similar questions: a few have dedicated themselves to materializing through a lo
cally driven and politicaly aware practice Nancy Scheper-Hughes's call for a
"critically applied anthropology"2 Such a path is certainly one of the most pow
erful and compelling examples of critical scholarly engagement in medical an
thropology. But for those, myself included, who are committed to a diferent kind
of engagement within the academy, the choice of how and what to write seems
murkier. The language of the time is strewn with the best of intentions, refexive
articulations from the moral to the militant. I am somewhat uneasy about the use
fulness of performative moralization in anthropology; still, I appreciate the senti
ment. With the help of several thoughtful interlocutors, and in particular Veena
Das and Niranjan Karnik, I have been working toward what Scheper-Hughes has
called a "good enough" practice. 3 I am indebted to many people in Nagwa for
talking to me at great length, without as of yet a good enough response on my
part. Many others would not and did not, and here too I should acknowledge what
I was taught. Ram Lakhan in particular straddled both camps, as mentor, harsh
critic, and sometime friend. Among committed outsiders, the extraordinary and
ubiquitous Om Prakash Sharma and the tireless community worker Frans Baart
mans introduced me to many people in Nagwa and were unfailingly gracious with
their time, insight, and example.
FRIENDSHIP
The love and support of many of these and other wonderful friends and family,
and the occasional providential interention of various mysterious strangers and
tricks, have given possibility and shape to this work of the past decade. No list can
begin to comprehend the friends whose caring has helped me write and fnish this
book, but I do want to remember two people who died recently Tara Devi and
Habib Khan. Memories: Tara making potato latkes using Linda Hess's recipe,
while giving me advice on keeping things secret in Varanasi; Habib and his kids
and I lyng on the roof of his house looking at the stars and Habib lecturing me
about the nature of love.
OF LOVE, THEN
Tom Boellstorf was my partner for most of the years I worked on this book; his in
tegration of impassioned community service and rigorous intellectual practice re-
xxw ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
mains a model, perhaps the best lesson with which to confront the practice of
jha1ri anthropolog
The years of this research and this writing have been rich and wonderful ones
for me. Two friends, Punam Zutshi and Vimal Shankar, made this book and its au
thor happen in unanticipated ways.
NOTE ON TRANSCRIPTION,
TRANSLATION, AND TRANSLITERATION
Unless otherwise noted, all reported conversations and statements come from feld
notes written in English a few minutes to several hours afer an interview or en
counter; thus, the wording frequently refects an after-the-fact translation by a
nonnative speaker and introduces a set of obvious biases. I found in most cases
that discussions I initiated with notebook or tape at hand were less productive and
less interesting. This fnding is idiosyncratic and is not meant to convey any pro
grammatic intent.
I have used the following guide to transliteration and diacritics: citations previ
ously transliterated are printed as in the original, as are the titles of flms and
books. Al quotations from interviews that I have transliterated are italicized and
have diacritics. Hindi, Bhojpuri, Bengali, and Sanskrit words feature standard di
acritics, and Urdu words are transliterated as they would be spoken by most Ba
narsis. The exceptions: ( 1 ) common nouns that have entered into English are nei
ther italicized nor given diacritics; (2) anglicized spellings that do not follow
standard diacritical usage have been retained in some cases, and I have tried to fol
low current convention on a case-by-case basis; (3) place, language, institutional,
and personal names and proper nouns more generally are not written with dia
critics (e. g. , Varanasi not VaraQasi, Shankar not
S
ankar) unless they are part of a
title or quotation. As the plural form of some Hindi words may confuse some
readers, I have followed the trend toward hybrid "Hinglish" and used English
plural endings when these seemed clearer.
XXV
Introduction
in which rve tps fure prominentl, an ol woman shakes h ha,
and t autor riect upon lsin his marbls
THE MAD OLD WOMAN OF THE MILLENNIUM
She appears but for a moment, the mad old woman of the millennium, her pres
ence noted because of a debate over whether times were hard enough that God
would take to writing letters. She appears-ofering everything, demanding noth
ing-"giving up her food for fve days and nights, during which period she sat shak
ing her head about. " We know nothing else about her, save that this head-shaking,
food-resisting body of hers could at one point promise redemption, and that this
promise seems to have led (times being hard indeed) to bloodshed and misfortune.
Early in 1865 several boatmen returned westward from Calcutta, to their
homes along the Ganges River near the city of Varanasi, otherwise known as Ba
naras, Benares, or Kashi. They bore with them a letter from God. God in this case
was the goddess Kali, according to the Varanasi correspondent of the Alahabad
Poneer, an English paper.
1
The boatmen in this case were Mallahs, members of a
community or caste of families whose hereditary work was boating and fshing. In
her letter the goddess called for the Mallahs to stop several low-status practices
''ith which they were identifed: eating fsh, eating meat, and seling fsh for a
livelihood. The demand, which would have deprived many in the community of
their means of surival, seemed to presage a millennial change in which poor
communities like the Malahs would no longer need to engage in difcult, low
status work. The goddess of the letter demanded that instead of fshing, the Mal
lahs should devote themselves completely to becoming her bhaats, or devotees.
During the following weeks, the letter from God circulated in several of the
colonial administrative districts surrounding Varanasi. Mallah community leaders
debated its relevance and authenticity. A meeting was organized in order to decide
what, if anything, to do about the letter and the rumors circulating. The meeting
I
2 INTRODUCTI ON
was held on April 13, a Saturday during a religious fair at a local pilgrimage site to
the northeast of the city near the vilage of Balua.
The particulars of the letter and the debate were recorded in the regional En
glish press because of a subsequent set of events that occurred at the festival and
that heightened the millenarian stakes of the goddess' demand. These events,
which culminated in several violent deaths and the interention of the police, are
ofered by the press as exemplary of the macabre religiosity of Indians, and par
ticularly Hindus, in the absence of British interention. The week of the Balua
fair, marking the beginning of the Hindu solar year and coinciding with festivals
throughout the country was otherwise represented in English papers in terms of
the lack of what was termed "incident. " The memories of the faied rebellion
known as the "Indian Mutiny" and of its aftermath were less than a decade old.
Religious festivals were frequently read by colonial authorities as dangerous sites
that could incite local passions. Most reports from correspondents to British In
dian newspapers that week reported the success of pacifcation campaigns abol
ishing what were at the time seen as among the bloodiest and most rabble-rousing
of Hindu rituals, the devotional piercings and other mortifcations of the fesh that
the British grouped under the heading of hook-swinging. 2
Amid this litany of successes in curtailing religious license, the Varanasi corre
spondent to the Poneer, in a letter appearing on April 19, reported on an unex
pected failure: an incident of violence among the Mallahs gathered at Balua:
BEN ARES
Aprl 15t.-A very singular occurrence took place, on the 13th instant, at Bulooa, in
this district, which terminated in the violent death of two of the boatman caste of
that place. It seems that the mulls [allahs] of Bulooa, whilst engaged in sonee poo
jah [propitiation of the inauspicious planet Saturn, or Sani, it being Saturday], got it
into their heads that if blood were shed, some beneft would accrue to their commu
nit and that the parties slain would rise again and live for ever! Two of the most en
thusiastic in the cause accordingly consented to meet death at the hands of the
brotherhood. The throats of the wretched men were immediately cut, while their
parents stood by and exhorted them to bear the pain, as they would be sure to return
and live for ever. The police now interfered, and met with some rough treatment at
the hands of these

trange creatures, who did not approve of their orgies being in

terrupted. 3
One must wade through the brutal language of the colonial grotesque. No letter
is mentioned initially; it appears two days later in a second report along with other
new details. One such detai almost escapes notice, scarcely relevant to the corre
spondent save as a further sign of the irrationality of the Hindu lower orders: al
lusion is made to local interest in the behavior of an old woman, interest that
somehow relates the debate over Kali's letter to the subsequent violence.
The second report begins with a reprisal of the two deaths, depicting the vio
lence as characteristic of such religious assemblies, and goes on to describe the in
terentions of the police at considerable length. It then turns to the letter:
INTRODUCTI ON
3
It appeared that two "seers," had been down to Calcutta in charge of some boats,
and on their return had brought with them a letter addressed to the caste, calling on
them to become Bugutt, and not to kl or eat fsh any more. This letter seems to
have been circulated in the Benares, Ghazeepore, and Azimghur districts; and t be
lii in its truth see to have been strengthened l the fct o an ol woman givin up her fod fr
fve das and niht, during which period she sat shaking her head about. On the occasion in
question the people of the caste acted a regular play, three of the defendants in the
case representing Ram, Mahabeer, and Mahadeo, Junior, and the two deceased,
Uttril and Mahadeo, Senior: the latter were slain by the former, Ram having
promised to bring them to life again. Aong those captured are the three suriving
gods, who have confessed their guilt [italics mine ].4
The narrative link between the dangers of popular enthusiasm and the bloody or
gies that inevitably follow is "the fact of an old woman. " Not just an old woman,
but a woman shaking her head about: the motion a classic sign of the pagl, the
madwoman, for many in north India. And not just an old pagl, but one whose
complete and sustained refusal of food takes her entirely out of the transactional
frame of being a person, in particular of being an old and dependent person, and
places her in that space of power and death from which her shaking silence speaks.
In the decade following the faied hopes and repressive sequelae of rebellion,
within a colonial text afrming the irrational nature of local violence, the mad old
woman of the millennium makes an appearance within a text that does not know
quite what to do with her.
I came across the old woman, and the events at Balua, while sitting in the India
Ofce Library in London looking for probate cases in which children attempted to
use a changing colonial legal system to prove an old parent was of unsound mind.
The brevity of her appearance, despite its critical location in the narrative, sent
me in search of further mention of a fgure whose refusal to accept food and
whose shaking head was ofered as a source of valid knowledge. In several variants
of Indian epistemology, any such source of valid knowledge would be termed a
prmi1a. How did the "fact of an old woman" sere as a prmila for the resurrec
tional moment of the Mallahs?
Despite their "being uncommon and out of the way, " the deaths in Balua were
not widely reported. The Bengal Hurkaru and India Gazett of May 3 ofered a de
scription of the events with no mention of the old woman but with greater detai
pertaining to the divine origin and contents of the letter and with a revised list of
the fve gods involved. However, other fgures of old women and descriptions of
their relation to religious practice were not foreign to the pages of the Hurkaru that
month. On April 1 3, the date of the Balua afair, the paper reported on pilgrims
who had journeyed to immerse themselves in the Ganges far upriver at the reli
gious fair at Hardwar. The correspondent is preoccupied with the women as they
emerge from the water, dripping:
A large proportion of the bathers were women who journeyed to this distance from
the southern and eastern districts of Bengal, the central provinces and central India,
4 INTRODUCTI ON
and amongst these thousands, it does not say much for the beauty of the houris of
the east, not a single realy beautiful woman could be seen. Old and decrepit women
seemed to counterbalance the young, and when these, after the immersion arose
from the waters "like Venus of the sea" they did not strike the spectator as possess
ing in any remarkable degree the grace and beauty of the form divine.
Here, as a comic fgure of the spiritual and physical decrepitude of the east, the
British editors ofer the vision of a national body composed of old women. Dod
dering and even mad old bodies appear in the press of the time as frequent signs
of the strangeness of India, as frequently as do dangerous and enthusiastic young
men lie those of Balua. Mter casting his eye over the aged Venuses of Hardwar,
the Hurkaru correspondent notes the pathetic folly of "one old Raja, " who "to
pave his way to the regions of bliss everlasting, gave 55, 000 Rupees [to Brahman
priests ofciating] , and would have given more but that the unfortunate and
crazed creature kicked the bucket before he could fnish his almsgivings. "5
Against the colonial repetition of the decrepit or crazed ol d person as a sign of
Indianness, the fgure of the ol d woman who in her gestures and refusals proves
that Kali's time is imminent remains apparitional. What she signifes, what she
achieves-that which makes the letter from God readable-is not available to the
English papers, for which she is but one sign of local irrationality among many
Who is she? I abandoned the archiving of probate cases to search unsuccessfully
for her in the local Hindi and English press. Yet the question of the old mad
woman, and of her movement and her sience, remains.
This book is about the representation of old people as mad or otherise dif erent
in what they do or say and about the relation of such diference to other sorts of
realities, such as a millenarian moment in the history of Varanasi Mallahs. One of
my goals in writing it is to suggest that age, as a way of representing and under
standing other sorts of diferences between individuals and classes of individuals,
is critical to the articulation not only of individual bodies but of collective ones.
The Balua afair suggests the importance of old age to the articulation of a speci
fc moment of radical social possibility, to a new vision of culture and community
How and why might the old body sere as a critical site in the constitution of col
lective meaning and practice?
Current debates on old age in India and elsewhere engage other collective
frames, particularly that of the nation. The "nation" has always been an impor
tant category in how the subset of social scientists known as gerontologists think
about old age, but inevitably in a single and very specifc way: there are, or will be,
too many old people in our country, or in other people's countries, and so we-the
guardians of the nation, or of the welfare of other nations-must do something
about this problem. Thus the connection of old age, understood as a problem, to
the category of the nation is central to many of the books on gerontology that
have recently appeared in India, a number of which bear the identical title: Agn
in India. In part I write as a contribution to the ongoing critique of such alarmist
arguments and the efects they may have on real people, old and less old, particu-
INTRODUCTI ON
5
larly when the arguments extend across national boundaries. Thus, in part, the
reason for my ow title, No An in India.
But there are other, and perhaps more interesting, arguments to be made, and
many other absences that the No of the title is meant to suggest. The old woman
of Balua, whose refusal of the dependency normally constitutive of old age seems
momentarily to signif a moment of radical transformation for the Mallahs,
points to a dif erent intersection of age, gender, and nation. Much recent work in
the social sciences and humanities has examined the relationship between gen
dered and sexual representations and the politics of empire and the postcolonial
nation,6 but ae has far less frequently been examined as a form of dif erence in its
own right. How do collectivities and polities articulate themselves through or
against such generational and age-specic representations? Can we learn some
thing about the politics and histories of communities, nations, and empires
through the study of where, how, and in which bodies age matters? How does the
study of the body in time ofer a way into the ongoing articulation of something
called India?
THE AGE OF ALZHEIMER' S
I approach the body in time through the exploration of what has perhaps been its
dominant medicalization during the years of my research, the set of bodily condi
tions and social practices organized and known as Alzheimer's disease.
When I was a kid we talked about senility as a vague sort of thing, losing your
marbles, in old people who weren't getting enough blood to their brains. When I
went to college, it was still possible for a professor in psychology to lecture that se
nility was a cognitive defense against the mindlessness of institutionalized old age.
:ly friends and I knew-from flms, journalistic exposes, and visits to old rela
tives-that nursing homes could make you senile. The etiological dilemma of Kn
Lar-is it his old age or his daughters' actions that precipitate Lear's madness?
bespoke something real .
Well over a decade later, I was sitting in a cafeteria writing an early draf of this
book and overheard, at the next table, "It must be my Alzheimer's, dear." I rarely
hear senility discussed anyore. Friends ask me: "Isn't there a diference? Isn't
Azheimer's a disease but senility the normal process?" Newsweek articles I read in
Varanasi when I was doing the research for this book proclaimed Alzheimer's "the
fourth leading kler of adults, " a "bomb, " and an "epidemic" requiring "the
equivalent of a Manhattan Project. "7 We are, it seems, ever on the verge of a cure;
not a season went by during the writing of this book but some lab claimed to have
defnitively identifed the Alzheimer's gene or to have recombinantly produced an
animal model of the disease or to have developed an inexpensive test to identif
and label future victims. Whatever the degree of market-driven hype, new knowl
edges have clearly emerged and further breakthroughs are liely Something has
happened: something learned; perhaps something forgotten.
6 INTRODUCTI ON
No Agn in India is written about a diferent place, dif erent friends, and dif erent
memories and lapses of memory, but its earliest roots lie in my coming of age in
Canada and the United States, in my witnessing the emergence of the age of
Azheimer's in North America. Michael Agar writes that anthropologists interpret
culture through Heideggerian "breakdowns"-through insight gained when
events difcult to explain with one's own framework or "schema" for making sense
of them force one into the realization of a dif erent schema. 8 The juxtaposition, in
my own life, of the age of senility with that of Alzheimer's constituted the earliest
breakdown, the beginning of an isight that to talk about the behavior of old peo
ple was to invoke far more than blood fow, brain cells, nursing homes, or marbles.
The genre of contemporary writing about Alzheimer's dementia is often High
Gothic, refecting seniity's newer and far more virulent identity as "the brain
kiler." Any alternative framework to the reductively pathophysiological to frame
what's at stake in the lives of demented persons and their families is increasingly
delegitimated. Karen Lyman has called this winnowing of what constitutes ac
ceptable discourse the progressive "biomedicalization" of dementia. 9 I agree but
resist the implication that the impetus for the shif lies primarily with a purport
edly hegemonic abstraction called biomedicine. Hegemonies are not so easily re
duced to institutions. SGmething far deeper, something more pervasive is at work.
The ever more inescapable obviousness of dementia gready exceeds the sites of its
professional management. As at Balua, but in very diferent ways, there is far more
to the representation of the old person than the specifcity of the aging body
I am neither interested in denying the relevance of the brain nor in making
light of what famiies experience. This book will challenge us to think about what
some of us understand as Alzheimer's in terms other than or in addition to those
of a diagnosis or a disease: as a set of local and contingent practices rooted in cul
ture and political economy To do so it wldraw on data across class, gender, caste,
and regional and national boundaries and will focus on what is at stake in the rep
resentation, experience, and negotiation of old age in a place increasingly labeled
postcolonial India. Yet its argument is as rooted in the materiality of contempo
rary clinical knowledge and the specifcs of my own personal and clinical experi
ence in the United States as it is in the Varanasi, Delhi, Calcutta, and Bombay
ethnographies and Indian and European archival work that form the bulk of the
research.
Before undertaking the Indian research, I examined geriatric and gerontologi
cal practice in the United States at multiple sites: at a school of public health,
studying community-based geriatric health care; at governmental and nongovern
mental social welfare agencies, designing older worker employment and training
programs; at a medical school, being trained as a medical student in evaluating
neurobiological research and conducting geriatric assessments and dementia
workups; at a minimally funded nursing home in a Boston slum, working as a
nursing aide and tying patients to their chairs each day and to their beds each
night to protect them from falling; at well-funded nursing homes, working as a
INTRODUCTI ON
7
medical student and learning about miieu therapy and behavioral management;
at local chapters of the Alzheimer's Disease and Related Disorders Association,
joining support groups for the families of Alzheimer's patients; and at home and
in the world, watching as not only relatives but two mentors, whose advice and ex
ample were integral to diferent stages of this project, grew increasingly forgetful
and faced the diagnosis of Alzheimer's and the stigma of its label.
Yet exhaustive appeals to experience like these I have just made, frequent in the
gerontological literature, may disguise as much as they disclose. Jaber Gubrium
has drawn attention to the emergence of an Alzheimer's disease movement
among family members and gerontological professionals, and to the nature of its
practice: the continual reenactment, through meetings and a prolifc literature of
articles, books, and videos, of the status of Alzheimer's as a real and a biological
disease. He suggests that repetition allows those involved with the movement to
deny the inherent ambiguity in maintaining a distinction between normal aging
and pathological dementia. 1 0 In the early chapters of this book, I will suggest that
the iterative quality of Alzheimer's discourse further allows its victim to be recon
stituted as a nonperson, and I will argue that it is not the biological processes of
dementia as much as the social processes of its construction that deprives the de
mented elder of selfood. Roland Barthes, in Sad, Fourer Lola, frames the prob
lem of repetition more generally, looking through what he terms such "enumera
tive obsessions" in language and narrative to a set of vacancies that they expose. 1 1
Barthes is a presence throughout this book; central to its method is my interest in
cultural representation not only as a structural feld but as a set of obsessions and
absences. For before one sees through representational surfaces to some notion of
underlying architecture, the anthropologist's abstraction of culture, one needs to
think about the repetitions of signs and narratives on those surfaces: culture as a
kind of semiotic frottage.
At stake both in the voices of the old persons discussed below and in the insti
tutions and narratives through which these voices are heard is a multitude of rep
etitions. Many enumerative obsessions, not only the elaboration of Alzheimer's,
anchor my

rguments here. These will become apparent in the frst few chapters,
as the narrative shifs from Boston to Varanasi via an interlude in Zagreb. Against
Azheimer's, I examine the "decline of the joint family"-the central narrative in
Indian gerontology-and its relation to the language and practices defning the
behavior of old people. In juxtaposing these two obsessions-rather than, for ex
ample, two cultural systems or structures-I try to move beyond an overly essen
tializing anthropology mindful of Ronald Inden's and T N. Madan's critiques of
attempts particularly by Europeans and Americans to uncover the essential
India. 1 2 Against the anthropological reifcation of ethnographic diference as nec
essar{ privileged and essential, I struggle to bring together the competing and
crosscutting totalizations of the modern body, of local and global economies and
practices, and of culture as structure organizing at every turn one's orientation to
self and the world.
8 INTRODUCTI ON
These latter sorts of questions are of great interest to me as an anthropologist,
but they may seem less compelling to readers more interested in Azheimer's and
old age; the relations of mind, body, and memory over time; or the sociology and
politics of urban north India. I have tried throughout to strike a balance between
the dif erent sorts of interests and degrees of familiarity with medicine, gerontol
o
g
anthropology and South Asia with which dif erent readers may approach this
text. Two other balancing acts inform my writing: writing for readers from India
and elsewhere; and writing for imagined specialists and imagined general readers.
Balance is of course not a neutral term, as anthropologist Laura Nader would
remind us 1 3 and as the language of balance framing the old person in middle-class
neighborhoods in Varanasi will reveal. Other metaphors of how one can bridge
the multiplicity of theories, persons, and politics informing one's writing-Donna
Haraway's eat's cradle, the play of approaches held in interlacing and productive
tension, and Wendy Doniger's home cooking and tool kit, the celebration of use
fuly messy bricolage1 4 -may evoke a sense of the approach used here. Le some
of the people about whom I wite, I wlat points elect a rather unbalanced aesthetic
in pushing the reader to make certain connections, a juxtapositional ethnography of
sorts. In the chapters that follow, discussions of seventeenth- and nineteenth-century
European cultural history will come perilously close to readings of Aerican su
permarket tabloids and ethnographic descriptions of Aerican support groups
for Azheimer's disease caregivers; these in turn are inserted into a text that focuses
on several neighborhoods in one north Indian city but that includes discussions of
an Italian pharmaceutical house in Bombay, a government ministry in New Delhi,
an old age home in Calcutta, and geriatric clinics in Madras and Dehradun. Con
temporary journalism rubs shoulders with Sanskrit epics and folklore, Hindi fms
and magazine ads, sociological anthologies, and religious calendar art. The au
thor's two grandmothers make their appearance.
There is method to all this, and some constructive models in social theory. I will
not belabor these here-each juxtaposition must stand on its own-save to make
a few points relevant to this particular project. Field sites-to use the term an
thropologists give to the places about which they write-are plural. Each of the
people I will invoke and remember below is located in terms of multiple sites:
brain, body psyche, family household, neighborhood, religion, caste, ethnicity,
class, sex, language, episteme, city nation, world system, and so forth. These sites
articulate with one another in various ways-stable and shifing-in time and
space. I juxtapose. variant classes of disparate material in diferent portions of this
text to highlight one or another of these articulations and some of the political
and interpretative issues at stake in each case. This method leads to a book that is
far from Aristotelian in the sorts of unities it ofers. Unlike the conventional soci
ology and anthropology of India, it is not quite "about India. " Nor is it really a
comparison, for in at least one strong sense there is no place called "the West" out
there with which "India" can be compared. A genealogy of contemporary geron
tological practice in India, for example, must draw upon the specifcs of a Euro-
INTRODUCTI ON 9
pean history of medical practice as opposed to reifing the latter yet again as a sort
of black box called "Western medicine. " It must ask what is at stake in the con
struction of a postcolonial social science around the fgure of an old body, and in
so doing turn to the governmental, nongovernmental, and commercial sites where
such a science takes shape. It must take seriously the multiple and interlocking
worlds of meaning and institutions of social regulation within which a body be
comes a series of subjects over time. Such a project requires an examination of
many sites of cultural production, from changing readings of Brahmanic and
anti-Brahmanic Hindu texts to diferent sorts of emerging urban spaces and the
social dramas they frame to images and understandings incited by advertising. It
must be a response to a word ever more global and yet trenchantly and ofen trag
ically ever more local in the ways poverty, violence, disease, and other viscerally
real efects of marginal subjectivity are imported, isolated, and maintained within
ever lss porous borders.
So, the book is about senility, dementia, hot brain, sixtyishness, Azheimer's dis
ease, dotage, weakness, enchantment, and other states not named but which might
strike one who is familiar with one or another of these formerly used terms as
being recognizable. That is, it is about the language of behavioral inappropriate
ness and the practices of exclusion that come to encompass the lived experience of
many old people. It is about the structures-bodies, generations, households,
neighborhoods, neurons, classes, and cultures-that mediate and sustain the rela
tionship between experience, signifcance, and practice. It is ultimately about the
diferences between bodies that explode eforts to ground an analysis in any of
these frames-biological, political, or cultural-without rethinking the relation
ships between them.
THE VIEW FROM THE RIVER
The river, again. We are in a boat: myself two other passengers-railway workers
from the nearby town of Mughalsarai-and the boatman, who is pulling hard
against the current and ferrying us upstream. We are on the Ganges, in Varanasi,
and on our left the ghats glide by, fights of stone steps leading up to the lanes of
the city A few men and women, some quite old and stooped, are bathing. The
scene-river, ghats, lanes, boats, and bathers-is cliched. It has come to stand in
for the city as a whole in a variety of registers: religious, touristic, sanitary, schol
arly Its meanings-what we four on the boat can make, respectively of what we
see-are overdetermined.
Other boats glide by I don't remember their passengers, but they might have
held parties of religious pilgrims come to see and bathe in the river at this sacred
site, or tourists from larger cities or from abroad doing the prescribed early morn
ing boat ride-cameras poised to catch the houris in dripping saris, the smolder
ing cremation pyres, the fsherman drawing in their nets glinting against the sun
rise, or the suspicious-looking objects foating in the water. Or they might have
10 INTRODUCTI ON
been parties of men crossing the river to the wide and empty other bank for an
outing, one of the lazy pleasures of banarsipan, the much-elaborated essence of
being a Varanasi resident. 15 Or of develop

ent workers engaged in an often

publicized multinational efort to fght polution and "save the Ganges. "
It is r g8g. The boatman's name is Shankar, and I know him because his wife
cleans house for Marwari Mataji, the old lady who lives upstairs from me. Mataji
and I share a building overlooking the river, owned by a temple trust; the principal
trustees are the Peshwas, descendants of the former rulers of much of western
India. Mataji was once a wealthy widow who came to Varanasi to live out her days
in the religiously meritorious act of being a ki zviz, a dweller in Kashi. (Kashi is
another, venerable name for this city in the easternmost part of Uttar Pradesh. )
Marwari Mataji became a disciple of Karpatri, an ascetic leader of the Hindu po
litical right, who himself used to stay in this house by the river. Karpatriji had long
since died (though his ghost would later come to haunt me in the person of Tam be
the madman) , and Marwari Mataji kept his memory alive.
Shankar is grizzled, wiry, and white-haired. When I frst met him I thought he
was in his sixties. But he is considerably younger. "Shankar works hard, " I re
member Marwari Mataji saying. "He just looks old. " I would rent Shankar's boat
for exercise on occasion, but even without passengers found it difcult to propel its
lengthy wooden oars. Amid the trafc of other people's boats, I would spin in cir
cles while Shankar watched from Mataji's window
The two men from Mughalsarai are looking at me and I at them. They ask me
if I'm a tourist. I get a little defensive. I tell them I'm a medical student and an an
thropologist learning about what some people call the kmzon (weakness) of dima
(brain) in old age, what others joke about as "going sixtyish, " sathiana. One of the
two men leans forward and asks me to explain, as an expert, why the brains of
Muslim old people stay sahz, right or correct, and why Muslim elders usually don't
get angry, confused, or obstinate. Why that is, they do not go sixtyish.
The two men are Hindu and working class. It is a time in which political writ
ers-in Varanasi and around the world-are worrying about rising communal
tensions between Hindus and Muslims, and I am therefore struck that a poor
Hindu man is framing the old brain of the Muslim as somehow more "right. " But
I lack a good answer to the railway worker's question, and I tell him so. I play it
safe. I admit that I have never noticed any diferences between Hindu and Muslim
brains and ask him why he posed the question. He pauses. He says he wonders
whether the fact that "we Hindus fght far more with our old parents and are less
disciplined in family afairs than Muslims" might have an efect on the behavior of
old people. These are not his exact words; as a social anthropologist, my practice
was to write down the details of remembered conversations such as this one each
evening before retiring.
Rereading what I had written in my notes of this conversation over subsequent
weeks, I came to doubt whether I had interpreted the meaning of the man from
Mughalsarai correctly Diferences ascribed to Muslim brains were neither a fea-
INTRODUCTI ON 1 1
ture of Indian popular discourse on old age nor were they apparent within the
language or practice of most persons I interiewed. Yet over the course of two
years in Varanasi studying when and why old people were understood to be be
having diferently and with what sorts of social and bodily consequences, I was a
dozen or so times asked the same question, about the saki brains of Muslims, and
always by working or middle class Hindus. 16 The question came to haunt me. I
would ask friends, acquaintances, or interiew respondents in the four neighbor
hoods where I spent most of my time whether there were any diferences between
Hindus and Muslims in old age, and they would inevitably answer in the negative.
Despite the putative advantage the raiway worker's question seemed to ofer to
Muslims, the Varanasi Muslims with whom I spoke were unanimous in rejecting
the idea that there could be any diference between Hindu and Muslim bodies and
brains, seeing in the obseration primarily a threat to their ultimately more strate
gic assertion that all persons were the same.
Yet each time I was ready to abandon the question, someone else in a diferent
neighborhood and diferent context would pose some variant of it. I would press
each new person for his or her own ideas, and I usually was told something like
what the railman had frst said: Muslimfmilies are diferent; they are sahz, unlike
our own, which in contrast are somehow spoiled or excessive or undisciplined or
simply bad. And bad families produce weak-brained old people. Yet none of these
interlocutors were happy with the sufciency of this answer: thus their initial pos
ing of Muslim dif erence as a question for an academic "expert. " And so I begin
by posing their question here, yet again. For me, it is a variant of the question
raised by the old madwoman of the Balua afair. What might be at stake in the act
of speaking about old brains and the behavior of old people, such that their being
invoked moves us so seamlessly from the old body to the status of famiies and en
tire communities, religions, or nations?
Dulari '
She would crouch at the edge of a crossing of muddy lanes or against the wall of
a house. She had on an old grayish sari, and her thin arms reached around her
squatting legs to grasp one another; then, with a motion of hand and head, she
rocked slowly back and forth. She was small and dusty easy to miss; I probably
had passed the crossing several times without noticing her. It was her voice, rising
and falling as she rocked, muttering quietly and incessantly that I fnally heard.
Syllables thrust together-gurgling, "my daughter," "nothing, nothing"-in a
monotone. A kid passed by saw me listening, and grinned: "It's bakbak. " Mutter
ing, nonsense. Another kid: "She's crazy, a pal. "
She wasn't always at the crossing, but I heard her there a fair amount before I
knew who she was and where she lived. Always the rocking back and forth, with
her head bent down and to the side, and the rhythmic babak. Then one day, as I
was hurrying by one of her habitual spots, she looked up with a steady gaze and
spoke: "I have no one. " And then, "I'm hungry" I hesitated, embarrassed, and she
began to talk. Bakbak of a diferent kind, cogent stories and cogent demands, but
repeated again and again, a new cadence set against the absence of a good old age
and the presence of the hope that I might be one of the Christian Fathers come to
redeem her sufering with money
She talked and talked: of the death of a daughter under mysterious circum
stances, of her own subsequent abandonment by her famiy, of her renting from
distant relations a room in Nagwa slum, along wth a male cousin, an old childless
widower, who pulled a rickshaw in the city to support them. I began spending time
with the two of them, helping out some, quid pro quo for listening to the story of
Dulari-that was her name-the repetition of her missing daughter. But it is the
1
3
14 DULARI
bakbak of the ol d madwoman of the crossing I most remember, its vagueness, its
rare and almost impossible coherence.
She was in a way expected in Varanasi. Amost everyone's Banaras had an ab
stracted old woman as an icon of the place, from Brahmanical panegyrics and the
colonial picturesque down to Allen Ginsberg and Raja Rao. 1 Writ more broadly,
she was India as the site of cheap solicitude under the sign of Mother Teresa, a
metonym for the land of starvng ancients awaiting the administration of that last
loving cup. And not just cheap solicitude: the poor widow has become one of the
focal points of a new critical analysis of Indian political economy in the work of
Martha Chen, Jean Dreze, and more indirectly Bina Agarwal and Aartya Sen. 2
I returned to Nagwa in the autumn of 1 g8g, after some months' absence. Du
lari was no longer at any of her crossroad spots. The cousin had died, and with
him her source of food and rent. The relatives from whom she had rented a room
told me her health had worsened from the sadness, and that they had no choice
but to ask her to leave. They said they had asked one of the Christian Fathers to
fnd her a space somewhere. Some kilometers north, Mother Teresa's Varanasi
house stood set back from the river. It was a small version of her Calcutta opera
tion; the sisters and staf told of periodic sweeps of the train station in search of
abandoned or destitute elders needing shelter and a place to die. I found Dulari
there, lying on a bed with her hair closely cropped.
Her look struck me: frst, a bit mad and then, as two of the sisters walked by
conspiratorial. She pulled out a piece of paper from under her sheets and quickly
thrust it into my hands: "They can't have this! " It was a picture of the goddess
Durga. The nuns walked by, waiting.
ONE
Orientations
in which anthropologts construe, and neurns and nations co,oin
THE ZAGREB TAMASHA
Who i it that can tl me who I am?
AJNU LEAR I . I V. 230
Tamasha i n Hindi i s a commotion, a performance-song and dance, tragedy bur
lesque, and romance strung together with lots of noise-as in its heir, the modern
Hindi flm. In r g88 anthropologists from around the world convened in Zagreb for
a global conference. 1 Several sessions were devoted to old age. At one, an anthro
pologist from India presented a paper speculating on the long lives of elders in a
hill tribe in northeastern India. Mterard, the foor was opened for questions.
A American anthropologist asked the speaker about the prevalence of de
mentia among the elders. Dementia is a clinical term, which in r g88 signifed pro
gressive and long-term cognitive losses. Most of the anthropologists in the room
were from North America, and they knew that dementia was more prevalent
among the oldest old, persons in their eighties and nineties, lie those of the su
perannuated hil tribe just described. The question seemed reasonable.
But the speaker did not follow it. There was a pause, and the American re
peated the question, varying the key word: senil dementia? Alzheimer's diease? The
speaker did not seem familiar with the terms. The room became still. The
speaker's scholarship was not in question-he had presented a careful ethnogra
phy and had addressed questions of deep concern to Indian anthropology and to
the emerging feld of Indian gerontology-but Alzheimer's disease was not cen
tral to his frame of reference. Yet what had been a lackluster session on a hot af
ternoon suddenly grew focused and then animated as the audience, mostly from
the United States, Canada, and western Europe, struggled to explain what to
many of them seemed utterly obvious. Terms few across the dais.
1
5
16 ORI ENTATI ONS
I was sitting in the back row, en route to India to begin the feldwork for this
book. I sensed in the sudden impasse between audience and speaker a soupcon of
tamasha, of what the anthropologist Victor Turner might have called a "social
drama. "2 Turner counseled paying attention to such moments of disruption,
chaos, and confict, as much as to more everyday things, in the study of social pro
cesses and structures. I had been trained as an anthropologist, to do flwork, and
had romantic visions of writing feld notes, of that moment when my life would
cease to be just a more or less enjoyable middle-class existence and would become
an instrument of knowledge. At that moment in Zagreb I had my own little
"breakdown, " my own collapse of expectation into a sense of possibility and con
fusion. I remember deciding that feldwork had ofcially begun; I started to write.
That the scholars I was writing about might not be so easily reducible to separate
erican" and "Indian" camps, and that they were far more subtle and sophis
ticated in their work than the momentary tamasha I was able to exploit might in
dicate, did not occur to me at that moment. I was learning one of my frst lessons
about anthropological desire: it ofered Archimedean possibilities, totalities out
there for the taking. Everything, everywhere, all the time, was grist for one's inter
pretive mill: one had only to pretend a stance of complete innocence-life as
Holden Caulfeld, Harriet the Spy, Candide. 3
The various words ofered by the audience to the speaker did not clarif the
original question for him. People kept trying to explain the obvous, until one ex
uberant participant shouted out "Crazy old people! " The audience's attention
shifed quickly to the newcomer. That was not what was meant, they assured the
speaker, not at all. They were gerontologists; they were not ageist. They were re
ferring only to specifc biological diseases. The eforts to explain Alzheimer's re
sumed.
I began to wonder, Candide in the back with notebook cocked, whether the
anxiety around this challenge to gerontological aesthetics might carry greater
signifcance. In calling into question the translatabiity of the medical language of
dementia, the speaker seemed to have pushed his interlocutors down a slippery
slope culminating in an admission (instantly resisted) that these medical terms
pointed to the aberrant behavior of elderly persons, to old crazies. And not only
was a link between disease and difcult old people being both ofered and resisted,
but it was being framed as a moral imperative, that to ask about te mind q ol peo
ple i essential and expected.
The obviousness of Alzheimer's for the majority of the Zagreb participants
mirrored its social and clinical construction in much of North America and Eu
rope as a discrete, virulent, and unambiguous form of patholog. In rethinking the
events of the Zagreb conference some years later, I was reminded of the format of
famiy support groups sponsored by the Alzheimer's Association in the United
States. 4 I attended several meetings of such groups in the Boston area from r ggo
to r gg2. In most sessions, family members were encouraged by a faciitator to ac
knowledge-openly, to other group members-that their relative had a brain dis-
ORI ENTATI ONS 17
ease. The repeated exhortations to ackowlde Alzheimer's were performative; that
is, they conveyed meaning as much in the act as in the content of speech. Obvi
ously group members already knew their relatives were demented: this knowledge
had brought them to the group in the frst place. But the communal acknowledg
ment of Alzheimer's, through this adaptation of the confessional rhetoric of the
American self-help movement, was framed as a critical frst step toward "gaining
control of our lives. " There is much at stake, whether in self-help sessions or at in
ternational conferences, in the confessional naming and renaming of Alzheimer's.
The aggressive and iterative obviousness of dementia discloses its structure as a
moral discourse.
Against this particular normative content, the Zagreb session ofered a con
trasting and equally normative construction, that of the speaker. "What we
mean, " another participant told him, "is senility" '1, senility . . . , " the Indian
anthropologist noted, and the audience relaxed, the hermeneutic circle fnally
having collapsed. "But you see," the speaker explained patiently "there is no se
nility i this tribe. " To him this truth was redundant. The point of his lecture had
been to describe an isolated society in which the traditional Indian joint family
was not yet threatened. Old people in such a society were well-cared for and did
not become senile.
The speaker's invocation of the joint family as the sole criterion for assessing
the well-being of old people is an important feature of post-Independence Indian
literature on old age. Indian gerontology is buit around a narrative of the in
evitable decline of the universal joint family secondary to the four horsemen of
contemporary apocalypse: modernization, industrialization, urbanization, and
Westernization. The status and health of old people is consequently declining; so
lutions must be looked for in the highly developed technologies of Western geron
tology and geriatrics. The West occupies a split role in this narrative, as the source
of both the problem and the solution. For the speaker, "senility" was counterposed
to the ' )oint family," the latter an index of Indianness and the former, in conse
quence, of Westernization. He seemed to suggest that it is only meaningful to
speak of senile old bodies in the context of fragmented or nonexistent-and thus
"Western" -families.
Those audience members not from India did not appear convnced of either
the lack of "senility" among this tribe or of the speaker's explanation for it as an
index of Westernization. The American who had asked the original question re
garding the prevalence of dementia remarked to me later over dinner at a Cro
atian castle that, assuming that the proportion of tribal elders over the age of sev
enty was as high as the speaker had suggested, dementia was in all likelihood a
more signifcant problem. Most of the audience, given the zest with which they
took up the efort to translate the term, would probably have agreed. Two distinct
and seamless narratives emerged: for many of the Americans and Europeans, se
nile pathology was located in specic and isolatable disease processes; for many of
the Indians, senile pathology was located in family dynamics and cultural crisis.
18 ORI ENTATI ONS
Each narrative-repetitive, necessary, obvious-articulated the particular com
mitments of what afer Arthur Kleinman I will call a local moral world. 5 Against
the global vision of the Zagreb conference, worlds collided.
WHAT' S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?
No one else, of course, seemed to notice the detritus of collision. The following
morning I lef the conference, took a bus to the Dalmatian coast, bringing along
Kin Lar as reading (my passage to India, reading materials and all, choreo
graphed long before I left Boston) , and boarded a ferry to the island of Rab. On
the boat I met two South Asian medical students taking a vacation from studying
for their exams, and we got to talking. They were being trained in Zagreb, and
were from Pakistan. Their families, before Partition, were from villages now in
India. We got on well: they saw me as an accomplice in their plan to meet German
babes, I saw them as fodder for my new life-as-feldwork. I steered the topic
around to my project, hoping for a repetition of Zagreb, a little bit of potted
tamasha. Not surprisingly the two were fuent in the minutiae of senile dementia.
Did they think there was much of it in India and Pakistan? One did, one didn't.
The one who didn't brought up some of the points made by the Indian anthro
pologist in Zagreb. The other student recapitulated the point made by the Aer
ican anthropologist at the castle. But no clear disjuncture of moral worlds
emerged as the boat pushed along the Adriatic coast. Sensing my irrelevance, the
two students lost interest, returning to a discussion between themselves about their
chances of getting laid on the island. I drifted back to my seat and buried myself
in Shakespeare. Real life, unlike the best-laid plans of anthropologists, seldom fol
low the logic of the excluded middle.
Lear: "The art of our necessities is strange. "
THE BETTER BRAIN
I am happy to know tat you are conductin your wth Anniversar Corerence o Al;eimer'
Dease Intrnational. . . . God loves you.
MOTHER TERESA
In 1 985 an article in the biweekly news magazine India Tday reported on a search
for the characteristic neuropathological signs of Alzheimer's disease, its "plaques"
and "tangles, " in Indian brains. A team of neurologists and neuropathologists in
the city of Madras studied the brains of a sampling of local corpses and found
that the tissues they examined appeared to lack these stigmata. They concluded
that some sort of protective factor might be preventing the occurrence of
Azheimer's disease in India. Genetic, environmental, and behavioral hypotheses
were raised.
As described in India Tday, the fnding was singularly unimpressive. Neuro
fbrillary tangles are ubiquitous, not limited to the brains of demented persons,
ORI ENTATI ONS 19
and the scientists' reported claim not to have found even one suggests a signifcant
misunderstanding on the part of either the research team or the journalist detail
ing the study. The data seemed to have come from work with too few brains to
generate much certainty, and the brains studied were from persons who had died
in their sixties and not their seventies and eighties. There was little to no clinical
data on the persons whose brains were used. And the sampling was haphazard.
Yet in some sense the article was not just about-or even primarily about
the prevalence of senile dementia in India. The terms ''lzheimer's disease" and
"senile dementia" do not appear. The term used to link the search for plaques
and tangles to everyday life is the less technical "senile persons. " As in Zagreb,
senile persons are not being made sense of in terms of their own bodies as much
as within a relational context, here one explicitly comparative: the article is en
titled "The Better Brain, " and it begins by noting that "the little grey cells in In
dian brains have a lot going for them. Recent medical research by some neu
ropathologists and neurologists has produced the interesting revelation that in
Indians, brains grow senile and degenerate much slower than westerners and
the number of senile persons in India is far less than that abroad. In other
words, the researchers claim, the Indian brain retains its agility and sharpness
much longer. "
These are resonant and densely referential sentences. Writing about the brain
here demands a comparative language; more than Hercule Poirot is invoked in the
mention of little gray cells as the site of national diference. The rate of degener
ation of Indian as opposed to European brain tissue was a subject frequently ad
dressed in British colonial debate on both tropical medicine and imperial peda
gogy The article reverses the classic assertion of such literatures, that Indian brain
tissue ripens quickly but rots still more quickly Indians and not Englishmen get to
play the great detective.
Ultimately, as in Zagreb, the dominant referent of the comparison is to a moral
world in which senility is a benchmark of the tragedy of modernity through the
mediation of the Bad Family. Thus, again and again, in modern life old people are
less respected and they become senile. India's relationship to such a debilitating
modernity is ambiguous. In comparison to its own remembered past (or to that of
a Northeast hill tribe, which can stand in for this past) , modern India engenders
senilit But set against something termed the West, ever reimaginable as consti
tuted by infnitely worse families, the inalienable diference of lndianness is re-
trievable as the better brain.
.
The centerpiece of the article is a photograph of Professor R. Sarasa Bharati,
head of the department of neuropathology at Madras Medical College, sitting
next to a large electron microscope. Near the photograph, the text notes:
Medical studies have revealed that nearly 1
5
per cent of westerners over 6o have such
tangles in their brains. Says Bharati emphatically: "Such tangles have not been spot
ted in Indian brains at all. In all the brains which came for autopsy and which I ex
amined, I haven't seen a single neurofbrillary tangle." And her observations have
20 ORI ENTATI ONS
been done under a powerful electron microscope-the frst of its kind in India
which magnifes the minutest brain segments an incredible 1 . 2 million times.6
The microscope dwarfs the professor. Not only is the size of the machine impres
sive, reminiscent of the grandeur of Nehruvian big science/ but it is ofered
within a set of other extremes. The machine is "the frst of its kind. " It operates
through the deployent of numeric extremes: infnities and zero. Indian fesh can
be magnifed almost infnitely, revealing its position in a global hierarchy of tissues.
The existence of pathology-here neurofbrillary tangles-is reduced to an ab
solute nothingness.
In the subsequent decade, increasingly sophisticated clinical and laboratory re
searchers would begin to discover the existence of plaques and tangles throughout
India. An Alzheimer's movement, primariy composed of physicians from South
India, began to take shape. The globalization of gerontological practice, which I
will describe in detai in chapter 3, grew more diverse and international groups ad
vocating increased knowledge of and commitment to Azheimer's disease ap
peared, such as Alzheimer's Disease International (ADI). This group in turn en
couraged the growth of associations such as the Alzheimer's and Related
Disorders Society of India (ARDSI) . While I sat in the India Ofce library
transfed by the old woman of Balua, AI held a tenth anniversary conference
in Scotland in September 1 994 on the occasion of "World Alzheimer's Day"
bringing together representatives from around the world. AI and ARDSI, like
the American Alzheimer's Association, were organized to spread the message: the
necessity of acknowledging Alzheimer's as disease, despite the absence of efective
treatment to date. But against the spreading moral imperative of the senile con
fessional-we too have Alzheimer's in our countythe frst entry of Alzheimer's into
popular middle-class discourse is as an absolute negation: the better brain of 1 985,
free of even a single stigmatizing tangle. Against the ephemerality of the Western
brain, there is no senility in India. The powerful gaze of a West "which magnifes
the minutest brain segments an incredible r . 2 million times" is purchased and re
deployed to materialize national dif erence on the cellular level: "Indian brains
show fewer physical symptoms of senility than their western counterparts. "8
TROPICAL SOFTENING
Al t institutions and habit q the Benali tnd matall to abbreviat t trm q ex
tence-teir preature deca bein in perct accordance wit their earl and frced development.
JAMES MARTN, THE INFLUECE OF TROPICAL CLIMATES ON EUROPEAN CONSTITUTIONS
The interpenetration of discussions of neuropathology and the moral implica
tions of senile bodies long precedes the emergence of Alzheimer's and its stig
mata. The dominant literature of mid-nineteenth- through early-twentieth
century neuropathology, centered in western and central Europe, was sensitive to
the texture of the brains of the apoplectic and demented. "Cerebral sofening"
ORI ENTATI ONS 21
was associated with atherosclerosis and described in a rich and almost gothic lan
guage of liquefaction as a powerful sign uniting physiological, psychological, and
moral decay9 Sofened brains could be cut like overripe fruit into slices to reveal
dank pockets of mush within. This sofness of brain tissues at times dovetailed
with a very dif erent but roughly contemporary framework for marking the pro
gression of bodily decay that of the various climacterics, or critical periods of late
life. Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century climacteric theory reading the life
course as a series of nodal moments that, if unsuccessfully negotiated, would lead
to the acceleration of mental and physical disorder, framed the life history of the
demented as the failed negotiation of an age-specic grand or senile cliacteric.
1 0
Climacteric failure, which I take up i n the next chapter, was rooted i n an ofen ex
plicit moral softness, particularly in the failure to adopt an appropriate stance of
disengagement beftting the dignity of old age.
Softening and the dementia and associated moral weakness it invoked took on
additional meaning in the emergence of British tropical medicine in the colonies
and particularly India, linking the sofening character of the tropics to the aging
brains of its inhabitnts. The disease of "tropical sofening" was a dual concern
for British authors in the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning
of the twentieth, both a climactic and physiological threat, given the shifing Eu
ropean experience of tropical humidity, and a moral threat, given what was per
ceived as the unsettling fuidity of Indian manners and reasoning. The tropics had
the same efect as old age upon the physically and morally unprepared body Both
softened the tissues: colonial life was fundamentally climacterical .
The tropics aged one: the theme long precedes the stabilizing and controlling
processes of colonial medicine. Montesquieu's eighteenth-century Spirt o the Lws
notes that in their political life, persons in the hot South of. the world are like timid
old men, unlike the more youthful peoples of the cold North. The senescence of
southern populations is one source of their acquiescence to despotic rule. In a
dif erent argument, Montesquieu explains despotic rule by the need to control
southern women, whose premature physical aging makes randy young women a
threat to public order. The early ripening and rot of tropical bodies is here split:
the physical body ages early, but not the reasoning faculties. Young women
threaten in part because they lack the intellectual maturity to moderate their
quickened physical desire. Beauty and Reason, as Montesquieu puts it, are dis
junct. Beauty comes and goes, before Reason, apparently more impervious to cli
mate, can ripen.
1 1
The emergence of a science of tropical efects upon globalizing European bod
ies is predicated upon the logic of a world like that which Montesquieu ofers. The
intellectual and the corporeal are peculiarly disjunct in the South and East of this
world. The body of Desire is infantile, the body of Reason old and wizened. The
moral quality of the body of Reason is ofen gendered in its representation. Un
worldly but benevolent and wise old men (Kipling's old monk in Km, Forster's Pro
fessor Godbole in A Pass
a
e t India) and virulent and dangerously smart old hags
22 ORI ENTATI ONS
(Haggard's several murderous old witches) dot colonial literature. 1 2 The relation of
this old body and its brand of Reason to the corporeal, to the body of Beauty and
the world of power and desire, is a problem. For Hegel, in India the Idea is cut
adrif from the external, from its dialectic with and within the World. Reason, cul
ture, and aesthetic form drif within a symbolic realm coincident with pure imag
ination and dream. The relations of Indian culture to the material world are arbi
trary1 3 A sociology of India, within the logic of tropical decrepitude, can frame all
considerations of power and corporeality as residual . Medically, the physical
decay of the southern body, internally split with Reason preserved, does not pre
sent a systemic crisis. European bodies are at a diferent kind of risk. Reason must
be policed, and the minds of arriving colonials watched for liquifactious behavior.
The softening efects upon European bodies become increasingly pronounced
in the later nineteenth centur The dif erence between southern and northern
bodies is rearticulated in the emergent languages of tropical and sanitary medi
cine. A 1 907 health manual for the British family in India links tropical liquefac
tion to cerebral sofening through the medium of blood and a collapse of one's
"system": "There is little doubt that the exposure of Europeans to the efects of
continued tropical heat during a series of years produces a debilitated condition of
the system, consequent on blood-degeneration, favorable to brain-sofening. "
Treatment is futile; sofening is inherent in the unremitting heat of tropical life
and the only long-term solution is "removal to a temperate climate. " 1 4 The text is
concerned primarily with European bodies; Indian bodies and particularly Indian
blood have already acclimatized, existing in the split degeneration of a lonue duree
that preseres its queer Reason from the extremes of climate.
Throughout the nineteenth century attention to corporeal decay and its man
agement intensifes as a European mode of understanding Indian dif erence, and
the biopolitics of empire increasingly encompass Reason, no longer invulnerable
to precocious decline. Indian minds are naturally soft and, though not in danger
of sudden sofening, are in a sense congenitally senile. Such sofness is predomi
nantly a fgure of moral diference. Sir Henry Maine, jurist, educator, and early
anthropologist, phrased British concern pithily in an 1 866 address on the future of
Indian education: "The fact is, tat te educated Native mind requires hardenin. " 1 5
Maine's comments are part of his defense of memory as a tool of empire, and I wl
return to them in a discussion of memory, capital, and exchange in the fourth chap
ter. Lie the neuropathological varieties of softening in the medical manuals, the
moral versions were similarly rooted in physiological diference. In challenging
the view of English alarmists that the iperial pedagogy of memorization favors the
supercial mind of the Indian (thought to be more adept at rote learning) , Maine
suggests in contrast that the diference between Indian and English minds is an
epiphenomenon of their occupying diferent climactic frames. Native minds
fower early and luxuriantly but putrefy and rot as quickly posing no threat to En
glish control in the context of an all-too-ephemeral precocity Senilit the ten-
ORI ENTATI ONS 2
3
dency of all things tropical to evolve into imbecility is the dominant trope of im
perial appraisal.
In a 1 921 psychiatric text, the everyday fuidity of Indian tissue leads to the
diferent clinical presentation of local versus European lunatics. A. W Overbeck
Wright's Lunac in India incorporates toxemic along with racial and climatological
levels of explanation to locate the character of Indian lunatics within a broader
explanatory triad of the tropical, the hereditary and the unclean. The triad helps
specif the dif erences between Indians and Europeans and their respective sus
ceptibilities to lunacy Europeans hold in their bowel movements, and the accu
mulation of fecal toxins not only slowly poisons their system but builds up alarm
ing levels of bodily heat. However adaptive in temperate climates, the warming
efect of anal retention in the tropics leads to serious toxemia and fever. Europeans
in India build up heat and become weak. This fact allows Overbeck-Wright to ex
plain their ofen explosive and violent behavior in the tropics. The object of this
symptomatic violence is left unstated.
Indians, more constitutionally soft and placid, sufer from the contrary disposi
tion: they let everything out. They survive the heat, but at the cost of any attention
to boundaries or to physical hygiene. Indians are fthy and fuid; Indian lunatics
are particularly prone to besmear themselves or others with excrement. 1 6 In de
scribing Indian mental derangement, Overbeck-Wright draws not on the lan
guage of constipation but of diarrhea, of a national identity not like the British
flled with shit but rather one covered in it. Softening and diarrhea here supple
ment one another as fgures of liquefaction and the abject nature of the Indian's
lack of boundaries.
Softening-as a fguratively powerful and clinically vague term-retains some
of its currency in contemporary Indian English. A 1 992 article in India Tda on
leftist politics in Kerala noted that "younger cadres . . . are opposed to the septua
genarian Seetharanaiah because they feel the softening of the brain which can
afict th
e
elderly is seeping into his policies. " 1 7 Here the sofness of senile policy
seeps, an image again of the incontinent brain. Ad in lay terms, one can still in
voke tropical diference to collapse an inferiorized self and debilitated body "Per
haps it is the water," Marwari Mataji's son-in-law in Varanasi used to remind me
from time to time, "because in this country, at sixty-fve to seventy people's brains
ofen get weak. "
Yet though a few European academics throughout the colonial period contin
ued to lament the paucity of data on the "peculiarities of tropical neurolo
g
" 1 8
colonial medical engagements on the civic and national levels were dominated by
the dangers of external infection rather than internal constitution. 1 9 Clinical details
of the particular efects of cerebral sofening on the natives are scant: softening is
more powerful as an ideological fgure glossing the tropical body than as a medical
technology of interention or control. There is a similar dearth of references to se
nility and senile dementia i late colonial medical and psychiatric literature.
2
4
ORI ENTATI ONS
EMBODYING PROBATE
Such terms abound, however, in colonial legal texts of the early twentieth century
as part of discussions of probate law and of testamentary capacity: who is of
sound enough mind to prepare his or her will? Both "senile dementia" and "senil
ity" are mentioned in debates on testamentary capacity in texts detailing the In
dian Lunacy Act of 1 91 2 and its amendments and replacements. The terms are
necessary Beotra notes in his 1 965 introduction to the Act, because "in alcivilised
countries the law has thrown the mantle of protection over infants, idiots, and lu
natics. " The two terms thus constitute not only a mantle of protection but a guar
antee of India's claims to civiization.
According to the Lunacy Act, senile dementia is defned as insanity secondary
to a "degeneration of mental faculties" in which ')udgement, memory interest,
and control over emotions are impaired. "20 The Act includes dementia as a cen
tral component of its delineation of testamentary capacity, based on a require
ment reinstated in the Indian Succession Act of 1 925 and corollary Hindu and
Muslim personal law that testators be "of sound mind. "2 1 Beotra notes that such
laws are designed to protect both old persons falsely accused of lunacy and po
tential benefciaries wrongly cut out of a wil . 22 He notes further that, under the
secular code of the Indian Succession Act, dementia certied by a medical practi
tioner is a sufcient challenge to testamentary capacity but concludes that in gen
eral the Lunacy and Succession Acts have been framed in subsequent case law to
discourage magstrates from basing judgments solely on medical opinion.
Medical opinion, Beotra points out, is too ambiguous. Part of the problem lies
in the efort to determine the relationship between pathology and normality in old
age. The Lunacy and Succession Acts dif erentiate between losses of capacity due
to "mere" old age versus those due to "extreme" old age: "Mere old age does not
deprive a man of the capacity of making a wl. Yet if a man in his old age be
comes a very chid again in his understanding or by reason of extreme old age or
other infrmity he becomes so forgetful that he does not know his own name, he is
not ft to make a will. "23 To complicate matters, in the literature on these Acts
mere old age is ofen referred to as senility. In Beotra's discussion of the Lunacy
Act, senile dementia is clearly a ground for challenging testamentary capacity but
memory impairment and "senility following old age" are not. 24 Other digests and
commentaries refer to seniity as a form of simple degeneration, dementia as a
form of lunacy and both as legitimate challenges to testamentary capacity25
Yet the legal possibiities of such ambiguities were seldom exploited by those
Varanasi and Calcutta lawyers handling probate cases whom I interviewed. Wills
were ofen contested, but challenges to testamentary capacity drew more on other
bodily changes than on unsound mind. I spent the most time following the case
load of Mr. Tiwari, a lawyer with an old and busy practice in the heart of
Varanasi. He was the brother of Mrs. Sharma, my landlady in the Varanasi neigh
borhood of Nandanagar, where I lived for a year in 1988. Tiwari-sahib's ofce was
ORI ENTATI ONS 2
5
ofVishwanath gat, the famous lane leading to the city's most important temples.
During business hours, which ofen stretched late into the evening, it was full of
clients and their families, assistants, and friends all seated together in Tiwari
sahib's small inner chamber. Tea fowed, legal books and documents littered the
mattresses on which everyone sat. Tiwari was a voluble man who would describe
various cases of his for me in which testamentary capacity had been at issue. Dur
ing rare pauses, the friends, clients, and assistants would make supplementary ob
serations.
Much of Mr. Tiwari's practice involved intrafamilial litigation concerning tes
tamentary matters, but in his experience the various defnitions of senility and de
mentia in case law and commentary were peripheral to the construction of useful
argument. Testamentary capacity in practice was more narrowly embodied than
in the law, far less often a matter of the soundness of mind and far more ofen a
matter of the weakness of the senses. Children were far more likely to stress the
impaired vision or hearing of an eldery parent than draw upon "unsound mind,"
far more likely to stress misrecognition than misunderstanding.
Matters of inheritance in India are subject to one of several parallel legal
codes: the Hindu, Muslim, and secular personal laws. Textbooks of contemporary
Muslim and Hindu law often refer to the secular Indian Succession Act in matters
of defning soundness of mind. The Hindu Succession Act of 1 956 throws its
mantle of protection only on "persons who are deaf and dumb and blind. "26 Even
where discussions of "mind" appear in the English-language codes of contempo
rary Hindu and Muslim law, commentaries do not elaborate categories of lunacy
The dif erential embodiment of family crisis extends to the Bombay cinema. In
the 1 989 Hindi flm hit Ram Lan, the story begins with an old landowner with
failing eyesight being tricked by a corrupt lawyer into signing a sham wl. As op
posed to the 1 865 story in the Hurkru, wherein the mental capacities of testate old
raas are continually being exploited by an army of temple priests, Ram Lan
ofers a dif erent embodiment of the weakness of old people and of the crises it
may engender. The weak eyes of the old man, and not his weak mind, become a
metonym for the generalized weakness of old age. The old body means dif erently
Despite the colonial embodiment of testamentary capacity as mind-as in the
mentalist language of the Lunacy and Succession Acts and of those that replace
them-within the everyday practice of probate law in Varanasi in the 1 g8os and
within the representation of probate in Hindi flm, the unsound mind of an elder
is framed as a problem of recognition, not judgment. The relevance of globaliz
ing systems of classifcation-of colonial medicine, and law, and their heirs-is
neither unitary nor obvious.
A MEDICAL EXPLANATION
What woul happen i he we t become senil as Pesient? he wa asked.
Mr Reagan said h woul resn.
26 ORI ENTATI ONS
How woul he know that he had become senil?
Mr Reaan said he e xpectd hi doctor t check him. Th he intrrupted te intrview t ask
fr a medical explnation q senilir.
NEW YRA- TMES, NOVEMBER 8, 1 984
The ambiguities surrounding the relationship of "seniity" and "senie dementia"
in the Indian probate literature refect a process of their continually shifing pro
fessional and lay defnition. Even in the last decade, the two primary international
classifcations of dementia have shifed in signifcant ways. I want to introduce
some of these recent shifts before turning to a redefnition of senility as an ideal
type enabling certain kinds of analysis.
- Dementia is a clinical as opposed to a diagnostic term, one that conveys a partic
ular behavioral picture but in itself implies no particular causal model. Clinically,
it is defned primarily as a set of multiple and relatively stable cognitive defcits,
and in particular a defcit of memory I must be careful when I say "it is defned, "
for the ontological status of dementia-its claims to being a thin at all-eroded in
the early 1 990s in the United States. The primary American manual defning and
classifing psychiatric and some neurological disorders is the Diagostic and Sttiti
cal Manual i t Amercan Pschiatrc Association (DSM) . When I began my feldwork
for this book, DSM-III-R (the then-current revised third edition of the American
Psychiatric Association's Diagostic and Statitical Manua defned dementia like other
entities in DSM by a list of signs and symptoms, of which the person so diagnosed
must exhibit a designated number. The section of DSM-III-R on dementia began
with such a list, by which a clinician could make a diagnosis "of dementia. " DSM
III-R went on to defne a set of subtypes, the two principal ones being dementias
of the '1lzheimer's type" and "multi-infarct dementias. " The subtypes, unlike the
general category, implied not only a clinical sydrome but a causal model: the pri
mary degeneration of brain tissue in the case of dementias of the Alzheimer's
type; and the secondary degeneration of brain tissue in the case of multi-infarct
dementias, the primary process being the constriction and eventual blockage of
small blood vessels supplying the brain leading to numerous tiny strokes.
By DSM-IV's appearance in 1 994, the initial description of dementia in the
manual had been shortened and no longer included any diagnostic criteria. That
is, one could no longer be formally diagnosed "with dementia" but on! with its
former subtypes, which now took on the status of independent entities grouped to
gether because of clinical resemblance. In the context of DSM, dementia tout court
in the United States ceases to exist in 1 994. 27
The former subtypes change dramatically as well . "Multi-infarct" disappears,
to be replaced with "vascular dementia, " a term that had only a decade earlier
been banished to nosological purgatory The previous century had seen a contin
uous set of reversals of the primacy of vascular versus brain models of dementia.
Atherosclerotic dementia-and the consequent reduction of blood fow to the
brain-dominated until the 1 96os and 1 970s, when Alzheimer's disease was in
sense rediscovered. Vascular fow models did not disappear, but were replaced by
ORI ENTATI ONS 27
multi-infarct models in which the efects of vascular disease were secondary as a
result of the multiple small strokes. The career of vascular dementia, the domi
nant medical model for senility for much of the twentieth century, all but erased in
the wake of the reemergence of Alzheimer's disease and now making a pro
nounced reappearance, raises critical questions and will be taken up in the next
chapter.
A second change in the delineation of the former subtyes in DSM-IV is the
continued deemphasis of a once-critical distinction between the presenile and se
nile dementias. Alois Alzheimer's frst '1lzheimer's" patients were middle-aged
people; their premature senility generated the social concern and clinical interest
that led the German pathologist to identify a set of neuropathological signs-the
many "plaques and tangles" of Alzheimer's disease-with a "presenile" disease
process. Within a few years of Alzheimer's published fndings, other neuropatho
logical investigators reported similar fndings in the case of senile dementias and
suggested that the presenile-senile distinction might be abandoned, but it persisted
for decades. In DSM-IV it lingers as a pair of subclasses of Alzheimer's Tye,
"early onset" versus "late onset. " With the emergence of more sophisticated ge
netic modeling exploding the unitary category of Alzheimer's, it may regain its
once coherent ontological status.
Two other broad subtyes of dementia complete the DSM-IV picture, demen
tia due to other "general medical conditions" such as Parkinson's disease or ADS,
and the various "mixed" and other less easiy classifable dementias, which ofen
suggest a combination of primary and secondary dementing processes. The num
ber of categories of mixed or "other" dementias has expanded in DSM-IV even
as the former subtypes of Alzheimer's and multi-infarct dementia take on a new
ontological primacy as .distinct classes not reducible to an overarching category
Thus by the early 1 ggos the ontology of dementing illness comes to focus primar
iy on causal models and not clinical syndromes, yet against conceptual clarity the
vague and mixed classes proliferate.
Despite the disappearance of dementia-in-itself as a diagnosis in DSM-IV the
dif erent subtyes share a set of core criteria. These shared criteria have continued
to shif toward the emphasis of cognitive and the deemphasis of noncognitive
syptoms and signs. They are worth examining closely DSM-111-R is written in a
more cookbooklike style, with a focus specifcally on "memory" as opposed to cog
nition more generally and stresses the clinical elicitation and enumeration of
symptoms:
A. Demonstrable evidence of impairment in short- and long-term memory
Impairment in short-term memory (inability to learn new information) may be
indicated by inability to remember three objects afer fve minutes. Long-term
memory impairment (inability to remember information that was known in the
past) may be indicated by inability to remember past personal information (e.g.,
what happened yesterday, birthplace, occupation) or facts of common knowl
edge (e.g., past Presidents, well-known dates).
28 ORI ENTATI ONS
B. At least one of the folowing:
I . impairment in abstract thinking, as indicated by inability to fnd similarities
and diferences between related words, difculties in defning words and con
cepts, and other similar tasks
2. impaired judgement, as indicated by inability to make reasonable plans to
deal with interpersonal, family and job-related problems and issues
3 other disturbances of higher cortical function, such as aphasia (disorder of
language), apraxia (inabiity to carry out motor activities despite intact com
prehension and motor function), agnosia (failure to recognize or identify ob
jects despite intact sensory function), and "constructional difculty" (e.g. , in
ability to copy three-dimensional fgures, assemble blocks, or arrange sticks in
specifc designs)
4 personality change, i.e. , alteration or accentuation of premorbid traits.
C. The disturbance in A and B signifcantly interferes with work or usual social ac
tivities or relationships with others.
28
The noncognitive, barely present in the DSM-111-R inclusion of personality
change, is expunged entirely in DSM-IY
A. The development of multiple cognitive defcits manifest by both
I . memory impairment (impaired ability to learn new information or to recall
previously learned information)
2. one (or more) of the following cognitive disturbances:
a. aphasia Oanguage disturbance)
b. apraxia (impaired ability to carry out motor activities despite intact motor
function)
c. agnosia (failure to recognize or identify objects despite intact sensory func
tion)
d. disturbance in executive functioning (i.e. , planning, organizing, sequenc
ing, abstracting)
B. The cognitive defcits in Criteria AI and A2 each cause sigifcant impairment in
social or occupational functioning and represent a signifcant decline from a pre
vious level of functioning.
29
Even social function is expressed in explicitly cognitive terms. The word "cogni
tive" appears again and again throughout the DSM-IV lists of criteria for the var
ious dementias, far exceeding the simple act of its signifcation: an excess of lan
guage. Helena Chang Chui, in a 1 989 review, noted that "although dementia
focuses on cognitive defcits, emotional and personality changes usually occur con
comitantly"30 The cognitive formulation of symptomatic relevance is ofered de
spite the repeated suggestion, in the dementia literature, that more than cognitive
change is involved.
The other internationally recognized classifcatory scheme, the International
Statistical Classifcation of Diseases of the World Health Organization, was re
issued in 1 992 as the ICD- 1 0. The lCD series parallels the DSM both in its noso
logical structure and general direction of change, though the lCD changes often
lag by a few years. ICD- 1 0 stil includes a more developed noncognitive compo-
ORI ENTATI ONS 2
9
nent. Dementia-which retains its ontological priority as a general category in
ICD-has four criteria, the third of which is "emotional":
There is a decline in emotional control or motivation, or a change in social behavior
manifest as at least one of the following:
(r) emotional lability;
(2) irritabiity;
(3) apathy;
(
4
) c0arsening of social behavior.
Despite the diference between the two manuals, they share a fundamental oppo
sition beteen the cognitive and the afective as an evaluative structure and the
emphasis upon the former as the primary sign of pathology3 1
Many of the changes i n DSM-IV are a response t o terminological confusion.
In American geriatric training in the r g8os, students were taught to dif erentiate
acut causes of cognitive change and confusion ("delerium") from chroni conditions
("dementia") , and in the case of chronic dementia, to diferentiate revesibl (poten
tially treatable) and pseudo- dementias (in which apparent cognitive losses refect an
underlying depression) from the irrevesibl and progressive causes of deterioration,
the major dementia subtypes of DSM-111-R. The so-called reversible dementias
include various metabolic, toxic, and systemic changes, ofen secondary to med
ication, alcohol, or other drugs or to chronic undernutrition; normal pressure hy
drocephalus, treatable with surgery; intracranial infections; and other potentially
treatable causes including sensory deprivation, cancer, immunologic disorders,
hematomas, and fecal impaction. The strongest argument for the medicalization
and internationalization of dementia, the agenda of groups lie ADI, is that some
of the dementias are ameliorable. However, many reversible dementias are not
necessarily reversible, and few blinded studies of their treatment exist. 32 Nor are
the irreversible dementias necessarily irreversible, though the literature on their
successful treatment refects in signifcant measure the ofen dubious claims of
various pharmaceutical houses to have developed an efective magic bulet. Some
studies suggest the progression of some vascular dementias may be halted with
tight blood-pressure control . 33 DSM-IV has excised the language of "progressive"
and "reversible. "
The distinction between Alzheimer's Type and Vascular Dementia and their
terminological predecessors has been used to generate comparative epidemiolog
ical data on dementia worldwide. The most frequent "cross-cultural" issue in de
mentia rsearch has been a wel-kown fnding that whereas in western Europe
and North America well over half of all dementias in persons over sixty-fve are
diagnosed as probable Alzheimer's disease and less than a ffh as vascular de
mentia, 34 in Japan Alzheimer's is diagnosed only half as ofen as vascular demen
tia. 35 Some studies in Russia have suggested a picture simiar to that of Japan. 36
Attempts to explain such national diferences have focused on eforts to suggest
these are artifacts of diferent study designs or of how diferent communities of
3
0 ORI ENTATI ONS
physicians are trained to diagnosis dementia, o r t o try to make sense of i t i n terms
of real epidemiological diference, whether rooted in genetic, environmental, or
social factors or some combination. Examples of the frst sort of argument have
suggested that vascular dementia is underdiagnosed in North America and Eu
rope and overdiagnosed in Japan, that prevalence measures are in general poor
data for research on the causes of dementia, and that most measurements of the
prevalence of either Azheimer's or vascular dementia have widely difering crite
ria as to the inclusion of the so-called mixed dementias and are difcult to con
sider comparatively 37 Examples of the second sort of argument have pointed out
the high rate of stroke in Jpan, consistent with the observed higher prevalence of
vascular dementia there, as Graves and her colleagues note. 38
The opposition of the prevalence of vascular and Azheimer's dementias is epi
demiologically and semiotically dense. Alzheimer's type dementias are found on
average at a later age than vascular dementias and more often in women than
men-in part in consequence of the fact that more women than men survive into
extreme old age. 39 Diferential prevalence rates of the two types of dementia in
diferent historical and material settings may suggest many things: that slightly
younger persons are more likely to be brought to medical attention and be
counted than older ones, as are men rather than women; that persons in general
do not live long enough to be diagnosed with Azheimer's as opposed to vascular
dementia; and that the extent to which old women's versus old men's bodies were
and are institutionally avaiable for enumeration and study might determine what
sorts of fgures predominate in an emerging science of the senile body Further
more, given that epidemiological diference seems to place Japan and Russia to
gether in opposition to the United States and Western Europe-superimposing a
West versus the rest opposition onto the distinction between Alzheimer's and vas
cular dementia-not only the gendered but also the nationalist implications of
these categories may be relevant to how they come to matter as they travel ever
more globally
Thus, the recent fndings that vascular dementias are far more prevalent than
Alzheimer's type dementias in India and Mrica must be approached carefully:
such fndings refect complex demographic dif erences in who surives, gender
and class-specifc patterns of which bodies are likely to be presented to a medical
gaze, and the postcolonial prospects of the better brain. 40 A r ggr review of the
epidemiology of dementia in the Third World from B. 0. Osuntokun and col
leagues at the University of lbadan in Nigeria ofers a case in point of the exten
sion of the Japan model globally The authors begin with a startling fnding, but
one reminiscent of R. Sarasa Bharati's Madras research reported in India Tda:
"No authentic case of A [Alzheimer's disease] has been reported in an indige
nous Black Mrican. In one community-based study to assess the magnitude of
neurological disorders, reported in r g87 from Nigeria, involving a door-to-door
surey of nearly r g, ooo subjects, 4% of whom were over 65 years of age, no pa
tients with dementia were seen. "
ORI ENTATI ONS 31
The authors go on to note that one of them has had thirty-three years experi
ence in a practice in a premier teaching hospital, "during which over 14 milion pa
tient had been seen including 4% aged 65 years or more: the diagnosis of A had
not been substantiated in any patient" [my emphasis] . They then ofer another
pair of fgures, frst 37 patients seen between 1 984 and 1 989, of which "none had
A, but 18 clearly sufered from multi-infarct dementia, " and second, autopsies
"on 198 brains of Nigerians aged 40 years an
d
above (including 45 older than 65
years) , " of which none showed the "senile plaques, neurofbrillary tangles, beta
amyloid deposit, pathognomonic [uniquely characteristic] of A. "
Against this data, they note that the prevalence of Alzheimer's among Mrican
Americans is at least as high as that of white Americans, and thus reject a genetic
hypothesis to explain their data. They suggest in contrast that their data indicates
grounds "for the hypothesis that A is the consequence of some exposure to some
environmental factors in which homo sapins is not adapted and which are not pres
ent in non-industrialized countries. "41 Alzheimer's is again framed as the disease
of modernity but not the result of a bad family as perceived in Zagreb, but rather
the result of the implied efects of changes in diet or of pollution or other toxic ex
posures.
The hypothesis in itself is interesting, though it hints at the false assumption
that life in Ibadan or elsewhere in the "nonindustrialized world" is more rather
than less free from pollutants and toxins as a result of its relative marginality within
the global economy. I recall a discussion over tea at a roadside stall near the uni
versity hospital in Varanasi with a professor who suggested that India might have
less Alzheimer's because of less exposure to aluminum in its "traditional diet," the
efects of exposure to the metal periodically being a hot topic in Azheimer's re
search. Whie we talked, large trucks and buses inched their way through trafc,
spewing noxious fumes that swirled around us. And our tea was being boiled in a
large aluminum pot and sered to us from a long aluminum dipper.
Like India's better brain, the Nigerian study deals in infnitudes and absences
rather than in the realm of the statistically signifcant. Nineteen thousand persons
are examined in the community, or an incredible 1 4 million in the clinic of the se
nior investigator, and not a single case of Azheimer's is found. The discussion of
multi-infarct dementia is strikng for the return to more cautious enumeration: 1 8
persons with this dementia out of 37 examined. "Dementia, " i n summary, appears
split here into a realm of Alzheimer's characterized by fantastic reportage and ab
solute knowledge, and a realm of vascular dementia characterized by more nego
tiable possibilities. Africa is simultaneously a place located out of time, space, and
contingency, in which no case of Alzheimer's and no plaque or tangle has ever
been found (no aging in Africa, in efect), and in which a physician can efectively
screen 14 million patients; and a place within the world, in which epidemiology is
a shifing terrain, demographics change, and diet, pollutants, and toxins may or
may not play diferent roles in the causation of dementia over time.
Alzheimer's as the site of the fantastic is not limited to the narratives of the sci-
3
2 ORI ENTATI ONS
entifc periphery The underdiagnosis of other dementias relative to Azheimer's
in the United States correlates with the latter's symbolic importance as the domi
nant sign of senilit The anthropologists in Zagreb frst tried to gloss dementia by
referring to ''lzheimer's. " In American popular discourse, ''zheimer's" has all
but replaced "senility" as a word with multiple contextual uses-in joking about,
insulting, despairing of and analyzing the behavior of oneself and others. The
Alzheimer's Disease and Related Disorders Association, informally the Alzhei
mer's Association, eventually had the confusing "and Related Disorders" ofcially
excised. At meetings sponsored by the association, expert speakers alternate be
tween attention to the multiple types of dementia in the content of their presen
tations and the continual evocation of ''lzheimer's" to sum up what they mean.
Azheimer's-not vascular dementia, not the questionably reversible dementias
nor the many other possible diagnoses-receives the most lingering gaze, remains
the brain kiler, the "time bomb" that (citing Newsweek's phrase book again) is "tick
ing away"42 The force of the explosion is anticipated in the endlessly repeated fact
of its terrifing ubiquity: " [t may be ticking, in fact, for all of us." Azheimer's is
about "all of us. " It is as much a sign of identity for American readers of Newsweek
as debate over the better brain has become a sign of diference for the readers of
India Tda. Wen brains become powerful indices of "us" and "them, " how do we
approach the globalization of plaques and tangles?
THE SENILE BODY
Senility, senile dementia, and Alzheimer's are not stable and invariant terms
within several of the contexts we have begun to discuss. The putative lingua franca
of the world of electron microscopes and white-coated researchers pictured in
Indi Tda quickly disaggregates into the diferent ways of engaging old age and
diferent projects of materializing the senile body evidenced in Zagreb. The easi
est response to these diferences-indeed, the classic anthropological strategy-is
to read them as variations in something called culture. In making sense of Zagreb,
for example, one could draw upon the frequently cited insight of ethnographers
that within a comparative context many Americans and Europeans act and expe
rience themselves as autonomous and bounded entities, highly individuated selves
within quite separate bodies, while many Indians act and experience themselves
primarily in terms of their relations with others, as linked and interdependent
selves continually sharing and exchanging substance with other bodies. 43 Along
such lines, the more embodied and individuated seniity of Americans versus the
more social and comparative senility of the Indians at Zagreb makes a bit more
sense. At times I will draw upon such "culturalist" logics, if in somewhat less grand
formulations, when they seem particularly compelling.
But the immediate move to culture as the ground sufcient for situating difer
ence obscures many other and more immediate forms of understanding and col
lapses more nuanced analyses into a necessarily misread totality, reinstating the
ORI ENTATI ONS
3
anthropological predicament James Clif ord and others have been addressing for
some time. 44 Against both camps in Zagreb, each convinced the other was missing
the point, and against their easy reifcation onr into two discrete moral worlds, I
draw upon some additional tools. I begin by constructing an ideal type from the
one word that momentarily appeared to link the Zagreb conferees: senili!.
I use senili! precisely because of the contested and shifting meanings of the
term. I refer by it to the attribution i dif erence or dicontinui! to an ol person or to ol peo
pl a a group, when ti dif erence i embodied a behavior-as actions or uttrances-nd when
it i to some degree stimatied. For the moment I will use "old" loosely begging for
now the specics of how it translates, takng it as a generalized way of marking
and signifing someone whose body demeanor, behavior, social position, or his
tory is suggestive of the later decades of the life course in a given place or time.
This defnition of senility puts aside the question of causation, or in medical
terms etiolog, by suggesting that it may be useful to look at senility as a process,
something that is articulated in time. 45 In part, the processual nature of senility is
comprehensible within the frame of the various physiological models that we wl
examine below, . whether we are speaking in terms of progressive disorders like
Alzheimer's disease, of bad families, of nineteenth-century European theories of
the male climacteric or tropical sofening, or of Indian Ayuredic discussions on
the excess of wind. But a processual analysis of senility is not exhausted by any of
these models. Colleen and Frank Johnson have shown how the timing of the di
agnosis of Azheimer's among the American families they studied in the 1 g8os was
correlated more closely wth levels of family stress than levels of dementing illness
as measured by a mental status examination. 46 Caregivers appeared to defer diag
noses for family members until such time as they felt they could no longer care for
them. One of the implications of the Johnsons' study is that the practice of diag
nosing dementing illness functions as a critical legitimation for institutionalization.
Bodily events-diagnosis, institutionalization, and their benefcial or traumatic
outcomes-cannot be reduced solely to a body's internal workings. Seniity is
acutely attributional: it almost always requires two bodies, a senie body and a sec
ond body that recognizes a change in the frst. A with the politics of madness, dis
cussions of medical ontology are inseparable from the culture and politics of at
tribution. Without dismissing the material nature of senilit we need to recognize
that "going sixtyish" in Varanasi or "being a victim of Alzheimer's" in the United
States are fundamentally dialogic processes, involving both an old person and
some other.
Thus the types of kowledge and practice that structure the experience of se
nility and make it comprehensible emerge within a particular relation of desire
between the senile and the attributing body Is the senile body the speaker's own?
Knowledge of and engagement with and within one's own body I term frst-person.
Is the body in question that of some known other, whether parent, spouse, relative,
or friend, or of someone diferentiated from the speaker along axes of class or
caste or gender? Knowledge of and engagement with another's body I term second-
34
ORI ENTATI ONS
person. Or i s the senile body generalized, a body we can imagine as universal? Here
the lines of desire between speaking and senile bodies get blurred, encompassed
by some form of universalizing reason. The senie body emerges as a collective
representation, as a fact in the world. Knowledge of and engagement with such a
body I term third-person. Like my use of senilir, these types of knowledge and prac
tice are at best heuristic tools. Lie any tools, they will come in handy at some
times and not others, when it may be more useful to collapse them or ask dif erent
sorts of questions.
AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL PICARESQUE
Do not trouble t o test me
I am alwqs in the .rgont
Wh it comes to bearin
The burden o gref
FROM POEM BY
"
AKBAR PEHLWAN,
"
WRESTLER AND HI RED MUSCLE, AS RECI TED TO PSYCHOANALYST
SUDHI R KAKAR AFTER THE LATTER HAD ATTEMPTED TO ADMI !I STER A PSYCHOLOGI CAL TEST
Heuristic tools became necessary as a way of confronting a traumatic frst year of
research. I arrived in Varanasi in September of r g88 to begin what became a fu
tile search for something remotely resembling what I was medically trained to rec
ognize as senile dementia. Like Professor Sarasa Bharati, I could not fnd it.
In theory I wasn't supposed to be looking for an "it" at all. I was trained to
avoid what Athur Kleinman has called a "category fallacy," the too-hasty
reifcation of a historically and culturally specifc concept like "dementia" as a
necessariy universal tool for cross-cultural analysisY I did not wish to presume
the existence of a cultural equivalent of dementia in Varanasi, merely to "change
the labels" as Catherine Lutz has put it. 48 I knew from previous years in Varanasi
that few old persons were brought to hospitals or doctors' ofces with anyhing like
dementia and that few families ever spoke of such a thing. I organized my initial
feldwork in recognition of these insights, not in terms of clinics but rather house
holds across class. On a previous trip to Varanasi in r g87 I had begun to speak with
community leaders in two neighborhoods about the possibility of going from
house to house and interiewing older persons and, when possible, others in their
households. My interviews would be open-ended and not limited to glossing some
dementia-equivalent.
But inherent to my imagined project was my belief that lurking somewhere in
the prelinguistic realm of bodily stuf was something enough like dementia that I
could use a "culturally appropriate" mental status examination (MSE) to create a
sample of old persons who elsewhere might be termed demented. 49 If I went to
enough households and talked with enough old people, I would be sure to fnd a
few who were enough "like" demented persons that I could then ask their families
if I could interview the elders and others in the household more extensively over
the subsequent year. In this way I could learn what would be the relevant questions
ORI ENTATIONS
35
to ask of such families and such persons, so as not to presume the language and
logic of biomedicine and so as to avoid the category fallacy Armed with a set of
better categories, I could then return and construct a larger sample of persons to
interview and generate some better quantitative data. I could not see that the
search for the better category was not a way out of category fallacy. Nor did I have
a sense of why any categories, fallacious or nbt, should matte in these neighbor
hoods.
Despite such best-laid plans, none of the older persons I initially met-even the
very aged and frail ones-appeared to be clinically demented. Or if like Dulari,
an old woman or man did at frst seem demented, subsequent acquaintance sug
gested otherwise. I returned home each night to my room at the Sharmas to con
struct elaborate maps of my neighborhoods and to devise ever more intensive
sampling techniques. Nothing appeared to work. Each night I would stare at my
brightly colored Neelgagan-brand notebooks, unable to write. Something was
wrong. I grew ever more desperate. I found myself two months into feldwork,
stalking an old woman who was muttering to herself following her through the
lanes of the city at what I thought was a discreet distance, hoping she would lead
me to her home where I could then interiew her neighbors-unti I saw the
strangeness of my endeavor mirrored in the harsh stare of a woman passing by the
two of us, the anthropological feld-worker and the old woman his quarry
There were obvious initial problems. I had spent a month rebuilding the links I
had begun to make in 1 987 with community leaders, and then with neighborhood
supervision I had begun house-to-house interiews, frst in Nagwa slum. Within a
week, I realized that any MSE was an inadequate sampling tool for working in
economically and politically marginal neighborhoods. Changing questions from
something like "name the president" to "name the prime minister" was not ade
quate. Most tests presumed literacy numeracy, knowledge of current events, and
knowledge of words, fgures, and narrative forms learned in school and developed
through class-specifc practice. But access to vable schooling and to the media
difered across class and gender. Not only were existing MSEs inordinately bi
ased,50 but the use of examination techniques of knowledge gathering replicated
other forms of state and police interrogation. Even with provisional corrections
for formal biases, therefore, their use in places like N agwa reasserted certain dy
namics of power in such a way as to produce a response of learned helplessness
and low scores-from persons being interiewed. According to any of a bev of
such tests, almost the entire population of N agwa, young and old, was severely
demented.
But even less formal assessments didn't generate my hoped-for sample. Was I
confrming the better brain? I began to consider demographics more carefully
The state of Uttar Pradesh had not undergone the "demographic transition" of
several south Indian states and various regions and communities around the coun
try: lower infant mortality, greater longevity and a shift from a predominantly
youthful population to one with a greater proportion of middle-aged and elderly
3
6 ORI ENTATI ONS
persons. The demographics of Nagwa slum were further tilted toward the young,
with a handful of persons, among several thousand residents, who thought they
were over seventy Le Shankar the boatman, people became "old" in Nagwa in
their forties and ffies, old not only in name but in body Sick old people seldom
had independent access to medical resources, and died more quickly than chroni
cally il persons in other neighborhoods of the city
The proportion of persons sixty-fve and over in India overall was measured at
3 to 4 percent of the country's total population in 1 g8o, 5 1 a fgure far lower than
the proportion of persons at or over sixty-fve in most of Europe and North Amer
ica. Few of the Indian group surived their seventies; according to United Nations
estimates, 3 percent of the population of India was aged eighty years or older in
1 980 and 4 percent will be eighty or older in 2000. 52 Poor old people fai to sur
vive, as we will see in later chapters, less because of a lack of secondary and ter
tiary medical resources than because a dearth of afordable primary health care in
the context of endemic poverty and the related feeling of many adult children that
limited health resources-what we may term the severely circumscribed "health
capital" of many families-are wasted on the old.
Framing my dilemma in terms of demography initially seemed to solve another
dilemma: the social geography of the emerging Alzheimer's movement in India.
The ASI began in Kerala, in South India. Though it has spread to middle
class enclaves in large metropolitan centers, it remains particularly widespread in
cities and towns in South India. Other signifcant interest in dementia research in
India has occurred in Madurai and Madras, in the neighboring southern state of
Tamil Nadu, and among middle-class or wealthy urban communities elsewhere,
such as among Parsis in Bombay 53 In the former cases these are areas, particularly
in Kerala, where a signifcant demographic transition has occurred;54 the demo
graphics of the relatively afuent Parsi community are similarly posttransition.
Despite the claims of Bharati and of Osuntokun, a growing number of neu
ropathological and community studies suggest that the neuropathological stig
mata and associated behavioral changes of Alzheimer's disease do exist in India. 55
In the absence of compelling data for "preindustrial" populations where the very
old are uniformly spared such changes, it seems .reasonable to expect that there
may well be more old people with more plaques and tangles in Kerala, people who
are probably more forgetful and more confused than they would otherwise be.
But my initial dilemma in Nagwa pushed me in a direction I could never have
anticipated had I contented myself with work among persons labeled detd in a
metropolitan middle-class or "posttransition" area. For though I did come to meet
many older persons in Varanasi (slowly, over the course of months) who would
have been labeled demented by most physicians, other questions had come to the
fore, questions that became more central than the debate between the enthusias
tic, nascent Azheimer's movement and the proponents of the better brain theory
advanced by nationalist science. I slowly learned to practice what was obvious to
me in theory: to listen to the ways in which old age matted to people in Nagwa and
ORI ENTATI ONS
37
elsewhere, to ask the question Keinman taught me to foreground: what i at st is
asking about old age?
As I stared despairingly at my notebooks night after night in Nandanagar, Mrs.
Sharma began to worry ':sk Munni to help you, " she ofered, referring to the el
dest of her fve daughters. Munni and her sister Sapna suggested I talk to the old
lady next door: "She's quite mad. " Increasingly as my project became known to
friends and acquaintances in each of the four neighborhoods, they began to ofer
me the names of old persons who they thought would be appropriate for my work;
but almost inevitably these were old people in ot people's homes, not their own.
In Varanasi, it was only when I abandoned lookn for what I understood as de
mentia that I began to fnd it, throughout the city. Why the existence of difcult
and "weak-brained" old people raised questions of self and other-our household
versus that of our neighbors, our devotion to parents as opposed to that of other
kin, Hindu versus Muslim mental weakness-emerged as a critical problem, as
well as raised new issues of interpretation. This led to what I will discuss below as
familial bodies, dying spaces, and phenomenologies of the voice.
In the remainder of the two years that followed my fruidess frst few months of
house-to-house MSEs, as these new lenses became central to my learning and
writing, I did end up meeting many more persons who would be considered de
mented in allopathic, biomedical terms. I could not suspend making such clinical
assessments, when they seemed germane, nor would I wish to; such a practie of
selective bracketing only reproduces a vulgar Orientalism and replaces critical en
gagement with anthropological romance. But a division of Varanasi elders into
demented and not demented persons ofen obscured as much as it revealed: such
a distinction was not the most critical determinant of the physical survival of old
people, of their or their families' well-being, or of how the old body was experi
enced and contested and cared for.
"Dementia" is not at the center of this book not because it is a social construc
tion with no bearing on the lives and bodies of persons in Varanasi, and not be
cause to use the term enacts Western biomedical hegemony To read critical tools
such as hegemony as being located seamlessly with "the West" and "biomedicine"
is to replace a coherent theory of language and class with a set of easy opposi
tions-East/West, traditional medicine/biomedicine. The relation of terms like
clinically demented and practices like dementia exams and prevalence studies to
local and global asymmetries is far more c
o
mplex and requires a theory of how
such language and practice engage the body To speak of dementia is to engage
the body in at least two critical ways.
Like all human eforts to act in the world, the speaking of dementia is of ne
cessity social; its analysis in social terms must include both a pragmatic engage
ment with and debate over its usefulness and relevance as a tool and a theorization
of how the languages and practices constituting it enact a certain sort of embod
ied subject. To reduce this analysis only to the tamasha of competing cultures is to
fail on both counts. Dementia may or may not be useful in clinical terms, but the
3
8 ORI ENTATI ONS
question of its usefulness may have far more t o do with why most old people in
Varanasi fail to surive very long than with a disembodied feld of cultural difer
ence. On the one hand, speaking of and measuring dementia may invoke a pow
erful tool-which though a historically and culturally located representation can
engage the fate of bodies and lives in a manner not reducible to the obviousness
of its being a social construction. However meaningless the language and prac
tices instantiating Azheimer's in much of Varanasi in the 1 g8os, their use could in
theory lead, for example, to the diagnosis and treatment of normal pressure hy
drocephalus in a confused and forgetful older person who might otherwise not re
cover what in the diferent neighborhoods of the city would be termed balance or
strength. I say in teor because this diagnosis and treatment require far more than
an assemblage of ideas and practices but presume a local economy and world sys
tem in which the human and technical resources necessary for such a diagnosis
and treatment are widely available and not far more pressingly required for pri
mary health care.
On the other hand, speaking of dementia not only creates a set of more or less
useful and appropriate tools but invokes a moral world like that represented by the
Americans at Zagreb and, as we shall see, made to matter by a plethora of foreign
agencies from the United Nations to international Alzheimer's groups to multina
tional pharmaceutical corporations. Following Judith Buder, one could say that to
speak of dementia is to call upon an aging body in a certain way and not in an
other and in a sense to materialize the body-literally and fguratively to make it
matt-in a necessarily contingent manner. Buder reworks the analysis by the
French Marxist philosopher Athusser of how persons are haied or "interpel
lated" as subjects into a discussion of how persons are hailed as bodies. 56 Her own
argument centers on the politics of sexual diference, but one can apply it to the
materialization of dementia in India in terms both of a local politics of genera
tion, gender, caste, and class and of a larger politics of global capital and post
coloniality Speaking of dementia pushes bodies to matter as old, as poor, and as
global in new ways.
Each of these processes involves both material things and the political terrains
through which these are articulated over tie. At stake in speaking of dementia is
not the often banal narrative of an earlier medical anthropology: Is an embodied
state biological or cultural? Rather, what is critical may be to fnd a way to engage
language and practice both as tools the usefulness of which we can test and debate
and rethink-whether that means researching the genetic basis of amyloid depo
sition or struggling for primary health care in a community-and as the always al
ready politicized grounds of how we can know and engage our bodies at all .
Senility dementia, and senile dementia continually resurface in ambiguous
ways in Indian medical literature, always in terms of both their prevalence in "the
West" and their absence in any of a number of senses in India. Readings of this
absence vary, from Bharati's, who argues from laboratory research that Indian
brains lack plaques and tangles, to that of the founders of the ASI in South
ORI ENTATI ONS
39
India, who argue from clinical experience that Indian doctors must stop denying
the prevalence of Alzheimer's disease. What unites these very diferent assess
ments is the way they express Indian diference as a lack: of tangles, of commit
ments. Psychiatrists I intervewed in x g8g at the National Institute of Mental
Health and Neurological Science (NIMHANS) in Bangalore who were then in
volved in a study of Alzheimer's disease reported to me a predicament opposite to
the fndings of Bharati, a third variety of absence. They found that autopsy stud
ies utilizing dead brains were relatively easy to structure and clearly demonstrated
the existence of plaques and tangles similar to those found in age-matched studies
abroad. However, clinical studies using both outpatient and institutionalized pa
tients at NIMHANS were far more difcult to set up; few very old patients were
brought for treatment; fewer still were demented. The psychiatrists with whom I
spoke were shifing their emphasis from clinical to neuropathological work; dead
persons were more amenable than live ones to the elicitation of senile pathology
OF VARANASI
I worked primarily i n the city of Varanasi; I had lived there on several previous oc
casions as a student of comparative religion and was familiar with its neighbor
hoods. Varanasi is among other things a sacred city built along the archetypically
sacred Ganges, Ganga in India. From the river, Kashi is Shiva's city-that is, a
unity the oft-described and continually researched "sacred city of the Hindus."
The river anchors the pilgrim's construction of Kashi as the most famous of
frtha: "crossing over" places, junctures with the transcendent experiential order of
moksha, or release. It has anchored as well the colonial constructon of Varanasi
as the essence of the imagined Hindu. Our understanding of its sacredness is
fltered through its importance as a sign of the essential India in colonial repre
sentations of the touristic, Cohn's obserational/travel modality: "a repertoire of
images and typifactions that determined what was signifcant to the European
eye. "57 Cohn points to depictions of the Varanasi riverfront as a central image
within the commodifed portraiture of the essential Hindu, alternately exotic,
docie, threatening, superstitious, bestial, and otherworldly.
The riverfront ofers an overdetermined reading within the lndological con
struction of India as "the one and the many," "unity in diversity" and so forth. Its
imaging out of time and beyond commerce and politics allows its continued rep
resentation as the confrontation of a teeming plurality with a negative oneness.
Thus its primary icon, the line of stepped quays, or ghats, which stretch along the
river's broad cure studded with mandirs (temples) , maths (monastic communi
ties) , palaces, and the two cremation ghats, and fanked by the empty sands and
distant tree line of the opposite bank of the river, us par. On the one side, majestic,
hierarchical, labyrinthine, and ultimately redundant dharma, or righteous action,
divisible into myriad identical units (the ghats) , each of which stands for and repli
cates the whole. On the other, the emptiness of u par, the sandy and desolate ex-
4
0 ORI ENTATI ONS
panses of the uninhabited other bank. Foreign constructions of Varanasi i n par
ticular have tended to read the city through the perceived logic of its riverfront
and its unambiguous religious meaning. Apologists see the glories of the inhabited
bank and the solemn realities of the other; critics see the crowd (and sense com
munal frenzy) , hear the clamor (and sense spiritual infantilism) , and smell the flth
(and sense bestial humanity) of the inhabited bank, and espy the fatalistic "life
negation" of Hinduism on the empty other. 58 It is the great Orientalist scene.
Within such a context, Nita Kumar's reinterpretation in The Artians o Ba
nar9 of the riverfront, the "other side, " and their signifcance through a localized
culture of pleasure-the language and practice of "Banaras-ness"-is radical .
She reveals a diferent self-consciousness of the city, one alive to sensuality, to craf
and commerce, and to Indo-Muslim culture, located within networks of trade and
artisanship and the interpellation of its citizens within local and national dis
courses of their being bhaii and Banarsi thugs: North Indian rednecks, cheats,
and rufans. Following her lead, I will examine one of the stock characters of
Varanasi, the devout and often destitute old person on the ghats, but only by plac
ing this body within the context of the myriad other old bodies of the city reread
ing the touristic.
Varanasi is a particularly interesting place to study old age. One of the key
signs in the iconic representation of Varanasi is the old person and particularly the
old widow, who has come to Varanasi and the Ganga to live out her last days or to
die or at least be cremated here. The motives of these "dwellers in Kashi, " or
kvi', are ambivalently structured by many Varanasi natives with whom I
spoke: on the one hand, they are said to have come out of great devotion (bhakti)
to God to die in this sacred place; on the other, they have been cast out by unlov
ing families or have lost their kin through untold tragedies. Might some of the
kvi', I initially wondered, be demented as well?
Varanasi as sacred center is also home to hundreds, at times thousands, of san
nyasis, renunciates, and other sadhus, or holy men. Sannia is the last stage of
aamadarma-the idealized four-stage life cycle in the ethical and legal tradition
of classical dharmafitra-and is conceptualized as a time of complete renuncia
tion of secular life and pleasures, with one's mind focused on God and on the nu
menal world beyond appearances. 60 The goal of this fourth stage is the fourth of
the classical goals of human existence-righteous action, pleasure, proft, and lib
eration from sufering. Moksha, or liberation, is ofen conceptualized as radical
cognitive transformation in which one larns t frget the ilusions of the phenome
nal world. Old age as a radical cognitive transformation involving a practice of
forgetting? Is sannia, I initially wondered, ever a radical rethinking of senility?
Finally Varanasi is an important center for medical and textual research and
practice, with several colleges and universities. Scholars of biomedical (or "allo
pathic, " as it is known in India, having no exclusive claim to being either biologi
cal or medical) and Ayuredic medicine abound, and there are several notable
practitioners of homeopathic and Islamic Unani medicine. Pandits who could
ORI ENTATI ONS
4
1
lead one through medical, legal, phiosophical, and narrative texts are many. The
presence of other forms of expertise not as localized to Varanasi-particularly in
social work and law-also drew me.
I organized my feldwork in Varanasi into three overlapping spheres: ( 1 ) a study
of old people and their families over two years in several neighborhoods, roughly
stratifed by class; (2) a study of formal and informal institutions-ashrams,
monasteries, widow houses, government homes for the aged, charitable homes for
the dying, local support networks-for kizvi and sannyasis, and extensive work
with individuals; and (3) a study of local institutions and practitioners, including
allopathy (neurology, psychiatry general practice), Ayureda, exorcists, the civil
courts, and political and religious associations.
I spent several months outside of Varanasi doing research in other types of in
stitutions. In Delhi I worked with volunteer-supported old-age advocacy and fund
raising groups, with the Ministry of Welfare, with police missing-persons bureaus,
and with several additional families of friends and acquaintances wh
o
told me
their parents or grandparents were or had been senile. In Bombay I worked with
a multinational pharmaceutical company marketing a drug to ameliorate demen
tia. In Calcutta I worked in two old-age homes founded by a women's volunteer
association, at the missing-persons desk of the local news department at the na
tional television network of Doordarshan, and, as in Delhi, with the families of
friends and others. In Madras, Bangalore, and Madurai, I met with several physi
cians and researchers working on old age. In Dehradun, I visited two very
diferent institutions, a wealthy retirement ashram and a geriatric clinic. I spent
several days each at ashrams in the religious centers of Brindavin and Hardwar,
sacred sites with somewhat diferent institutional relationships to older persons
than found in Varanasi. Finally, in Allahabad, I visited the camp of Devraha Baba
during the great convocation of ascetics, the Kumbh Mela; Baba, who has passed
away since that time, was a famous superannuated saint then said to be at least 1 40
years old.
Despite the breadth of this ethnography, it centers in four neighborhoods of
Varanasi. The city is spread along the west bank of the Ganga as it briefy courses
northward. The older neighborhoods of the city, the pakimahal, lie closest to the
river. The pak mahal consists of a narrow strip of neighborhoods, primariy
Hindu, stretching for many kilometers along the river; another strip alongside the
frst one, which is mostly Muslim; and beyond these a patchwork of neighbor
hoods. Farther out from the lanes of the paki mahal is the kcci mahal with its
hodgepodge of slums, or bastis, middle- and upper-class "colonies, " urbanized vil
lages, large estates, the former British cantonment, and to the north the vlage of
Sarnath, sacred site of the Buddha's frst teaching.
Ravindrapuri colony is in the south of the city just south and west of paki
mahal Muslim and Hindu neighborhoods, north of a low-caste Chamar slum, and
east of other similar colonies. Its inhabitants are the families of higher level gov
ernment bureaucrats, professors, doctors, engineers and other professionals, busi-
4
2 ORI ENTATI ONS
ness executives, and families with other sources of income. Nandanagar colony,
where I lived with the Mishras from r g88-8g, is on the southern outskirts of the
cit on the western rim of the vast semicircular campus of Banaras Hindu Uni
versity bordering a low-caste area of the village of Karaundi. It is smaller and less
wealthy than Ravindrapuri, but its residents are similarly primarily the famiies of
bureaucrats and other government ofcials, professors, and professionals. I treat
these two communities together in the ffh chapter.
Nagwa Harijan Basti is a low-caste slum near the river just south of the south
ernmost of the major ghats, Assi. On its north is the stream of the Assi and beyond
that another poor, though more mixed-caste, neighborhood on the east felds and
the river, and on the west and south wealthier colonies. Unlike the colonies, which
are primarily inhabited by upper- and middle-caste Hindus, the slum is almost ex
clusively Chamar, an untouchable jati, or caste group, whose low status is "ex
plained" by its traditional and polluting occupation of working with leather. Some
residents of Nagwa do work with leather, running the shoe- and sandal-checking
stands outside some of the city's many large temples; most are involved in numer
ous other jobs. Women work as domestics, running small shops, selling vegetables
in the Lanka market nearby in construction, as midwives, as possession healers,
and as beggars; men may do these, midwifery and usually beggary excepted, and
also work as teachers, rickshaw pullers, petty bureaucrats, students, and migrant
laborers. Some residents work seasonally on their family's land or on land to which
they have obligations, in villages to the south and west of the city. The sith chap
ter focuses on Nagwa slum.
Bengali Tola-the Bengali quarter-lies deep in the pakimahal along the river,
between the major bathing ghats of Kedar to the south and Dasashwamedh to the
north. Many Bengalis live here, as well as local Hindi- and Bhojpuri-speaking Ba
narsis and a signifcant community of Telegu- and Tamil-speaking south Indians.
The area is cosmopolitan, crowded, and complex, with large homes known as
have/is and small hovels, remnants of erstwhile palaces and water bufalo pastures
tucked away around a corner, and dotted with numerous religious institutions.
Many ktwidows, ki zvt!old men, and superannuated sannyasis live along the
lanes of the quarter, and it was here, during the year r g8g-go when I lived in the
quarter below Marwari Mataji, that I did most of my ki zvl interviews.
The interdisciplinary site known as South Asian studies has changed consider
ably since I was a college freshman. Nowadays I pause before admitting that I
have chosen to work in Varanasi, and not in other, less conventional and less
touristic places. Whenever I return to the city and board at one of the several
guest houses catering to visiting scholars, the variegated combination of expatri
ates I always run into presents an unpleasant refection, perhaps one too close for
comfort: religious seekers complaining about the locals, would-be sitar masters
doing the George Harrison thing, students seeking the real India in the city's nar
row and seemingly timeless lanes, and budget travelers counting the days until
they can escape for the "hassle-free" vistas of Kathmandu.
ORI ENTATI ONS
43
For all the international attention and the prodigous literature it has gener
ated, "Banaras" continues to be framed as a cultural domain unto itself paradig
matic yet exquisitely local. In part, this localism originates in the Orientalist imag
ination, in part in parallel maneuvers to render the city timeless and unique,
undertaken by Brahmanical pangyrists, national and international tour operators,
and increasingly the so-called Hindu right. Bombay flm has circulated depictions
of "Banaras-ness" widely through fms like Banarsi Thu and Banarsi Babu. An
thropologists like Jonathan Parry, Nita Kumar, and Joseph Ater have produced
careful, complexy theorized, and richly textured ethnographies of the city all of
which have chosen to highlight practices understood as unambiguously traditional
and particularly local. 61
I began this book trained to do something similar, but in confronting the limits
of my initial endeavor and in being forced to ask in diferent ways what was at
stake in studying old age in a given place and time, I came to redefne the bound
aries of my "feld" in its dual sense: where and who I study, and how and for whom
I write. 62 Varanasi has receded from its position as the center of this book, fgura
tively and literally, and has become a site in a diferent way, as a set of linkages
from the intimate to the global, but particularly in between.
Wrld Wide Wb
Flexible ethnography for a fallen age: use Netscape to get on the Web, get into the
database of the Alzheimer's Association, and wait for a prompt.
Eter keyord( s ) :
L. ______ ( Seach I ( Reset
I
Type "Inda, " to be disappointed with a polite no. "Sorry I didn't fnd any docu
ments that matched your search for Inda"! Play around a bit; collect bits of the
words and pictures flling the screen. A ad for A Ln Good-be: Rections on Deal
in wit Alzheme', accompanied by photographs of its author, Dr. Linda Morrison
Combs, as a little girl, a photograph of Linda's mother before she developed
Alzheimer's, a "Personal message from Linda, " and a Secure Online Ordering
form. A collection of media releases: "Ronald and Nancy Reagan join forces with
Alzheimer's Association, " followed by "Government Abandoning Alzheimer
Famiies through Medicaid Cuts. " The ICD- 1 0 description of Primary Degenera
tive Dementia of the Alzheimer Type. And the Alzheimer Page from the
Alzheimer's Disease Research Center in St. Louis, which ofers another prompt. 1
Again, try "Inda. " This time, success, even afer weeding out the majority of ref
erences to the other (Native American) Indians.
Two threads-"thread" being the term for a set of related postings on an In
ternet newsgroup-appear most promising. Both are culled from a newsgroup de
voted to online discussions about Alzheimer's. The frst is a debate on the rela
tionship of Alzheimer's to a core New Age term, "oxidation, " and subsequently
on the antioxidant efects of a vegetarian diet. The debate leads one contributor
to ask: "What is the incidence of A . . . say in India . . . where goo,ooo,ooo pea-
45
4
6 WORLD WI DE WEB
pie are vegetarian?" The thread concludes, medical web site i n India would be
the one to check, I suppose?"2 Oh yes.
The second is an appeal from one Austin Lobo at rpi . edu in the United States,
whose mother-in-law is in Bombay, diagnosed since 1 993 with Alzheimer's ("later
confrmed by a thorough exam at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in NC").
Back in Bombay with her husband "as sole care-giver," the mother-in-law "paces
about her house, hiding things and accusing everyone around her of stealing from
her. " Mr. Lobo laments the impossibility of institutionalization and the lack of
support groups: "In India, the social conditions are such that putting a parent in a
nursing home is almost unthinkable. And AD or any other mental condition is
treated as ' madness in the family [sic] , ' with as much of a stigma as leprosy in bib
lical times. "3
In response, a sympathetic poster notes that "with the awareness of Alzhei
mer's disease and dementia expanding globally, even in traditional societies such
as India there is some recognition developing of the enormous strain placed on
the famiy unit and the additional burden of social ostracism";4 she goes on to rec
ommend a contact person in Bombay In India: site of the biblical, hundreds of
millions of vegetarians, medical Web sites for the curious, the "unthinkable. "
TWO
Alzheimer' s Hell
in which Alheimer's i reveald as a metaphor fr ol ae, senili! has a hitor
and te relation between witches and kins of ers a subaltrn phsiolog
NO AGING I AMERICA! LEADING SCIETISTS REVEAL
Jl, at last you haue a grandmother Mine has Alheimer's disease. It' lie she's not euen
there. Enjo your sty in Hollywood!
VALUE RENT-A-CAR SALESWOMA! HANDI NG ME THE KEYS AT FORT LAUDERDALE AI RPORT
AND NODDI NG TOWARD MY GRANDMOTHER, AFTER I HAD COMPLAI NED ABOIT THE WEATHER
"Dapper Dana Andrews' Alzheimer's Hell" screamed a r gg2 headline in the
Globe, an American supermarket tabloid. 1 I read the tabloids a lot when writing
the frst incarnation of this book, their lurid headlines scanned while I waited in
line to purchase more cafeine and carbohydrates to fuel my scholarship. Old age
was a frequent theme, particularly astonishing tales of age incongruities: cente
narian men marrying young women, old women or young girls giving birth,
grandmothers (inevitably described as "grannies") doing daredevil acts. Aid this
cavalcade, the Hollywood celebrity with Azheimer's was a frequent fgure. The
' :lzheimer's hell" article chronicles the transformation of the "dashing matinee
idol" Adrews into a "pathetic victim of Alzheimer's disease"; the disease is de
scribed through a sequence of violent metaphors: mangling, ravaging. Below the
headline, two cameo-style photographs of the former actor are placed side by side,
with the caption "From this to this in 4 years. " In both, Andrews is smiling and
wel-dressed. In the frst, taken we are told when he was seventy-nine, Andrews has
jet black hair and stares out at the camera, about to say something. In the second,
labeled "his mind and body fai him, " Andrews has a head of gray hair and stares
of at an angle, looking as if he has just fnished speaking. The only apparent signs
of mind and body mangling are the hair color and the hint of speech, imminent
or completed. Old old Andrews stares past us; we are ofered no connection to
him. He has already spoken; the wisdom of experience, the possibility on the
opening lips of young old Andrews, has fown with the hair color. We are lef with
47
4
8 ALZHEI MER' S HELL
a "pathetic, mindless shell, " a truth rooted less in the devastations of brain disease
than of a particular vision of old age
Why the turn here to American supermarkets and to Hollywood? The simplest
answer is that the tabloids form part of a disparate collection of texts and events
that have helped me both unthink and rethink what is at stake in talking about
Alzheimer's, senility and attempts to improve the welfare of old people. For read
ers more in sympathy with the North American position at Zagreb than with the
others (the Indian position or my own back row pretense of Archimedean dis
tance) , this unthinking may be necessary to grasp why the medical practices by
which the behavior of certain old people has been comprehended and sometimes
altered are locally and historically particular, their analysis exhausted neither by
the very real biology of the brain nor the very real political economy of age, the
family, professional knowledge and the state. The tabloids help me express why
something like culture remains critical, and yet their silliness-a particular kind of
irony-renders the whole project of stabilizing and systematizing culture slightly
parodic, a necessary stance.
The following two chapters are partial eforts at such rethinking. This chapter
isolates several particulars of an American sociology and a European history of
senility, particulars that help me tell a specifc story about conjunctures and de
bates in India. It is neither a comprehensive historiography nor a focused sociol
ogy of science. Such broader approaches are critical and, at the time of this writ
ing, unrealized, but they are not central to the particular history of the present I
am writing, a history in some senses about but never simply located in India. This
is an anthropologist's book, and though it eschews the particular unities of either
the monocultural or the world systems anthropological text, it nonetheless is
rooted in an attempt to provide materials for a genealogy of the particular. 2
The particular social facts most relevant to how I have chosen not to write about
senility and Alzheimer's are the folowing:
r . During the decade of this project and into the short-term foreseeable future,
there has been and remains no efective treatment for most degenerative de
mentias. Nor does a radical technical or conceptual shif in the treatment of the
major dementias appear imminent:
2. As noted in the last chapter, the practices which materialize Alzheimer's and
the dementias more generally tend to be attributional, involving two classes of
bodies, those in which the disease is located and those (the "caregivers") in
which the disease is publicly experienced, through which it is made to matter.
Each of these points will lead me to certain emphases and deferrals. In terms
of emphases, I note the second point. Writing about Alzheimer's pushes me to ex
amine the diference between these two classes of bodies and to think about other
modes or axes of diference through or against which this diference between the
diseased (and usually older) and the care-giving (and usually younger) may be
framed. The axis of diference that I will foreground here as most useful to a his-
ALZHEI MER' S HELL
49
tory of senility is that of gender. Mutually constitutive relations between age and
other axes of dif erence have already been suggested in the preface and introduc
tion: the colonial, caste, and class dif erence rearticulated in the moment of the
old woman of Balua, the religious diference deployed in the self-construction of
working class Hindus on the boat, and the colonial and racial dif erence material
ized in the fgures of tropical ripening and sofening.
Given the frst point, I have chosen not to focus on the Alzheimer's gene,
Alzheimer's mouse, or other sites of biological research. 3 As the science of senil
ity changes conceptually and technically these sites will become more relevant to
the kind of project undertaken here. Paul Rabinow draws on Baudelaire and
Foucault in cautioning students of science against the easy nostalgia and ressenti
ment of "despising the present. "4 Though what constitutes nostalgia and ressenti
ment may not be obvious, depending a fair amount upon where one is sitting, the
point is critical. I have no a priori interest in deconstructing Alzheimer's or in
ofering a nativist "Indian" category or conjuncture in its place. But both the sto
ries of Alzheimer's in this chapter and of the Bad Family in the next are uniquely
negative stories, about absence and dif erence, perhaps because they are so criti
cally narratives of loss (of self, of material resources, of culture) and death. Sim
ilarly, J. P S. Uberoi once ofered a critique of an earlier version of this material,
saying that it was so unrelentingly about negation, a sociology not of reason but
its absence. 5 Yet to the extent medical practice, and in particular the medicine of
old age, is a social engagement less with recuperation than with loss and death, it
may engage a peculiar type of negative reason and demand a peculiar sort of
critical response.
Given these two points, we might say that practical knowledge of Alzheimer's
is organized around two maneuvers. First, it involves an itration of its pathology as
opposed to its normality despite the lack of a cure. Second, it involves a circultion:
of legitimate sufering, between diseased and care-giving bodies. These maneu
vers, of iteration and circulation, wil be important to keep in mind as the story I
tell tacks back and forth between India and other places.
The tabloids I have been referring to are a particular subgenre of American
journalism that appears weekly next to supermarket checkout lines and in conve
nience stores and combines celebrity gossip with miracle diets, psychic predictions,
and a steady reportage of the shocking and weird. Their language of extremity
and excess has characterized presentations of senility in the United States that
were far more highbrow during the decade ( 1 g8s-95) in which I was actively en
gaged in learning about senility Below I will move from tabloid sensationalism
through mainstream journalism and into the language of dementia professionals,
stressing the thematic continuities: how a culturally and historically distinct obses
sion with what the Globe called ')lzheimer's hell" informs more reasonable dis-
course.
Additionally, I will use the tabloids as a shorthand for raising questions about
American class consciousness and any attempt to articulate a cultural study in the
50 ALZHEI MER' S HELL
United States, even of the potted comparative sort that expatriate anthropologists
implicitly engage in. Put simply, through their carnivalesque scenarios Aerican
tabloids ofer ironic readings of the "leading experts" or "leading scientists" whose
ubiquitous revelations sufuse the text but are never quite taken at face value, un
like the expert sound bites of more mainstream media. This irony is not simply the
highbrow irony of kitsch, and it will help to trouble the certitudes of mainstream
public culture and its partially manufactured consensus on how Aericans think.
Finally, I will use tabloids themselves metaphorically, as a sign of the efects of
a style of anthropological and social reasoning still prevalent in South Asian stud
ies. The anthropologist's India has its tabloid qualit and its truths are often
framed in terms of a similar straight-faced extremity Graduate students who elect
to study India are exposed to a discursive morass with its own hermetic logic,
which generates carnivalesque truths that could appear, if there were but a mar
ket for them, on the covers of the Globe and its fellow tabloids: "Indians prefer hi
erarchy to equality unlike modern French"; "Indians not individuals, leading sci
entists reveal"; "Indian men ruined by devastating childhood practices: their
mothers split in two! "; "Bizarre Hindu village discovered where bodies are fuid, "
or "Secret pact between British and Brahmans discovered-it's all a colonial
plot! " Still, this anthropological India is seldom just the sum of its colonial and
postcolonial rhetoric. It can ofer the basis fo. a "good enough" engagement with
the world out there, to borrow again Scheper-Hughes's phrasing of a response to
anthropology's obsession with its own refexivity. Like the tabloids as I read them
here, the anthropologist's India signifes powerful truths through the very excess
that renders it parodic.
Protesting too much, I return to the senility of the rich and famous. Andrews
"can't remember a thing, " "has like a fve-second attention span and then he's
gone, " "doesn't know you've even been there, " and "started getting lost. " Defcits
in memory and attention are the key symptoms of the mangling of minds. A 1 990
article in the Str tells the same horror story about comedian Harvey Korman,
who "mixes up his wife and kids," "began showing up uninvited at his former
houses, " and has "been knocking on neighbor [and ex-Charlie's Angel) Jaclyn
Smith's front door and saying ' I' m home. ' " The extreme forgetfulness elaborated
in these articles is hell because it implies a loss of self Not only are the "mindless"
victims of Azheimer's no longer the persons they once were, they are in a sense
no longer persons at all. Mind and self come to stand for one another.
Again, the victim is not the one who sufers in this hell: " [T) he only blessing is
that the horrible disease destroyed the actor's mind before he could realize what
was happening. " The disease was "harder on his wife and three grown children. "
The article suggests that Korman, confusing hi s wife with sex symbol Smith, could
be doing far worse. The relatives are the victims, as in the case of Andrews's wife:
Just as painful was the efect Dana's disease had on his wife . . . . She was forced to sell
their luxurious $6oo,ooo home in Studio City to help pay for her husband's care.
ALZHEI MER' S HELL 51
"It was a big life change for Mom when he had to go in," says Stephen. "It's a
shock to the system to suddenly be on your own after all that time together with
someone you love."
She had a big house to run without Dad around . . . . "
Illness, Arthur Kleinman suggests in The Ilness Narratives, may act like a sponge,
soaking up meaning from the life world of the suferer and recasting it in terms of
itsel6 Azheimer's soaks up meaning less from the life of the initial "victim" than
from those around him or her, casting all efort and experience of relatives-the
"other victims"-in terms of the embodied signs of this mangling process. This
exchange of syptoms-the body of the caretaker for the body of the Alzhei
mer's patient-dominates the middlebrow literature on senility.
Yet the irony of Alzheimer's-the sufering of the stricken brain being experi
enced primarily by those wth brains intact-is in its tabloid version underscored
by a deeper irony absent in middlebrow and expert versions, a hermeneutic of
suspicion regarding the victimhood of rich relatives of famous people. Andrew's
wife, forced to give up her then expensive home, becomes in a mocking gesture the
poor little rich girl. Suspicion as to family motives mirrors another age-related
tabloid genre: the violent contest between generations. lntergenerational squab
bles, ofen involving a negotiation over the prerogatives of an older generation re
fusing to hand over its authority erupt in the tabloids in grotesque fashion. In a de
lightfully hideous Sun piece from 1 g88, a struggle over institutionalizing a
seventy-two-year-old parent suggests that a family's putative sufering in the mode
of the other victim may point to a desire for the old person's disappearance. 7
Tabloid irony forces open the question of Kn Lar-incoherent within middle
brow and expert variants of Alzheimer's-the question of the relation between a
family's gerontocidal desire and the insanity of old age. Whence the loss of self?
The piece begins with an image of the old person as excessive wanderer, "lost
5 years, " yet immediately this ubiquitous fgure within gerontological literature is
grotesquely transformed, the truth of her wandering revealed as lethal immobility.
GRANNY, LOST 5 YRS, FOUND IN MURPHY BED!
-SHE WAS MUMMIFI ED
A woman's fnal trip t o her old famiy home turned into a horrifying nightmare when
she discovered her grandmother's mummifed corpse stufed into a folding bed-still
wearing her favorite nightgown.
Police in suburban Liverpool, England, say Abigail Larson, 72, died when her
fold-away bed-commonly known as a Murphy bed-lurched backward into its
cabinet as she slept, pinning the gray-haired granny between the mattress and the
wall.
As the granddaughter, the voice of both innocence and irony here, discovers that
her wandering grandmother has never lef home, she ofers us a dif erent trajec
tory for the old woman's movement, one in which wandering and fity continu
ally shift referents:
52 ALZHEI MER' S HELL
Abigai's granddaughter, Janet Biggers, told ofcials she hadn't seen her grand
mother for more than fve years, and the family assumed the spunky senior citizen
had run away afer a bitter fght regarding their plans to put her in a nursing home.
"Grandma was starting to fail, and my mother and uncle both felt it was unsafe
for her to live in that big house all by herself" Janet explains. "Mother was especially
fearful Grandma would fall down the stairs and hurt herself
"However, Grandma couldn't stand the idea of selling the family home and liv
ing in a nursing home, and she told my mother so in no uncertain terms. She threat
ened to run away before she'd let them take her away"
According to Janet, the discussion ended on a bitter note, and several days
passed before her mother decided to visit the stubborn old woman. But when she ar
rived, the house was empty and Abigail was nowhere to be found.
'" searched all over, certain she had fallen or hurt herself but we couldn't fnd
Grandma anywhere," Janet notes.
Mindless wandering may or may not be desperate running away; being stuck in a
nursing home becomes being mummifed in a Murphy bed. The desire by Lar
son's children to sell that big house and rid themselves of its burden afrms the
disposable fgure of the granny The article evokes the image of Mrs. Fletcher,
roughly contemporary with it, a fgure from an American advertisement for a
communication device designed for old people. In the ad, an old woman has fallen
down and pathetically intones, "I've fallen and I can't get up. " Repeating Mrs.
Fletcher's monotonous cry for help briefy became an American national craze.
"We notifed authorities she was missing, but they gave up looking after a couple of
weeks. All we could do was hope she would call and say she was all right."
Five years passed, and Janet's family decided there was no use in hanging on to
Abigail's three-bedroom home. "My mother cried when she caled the real estate
agent," she says. "It was one of the hardest things she's ever done. She kew
Grandma would be furious, but after fve years she felt she had no choice. The up
keep on the house was breaking us fnancially"
Here is tabloid irony the crocodie tears of the other victim: Janet's mother, all too
eager to sell the family home in the frst place, now can aford to wait fve expen
sive years with Larson gone. Then, the fnal revelation:
Janet stopped by later to clean up and walk through the house one last time. On im
pulse she opened the folding bed in her grandmother's bedroom, and it was then
that she made her grisly discovery . . .
"There was Grandma laid out fat, still wearing her favorite purple and pink
nightgown. Her skin was withered and tough like leather, but other than that she
looked as if she were still asleep. I guess the Murphy bed just fipped backward and
took her with it . . . . "
With this inverted fall and the image of the dead granny pathetically lost in her
own home, among her own family the embodiment of confict shifs once again,
from the fallen back to the lost and confused senile body:
ALZHEI MER' S HELL
5
Janet notes the family is saddened by her grandmother's passing, but relieved to
know she isn't out in the street lost and confused.
"I'm just glad to know Grandma died in famiiar surroundings," she declares.
"I'm going to miss her a lot."8
The absurdity of this piece-sufocation in a lurphy bed transformed into a
wholesome death in famiiar surroundings-underscores the irony of intergener
ational confict. Care is interchangeable with control; the rhetoric of falling
justifes institutionalization, but once Larson is lost and her children are free fve
years seem blithely to go by. Confusion and wandering are presented as far less
dangerous than the lonely and deadly embrace of the family home, where
Grandma can be missed because she is fxed, all too literaly in the plans of her
children.
ALZHEIMER' S, SUBJECTIVITY, AND THE OLD WEST
I now begin t journe tat wil la me it t sunset q my l. I kow tat fr Amera
tere will alwqs be a brht dawn ahead.
RONALD REAGAN, LETTER TO THE AMERI CAN PEOPLE ANNOUNCI NG HI S ALZHEI MER
'
S
The multiple ironies that help sell tabloids were absent from writing on senility in
the mainstream American press during the 1 985-95 decade, but the same
themes-the devastation of Alzheimer's and the transposing of the identity of its
sufering onto family members-continued to be elaborated. Missing was a
tabloid sensibiity that the elaboration of the devastation and the sufering of fam
ily members were language games with potential winners and losers. The 1 989 set
of articles in Newsweek that I referred to earlier, collectively entitled 'l about
Alzheimer's," framed the disease through similarly violent imagery leading to an
erasure of self stripped of "every vestige of mind and identity, " the primary vic
tim simply "ceases to exist. "9
The threat to selfood posed by Alzheimer's within the middlebrow text re
mains dual, both the loss of self of the old individual and the loss of self of the
other vctim. Newsweek focuses on a seventy-one-year-old Boston woman, Ina, who
from the start is represented through a series of losses: she forgets things, is "apa
thetic, " "the logic is gone," "she has lost her sense of temperature, " and so forth.
These losses challenge our conception of a just world, placing the faux horror of
the tabloid article within a far more impressive theodicy:
Her name is Ina Connolly She is 7I years old and she is a victim of Alzheimer's dis
ease. But that is not all she is. She is also the mother of six grown children and the
grandmother of seven. When her children describe their mother, they invariably
mention her strength and her kindness. "She was the Rock of Gibraltar," says her
son Frank, 34 "She was always doing things for people," says her daughter Kathy, 39
But the disease that is slowly destroying Ina Connolly's mind is not a respecter of
past deeds. It does not matter that, as a young girl growing up in Boston, Massachu
setts, she helped to raise her seven brothers and sisters and that she took care of her
54
ALZHEI MER' S HELL
elderly mother. It does not matter that she was once able to f plumbing, hang wall
paper and prepare a full dinner every night, while keeping six kids out of major trou
ble. It does not matter that she could once swim faster than anyone in her family, that
she secredy yearned to be a basketball star, that her late husband considered her the
most beautiful woman he'd ever seen.
Alzheimer's is urir. Within the late twentieth-century comparative aesthetics of
the plague (until the advent of AIDS Alzheimer's was proclaimed the disease of
the century), 10 Alzheimer's is framed as the disease that happens to good people.
The contrast with AIDS in this moral sense is ofen explicit. Our sense of the
tragic escalates through the portrayal of a kind of victim very diferent from the
social portrayal of the AIDS suferer: Ina is a mother, a grandmother, a sister, a
daughter, a cook, a homemaker, a woman with secret yearnings, the most beauti
ful woman ever to her late husband.
The moral outrage the article invokes in its construction of Ina is immediately
displaced onto the body of her famiy. Through the ever-present violent imagery,
Ina shifs from being victim to victimizer. For her family, beyond the layered and
tragic absences is an ever-present fear should "she ever became violent . . . espe
cially toward the baby [her granddaughter] . " Ina is a physical threat to the body
of little Amanda, as well as a psychological threat to the ability of her son Frank
and daughter-in-law Mary Ellen to lead sane and normal lives.
The excess of Alzheimer's is structured not only as an explosion of violence but
of time. Newsweek describes Alzheimer's as "a marathon, " an "exhausting vigil"
given bodies "who need to be constantly watched or restrained," an "ordeal, "
"round-the-clock, " and most tellingly, an "endless funeral . " " Such terms echo the
title of the most wel known American how-to book for famiies of persons with
Alzheimer's disease and other dementias, The 36-Hour Dq. 1 2 The sufering con
veyed by such temporal language is not that of the old person, who is here the
agent but not the subject of disease. What is lacking from the repetitive language
of Azheimer's is much of a sense of the subjectivity of the old person, his or her
presence. The Newsweek articles center on "the other victims"; Ina's past self is dis
played as an icon of family virtue, but the moral indignation around the unfair
ness of the disease glides quickly into the family's lament. The continually reiter
ated discovery of Alzheimer's journalism is that it is the caretaker who is the real
victim. The endlessness and virulence of Alzheimer's is her experience.
What of the absent agent of disease? His or her incoherent voice as a person
with dementing illness is ofered in lieu of an attempt to acknowledge a subjectiv
ity and distinct selfood. All we know of Ina now is that she can't speak coherently
into a tape recorder and claims to be the president of Harvard. The logic of the
text denies any possibiity of continuity and any meaningfulness in taking Ina
with all her confusion-as still fundamentally a person. All we are allowed to hear
is a set of aphasic, confused, and angry sounds presented to us as the sum of Ina
and thus confrmation of the death of selfood.
Within much of the specialized literature, such as The 36-Hour Dq, prepared
ALZHEI MER' S HELL
55
for famiies of persons diagnosed with Alzheimer's and other dementias, this era
sure generates some refexive concern. The 36-Hour Da begins with the story of
Mary, a woman struggling to cope with memory loss and an increasingly confus
ing and terrifing world. Her story is prefaced by an admission of the dif erent
agendas of families and "suferers":
Alth
o
ugh this book was written for the famiies of people with dementing ilneses,
we recognize that other people, including those sufering from these conditions, may
read this book. We welcome this. We hope that the use of such words as patient and
brain-injured person will not discourage those who have these ilnesses. These words
were chosen because we want to emphasize that the people who sufer from these
conditions are ill, not ' )ust old." We hope the tone of the book conveys that we think
of you as individuals and people and never as objects. 1 3
Unlike Ina, Mary as a person i s not placed entirely within an idealized past.
Alzheimer's is less of a totalizing construct-it neither stands for al dementias nor
is it framed in as violent a language. The authors' goal, which they share with sup
port groups lie those of the Alzheimer's Association, is to help famiies through a
reconstruction, rather than an outright denial, of the subjectivity of the person
with the dementing illness. Perhaps the most compelling narrative of such a re
construction is a 1 994 flm by Deborah Hofann, Complaint r a Dutl Dauhtr,
in which Hofann shows both the progression of her mother's dementia and of
her own eforts to take care of the older woman and to cope. Lie the tabloids,
Hofmann uses humor as a critical tool. Her story has an epiphany: before it, she
is split between Sisyphean eforts to keep her mother, Doris, the same and a grow
ing frustration at
D
oris's refusal to remain who she was. But she comes to realize
that her mother is changing and to make sense of Doris's actions by learning to re
construct continually who she is. Humor allows Hofnann to read the absurdity of
her mother's actions as the experience of a self in escalating fux, and not as the
extinction of sel
In practice, the reconstruction of subjectivity is a more contested process, and
the best of intentions ofen produce troubling results. In one family support group
meeting I went to, held at the ofces of ADRA of eastern Massachusetts in 1 992,
there were seven persons besides myself in attendance: a male neuopsychologist
who was leading the group; a female nursing home administrator, setting up an
' zheimer's unit"; four sisters in their twenties through forties, daughters of a
woman diagnosed with Alzheimer's the previous year; and a woman in her ffties,
married three years ago, who was taking care of a demented mother-in-law.
The meeting lasted over two hours. We each introduced ourselves, starting with
the psychologist. Two of the daughters were married, the other two lived together,
and their mother was shuttled between their three households. The four women
had diferences among themselves as to how their mother should be helped and
responded to but seemed content to share the task of caring for and watching her.
The fftyish daughter-in-law was less comfortable with caretaking, feeling trapped
5
6 ALZHEI MER' S HELL
by her mother-in-law's ilness ('.It's disgusting, yes, that is just what i t i s, disgust
ing! "), her husband's inability to appreciate what she was going through, and the
resistance of his famiy to putting the old woman into an institution. She told us
that she had begun taking tranquilizers to cope. The nursing home representative
and I introduced ourselves, and then the psychologist reintroduced himself this
time as a fellow family member of a person with dementia, and described several
years of caring for a parent.
As in other support groups for secondarily victimized families, such as those set
up for the family members of alcoholics, the process of each of us establishing our
credentials as sufering caretakers-through a ritual of going around the room
and revealing something personal-created what Victor Turner calls communit, a
temporary sense of community and shared purpose, alowing us to share intimate
details and to reach new insights. 1 4 What dif erentiates the Azheimer's Associa
tion from other such groups-which name themselves "Parents of" "Chidren
of" or "Spouses of' '-is the naming of this famiial sufering not as adjunct to but
constitutive of the experience of Azheimer's itsel( The organization is not Chil
dren or Other Relatives of People with Azheimer's-it is, simply the Alzheimer's
Association. It is the absent victims, as in the introduction to The 36-hour Da, who
are adjunct.
Followng introductions, the psychologist introduced the agenda. The discus
sion was organized around a paired denial and reclamation of the absent victim's
subjectivity Our frst goal was to regain control of our own lives, by recognizing
dementia for what it is: the loss of self in the old person. Our second goal was to
learn to communicate with the person with dementia, in efect by reconstituting a
sel( The frst goal was achieved through an fairly exhaustive discussion by the psy
chologist of the pathophysiology of Alzheimer's and other dementias. Few ques
tions were asked during this segment. Family members were interested, but did
not engage this knowledge, nor did they try to apply it directly to their own situa
tions. Its content as a statement was performative: the discussion did not seem to
provide group members with much specifc information, but its utterance rein
forced their sense that Azheimer's was something powerful, complex, and wholly
other. It did this through the speaker's language, itself powerful, complex, and
dif erent from the language we were using as a group.
Given this performative structure, the psychologist's blurring of the nosology of
dementia in his presentation was not surprising. He began by contrasting
'zheimer's" with "pseudodementia, " using the latter term to encompass all the
potentially reversible dementias and not only those felt to be related to depression.
Dementia was transformed from a clinical category into a specifc disease through
this equation of real dementia with endless sufering, and thus with the existential
situation of these families. Multi-infarct and other less reversible demcntias were
briefy discussed, but despite their epidemiological importance did not carry the
same semantic weight of virulence and chronicity as the plaques and tangles of
ALZHEI MER' S HELL
57
Alzheimer's disease and so were not elaborated upon. The performative usage of
neuropathology was heightened near the end of this segment during a discussion
of amyloid deposits. The daughter-in-law, whose open bitterness toward her
mother-in-law made the synthesis between control and understanding the psy
chologist was striving for less appealing, broke in. "You talk about how this protein
afects their brains. How about how it afects my brain! " For this woman, discus
sions of pathology did not engage her own victimization, but rather challenged its
authenticity through impersonal medical language. Her goal, placing the origins
of her vctimization in the old woman's "disgusting" behavior and not in her body
and brain, difered from that of the others at the meeting.
The presentation of neuropathology gave way to a discussion of how group
members were making decisions and whether these were informed by an honest
acknowledgment of Azheimer's and its progression. Group members united in
trying to convince the daughter-in-law that her husband needed to acknowledge
the disease; she persisted that he was incapable of doing so. The group's sense that
the common reality that "family members often refuse to acknowledge dementia"
was at the root of the trouble was of limited success here; in a session "all about
Alzheimer's, " the relationship between husband and wife as the source of much of
the problem could not be addressed.
The confict between the received wisdom of the Alzheimer's movement and
the complex needs of families was more acutely brought out in a debate between
the psychologist and one of the unmarried daughters. The psychologist began by
invoking clinical knowledge: persons with dementia are ofen disoriented and are
further destabilized with a change of environment. He suggested that to keep
shuttling the mother between her daughters was continually to disrupt her env
ronment and do her no good. "For her sake, " he suggested, "you need to make
some difcult decisions. "
Two of the daughters nodded assent. A third objected: "If we don't split the
task of caring for my mother, one of us will ending up bearing all the burden; all
of us have very busy lives. What you're suggesting means we'll end up putting her
in a nursing home, which I don't think would be good for her. She knows each of
us, and kows she's with her family This is her life. That's what's important. "
Debate continued along these lines. The dissenting daughter challenged the
importance of tending primarily to her mother's cognitive state, viewing her
within a network of relationships and through a life history. The psychologist con
tinued to deny the legitimacy of the errant daughter's concerns, repeatedly restat
ing the cognitive facts of the case and suggesting that the daughter needed to sep
arate her needs from those of her mother by unselfshly institutionalizing the old
woman.
He then continued with the second objective of the session. To understand and
communicate with a demented person, he said, don't look to them but to yourself
Imagine yourself with the disease. "You have Azheimer's disease. How would you
5
8 ALZHEI MER' S HELL
feel? How would you cope?" The empathetic technique of The 36-Hour Da i s in
voked, but within a two-part scheme. Only when family members have "acknowl
edged Alzheimer's, " have denied meaningful agency and subjectivity to the per
son with dementia, can these be reintroduced through the superimposition of
their own subjectivity onto the experience of the other: Yu have Alzmer' diease.
Against the emphasis on "the other victim" I have been tracing, the seldom
heard voice of the person with dementing illness surfaces at critical junctures. I
mention two of the most prominently featured voices. When Janet Adkins, diag
nosed with Alzheimer's disease, succeeded in committing suicide as the frst
kown benefciary of Dr. Jack Kevorkian's "suicide machine" in the back of a van
in a Michigan campground in 1 990, her last utterance, thanking the maverick
pathologist profusely, was widely reported. 1 5 In the media, Adkins's voice-her
gratitude to the physician for terminating her endless funeral at its onset-was
meaningful, and her actions could be placed within the context of her life as con
tinuity:
Mrs. Adkns, who had greeted middle age by climbing to the top of Mount Hood
and treking in the Himalayas, had approached her death with the same zest and in
dependence that she had shown during her life. 1 6
Only at the moment when the ''lzheimer's patient" removes herself from being a
burden to famiy and society is her subjectivity acknowledged. In freeing us, she is
granted personhood.
When Ronald and Nancy Reagan and their publicists reported the former
president's Alzheimer's through a letter purportedly written by Reagan himself
the incident received enormous coverage and was repeatedy lauded as a selfess
act of the couple (and especially Mrs. Reagan) in its popularization and destigma
tizing of the Alzheimer's confessional. 1 7 Like Adins, Reagan is presented in con
tinuity with his pre-Azheimer's self, and also like Adkins, the images used are
those of the rugged American West and the gritty leather-skinned selfood it is
supposed to produce. In the brilliantly crafed letter, Reagan writes of himself rid
ing of into "the sunset of my life. " 1 8 The phrase, read by the news media as quin
tessential Reagan, collapsed the former president's future decline into a timeless
image of the heroic cowboy. The future Reagan is narratively exhausted of any
meaning but, rather than being read lie Ina as an absence, is continually returned
to this iconic moment of the ride into the sunset. In addition to erasing the future,
and in a less visceral way than Adkins, Reagan ends the letter by elaborating the
only real victim of the illness, his wife, and by extension, the American people, ac
knowledging his sorrow at any sufering they may have to bear on his account but
afrming their ability, as tough stock, to ride it out.
In the weeks and months prior to his admission of illness, Reagan's utterances
had been read by the media as confused or as politically ironic: ' :sked [around the
time of Nixon's funeral, when Reagan's confusion was publicly noted] what Rea
gan had fnally thought about Watergate, the epic scandal of this age, Reagan fell
ALZHEI MER' S HELL
59
silent. 'Forgive me,' he said, 'but at my age, my memory is just not as good as it
used to be. ' " 1 9
But as soon as the whispers and allegations of senility building on years of crit
icism by his opponents that as president Reagan was confused and forgetful, were
recast as Alzheimer's, the possibility of irony vanished. Though his primary au
thorship of the letter is contestable, it was cast-in its clarity its collapse of time
and erasure of a future, and its elaboration of the trials of his caretakers-as the
one authentic voice. 20 Despite occasional later and poorly publicized rumors Oike
that of Reagan urinating in the middle of a hotel lobby surrounded by Secret Ser
vice agents keeping photographers at bay), the media respected and retained this
voice as Reagan's last and truly presidential word. His back to us, Reagan retreats
in silence. His heroism is epic, and in an age of identity through victimization his
sacrifce inverts the classic Christian narrative: Reagan demands none of his own
victimhood, and ofers it all up to us, the nation as other victim. In granting us his
sufering, we are redeemed: he rides of into the sunset, Nancy and we struggle
through the endless funeral, and yet through the gift of his ennobling victimization
he frees us: "I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead. "
In contrast to the redemptive aesthetics of the Azheimer's victim removing
herself, the daiy experience of the demented person's famiy is read as Grand
Guignol. When in Newsweek Frank and his sister redecorated Ina's bedroom, we
learn that "it was an exhausting efort. They were ofen up late at night, cleaning
out the closet and drawers full of the junk that had accumulated. " And Frank
laments the days when he couldjust up and leave his job for a month, hitchhiking
around America and sleeping on the ground.
The sufering of families is intensely real . The difculty of approaching the
subjectivity of persons with dementing illnesses is enormous. But the intensity of
this sufering and the enormity of this difculty are culturally constructed and
elaborated realities. Frank sufers in large measure because of how he and his so
ciety experience the dependency of a parent: on its own terms, cleaning up Mom's
bedroom should not be construable as the worst torture the twentieth century has
had to ofer, and yet here it is. Newsweek cannot reach Ina as subject because its
writers share certain assumptions about what constitutes selfood. The power of
Azheimer's as popular category lies in its expression of a structuring of social re
lations in which dependency is equivalent to the loss of identity Ina's non-sense
suggests a nonsel Selves, to remain selves, must account for themselves. Ina does
not tl us who she i: she cannot be represented, save as an absence.
The second threat to selfood that Alzheimer's has come to represent is the
threat to one's autonomy when one's parents become dependent. Frank has a wife,
a steady job, his own children, and other responsibilities, but it is his mother Ina
who represents the image of his lost selfood-fgured as a solitary and quintes
sentially American journey away from home and into the West, sleeping on the
ground-and not these others. If one's parents signify the point of departure for
a selfood experienced as a journey parents who become seriously dependent
6o ALZHEI MER' S HELL
challenge the very essence of their children's selfood, Frank's abandoned back
woods odyssey The endless funeral is his, not lna's. 2 1 Reagan remains heroic;
Frank, unable to join him, must watch from Ina's bedroom.
THE GERIATRIC PARADOX
In calin such a teor a dogma we do not mean at al t diparae it, but ratr t stress it
scope and repercusions.
GEORGES CANGU! LHEM, THE NORMAL AND THE PATHOLOGICAL (1943)
Despite the insistence of a few geriatric experts that Janet Adkins's future was not
as unremittingly bleak as she, her family, and Dr. Kevorkan feared, the popular
and professional construction of dementia has framed the case otherwise.
Azheimer's, though cleanly separated from old age by the force of the geronto
logical ideology that old age is normal, is continually and iteratively identifed with
the inevitable consequences of old age: decline and death. Alheimer' comes to replce
ol age in te structural understndin i the li course. Old age is rendered "normal, "
freed from its inherent associations with decline and death, but in a' paradoxical
move that locates decline and death within a disease construct standing vigi at the
borders of old age and negotiable only through the language of medical expertise
and clinical enumeration: plaques, tangles, functional assessment, and mental sta
tus scores. The paradox of Alzheimer's refects a larger paradox within the mod
ernist understanding of old age, of growing concern in the 1 ggos, leading in turn
for calls for a "postmodern" perspective on old age and even a "postmodern life
course. "22 But plus fa change, as we shall see.
The .ewsweek articles stress the need to "face the facts": Alzheimer's is the .urt
ladin killr, there are few options for families, there are as yet no efective treat
ments, it ruins the brain. The articles again and again afrm the radical split of the
pre- and postdiagnosis self, through the elaboration of the claim that Alzheimer's
is not a normal part of aging. The third of the three .ewsweek pieces opens with a
picture of a neuropathologist holding a diseased brain up to the camera lens, sum
ming up the essence of the disease. Alzheimer's is a brain disease; that it occurs
primarily in old people is registered nonchalandy as almost incidental.
The pathology of Alzheimer's versus the normalcy of old age is a foundational
principle of the Alzheimer's Association and other advocacy groups. Yet in elabo
rating the enormity and ubiquity of Alzheimer's as plague, these groups uninten
tionally reafrm its identity with old age . .ewsweek diferentiates Alzheimer's from
old age by virtue of the former being fatal and incurable, as if death did not linger
on the horizons of old age and as if aging, like pseudodementia, were reversible.
In playing the numbers game-Alzheimer's as the nation's fourth leading killer,
cutting down one out of ten Americans over sixty-fve, nearly half of those over
eight-fve, and the majority of the superannuated-this literature afrms a com
monsense view that Alzheimer's is obviously a matter of old age. The older you
ALZHEI MER' S HELL 61
get, the more likely you are to have Alzheimer's: a fact the Alzheimer's advocates
will not let you forget. From this to this.
Plaques and tangles form in al aging brains; memory loss occurs routinely in
aging. "Benign. senescent forgetfulness" (or BSF) emerged in the 1 g8os as the heir
to seniity's man de of normal forgetfulness. Though benign and by defnition nor
mal, it remains a medical term. The line between the ambiguous normality of
BSF and the unremitting pathology of dementia is itself not clear. How much for
getting is disease? How many plaques does it take?
In the face of this uncertainty, we might wish to locate the persistent and per
haps scientifcally dubious search for t Alzheimer's gene and for other indelible
and unitary markers to determine defnitively who has or wl someday have
Alzheimer's and who does and will not: at once the hope for an eventual cure and
an attempt to resolve the troublesome resistance of the normal and the patholog
ical to remaining distinct from one another, On the day in 1 990 when Janet Ad
kins's suicide was reported in the New Yrk Tmes, another article appeared in the
same paper on a "puzzling protein" that "shows up only in those with Alzhei
mer's. " Researchers were attempting to locate the protein, at that point detected
only in autopsy-derived tissues, in the cerebrospinal fuid of living persons to cre
ate a diagnostic test for the disease. 23 Other, less invasive tests have since been de
veloped. 24 Presumably, such a test might have surprised Janet Adkins, revealing to
her that she did not have Alzheimer's and sparing her and her family her decision
to commit suicide; more likely, the test would have confrmed the diagnosis, and
could spur many others at even younger ages to seek out Dr. Kevorkian or to buy
and use Derek Humphry's best-selling how-to suicide manual Final Eit. 25
Jaber Gubrium musters both neurological and feldwork evidence to suggest
that "it is not yet possible to clearly dif erentiate dementing ilness from normal
aging, and that the attempt to do so is a social construction to create order from
the disorderly aspects of living with dementia. "26 Lyman has presented a compre
hensive review of how the "biomedicalization of dementia" reifes as objective
and necessary a way of looking at individuals grounded in particular relations of
authority and control while it denies the relevance of these relations in the emer
gence and response to cognitive and behavioral change. In brief she argues that
"the myth of 'senility' " has been replaced by the "myth of ]zheimer's disease. ' "
That is, the acceptance of the inevitability and normalcy of cognitive decline in
old age has been replaced by a disease model that, even as it challenges ageist pre
sumptions, pigeonholes individuals as Alzheimer's victims through the "ready ac
ceptance by clinicians, service providers, and families of an oversimplied diagno
sis and prognosis. "27 Like Gubrium, she questions the ease with which the
Alzheimer's movement dif erentiates the normal from the pathological, and cites
studies of institutionalized people considered troublesome wanderers to make the
observation that individuals who continue to act as they did before being institu
tionalized, that is, by the "normal" rules of life outside the nursing home, pose a
62 ALZHEI MER' S HELL
challenge to institutional routine and are far more likely to be labeled as de
mented. 28 Medicalization, Lyman notes, "through medical labels, disease typif
cations, and medical authority justifes control as appropriate treatment for the
good of the patient. "29
The maintenance of a sharp distinction between the normal and the patho
logical in the demarcation of and care for the senile body draws on a tension cen
tral to the discourse and practice of geriatric medicine. Like Alzheimer's disease,
the explicit idea of geriatrics-of a branch of medicine and its allied professions
devoted to the care of the old body-emerged early in this century I. L. Nascher,
a New York physician who during his medical training in the r 88os had been
struck by the frequency with which more senior physicians used "It's just old age"
to avoid disentangling the complex medical problems of elderly patients, coined
the term in r gog to parallel the nascent feld of pediatrics. Nascher's goal was to
demonstrate that old age was not equivalent to ilness, and that the normal and the
pathological were as distinguishable in old age as in younger adulthood.
Nascher later would retell the birth of geriatrics as the narrative of an
epiphany generated by an encounter with an old woman patient he had as a med
ical student. Visiting a slum workhouse with mostly elderly inmates, young
N ascher and his medical preceptor are accosted by a woman complaining of her
pain. The preceptor ignores the woman, and fnally Nascher gets up the courage
to ask why they are not trying to help her. "It's just old age, " his preceptor explains.
It is at this point that Nascher recounts the realization that founded (and contin
ues to dominate) the feld: it' not just old age. In the declaration of old age's nor
mality, Nascher has the vision of geriatrics. 30
This separation of the normal from the pathological structures Nascher's
founding text, Gatrics. He separates the text into two sections: Physiological Old
Age and Pathological Old Age. 3 1 His division draws upon a century of medical de
bate theorizing the relationship between the normal and the pathological;32 in
particular, N ascher draws upon some of the early work of the preeminent French
physician J. M. Charcot. Charcot's r 866-67 UfOns Cliniques sur les Maldies des
Vieillards et ls Maladis Chroniques remained the preeminent text in the feld and had
been translated and made widely avaiable in English. 33 Like Nascher, Charcot
placed the origins of his interest in the old body in an institutional encounter with
old women. Take away the employees, the lunatics, the idiots, and the epileptics,
he reports noting to his students, most of the remaining residents at the Salpetriere
hospital (formally the Hospice de la Vieillsse-Femmes) are old women of the socially
least favored classes, presenting an ideal population for study 34
Charcot built upon the work of C. R. Prus, who had been the head of the med
ical service at the both the Salpetriere and the Bicetre (Hospice de l Vieillsse
Hommes) in the r 83os and r 84os and who utiized the growing population of the in
stitutionalized old poor in Paris to articulate a natural history of the old body in
decline. 35 Prus wrote of the medicine of the elderly in the future tense: as modern,
ALZHEI MER' S HELL 6
3
yet unattainable; his declaration that "I meicine des vieillrd est encore a.ire" be
came an aphorism of the mid-nineteenth-century clinic. 36 Charcot's method of
clinico-pathological correlation ofered a realization of Prus's hope for the
Salpetriere and its human material. Old age provided a particular vantage onto
the relationship between norms and pathology: "changes which old age some
times induces in the organism sometimes attain such a point that the physiological
and the pathological states seem to mingle by an imperceptible transition, and to
be no longer sharply distinguishable. "37
Charcot attempts to distinguish between the two; his focus, summarized in his
title, is on pathology and he interpolates from his delineation of the pathological
to the possibility of a senile physiolog Yet the distinction is tempered by what for
Charcot is the diferand of the diseases of old age: normal and pathological are
not easily separable: they implode. Charcot's moral stance is not that diferent
from Nascher's: against their neglect, the diseases of old persons need to be stud
ied, understood, and whenever possible treated. But the system he creates is strik
ingly diferent, based as it is on his sense that a rigorous shepherding of bodily pro
cesses into the normal and the pathological is not useful in the study of old age. 38
Charcot places old age at the limits of the project of contemporary Parisian
medicine, as depicted by the historian and philosopher Georges Canguilhem.
Canguilhem suggested that the mid-nineteenth-century European articulation of
the normal and the pathological as "quantitatively identical" (the pathological
being a state of excess or defciency of the normal but not something substantively
diferent) was of a piece with an era in which disease was denied its own separate
reality: "The denial of an ontological conception of disease, a negative corollary
of the assertion of a quantitative identity between the normal and the pathologi
cal , is frst, perhaps, the deeper refusal to confrm evi. "39 In Charcot's framing of
old age, the ontological conception of disease is not only denied but the quantita
tive identity of the normal and the pathological collapses altogether: at the mar
gins of life, normality i excess or defciency
The historian Thomas Cole, in his discussion of early to mid-nineteenth
century hygienic perfectionism, ofers a somewhat diferent reading than Cangui
hem of a related denial in the Aerican construction of the natural death, the
"broader cultural efort to eliminate death as a force in life and to remove both the
pain and preparation previously considered essential to dying well . " Cole charts
the ascendancy of a national ethic of self-reliance and the transformation it ne
cessitated: "But how could the ideology and psychology of self-reliance be squared
with decay of the body? Only by denying its inevitabiity and labeling it as fail
ure. "40 The denial of inevita
b
le decay takes a dif erent form in the later nineteenth
century as old age becomes the site of scientifc management. A language of per
fectionism gives way to one of normalization. 4 1
Canguilhem suggests the partial reemergence, in late-nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century Europe and America, of an ontological conception of disease,
6
4
ALZHEI MER' S HELL
linked both t o shifts in the understanding of infectious disease and neurology and
to the violent laboratory of the First World War. Geriatrics emerges not only, as
Cole suggests, within the context of the denial of decay but additionally as disease
comes again to take on a qualitative distinctiveness. The diference between the
nineteenth-century Charcot, who saw himself as able to collapse the normal and
the pathological in old age, and Nascher, who in 1 909 attempted unsuccessfully to
separate them and to ofer disease in old age an independent ontological status, is
in this latter context striking.
Nascher begins with the assumption that old age itself is normal. In the section
of Geratcs devoted to physiology, he attempts to quantify the bounds of the nor
mal in old age, system by physiological system. He then moves on to pathology,
where he catalogues the diseases of old age. But though the book is divided neatly
into two parts, the same symptoms, syndromes, and processes are frequently de
scribed under both headings. The division between the normal and the patholog
ical, though carefully nurtured, seeps, leaks, and eventually collapses. Unlike
Charcot's UfOn, where the collapse is taken as the point of departure in studying
the old body in the foundational text of American geriatrics the central fgure of
normal aging runs counter to the demands of its content.
The difculty of maintaining the separation and Nascher's eforts to do so
characterize his writing on dementia as well . Like Charcot, Nascher associates
clinical dementia with the pathological fnding of cerebral sofening, but he is
careful to diferentiate sofening as pathology from softening as "normal senile de
generation. " Clinically, however, the distinction between the two states in Gatrcs
is unclear, and neither is described in a normalizing language. Ultimately Nascher
must collapse the two, as distinct causes of a single clinical entity "primary senile
dementia. "42
To maintain a pathological reading of seniity Nascher draws upon a plethora
of competing and complexly interlocking concepts coming out of the late nine
teenth and early twentieth century His resulting typology-sofening, arterioscle
rosis, psychosis, and atrophy-is an attempt to unite these dominant theories of
the diseased old mind against some notion of the mind's normal aging.
S'in we have encountered already, in relation to it

penchant for the tropics.
Descriptions of the "very sof and liquefed" brains of persons who had died with
diagnoses of apoplexy or palsy frequent early-nineteenth-century discussions of
neuropathology and continue to be used into the twentieth. 43 Leon Rostan wrote
Recherches sur l Ramolisement du Cerveau in 1 823, analyzing the relationship between
apoplectic events, mental syptomatology and l ramolisement, or sofening,
through examinations of Salpetriere women and autopsies of their brains. Unlike
the later Salpetriere physicians Prus and Charcot, Rostan does not center his re
searches on the old age of the female cadavers he examines. "Senile dementia" for
Rostan, like "mental alienation" more generally, is one of several signs of latent
softening in the absence of apoplexy44 Dora Weiner has discussed the Revolu
tionary shift in the formal status of Salpetriere inmates from indigents to citizen-
ALZHEI MER' S HELL 6
5
patients under the liberal welfare regime of Philippe Pinel, noting the famous
physician's attention to the age-specifc illnesses of the primarily elderly inmates of
the hospital. That the old age of the citizen-patient could be noted and treated
was an efective sign of the scope of Pinel's humanism, but the old body and ca
daver for Pinel and Rostan were not the sites of the limits of normalization as they
would become for Charcot. 45
Rostan noted that sofening was a problem of climactic extremes, most preva
lent in very hot or cold climates, but British approaches to the gross pathology im
ported from France difered. Sofening of the brain as a general fgure of lay and
medical speech did accord well with mounting concerns over the efects of the
tropics on European constitutions. Yet as the formal collection of medical statistics
became a critical component of colonial administration,46 London-based physi
cians like Richard Rowland could reread the tropics against the rhetoric of sof
ening: "Cerebral sofening does not appear to be a prevalent afection in warm cli
mates. The Army Medical Reports rather lead to the conclusion that it is less
frequent in those latitudes than with us." Rowland's understanding of the tem
perate and arctic spaces of sofening is not simply his reading of available quanti
tative data, however; it accords with his sense that palsy and apoplexy the two
clinical states correlated with softening, are nerous afections more likely to occur
in modern urban settings and among professions involved in mental labor. 47
]. Hughlings Jackson in 1 875 criticized the nonspecic use of softening and the
tendency to equate it with general atrophy of the brain. Sofening is local necrosis of
brain tissue and its causes are arterial. Attempts like Rowland's to see prary ner
vous symptomatolog as the cause of softening reverse the causal equation. The key
to the study of sofening is the careful study of the arterial system and its patholog48
Artosclrosi, leading to diminished blood fow and increased pressure with
efects independent of strokes and hemorrhages, was the second of Nascher's cat
egories; by the early twentieth century it had become a ubiquitous concept for ex
plaining the changes of aging, so often invoked that its use had become the subject
of conscious irony49 Like softening, arteriosclerosis had particular resonance for
tropical bodies. Both Emil Kraepelin's modernist psychiatric nosology and Eugen
Bleuler's later revision examined the relationship between arteriosclerosis, insan
ity and heat. Hot climates, hot baths, and the like make blood rush to the head,
exacerbating the diminished elasticity and self-regulation of arterial vessels in old
age and potentiating not only the likelihood of sofening, but more difse tissue
damage leading to "arteriosclerotic insanity"50
Pschosi: Nascher drew on a third set of ideas, engaging the language of mad
ness as primary independent of sofening, arteriosclerosis, or atrophy in framing
senility as senil insanit or senil pschosi. Preventing or at least forestalling senility
was one of the preoccupations of the nineteenth-century concern with moral hy
giene, manifest as two contradictory strategies, a conseration model stressing rest
and the prudent expenditure of nerous energy and an activity model stressing
continual exercise of the mental faculties. 5 1 Both strategies drew on a set of ideas
66 ALZHEI MER' S HELL
about involutional psychosis and the senile climacteric that structured the onset of
old age as a dangerous passage that must be negotiated with forbearance and
moral strength to avoid a decline into senile pathology52 Both strategies stressed
the need for order, and both extended a tradition that looked to Roger Bacon's
thirteenth-century exposition on the prevention of old age through an ordered
life, translated by the seventeenth-century English physician Richard Browne and
frequently reprinted. 53
Against the moral hygienic discussion of madness as the failure of order and
appropriate behavior in old age drawing on traditions of prolongevity is an
equally venerable argument that senility is inevitable. Against Browne, another
seventeenth-century text frequently cited over the subsequent two centuries is the
English physician John Smith's exegesis of the twelfth and fnal chapter of Eccle
siastes. Smith's reading is lengthy, and complex; its gist is an interpretation of the
Biblical chapter as a fairly exhaustive and anatomically detailed description of the
physical changes of old age: the decrepit body as memento mori. Moral order can
not forestall the process; rather, the process signifes the need for a moral order
outside and beyond the body 54 This other moral economy of old age is deempha
sized during the nineteenth century as Cole suggests, but it does not disappear.
The diferent gerontologies of Browne and Smith are both drawn into later for
mulations.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the Scottish physician Maclachlan juxtaposed
both approaches in noting that, despite inevitable bodiy decay, old people are
ofen the wisest in a society From this observation he suggested that the brain and
the rest of the body decay at diferent rates. For Maclachlan, the brain's staying
power lay in its close relationship to the mind and the soul. He combined a moral
hygienic with an arteriosclerotic model: mental distress in most older people, he
argued, is eiter a derangement of character brought on by poor moral hygiene or
a disease process, such as sofening. However, Maclachlan had also to confront the
eventual decay of all fesh, and he posited a two-stage model. Whatever the status
of its moral economy ultimately the brain in extremis must decay: ''ll fesh is
grass, but thus the immortal portion of our nature asserts its independence, and
long outlives the decay that surrounds it. A period generally arrives, however, in
the progress of years, when, like the frame itself the intellectual faculties betoken
the destructive efects of time. "55 Moral decay, pathological disease, and normal
degeneration are all accommodated. The maneuver, to resolve a debate around
the pathology of behavior in old age by splitting the life stage into two halves,
younger and older, became a frequent structural response to the difculty of con
stituting norms.
The opposition between the moral and the degenerative was recast with the
emergence of a biological psychiatr The relation between senile insanity and se
nile dementia concerned Kraepelin in the formation of his classifcation of men
tal illness, ancestor of both the DSM and lCD series. For Kraepelin in 1 904, what
was translated as involutional melancholia was a psychosis setting in "at the beginning
ALZHEI MER' S HELL 6
7
of old age in men, and in women from the period of the menopause onwards . . . .
About a third of patients make a complete recovery In severe and protracted
cases, emotional dullness may remain, with faint traces of the apprehensive ten
dency Judgement and memory may also undergo considerable deterioration. "56
This psychosis retained traces of its climacteric origin. It is a state passed
through, not necessarily an endpoint, and it can be treated and cured. Against the
generally good course of involutional insanity, the state of senie dementia or se
nile imbecility has a poor outcome. Both involutional psychosis and senile de
mentia were for Kraepelin secondary to "the general failure of strength and vi
tality in old age . . . a time when the power of resistance is reduced. "57 Dementia
difered from involutional psychosis clinically in its more variable and labile
afect, increased hypochondriasis, and the signifcant loss of short-term mem
ory Kraepelin, structuring his nosology through behavioral rather than other
clinical or pathological criteria, had far less difculty than Charcot or Nascher in
separating the normal and the pathological . The critical and difcult boundary
for him was between varieties of the pathological, between acute psychiatric ill
ness (insanity or melancholia) and chronic neurological illness (imbeciity or de
mentia) .
Insanity rooted in the reversible and morally weighted efects of a weakened
person's melancholic response to the irreversible involution of old age, remains
part of Nascher's typology
The language of the climacteric and of senie involution will be discussed
below in terms of the relation between the "senile" and the "female" climacteric;
here I would note the late-nineteenth-century emergence of involution as a criti
cal site for the incorporation of Darinian ideas into discussions of old age. The
gross anatomical term involution, a structure turning in upon itself comes to take
on a teleological cast in the mid-nineteenth century primarily in discussions of the
involuting uterus as a metonym of the aging woman whose purpose has been
fulflled. 58 The site of involution in succeeding decades both expands to defne the
old body more generally and difses to describe the cellular and subcellular atoms
of decline. 59 Involution as a fgure comes to embody the late-nineteenth-century
reading of moral hygiene, no longer a perfectionist vision of prolongevity but a
process of evolutionary triage in which the old must pass over social and repro
ductive privilege to the young for the sake of the species.
Nascher's own prewar writings on involution and the climacteric engage a cav
alcade of social types, stereotypic depictions of classes, genders, and professions,
and their moral abiity to negotiate the onset of old age. 60 The old person who has
faied to accept old age and act accordingly is framed as hypersexual and pathetic,
in the tradition of Renaissance and Restoration pantaloons and bawds, but repre
senting a greater and increasingly eugenic threat. Physicians, not the least of
whom was Alois Alzheimer, were being drawn into debates over the dangers of
P<rticular classes of persons to the species (and in some settings, to the race) and
over the evolutionary meaning of bodily weakness. 6 1 Following the First World
68 ALZHEI MER' S HELL
War, most American discussions of involution centered on the presumed peri- and
postmenopausal insanity of older women, but eugenic concerns remained. The
pathologist Aldred Warthin, in his 1 929 book Ol Age: The Maor Involuton, argued
that human development represented an energic balance between growth and in
volution and cautioned against eforts to disturb this balance by extending the
aficted lives of the oldest old. Warthin dif erentiated the minor involutions of
pre- and postnatal growth, necessary for the survival of the individual, from the
major involution of old age, necessary for the surival of what he alternately
called the species or the race. Warthin's energies were based upon an understand
ing of the body as a machine for the propagation of germ plasm through time. In
old age, "the individual human machine has fulflled its function, and, now useless,
stands in the way of the progressive evolution of the species . . . . The Universe, by
its very nature, demands mortality for the individual if the life of the species is to
attain immortality "62
Warthin's explicit concerns were the energy depletion resulting from an aging
population and the lowered adaptability of a senescent and backward-looking
race, not the explicit degeneration of the germ plasm resulting from aged semen.
Yet his book was particularly concerned with a sexualized vision of the old and
mortal versus young and immortal bodies. Scientic photographs of naked men,
primarily black-and-white full frontal shots, are interspersed through the book.
The accompanying descriptions focus on the face and posture, but the pho
tographs themselves additionally present a progression of visible penises. The "lad
of eighteen years" stares optimistically upward into the distance, his body thrust
forard in anticipation of the future; the "youth of twenty-two years" stares more
noncommittaly ahead, his body erect. Further stages follow, until one reaches the
"father of eighty years and son of thirty-seven years. " Both men are standing side
by side, naked, with the son's pulled-down pants visible at his ankles. The text
notes: "[ T] he weary worn-out machine of the old man contrasted with the inso
lent aggressiveness of the son at the height of maturity tells the story of the mean
ing of involution and old age more efectively than any detailed scientic descrip
tion can do. "63 The unspoken juxtaposition of father's and son's nakedness tells a
slightly dif erent story that presumes an interested obserer. The hygiene of invo
lution has shifed into a new moral vision of immortal and insolent male bodies.
Atophy is the fourth of Nascher's considerations. Like Maclachlan and Krae
pelin, Nascher positioned irreversible atrophy in late life, against other causes of
behavoral change in those less superannuated. Atrophy provided the greatest
challenge to the distinctiveness of the normal and the pathological. Even with
normal aging, things eventually fell apart. A more clearly pathological under
standing of atrophy developed through the work of Aois Alzheimer, a German
neuropathologist. Although Alzheimer frst located his plaques and tangles in the
"presenile" brains of individuals in their ffies and was far more interested in the
problem of presenile dementia, within a decade of his initial 1 906 report many
ALZHEI MER' S HELL 6
9
European and Aerican pathologists had gone on to note similar fndings in se
nie brains and to suggest a single pathological process across the life course. 64
Though described as both presenile and senie, Azheimer's disease did not
supplant arteriosclerosis, psychosis, sofening, and normal aging as a critical con
cept in the study of senility. The diagnosis remained "nearly medically dormant
until the 1 g6os";65 arteriosclerotic models dominated, along with the emergence of
a pharmacotherapy based on a class of drugs marketed as vasodilators, which,
given the dominant paradigm, were intended to open up arteries to get more
blood to the brain. Despite the many studies folowing immediately upon Alzhei
mer's own work suggesting that his fndings also might explain senile dementia,
the model was left largely alone for half a century Patrick Fox has traced the role
of a "handful of neuroscientists" and of the infrastructure of the National Insti
tutes of Health in mobiizing resources for the creation of a popular ')zheimer's
movement" in the United States in the 1 g6os and 1 970s. 66 By the 1 g8os, with the
exception of multi-infarct dementia, vascular models were all but passe,67
Vladimir Hachinski being all but the only North American who advocated retain
ing some concept of limited blood fow in the study of senility; in the 1 ggos, a vari
ant of vascular dementia had returned to acceptability
Nascher's book was retided Th Care o te Aed by his successor, Malford
Thewlis. "Geriatrics" remained a seldom used neologism in the country where it
was coined until afer the Second World War, and large-scale subspecialization did
not emerge until the 1 g6os and 1 970s. The term began to return to vogue when the
same images that dominate Nascher's retelling of the origins of the term-insti
tutionalized old bodies and an unhearing medical profession-began recurring
with great frequency in the American press and in many books "exposing" the sit
uation of old people. 68 Against the ageism of physicians and institutions in an anti
psychiatric era, geriatrics' ofer of "normal aging" against "It's just old age"
emerged as a powerful tool to demedicalize old age. The Alzheimer's era repre
sented a shif in the negotiation of the divide: old age was declared to be entirely
normal; benign senescent forgetfulness was ofered to neutralize the ambiguity of
normality and then allowed to drop out of sight. Those relegated to the victim
hood of Alzheimer's now had to bear the dehumanizing brunt of a total and un
questionable pathology Far from demedicalizing old age, geriatrics' insistence on
normality instantiated a far more totalizing medical regime.
From its inception, geriatrics presented a paradox-a feld insisting on the nor
mality of old people but constructed through their diferentiation and isolation,
defning them as distinct from adults and requiring a separate and ancilary pro
fession modeled on the care of children. The paradox is evident in both the poli
tics of geriatric practice within the tertiary hospital setting and in the internal con
tradictions that defne the geriatric body as a locus of knowledge.
The language of "normal aging" is critical in gerontological and geriatric
training; my feld experience here is based on my own training from 1982 to 1 986
70 ALZHEI MER' S HELL
i n geriatric medicine, social work, and nursing home work, and on formal feld
work with geriatric professionals in hospitals and nursing homes in Boston. In a
session I attended as a student, a geriatrician at a community hospital was trying
to teach medical students about "normal aging. " Most of the students resisted her.
If old age is normal, why are old people so frequendy hospitalized? Why is so
much of internal medical practice geriatric?
The physician persisted; she was used to the objections. Old people ofen have
more health problems, but these are diagnosable and mandate therapy; too ofen,
a physician focuses on a limited diferential for the chief complaint when a pa
tient's multiple problems, social situation, and ofen multiple medications may
have direct bearing on etiology, diagnosis, choice of therapy, and outcome. The
class was unimpressed. Yes, these are all to the good, but what is the point of all
this talk of normal aging if geriatrics is invoked precisely to treat complex pathol
ogy? Most students lef the meeting without a sense of what defning old age as
normal ofered. The physician's invocation of the geriatric paradox had defected
her message about the need to rethink the goals of internal medical practice.
Internists and other specialists in Harard hospitals throughout my own train
ing often remarked with both humor and scorn, "There's no need for geriatrics;
internal medicine [or neurology, etc.] is geriatric medicine. " House staf and med
ical students were usually discouraged from seeking geriatric consults; when these
were sought, the recommendations of the geriatric team were usually criticized as
impractical and having litde bearing on what were seen as the critical medical is
sues: "So they take of a drug or two, big deal . " Despite the increasing routiniza
tion of geriatrics as a certifable specialization within Aerican medicine, its le
gitimacy among tertiary care physicians remains marginal.
Such marginal status is a pity, for the hospital practice of internal medicine re
mains profoundly ageist, characterized by the rich and well-documented language
of "litde old ladies," "gomers," "fogs, " "slugs" and so forth (institutional elabora
tions of Mrs. Fletcher, the "I've fallen and can't get up" lady), by the Sisyphus-like
determination of many house staf to get patients of the serice and their conse
quent resentment of the immobility. of sick elderly, and by the almost refex ob
session with obtaining DNR (do not resuscitate) statuses on old patients from them
or their relatives. Amid such a milieu, where old bodies ofen challenge the smooth
functioning of house staf practice, the geriatric aesthetic of normal aging does
not engage the agenda of house staf nor does it ofer a coherent challenge. Geri
atric ideology subverts its own goals.
OUBLIER POSTMODERN AGING
When I frst wrote a draf of this section, in 1 991 , there did not seem to be many
critical voices raising simiar concerns. Within American medical anthropology
gerontologists took on the project of geriatric normality with litde apparent refex-
ALZHEI MER' S HELL
7
1
ivity discovering in other cultures oases where the words of Nascher's preceptor,
"It's just old age," could never be uttered meaningfully69 But the 1 ggos has seen an
eforescence of a self-consciously critical gerontology 70 Much of what I am argu
ing here has been already (and ofen far more elegantly) put forward. One variant
of this turn has been a move away from the normalizing language of the Nascher
ian epiphany to a recognition of geriatrics' silencing of the existential and em
bodied abnormalir of the last years of the longest human lives. Several scholars
have called this a "postmodern" recognition: Cole has charted the move from the
modern construction of old age-in terms of liberal capitalism, ideologies of self
reliance, retirement, and the scientifc management of agng and both its per
fectibility and normalization-to the postmodern, through the faiure of liberal
ism, renewed alarmism about an aging population, the rejection of Nascherian
dualism, and the return to a dialogue with death and an ars moriendi. 7 1
But there is reason to pause. The rise of critical gerontology in the United
States-and of its recognition of the medicalizing and dehumanizing dualism of
the geriatric paradox-comes precisely when the political economic apparatus that
funds most gerontological research is looking for ways to demedicalize, to deinstitu
tionalize, and more generally to defund the care of older persons, the majority of
whom are not wealthy and face not the withdrawal of futile but of needed health re
sources. In the United States, the policy debate of the 1 ggos brings together ethicists
like Daniel Callahan who question how much futile medical care a society should be
providing the oldest old72 and political initiatives to cut Medicare and Medicaid
without serious attention to the intersection of age, class, race, and gender.
The response of American gerontology to the paradoxes of its normalization
has traditionally been and continues to be the splitting of old age into ever fner
categories: the "young old" versus the "old old," "successful aging" versus "the
frail elderly, " and so forth. Nascher's failed efort to separate out the normal from
the pathological is realized by splitting the objects of inquiry and policy into those
defned by their normality (and not coincidentally by their constitution as a mar
ket segment) and those defned by their pathology (and not coincidentally by their
constitution as an economic liability). Within the logic of such a split and its ever
more trenchant rematerialization of failed eforts at normal aging as the dehu
manized domain of Alzheimer's disease, the "recognition" of the profound ambi
guity of old age seems less postmodern revelation than the latest turn of the screw
by the professional compradors of gerontology what I have elsewhere criticized as
the "trope of ambiguity" running through much gerontological anthropology 73
To fnd a language to write about old age that fetishizes neither essentialized
normality nor essentialized ambiguity I want to move back a step and examine
age itself as a particular kind of diference made to matter in terms of narratives
and practices constituted in terms of other culturally available kinds of diference.
To make my meaning clearer, I begin by articulating a provisional European ge
nealogy of senility Why should it be interesting that the emergence of things like
72 ALZHEI MER' S HELL
dotage, the senile climacteric, and Alzheimer's disease as medical problems 1s
rooted in discourses of and debates on the bodies of women?
A WITCH' S CURSE
That it was an old woman who inspired Nascher's epiphany recalls Charcot's ra
tionale for his own interest in old age, the ready material of the many old women
of the Salpetriere. The institutional availability of certain types of bodies difers
as an origin story from Nascher's rite of discovery but informs a reading of the lat
ter: concern for the old person in Nascher's case is similarly predicated on her in
stitutionalized immobility. What is the relationship between this recurrent fgure of
the old woman-the much abused "granny" of popuh_r myth-and the universal
old person who is the object of geriatrics?
The relationship might at frst seem a result of demography and of the efects
of patrilineal household structure: if women live longer and there are more old
women than old men, and if old men are more likely to retain property to re
marry and to be able to depend on children and others-and thus less likely to be
institutionalized-the recurring old woman of the geriatric text refects little more
than the demographics of old age and the political economy of the household.
Women's bodies, however, are notoriously good for men to think with, and I want
here to examine briefy three moments in the history of the senile body in western
Europe and the United States: the medicalization of the dotard, the rise and fall
of senile climacteric, and the question of Alzheimer's women.
Dotage and senility enter medical discourse in Europe as juridical entities
things about which the physician can claim not only knowledge but authority from
the state-through an appropriation of the body of the middle-aged and older
woman from the gaze of the Inquisitor. Sixteenth-century physicians like Jo
hannes Weyer and Reginald Scot argued that most of those burnt as witches
under ecclesiastical authority never did the evil deeds to which they had confessed
but were, whether they were possessed or not, melancholic, decrepit, and doting
old women. Demonic possession was not ruled out, but was replaced by doting
melancholy as the subject of medical-and state-oncern.
Weyer, in a letter to his patron Duke William of Cleve accompanying publica
tion of his De praesti damonum, makes the juridical content of this new dotage
explicit:
To you, Prince, I dedicate the fruit of my thought. For thirteen years your physician,
I have heard expressed in your court the most varied opinions concerning witches;
but none so agree with my own as do yours, that witches can harm no one through
the most malicious will or the ugliest exorcism, that rather their imagination
infamed by the demons in a way not understandable to us-and the torture of
melancholy makes them only fancy that they have caused all sorts of evil . . . . You do
not, like others, impose heavy penalty on perplexed, poor old women. You demand
evidence. 74
ALZHEI MER' S HELL
73
Weyer returns to these women throughout De praesti daemonum. George Mora
has catalogued his descriptive terms: "raving, poor, simple, useless, ignorant,
gullible, stupid, vile, uneducated, infatuated, toothless, silly, unsteady decrepit old
women. "75
Weyer details innumerable case histories of alleged witches. They are unpleas
ant tales. A eighty-year-old woman is accused of practicing enchantments. Sus
picion is confrmed when her son gives her a packet of earth so that she might free
herself of her chains. Weyer goes to meet her. Though she frequently "seemed to
fall into a tate of unconsciousness," she managed to explain that the packet was
in fact linen, to tend to her ulcerated legs, injured when earlier inquisitors had
poured boiing oil on them to gen-:rate a confession. 76 Other women are far less
lucid, a state that, though indicating a state of sin, implies no threat to any save
themselves: "Certain deluded old women . . . their brains-the organs of their
thoughts and imaginings-so frmly ensnared by rare and deceptive phantasms
and forms because of their unbelief . . . that they know of nothing else. 'm Weyer
invokes the authority of medicine not to deny the relation of sin to behavor, but
to transform its valence from threat to pathos.
In England, Reginald Scot invoked melancholy more explicitly in his 1 584
work, The Dicovere o Witchcrc. Scot places accusation in the context not of the
evil Inquisitor but of daily life in the community: these women are not witches, but
melancholies, and their lack of control over their voice raises the suspicion of oth
ers when misfortune strikes.
See also what persons complaine upon them . . . waie what accusations and crimes
they laie to their charge, namelie: She was at my house of late, she would have had
a pot of milke, she departed in a chase bicause she had it not, she railed, she curssed,
she mumbled and whispered, and fnallie she said she would be even with me: and
soone after my child, my cow, my sow, or my pullet died, or .was strangelie taken. 78
Scot's attentiveness, like Weyer's, is to the voice of the supposed witch. The identity
of witches and women, in the Inquisitorial handbook Mallus Malcarum of 1 486,
the embodiment of a woman's carnality and weakness, is in her "slippery
tongue. "79 Scot resists explaining the tongue in terms of womanly nature. He in
vokes a catalog of decrepitude similar to Weyer's:
women which be commonly old, lame, bleare-eied, pale, fowle, and full of wrinkles;
poore, sullen, superstitious, and papists; or such as knowe no religion: in whose
drousie minds the divell hath goten a fne seat . . . . They are Jeane and deformed,
shewing melancholie in their faces, to the horror of all that see them. They are dot
ing, scolds, mad, divelish . . . .
These miserable wretches are so odious unto all their neighbors, and so feared, as
few dare ofend them, or denie them anie thing they aske. 80
The impossibility of hearing the old woman's request as just that-a request-is
central to Scot's analysis, as in the example of the indigent woman coming over to
borrow milk. Women accused of witchcraft in England and the English colonies
74 ALZHEI MER' S HELL
in Aerica were ofen solitary indigent, and dependent on the charity of neigh
bors for survival. Alan Macfarlane's 1 970 study of witchcraf accusations in the
English county of Essex in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries suggested that
the rise of accusations should be understand in the context of shifing defnitions
of community and the delegitimation of the old woman's claims on her neighbors'
resources. The powerful and increasingly angry voice of the indigent older
woman demanding what was less and less her due became increasingly unbear
able and incoherent. 81
I do not wish to argue that most, or even some, of the accused witches were de
mented. The "old women" of these catalogues were not necessarily over sixty; the
qualities ascribed to them are numerous. Diverse persons were vulnerable to being
named witches. And "melancholy" has many associations. The point is simpler:
medical authority in conjunction with the prince, is invoked to defne the
signifably old body when that body is female. Doting, melancholy, and demand
ing voices of old people are otherise no strangers to Reaissance texts-Lear has
come down to us with all his rage intact-but these voices are heard dif erently
across gender. Lear may rail, but his is an abject voice. The old woman's curse,
however, is powerful and must be contained. In the eforts of Weyer and Scot,
medicine is invoked to defuse the threat and appropriate the voice. Before Scot's
Dscovere and since, English physicians writing as natural theologians or philoso
phers would detail the signs of dotage and decrepitude as memento mori or social
commentary; but in the doting voice of the old witch, medicine claims a diferent
kind of knowledge and hails a dif erent sort of old body
THE SENILE CLIMACTERIC
The rediscovery and elaboration by Renaissance authors of "the dangerous grad
uall yeares, called climactericke, " seldom referred to the bodies of women. 82 Cli
macterics were periodic points along the life course-at ages that were usually
multiples of seven or nine-when the body was particularly susceptible to hu
moral excess and its accompanying emotion and morbidity The ungendered (and
thus inevitably male) climacteric continued to be cited well into the nineteenth
century, the Irish physician Kennedy remarking in r 84 that
from the time of Galen to the present period it has been nearly universally believed,
that certain epochs of human life are very liable to be accompanied by disease of a
certain character. A good deal of trouble has been taken to ascertain at what exact
periods of life such a disease shows itself, and particular years, such as the forty
second and sixty-third, have been determined on: the latter of these periods has in
deed been called the grand climacteric, as being the time above all others when the
disease is apt to declare itself 83
Increasingly for nineteenth-century analysts, the existence of this grand climac
teric and in particular the usefulness of its particular multiplication of sevens and
nines was questionable. Kennedy himself concludes the above description by not-
ALZHEI MER'S HELL
75
ing that "in the cases of climacteric disease which have come under my own no
tice, I have not been able to confrm any of these points. . . . " Well before
Kennedy's time, the ungendered grand climacteric was becoming less tied to the
chronological precision of a magical multiplication of sevens and nines and more
to the emerging and gendered obviousness of what grew increasingly medicalized
as "the menopause. "84 On the one hand, the life course is disenchanted through a
process of its rational feminization. On the other, the shift refects the larger trans
formation Thomas Laqueur has suggested in European medical constructions of
the sexual body from a unitary anatomy in which the female body is a partial or
degenerate but not qualitatively dif erent variant of the male to a binary anatomy
in which male and female bodies are mirroring opposites, qualitatively dif erent
things. 85 The increasing taken-for-grantedness of the menopause replaces the in
vocation of Galenic tradition as proof of an ever more elusive and paradoxically
ever more male climacteric. Whereas eighteenth-century arguments for the exis
tence of the menopause invoked the Galenic climacteric, by 1 865 the climacteric
has been unambiguously speciated into male and female varieties and the gender
ing of what is obvious in the decline of old age has been inverted and split. C. M.
Durrant can derive the male climacteric solely through the female: "We are so
much accustomed to regard with interest and anxiety the peculiar changes which
take place in the constitution of the female at mid-age, that we are apt to forget
and overlook the phenomena which, in a more or less marked manner, attend the
turning point towards a downhil course in the opposite sex. "86
The gendered shif in what was obvious and what derivative begins in Britain
early in the nineteenth century In 1 81 3, Henry Halford wrote what became a clas
sic text on the climacteric, splitting the crisis along gendered lines and placing the
two newly distinct phenomena side to side. Halford contrasted the dif erent em
bodiments of each: the male climacteric being a "defciency in the energy of the
brain itself" leading, if not negotiated with care, to chronic mental defciency The
female transition was not of the brain but of the body, and it was of a sufciently
marked character as to "render subsequent alterations less perceptible"; that is, fe
male energy was so closely tied to the womb as to render the question of mental
crisis irrelevant. 87
Nineteenth-century discussions of the dual climactera continued to cite Hal
ford as the author of the split. 88 The characterization of the male climacteric as
cerebral and progressive and the female as visceral and acute lingered for over a
century: in 1 933, Edward Podolsky could still write that "there is a defnite male
climacterium in the same sense that there is a female climacterium, with the no
table exception of course that in a man there does not occur those physical
changes which sere as a visible means of indicating the change of life. In the male
real and defnite changes take place, but the physical element is negligible; the
mental upheaval is quite considerable. "89
As the obviousness of this male climacteric begins to unravel in turn, in the frst
decades of the twentieth century, numerous explanatory models are foated by its
7
6 ALZHEI MER'S HELL
proponents to explain the reasons for the dual climactera. Heredity, arteriosclero
sis, toxemia, and neurasthenia were invoked. 9
0
Endocrine explanations domi
nated, refecting both the emergence of the gland as a key concept in medical re
search and more generally the incorporation of evolutionary (climacteric as
involution) and ecological (climacteric as reorientation of relations between body
and environment) narratives. Gonadal endocrine models exploited the radical
diferences in the signication of ovaries and testes. Galloway in 1933 argued that
involution is a paired process: "the homologous organs which show the changes of
involution frst in one sex should be those which degenerate frst in the other. "
This principle of equivalence must break down, however, because "i n the human
female there is no need to follow the subject, the symptoms being so distinctive,
culminating in the only objective sign we possess, the cessation of menstruation. It
is some centuries since the great Belgian physician, Jean Baptiste Belmont, said
'woman is made what she is by her ovaries. ' Thus attention is at once concentrated
on them and the ductless glands under whose dominance they act. "9 1 Men were
complex and not uniglandular; Galloway describes a network of testicular,
adrenal, and pancreatic secretions. Hormonal logic separated the simpler pelvic
and ductless female embodiment of the transition to old age from its more layered
and polysemically ducted male embodiment. As male hormones were interacting
within a rationally ordered system rather than simply drying up, the male climac
teric occurred later than the female. 92
Nascher turned to the climacteric to help resolve the tension between the nor
mal and the pathological, particularly in regards to the senie mind. In his discus
sion of normal aging, N ascher ofered images of old people as weak, wilful, de
pendent, and decaying. In simultaneously moving to free old age from pathology
he constructed what one might term a subaltern physiology legitimating the study
of the old body as both normal and diferent by framing its normality in terms of
other classes of subordinate bodies. To construct a senile physiology, Nascher
drew upon other alternative physiologies, those of the child and of the woman.
Old people were normal in the same way women and children could be normal .
In the case of the child, discipline as metaphor was supplanted by disciplinary
object as metaphor. Less relevant for the new geriatrics were the formal congru
encies between the child and the old person, and more relevant were substantive
similarities between their behavior, their demeanor, and the degree of autonomy
of which they were or should be capable. Nascher opened Gatrcs by declaring:
"Senility is often called Second Childhood. "93 He used the term loosely, as a syn
onym for old age; elsewhere in Geatrcs he defned it more narrowly as the domain
of those oldest old who have passed through the "senile climacteric. " In equating
very old age with second childhood, Nascher did not so much demonstrate the
common structural concerns of pediatrics and geriatrics, as play on a powerful
sign of the mentally impaired elder as legitimation for a new feld of knowledge.
In appropriating the child, Getrcs positioned childish behavior at the center of
the new physiology
ALZHEI MER'S HELL
77
Nascher explored the climacteric at length in a 1915 article, "Evidences of Se
nile Mental Impairment. " The piece is a discussion of both normal and patho
logical old minds through the presentation of eight cases, a progression of stock
characters: "The oldest in this series of eight is a retired minister; of the others,
one is a retired merchant, one is a manufacturer still in active business, one is a
physician, one is a lawyer, and one is a humble shopworker. There are two women
(widows), one living alone, the other living with her daughter."
The eight exhibit "various phases of senile mental impairment": the physi
cian's mind is "extremely clear and alert"; both the minister and manufacturer are
egotistical and forgetful; the lawyer is similarly so, and additionally "becomes con
fused or rambles"; the shop worker has "moments where the mind seems like a
mental blank"; and the merchant is in the terminal stages of senile dementia.
Nascher fnds it difcult to place the two women along this progression; their vi
gnettes stress less cognitive status than demeanor and the type of relationships the
women have created. 94
In delineating a "senile" as opposed to a "male" climacteric, Nascher attempted
to routinize the senile body within a rational and ungendered discourse of geri
atrics. Yet the possibilities of the normality he articulated remain rooted in a gen
dered logic. Unlike Galloway he did not contrast the simple gonadal decline of
women with the higher glandular embodiment of men. Rather than both sexes de
clining-albeit in diferent sites and at diferent rates-ld men and old women, in
Getcs, approached one another: "In childhood the growth force is exerted in two
directions, or rather with two distinct purposes, accumulation of tissue and dif er
entiation of the sexes. In old age . . . this growth force is now mainly exerted toward
the approximation of the sexes and in old age they approach a neutral tye. "95
Not quite neutral, for the process "is more pronounced in the virilescence of the
female. " In noting the heightened masculinity of old women, Nascher may have
been responding to more than their mustaches (to which, however, he had a ten
dency to return throughout Getcs) . Whether the enhanced power of old women
has been a universal archete96 or a culturally and politically located strategy of
resistance,97 it presented for Nascher a concern that challenges the central meaning
of old age and its physiology of decline. He responded by interpreting the strong fe
male old body as performative health, the failure of women to look as senile as they
really are: "The obvious manifestations of senility appear later in the female, for the
reason that she makes an efort to remain attractive, the psychic factor involved in
the production of the senile slouch in the male being overcome by her vanity"
Beyond strategic vanit the performance of the wrong normality was an indi
cation of a woman's cognitive limitation: "Women being more impressionable
than men, they are more amenable to religious teachings, they become more read
ily resigned to the inevitable through their faith and hope of eternal life hereafter,
and being more cheerful they do not present the disagreeable, gloomy appearance
of aged men. " The performance of health masked the process of decline, depriv
ing women of what limited brain power the terms of discourse granted them in
7
8 ALZHEI MER'S HELL
the frst place. Thus "the mental changes i n the female generally include all of the
intellectual faculties and proceed to the extent of complete dementia far more
often than in the male. "98 One could not so easily, therefore, measure and rank
women's cognitive status, it being a matter of all or nothing, performative health
shifting quickly to complete dementia.
Dementia more generally is the result of the poorly negotiated climacteric. Ne
gotiation is dependent on one's moral sense: "Occasionally there is a recrudes
cence of sexual desire, to gratif which he may attempt rape upon little girls. Such
crimes do not arise from depravit but through weakened mentality involving a
weakened moral sense, inabiity to realize the nature of the act or its conse
quences, loss of control over conduct, and an irrepressible sexual fury"99 If the cli
macteric represents a sexual gauntlet conditioned by a moral sense, dementia is
the end stage of having failed to control one's sexuality. Unlike Warthin, Nascher
retains the legacy of Victorian perfectibilit Mental control is an explicitly eco
nomic process of the prudent management of limited resources. The physician
not surprisingly, the hero of the "Evidences" article-whose thinking is clear and
alert, has negotiated the climacteric successfully. His old age is characterized as
conservative: "more serious, less aggressive, less energetic. "
The merchant and the shop worker pass through the climacteric inefcienty
and at great cost. Unproductive emotional excess at their retirements depletes
their vital resources and sets the stage for their poor negotiation of the climacteric.
The lawer, the minister, and the manufacturer are all still negotiating their re
spective climacterics. They are all emotionally excessive and somewhat egotistical .
The women resist climacteric readings. The eldest
has been living alone since the death of her husband nearly twenty years ago. Before
his death, she was hospitable, sociable and charitable, but soon after his demise she
became irritable and suspicious . . . . For the past ten years there has been coming on
a slow mental impairment. Her interests in life have become restricted, until today
she cares about nothing except her life and her little home, including a eat-her sole
companion . . . . Aside from [uyng food] , she does not leave her house, admits no
one to her rooms, and in fact leads a hermit life.
The woman's struggle at the time of her becoming a widow is analogous to the
preclimacteric dilemmas of the merchant and shop worker. But no eruptive cli
macteric follows, just steady decline. Has the meaning of the climacteric been ex
hausted in her undergoing the menopause? The one hint we have here is the ar
chete through which Nascher presents her, that of the crone: willfully alone, her
irritable voice, the hermit hut, the telltale cat. In Nascher's ofering us-through
the solitary and demented old woman-a fgure of the witch, we come full circle
to Weyer's substitution of the witch for the doting old woman. Female physiology
is relevant primarily to anchor construction of a (male) body subaltern in its old
age; its climacteric language of gonadal weakness and absent cognition is ex
hausted in the signifcation of old men. There is an unsignifable gap between this
ALZHEI MER'S HELL
79
senie physiology predicated upon a naturalized rhetoric of gender diference, and
the bodies of women Nascher encounters. If old men are normal but weak, and
to be normal and weak is to be like a woman, what are old women like? They seem
to be like men: independent, mustachioed. But this must be performance, a mag
ical physiology Nascher falls back upon the archetype of the witch.
Simiarly, the second widow, "82 years of age, is fond of society, especially of
the young, and tries to appear young by resorting to facial artists, hair-dressers,
beautifers, and dressing in youthful garments and conducting herself like a young
woman. She takes seriously the jokng propositions of marriage made by young
men who know her weakness. "
Now "her memory is weak, she loses her way, " and yet "on the whole her con
versation is rational and coherent, though inappropriate for a woman of her
age. " 1 00 Her cognitive state is difcult to assess; she is presented as alternately ra
tional and confused. Her state in some ways seems analogous to that of the mid
climacteric "egotistical" lawyer and minister. But Nascher does not use a language
of pathological selfood-he does not call her "egotistical, " as he called the three
men-so much as he stresses her social pathology, her inappropriateness. She is
the old bawd, and her role encompasses her pathology more seamlessly than its
mirror, the old pantaloon, can represent the experience of climacteric men. Bawd
and witch: the two women are ofered not as a series, not as a moral economy of
aging as for the men, but as totalizing caricatures that obviate a processual physi
ology negotiating the normal and the pathological through moral choice. The
male body is made to contain the distinction through the invocation of the taken
for-granted logic of the female climacteric. The female body is made to contain
the distinction through a set of archetypes preventing counterhegemonic readings
of its sexuality Throughout, the fusion of physiology and pathology is not threat
ening to geriatric ideology, for it is read as diference in gender and not diference
mage.
ALZHEIMER' S FAMI LY
A compelling historiography of Azheimer's disease has been emerging, one that
centers on Kraepelin's motives in naming an "eienarte" r go6 fnding of his stu
dent and colleague Azheimer as a distinct disease. 1 0 1 Eienarte has been trans
lated as characteristic or peculiar. The standard narrative of Alzheimer's assumes
the former gloss, that Azheimer was conscious of identifying a pattern of neural
degeneration and plaque formation suggestive of a pathological sydrome distinct
from the "normal" anatomical fndings of senile dementia, and that Kraepelin
was merely honoring his achievement in eponymously naming the syndrome
Azheimer's disease. G. E. Berrios has convincingly and rather elegantly suggested
the latter gloss, that Alzheimer was struck by the peculiar characteristics of the
symptomatology of the middle-aged housewife brought into his clinic by her hus
band and of the neuropathology of her sliced and silver-stained brain.
Bo ALZHEI MER'S HELL
For Berrios, the critical and still-opaque moment i s t he decision of Kraepelin
and his colleagues to in efect rewrite Alzheimer's case materials, stressing only
cognitive symptoms rather than cognitive, afective, and delusional symptoms,
only a degenerative etiology and not arteriosclerotic and degenerative etiologies,
and only onset in midde age rather than a span encompassing midde and old
age. Through this set of exclusions Kraepelin could construct a distinct disease
category whereas for Alzheimer and most of his contemporaries the case of the
midde-aged housewife was peculiar precisely in its early onset and extreme pre
sentation of an existing disease category Berrios notes: "The most common in
terpretation by those living and writing during Azheimer's period was that the
'new' disease simply named cases with early onset, marked severity and focal
symptoms. As the cognitive paradigm consolidated, a clear move toward narrow
ing down the syndrome by for example, dismissing the presence of delusions and
hallucinations can be detected. Likewise, arteriosclerosis was quietly dropped, and
became an exclusion criterion. "102
Kraepelin's motives remain a puzzle for Berrios, perhaps given his tendency to
split Kraepelin's practice into distinct and fairly seamless "scientifc" and "nonsci
entic" realms. 103 His analysis, however, stilhelps clarif the central puzzle of the
historiography of the disease, its disappearance and rebirth. As Berrios notes, the
correlation of plaques and tangles with the symptoms of dementia preceded
Alzheimer's 1 907 report, 1
0
4 and subsequent work demonstrated the same constel
lation of symptoms and pathology with clinical onset in old age. 1
0
5 The classic
narrative of the modern Alzheimer's movement-that the great pathologist was
limited by the ageism of the time and could only see presenile dementia as patho
logical, awaiting the late 1 g6os for medicine to recognize that Alzheimer's was also
an apt characterization for senile dementia and thus to inaugurate the separation
of normal aging from pathological dementia-presumes Kraepelin's exclusions.
Yet the disappearance of Alzheimer's disease, its failure to capture the language of
senility treatment and research for half a century, suggests two alternative pro
cesses not adequately framed by "ageism, " the frst of which Berrios iluminates:
Kraepelin's exclusionary construction of a presenile nosology ran against an
emerging consensus and failed to provide a fruitful site for the laboratory or
clinic. 1
0
6
The other critical process, of course, was the development of arteriosclerotic
dementia, which far from being relegated to the sidelines by Kraepelin's exclusion,
became the dominant concept in senile dementia research and clinical practice for
much of the twentieth century Unlike the degenerative changes of Alzheimer's,
the vascular changes of arteriosclerosis were central sites of pharmaceutical re
search and interention, and new classes of vasodilatory drugs emerged as senility
treatments. Conceptual and commercial practices sustained one another well into
the 1 970s, in the United States, and later in much of Europe, Asia, and elsewhere.
There are multiple ways to think about the events of the 1 g6os through 1 g8os,
chronicled at length by Fox, Gubrium, and Lyman: the emergence of a profes-
ALZHEI MER'S HELL 81
sional and later a popular Azheimer's movement in the United States, its power
ful and in some senses ironic medicalization of old age, and the various routes of
its attempted globalization. The 1 970s and 1 g8os movement chronicled by Fox and
Gubrium emerges explicidy in terms of the anti-ageist critique-stressing the
normalcy of old age-of geriatrics. But the ideology of geriatrics and Fox's care
ful micropolitical analysis beg the question of why Alzheimer's was rediscovered
as senie pathology precisely when it was and why the popular culture of Alzhei
mer's hell spread so quicky
In part, Alzheimer's reemerges in the United States at an interesting time: the
middle- and upper-class "young old" were appropriating the man de of the elderly
in the creation of a social movement, and popular and ofcial concern in wealth
ier industrialized countries was increasingly taking up the imminent burdensome
ness of a growing gray wave. On the one hand, groups like the American Associ
ation of Retired Persons (AARP) formed powerful and well-heeled lobbies,
promoters of pedophobic Sun Cities created planned gerontopoli where children
and not the elderly were marginal, and resistance to ageist economic practice such
as forced retirement spawned an "aging and work" subfeld of social work and
fairly class-specifc senior employment agencies like the American group Opera
tion ABLE. The normalcy of decline-central to Nascher's physiology despite
the ideology of the new feld-was increasingly resisted, and normal aging came
to signify the wealthy retirees having fun pictured on the pages of Moden Matrt,
the AARP's magazine. Normal aging signifed an extension of the ideology of the
American Dream and of its dominant mood of fun. 1
0
7
On the other hand, rejecting the burdensomeness of the dependent elderly and
presering society's collective ability to leave home and roam America's byays
like Frank in his fantasy of authentic pre-Alzheimer's personhood-was legiti
mated through a redefnition of the most needy elderly as encompassed by the
nonpersonhood of their disease. The thematic of Macfarlane's analysis of village
communities in Tudor and Stuart Essex is repeated: as the legitimacy of the gif
no longer the giving of food to
w
dows by individual householders but the guar
anteed provision of income to all elders by the state-becomes contestable, so the
mind of old people-no longer marginalized older women but the so-called frai
elderly-becomes the object of unambiguous pathology here not the subter"
ranean associations of witchcraf but the earthly hell of Alzheimer's disease.
Given their rough class logic, the two turns-gerontocratic and gerontopho
bic-are not usually in opposition to one another. When an old American named
John Kingery was abandoned, apparendy by his daughter to avoid the costs of
maintaining him at a nursing home, at a dog track in Idaho hundreds of miles
from his family, a spokesperson for the AP lamented that such an action had to
happen but sypathized with the daughter:
"granny dumping, as it's called, was unheard of 15 years ago but now the anecdotal
evdence tells us it has become somewhat of a trend," said John Meyers, a
82 ALZHEI MER' S HELL
spokesman for the American Association of Retired Persons, which has 33 milion
members. "Not a day goes by when a hospital emergency room somewhere in Amer
ica doesn't have a case where some elderly person has been abandoned, usually by
the children " . . . . "The fact that children abandon their parents, as horrible as it is,
is indicative of the terrible balancing act that care-givers are stuck with. " 1
08
Meyers advocates federal support to famiies for adult day care centers, giving be
leaguered children a break. ARP members are at least as likely to be givers as re
cipients of care; one can join and begin receiving various senior citizen discounts
at age ffty Meyer's response, like the Newsweek articles, reminds us that being a
caregiver is experienced as the hell of the tabloids by older as well as younger chil
dren, that the desire behind the hegemony of Azheimer's pathology and its denial
of subjectivity to certain old bodies is located less in the politics of age per se than
of generation. His response again underlines the critical role of gender in the
structuring of pathology. Mr Kingery is granny-dumped; his expendability is re
inforced through the fgure of the pathetic old woman. The Murphy bed reap
pears as a generational collective fantasy
The language of legitimate pathology refects not only the view under the mi
croscope but the social construction of the person identifed with the slice of tis
sue. The vascular damage and necrosis of multi-infarct dementia and the plaques
and tangles of Azheimer's continue to share the etiologic limelight, but it is
plaques and tangles that become the key signs of the demented brain, and
''zheimer's" that becomes a medical idiom for dementia and lay idiom for senil
ity. The power of Azheimer's over other medicalizations lies in part, as Gubrium
and Lyman have pointed out, in its clear drawing of the line between normality
and pathology and its legitimation of control as therapy. Beyond this, Azheimer's
is structured as an embodiment of excess. Its "gold standard" remains the plaques
and tangles that appear in most aging brains but in excess in Azheimer's.
109
Plaques are real, demonstrable, and countable. Given the emphasis within the
Azheimer's movement on the continual reiteration of the disease's pathology
one of the two "enumerative obsessions" present at Zagreb-plaques and tangles
become the enumerable source of proo Old parents place demands on their chil
dren; these demands do not make Frank's dream of freedom any more realizable.
The behavior that has come to be called dementia makes particularly enormous
demands on children; these are far from the only demands, but contribute criti
cally to a moral economy in which the oldest old demand too much. Daughter
Regan says to Lear, "I pray you, father, being weak, seem so. "
110
The legitimacy of
the claims of old persons on their children is inevitably contested. Excess plaques
and tangles are demonstrable signs of a condition of this existential excess of the
old. They come to stand for the person with dementia not because of their uni
versality-vascular or multi-infarct and other types of dementia do not necessar
ily present with the pathology of Azheimer's-but because of their semantic po
tential, as conveyers of what the patient means to others. The neuropathology of
Azheimer' s-an unambiguous disease that can be counted, excess that can be re-
ALZHEI MER'S HELL 83
vealed for all to see-proves the logic of senility The interpersonal and existential
crises of aging-its excessive demands-can be reduced to the disturbance of ex
cessive mind. As the contest to defne a person's old age is increasingly appropri
ated by children, Alzheimer's becomes the quantifcation of excess.
Unlike the language of climacteric excess, the modern concept of Alzheimer's
resists the deployment of gendered pathology in naturalizing its claims to speak of
age. Whereas Charcot and Nascher locate the conditions of possibility for a sci
ence of the old body with the institutionalized body of the old woman,
Alzheimer's frst patients are defned by him not as a priori institutional material
for a science but persons from the outside whose reason for entry into the institu
tion is in itself the critical fact anchoring a reading of their cellular patholog The
patient of the 1 906 report had been "a woman, 51 years of age, " who
presented as the frst most striking mental symptom, ideas of jealousy concerning
her husband. Soon after, a rapidly developing mental weakening was noticed; she
would lose her way about in her own home, throw things around and hide herself for
fear of being killed . . . . In hospital she seemed perplexed, was disoriented for time
and place, occasionally complained that she understood nothing . . . . The patient
fnally was completely demented; confned to bed with contractures of the lower ex
tremities; and passed urine and feces involuntarily In spite of greatest care decubi
tus developed. Death afer a duration of 4 1/2 years.
Subsequently "after the Bielschowsky silver impregnation method" Alzheimer no
ticed two features on slides of her cortical brain tissue: "tangled bundle [s) of
fbrils" and "a deposition of peculiar stufs. " 1 1 1
The second case of what had already become known as Alzheimer's disease,
published in Igu, was of Johann F, a ffty-six-year-old day laborer and "moder
ate drinker" sent in 1 907 to the Munich psychiatric clinic "by the overseers of the
poor." For the previous si months he had "been forgetful; lost his way easiy;
could either not perform simple tasks or executed them awkwardly; stood about in
an aimless manner . . . and no longer bathed. " Over the course of the next three
years Alzheimer documented Johann F's "manifest deterioration, " eforts to pack
his clothing and leave the institution, increased incontinence, continual weight
loss, and eventual death "from symptoms of pneumonia. " 1 1 2
The fact that pathology is frst searched for and discovered in a jealous and ini
tially hysterical woman and then in an unproductive day laborer does not allow
one to reduce either the materiality of dementia or Azheimer's reasoning as a sci
entist to the equally material subalterity of these frst "Azheimer's patients. " Yet
behind the inquiry of the scientist wait the concerns of the husband and the over
seer; Alzheimer's at its moment of origination is rooted in a specifc need to ex
plain the progressively more demented minds of the already dependent. Its in
delible pathology-its incontrovertible plaques and tangles-demonstrates a
pathology that is rooted in far more than the very real changes Alzheimer recog
nizes and reconstructs as clinical signs. The possibility of the neuropathological
sign as stigmata draws on the social dependency of the person being redefned
84
ALZHEI MER'S HELL
through i t as unambiguously pathological . From its very frst two cases, Azhei
mer's has been situated at the moment of institutionalization and the conditions
of its possibility
This moment and these conditions are overdetermined. Social artifacts of
shifting categories of dependency and technobiological artifacts of new drugs,
new mice, and new clinical tests will afect and transform each other. Alzheimer's
may take hold as clinical reality in India even in the absence of a so-called health
transition. The impact of these new technobiological artifacts upon the local con
struction and negotiation of dependency across age, gender and class might well
be studied as an ongoing process. At the moment and site of this research, such
technobiological artifacts were of limited relevance to questions of local biology
or local politics, and the following chapter turns to a narrative and set of practices
of greater immediacy, those of the Bad Family
Yet at this moment of enchantment, in which globalizing agents like the mission
ary physicians of Alzheimer's Disease International and multinational marketers
of senility drugs profer Alzheimer's as the answer to India's inevitably backward
treatment of old people, the body of Alzheimer himself takes on unexpected and
perhaps local forms. The Bangalore-basedjournal of the Indian Academy of Sci
ences, Current Science, devoted a 1992 issue to Alzheimer's disease, billing it as "an
emerging issue for the developing countries. " 1 1 3 The articles included were a mix
of review articles, clinical overiews, and recent research and in their relative com
prehensiveness suggested that a diferent kind of Alzheimer's practice had re
placed the "better brain" project. On the cover of the special issue was a photo
graph of Alzheimer, but not the usual head shot accompanying books and articles
on the topic in the United States and Europe. 1 1 4 The usual narrative of
Alzheimer's life is one of tragedy the template generated by Kraepelin's own essay
on his junior colleague's various family losses and his own premature death. But
the Alzheimer who may be coming to matter in Indian science and whose invoca
tion promises to restore aging in India is envisioned dif erently here. In his inau
gural appearance in India, the great pathologist is pictured e fmill, holding his
son on his lap, seated next to his wife and daughter, and gazing through his ubiq
uitous monocle at their newborn baby
- Nuns and Doctors
A history of dotage wrested through the substance of old women's cries, gestures,
bodies, and brains: the captive material of the Salpetriere, for Charcot's theater of
clinico-anatomical correlation, the old women who ofer us knowledge, and
through their inexhaustible numbers the possibility of a science of old age and of
the boundaries of the pathological. But for a twentieth-century science of vivisec
tion and recombination, the surplus material of old women was not enough; their
live bodies could not circulate into the laboratory and the search was on for the
animal model, culminating in the arrival of several subspeciated brands of
Alzheimer's mouse on the business pages of the Wall Street Journal and New Yrk
Time in 1995.
It is no longer a question of relative ethics, mice versus doting old women. Old
women could not serve as the materialization of Alzheimer's as Alzheimer's was
increasingly less a metony of old age than a metaphor for it, its structural re
placement. No one ever dies of old age anymore, but of the nation's fourth lead
ing yet most insidious killer, and the material for a science can no longer be lim
ited to the old. One looks for clues, rather, among the young: skin tests or other
quick and painless assessments of future hell .
But the history of dotage still exacts its occasional pull : its reliance on the sub
altern physiology of woman did not disappear with Alzheimer's plaques or with
the celebrated arrival of genetically engineered mice. Like Scot with his witches
and Charcot with his vieillfemmes, a group of researchers at the University of Ken
tucky discovered the disciplinary possibiities of old nuns. One-third of the elderly
School Sisters of Notre Dame were diagnosed with Alzheimer's, but all had kept
written traces of their youth-autobiographical essays they had been instructed to
write as novices, under the confessional authority of the church.
The Kentucky doctors found that the demented of the old nuns had, as young
86 NUNS AND DOCTORS
women, been more likely t o have written simple sentences devoid of grammatical
complexities; the old "mentally sharp" nuns when novices had in contrast written
complex sentences. "Study Suggests Azheimer's May Begin Early" ran the head
line in the San Frncico Chronicl. 1 The possibilities for Azheimer's swelled as the
ever more contested distribution of intelligence-heretofore limited to the revived
Bel Curve nature-nurture debates of the r ggos academy-could be framed as the
harbinger of worse hard-wired horrors. 2 Once again, the institutionalized bodies
of old women are the substrate for geriatric knowledge, but these bodies are now
extended back in time to a plumbing of a youthful confession for new stigmata.
Other explanations for the distribution of novitiate intelligence and for its corre
lation with the mental status of aged nuns were unimaginable.
From the wordplay of Mary Daly ex-Catholic and self-proclaimed Witch:
"academentia. "3 But real .
THREE
Knowledge, Practice, and the Bd Famil
y
in which te ol bo4 i constitutd a a sit q national we!re,
a an embodiment q te bad famil q midl clss modernit
ON GERONTOLOGICAL OBJECTS
It i hih time fr the basi q dicussion in these questions to be broadened and tickened up.
WILLI AM JAMES, A PLURAUST/C UNIVERSE
Against the taken-for-granted necessity of senile dementia, the anthropologist of
northeast India in Zagreb ofered the equally taken-for-granted declining status of
the joint family as an index of seniity When famiies fall apart, children no longer
respect and take care of their elderly parents. When old people are ignored or
abandoned, their bodies, including and encompassing their minds, decline. About
a dozen social scientists from India had come to Zagreb to give lectures on old age,
and they shared the concerns of the ethnographer of the northeast hil tribe. The
strength of the Indian contingent was indicative of the growth of social gerontol
ogy in India. To approach the construction of the senile body in Varanasi, I begin
with an examination of Indian gerontological practice and some of its discursive
and political milieus, to place the relation between the senile body and the struc
ture of the family within the ongoing production of the taken-for-granted.
I start with the words of N. L. Kumar, 1 a Delhi-based activist for the elderly, spo
ken to me in an interview in 1 989 at his home. I use Mr. Kumar's words to explore
a diferent sort of gerontological paradox. I was struck by what, from my perspec
tive, appeared as a set of ironies in Kumar's practice; I therefore want to note, at
the outset, my respect for what Kumar has almost single-handedly accomplished,
setting up what is by now a well-known nongovernmental organization (NGO) with
unceasing passion and determination. This respect extends to Dr. S. K. Nayer, Mr.
]. P Sharma, and Mrs. Aloka Mitra, whose work for the welfare of the elderly I dis
cuss below I have tried to keep respect for their individual accomplishments, char
acter, and vsions distinct from a critical analysis of discourse and practice.
88 KNOWLEDGE, PRACTI CE, AND THE BAD FAMI LY
"You see, frst, people did not know what a senior citizen is. "
We were sitting in Kumar's living room having tea, and I was taping the inter
view Kumar was noting the difculty that he had initially in arousing interest in
old age as a social issue. Searching after his own retirement for a cause to advocate,
Kumar had chosen work in gerontology He put the matter succinctly: "When I
retired, I had the whole time. So I said I should do something. So, all of a sudden,
this idea struck me. Because at that time, there was no aging in India. "
Kumar's lament, which eventualy led t o his founding of the organization Age
Care India and of the journal The Elerl, is for the lack of "aging" as a feld of
knowledge. But it is expressed as a lament for a lack of categories. India lacks se
nior citizens and India lacks aging. Kumar thus formulated his cause: India needs
senior citizens and India needs aging. The primary task of an Indian gerontology
is here not to study aging but, notably, to create it.
This act of creation merits refection. Since the early r g8os there has been an
eforescence of research projects, articles, books, projected welfare schemes, and
commissions concerned with the experience of old people in India. Much of this
emergent discipline of gerontology has shared the irony of Kumar's words. That
is, it is a feld that has erased its ostensible object, allowing for the paradox of no
aging in India.
By obect, I mean here not only an object of analysis but also the implicit
benefciary of an applied social science. The ostensible object of the new geron
tology is the typical old Indian. Many recent gerontological reports ofered this
fgure and his or her needs as their raison d' etre. The face of a wizened old peas
ant or of an urban slum dweller has graced book covers. 2 Gerontological activists
have invoked urban poor or rural elderly HelpAge India, the country's premier
gerontological social service organization, christened this object "the less privi
leged elderly" on the back of its r g8g Christmas cards.
This object is erased when, despite a plethora of state-sponsored studies sug
gesting that many old people fall between the cracks of self family, and govern
ment assistance, the only signifcant form of state support remains a pension for a
minority of relatively privileged elderly. It is erased when private gerontological
institutions that constitute themselves as serving the needs of a lower-class major
ity in fact distribute most of their resources to an urban and ofen middle-class
clientele. It is erased most profoundly when the structure of the scientic discourse
of aging limits social analysis to the needs of urban elite elders and their famiies.
The pensioner, the "senior citizen" whom Kumar searches for but will only fnd
when he abandons the slums of Delhi for its wealthier colonies, remains the pri
mary object of academic and applied gerontology in India.
How does the science of aging in India erase its object? Gerontological writing
and practice is dominated by a powerful and seldom challenged narrative of the
decline of the Indian joint family and the consequent emergence of old age as a
time of difculty The narrative runs somewhat as follows: ( r ) Indian famiies were
all once multigenerational ' )oint" households; (2) in such households, old people
KNOWLEDGE, PRACTI CE, AND THE BAD FAMI LY 89
had all their needs taken care of were listened to and respected, and had few com
plaints-old age was a pleasure; (3) with the advent of Westernization, modern
ization, industrialization, and urbanization, families began to break up, and the
social support and respect for the elderly declined, along with their quality of life.
Far from a universalizable object of analysis, the old person who inhabits such
a narrative maps primarily onto the experience of elite and urban middle-class el
derly men. The object of gerontology is split between the "disadvantaged elder,"
who is the disciplinary icon, and the pensioner, who is the ultimate index of analy
sis. Analyses of the sociology of aging or proposals for government spending, usu
ally constructed out of the experience of the pensioner, inevitably invoke the
fgure of the disadvantaged elder to legitimate their universality and claims for pa
tronage. The pensioner and the disadvantaged old person come to stand for one
another-through the denial of local disjunctions of class and power-in the con
stitution of a seamless gerontological object.
Most of the literature in English or Hindi on old age in contemporary India is
organized around an imminent "problem of aging": more old people and less de
sire and ability-given the taken-for-granted decline of the joint family-to take
care of them. This problem is deemed not only relevant but critical for immediate
address in India: the language of gerontology is alarmist, almost apocalytic. In
both the studies on old age and the formal and informal charters of the institu
tions considered here, the problem of aging is taken as an originating point. It is
assumed, not demonstrated.
THE ''GING IN INDIA' SERIES
The issue that brings him t a halt is notin more or lss tan repetition.
KI ERKEGAARD, REPETITION
I focus here on two texts. Aging in India, K. S. Soodan's sociological surey of urban
Lucknow elderly, was published in 1 975. The Agin in India, edited by A. B. Bose and
K. D. Gangrade, appeared in 1 988. The fact the two works share a title is not sur
prising: other recent English-language books on gerontology include the 1 982
Agn in India and the 1 987 Agin in India, as well as variants on the theme-the 1 982
Agn in Sout Asia, the 1 987 Agin in Contporar India, and the 1 989 Aged in India. 3
Even if we concur with Kumar that prior to the 1 970s there was no aging in India,
there seems to be naught but Aging in India since. 4
The repetition merits analysis. 'ging" implies a universal, the idealized object
of international gerontology, a thing that can be in India. Yet "India" is not a uni
versal . 'ging in India" is oxymoronic. India is an Other that must be encom
passed; the phrase sustains a relation between totalizing and subordinate uni
verses. There are few gerontological works in India titled simply Agin by itself,
"aging" cannot articulate the relationship to an Other central to these works.
"India" or "in India" is thus the requisite coda for gerontological formulations.
The three most prominent organizations devoted to the elderly and based in New
90 KNOWLEDGE, PRACTI CE, AND THE BAD FAMI LY
Delhi are named HelpAge India, Age-Care India, and Age Aid Indi. Kumar, the
founder of the second of these, described the genesis of its name:
See, the name always matters . . . . I said, "Look here; this sort of organization, we
don't have a proper name for it. Let's go, let's go out somewhere. We went to a
restaurant, we went to a park, and we were relaxing. We walked over the grass. It was
cool, you see, evening. And he suggested some names, I suggested some names. Then
later, I suggested this name. Why not make it Age-Care? And we added India, to give
it a specifc.
Like Adam and Eve's naming of the animals, this garden idyll generated a uni
versal category with the "specifc" of India an essential aferthought.
HelpAge India, the most prominent of these social service agencies, is more
explicitly predicated on the legitimacy of internationalist universals. It began as a
subsidiary of a British organization, HelpAge, which was spreading the message
of caring for the aged worldwide. In a replaying of colonial experience, the Indian
organization began with a Company phase, a few adventurous British social work
ers out to understand the problems of the aged in India. It moved into an impe
rial phase, the emergence of an organization modeled on British lines and run by
an Englishman. And it matured into a neocolonial phase, an Indian-run organi
zation, but still dependent for much of its funding and thus inspiration on several
European HelpAges. 5 In moving from being a branch of HelpAge to indepen
dence as HelpAge India, the agency's one-way ties to British knowledge are not
abandoned. By appending "India, " HelpAge, Age-Care, Age Aid, and geronto
logical authors all claim local autonomy from internationalist discourse, but do so
through a reassertion of epistemological subordination.
The Aging in India books share not just a title but the narrative of the Fall. To
demonstrate an imminent crisis, their authors rely exclusively on numbers. There
are no detailed case studies demonstrating the crisis, nor any historical analyses
documenting change. Any documentation of experience is lacking. Like a geyser,
the crisis lies beneath the surface of things; its explosive power cannot be seen be
fore the fact and must be inferred. Projective demography thus lies at the center of
this gerontology. The earliest of the series, Soodan's 1975 study of urban Luckow
elders, opens with a demographic demonstration of old age being a problem: "any
person completing 55 years at the time of the surey was considered an aged per
son for the purpose of this surey The number of such persons in India is now in
creasing at the rate of . 9.07 per cent for the decade. This rate of growth is likely
to further increase as a result of longer survival ages enjoyed by elderly persons.
The resulting problems posed by the increasing number of the aged now and in
future [si] will have to be faced by us sooner or later. "6
The book begins by assuming "problems," but what they are remains un
specifed and their timing is vague: "sooner or later." The numbers themselves are
the principal signifers here. Throughout the Agin in India series, demographics
are used not to supplement but to represent the meaning of old age and the con-
KNOWLEDGE, PRACTI CE, AND THE BAD FAMI LY
9
1
cition of old people. Despite this impressive rise in the number of old people, only
near the end of the chapter does Soodan reveal that for the same decade ( 1 951 -61 )
the proportion of old people actually "fell slightiy from 8. 3 per cent of the popu
lation to 7- 45. "7 The use of demography as legitimation of the a priori problem
aticity of old people is selective. Soodan goes on to cite fgures refecting a pro
portional increase of those over ffty-fve in coming decades, but these again are
ofered as an afrmation of what is already assumed.
Most of the Agin in Indi books include chapters on demography; these tend to
repeat one another. Implications are seldom assessed. As an example: the efect of
a "gray wave" is examined through parameters such as dependency ratios. These
assume that most young people are working and that most old people are not, nei
ther of which is a tenable assumption in many Indian contexts. Further, the idea
of "dependency" as a parameter of a problem rests on a set of culturally and his
torically located rules in which autonomy defnes selfood and individuals are re
sponsible for the maintenance of their autonomy. Dependent old people break
these rules, and lots of them challenge the playing of the game. Diferent rules
mandate careful consideration to diferent challenges. Gerontology by taking its
problem for granted in structuring analyses, rarely asks which demographic infor
mation is useful or how it should be interpreted.
Soodan randomly samples households throughout the city of Lucknow, using
an elaborate schedule that solicits residential, occupational, medical, familial, and
emotional data from informants. He utilizes these data to suggest that old people
have multiple problems: residential, occupational, medical, familial, and emo
tional. That Indian narrative and medical texts have made a similar point for mil
lennia is no bar to Soodan tying these problems to a new problem of aging. A new
problem mandates a new solution, and Soodan advocates fnancial assistance and
professional attention for each of his classes of problematicit His suggestions in
clude a universal pension, increased funding for gerontological research, and the
provision of health services, old age homes, clubs, day care centers, homemaker
serices, meals-on-wheels, and "friendly visits" by the state.
The complaint and the sufering Soodan documents are real. But the catalogue
of needs he generates in his zeal to document multiple sources of distress, com
plaint, and sufering as The Problem is so broad as to approach the tautological.
Soodan's "solution" ignores the economic limitations of state spending, the poli
tics of state assistance, and the setting of welfare priorities. In proposing interen
tions like meals-on-wheels in the context of endemic undernutrition and limited
access to potable water across generations, Agin in India approaches the absurd.
Like the books that follow it, Soodan's detailed and well-intentioned study rein
forces the bureaucratic equation of gerontology with a utopia beyond practical
consideration. The generation of gerontological utopia legitimates the sience of
the state.
The 1 988 avatar of Aing in India develops the same set of themes. Its jacket
alerts the reader to the fact that "the aging of populations is taking place in both
9
2 KNOWLEDGE, PRACTI CE, AND THE BAD FAMI LY
developed and developing countries due to the lowering of birth rates and death
rates and increased life expectancy In India, too, the numbers as well as the pro
portion of the population 6o + are showing a rising trend. This gives an indication
of the tasks that lie ahead, specially since about half of this population belongs to
vlnerable socio-economic groups. " Again: the demographic proof of an un
specied problem, the requisite positional coda "in India, too," and the legitima
tion of the feld in terms of "vulnerable socio-economic groups. " The protagonist
is the disadvantaged elder, incarnate as the village peasant on the book's cover.
Yet gerontology's split object is evident. The volume is based on the proceed
ings of a seminar held joindy by the Citizenship Development Society and the
Bombay-based Association for Senior Citizens (the latter group does not append
"in India" to its name, but describes itself as "acting as the Indian chapter of the
International Association of Senior Citizens based in Los Angeles") . Funding for
the seminar was provided by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation of West Ger
many, dedicated to Naumann's faith in the "self-reliant individual . " Articles in the
volume-as they move from general exhortations nominally sensitive to both of
gerontology's objects to specifc proposals-presume individuals and families with
economic resources sufcient to aford subsidized elderly housing and attend geri
atric clinics and with a desire to identif themselves or their parents as senior citi
zens and initiate political action as an interest group. They presume, in other
words, the pensioner or senior citizen, not the disadvantaged elder in whose name.
the volume is legitimated.
Thus C. Subrahmanium notes in his introductory remarks to this volume:
'ong the aged there are two categories. The frst category consists of men re
tired from active life-from Government service and other organised sectors . . . .
Organizations to utiise the services of these senior citizens wil have to be estab
lished. " The pensioner is presented as active and as male, and his presence man
dates the establishment of gerontological organizations. In contrast, "a dif erent
approach will have to be made for those who have become weak and disabled. "
For them, "family as an institution wil have to play a crucial role in taking care of
the aged. "8 The fgure of the disadvantaged elder glides into that of the frai and
weak body and this latter, gender-neutral fgure does not generate the promise of
new institutional development but of recourse to the family-whose terminal de
cline is suddenly and mysteriously forgotten-with no mention of state patronage.
A third component of the Aging in India series, along with routinized demo
graphics and the utopian response to the apocalyptic Problem, is an elaboration of
tradition, contained within the obligatory narrative of the Fall. The 1 988 Agin in
India begins with appeals to demographic crisis and goes on: "By tradition, reli
gious and cultural, the elders are given a high status in Indian society . . . . In the
past, joint family was the common pattern that existed with the head of the fam
ily enjoying rights and responsibilities and commanding obedience and respect. "
However: "Under the impact of the Industrial Revolution the joint family system
is fast breaking down. "
KNOWLEDGE, PRACTI CE, AND THE BAD FAMI LY
93
The use of the image of a devastated joint family remains selective. But as the
primary object of most of the Agin in India series is the pensioner, the references
to the decline of the joint famiy are ubiquitous. Another article in the volume, a
sociological analysis of intergenerational confict, assumes that the premodern
family was "a self-sufcient unit, socialy and economically, the centre of the uni
verse for the whole family the arbiter of life's important decisions," and so forth. 9
The article proceeds with an analysis of "change" in family structure, with no data
whatsoever on the presumed "before" of the picture.
Throughout the genre, the "traditional" family is conceived in idealized terms
as an indivisible unit free from confict and existing outside of the contingencies of
time and space. A Golden Age is uncriticaly assumed. Normative exhortations to
honor one's parents and the flial piety of moral cynosures such as Lord Ram or the
devoted son Shravan Kumar are taken as evidence for an unambiguously geronto
cratic society stretching from ancient Vedic days to the fondly remembered child
hood of the author in question. Other traces of "tradition"-the elaborate de
scriptions of the decrepitude and humiiations of the old body in the texts known
as Puranas, the stress in Ayuredic medicine on the avoidance of old age altogether
through longevty (raqana) theray the extensive soteriological use of the fgure of
the old person within Buddhist and Epic texts as sign of the materialist fallacy at its
most pathetic-all are ignored in these readings. 1 0 Or, as we wl see below in the
case of Ayureda, the location and meaning of decrepitude are extensively re
worked. In closing inquiry to the richness and complexity of ritual and text as re
sponses to, rather than merely injunctions about, aging and to the history of the
family as more than a process of decline, gerontology denies itself the use of this
history in its own creation. With the sealing of of the past, the discipline defnes it
self as having recourse only to "the West" for models to interpret a Fallen present.
INTERNATIONALIST SCIENCE
I have to tk you r America fr the great attmpt you are makin to break down the barrirs
r thi littl worl r ours . . . it has been given t thee t march at the vanuard r civilisation
with the fag r harmOT.
SWAMI VI VEKANANDA, CHICAGO ADDRESSES
The United Nations declared 1 982 the International Year of the Aged. Represen
tatives from around the world met that year in Vienna for a World Assembly on
Aging. This meeting has come to assume near mythic status in Indian texts on
gerontology. Its continual invocation 1 1 is reminiscent of the symbolic power of the
1 893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago where the Bengali religious leader
Swami Vivekananda is said to have put Hinduism on an equal footing with the
world's other great religions. But no such explicit counterhegemonic move came
out of the Vienna conference. The structure of the World Assembly was less in
teractive than didactic, and its message-aging as a global problem-permitted
no variant interpretations.
94
KNOWLEDGE, PRACTI CE, AND THE BAD FAMI LY
American gerontology texts of the same period
a
s the Indian texts cited above
seldom mentioned the World Assembly, unless they were by authors in the busi
ness of writing authoritatively about aging in non-American societies. "Interna
tional gerontology" (as opposed to the specifc citation of European and particu
larly Scandinavian experience) has had relatively little impact on American
gerontology yet American and European authors continue to dominate the feld
and set its agenda.
The unidirectional fow of information was illustrated by the appendix to the
Assembly's report. Letters from four representative world leaders were included.
Ronald Reagan was there for the developed West, Henryk Jablonski of Poland
stood for the Eastern Bloc, Indira Gandhi spoke for the developing world, and the
Pope held forth for Christendom. While Jablonski and Reagan extolled the virtues
of the gerontological experience their respective systems of kowledge and power
have produced, Mrs. Gandhi was more modest: "The pooling of experience and
ideas from diferent countries will be useful in helping us to tackle our own prob
lem. " 1 2 Knowledge was neither produced nor transformed at the conference but
transferred along well-rutted paths.
In preparation for the 1 982 conference, both India and the United States pro
duced status papers on the condition of old people. The American paper was im
plicitly constructed as a vehicle of fre policy: it was produced by the Depart
ment of State. 1 3 The Indian paper was structured as a vehicle of social policy and
was produced by the Ministry of Welfare. 1 4 The theme of the American docu
ment was success in meeting the challenges of the problem of aging, a theme
refected in the narrative structure of its system of classifcation in which old age
is held aloft on pilars of "Health, " "Income Security" "Social Services, " and
"Personal Fulfllment. " The Indian document refected two contradictory orien
tations: an openness to the importation of foreign gerontological technology, yet
an adjoined critique of age-specifc policy eforts. The paper suggested that geron
tological concerns in India are being and should be met not through gerontology
but through integrated planning for the welfare of the entire population. Kumar's
"no aging in India," the acknowledged lack of state involvement in old age, was
perceived simultaneously as a vacuum to be fled by the West and as a sign of a
generationally indivisible familial self and polity in contrast to those of the West.
Yet the Indian document, with its ambivalence toward the relevance of a
specifcally gerontological epistemology made no impact on the Vienna Assembly
or its sequelae. The primary document to emerge from Vienna, and one to which
the Indian Ministry of Welfare has had to devote considerable attention, was an
"International Plan of Action, " a set of recommend

tions (each beginning "Gov

ernments should . . . ") with the provision for follow-up questionnaires to examine
individual governments' compliance with them. These questionnaires are com
posed of questions in the form "Does the Government have policies . . . ?" "Has
the Government adopted a policy . ?" and so forth: they demand adherence to
a single ideology of gerontological practice. 1 5
KNOWLEDGE, PRACTI CE, AND THE BAD FAMI LY
95
The form of the Ministry's response to the questionnaire has been that of the
confessional . Despite the partial critique contained within their own status paper,
ministry ofcials I interviewed in 1 989 interpreted their inability to answer many
of the responses mandated by the International Plan as gerontological failure or,
at best, as due to a lack of resources. Again and again, the questionnaire de
manded "Does the Government . . . , " to which the ministry ofcials could only
respond in the questionnaire they returned to Vienna: No, No, No. 1 6
The A merican status paper stood in sharp contrast. A record of continuing
successes, it pointed out the congruence of "international" and ' )merican"
gerontology It ofered a history of gerontology as a deepening recognition of the
problematicity of "aging" and as a movement toward the standardization of a re
sponse. This movement was fgured as a series of syposia, councils, andconfer
ences. One reads that an emerging "awareness of aging as a national challenge . . .
at the end of the nineteenth century" was formalized in 1938 through a sypo
sium and companion volume, Pobls o Agein. 1 7 American institutions were
ofered as templates for international interentions, including those proposed by
the World Assembly and its Plan of Action.
The kowledge to be gathered under this new movement, according to the sta
tus paper, assumed a division between the informed and the ignorant. From the
outset, gerontology in the United States was framed as a missionary specialty.
Thus, in the 1 950s an "Inter-University Council on Social Gerontology [met to)
further professional training" through "two month-long indoctrination programs for
75 college and university faculty members who had developed an interest in
aging. "1 8 Conversion was followed by routinization; gerontology formalized its
identity as an increasingly bureaucratized aging enterprise, and the direction of
assumed rationalization was toward a merger with the state.
The 1 982 World Assembly on Aging shared the two primary goals of the ar
chetypal gerontological conference of which it is structured as an extension: nam
ing old age as problem and inculcating the need for a uniform response among the
ignorant. "International gerontology" was thus the efort to universalize through
one-way communication a culturally specifc epistemology: the invocation of a
global community of knowledge to advance the claims of truth of a particular
worldview we might term internationalit.
The epistemology underlying the World Assembly and its "collective" expertise
is internationalist rather than international . It can be represented as a set of as
sumptions:
Universalit: The old person and the old body are legitimate foundational points
for a science whose assertions are universalizable. There is a universal old
person, a universal old body, and a universal way of talking about them,
and a gerontology is-and should he-about such universals. These uni
versal objects of gerontology are not located within culturally and histor
ically specifc discourses.
9
6 KNOWLEDGE, PRACTI CE, AND THE BAD FAMI LY
Poblmaticit: The old person and the old body-rather than old age-are con
ceptualized and signifed a priori as problems. This problematicity can
not be defected onto other frames such as the family
Morl Imperative: To talk about old people and old bodies as problems is a moral
and necessary act.
Threat. The old person or old body as problem is not only essential and analyz
able but inherently threatening. This threat is met by a metanarrative of
"normalcy" or "functionality" that is superimposed upon the root prob
lematicity of the old person or body partially rendering that problem
aticity invisible.
That this epistemology and its claims are in point of fact not universal is read by
international gerontology along evolutionary lines as legitimation of its civilizing
miSSIOn.
Precisely what is at stake for international gerontology becomes clear in a char
ter of its goals created by one of its premier exponents, Donald Cowgill. In a 1 979
article, "The International Development of Academic Gerontology" Cowgill and
Rosemary Orgren noted that gerontology as a scientifc discipline emerges only in
certain social and historical contexts and its development is conditioned by further
social and historical changes. More concretely we may posit that societies which
have small proportions of their populations in advanced ages . . . wl not develop
a self-conscious analysis of old age and will not be concerned with the problems
and conditions of aging."
Cowgill posited fve stages of gerontological thought:
1 . The absence of gerontology within "developing societies, " for example, Brazil
or Iran.
2. A "beginning interest," ofen a "transplanted interest stimulated by contact
with gerontology elsewhere, " for example, Thailand (where, as luck would have
it, "a former student of mine is planning to study the inmates of their old folks
residential homes") or Taiwan.
3 An intermediate stage of "research under way" where "few if any faculty de
scribe themselves as gerontologists, " for example, Australia or Japan.
4 '' full range of academic programs in gerontology" for example, most of west
ern Europe.
5 Formal state-sponsored gerontological research, the transition to which the
United States is undergoing. 1 9
The gerontologist must not only study the old person at home, but should en
courage gerontological transformation abroad. Cowgill's scheme of the evolution
of gerontological knowledge paralleled his more well known evolutionary schema,
presented in the 1 972 volume he edited with Lowell Holmes, Agin and Moderniza
ton. In the 1 g6os and 1 970s, Cowgill and others applied modernization theory-a
powerful body of Cold War scholarship cutting across social scientifc disciplines,
KNOWLEDGE, PRACTI CE, AND THE BAD FAMI LY
97
which charted the progression of formerly colonized societies from "traditional"
to "modern" guided by the controlled infusion, through market penetration, of
foreign capital and expertise-to the study of old people. The theories of Parsons,
Redfeld, Rostow and others correlating the increased penetration of the United
States into "developing economies" and the predicted rise of the socioeconomic
conditions of the formerly colonized, were used to predict a corresponding decline
i the status of old persons even as their societies advance, the fy in the modern
ization ointment. 20
The sources of decline within this theory are multiple and overlapping. Indus
trialization and consequent urbanization lead to the migration of a younger gen
eration away from villages; joint famiies are split and children, the traditional sup
ports of their old parents, are displaced. Traditional knowledge and thus the
legitimation of gerontocratic authority is rendered increasingly obsolete; inter
generational confict rises and chidren come increasingly to identif themselves
against their parents. Parental support is increasingly perceived as a burden. The
lengthening of the life span and a decline in birth and mortality rates lead to more
old people, numerically and proportionally; the burden is not only subjective but
objective. Women move into less ascriptive roles and are less able to be home to
care for an older generation. Aging and modernization theory reads these changes
as iatrogenic side efects of an otherise benefcent process: international geron
tology becomes the prescribed treatment for the prognosticated ills of moderniza
tion.
Talcott Parsons himself articulated the transformations of old age with mod
ernization:
By comparison with other societies the United States assumes an extreme position in
the isolation of old age from participation in the most important social structures
and interests . . . . Two primary bases of the situation . . . [are frst] the isolation of
the individual conjugal family[:] . . . the parental couple is left without attachment to
any continuous knship group; [second] the occupational structure. As an individ
ual's occupational status centers in a specifc ' )ob," he either holds the job or does
not, and the tendency is to maintain the ful level of functions up to a given point and
then abrupdy to retire. 2 1
I n Agn in Jstn Socits, Ernest Burgess developed these ideas at length, arguing
that urbanization and mass production undermined the economic basis of the ex
tended famiy resulting in less family support and greater isolation for longer lived
elderly. 22 That modernity was responsible for the "scandalous" position of the el
derly achieved wdespread intellectual and popular support through works like Si
mone de Beauvoir's l Vieillsse. Beauvoir argued that the dehumanization of the
elderly could occur because modern society had no use for them. Old people are
increasingly "defned by an exis, not by a praxis"; that is, they are seen as being ob
jects and not actors, as being nonselves, persons without subjectivity23
Aging and modernization theorists were more optimistic. A potential crisis of
legitimacy for the foreign expert-the deleterious efects of development for old
9
8 KNOWLEDGE, PRACTI CE, AND THE BAD FAMI LY
people-was transformed into a further rationale for their practice. International
gerontology ofered the West as both problem and solution, Hope in a Pandora's
box of gerontophobic demons. The underdeveloped naif was falling and required
the experience of the fallen to learn to cushion the blow. The decline in elder sta
tus with modernization was ofset by the growth of formal gerontological knowl
edge.
Thus Erdman Palmore and Kenneth Manton could write: "When societies
'mature' the rates of change level of and the discrepancies between aged and
non-aged decrease. There may be other factors such as the growth of new institu
tions to replace the farm and famiy in maintaining the status of the aged such as
retirement benefts, more adult education and job retraining, policies against age
discrimination in employment, etc. " Modernization is redeemed. "The aged need
not fear the advanced stages of modernization, because their average occupation
and education status should no longer fall as in the early stages, and it may even
begin to rise. "24
Palmore and Manton attempted to quantify status and modernization in an
efort to demonstrate both this rise and fall. Defning status as the "relative socio
economic position of the aged" (measuring the employment status, occupation,
and education of those over sixty-fve and comparing it to those twenty-fve to
sixty-four) and modernization in terms of increased productivity (measuring the
per capita gross national product) , the shif away from agriculture, and education
(measuring literacy the proportion of youth in school, and the proportion of the
population receiving higher education) , they presented data to suggest status does
not simply decline with modernization but begins to improve. In defning aging
and modernization not as a linear decline but as a ':-shaped relationship," Pal
more and Manton argued that with the emergence of what Cowgill and Orgren
would have termed a stage fve level of sophistication (with its corollary of total
state involvement) , gerontology would eventually raise the status of old people to
potentially unlimited horizons.
Palmore and Manton's and Cowgill and Orgren's constructions of the evolu
tion of gerontology had to remain vague on origins. Gerontology was represented
both as a natural function of the proportion of elderly within a society and, para
doxically as a
.
sophisticated technology requiring foreign insemination. Ultimately
the feld is structured as an enterprise whose interests are tied to the state and
whose members should advocate the continual expansion of its boundaries.
Gerontology comes down from above, here in the person of the ffth- (and high
est) stage American scholar sending his students around the world to spread the
true gospel.
What makes this manifesto frightening is the absolute sincerity with which it
was presented. That stage one and stage two societies might have elaborate, func
tional, refexive, modernizing but dif erent theories of aging and the life course
(against the gerontological assumption of universality), that isolating and profes
sionalizing these processes of thinking about aging-let alone allying them to the
KNOWLEDGE, PRACTI CE, AND THE BAD FAMI LY
99
state-might have untoward efects on the lives of old people (against the geron
tological assumption of the moral imperative), and that the process of kowledge
production Cowgill ofered is rooted in political inequities were not considered.
The center-periphery structure of international gerontology was evdent in the
"Plan of Action Questionnaire, " which assumed the universality of aging as a
problem and of the state as defner of problems and agent of solutions. The
schedule of needs implicit in its questions maintained the hierarchy of geronto
logical development by defning the success or faiure of local responses in terms
of the acquisition of Euro-American gerontological technology The Vienna
ofce's demands included the following:
2. 9 If the country has no research centre dealing with the aging of populations,
does the Government contemplate establishing one or more such centres?
4
1 Has the Government adopted a policy concerning the protection of elderly
consumers?
7. 2a . . . please indicate which of the following social welfare serices have been
developed for the elderly?
Financial assistance
Senior centres and day-care centres (with health services)
-Distribution of basic foods to needy elderly
Meals in group setting (soup kitchens, etc. )
-Home delivery of meals (i . e. , "Meals on Wheels")
Distribution of clothing and other basic items to needy elderly
Clubs
Home help (i. e. , to assist in housekeeping, cleaning, shopping,
personal hygiene, etc.)
Laundry services
-Volunteer serices for the aged
Friendly visitors (for promoting social contact)
Telephone contact systems
The document presumed a state that ensures the provision of basic resources to its
citizens but may neglect to pay attention to the specifc needs of the aged. Like the
Agn in India series, it presented a utopian gerontological universe that in its in
commensurability with Indian political economy marks the internationalist im
perative as both a superordinate asymptote for gerontological striving (guarantee
ing the need for an infnite production of discourse) and an avoidable impossibiity
for the state.
Other possibiities do exist. Against the utopian gerontology that emerges in
the meeting of a local sociology of old age with a globalizing mission practice, the
vigorous debate on social security begun by Amartya Sen and continued by Bina
Agarwal, Marty Chen, and Jean Dreze, among others, 25 addresses the specifc
needs of the elderly generally and old widows in particular without isolating them
from broader questions of entitlement, scarcity the state, and public action.
100 KNOWLEDGE, PRACTI CE, AND THE BAD FAMI LY
Against the construction of the Indian elder as a unitary object within the narra
tive of the Fall, the eforts begun by Alfred De Souza and others at the Indian So
cial Institute in Delhi to address the class-specifc needs of urban elderly and in
particular the elderly poor ofer the beginnings of a dif erent sociology of old
age. 26 But such possibilities will remain incoherent as long as state and global in
terest in utopian rhetoric and inexpensive inaction colude with the disciplinary
structures of international gerontology.
THE "GOLDEN I SLES"
It i reportd, that upon the Hill f Casmere tere are men that live some hundred q years,
and can hol their breaths, and !e in Tances fr several years togethe i tey be but kept warm.
JOHN MARSHAL, "A LETTER FROM THE EAST I NDI ES,
"
PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS
Peter Laslett, ofering a historical critique of aging and modernization assump
tions in Britain, noted that these theories posit a typology of before and after: the
elderly before modernization were treated well; the elderly since modernization
are treated poorly 27 A second typology of there and here is superimposed on that
of before and afer. Corinne Nydegger termed the before and there stories geron
tological myths: the "Golden Age" and the "Golden Isles"; they are united by the
theme of the "Rosy Famiy" providing strength, love, and sustenance to all its
members. "28
Critiques of Aging and Modernization approaches have tackled either the be
fore/ after or the there/here versions. Dependency and world-systems critiques of
modernization theory-which examine how neocolonial and core-periphery eco
nomic relations continue colonial processes of surplus extraction and collective
impoverishment and intensif the marginal existence of the nonmetropolitan ma
jority rather than "boost" underdeveloped economies-have been applied in a
gerontological context by Peter Townsend and others. Townsend does not reject
the central tenet of classical Aging and Modernization theor that old age has be
come a bad age, but rather shifs the emphasis from status decline as an unfortu
nate epiphenomenon of an otherse benefcent and natural process to decline as
socially engineered:
I am arguing, then, that society creates the framework of institutions and rules
within which the general problems of the elderly emerge and, indeed, are manufac
tured. Decisions are being taken every day, in the management of the economy and
in the maintenance and development of social institutions, which govern the posi
tion which the elderly occupy in national life, and these also contribute powerfully to
the public consciousness of diferent meanings of ageing and old age. 29
The decline in the quality of life of older people does not just "happen" with mod
ernization; societies actively and continually produce dependency
Sheila Neysmith and Joey Edwardth place Townsend's idea of the social de
pendency of the elderly into the context of Third World economic dependency
KNOWLEDGE, PRACTI CE, AND THE BAD FAMI LY 101
They suggest that "the manner in which Third World nations respond to the
human needs of their old is subject to the relationship that entwines Third World
and capitalist industrialised nations," such that "social policy and human service
models are nurtured by the ideology underlyng these economic relations. " The
resulting institutions "at best support an elite . . . . This social structure, however,
means that most people wil never beneft from such programmes. " Neysmith and
Edwardth conclude:
Third world countries must develop indigenous responses that refect the needs of
old people in their countries. Retirement and famiy policies as conceptualized in
countries with developed market economies may be totally irrelevant; other pro
grammes may not be. At a minimum, the assumptions behind serice models must
be critically examined. Our critique goes beyond the question of transferability of
services. Service models merely refect theories of aging, all of which are ideologi
cally based. 3
0
Most criticisms of Aging and Modernization challenge its universal typology of
social change. Cowgill and Holmes culled material from a variety of decontextu
alized sources and ignored or explained away inconvenient data in their pursuit of
universal patterns. 31 Palmore and Manton's work has been criticized for a similar
tendency to use data selectively. 32 David Fischer has argued that their correlation
of modernization and status decline is tautological, given that variables like edu
cational status are used as an index both of status and of modernization. 33
Sociologists and historians of aging writing primariy about the United States,
Britain, and France have challenged the uniformity of the premodern before, the
unambiguous valence of social change, and the correlation of the status of the el
derly with industrialization. Georges Minois, in his comprehensive Hitire de I
Vzillsse e Occit, traced the gerontophobic representation of the elder in Europe
from Mediterranean classical antiquity through the Rnaissance. 34 Fischer and An
drew Achenbaum, writing on the United States, did not challenge the existence of
a Golden Age in itself but argued that declines in status were not necessariy a
product of urbanization and industrialization. 35 For Fischer, the decline of a geron
tocratic "cult of age" occurred early in the history of the republic and was tied to
social and ideological changes associated with the American and French Revolu
tions. For Achenbaum, signifcant change came later, after the Civ War and on
into the twentieth centur with "the impact of science and technology, of indus
trial innovations and bureaucratization, and of heightened age-consciousness and
age-grading." Peter Stearns argued against the existence of a Golden Age in
France. 36 Quadagno summarizes many similar studies: "The extended family
household of traditional society is not universal but varies signicandy over time
and space. Retirement is not solely a phenomenon of modern society Increased re
liance on large-scale organizations is not necessarily a symbol of the breakdown of
the family network. Further, some of the changes that did occur may have
b
een op
erating i diferent directions at diferent times. "37
102 KNOWLEDGE, PRACTI CE, AND THE BAD FAMI LY
Quadagno suggests that the empirical indicators used in this literature to assess
status make multiple ethnocentric and historically located assumptions about what
constitutes the physical and emotional security of old people, and she calls for a
redefnition of what sociologists mean by "status" sensitive to local political and
moral worlds.
Aging and Modernization theory projected the Golden Age onto Golden Isles
even as it ironically forecast their destruction. Critiques of Golden Isles ap
proaches have come from gerontological anthropologists. In writing of her feld
work in Samoa, Ellen Rhoads did not question Samoa's status as a Golden Isle but
suggested that dif erent constructions of family, work, and intergenerational sup
port seem "to have inhibited development of some of the more negative efects of
modernization cited by Cowgill and Holmes. "38
Janice Reid challenged both before and after in her work with members of the
Australian Yolngu community Cultural ideals, she argued, have far less to do with
the fortunes of individual elders than do "their personalities and their diferential
location in the economic, political , and social structures. " She stressed the variable
efects of social change: "Some old Yolngu today have been able to take advantage
of the direction of social change to enhance their status and material security; oth
ers have been bypassed or marginalised by the forces of modernisation and seen
their forces dwindle with age. "39 Nydegger pointed out that the majority of stud
ies on "the status of old people in . . . " have confounded "professed attitudes"
with "actual treatment" and respect for parents within families with the provision
of physical and emotional security for old persons as a group by society as a
whole. 4
0
Sociological and social anthropological studies of old age in India refect both
the initial enthusiasm for Aging and Modernization and the later emergence of a
critique. Three of the early advocates of the decline of the joint family were
Aieen Ross, F G. Bailey and Scarlett Epstein. In The Hindu Famil in It Urban Set
ting, Ross documented the opposed forces of "Break Down" and "Unity" within
rural families. She was unable show a simple movement from one pole to the
other, yet still concluded that with further modernization the forces of dissolution
would prevail. In constructing a story of there-before, she confated Sanskrit pre
scriptive traditions with social reality: "In the vlage they will have been largely
brought up on the idealized conceptions of adult roles found in the Mahibhirta
and Ramia1a. " Her conclusions, like those of the Agin in India series, were entirely
anticipatory: "These changes will bring older people many frustrations and anxi
eties. They will experience a loss of self-esteem, and may even feel intense social
isolation. They may fnd it difcult to understand the revolt of their children and
grandchildren against them. "41
Bailey and Epstein both noted a signifcant decline in the joint famiy despite
the paucity of historical data they drew upon. Bailey, working in Orissa, attributed
fssion to economic diversifcation, secondary to the dif erential income of broth
ers.42 Epstein found that only 8 to 10 percent of the families in the two Karnataka
KNOWLEDGE, PRACTI CE, AND THE BAD FAMI LY 103
villages of her study ft her defnition of ' )oint" as opposed to "elementary" fam
ilies. She admitted that for poorer families without signifcant landholdings, a sub
sistence economy would have always mandated small family size. For landholding
peasants in her initial study however, family size had declined, probably secondary
to the transformation from a subsistence to a cash economy43
When Epstein returned to these villages a decade later, she further qualifed her
hypothesis. The families of wealthy farmers did not appear to be dissociating, and
she concluded dissociation was a phenomenon of "midde-farmers. "44 Part of the
problem may have lain in her defnitions, which she adopted from I. P Desai: 45 "I
treated as joint families only those where all the following conditions in a unit
larger than the elementary family were obsered: 'common property and income,
co-residence, commensality co-worship and the performance of certain rights
and obligations. ' "46 The defnition, which makes unwarranted historical assump
tions and which does not take into account local and regional variations in house
hold structure and the defnition of "family, "47 may have contributed to Epstein's
initial fnding. Her 1973 data led her to complicate the picture with the description
of an intermediate "share family" of multiple dwellings but shared income pool
ing and expenditure. Behind the share family lay her later fnding that despite eco
nomic diversifcation, no vlagers were ready to part with their land, "however
unproductive it may be. ' '48 Her data eventually pushed Epstein beyond the pre
dictions an
d
models of Modernization Theory.
Multiple studies exist that suggest the joint family has not declined in any sim
ple sense.49 Studies of the Indian household have shifted away from the debate
over before and after. 5
0
Yet, within the feld of Agn in Indi, study afer study re
peats the same uncritical and unsubstantiated conclusions. The Golden Age and
the Golden Isles thrive as the dominant fgures of discourse. Neysmith and Ed
wardth called for an "indigenous" gerontology as a response to what they saw as
knowledge and institutions produced by and through the core metropolitan loca
tion of international gerontology But Agn in India, and the story of the Fall into
the Bad Family it relates, is complexly local and refects more than the global in
terest of the core and the class interest of the local metropolis.
GERONTOLOGY AS CULTURAL CRITIQUE
I hear tat in Amera t ol peopl are al abandoned.
MA: SI TTI NG ACROSS t'ROM ME IN I >ELHI - VARANASI RAI LWAY CARRI AGE,
OR ONE OF SEVERAL HUNIRt: D OTHER CHANCE I NTERLOCUTORS.
Agn in India demands more than a hermeneutic of suspicion. The constant itera
tion of the decline of the joint family as the master trope of Indian gerontology
against the evidence of historical and contemporary diversity is more than the
domination of neocolonial modernization theory and its institutional correlates. It
is more than the hegemony of the pensioner as the ultimate object of analysis and
patronage. The endless repetition of the narrative of the Fall suggests that its
10
4
KNOWLEDGE, PRACTI CE, AND THE BAD FAMI LY
telling is a powerful act; gerontology may convey at least as much performative as
mimetic truth.
To locate the power of the narration I turn from the narrative's overt catalogue
of signifers to its metonymic structure, to examine the narrative afer Barthes for
the vacancies it exposes. Vladimir Propp's structural analysis of the folktale, de
spite the anthropological naivete of its claims to universal employment, is helpful
in vewing narrative as the elaboration of an abduction. Propp delineates a mor
phology, which I simplif here: ( 1 ) A victim is abducted from home; (2) a hero is
(a) tested and passes the test, (b) receives the magical gifts of a donor, and (c) lo
cates the victim; (3) the hero and the vilainous abductor struggle unti the villain
is defeated; (4) the hero is rewarded and marriedY In the gerontological narrative
of the Fall the abducted victim is sometimes the old person, but more generally is
a vague narrational presence we may call the imagined Indian sel( The authors of
articles in the Agn i India series, and the hundreds of middle-class persons who
have related the decline of the foint family story to me in interviews, combine the
old person with their own frst person voice: " f no longer have the support of
children; our families are breaking apart. " One does not have to be old to experi
ence the sense of loss. What is at stake may not be only the abduction of a good
old age but that of the known sel(
This abduction is from a state of wholeness marked as the joint family The
telling of the narrative presumes that the victim-narrator experiences his or her
distance from this state of wholeness as an episode of violence in both space and
in time. The vlain who abducts is, in the oral narratives I collected, often moder
nity but more ofen "the West"; in the Agn in India series, the vilain is unambigu
ously the latter. The originating point of the narrative as a temporal sequence,
then, is located with the violent action of a villainous West.
To read the repetitious quality of Indian gerontology's insistence upon the Fall
against "the facts" as but collusion with or mimicry of internationalist gerontol
ogy's Aging and Modernization paradigm is to ignore this centrality o the West
as villain in the narrative. Gerontology in India is predicated upon a sense of Kul
turkampf and of a consequent threat of the loss of sel( Its movement both tracks
this loss and challenges it through the reifcation of a morally superior lndianness,
represented as the inclusive and embracing family.
Against both an imagined West and an experienced Here and Now, the fam
ily's internal relations are constituted not as shifing in time and potentially frac
tious but as anchored in a stable tradition and characterized by equipoise, love,
and respect. The social memory of the joint family signifes a powerful alterna
tive to the inferiorized self Ashis Nandy has posited as the enduring legacy of
colonialism. 52 In The Intimate Enemy, Nandy, like Frantz Fanon, is concerned with
the internalization of colonial diference by both colonizer and colonized and
with the possibility of psychic decolonization, of a "recovery of sel(" Nandy's
focus is upon the individual , and he uses the genre of biography to examine both
the possibility and the pathos of individual eforts of decolonization. Many of his
KNOWLEDGE, PRACTI CE, AND THE BAD FAMI LY 10
5
biographical subjects are critical fgures in projects of religious and national con
struction, and the site of both loss and recovery of self in The Intimat Eney tacks
between the body and the nation.
For many individuals-for most of the adult residents of the two wealthier
colonies of Varanasi and many in the Bengali quarter, and for many hundred
middle-class interlocutors I have happened to meet in living rooms, clinics, cofee
houses and train compartments-thefmir rather than the autobiography or the
\-ision of the nation was the site of loss and recovery in Nandy's sense. And if that
which was lost and recovered is the "self" then it was very much a self efmill,
the relational or "dividual" self psychological anthropologists and cultural psy
chologists continue to ofer. 53 Yet unlike the telling of this anthropological story of
India and its essentially familial self I fnd the repetition of the decline of the joint
family suggestive of familism (or relationality, fuidit dividuality, and so forth), not
as a static quality of "Indian culture" or "the Indian self" but rather as a site of
anxiety and confict, of the simultaneous maneuvers of loss and recovery in the
construction of personhood and community within the space of an urban India
modernit Against history against the particular experience of postcolonial
modernity of an urban middle class, this repetition sustained the maintenance of
an oppositional space of afect, memory and wholeness called the Indian family
That the self identifed with this idealized joint family is "lost" within the tem
poral sequence of the narrative, abducted by Western modernity, is not a chal
lenge to its authenticity Even as the narrative charts this loss it afrms through its
continual reiteration the ultimate equation of the Indian self with the joint family.
The decline becomes less a loss than a superimposition of inauthentic Otherness.
By positing a decline from an idealized joint family Indian gerontology main
tains its critical dif erence from the West by keeping the "essential" India, where
old people are never problems, apart from the actions of history conceptualized
as a progressive alienation from this essence. Through this exteriorized history the
move from a Golden Age in which old people never experience old age traumati
cally into the present-where families do undergo fssion, generations do compete
for control of authority and family resources, bodies do experience debiity and
psyches do have difculty negotiating these changes-never challenges the essen
tiality of the ideal family and of the enriched selfood it sustains.
Thus, to read the repetitious and antimimetic quality of Indian gerontology's
insistence upon the Fall as but collusion with or mimicry of internationalist geron
tology's Aging and Modernization paradigm is to ignore the centrality of the West
as villain in the narrative. As Susie Tharu in a diferent context has noted: "To
suggest that . . . collusion is a total or adequate characterization of what takes
place is to let the contestatory nature of . . . subaltern discourses slip through a
theoretical sieve too gross for such fne gold. " One must therefore be sensitive to
"the subversions, elaborations, hybridizations, transformations, realignments or
reappropriations that do take place within oppositional discourse. "54
Obviously the framing of the postcolonial Indian middle class as "subaltern"
106 KNOWLEDGE, PRACTI CE, AND THE BAD FAMI LY
can be a troubling maneuver, and it has garnered its share of critics. 55 The ubiq
uity of the joint family narrative did not extend to lower-class families in the Ben
gali quarter and Nagwa slum, for whom it was virtually absent from discussions
about old age. Still, in some strong sense I fnd it valuable to read Agin in India as
"oppositional discourse. " Gerontology in India is predicated upon a sense of
dif erence that is mapped onto a polarity of India versus the West. Its originating
point asserts the moral superiority of lndianness through its representation as the
inclusive and embracing family. The continual invocation of the ideal joint family
subverts both external and internal discourses of the inferiorized Indian sel
Even among the middle classes for whom the critique ofered by Indian geron
tology has relevance, its subversion of the unidirectionality of internationalist dis
course can only be a partial one. On the one hand, the narrative implicit in
Cowgil's vision of gerontology (the villain as native ignorance, the hero as the in
ternational gerontologist) is inverted. The West assumes the role of villain. On the
other hand, the hero in the Agin in India narrative relies on a magical gif to defeat
the villain: the gift is gerontological technology and its donor the international
gerontologist. What is unique about gerontology as fairy tale is that the villain and
the magical preceptor are ohe and the same. Despite the origins of narrative in a
sense of the radical inappropriateness of Western experience, this very dif erence
generates a preceptorship that assumes the universal applicability of a Western
gerontological epistemology. As the narrative proceeds the role of the villain con
sequently shifs, from the West to the Indian government who will not fund these
wonderful programs. The Aging in India series leaves us midnarrative: the hero now
has the magical means to return the abducted victim home, but faces further tri
als as the victim's royal father (the state) has yet to relent and to allow a marriage
between our hero and the victim. We are lef with the hope that the king will re
lent and the victim wil live happily ever after-but note-no longer defned by
and for him or herself but rather bound forever to a gerontological husbandry
leavened with Western magic.
In two of the four institutions whose emergence I trace below, the founders
soon discover that American gerontology doesn't work. But they do not turn to
local models or epistemologies, for their narrative of the Fall erases these. Against
the logic of the joint family narrative, they come to conclude that what is wrong
with their practice is neither the technology nor its implementation but the errant
nature of the Indian disciplinary object-the old Indian. Their response, interest
ingly, is to abandon her, to construct a gerontology without the contradictory pres
ence of the old.
BP CHECKS: THE VOLUNTEER AGENCY
HelpAge India and its less prominent fellow agencies Age-Care India and Age Aid
India have been among the most vocal advocates of the need for a response to the
Fall. I focus here on Age-Care India and its founder N. L. Kumar. Kumar was a
KNOWLEDGE, PRACTI CE, AND THE BAD FAMI LY 10
7
social worker by training, but his specifc interest in gerontology was sparked by
years spent living near the hill station resort of Mussourie, with its large expatriate
community.
I was in touch with some of the foreigners-mostly Aericans, I would say-be
cause Mussourie is, uh, their headquarters. So then what happened: I used to get lit
eratures through them, about the old age homes and the old age social security mea
sures abroad. I used to contact the embassies also to get some literature from the
countries, and got interested . . . . I said, "This is a new feld and a very pertinent
area, to do the work for the aged, which is not looked afer in our country."
Kumar, in the interiew from which I am quoting, went on to ofer a dismal pic
ture of the condition of most elderly in India. The narrative fow here is not from
the perception of a problem to the examination of the solutions others have
found; rather, the admiration for the Other leads to the perception of not mea
suring up at home.
Kumar's frst project was originally to be an old-age home. Though he and his
colleagues could not acquire the land they wanted for the home and abandoned
their plans, their choice of the old-age home, which they understood to be the ex
emplary site of gerontological practice in the United States and Europe, was note
worthy. The home, to have been buit in the city of Dehradun, was not intended
for impoverished old widows or other elderly destitutes but for wealthier retirees
who were not wanted at home or who found living with their children difcult.
The gap between Kumar's rhetoric of radical action and the intended benefcia
ries of his early projects refects the same duality as the Agn in India series.
Whereas Kumar's rhetoric was heartfelt, the founder of Age Ad India A. S.
Bawa recognized that his organization is not structured to aid the poor and desti
tute. "The destitute receive assistance from the government and other quarters.
But old people who are settled, who are middle class, may be entitled to a pension
or other funds but lack the physical means or ability to get them. These old peo
ple are invisible. No one gives them much attention. " Of these three Delhi-based
organizations with the coda "India," Age Aid has been the least concerned with
rural, poor, informal sector, and destitute elderly and yet of the three its rhetoric
most closely matches its practice. Age Aid's downplaying of the needs of the des
titute suggests a denial rather than an erasure. Interestingly of the three groups
Age Aid is the least self-consciously modeled on a Western institution. Its literature
has used the organization's Panjabi name "Birdh Sahaara" as often as the English
title, and, not surprisingly in the vernacular there has been no need for the
"specifc" of "Birdh Sahaara India. " A Sikh-run organization at a time when Sih
identity does not sufer from a dearth of signifers, Age Aid has incorporated both
Western and Indian referents into its charter and practice, its origin narrative link
ing the exemplary actions of both the Petit Freres des Pauvres of Paris and the Si
Gurus Nanak and Amar Das.
Kumar and Age-Care's next efort was designed specifcally for lower-class el-
108 KNOWLEDGE, PRACTI CE, AND THE BAD FAMI LY
derly: a "mobile health checkup" aimed at those persons most deprived of health
services. But the class specifcity of the efort was signifed more by Kumar and
colleague's self-representation than by their actual interention: "We went by the
Delhi Transport Bus Service, because we didn't have any other means of commu
nication. We were actually like Chinese barefoot doctors. Ad we adhered to that.
We did everything on our two legs. " The invocation of the imagery of rural-based
populist health care was ofered for an interention planned around neighbor
hoods accessible to major urban bus lines; the aesthetics of mobility obscured
questions of need.
The checkup was limited to a blood pressure test. Blood pressure, frequently re
ferred to as BP, was central to midde- and upper-class narratives of aging and
health for many of the people I interiewed. Men tended to "have BP" (whereas
women tended to "have low BP"), and this having was frequently linked to the ten
sions associated with success. BP when it appeared at all, was peripheral to lower
class narratives of illness in old age, and not the least because cardiovascular com
plaints were not as signifcant as the various manifestations of "weakness" in
understanding the poor aging body Debiitative complaints-what Djurfeldt and
Lindberg have described as a coherent "poverty panorama" 56 -anchored the ex
perience of the aging body in Nagwa slum and parts of the Bengali quarter. Such
complaints suggest that the language of BP-the risks of accumulation, of the
need for balance, of the hidden threats lurking within mandating a constant. vigi
lance, thus "checkups"-may refect a misplaced preventive efort. In contrast, the
language of weakness brings out themes of hard labor by aged persons, of under
nutrition, and of other forms of deprivation that might have informed a dif erent
understanding of aging. But to quote Kumar: "We sat down, decided that we
should do [it] this way to reach the public and have our sort of educative aware
ness among the masses . . . . The people were ignorant. They did not know." The
goal became convincing Delhi's poor elderly that they should be concerned about
their blood pressure.
Once the mobile checkups began, along busy Delhi thoroughfares, two sur
prises confronted the Age-Care volunteers. First, few of those passersby who
stopped for the checkup had high blood pressure. As Kumar indicated, "You'd be
surprised-many cases were fne! Moneyed people or traders or businessmen
would not come to us; they are more prone to these things. These-those that did
come-are the people that are never checked by anyone. So when they came, we
found generally these people didn't have much problem. Because they are physi
cal workers, and they can stand any stress and strain. "
Second, the few detected cases were not elderly persons but those i n their thir
ties and forties. "We did not discriminate at that time because you could not fnd
an old person on the roadside," said Kumar. This was not, in retrospect, such a
tragedy Mter all, Kumar concluded, "You can't do much to the old. Because they
are having multiple problems. If you take care of the younger generation at that
stage, you are doing a very useful work for the society
KNOWLEDGE, PRACTI CE, AND THE BAD FAMI LY 10
9
The project was caught between conficting interpretations of its object: an in
terention designed for wealthier bodies indicated unexpected good health among
the poor and confrmed the morality of their erasure; more salient criteria are ig
nored. A interention located in a space traversed by younger bodies afrms the
irrelevance of the old as gerontological object. Kumar realized that blood pressure
checkups, roadside interentions, and age-segregated campaigns were inappropri
ate measures in Delhi. But rather than redefne the gerontological armamentar
ium, he blamed his failure upon the inappropriateness of lower-class elderly in
and of themselves. As workers, "they can stand any stress and strain, " and Kumar
legitimated the narrowing of aid to that segment of Delhi for whom blood pres
sure was a critical sign of debility and control . Ad if "you can't do much to the
old, " old age itself is at fault, the impediment to successful gerontology. Thus the
paradox for volunteer agencies searching for the signiably deserving: barefoot
doctoring for the middle class, Age-Care for the young.
FREE RADICAL EXCHANGE: THE GERIATRIC CLINIC
Geriatric clinics and research centers have begun to appear in several cities across
India, most notably in the South, in Madurai, Madras, and Bangalore. In the his
tory of the north Indian clinic I discuss below, the founder had a similar experi
ence to that of N. L. Kumar and reached similar conclusions about the prospects
for geriatrics in India. S. K. Nayer returned to India afer more than twenty years
practicing medicine in the United States, hoping "to make a dif erence" in India
given his experience abroad. In his years among the old-age enclaves of southern
Florida, he had become profcient in geriatric medicine. A geriatrics clinic seemed
to make sense for Dehradun, the city where he settled, with its military and other
enclaves with many retirees. Nayer had a large and well-appointed clinic built; a
sign announced its specialty prominently: "Disha Geriatric Clinic. "
As Nayer began t o build a reputation as a highly competent physician, Disha's
clientele slowly grew They were not an exclusively or even primarily elderly
group, however. "Geriatrics" was no more relevant to most patients' choice of a
clinic than was "Disha. " "People don't know what it means," laughed the clinic re
ceptionist, referring to geriatrics. Yet the name is not meaningless, and even in
Dehradun it has a local context. In nearby Mussourie, a physician's billboard that
announced a bevy of degrees from Ayureda to acupuncture to several spurious
allopathic ("Western medical") certifcates (but not the M. B. B. S. or M. D. , the
basic allopathic qualifcations) had at the bottom of the list "geriatrician. " Geri
atrics has come to assume a particular authority in the signifyng of medical com
petence. Throughout India, there are physicians who display the distinction
A. G. S. on their billboards, acquired by joining the American Geriatrics Society.
For most, it is a dubious qualication, but the frequency of appearance of
l. G. S. suggests that even in legitimate contexts, the power of geatcs may lie as
much in the authority of the esoteric as in the discipline's specifc content.
IIO KNOWLEDGE, PRACTI CE, AND THE BAD FAMI LY
Treating a signifcantly younger population than he expected pushed Nayer to
rethink his goals. In ofering care to terminal cancer patients whom other medical
institutions vew as hopeless, he has maintained a commitment to defning med
ical care not in terms of cure but function, a central tenet of geriatrics. For the el
derly and their families, however, he has realized that the medicalization of func
tionality is not marketable. Nayer has come to interpret this question of
marketability in terms of the "practicality" of Indians, which he contrasted to the
"always interene" strategy of Americans. Indian practicality he refected in one
of our conversations in 1 g8g, masks the stinginess of an "agrarian personality"
Yet the money spent by the families of terminal cancer patients in his clinic is at
least as "impractical"; Nayer's analytic of medical ralism is restricted to the el
derly. Furthermore, though not all of the Disha patients were wealthy most had
means. "Making a diference" notwithstanding, this was an elite medical institu
tion. Practicality as an explanation for the lack of old patients in a wealthy retire
ment community seemed insufcient. Like Kumar, Nayer discovered the resis
tance to a therapeutic practice exclusively for old people but did not question the
relevance of his goals. Here again, the realization of the lack of aging as category
led to self-blame and its displacement. For Kumar, the displacement was onto the
mechanical invulnerability of the worker or the troublesome intractability of the
old person; in Dehradun, Nayer invoked the shortsightedness of the agrarian per
sonality.
Nayer's own interests suggest a diferent conception of the aim of geriatrics
than that which he learned in the United States and was attempting to transpose
to India. His ofce shelves were lined with a half-dozen geriatric medical text
books, but with over twice as many American books on prolonged life extension:
The 120-Yar Diet, Maximum Li f Span, The Secret o Lon Li f, Li f Etesion Report,
Polnevir I, How t Live t Be wo, Anti-Ag News, and the like. The authors of
these books have sometimes represented their subject as geriatrics, but the self
help longevity genre runs counter to a central tenet of geriatric ideology, that the
quality more than the quantity of life should be the physician's aim. Nayer was a
good geriatrician in the strict sense of the term, but his heart lay with this alterna
tive tradition of radical life extension and in particular with the theories of caloric
undernourishment and free radicals of the Aerican biologist Roy Walford.
Nayer's interest in Walford brought the imagined Other as possessor of the
ideal technology of aging full circle, for Walford himself looks to India for inspi
ration. In brief Walford has advocated a severely reduced caloric intake as essen
tial for reducing free-radical damage to tissues on the molecular level. 57 He devel
oped his thesis through laboratory research, but has ofered as potential proofs of
the preserative efects of undernutrition the superannuated yogis of India. Wal
ford journeyed around India, and his travels culminated in a mountaintop ren
dezvous with an ancient guru. For the California scientist, the secret of successful
aging was present in India's timeless customs.
Extremely well-read, Walford has cited Sufut and Caraka-the classic Sanskrit
KNOWLEDGE, PRACTI CE, AND THE BAD FAMI LY III
medical texts-on rasqana therapy as further evidence for his claim. Rasqana,
classical alchemy is one of the eight traditional branches of Ayurvedic medicine
and is concerned with therapies for extraordinary longevity Given moves over the
past century to legitimate Ayureda by mapping each of its terms and concepts
onto Western biomedical and folk categories, rasqana has been labeled the "In
dian geriatrics. "58 Because of the frequent appearance of Ayureda and of
rasqana in texts and institutional settings that engage old age, I have devoted con
siderable attention to it in this book. But Walford's mention is brief, and the purg
ing central to rasqana and its associated pancakrma therapy dif ers signifcandy
from the long-term caloric undernutrition he advocates. 59 Walford uses Indian
terms rather lie some Indian physicians profess membership in the community of
geriatricians-as signiers of legitimation by and through the unknown Other.
Western "alternative science" in the 1 970s and 1 g8os, most notably the writing of
Friof Capra60, frequendy has used simplifed and decontextualized images taken
from Indian philosophy and religion to signify the universality and hermetic truth
of its assertions. The signifer here is the superannuated Eastern Master, ubiqui
tously imagined with an undisclosed and powerful secret. From the Grand Abbot
of Shangri-La to the Ancient One in Doctor Strane comic book to transplanted
gurus lie Muktananda, Maharishi, and Swami Bhaktivedanta of the Hare Krishna
movement, the Eastern Master is a minor archetype in American popular culture.
His secret stands for the true meaning of Eastern esoterica, inevitably lost to the
Easterners themselves and only rediscovered through Western rationality Thus
the Grand Abbot, himself a European, waits until an Englishman lands in
Shangri-La before handing over his reign; the Ancient One passes on his lore to
Dr. Strange in Greenwich Village; and the late Bhaktivedanta's disciples founded
a popular and beautiful temple in the holy town of Brindavin, where some gave
lectures on the Bhagavad Gita when I vsited there in 1 983, proclaiming that only
through its marriage with Western practicality can the esoteric truths of Hinduism
be reclaimed. Simiarly, through the power of physics and biochemistry Capra
and Walford ofer their own disclosures of The Secret. Walford applies years of
work with laboratory rats to ofer his reader the philosopher's stone.
The lore of the Eastern Masters is more ambivalendy perceived at home, and
not because of a mythic lost essence. Though Walford cites rasqana as a core ele
ment of Indian tradition, the creation of superannuation through medical ther
apy is "traditionaly" viewed with considerable suspicion. Though they are pre
scribed for a long life span or extraordinary mental or physical powers, rasqana
tonics and other regenerative therapies in Ayureda are frequendy declared un
suitable for the elderly due to their extreme purgative or emetic efects. Many pop
ular rasqana medications, even one called "Geri-forte" and initially marketed for
an older clientele, are primarily used by younger individuals for memory virility
and strength, a point I wl come back to in the next chapter. R. H. Singh of Ba
naras Hindu University a prominent rasqana scholar, noted both the difculty in
calling rasqana geriatrics and the psychoactive properties of many rasqana drugs
II2 KNOWLEDGE, PRACTI CE, AND THE BAD FAMI LY
in declaring, during an interview with me, that "rastana is not geriatrics; it is psy
chiatry"
Singh's contention builds on the ambiguity of the old body as legitimate med
ical object in classical medical and narrative traditions. As often as the fantastic
restorations of rastana cures are described-the classic case is the restoration of
the ancient sage, or rishi, Chyawan through a rastana preparation, the ubiquitous
Chyawanprash subsequently named afer him-so too are these cures portrayed
as worthless panaceas. 6 1
What is at stake in the "tradition" so insouciantly cited is well ilustrated in So
madeva's eleventh-century compilation of tales, the Katiartaara, in the story of
the king Vinayashila. The king wants to remain forever young; he knows that as
long as he remains youthful, the life of his kingdom will be happy and prosperous.
When gray hairs appear, he summons his ministers to provide him with a
longevity medicine. They demur, suggesting that in this fallen age such tonics can
no longer be found, that any doctor who promises an end to old age is a quack,
and that the physical changes of old age need not be viewed as decline but self
transformation and a path towards liberation. The king will not listen; he sum
mons a duplicitous physician who promises a cure. Dr. Tarunachandra, or New
Moon, places the king in a dark cave and feeds him strong purgatives that cause
him to waste away from accelerated old age,jari; eventually the doctor kills the old
king and replaces him with a young man who resembles him, and the story con
tinues. 62
The morality of geriatric intervention remains contested. At the session on
rastana during the 1 990 meetings of the International Association for the Study of
Traditional Asian Medicine (IASTAM) in Bombay the possibility of rejuvenating
the elderly (as opposed to the middle aged) was a central and unresolved issue for
delegates. Both in Somadeva's text and in Bombay doctors with vested interests in
the expensive transformations of rastana were certain of their geriatric applica
bility whie others were more worried. 63
The challenge in the Katiartaara is not to the possibility of rejuvenation, but
to its moral implications. Tarunachandra the doctor can kill the king not because
the fruits of rastana are always iatrogenic but rather because seeing the primary
task of aging as the denial of decline and death is unwise and unhealthy In bring
ing geriatric knowledge to India, Nayer unintentionally assumes the role of
Tarunachandra, who in claiming the old body as medical object denies the soteri
ologic power of old age. His interest in the latter-day ratana of Walford suggests
that, like Kumar's, Nayer's heart lies with a preventive geriatrics aimed at the
young; the old, like King Vinayashila, are ambivalent clinical subjects. The con
tours of Nayer's practice are split, between a desire to maximize function, treat
those thought untreatable, and add life to years-the ideology of mainstream
geriatrics-and the hope of adding years to life, of extending youthfulness by
decades. Both the challenges of his clinical experience and his circuitous return to
rastana, via California, ofer Nayer the materials for a transformed geriatrics. In
KNOWLEDGE, PRACTI CE, AND THE BAD FAMI LY IIJ
movng toward an intergenerational practice, Nayer takes up the challenge; but in
his sense of faiure and search for blame we confront again the split and unrecon
ciled object, here the agrarian-minded peasant reluctant to medicalize old age, set
against the hyergeriatric yogi, dedicated to the care of the aging body with su
perhuman results.
INTO THE WOODS: THE RETIREMENT ASHRAM
Not far from the Disha Clinic, a sign points one down a back lane to a
"Vanaprastha Ashram" cum "human development centre. " The sign, unlike that
of the clinic, is in Hindi, and suggests an institution less immediately dependent
on an imported universe of discourse. Ashrams, here connoting forest settlements
of male and female sages who have renounced urban life, call to mind the isolated
communities of elders visited by Ram and by the Pandava brothers during their
years of exile in the Hindu Epics. Ashram here has a second meaning, a stage of
life; the vinaprasta iama is one of the four stages of life (the order of iama
darma) elaborated in the legal dharmafitra texts, the penultimate stage when indi
viduals or couples leave their homes, having fulfled their household obligations,
and take up lives of renunciation in the forest.
The Manav Kalyan Kendra envisions itself as a refuge, a forest removed not
only in space from the family and the life of the city or tow, but in time, from the
compulsions of modernit In defning itself explicitly as a vinapratha ashram, it
draws on other "vinaprasta ashrams" founded in the colonial and post
Independence period, such as the large Arya Samaj ashram in Hardwar not far
from Dehradun. The ideology and practice of the founders of the Manav Kalyan
Kendra are in large measure rooted in Arya Samaj . This Hindu reform movement
founded by Dayananda Sarasvati in 1 875 quickly became popular among an
emerging merchant-caste elite in Punjab and western Uttar Pradesh. In a series of
handbooks, Dayananda had earlier ofered his vision of renascent Hinduism to
the urban middle classes of western India through a focus on the famiy and its rit
ual construction in space and time;64 one important part of Arya Samaj practice
was a close attention to the life course sacraments, or salki ras, and another, par
alleling other contemporary reform movements, was attention to the plight of
widows. The movement began building schools and other institutions in the r 88os;
the building of widow houses, the forerunners to the vinaprasta ashrams, began in
the early twentieth century65 The Hardwar ashram occupies a large physical
plant, with both permanent residents and visitors, elderly women and men. Like
the Manav Kalyan Kendra, it is a retirement ashram, a place of retreat and re
laxation for urban middle-class pensioners and other elderly apart from their chi
dren, framed in terms of an ideology of a strong traditional family.
Retirement ashram: the phenomenon of fed retirement for government ser
vants and other formal sector workers is central here. The Manav Kalyan Kendra
is a place to visit afer retirement. The architecture of the human development
II
4
KNOWLEDGE, PRACTI CE, AND THE BAD FAMI LY
proposed by the religious guide of its founders rests on the possibilities and expec
tations available within the formal sector. The ashram is an elite space, a resort in
some ways similar to the Sun Cities of the United States but difering in its orga
nization as a didactic, rather than recreational, community and as a place of re
treat rather than neolocality These vanaprathi have not irrevocably disengaged
from their families in Delhi and Bombay; their life in the forest is a sojourn rather
than a departure. The ashram implies a mobile old body.
The charter behind the ashram frames it as a response to the decline of the
joint family and the dangerous ascendancy of the West. The ashram was princi
pally founded by Dr. J. P Sharma, who runs a small homeopathic drug company
Sharma set up the Kendra as the embodiment of the ideals of his lifelong guru,
Panditi; Panditi lives in the ashram and is supported by Sharma. In describing his
vision for the ashram in an interview with me, Panditi enumerated the si princi
ples that structure the practice of those who visit and stay there: devotion, con
templation, humanity all are one, sere all, love all. The discipliqe he teaches, and
its mode of enumeration, shares much wth Arya Samaj practice.
When I spoke with Dr. Sharma, he was as much concerned with what Panditi
represented as with the explicit content of the six principles: "You know, along
with our country's improvements in industry and technolog etc. , there is a dark
side: the loss of values, of our religious heritage. India used to be a beacon to all.
We are trying to presere that tradition. " For Sharma the central lost value is re
spect for the aged, the inverse benchmark of Westernization. Sharma and Panditi
tried to approach the loss in two ways. First, they created the Vanaprastha ashram,
a refuge from valueless modernity, for pensioners. Next, they created a second and
parallel ashram, which was then being built next door: a Vriddhashram, or old age
home, for the pensioners' parents. Old people will not come to this second home,
they will be placed there. Side by side, the two ashrams call to mind two diferent
images of the old body and two dif erent responses to the "problem of aging."
Sharma envisioned them, together, as a response to the lost family Old people
who have the option would leave their families and come to the Vanaprastha
Ashram to study and develop. Other old people wth diferent options would be
taken care of in the Vriddhashram. Famiies, attracted by the Kendra's message,
would settle nearby Traditional values would radiate outward from Panditi and
his aging disciples to infect the community-imagined as a large joint famiy
and the seed of a new Hindu renaissance would be planted. The disparate gener
ational elements Sharma saw as characteristic of contemporary urban middle
class life-estranged old parents, nuclear households, and unwanted elders-are
gathered in distinct spaces (development center, old age home, periphery) and
placed in close proximity Each of the spaces is justifed as a metonym for the new
famiy
Thus, though a distinct alternative to family care and coresidence, the old age
home can remain as a signifer for the strong Indian family. Against the experience
KNOWLEDGE, PRACTI CE, AND THE BAD FAMI LY II
5
of its residents, the ideology of the old age home ofers them the inviolable and
desirable family as the only legitimate gloss on identit The family achieves a new
hegemony at the moment it is perceived as being in decline; its inherent limita
tions, central to earlier constructions of old age, are no longer represented. The
stage of vanaprastha is no longer an abandonment of the family, a moving beyond
it to more essential truths appropriate to later life, but a return to "the famiy" as
the very content of soteriolog
The neoorthodox Vriddhashram is distinct from the familiar institution of the
widow house usually located in pilgrim towns like Brindavin and Varanasi. Such
institutions still exist and will be discussed in chapter 8, but they difer from the
Dehradun home in drawing meaning against-and not through-the family The
widows, beggars, and other poor elderly who live in or receive rations from chari
table homes live the ethos of sannyaa, the renunciate fourth stage, and not
ghastya, the familial second stage of the householder, or vanaprasta, the liminal
third stage. In the stories they tell of their own lives and in the stories neighbors tell
about them, their lives are made sense of in terms of a simultaneity of abandon
ment-the Bad Family, the travails of this world, the cruelty of God-and disen
gagement-the deeper truths of pilgrimage and prayer, the fruits of death at a
tfrta, a sacred place of crossing-over. The ambivalences of the widow house are
brought out in Pankaj Butalia's flm on widows in Brindavn. 66 Whether the stories
of inmates are heard as tales of rejection by the family of the widow or by the
widow of the family, they suggest that old age is a time essentially in confict with
the values of younger family members, that the disengagement of the old body is
predicated upon a rupture of familial continuity The widow houses and charita
ble institutions of Varanasi are not reconstituted families: they are explicitly con
structed as alternatives, whether understood as places of grace or wretchedness.
Seva, or service to and respect for aged parents, is a domestic duty Renuncia
tion, the move away from the household through vanaprastha and sannyaa, is in the
Epic and Puranic texts framed as a move away from loving family members and
from the comfort of receiving sevt. In setting up an old age home as the locus of
seva, the Manav Kalyan Kendra legtimates the dissociation of the dependent old
body from the famiy In claiming this old age home as an equivalent space to the
family the kendra denies the old person the alternative moral frame of disen
gagement through which to make sense of the alienation that it paradoxically de
mands. The only legitimate renunciates at the kendra are the mobile elderly the
pensioners who come on vacation. The object of gerontological solicitude is again
dual: the aging self the pensioner who leaves his or her famiy temporariy yet who
is framed through the semantics of vanaprastha; and the aging other, the aged and
dependent relative who becomes the embodiment of a revived ethic of sevt and is
framed through the semantics of ghasthya, of the household. The order of the four
iramas is inverted and collapsed as the totality of the family becomes the only le
gitimate narrative of the life cycle and its denouement.
u6 KNOWLEDGE, PRACTI CE, AND THE BAD FAMI LY
MOTHERS VERSUS AUNTIES: THE OLD AGE HOME
Actualr, she had no ieti mark on h In .ct, she wa just an aunt. One r innumerabl
aunt. Not a
i
ne's moter or ft just an aunt.
BANI BASU,
"
AUNTY
"
Aloka Mitra has been instrumental in the creation of institutional environments
for old people that are exemplars of the ideal old age home in American and Eu
ropean gerontological witing. At the two institutions-both called Nava Nir, or
new nest-founded by the Women's Coordinating Council (WCC) of Calcutta in
the early 1 g8os, the residents plan their own meals, discuss allotment of the bud
get, balance the books, control their own medication-taking whenever possible,
and sometimes teach in neighborhood schools. The Nava Nir homes are highly
permeable and decentered and do not resemble the total institutions described by
Erving Gofan. 67 The decisions by staf and WCC members to allow residents to
run many of the day-to-day afairs of Nava Nir are not an efort to create the "il
lusion of control" advocated in American old age home literature and social psy
chological research. 68 The old miima, the aunties, of Nava Nir must administer
both the institution and their own lives; there is no one else to do it.
There is an irony in the juxtaposition of Nava Nir and the ideal geriatric insti
tution in American professional literature. The latter sufers from the variant of
the geriatric paradox discussed by Carroll Estes in The Agin Entrprie: interen
tions and institutions for old-age welfare ofer a vsion of normal and independent
aging. These interentions are predicated upon the growth of an old-age welfare
servce sector. Such a sector of necessity demands dependent old bodies, and an
"aging enterprise" emerges that maintains the very relations of dependency that
its ideology challenges. 69 American gerontological eforts to produce old age
homes that are less coercive and more open are ofen crude examples of the aging
enterprise. A 1 987 article in the American Journal q Al;eimer' Care and Research,
"Design for Dementia: Re-creating the Loving Family" discussed how a "home
like environment" could be architecturally created that simultaneously ofered pa
tients "greater independence" and the staf"total control . "7
0
The design in ques
tion-multiple independent rooms ringing a central station from which staf could
obsere everything-is a literal translation of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon
prison design and is reminiscent of Foucault's discussion of permanent surei

ance and disciplinary normalization in Dciline and Pnih. 7 1

In the Nava Nir homes, a diferent sort of economy of regulation and surveil
lance operates with the same surface efects as the panoptic institution. The disci
plined order of N ava Nir is maintained not by a plnned withdrawal of repressive
institutional controls and their replacement by internalized and productive con
trols-the miiml regulate their own movements, bodies, and lives and have no
need of a staf to maintain their inmate status-but as a fscal and social compro
mise by a welfare organization (the WCC) that could not aford to provide enough
staf to take over many regulatory functions. One could read the almost complete
KNOWLEDGE, PRACTI CE, AND THE BAD FAMI LY II
7
absence of external regulation in the Nava Nir homes as the acme of either the
"greater independence" the gerontological literature attempts to ofer institutional
inmates or the productive power of the welfare regime of Foucauldian modernity,
but neither reading is sufcient.
What would be missing from such readings is an analysis of the sense of ab
sence that permeates both the narratives of inmates and the interpretations of
outsiders. For many persons of the Calcutta bhadralok, or middle class, who kew
of the homes or who listened to my descriptions of them, the greater indepen
dence of residents was read as an abdication by a management that they felt could
aford more staf and by chidren who had abandoned their parents. There was a
strong contrast between my own initial perceptions of the Nava Nir homes and
those of Calcuttan acquaintances: having long worked as a nursing aide in Boston
in a home where inmates were routinely infantalized and in another where they
were frequently physically restrained, and having worked to promote the concept
of shared and interdependent living of groups of older persons, I was and remain
enthralled by the independence of Nava Nir residents and by the openness of the
institution. Mitra and her colleagues had created the fantasy home of mainstream
gerontological literature, and had managed to do so without disciplinary training
in gerontolog Social life within the home was not characterized by the redun
dancy and dehumanization found i more total institutions. Yet for the Calcutta
residents whom I interviewed in r g8g and r ggo, the Nava Nirs were pathetic
places precisely because of the perceived lack of total dependence. The "inde
pendence" of residents pointed to the fact that they had no one to ofer them
proper sevi. Each of the multiple choices available to residents invoked their ab
sent or uncarin children; their institutionally intensifed individuality signifed ab
ject solitude.
This local critique assumed that the residents were put in Nava Nir, that they
moved from a position of high to low dependency. The story Mitra told me of the
homes' founding suggested a move in the opposite direction. During the United
Nations Year of the Woman, Mitra related, she and several others within the
WCC decided to create a refuge for poor old women "who had no one. " N ava Nir
would become a new family for homeless widows. Immediately the institution was
framed within an internationalist imperative and legitimated in terms of a triple
layered subordination: old, poor, and female.
The Nava Nir residents were almost all in their sixties or above, and from
r g88-r ggo all but one of the residents were women. But they were not the desti
tute widows Mitra's origin story envisioned. Two-thirds of the thirty I interiewed
lacked sons to depend on. Only one resident out of the thirty came from a back
ground of agricultural or urban labor; the others were all from middle- or upper
class families. Despite Nava Nir's subsidized costs, it remained out of reach for
lower-class Calcuttans and rural Bengalis. The one exception, the only man at
Nava Nir at the time, was sponsored by a kind employer. Yet this man was any
thing but sanguine about his good fortune when I met him: "Old age is a cursed
n8 KNOWLEDGE, PRACTI CE, AND THE BAD FAMI LY
life, " he complained. "Go and talk to the man on the street. Why am I here? Very
high accommodation here! Men like me are dying in the street! " He then glared
at the superintendent. 'k her! " She responded, "No, no, Dadu, that's not so. "
The superintendent prided herself on establishing close kinlike ties with the old
residents. They are not just addressed as her aunts and mothers, she noted, but
think of her as their daughter. The old man rejected the institution as family: "If
my friend didn't send money, do you think she would take care of me? Others live,
they die, and their bodies are dumped into a handcart! " The old man's denial of
Nava Nir as family dif ered from that of the middle-class Calcuttans whom I in
teriewed. For him, the rhetoric of the family was criticized not for disguising a
lack of care for the old person and thus the decline of the joint family but for dis
guising its rootedness in inequality and in the garbage bodies of the poor. He is
lonely the superintendent later confded to me. Yet in the old man's personal lone
liness, the irony of his class position and the limits of any rhetoric of concern were
manifest.
In another interiew, Mitra ofered a diferent charter of the institution, in
which the initial impetus for Nava Nir preceded the International Year of the
Woman. A WCC colleague of Mitra's was looking for an institution in which to
place an elderly aunt but discovered that all available decent institutions were run
by Christian orders like the Little Sisters of the Poor. She and others in the WCC
began to consider the establishment of a nonsectarian home. Thus the second and
underlying reason for the Nava Nirs: the need for an institution to house those el
derly relatives of wee members who lacked close family to support them.
These elderly relatives were al women. Nava Nir was founded primarily as a
home for women; there were no undomicilable old uncles to generate a less gender
segregated institution. Old age presented diferent challenges to men and women,
as the emergence of Nava Nir indicates; yet the Aging in India series and the agen
das of most of the new Indian gerontological institutions have paid but passing
reference to gender as critical to their feld. In maintaining the polarity of the ideal
and essential gerontocratic Indian past versus the fallen and inauthentic geronto
phobic Indian present, the decline of the joint family narrative generates all dif er
ence from a single historical movement. Encompassing forms of diference such as
class and gender that might suggest alternative readings of history are erased
within the grand narrative of modernization and Westernization.
Who are the mimi, poised between an external narrative viewing them as the
cast-of mothers of the fallen joint family and an institutional history representing
them as old aunts with less of a domiciiary claim upon their nephews and
nephews' wives? Are they mothers or aunts, and what is the signifcance of this di
chotomy? Both mothers and "aunts" are represented in Nava Nir, but the major
ity of residents had no sons: of my sample, one-third had living sons and two
thirds lacked them. Despite the narrative of the Decline, most of the "unwanted"
residents are thus aunts, old women without sons who must depend on daughters
who may e constrained by their husbands' families or upon more distant kin, and
KNOWLEDGE, PRACTI CE, AND THE BAD FAMI LY II
9
the rise of homes like Nava Nir suggest less a sloughing of of parents than the
emergence of a dif erent response to old people with weak claims upon family sup
port.
Widows with and without sons are important markers in popular discourse,
represented as mothers and as aunts. The needy old aunt is a prominent fgure in
Bengali and North Indian literature, classically in Banerji's Pather Panchali and
Premchand's "Burhz Ki. "72 In each of these texts, the complex pathos of the fam
ily with an unproductive old woman is heightened by the absence of the fgure of
a selfsh daughter-in-law. The nephew's wife, though she shares much of her per
sona with the daughter-in-law, is a more empathetic fgure, struggling to support a
family on threadbare wages with the added insult of an endlessly hungry old per
son who lacks a clear moral claim to. a share of the food. Old-mother narratives,
in contrast, are unforgiving in stressing the meanness of the daughter-in-law who
abuses the old mother and the weakness of the son who lets her. In nineteenth
century Calcutta, this far less ambiguous narrative was visually represented in the
art of the patua school of painters and woodcut printers as Ghar Kali, the End of
the World: a wife riding on her husband's shoulders while his mendicant mother
is dragged along on a leash held by her son (see frontispiece) . 7 3
These two fgures embodying pathos-the old mother and the old aunt-are
not only models of but models for making sense of aging within the family The
women of Nava Nir come from both groups; but the external critique envisions
them all as mothers while the internal charter claims them all as aunts. Naming
the old woman as aunt recognizes that old age is inherently a time of family stress,
stress heightened when the moral claims of the old person upon the next genera
tion are attenuated by distant kinship; the blame of imperfect sevi is deferred.
Naming the old woman as mother, conversely, roots the difculties of old age in
the inadequacies of children.
The primary narrative of Indian gerontology as I have stressed, elaborates the
latter fgure in a male or ungendered form: the neglected old parent. The errancy
of children is displaced onto the West and its corruption, and is universalized. But
the fgure of the old mother has a more complex pedigree. Ghar Kali, the End of
the World, bespeaks an apocalytic consciousness. The young couple in the image
neglecting their mother are not universal but located: the babu-the parenu In
dian government serant under the British-and his wife. The neglect of the old
mother, the foppishness of the son, and the selfsh disrespect of the modern wife
together constitute a central image satirizing the emerging urban elite as emblem
atic of Kali Yuga, of the most corrupt last moments of the most corrupt age of
humanit Sumanta Banerjee has linked the patua folk art of mid- to late
nineteenth-century Calcutta to a broader critique of the babu in lower-class
urban popular culture. 74 Following his argument, the fgure of the old mother en
ters public narratives in the nineteenth century as a subaltern or proletarian sym
bol of elite excess.
Sumit Sarkar cautions against identifying the work of the patuas and associated
120 KNOWLEDGE, PRACTI CE, AND THE BAD FAMI LY
genres with an exclusively or even primarily lower class level of culture. He sug
gests that "their patrons and consumers could include many of the bhadralok [the
emerging urban bourgeoisie] . . . . In so far as a specifc strata can be distinguished
at all-always a problematical venture in matters of culture-it would be rather
the world of genteel poverty, depressed upper-caste literati within a kind of pre
industrial lower middle class. "75 Ashis Nandy in arguing that the upwardly mobile
bhadralk-"made psychologically marginal by their exposure to Western im
pact"-turned to a reactionary defense of traditional prerogatives and in particu
lar to an elaboration of "the fantasy of feminine aggression towards the hus
band, " similarly suggests a Kulturkampf in which the satire of the Ghar Kali
appealed to the parenu bhadralk as well as to lumpen and marginalized groups. 76
The appeal of the ironic trope in which the narrative of the abject old mother
is popularized thus extends across class within the growing urban space of nine
teenth-century Calcutta. The old mother is a complex sign upon which several
distinct stories are superimposed: at the same time a mocking of upper-class
morality a lament for the decline of precolonial constellations of power, and a
framing of the elite self against the corruptions demanded by a new politics of
culture. However,
.
within the uniformity assumed by the modern gerontological
logic of a single universal problem of aging, the polysemy of the old mother is re
duced to a monoglot narrative. The Ghar Kali image, sensitive to the cultural
transformations of colonialism but rooted in a sense of internal dif erence and dis
equilibrium (of gender and social class) , comes to signify the uniform aging of the
theoretically classless and ungendered old person. The lower-class readings Ghar
Kali that Banerjee documents are echoed in the old man's frustration at being in
Nava Nir-the rejection of the rhetoric of universal care for the aged as upper
class self-interest-but fnd no place within the contemporary images constituting
internationalist gerontology or Agn in India.
The modern discipline of Agn in India does not create the sufering old person;
as the old mother and aunt, the fgure was and is ubiquitous. What is created is an
efort at hegemony a universalization of a particular set of interpretations of the
fgure, rooted in the responses of urban elites and petty bourgeoisie to questions of
identity within the colonial milieu. What is erased is the old woman as a signifer
of social dif erence. In the social milieu enveloping Nava Nir, the old resident
signifes the universal old mother, pointing to the callousness of children. In the in
formal charter of the institution discussed by Mitra, the threatening old mother is
replaced by the more ambivalent old aunt, pointing to the existential dilemmas of
aging. In the science of aging as constituted by Agn in India, the old woman is re
placed by the putatively ungendered old man, pointing beyond the particular
needs of real old persons to the search by elites and rising middle classes for a sta
ble Indian identity, embodying crisis and absence and yet, in the sensibility of
familism and sevi he invokes, ofering the possibility of totality.
Aitasa Pralapa
The Athara Veda, the fourth of the ancient Vedas whose authority grounds
Brahmanical practice, has a section of its twentieth book termed the Aita prali pa.
Ralph Grifth, at one time principal of the Sanskrit College in Varanasi, pub
lished an Athara Veda translation in r 8g5 and r 8g6. Of the Aita pralipa, Grifth
noted: "Regarded as uninspired productions, these hymns are hardly susceptible
of intelligible translation or explanation. "1
A later Vedic text, the Aitareya Brahmana, ofers a story explaining the origins
of these verses' inexplicability Aitasa was a sage, of an important lineage. When
he began to speak the words that would become the Atharva Veda hymns, one of
his sons heard only incoherent sounds, prattle, prali pa. In the terms of Nagwa
slum, bakbak. The son tried to stop the father from talking, believing him mad.
Aitasa cursed his son for murdering his speech. Aitasa's words were then spoken,
and have been spoken by generation afer generation ever since, in the monu
mental act of remembering, that is, learning to repeat the Veda.
Aita8a, if he lived at all, lived long ago, and neither his words nor his story are
necessarily paths toward thinking about parents, children, voice, silence, and mad
ness today And yet the story sticks. A father's speech, a son's inability to hear it as
carrying meaning. An intergenerational confict over the authority of interpreting
the word. Accusations of madness versus the possibility of a sacred speaking. Anger
giving coherence in the form of the curse versus prali pa giving only a contested and
feeble voice. The father defeating the son's eforts at reinterpretation and silencing,
and generation afer generation remembering and repeating the contested speech
of the father. Until, for a far later generation, a Britisher teaching Sanskrit in
Varanasi rereads the contest as a problem of philological science against obscuran
tism, erases the predicament of the Indian father amid his nation's own paternalist
claims, and discovers the sad truth of prali pa: "uninspired productions. "
121
FOUR
Memor
y
Banks
in which te corict q ol age are dif eentiall embodied,
meor i capital in a ltt-ticket worl,
and philosopher debat what's lfltr evetin i frgottn
THE EMBODIMENT OF ANXIETY
In Kn Lar, the origins of the old king's madness are disputed. "0 sir, you are
old, " declare Lear's eldest daughters, but the king charges that it is "fial ingrati
tude" that has led him toward dotage, lunacy and ruin. The etiologic debate is re
peated in Apne Begine, a r g8g Hindi flm that draws on Lar in its tale of a father
neglected by his two eldest sons and their wives and respected by his youngest son.
The older sons and daughter-in-laws enfeeble the old man, and yet like Lear's the
father's own inappropriate decisions allow his children to gain the initial advan
tage. In both narratives, old age and generational confict reinforce each other as
debilitating causes in a spiral of increasing senility, and in both, a similar question
is posed: Is it the bodily logic of old age or the ingratitude and cruelty of the Bad
Family that lead to the decline of the patriarch?
Lar has become a global site where the contested phenomenology of old age
has been continually reinterpreted and reworked; in the United States, the play
has been invoked to capture questions of Alzheimer's and identity 1 Apne Bgine is
a diferent sort of reworking. The fm and the play difer on many points. Sons
and their wives, not daughters, are envisioned as the priary caretakers of old
persons in Apne Begine. The old man in the flm regains his prerogatives and his
health at the end, and the selfsh children are chastised and readmitted to the fold
of the joint family In Lar, to the end we are lef not knowing if Cordelia's return
and death have restored the king's mind or shattered it completely; his bitter clos
ing lines vacillate between the howl of recognition and blithe confusion.
The narratives difer as well in how the signs of decline and sufering are rep
resented. Kn Lar is a tale of escalating madness, an inversion of the conjoint wis- .
dom and bodily debiity of old age-
When the mind's free,
The body's delicate
123
12
4
MEMORY BANKS
into dotage and insensibility t o physical degradation:
the tempest in my mind
Doth from my senses take all feeling else
Save what beats there. 2
Both old age and the Bad Family are experienced a a turbulence, located in the over
lapping frames of mind and heart. The torment of mid is both set against the lesser
malad of bodiy aging and, a in the followig q4otaton, united to it in a loss of self
we are not ourselves
When nature, being oppressed, commands the mind
To sufer wth the body.3
Against the concern in Shakespeare's play with the mind and heart of old age
and their complex relationship with the body and the family, the father in the
Hindi fm grows physically weaker and emotionally more depressed. His debility
is never expressed as madness: the exterior wasteland of the play becomes the
empty interiors of the unloving home or of the old man's weak body; the tempest
becomes the silence of the marginalized or foolish voice. The debate over the ori
gins of sufering in old age are mapped onto the old body in a diferent way as a
physical weakess encompassing strength and afect and not as a madness that
troubles the hierarchy of mind and body
In her ongoing study of an urbanized Hindi-speaking village near New Delhi,
Sylvia Vatuk has examined the anxieties expressed by individuals confronting
their own aging. The women and men she interviewed expressed frequent con
cern over the possibility of losing the support of their children in old age. Vatuk
calls this concern "dependency anxiety"; we will turn to a fuller consideration of
it in the next chapter. The persons she interviewed see physical debiity as the most
likely cause of the loss of support. By physical debility, Vatuk refers to the multiple
embodiments of lost function described by those interviewed: the weakness (in
Hindi, kmzor of ears, eyes, hands, feet, voice, and mind. Of these, hands and feet
as a conjoint pair were the sine qua non of the projected losses of old age:
phrase repeated [coundess times] refers to the importance of having 'working
hands and feet' (hath pair calt hue) if one expects to receive respect and care from
the younger generation. " Hat pair as the embodiment of anxiet is a frequent
theme in the voices she cites:
Old age is like a second childhood. In the frst childhood, oh how lovable one seems
to others! But do you think it is like that in old age? One can't walk properly, hands
and feet don't do their work, eyes and ears become weak.
A for old age, as long a one's hands and feet are working, everyone gives one food.
It is good to die when one's hands and feet are still working: that is a good death. 4
MEMORY BANKS 12
5
Second childhood-a frequent theme in European constructions of the aging self
and senile body including the text of Kn lar-is expressed through multiple
weaknesses and anchored by hat pair rather than by mental weakness or madness.
The weakness of old age in these voices is not limited to work-related debilit
In two of the three passages Vatuk cites that I include above, the informant goes
on to move from hat pair to the quality of the voice itself in old age:
A old person says something and others just say, "Oh, let him babble! That's just
the way he is! " . . .
If you complain, they say "Even in old age he wants to be satiated! He just lies
there in bed all day and keeps giving orders! No work to do, no occupation, just lying
there babbling about one thing or another all day long! "
Babbling here is read polysemically-as the refusal of children to listen to the
meaningful requests of old people they no longer wish to support and as part of
the primary weakness of old age itself On the surface, the babble of Vatuk's in
formants translates into the doting prattle of Lear as heard by his elder daugh
ters-always demanding, childish, and without meaning. But for the Delhi vi
lagers of Vatuk's study the troublesome voice is located within a very diferent
embodiment. Whether its source be the biology or pathology of old age, or the so
cial psychology and intergenerational politics of the family-the unresolved prob
lematique of Apne Bgane and Kn lar-the babble of the old voice is heard as em
anating from very diferent constructions of the senile body
That the personal and social dstress of old age i ebodid, and embodied i
df erent ways at diferent ties and for dif erent communities, suggests a way into
te unrefexive obviousness of Azheier's diseae as Aerican brain and body
kler. In its specic construction as "the nation's fourth leadig kiler," Azheimer's
draws upon a culturally and historically located embodiment of the anety of get
tg old. This piece of epidemiological casuistry refects the association between a
clinical diagnosis of dementia and death, ofen secondary to pneumonia. On the
surface, the relation between the progressive loss of brain function with Azheimer's
and a set of neurally mediated bodiy processes that may precipitate pneumonia and
other disease appears a matter of physiology tut cour. But the move to understand
tis relationship as the primary cause of a person's ilness and death suggests a
dif erent kind of language game. Institutionalized, chronically bedridden, and dis
oriented persons are liely candidates for pneumonia, but many of the precipitating
causes of disease are not physiological and universal but social and contingent con
sequences of thei diagnosis of Azheier's: being institutionalized and thus subject
to a range of ofen vent "nosocomial" pathogens, being physically restrained or
being quickly and often forcibly fed by underpaid and disinterested staf and thus
likely to get food into one's bronchial passages, being infantiized and lef beref of
meaningful decisions and mindful activity and thus having one's disorientation and
cognitive decline exacerbated. These pathogenic processes all stem from "Az
heimer's," but as physiological consequences of social responses to the old and
126 MEMORY BANKS
demented body: its. immobilization and infantilization, under the rationale of care
and protection, within a discursive conjuncture in which Alzheier's is a sign of the
loss of selfood. The language of "the nation's fourth leading kiler" and the epi
demiological practices that sustain such numbers erase this web of social and phys
iological pathogenesis, encompassing a complex set of practices-and possible sites
of social interention-within the seamless l between brain tissues and lung dis
ease. The social production of the pathetic, institutionalized, and increasingly vl
nerable senile body is reduced to the plaques and tangles of Azheimer's. The death
of weak and socially constrained old people is embodied through their brains. In old
age, Alzheimer's becomes a critical metaphor for death. 5
The centrality of Alzheimer's in America-the legitimacy of its consummate
embodiment, such that one can simply and meaningfully say that someone died
"of Azheimer's"-is marked by its key symptom, forgetfulness. Memory loss, and
"cognitive loss" more generally, becomes metonymically identifed with the wide
range of behavioral and neuropsychological changes consequent with dementia.
As discussed in the last chapter, Berrios has convncingly suggested that the origins
of this metonymy lie with Kraepelin's rewriting of Alzheimer's frst cases to create
a new and far less inclusive category of zheimer's disease. "6 But the cognitive
focus of Alzheimer's-as opposed, for example, to a focus on afective or other be
havior change or on delusional symptomatology-suggests a broader cultural and
historical consensus, that memory is the key to the sel
The forgotten word for many Americans immediately signals the devastations
of "what's-his-name's disease. " Alzi is a term used informally by some physi
cians to describe a syndrome of middle-aged and older Americans with com
plaints of memory loss and fears of Alzheimer's but no abnormal fndings on neu
rological or mental status examinations. Other sources of memory loss-stress,
the various paraphraxes traced by Freud, 7 the border category of benign senes
cent forgetfulness, stress, the possibility of a cognitive style of "absent
mindedness"-are increasingly forgotten. Reports of fnding the traces of future
Alzheimer's in the communicative patterns of young nuns, whatever the status of
its science, intensify the anxiety around each unremembered name. A senior
physician in Boston noted to me in 1 ggo:
My wife and I help each other out--she says, "What was his name . . . " and I fnish
the sentence. Together, we remember for each other. We joke about Azheimer's
"what's his name's disease. " We joke a lot, but our joking disguises a fair amount of
concern . . . . My mother became disoriented last week, in her apartment building.
My sister came for her and brought her back to her apartment, but my mother re
fused to believe that this was her apartment. My sister had to ask her again and
again, "If this isn't your apartment, then whose pictures are on the wall?" . . . Each
time we forget a word, we worry about ending up like that.
Memory, in both professional and popular literature and representations of
Alzheimer's, becomes the necessary and sufcient index of the embodiment of
aging, how one worries, in the words of this physician, about ending up.
MEMORY BANKS 12
7
Just as minds and brains are not the only possible embodiments of the etiologic
and existential crises of old age, so weak memory is not the only way of perceiv
ing the multiple losses of dementia. The following chapters suggest that in the
\ aranasi neighborhoods of my study markers of afective change were ofen ex
perienced as far more salient indices of pathological aging than memory loss per
se. That old people forget, and that some forget far more than others, was com
mon knowledge and common sense. But memory loss did not usually anchor the
frst-person narratives of persons exploring their own present or past aging or the
second-person descriptions of others. When it was present, it tended to be as a loss
experienced by middle-class families, particularly in their concern about old men.
:lore generally memory became a critical sign of the self primarily within third
person discourse, in the abstract discussion of the body and its relation to the com
munity the state, and the cosmos. Before I move beyond memory to the anger, si
lence, and babbling central to the narratives of my own feldwork, I want to
consider these third-person constructions. What does it mean to speak of memory
and forgetting? What is the relationship between memory and bodily social, and
economic power? Are there other processes of embodiment-more critical than
rhe anxiety of old age and the experience of senility-that soak up the act of for
getting?
THE PROMISE OF RSAYA.A
.\yreda literally suggests the authoritative knowledge of longevity; as such, not
only rasqana but all a.tana, all eight branches of medicine, are seen as critical to a
clinical practice preserng and extending one's years. Contemporary Ayureda
draws on a multitude of clinical, commercial, regulatory, research, and pedagogc
institutions; ongoing oral traditions of practice; and a series of primary and com
mentarial texts in defning its approach to the body and to therapy8
Professional Ayreda organizes itself through institutional forms parallel in
most cases to allopathic biomedicine: Ayuredic hospitals organized lie colonial
allopathic institutions; Ayuredic medical schools that include a substantial inter
national biological curriculum; Ayredic governing, accrediting, and regulating
bodies; Ayuredic pharmaceutical houses and "detail men" doing direct market
ing to physicians; and Ayuredic laboratories, research institutes, and journals.
Charles Leslie and Paul Brass have described the diverging pulls of integrationist
and purist schools of Ayuredic practice. Integrationists have argued that medical
care should go beyond the historical limitations of "systems" by introducing bio
medicine into Ayuredic physiology and methodology and Ayureda's diagnos
tics, pharmacopaea, and allegedly holistic epistemology into other medical cul
tures. Purists have seen such compromise as a denial of the efcacy of Ayurveda
as a totalizing and sufcient system of care. 9
The integrationist-purist divide began to get recast in the late 1 g8os and 1 ggos
in terms of the changed meanings of the global and the local, with particular rei-
128 MEMORY BANKS
evance to the study of ratana. Two processes have been particularly critical : frst,
the intensifed mass-marketing of 'yurvedic" products to the middle class
through the growth of television and print media, leading to changes in popular
conceptions of Ayureda as a set of indigenous commodities, and new debates
over the boundaries of what can be termed 'yuredic"; second, the emergence
of diasporic Indian ("nonresident Indian, " or NRI) centers of Ayureda, recon
ceptualizing and recommodifng it to both non-Indian and NRI consumers. The
key fgure in this latter process has been the allopathic physician turned New Age
guru Deepak Chopra. Chopra is a fascinating fgure in many respects: the nineties
version of the Eastern Master in American popular culture, he has transformed
the archetpe. Out with the long beard and love beads, the appeal to timeless tran
scendence set to kaal music a Ia Ravi Shankar; Chopra is the guru in a business
suit or semi-ethnic casual wear, whose infomercials appear gratis on public televi
sion, propelling the enormous American sales of his books ofering an ageless
body Among Indian vaiqas, Ayuredic doctors, sentiment toward these changes
has been mixed. On the one hand, Ayureda has become an internationally
know and increasingly respected and remunerative feld; on the other, Indian
vaiyas, whether purist or not, have had ever less autonomy in defning the legiti
mate parameters of their feld given rapid shifs in national and global markets.
Most Banarsis whom I intervewed through the better part of a decade con
ceptualized their alternatives in medical care not as a choice of system or episte
mology but of the type of drug likely to be prescribed or of the physician's per
sona. Ayureda was frequently identifed with the charisma of a class of
physicians, manifest in the quality of thejatbu(, the herbal preparations, selected
and compounded under their supervision. ]atbu( was not only a matter for physi
cians; many householders, women and men but particularly women, learned to be
profcient in the selection of herbs and other materials from the bazaar shops of
herbalists and in their compounding and prescription. Professional Ayreda
dif ered not only in the physician's greater skill in diagnosis and therapy but in the
quality of his herbs and of their preparation. With intensive advertising of stan
dardized products by Ayuredic pharmaceutical houses, the charisma inherent in
the expert physician'sjanbu(was being challenged by new forms of charisma, the
famiiarity of the clinical encounter and the authority of the local expert chal
lenged by the famiiarity and authority of the trademark.
Ayureda is organized and popularly understood not only through these insti
tutional and market structures but as indexical sets of practices and as iconic sets
of texts. Pulse therapy though peripheral to many textual constructions of the
feld, remains the sine qua non of the astute clinician who is said to be able to di
agnosis complex and previously untreatable disorders with a single reading of the
aficted person's pulse. The act of compounding-the assumed preparation of
each composite drug with the specifc patient in mind-similarly is a cardinal sign
diferentiating Ayuredic practice from other knds of healing. The manipulation
of surfaces, entrances, and exits-the various and ofen violent purgations, ere-
MEMORY BANKS 12
9
ses, sweatings, oilings, and enemas of a set of practices ofen grouped together as
pancormis a third critical component of the constitution of the discipline. 1 0
Contemporary textual readings of Ayureda are based on fve classes of texts,
frequently cited by vairas-what are often caled the greater triad and the lesser
triad, subsequent digests and commentaries, contemporary research monographs,
and internationalist apologia. The most authoritative are the two major texts of
the greater triad, the Sut Sarhit and the Caro Srita, both dated by Jean
Filiozat in their redacted forms to the second or frst century B. C. E. with little cer
tainty 1 1 These are the texts referred to by the biologist Roy Walford in his de
scription of the journey to the mountaintop yogi.
Contemporary monographs draw on classical sources and modern research
protocols, and ofen are structured through a common narrative placing the re
searcher's project within the twin legitimating frames of humoral holism and a
hodgepodge of scientifc references drawing on theoretical physics, articial intel
ligence, and various forms of systems theory1 2 Apologia by Western scientists
turning East-lie Friof Capra's The To i Plsics, 1 3 legitimating "Eastern
thought" because of its apparent congruencies with post-Newtonian physics-be
come powerful signs ratifing an oppositional construction of Ayureda. At the
r g83 annual Dhanvantari Puja function held by the Institute of Medical Sciences
of Banaras Hindu University (which had parallel biomedical and Ayuredic fac
ulties), paeans to Dhanvantari, a patron deity of medicine, and to Sushruta, the
redactor of the eponymous text who was by tradition a local Banarsi, were sur
passed in number by equally routinized lauds to Capra.
Memory, smri, is explicitly fortied by many raiana remedies. The viana
kla, detailed in Suuta, is typical of the extreme iatrogenic efects of raiana
therapy; against the aesthetics of oppositional holism, raiana ofers a dif erent vi
sion of therapy:
One Drona measure of Vidanga (seeds) should be boiled in the way of preparing
cakes in an Indian cake-pan. When the watery portion (of the cakes) have been re
moved (evaporated) and the Vidanga-grains well boiled, they should be taken down
and well pasted on a stone-slab. They should then be kept in a strong iron pitcher
afer havng been mied with a copious quantity of the decoction of Yashti-madhu.
The pitcher should be buried in a heap of ashes inside a closed room during the
rainy season and presered there during the four months of rain; afer that period
the pitcher should be taken out (of the ashes) . Its contents should then be conse
crated with (appropriate) Mantras by uttering them a thousand times and should be
taken every morning in suitable quantities after the system has been thoroughly
cleansed (by appropriate emetics and purgatives, etc. ) . The diet should consist of
cooked rice and clarifed butter mixed with a copious quantity of the soup of Mudga
pulse and Aalaka cooked with a smal quantity of Sneha and salt; and should be
taken after the digestion of the medicine. The patient should lie on the ground (and
not on a bedding). Worms would be found to have been issuing out of the body afer
the regular and continuous use of the medicine for a month, which should be ex
tracted with the aid of a pair of bamboo tongs or forceps after the body had been
130 MEMORY BANKS
anointed with the Au-taila (described before). Ats would be coming out of the
body during the second, and vermins [sic] (Yuka) in the .third month of the use of the
medicine which should also be removed as in the preceding manner. The hair, nails,
and teeth begin to fal of and become dilapidated in the fourth month of its use.
The medicine destroys the old body through the sequential expulsion of its fester
ing insides to build a new and transformed one, characterized by the guna (qual
ity) of sattva, lightness and truth. The process of destruction both mirrors the
decay of old age and through it ofers a radical form of purifcation, ridding the
body of its insectile temporality.
In the ffh month the body beams with a divine glow, becomes resplendent as the
midday sun, and exhibits features which specifcally belong to the etherial [sic] being.
The ears become capable of hearing the faintest and remotest sound (under its use),
and the vision extends far into space and beholds objects at a great range (which is
not usually given to mortal eyes to descry). The mind, shorn of the qualities of Rajas
(action) and Tamas (nescience), becomes possessed of Sattva (iluminating principles
or true knowledge). Things are permanendy and indelibly impressed upon his
(user's) memory at a single hearing and the faculty of invention wonderfully ex
pands. Old age and decay permanendy vanish and youth returns to stay in him for
good, bringing with it an elephantine strength and a horse-like speed, and he is en
abled to live for eight hundred springs. 1 4
This sattvic body i s superhuman, with an incredible life span. Its powers include a
mind, or manas, capable of forming strong impressions and thus endowed with an
indelible memor Forgetting cannot occur because of the strength of the process
of impression-formation.
Memory loss is here linked with the weaknesses of aging, and the idealized
youthful body ofered is a powerful rememberer. Memory is not distinct from bod
iy weakness, not compartmentalized because of its association with manas; like vi
sion and hearing, it is a bodily process linked to the actions of mind. "Mind" in
Sufruta is underst9od through the categories of the Nyaya-Vaisheshika philosoph
ical systems as an organ, atomic (that is, without signifcant mass or volume) and
not restricted to the boundaries of the body with which it is associated. Mind is
that organ that instantaneously travels through space, linking a perceived object
with the sensory organ in the body through which it is seen and linking the self
with sensory organs through the registering of impressions, or sarskiras. Rasaana,
through the fortifcation of manas, generates ageless sarskiras.
Caraka summarizes the cumulative efects of rasaana: "One attains longevity
memory [smrtz] , intelligence [meda] , freedom from disorders, youthful age, excel
lence of lustre, complexion and voice, optimum strength of physique and sense or
gans, successful words, respectabiity and briliance. " 1 5
These multiple qualities are not simply lumped together as the qualities of
youth. Rasayana is based on a physiology of decline in which the body sufers suc
cessive and periodized losses over the life course. A well-known line from a lesser
MEMORY BANKS 131
triad text, the fourteenth-century Sdhara saThita, 1 6 chronicles the progression
of losses decade by decade: "Childhood, growth, colour and complexion, intelli
gence [medha] , skin health, vision, semen, valour, intelligence [buddhz] , physical ca
pacity spirituality and life-these get lost in successive decades of life. " 1 7 Smrti is
not explicitly mentioned in the Sariadhara passage, raising the question of its as
sociation with either or both of the two losses translated as "intelligence, " medhl
and buddhi. For Ayuredic physicians I interewed in Varanasi, medha difers from
buddhi because of the former's explicit association with smrti. The Sariadhara pas
sage is often cited, and it suggests that memory loss is located in the aging of
younger bodies. Meda in Hindi means "bat ko smaran rakne I mlnsi fakti, " the
mental power of retaining-remembering something. 1 8 The onset of diminished
medha is framed as a problem of a younger body
Rasaana's relevance to older bodies has been and remains contested. The de
structive recreation of the body is too strenuous for certain classes of persons, ac
cording to most texts, including old persons. Tales of rejuvenated old persons,
such as Rishi Chyavana, are exemplary but draw as much on the power of the as
cetic as on that of the medicine. On the cover of J. K. Ojha's Clavanaprasha: A
Scientic Stud, the sage serenely sits amid a group of scantily clothed young women
bringing him platters full of lmvll fruit and the other ingredients of Chyawan
prash. The presence of the women both draws attention to the sage's indiference
to their allure and yet ofers the reader the object of rasaana as a body steeped in
sensuality
Chyavana was a powerful and angry aged rishi who cursed a king whose
daughter accidentally poked the rishi's eyes with a thorn. To win back the saint's
afections and avoid the curse, the king married his daughter to Chyavana. The
woman's body quickly wore down the old sage's vitality. When the divine twins
and physicians the Asvns gave him the secret of Chyawanprash, he was rejuve
nated: "This very saint regained youth and vitality by the use of this composition.
The word youth means manhood and sex power, because saint Chyawan had be
come dear to innumerable virgin youths. "
Though the promise of the drug is here the total rejuvenation of the old,
Ojha's text is less a paean to its efcacy than a caveat to young men. Chyavana lost
his vitality Ojha warns us, because of semen loss consequent upon sex with his
wfe, "leaving him convalescent. "
In reality semen i s not only the means of producing children but i s also needed to
regulate the glandular function of the body for its nourishment and development.
Thus it regulates the life. Too much discharge of semen adversely afects the physi
cal organs and reduces the human life by profusely weakening the body. Thus it is
said "celibacy is life. " 1 9
The text details some early signs of semen loss-feeble voice, changes i n the com
plexion-and roots senescence in sex and masturbation. Two "cures" are simulta
neously ofered, the supernatural transformation of Chyavana through the tonic
132 MEMORY BANKS
and the injunction against ejaculation. Against the fantastic medicine possible for
the exemplary body of the old sage, a therapy of seminal conseration is advo
cated. The meaning of rasiana is translated from fortifing drugs for exemplary
old bodies to fortied boundaries for normal young ones.
Chyawanprash, the gif of Chyavana to posterity like the vidana preparation
described earlier in the classical texts, specifcally preseres and improves memory
among a host of other qualities. Associated with Chyavana's body, the drug ofers
memory to "even the old. " Caraka ofers the recipe for the drug and then notes:
This is the famous "cyavanaprasa," an excellent rasayan. Particularly it allevates
cough and dyspnoea, is useful for the wasted, injured and old people and promotes
development of children. It alleviates hoarseness of voice, chest diseases, heart dis
ease, vatarakta, thirst and disorders of urine and semen. It should be taken in the
dose which does not interfere with the food (intake and digestion). By using this
(rasayan) the extremely old Cyavana regained youthful age. If this rasayan is used by
the indoor method, even the old attains intellect, memory lustre, freedom from dis
eases, longevity, strength of senses, sexual vigour, increased agni (digestion and me
tabolism), fairness of complexion and carmination of wind. One, shedding the form
of the old age, puts on that of the fresh youth. ( Thus is said cyavanaprasa).
20
Ku{pravefiki, the "indoor method," refers to the importance of place in rasiana
therapy Rasiana is not just a compendium of drugs, but a series of orienting and
purifying procedures at the center of which is the ingestion of the drug. The pa
tient must be oriented both to time and to place. During the IASTAM session in
Bombay di_scussed in the last chapter at which the applicability of rasiana to the
old was debated, a second debate was over the heightend commodication of the
tonic. Over-the-counter, mass-produced rasiana tonics, mosdy variations on
Chyawanprash, have been increasingly marketed as rejuvenators and energzers
without the therapeutic context of pancakarma purifcation or the specication of
the patient's environment. A vocal minority of those present in Bombay felt the
sale of such tonics, without attention to therapeutic context, was dangerous or at
best of no value to the patient.
The indoor method involves a hut for the patient to receive therapy, apart from
the household space and the family. The separation of the body from family space
suggests the third and fourth ascetic stages of life, vinaprasta and sannyaa. Like
sannyia, the entry into which involves a ritual death of the body and the creation
of a "deathless" body separate from domestic space, the indoor treatment sepa
rates the body undergoing the more corporeal death and rebirth of rasiana. The
hut is both space of seclusion and womb of rebirth. As a space of seclusion, it can
only be entered by certain types of persons:
[A] cottage should be built in an auspicious ground, facing eastward or northward
and in a locality which is inhabited by king, physician and brahma1as, holy saints, is
free from dangers, auspicious and with easy avaiabiity of necessary accessories. It
should have sufcient space area and height, three interior chambers one afer the
other, a small opening, thick walls and should be comfortable for the seasons, well-
MEMORY BA!KS 133
clean and favourable. It should be impermeable for undesirable sound etc. (sense ob
jects), free from women, equipped with necessary accessories and attended by physi
cian with medicaments and brahmalas. 21
Not only are women to be excluded, but for the practical reasons of the cost and
time of the indoor method, all but the wealthy: "The indoor method of rasayana
treatment is advised for those who are capable, disease-free, wise, self-controlled,
leisurely and rich otherwise the outdoor method is advisable. "22 Raoana ofers
memory preseration to the young and, in some few cases, to the old. Old bodies
can handle the milder remedy of Chyawanprash, but even then only through the
technologically intensive "indoor method" restricted to wealthy men. The old per
son seems more to sere as exemplary than clinical body and points to the need to
protect young bodies from being spent. Semen, money memory: all are somehow
linked. The primary currency of therapeutic protection, semen, glides easily into
other forms of symbolic capital .
THE MARKETING OF MEMORY
The semantic network23 linking memory, youth, masculinity and money in textual
sources of raoana characterizes the commodifcation and therapeutic use of the
contemporary raoana tonic and of other drugs. To continue to explore the map
ping of memory loss onto the cultural construction of the life span, I focus on two
newly commodied "neo-raoana" tonics, Geri-forte and Kesari Jivan, and a
tonic whose status as raoana is contested, ginseng.
To ask the question in a dif erent way: Why do young men buy health tonics
formulated explicitly for old people? Geri-forte is a pil marketed by the Ayuredic
drug company Himalayan as an "adaptogenic," a drug that enhances the strength
and mental power of debilitated persons and fghts stress. Himalayan has special
ized in reformulating Ayuredic herbal preparations, repackaging them in the
symbolic forms of biomedical, "English" medicine-brightly colored capsules,
plastic bottles, English labels-and distributing it by prescription primarily
through biomedical physicians. 24
Besides those in practice at the medical school of Banaras Hindu University
and the lunatic asylum to the north of the city there were two psychiatrists in pri
vate practice in Varanasi during the years of my feldwork. Dr. Singh, the younger
of the two, was not yet well-established. Ofen when I came by he was alone in the
ofce, a sharp eontrast to the psychiatric consulting rooms of the other private
doctor and of the university clinic, in which a dozen or more persons besides clin
ician and patient occupied the room, most family members of patients waiting to
be seen. 25 One afernoon when I came to call, Singh was seeing two persons who
looked like and turned out to be farmers, father and son, and he motioned to me
to take a seat. The young man was being treated for depression; his father brought
him into town for the occasional visit. After several minutes of the father describ
ing his son's limited improvement and the psychiatrist adjusting the medication, a
134
MEMORY BANKS
short spell of silence followed. The young man looked expectantly and shyly down
towards the foor. His father coughed, and excused himself to go urinate. Still
shyly, the young man described being impotent and requested appropriate medi
cine. The psychiatrist wrote him a prescription for Geri-forte.
Geri-forte is explicitly named and classifed as a drug for the elderly Yet my in
teriews with several Varanasi physicians suggest that much of Geri-forte's market
share comes from young to middle-aged men with the chief complaint of impo
tence. Mental weakness and impotence are marked by the same term, kmzon, lit
erally weakness. More than a semantic glide is at stake. Himalayan-sponsored
clinical research has suggested that Geri-forte may work as an anxiolytic, reducing
a patient's anxiety and some associated symptoms.
26
But there may be more to the
drug's efcacy across the life span than its possible anxiolytic efects.
The problem of Geri-forte is echoed in the marketing by the Zandu pharma
ceutical company of Kesari Jivan, a mass-market preparation of the ubiquitous
Chyawanprash with safon. In one of the more memorable of the Kesari Jivan
ads, shown on television and in vernacular and English newspapers and maga
zines, a young man is shown trying to catch a departing Bombay bus. He can't
make it up until an older man reaches down and pulls him aboard; a young
woman smirks in the background from her vantage point by a window. The leg
end, referring through the body of the old man to that of the young, reads, "Sixty
years old or sixty years young?" Kesari Jivan, the ad suggests, has given the old
man his vigor; but the ad is of course pitched to young men. Other Kesari Jivan
ads show a gray-haired older man in a comfortable safari suit standing straight
and tall and climbing a long fight of stairs wth apparent ease, while lagging be
hind is a mustachioed and dark-haired young man dressed for success in a fash
ionable shirt and tie, pufng and bent over like his compatriot on the bus. A drug
framed as an index of the strength of the old male body is addressed to the weak
ness of youth. The older body at sixty is paradoxically stronger than the younger
body at thirty The father leaves the room so the son can confess his impotence.
Geri-forte.
In the wealthier colonies of my Varanasi feldwork, Korean ginseng was a more
popular tonic among young men than the various Chyawanprashes. Chyawan
prash was something your mother spoon-fed you as a child. Ginseng carried with
it both the appeal of Ayureda and the exotic strength of East Asia. Over-the
counter preparations like Jensheng were packaged as potent red capsules with
Chinese-style lettering and were ofen labeled ':yurvedic. " The young men in the
colonies who used them-none of the young women in the colonies reported
using ginseng or other vitality tonics-often referred to ginseng as Ayuredic.
Ayureda here connoted the raw natural power of unadulterated herbs and the
long-term transformative efects of janbu{ against the fy-by-night efects of anrezz
davl, English (allopathic) medicine. Ayureda was Indian and was something to
take pride in. The Chinese lettering and the use of "Korean" paradoxically
identifed this medicine as something new and foreign: not Chyawanprash. East
MEMORY BANKS 13
Asian medicine ofered an intriguing mediation of self and other: a powerful
counterhegemony beating the West at its own game, a more inviolable self the de
sired object of the tonic.
The Jensheng red capsule was not the only tonic to play on its phallic
signifcation. Frequent newspaper ads for sexual vitality tonics continue to fore
ground the signifcance of the capsule shape: the image of a hand holding a mas
sive capsule in ads for the sexual tonic 303 links together medicine, ries (303 refers
to a type of gun), and masturbation. Ginseng and the other tonics marketed for
young men drew not only on rasqana but on another of the eight branches of
Ayureda, the science of aphrodisiacs, or viraTa. Va'rTa recipes are grouped
with rasqana therapies in most classical Ayuredic texts, and their benefts overlap.
Rqana recreates the body; vazkara7a brings it the wealth of progeny and the
pleasures of good sex.
In their therapeutic structure, the two specialties difer considerably: vazkrTa
lacks the elaborate locating and contextualizing of the body Va'ra7a remedies
are usually not herbal and often involve eating the fesh or specifc organs of ani
mals. In rasqana, the dismembered body is the patient's own, degraded through
strong purgation within an enclosure reminiscent of the spatial construction of
the sacrifcial body: the patient is the dismembered and recreated Purusha, the
sacrifcial body of Vedic ritual. 27 In vizkaraTa, the sacrifced and dismembered
body is that of the animal , and through its ingestion (as bufalo meat, cock's meat
fried in crocodile's semen, the eggs of swan, goat's testicles, or pounded pork) the
body becomes as powerful and the penis as large as that of a horse, bull, or ele
phant. For the young men of the colonies, ginseng dif ered from the classic
rasqana of Chyawanprash in its gendering: Chyawanprash implied the ingestion
of mother's milk, something one had long since been weaned of of; ginseng sug
gested the ingestion of male body parts, not goat's testicles but a powerful red cap
sule.
Classical descriptions of vazkaraTa, lie rasqana, note its limited usefulness
across the life course. Recipes that may be taken by old men are noted separately
and are usually vegetarian. 28 The ingestion of the dismembered other, like the de
struction of the self assumes a young body
Sanjay was a man in his early twenties who, at the time of the interviews with
him that I draw on here, had fnished with university and was preparing for his
forestry civil service exams. He was the son of a professor at Banaras Hindu Uni
versity and at that time lived in his family compound in a village on the northern
outskirts of the city fairly well known as the birthplace of the Hindi writer Prem
chand. San jay had recently been sick wth intestinal cramping pain and diarrhea,
and was worried about the efects of sickness on his studying for exams and
specifcally his ability to memorize. He decided to stop drinking unboiled water
and began taking Jensheng.
Sanjay spoke of his ilness both in localized terms-a "stomach" [et] prob
lem-and more generally, as kamzor, weakness. Ginseng, he said, was a powerful
136 MEMORY BANKS
Ayuredic tonic that hi s uncle, an allopathic government doctor, had recom
mended to him. Though ginseng was obviously Ayuredic, San jay noted, it was a
new product, probably the result of current Ayuredic research transforming old
formulae through recombination into powerful new drugs.
Ginseng is expensive, as Sanjay and most other men who chose to take it re
minded me. In r g8g, a packet of ten 250 milligram capsules in Varanasi ranged in
cost from thirty to thirty-fve rupees (then about two U. S. dollars, expensive for a
tonic) . Its price both limited its market and contributed to its appeal as a status
item. Ginseng was in. One of the more heavily marketed ginseng preparations at
the time was Thirty Plus, with ads featuring the Hindi flm actor Jeetendra, then
still known for his eternal youth and ability to garner young men's roles in middle
age. Ofering "stamina and performance, " Thirty Plus combined ginseng
("revered by oriental scientists for centuries" and used by celebrities "including In
dira Gandhi, Henry Kissinger and Marlon Brando") with the rastana drug Asva
gandha ("a native root, mentioned in Vedic literature"). The drug tackled the de
bility of old age, here lowered to only thirty. The meaning of thirty in these ads as
an index of progressive loss difers from that of sixty in the Kesari ]ivan ad, a sign
of exemplary power that younger men desire.
Ginseng grew phenomenally in popularity between r g88 and r ggo. As the sell
ing of the herb became increasingly bigger business, its questionable identity as
Ayuredic became of greater concern to ginseng distributors and their competi
tors. Neither quite Ayuredic nor allopathic, ginseng drew on both systems of
signifcation. Another ginseng preparation, Revital, inverted the recombinant aes
thetics of Thirty Plus in joining the Korean herb to allopathic additives ("Miner
als * Vitamins * Lipotropic Factors") . Revital, like Thirty Plus, ofered an "alert
mind" and "active body"; its slogan, "Better experienced than explained," ac
knowledges the drug's heteroglot resistance to rational description or systemic lo
cation.
Ginseng's upmarket position was echoed by a class of rastana Chyawanprash
derivatives that explicidy marketed themselves to the then

newly named "pup

pies" (Punabi) , "guppies" (Gujurati), and other young urban professionals of the
maor cosmopolitan centers of the country Chyawanshakti (shakt means power or
energy) was a tough-sounding version of Chyawanprash, marketed to resist the
mother's mik image of the latter. Ads for Chyawanshakti showed a successful
thirty-something man in business clothes and appealed to the drug's power to al
leviate the mental and
p
hysical weakness caused by the tensions of middle-class
modernity Baidyanath's Chyawanprash Special avoided children, mothers, and
old people in its advertisements, showing before and afer pictures of a young ex
ecutive type who has gained "physical ability plus mental agility. " Like many of
the ginseng preparations, Chyawanprash Special drew on the physical potency of
rastana and the sexual potency of vrara7a to ofer a selective focus on mental
ftness and memory power.
In the next chapter, I will turn to the generational politics and psychodynamics
MEMORY BANKS 137
of the relationships between young and old bodies underlying these ads and a va
riety of other practices and discourses. Here I want to focus on distributional as
pects of the losses and therapies detailed. For whom is mental weakness and mem
ory loss medicalized? For whom is therapy created, and to whom is it marketed?
MEMORY AND CAPITAL
In N agwa Harijan Basti, a pun played on the uselessness of tonics, whether
Ayuredic or alopathic. ]haTi is a particularly Banarsi term meaning "without
further use," usualy translated by slum residents as "what a lottery ticket is after
the lottery." JhaTfi was an exquisitely framed naming of abjection: like a lottery
ticket after the lottery, someone who isjhaTfi probably had an infnitesimally small
chance of making something of themselves in the frst place, and now even that
chance was over. Old people in Nagwa were ofen-jokingly or insultingly
called jhaTfi. "Zandu"-in Hindi the brand is indeed called JhaTfi-was the
name of the prominent Ayurvedic drug manufacturing house, makers of Kesari
Jivan and other Chyawanprash derivatives and sponsor of the 1 990 IASTAM
meetings in Bombay Thus the pun: "jhaTfi Chyawanprash"-useless Chyawan
prash.
JhaTfi played on more than the uselessness of tonics. Like the lotter the neo
raqana tonic promises not only a stronger but a more successful and translocated
body the wealthy young professional of Chyawanshakti, the strong and erect
sixty-year-old of Kesari ]ivan. JhaTi implies not that Chyawanprash could never
work or that it is a sham, but that whatever chances of translocation it ofers are
limited and inevitably past tense. The joke ''haTi Chyawanprash" points past the
tonic to the slum body Here in the slum we have jhaTfi old people, not strong men
of sity Here even the young arejhaTi and lack Sanjay's examinable body
Tonic transactions in Nagwa dif ered from those in the colonies. In the family
of Siranji, a woman in her late seventies or eighties who was one of the two oldest
residents of the slum, tonics were given by her son Babu Lal to two of his more
than one dozen famiy members living at home: to Siranji and to his young son
Raju, stil in grammar school . Raju's sisters had al been married, and several had
lef the household; those who remained were rarely ofered tonics. Raju's older
brothers had by then all lef school and worked with Babu Lal, running the family
vegetable shop, helping farm the family's small plot in their village to the south of
the city, playing the drums at various religious ceremonies (a job expected of the
low-status Chamar community the dominant caste of the slum) , and working at
various day laboring jobs. They no longer take tonics. Like San jay, they were con
cerned about protecting their youthful strength, and they wore various amulets,
rings, and strin
g
s around their necks, upper arms, wrists, and fngers, bindings
given in empowering transactions by gurus, local exorcists, and other experts in
spells and magic, mantra-tantra. Sanjay too wore several protective rings with
stones appropriate to his astrological chart and personal history; the dif erence
138 MEMORY BANKS
here was a matter of degree. The multiply girt body of Raju's brother, and to a
lesser extent, of middle-class guys like Sanjay, was tightly bound up against leak
age and loss, protected against the various depletions of women and upper castes
and the desiring all-too-fuid self But the family-through its purse controlled by
Babu Lal and Parbati, his wife-invested little in these transactions. Raju's re
mained the potentially translocatable body; he received a vitamin tonic daily from
a small and expensive bottle. He was not}hati; he needed a strong body to study,
to memorize, and to succeed. The chances of his radical translocation were slim,
but they were not past tense.
Raju's di (grandmother) Siranji, whose multiple complaints and aggravated
voice will be taken up in a later chapter, received a far less expensive mineral and
"lipotropic" (fattening up) tonic from a bigger bottle, which sat on a shelf in the
small courtyard that for most of the year doubled as bedroom for Siranji and the
grandchildren and storage area for the vegetable shop. Siranji wanted treatment
for her multiple ils and ofen saw the tonic as a substitute for proper care; famiy
members either felt that her old age could not be treated or that any efective treat
ment was well beyond their means and not an appropriate use of the moral econ
omy of the household.
The possibiity of her tonic not being entirely jhalti, and by extension Siranji
herself lay i n the afection behind the transaction. Siranji rejected her tonic, and
said that it burned her; but she also rejected it because she saw it as a way of shut
ting her up, as a worthless panacea. For her family, the tonic was in one way an at
tempt to silence her unending complaints, but it was also an efort to respond,
through the tonic as a gift that articulated a relationship between them, to a weak
ness that they understood to be beyond their means. From this perspective, the fact
that the tonic might well be pharmacologically jhalti becomes immaterial; as a
sign of the bonds that would transcend weakess, it retains a certain power.
For all in the famiy but Raju, weakness was seldom embodied as memor One
of Raju's older brothers, Munna, had a teach-yourself English text then popular
in the city which he studied in his spare time hoping for a better position or a col
lege admission. But English was an avocation, and not memory power but time it
self was the crucial missing commodity for him. Nor did Munna frame what was
lacking in terms of a powerful paternal presence. Babu Lal, unlie Sanjay's father
the university professor, had not achieved his status as one of the relatively more
successful men of the slum through the kind of memory power that tonics like
Chyawanshakti and ginseng augment. The fgure of the successful older man in
the safari suit climbing the stairs or standing erect on the bus-sity years old or
sity years young-did not fgure as a representation of the paternal-flial psycho
dynamics of Siranji's family
Along one of the roads of Ravindrapuri Colony, a large sign advertised a tuto
rial coaching center for secondary and intercollege level students: "Memory
Banks. " Memory, here explicitly structured as capital in the pun of the organiza
tion's name, was ofered for sale on the streets of the colonies, not the bastis. Tu-
MEMORY BANKS 139
torial programs, ofering supplementary education to ensure success in school and
state and national level competitive examinations, were all but required for aca
demic success in the often fercely competitive examinations for university en
trance or civil serice positions. Much was at stake in memory When the multina
tional toy company Hasbro came to India, one of their frst products marketed
was "Memory, " a card matching game, advertised in upmarket publications and
ofered as a didactic tool "designed to help your children develop their memory
skills . . . [and] build visual recall. "
The symbolic importance of memory i n the structure of the Indian state and
in the possibilities for the translocation of bodies characterized colonial British de
bate over the nature of native minds and the necessary safeguards thereof Sir
Henry Maine, in his lecture delivered at Calcutta in 1 866 and briefy discussed
earlier, addressed British concerns that the nature of competitive exams in Britain
and India designed to routinize the stafng of a burgeoning empire were reducing
education to "cramming" and the superfcial kowledge gained by rapid memo
rization, and that the superfcial mental faculties of native Indians, adept at such
rote thinking and cramming but not at the sustained refection of classical Euro
pean thought, would overwhelm this emerging meritocracy by exam, to Britain's
disadvantage. Maine disagreed, suggesting that knowledge gained by rapid mem
ory was by no means any more superfcial than what for him were increasingly an
tiquated methods.
I wish, however, to say something of the whole class of objections implied in that one
word, "cramming." If there is anything in them, you know, I suppose, that they have
a far wider application to this University They are constantly urged against the nu
merous competitive systems which are growing up in England, and in particular
against the system under which the Civil Serice of India, probably the most pow
erful ofcial body in the world, is recruited, and wil be recruited . . . .
As far as I understand the word, it means nothing more than the rapid commu
nication of knowledge,--communication, that is to say, at a rate unknown till re
cently
In ofering intensive memorization as a more rational didactic technique, Maine
linked its strength of method with the powerful body of bureaucracy and empire.
Memory-based learning, he suggested, works better than lengthier tutorial- or
lecture-oriented approaches. A new regime of imperial power had opened up
hitherto unexplored vistas of mental power.
As to the supposed and threatening superiority of Indians within the new
regime, Maine demurred. "What appears to be meant is, that the Natives of India
learn with singular rapidity. The fact may be so, though for my part, I doubt
whether they learn with greater rapidity than English lads who once put their
hearts into their work; and it may be also true, as some allege so positively, that
their precocity is compensated by a greater bluntness of the faculties later in life. "
Here again is evidence of the polysemy of "softening, " by which Maine charac
terized native minds, as an overlapping racial and generational pathology For
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Maine, the concern was not the greater cramming ability of Indians, negated even
if it were true by the simultaneous softening and blunting of their minds, but the
use to which they put memory and the new forms of knowledge Empire has
crammed-literally-into them.
I should rather venture to express disappointment at the use to which they some7
times put it. It seems to me that not seldom they employ it for what I can best de
scribe as irationally reactionary purposes. It is not to be concealed, and I see plainly
that educated Natives do not conceal from themselves, that they have, by the fact of
their education, broken for ever with much in their history, much in their customs,
much in their creed. Yet I constantly read, and sometimes hear, elaborate attempts
on their part to persuade themselves and others, that there is a sense in which these
rejected portions of Native history, and usage and belief are perfectly in harmony
wth the modern knowledge which the educated class has acquired . . . . They seem
to believe, or they try to believe, that it was better to be a Brahmin or a scribe at
tached to the Court of some half mythical Hindu king, than to follow one of the pro
saic learned professions which the English have created . . . . The only India, in fact,
to which he could hope to return-and that retrogression is not beyond the range of
conceivable possibilities-is the India of Mahratta robbery and Mahomedan rule. 29
Maine worried that memory as imperial pedagogy had rather paradoxically en
couraged a forgetting of the savage and corrupt Indian past. He argued that the
new rationally crammed cosmos of the educated Indian-derived solely he felt,
from British education-was superimposed on the Indian past to reclaim the lat
ter as something it never was. Indian "softening" was ultimately less a matter of
generalized forgetfulness, unlike European cerebral sofening. Indian minds were
sof as a result of their tendency to remember ever more falsely The better trained
in memory Indians became, the more they engaged in sof remembering.
"Memory" here suggests a two-edged commodity. Ofered to India as a system
of learning and advancement organized around the rapid cramming of European
culture, it provided a tool for the colonized to re-member a dismembered social
body. Within local postcolonial economies of examinations, bureaucracy and
translocation, the culturally elaborated domain of memory becomes a currency
critical to the preseration and augmentation of certain classes of bodies-young,
male, better of-and unavailable or irrelevant to others. "Memory loss" is experi
enced as, and signifes, something radically dif erent for variously located bodies.
The embodiment of anxiety and weakness-Vatuk's informants' concern
about their old age, San jay's concern about getting a job and succeeding his fa
ther, Raju's family's concern about his success in school, Siranji's concern about
the illness raging inside her-is not just a function of universally meaningful
symptoms that emerge out of an ideal and decontextualized sufering body. Old
people ofen forget things, and some forget almost everything; everyone in the
colonies and in the slum knows this. But despite such commonsense knowledge,
memory loss and disordered mind did not go on to anchor the construction of the
senile body or its infrequent medicalization. Siranji often forgot things, her family
MEMORY BANKS 141
acknowledged, and other slum elders were similarly described as forgetful if you
put the question to their family or neighbors. Among middle-class famiies, the sit
uation difered somewhat.
Here I will briefy mention two old people whose families I knew in Calcutta; I
will return to their stories in greater depth in chapters 6 and g. 30 Somita Ray grew
up in a Bengali village and was married in her early teens to a much older man
who had become a lecturer in Calcutta; when I met her he had long since died,
and she lived with her son and daughter-in-law in a small fat. The younger cou
ple were at their wit's end as a result of Somita's behavior: they told me about false
accusations, angry screaming, her hiding household objects to spite the daughter
in-law, and similar occurrences. They described the progression of her "mal
adjusted" behavior in terms of an exacerbation of previous personality traits, her
inability over many years to adjust to her educated daughter-in-law intensifed by
her inability to adjust to old age. Memory loss was one piece of the lengthy de
scriptions of the previous several years they ofered me in a course of interiews
over si months, but it was not an organizing feature of how they understood
Somita's diference over time.
Sudipta Basu was a very high ranking civil servant in West Bengal who was
pushed into the civil serice by his father despite his desire to become a historian,
a fact he ofen retold to his children and grandchildren. He would have been a
good historian, he used to say, because he had an especially good memory His in
terest in memory and classifcation sufsed his home life; his grandson, a friend of
mine, recalls that even as a small child he found his grandfather's strict adherence
to elaborate schedules and routines-to his nram, a word difcult to translate but
roughly his custom, practice, routine duty, or system3 1 -remarkable: "I would
play a game with him, lick his nose, and say, 'Is that your nram?"' ; "He used to
have a lot of serants, and every morning each would have to do his precise task
at just the right place and time. The fellow who shined his shoes had to place them
by the chair where he ate breakfast, another would stand ready to carry his brief
case. "
The grandfather had long since retired when hi s wife began to notice hi m for
getting words more and more frequently. She became upset: "You have bought all
these books and yet you stil can't remember this word! " man who was once
chief engineer of Bengal is now reduced to this! " From losing memory, his grand
son told me, he moved to progressively losing his nram, which upset his famiy far
more since it seemed so central to who he was. His wife became particularly con
cerned when he ceased to remember to ofer his daily prayers to Krishna, a prac
tice he had taken up afer his retirement with her encouragement.
A friend of the family a foreign-trained nephrologist, advised them that the
old man probably had Alzheimer's and that he would progress from these losses to
angry, violent, and suspicious behavior and fnally to passivity, bodily failure, and
death. As Sudipta progressed according to this prognosis and became increasingly
difcult to relate to, the family looked continually for evidence of relational conti-
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nuity. The grandson noted, "He continued to be warm to my father, which was
important because they had been particularly close"; "a cousin-brother had re
cently been married and came with his wife to pay their respects-when they bent
down to touch his feet, he leaned over to acknowledge them in turn, just as he al
ways had done. "
Unlike Somita's children, who focused on their mother's actions in terms of
previous histories of family relationships, Sudipta's family additionally marked
his last years in terms of the loss of memory and nram, repeatedly framing these
losses against the critical role of memory and routine in his earlier life as a stu
dent, examination taker, high-ranking civil servant, book collector, employer of
many serants, and postretirement Vaishnavite devotee. Memory plays a power
ful narrative role, along with family relations, in his grandson's retelling of
Sudipta's decline, less because it was an index of being a person than as it sug
gested being a certain kind of person, someone cultivated, someone who was a
master of order.
Such frames of gender and of socioeconomic dif erence mute the universal
signifcance of the forgetful old person. Before turning more closely to the
signifcance of relation, anger, and emotion as markers of diference, I want to
highlight the one signifcant exception, the archetype of the universal elder as the
site of a diferent sort of forgetting in a broad strand of normative Hindu thought:
the last of the four life stages of aamadharma, the sannyasi, or renouncer.
FORGETTING AS A PATH TO TRUTH
Smrti, memory, is the subject of signifcant debate within most of the classical
schools of Indian philosophy or darianiata. A central debate centers on the status
of srt as a pramira, or instrument of valid knowledge. Most schools of philoso
phy do not allow that memory can be a pramara: frst, it does not present but rather
re-presents objects to consciousness; second, it may represent its object diferently
from the initial presentation; and third, it may involve secondary cognition and
not be an immediate source of knowledge. 32 Pamira, as B. K. Matilal suggested,
conveys authorit; memory, as but a copy of prior authoritative experience, in it
self lacks authority and cannot be a pramira. 33 And as copies need not be exact re
productions even though they may claim to be, memory can easily deceive.
Memory's status as a copy whose relationship to primary experience is uncer
tain undergirds its importance in the more soteriologically oriented philosophical
systems of Vedanta and Yoga and in the great narrative and normative traditions
of the Sanskrit Epics, Puranas, and dharmaiatra, or legal compendia. These latter
are collectively known as smrti, that which is remembered, what Gerald Larson has
referred to as the "important corporate memory of the community. "34 Smrti is in
this context contrast with iruti, the authoritative and always precedent knowledge
revealed in the Vedas. Unlike smrti, which is refexively and explicitly told and thus
accessible as a remembered narrative, futi is always heard anew. Smrti is the trace
MEMORY BANKS 1
43
of authority a derivative and potentially deceptive text. The Vedas, structured as
prosodic oral recitative rather than prosaic narrative, are memorized to resist be
coming text and thus a nonauthoritative copy Thus a paradox: the "remembered"
is narrativized, and loses its authority; the authoritative is memorized, to avoid de
generating into narrative.
Memory in this contrast between frut and smrt literatures, signifes both the
potentially deceptive nature of corporate memory-and all memory more gener
ally-and the practical means by which authoritative kowledge avoids slipping
into the inherent misreading of narrative. The polysemy of "srti," in other
words, points both to the possibility of authority and ilusion, both to things as
they really are and things as we desire them to have been and thus be. This con
tradiction underscores the metaphorical language of memory and forgetting in
the path-based philosophical soteriologies of Hinduism. Memory points us be
yond the illusory confnes of this life to the cyclical unfolding of multiple lives. Yet
memory prevents us from forgetting the phenomenal, nonessential names and
forms that seduce our understanding and thus prevents us from realizing that
which is essential behind the vei of samsara, this cyclical and inherently unsatis
fying cosmos. To discover the Real, we must "forget" the phenomenal world of
names and forms; in forgetting, we "remember" our true identity beyond samsara.
In the fourfold scheme of stages of life, iramadharma, the fnal stages of the for
est dweller and of the renunciate are associated with both physical and cognitive
withdrawal from attachment to the world of names and forms. This disengage
ment is in a sense a forgetting of domestic and political attachments and a re
membering of an underlying transcendent sel Such transformative uses of mem
ory are explored in depth in the monistic tradition of Vedanta. The philosopher
Shankara, in his well-known ffh-century introduction to the Brahmasutabhasya, 35
examines the nature of the error that prevents us from experiencing things as they
really are. He does this through a concept of adhyia, superimposition. Adyia is
"the appearance, in the form of a memory, of something previously experienced
in some other place. " We recognize and remember our experience incorrectly by
superimposing ourselves as the seat of consciousness on ourselves as autonomous
bodies or distinct "selves. "36 Our memory of having been, in other words, condi
tions our self-perception as "selves," as something other than the pure conscious
ness of immediate being.
The power of memory to reif an erroneous conception of self lies in its con
stitution as multiple saTki ras, as the impressions of perceived events and objects
on the stuf of mind. These impressions are not only of the events of an individ
ual's life witnessed by a single body, but subtle traces, or vaanas, of events of mul
tiple past lives and, occasionally of other coexistent bodies. SaTki rs delineate a
historical self that we mistake for the transcendent experiencer of that which is
impressed. The subtler vaanas extend this historical self before our birth to other
births; this subtle memory of past lives conditions our sense of having a jiva, a
transmigrating soul. For great sages, memory may extend not only across lives but
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MEMORY BANKS
synchronically across bodies; rishis and other enlightened beings may remember
the experience of other bodies.
Again the paradox of memory Memory traps us within the illusion of the
bounded and contingent self yet memory explodes this self when, in remember
ing past lives or the lives of others, we discover the limitations of this world of
samsara. A error is manifest as memory so the path away from error involves for
getting; as memory on occasion points us to something beyond the self so the path
towards realization and moksha, release, involves remembering.
v
Wendy Doniger cites several stories from the ninth- to twelfh-century Kash
miri text Ygavasta that play with the illusory yet transformative nature of mem
ory A young man assuages his brother's grief over their parents' death by re
minding him of their multiple births and thus the relativity of death as an ending:
"Punya added that he himself could clearly recall his own births as a parrot, a frog,
a sparrow, a Pulinda [tribal hunter] , a tree, a camel, a lovebird, a king, a tiger, a
vulture, a crocodile, a lion, a quail, a king, and the son of a teacher named Saila. "
The remembering of karmic traces of past lives i s usually framed less as revelatory
than deluding: 'as, the delusion that results from the karmic traces causes such
misery among creatures. " We experience subtle memory as desire for things we
once enjoyed: a breast, possessions, the beloved. People are reborn, summarizes
Doniger, "in a particular form because they want something. There is a hunger
unsated in their present lives, that propels them across the barrier of death into a
new birth, where this still unfulflled longing leads them to do what they do. "
She compares the karmic transfer across death and rebirth with the transfer of
coded substance that McKim Marriott has suggested marks the construction of
the person in South Asia. 37 "If people become a part of strangers in daily inter
course and give parts of themselves in return, the emotional reality of the karmic
transfer across the barrier of death and rebirth could be very vivid indeed. The
bonds with members of one's own family, one's own 'fesh and blood, ' in the past
and the future, are even stronger; one's family, and one's caste, are one's self in
India. "38 If the ego is embedded in the transactional self of the family the caste,
and other local polities, then memory and forgetfulness point not just to the mul
tiplicity of lives but of bodies that constitute the self The fact that memory ex
tends back to encompass all those whom one has been makes sense given its si
multaneous encompassment of all those whom one is.
Forgetting and remembering as a dual path to truth are elaborated in several
contemporary Hindu movements. In Lawrence Babb's discussion of the Brahma
Kumari sect, belief in the apocalyptic vision of Dada Lekhraj , a "perfectly ordi
nary 'old man, ' " translocates women and men to a position outside of history and
beyond the cycle of time.
A practitioner of raja yoga is characterized as one who "remembers. " The Brahma
Kumaris constandy employ the idiom of remembrance in discussing these matters.
Raja yoga is "remembering father." The soul has "forgotten" its real nature and has
identifed with bodies. In yogic practice one should turn this upside down by "for-
MEMORY BANKS 1
45
getting the body" . . . and "remembering Shiv Baba. " . . . In this most fundamental
act of recollection-that is, in cultivating awareness of the Supreme Soul-one be
comes aware of one's own soul and forgetful of the body and the world. 39
Once again, the body of the exemplary old man-here explicitly the father
ofers the promise of memory to a new generation. Despite the importance of the
old man to the yogi's cultivated forgetfulness, the commonplace that old people
ofen seem to forget things does not explicitly inform Brahmakumari practice.
Though the normative model of the life course associates the renouncer's forget
ting of the phenomenal world with the proper dharma, or moral practice, of old
age, forgetful old bodies are seldom signifers of the phiosophical discourse of re
membrance and forgetting.
In the Katiartiara story of King Vinayashila and Dr. Tarunachandra dis
cussed in the last chapter, the king is upset by his frst shock of gray hair but can
not forget the pleasures of his life, particularly his wife. The king is a foolish old
man not because he is beginning to forget himself but precisely because he cannot
do so. The story continues afer the physician and the young man have killed the
king and thrown his body down a dry well and the young man has reemerged as
the rejuvenated king, renamed by his loving populace Ajara, one free from old age.
The doctor one day complained to Ajara that he was not receiving his due share
of the kngdom's riches. The new king laughed at the physician's limited memory:
"Ha! You are a fool. What man does anything for anyone, or gives anything to
anyone? My friend, it is our deeds in a former state of existence that give and do. "
To demonstrate the karmic necessity of his ascension as against the doctor's
agency Ajara has the latter trace the source of fve golden lotuses that they had
seen foating downstream. The physician travels for several days, until "on the
shore of a holy bathing-place in that stream, he beheld a great banyan tree, and a
man's skeleton suspended on it. . . . [A] cloud came there and rained. And from
that human skeleton . . . there fell drops of water . . . . [G] olden lotuses were im
mediately produced from them. " Tarunachandra throws the skeleton into the
river and returns to the palace, where Ajara informs him the skeleton was "my for
mer body I hung there in old time by my feet; and in that way performed asceti
cism, unti I dried up my body and abandoned it. "4
0
Two old bodies are contrasted in the story the foolish old king who cannot for
get and yet is fed rasqana tonics, and the wise old sage who forgets all attachment
and through his accumulated karma is reborn as a man who becomes a king and
who remembers his past life. Foolish old people have a surfeit of static memory
and delusional desire; exemplary old people forget but develop fuid and expansive
memories extending over lifetimes. The senie body is represented through desire
rather than memory. Desire closes of the possibiity of movement: the body of the
old king ends up in the dead end of a dry well, that of the old sage in the fuid
space of the river.
Desire, emotion, and memory, more than forgetfulness in itself are the stigmata
of the foolish old body In stories of foolish and weak elders or of the horrors of
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old age, an exemplary old person, like the old sage here, ofers a way out. Despite
the ofer, desire blinds the deluded soul. The king rejects the advice of his minis
ters and opts for the false promises of medicine. Even when the promise of
ratana is authentic, desire defects its application. In a tale from the Viramacart
of the thirteenth century or later,4 1 a ratana-like magic fruit, is given to a poor
Brahman, who decides to transfer the gif to the king, since eternal life without the
strength to use it for the betterment of others is but delusion.
In this city there was a certain brahman, who knew all the books of science, and had
an exceptional acquaintance with charm-textbooks; yet he was a pauper. [ The Brah
man propitiates the goddess Parvati, who appears and grants him a wish; he chooses
immortalit] The goddess gave him a divine fruit, and said: "My son, eat this fruit,
and you shall be immune to old age and death. "
Then the brahman took that fruit, and went back to hi s own house; and when he
had bathed and performed divine service, before he ate this thought occurred to his
mind: "How now! After all I am a pauper; if I become immortal who will be helpt
by me? . . . Real life is that which is lived by glorious and righteous men. A crow may
live for a long time, by gulping morsels of rotten food.
The pathos of the long-lived weak and poor is represented through bestial images;
only the wealthy and powerful merit the gif of the youthful body. But when the
exemplary Brahman ofers the fruit to the king, the unexpected happens. The
kng, afer some refection, realized that he could never endure the infnite separa
tion that immortality would bring between him and his beloved queen, Aan
gasena. He gives the magic fruit to her. "But this Aangasena had a groom as
lover, and she in turn, upon meditation, gave this fruit to him. " Down through the
body politic rushes the magic fruit towards its anticlimactic excretion.
And there was a certain slave-girl, who was best-beloved of this groom; and he gave
it to her. But the slave-girl was in love with a certain cowherd, and gave it to him. But
he in turn had a great passion for a girl who carried cow-dung, and gave it to her.
Now this girl was carrying cow-dung outside of the city, and had placed the bas
ket of it on her head and thrown that fruit on the top.42
The king chances to see the fruit of immortality on its mountain of shit; disgusted
with the inconstancy of desire-expressed as the shallow nature of women-he
himself abandons the kingdom for the forest. The Brahman's exemplary gesture,
ofering his own immortal potential to the king, leads the king through the
superfcially enhanced memory of the ratana recipient to the remembering of
the real nature of things, and thus to the fnal stage of life, sanria. The delusion
of ratana, here as in the story of the king and the physician, is not in its false
promises but in the desire underlying its possibility
Memory loss, in elite philosophical and narrative traditions of the path to truth
and the fear of old age, is bound to emotion and desire. The impressions of smrti
link individuals to other bodies in time and in space. The valence of these linkages
depends on whether they trap one within a world of desire or hint at alternative
MEMORY BANKS 1
47
imaginings of the self As a commodity, as something whose loss is explicitly re
sisted and culturally elaborated, memory in itself is a quality properly desired by
"glorious and righteous men. " As a sign of
w
isdom and of ignorance, and as
a state rooted in desire, memory and its loss point to the centrality of the emo
tions and their relation to desire in old age. "He [or she] is old, " I was told in
many neighborhoods. "His brain is weak. So he is angry and irritable. His brain
gets hot. "
Merz Lata Mahan
T me and, I belive, to ever Indian, Lt Maneshkr i not so much a peon as a voice-a
voice that soars hih and cast a ma spell over te hearts q millions q Indians fom t Hi
malyas t Ka1akumari. It i a voice tat i agelss.
GANGADHAR GADGI L,
"
MEET LATA MANGESHKAR,
"
ILLUSTRATED WEEKLY OF INDIA, 1 967
In the last years of Rajiv Gandhi's ministry, before India' s only prime minister
ever described as young lost a bitterly contested 1 989 election to V P Singh's
Janata Dal, a music video to promote both national integration and the Congress
Party's projected image as the only force holding the country together was repeat
edly broadcast on national television. "Meri Bhirat Mahan" featured music, flm,
and sports stars, each shown in his or her regional setting but each singing of and
to the people of India as a whole. Region followed region, building toward a
crescendo of unity in diversit
Perhaps the most powerful sequence appeared near the end of the piece. A series
of well-known f actresses was shown-Sharmia Tagore, Waheeda Rhman, and
other former stars widely acknowledged to be beautiful but past their years of
glory-and each actress sang against a scenic backdrop indicating her particular
geographic or ethnic origins. Each sang the song's lyrics, expertly lip-synching in
the style of the Bombay flm. The series of fm stars and backdrops then dissolved
into the scene of a far older woman in the studio, in the act of recording the ac
tual song you were hearing. The voice behind each actress, the unity behind the
diversity of the tableaux was revealed: the great diva of "playback" singers Lata
Mangeshkar, the Voice more than any other of independent India. And the song
was one of her most memorable, sung for Nehru afer a terrible war. In this video
moment of time regained, grandson Rajiv became grandfather. Jawaharlal and
the nation was returned to itself
The moment caught the viewer. Even jaded media watchers were known to
shed a tear. 1 It was not the famous old song of famous old Lata that made the
video remarkable, but rather that one got to see Lata in the very act of voicing the
nation, the bodies of actresses, and oneself It was the refexivity in the fnal cut to
Lata in the studio: the movement from actress to singer, region to nation, scenery
to machinery exterior to interior, body to voice, and young to old.
1
49
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Lata is far older than the young actresses her voice usually animates on the
screen. Her voice is unmistakable and has entered the realm of the signifably
timeless. Unlike the voice of the everyday old person, Lata's voice made no claims
upon the listener and was seldom heard as simply old. Like the old woman of
Balua, "giving up her food for fve days and nights, during which period she sat
shaking her head about, " Lata's voice foated free of transactional ambivalence
and could promise the millennium. The nation as what anthropologists migh! call,
after Claude Levi-Strauss, a syntagmatic chain of beautiful women is a familiar
theme, but unlike, for example, the Beach Boys' "California Girls," the chain here
was not held together through a desiring male gaze alone. Lata's voice stringing
together Sharmila, Waheeda, and Hema was the unity that materialized a desire
for the nation as a whole.
Usually, Lata's voice is inextricable from the bodies of the actresses she sings
through, whether in fm or live performance. For audiences, the young body and
the ofen far older voice are indivisible. If "Mother India" is part of the semantic
network of the Voice of Lata, she is so while dancing as a far younger body As
with Geri-forte, the qualities of old and young circulate in interesting ways. In
Mea Bharat Mahan, ' this circulation became explicit. Raqana-like, old Lata's voice
rejuvenated the middle-aged actresses, allowing them to reprise their moment of
youthful cynosure when their bodies could stand for all India. The relation be
tween actress and singer was made explicit: one did not experience the conjoint
young body/old voice as seamless and obvious, but as anticipatory, as youthful
body awaiting completion through the Voice. But under what conditions, in this
age of Ghar Kali, may the young and old be reunited in time? In the moment of
hoped-for national integration, under the political sign of the Son whose body
spoke-still awkwardly but ever less hesitantly-with the voice of the Mother and
Grandfather, Lata was called upon to reveal herself in fagrante delicto, amid the
impressive but contingent modernity of the studio in which the Voice cum Nation
is revealed as artifact. Beloved and unimaginably necessary, but requiring the seva
of those capable of mastering the ever more technical politics of keeping bodies
and voices lip-synching to the future.
Lata on the stereo as I write. It is not to provoke accusations of postmodern
superfciality that the chanteuse fnds her way into this book, just as it is not to pro
voke accusations of old-fashioned Orientalism that I refer to debates on memory
in Samkhya and Nyaya, and in the next chapter, to angry old rishis from the San
skiit epics. Having watched Mera Bharat Mahan work its magic in Varanasi during
an election, when full-page Congress Party ads featuring pictures of baby dolls
smashed into pieces as ominous signs of the future appeared daily and kilings of
Muslims in my neighborhood (apparently by Congress-aligned local "vested in
terests" in an efort to generate a soupcon of communal riot and bring home the
need for a centrist party) were going on, I fnd it hard not to fnd the then-ruling
MERI LATA MAHAN 1
5
1
party's deployent of age-old voices, younger bodies, smashed babies, fresh
corpses-of critical importance. But this is the sort of appeal to experience that
one should not have to rely upon. Lata is juxtaposed with Geri-forte, Kesari Jivan,
"the voice," and other bits that lie ahead both to tell a story and to resist a telling,
much as the angry rishis that lie ahead are not meant either to suggest a seamless
link with the micropolitics of twentieth-century senility or to deny the possibility
A diferent sort of reading seems necessary: much as the voice of old age demands
more than a sympathetic ear to be heard in ajhaTtf world. Much as Lata at her
best demands something else besides your passive enjoyment of her voice on the
stereo if you are really to be transformed from an aging body into the timeless
beauty of Waheeda Rehman on the silver screen.
Shravan Kumar carrying his parents.
FIVE
The Anger of the Rishis
in which t voie r ol age i give reason, bot, and space
HOT BRAINS
Wat i l.r ti bot now? On? my voice reains.
KRI SHNA SOBTI , AI LfKi
In her twentieth-century retelling of the Mahabhirata epic, Kamala Subramaniam
puzzles over the frequent anger of Parashurama, an ancient sage, or rishi: "The
rishis, they say have all their senses under control. But it is evident that anger is the
one thing they have never been able to control . To think that such a great man as
[Parashurama] , a man who had practiced austerities for years and years, should
have lost his temper so easily, is strange. " 1
The puzzle is this: the rishi is a paradigmatic type of realized individual, of an
ascetic relation to the world exemplied by the fnal "stages" of ii amadarma:
vinaprasta and san1ia. One moves, in the scheme of iramas, from discipleship to
the household to forest retirement to complete renunciation. The move is away
from the connotations of javin', of youth-hot and interactive-toward the colder
and less interactive body The scheme parallels the physiology of aging in the clas
sical medical texts of Ayureda, in which young adulthood is characterized by a
surfeit of pitti, hot bile, with an increase of vqu, cool wind, as one ages. Old bod
ies, socially and physiologically are colder and more controlled.
The body of the rishi, narratively placed high on mountaintops or deep in
forests, is the acme of the cold and noninteractive body. Rishi-like fgures become
legitimating icons for widely disparate projects. The cardiologist and American
popular author Herbert Benson drew on the calm and collected rishi in discussing
the cardiovascular benefts of the relaxation response. 2 Roy Walford ofered the
rishi's cooled down metabolism and dearth of free radicals as a sign of caloric un
dernutrition. Former Indian Prime Minister Narasimha Rao was often repre-
15
1
54
THE ANGER OF THE RI SHI S
sen ted at the height of his power as a cool and withdrawn but exceedingly power
ful fgure, with the connotation either of Brahman or rishi, in political cartoons. 3
Yet rishis are exquisitely prone to anger, which in the Varanasi neighborhoods was
ofen experienced and described as a type of heat-hot brain.
Not only latter-day rishis and sannyasis but old people in general were often
characterized to me in Varanasi as classically irritable and hot-brained; these
tyifcations extend to local proverb and narrative. Uskidimag garm ho gaya (his or
her brain has become hot) , conveying a chronic state of anger, was frequently said
of the old. Old people tended to dry up, and their decreased fuidity could be
manifest as frictional heat and irritabiity. The dry and unyielding irritabiity of
old people was often described in terms of the production of wind, the problema
tized voice.
The sort of categories and language games I highlight here-hot, cold, wet,
dry fuid, unyelding, interactive, not interactive-simultaneously open up and
curtail forms of critical inquiry To an anthropologist, they suggest the approach
to language and myth developed by Levi-Strauss, the analysis of paired opposi
tions like hot and cold as a means to imagine an abstract edifce called structure.
Structuralist approaches of various sorts have been immensely fruitful in the
analysis of society and of knowledge and practice in South Asia, but their mis
placed concreteness, frequent awkwardness in engaging questions of historical
process and of diference and hegemony, and uncanny tendency to reprise various
colonial nuggets of misinformation lead one to tread cautiously.
Structuralisms tend to be foreign afairs; the two most trenchant structuralist
engagements in Indian sociology have been frst, the work of Louis Dumont, his
critics, and those who have taken his program in diferent directions, and second,
what one might call the Chicago School and in particular the work of McKim
Marriott, the early Ronald lnden, and many of their students and colleagues.
Marriott's later work, and in particular a set of writings and interpretations
grouped about an interpretive device sometimes termed "the cube," is exemplary
both as an impressive heuristic, structuralist analytics of a certain sort taken to
their logical extreme and ofering powerful and unexpected insights, and as an un
comfortably reductionist Rosetta stone promising the fnal cracking of the hith
erto opaque code that is social behavior in India. 4
Among the many trained in this sort of approach to India, the response to a
radically changed sense of the necessary and obvious in anthropological practice
has ranged: from total disavowal to the turn to "ethnohistory" to ever more local
and nuanced structuralisms to the shif from questions of continuity to the more
productive ground of diasporas, modernities, conficts, ruptures, and "public cul
ture. " My own approach has been to retain some of the crude but useful insights
of a necessariy cosmopolitan reduction of continuity and diference to code, but
here decentering rather than destructuring its claims to totality, in part through a
perspectival language of frst-, second-, and third-person accounts and in part by
recognizing, as Margaret Trawick has suggested in an interesting synthesis of
THE ANGER OF THE RI SHI S 15
Bourdieu and Lacan, that structuralist accounts ofer not so much models of so
cial life as models for (and against) it. 5
The positioning of the old person in the third-person terms of hot/ cold and
other oppositions points not only to the physiological but the social body of the
abstracted elder. As Marriott and others have suggested, the polarities of hot/
cold, wet/ dry and windy I still refect a deeper framework for structuring experi
ence. The windy and dry person, blowing both hot and cold, illuminates a wealth
of positioned information. Heat, particularly in the context of the life cycle, may
be read as the externalization of power. These oppositional rhetorics of thermo
dynamic sociality were more useful glosses in some interviews than in others,
among some households more than others, in ways that did not cut neatly across
class, caste, gender, or family history
The ascetic path classically advocated in the latter stages of life centers on prac
tices in which one cultivates tapas, ascetic heat or power, through physical stasis
and disengagement. Tapas is sometimes demonstrable as siddhis-as superhuman
feats-the most signifcant of which in contemporary India is longevty Devraha
Baba, an ascetic who died in 1 990, was said to be 1 40 years old. He seldom spoke,
but when he did his words were raptly listened to by thousands of pilgrims. The
words of ascetics and particularly of contemporary babas are powerful, and de
mand the listener's attention. The internalized power of the ascetic, evident in his
or her impersonal and "cold" seclusion and detachment, is manifest as the exter
nalized power of a hot voice. The paradox of the aging voice, noted by Subra
manian when she wonders about the anger of rishis, is on one level the intrinsic
thermodyamics of tapas: accumulated power of the cold person who does not
expend it through social abstinence builds to explosive pressures. Such explosions
are described textually in classical Sanskrit and local narratives both as the prodi
gious sexual potential of the ascetic, most notably the god Shiva, and as the as
cetic's ferce anger.6
Unlike the rarely emitted but destructive fame of Shiva's third eye, the hot as
cetic voice can and should be heard, and, again in third-person humoral terms, is
framed as relational, as part of exchanges between bodies. Relationality, in the re
cent analyses of Marriott and Daniel in other South Asian contexts, is ofen
structured through the semantics of fuidity. 7 Babas and rishis have communica
tive and wet voices that melt the boundaries between them and their listeners.
These voices are by defnition meaningful, however opaque their overt signifca
tion; the ascetic voice, though turbulent, is not characterized by the "windy" at
tributes of incoherence and meaninglessness. Ascetics, even when like the Tantric
Aghoris of Varanasi who often violently curse passersby, produce meaningful
sounds.
Against the hot but meaningful exemplary voice that can transform the listener
through its wisdom, most hot old voices in the real time of second-person referen
tiality are heard as irritability as inappropriate anger. In humoral terms, the angry
voice of the exemplary elder dries up in the everyday context of family life. The
1
5
6 THE ANGER OF THE RI SHI S
interpretation of the hot voice-the extent to which i t can avoid desiccation, the
sources of its hearing as inappropriate, humorous, threatening, or pathological
varies across class and gender and household structure and is changing with the
globalization of Alzheimer's; I wl take it up at length in the fnal four chapters.
Here I want to locate the voice of hot brain in several more general ways: as em
blematic of intergenerational confict, as part of a set of old voices, as a particular
embodiment of the family itself and as a sign of what we might call a dying space.
SIXTYISHNESS AND SEVENTY-TWO NESS
T be on tis sie
o t cha,
wit
y
ou
on t oter
son,
is a li.
SUKRITA P. KUMAR,
"
FATHERS AND SONS
"
I begin with the third- and second-person frame of sathiii, which might be lit
erally translated as "sixtyishness. "
Dictionary defnitions of satiini, a Hindi word, stress its cognitive and per
formative implications. The r g87 edition of the Samipt Hin Sabdaar dictionary
defnes it as follows: " r . To be sixty years old. 2. To be old [hurrha] . Due to old age,
to have a diminished intellect [buddhz] ." Sit is the word for sixty; sathiijini is, lit
erally to go sixtyish. Other textual defnitions mention a loss of vivek, discrimina
tion, or of judgment. None explicidy mention forgetfulness or memory loss;
though arguably encompassed in budhi, they are not stressed. 8
Despite its abstract defnition as a loss of intellect, satiini was seldom used as
a descriptive term in third-person terms in any of the neighborhoods of this study
It was used more commonly about specifc old people, humorously or derisively
marking them as willful or stubborn. In this second-person spoken context,
satiini suggested less an abstract cognitive status and more the irritable and
ofen hot-brained behavior of a known elder. Younger women and men might call
friends of their own age satii: you're acting lie a stubborn old person. When I
would attempt to describe someone who had been described to me as weak
brained or hot-brained as having gone sityish, the person to whom I was speak
ing might laugh or frown: I had changed the trope of the discussion.
In its semantic fuidity its potential for insult or humor, and its link to chrono
logical old age, satiini shares features with the Indian English term "seniity"
into which it was on occasion translated by English speakers. But sathiini, unlie
seniit was seldom used as an abstract signifer. It linked the thermodynamics of
hot brain to the age of sity and to a relational context: stubbornness, wilfulness,
THE ANGER OF THE RI SHI S 1
57
and hot brain all suggested a struggle over authority within a household or, less
frequently, a public or exterior space. Unlike other frames for describing the be
havior of old persons, such as weakness and madness, sixtyishness was embedded
within the contested forum of intergenerational relations.
The linkage of chronological age to the hot brain through sa{iini is notewor
thy. Other Indian languages similarly link the senile body to age-specifc language.
Among Panjabis, Haryanvis, and Himachalis in the city, to go sattr bahattr
(seventy-seventy-two) was described through afectively loaded language similar
to going sixtyish in Hindi. In the Bengali quarter, the language of sixtyishness was
again displaced a decade; in Bengali, people got "caught by seventy-two"
biittireconnoting foolishness, willfulness, and inappropriate behavior. The
Bengali term bh'mrati has a similar slant; in its etyology there is the suggestion of
the oversexed and inappropriately youthful elder. Bh'mrati is not age-linked in it
self but a proverb told to me on a few occasions placed it at "seventy-seven years,
seven months, and seven nights. " Unlike sa{iini but perhaps lie sattr bahattr
jini, these phrases are endpoints, indices of willfulness and foolishness against
which one can be measured. Thus a conversation, overheard by a friend in Cal
cutta:
She: I have got hkimrati.
He: Well! Ae you seventy-seven years old?
She: Yes. Seventy-seven years, seven months, seven days, seven minutes, seven sec
onds . . .
And Sushil Kumar De's Bania Pabad9 quotes Diendra Ray: "Has the old man
reached bh'mrati or not?"
Sixty is a far more ambiguous marker. Though Banarsi friends joked that the
diference between sathiyini and biittre was that Bengalis presered their brains
by eating fsh, sixty connoted far more than mental weakness and angry willful
ness. An of-quoted proverb in many local languages and dialects is some variant
of "Satti ta pat(hi (Sixty thus strong) . " 1
0
The proverb evokes an important fgure, the powerful patriarch; his structural
forms are legion-the tu (father's elder brother) , the zamindar (the feudal lord) ,
and the didi Oiterally grandfather or elder brother, but here connoting political
boss or gang leader) . The power of age was critical to political image-making dur
ing the years of this study The septuagenarian Haryanvi politician Devi Lal styled
himself the nation's tau, "uncle" here denoting not gentle advice so much as frm
control. During this time, while Devi Lal foisted himself and his family-impli
cated in a variety of murders and at least one massacre-upon the nation through
the Janata Dal party's dependence on his kulak vote bank, I could not help refect
ing on the overdetermined sets of tus with which several friends were contending.
One friend was forced into a marriage against his and his parents' wl by his tau;
another friend's family was evicted from their home afer his father and his tau
1
5
8 THE ANGER OF THE RI SHI S
were estranged over the sharing of household resources and space. I n styling him
self the nation's tu, La! drew on a semantic network associating age and frm con
trol.
Unlike the former prime minister Morarji Desai, whose rejuvenative rasqana
experiments with urine did not put the semantics of old age to the most efective
political use, 1 1 La! used his age carefully His seventy-ffth birthday party in Delhi
was an elaborately scripted and staged event. Ritually elaborated rites of passage
for the elderly were not common in north India, unlike the south. Lal's birthday
party was a masterful piece of invented ritual, reminiscent, for an anthropologist,
of Barbara Myerhof's discussion of old people fashioning ritual in a southern
California senior citizen's center. 1 2 But the stakes in Devi Lal's birthday party were
massive. Drawing on traditions of the experienced world-conquering monarch, it
presented Devi La! to the nation as its cosmic center, the master of all he sureyed.
The ambiguity of sixty centers on issues of control. In ideal typic terms, the
sixty-year-old is at the height of his or her control of kin, household, hearth, and
other resources. The pressure from the next generation to transfer control is at its
most intense as well. Satrana-typifing the stubbornness and willfulness of the
older adult-is not only an assessment and criticism of certain kinds of behavior
by useless old people but it also expresses resentment against the perceived mind
set of those who hold power. At sixty, the fgures of the powerful parent (satta ta
pattht and the weak and useless parent (wah satra gaa) coincide. More than the
weakness of old brains, sixtyishness refects the contested space between genera
tions. In the fgure of the angry old person, these frameworks come together.
OEDIPUS IN INDIA
.otin tere i t lose,
Madam, i sel tere i none.
SL' KRITA P. KUMAR, "MASSEY' S TALES"
We thus return to the Kesari Jivan ad: the young man, bent over, hufng and
pufng, has just made it up onto the Bombay bus. The old man stands erect, to the
side and slighdy behind the younger man, his hand holding the younger man
frmly in position, touching his lower back. A young woman laughs from a win
dow The text reads:
6o years old or 6o years young?
Have you ever wondered why the old man who lives down the road is still full
of pep and vigour at 6o, while you feel tired and run down at just 30?
Again, the paradox of sixty: is the old man the sixty-year-old senile sathranevala or
the sixty-year-young powerful uncle? The mystery deepens: old men of sixty seem
to have the strength of young men of twenty or thirty whereas younger men are
as weak as one would expect old men to be.
From the vantage of a century of Freudian interpretive thought, I fnd it hard
THE ANGER OF THE RI SHI S 1
59
not to read the Kesari Jivan ad in the frst instance through the fgure of an erotic
triangle, 1 3 with the young man who can't stand up straight (and the potential con
sumer who may identify with him) at its point of articulation and the fgures sug
gesting his father and wife at the other corners. This kind of reading makes sev
eral demands upon me: how does the Kesari Jivan triangle relate to other erotic
triangles in the contemporary public culture of which it is a part? And, how does
any acknowledgment of the usefulness of such an analysis draw one into debates
on the appropriateness of crude psychoanalytic approaches to Indian material,
and to the history of such approaches?
My approach here will be to begin by reading the erotic triangle as a structural
fgure irreducible to any particular narrative or stage of human development. In
his classic essay "The Indian Oedipus," A. K. Ramanujan counseled reading
erotic triangles about conficts between parents and children as abstractions of
adult experience as much as of childhood. 1 4 The Kesari Jivan triangle can be con
trasted with other triangular images framing the old body in relational terms in
order to evaluate the limits of a universe of discourse in which the old body comes
to matter in certain ways. The exercise must be seen as a playful one, its usefulness
contingent upon the interpretive frames it may generate.
The tonic ad triangle difers from an earlier dilemma, that of the Ghar Kali
painting of nineteenth-century Calcutta and of the twentieth-century literature
on old mothers and aunts that succeeds it. Unlike either the classic oedipal son
mother-father or the Ghar Kali son-mother-wife groupings, the Zandu ad answers
the question of "sixty years old or sixty years young," contrasting the weakness of
father and son, in terms of the laughter of a young woman. In Ghar Kali the son
and his wife represent a modern order against which the mother sufers; in the Ke
sari Jivan ad the son-weakened like the fgures of young men in many rasqana
advertisements by the synergistic depletions of youthful excess and modern life
confronts a traditional order that separates him from his wife and that, through
the tonic, he can aspire to embody
In both cases, the predicament is the son's. In Ghar Kali, the babu-son is twice
the size of his mother or wife, dominating the narrative frame; in the ad, the ex
pected weakness of the old father is found to have aficted the son instead. Within
these frames, modernity is a pathology of an aging body in two dif erent ways: as
an order that functions by overturning generational hierarchy generating a strong
son and weak old mother, and as an order that functions by seducing the young
and depleting their strength, generating a weak son and a strong old father. Within
the limits of a structural comparison between a Bengali nineteenth-century image
and a Bombay-based late twentieth-century advertisement, one might note that
the old man here signifes strength and thus his son's abjection, the old woman
weakness and thus her son's rejection.
Within these triangles, the young woman bears the blame for the breach be
tween parent and child. The desire of daughters-in-law, many men and women
advised me in Varanasi, can split families: brother against brother, parent against
160 THE ANGER OF THE RI SHI S
child. Everyday narratives of daughters-in-law that acknowledged their political
marginality within families were rare. However politicaly peripheral, young women
were symbolically central to intergenerational relations. In the Kesari Jivan ad,
male intergenerational struggle is not represented save as implied competition for
the respect of the woman. The possibility of contested relationships between fa
thers and sons over prerogatives, property, and other household resources is
elided, or rather is embodied as the weakness of the son. Sons "lack pep. "
When the fgure of the bahi (daughter-in-law) is framed against that of her si
(mother-in-law), most commonly in the parlor dramas of Hindi flm, the confict
is overt and not framed as embodied diference. Whether the older si is the vic
timizer of a guileless bahi or the evi bahi terrorizes her helpless si, the son, unlike
the laughing woman of the ad, is passive. Though sons were politically central to
the structure of female intergenerational relations within the patrilocal house
holds I surveyed across class in Varanasi, in flm narrative they were usually hap
less obserers. In the 1 989 hit flm Chandni, a son is turned against his fancee by
the complicity of his mother; in the same year's Bivi Hai T Aii, the son remains
blithely unaware of his mother's frequent attempts to murder his wife. Contrary
to the position of the daughter-in-law in son/father and son/mother conficts,
sons in si/ bahi narratives are politically germane but symbolically elided within
the famiy narrative.
Mothers and daughters-in-law are interchangeable in these narratives. Inter
generational politics are not represented as a continually deferred engagement
with the older generation but as an ever-shifting struggle. The contest by older
women for the preseration of their control over the household is chronic and
overt. In the polarization of si and bahu, the ambiguity of sixty-old men as in
violable bodies versus old men as weak and powerless bodies, with no narrative
mediation possible between the two states-is given explicit narrative form across
the life course. The opposition of powerful/powerless works diferently in difer
ently gendered narratives: 1 5 sixty points to the ambiguities of the old man's age
and to the continuities of the old woman's.
Between mother and daughter a diferent sort of narrative emerges. Daugh
ters, within the standard tableau of the patrilocal family are married out and they
become supplemental to the scene. Mother-daughter engagements, particularly
between an elderly mother and a grown daughter, are more frequent in more
highbrow literature than in popular texts or fm. Perhaps the most arresting story
of the old body in Hindi that appeared at the time of this research is Krishna
Sobti's Ai Lrk, a dialogue primariy between an old woman bedridden with a
fracture who senses her imminent death and her unmarried daughter, an artist,
with whom she lives. 1 6 The daughter is avaiable to the narrative and to the em
bodiment of her mother, in part because she has not married and had her own
children. The daughter's very avaiability to her, the younger woman's not having
gone on to love, to create life and in so doing to provide for her own old age, trou
bles the mother. Her son, reminiscent of Ghar Kali, is absent entirely; her hope
THE ANGER OF THE RI SHI S 161
that at the least he would appear to discharge his ritual obligations to her dying
body remains unfulflled at her death.
The territory between mother and daughter here is open, not anchored by a
stable third and its ensuing triangular logic. Provisional triangles appear and dis
solve as the mother, in articulating both her diference from and simiarity to her
independent and unmarried daughter, remembers her life anew. There are mem
ories of a husband, and worries about a husband her daughter never had. There
is a doctor who briefy stands in for the missing son but who can provide only life,
not the proper closure the son never brings. There is a serant, Susan, who ofers
a diferent triangulation, a necessary and benign presence against which mother
and daughter together create the possibility of memory rooted in death. 1 7
In Ai lrk, neither mother or daughter need embody weakness and death in
the exclusive manner in which either the father or the son but not both must be the
weak body negotiated at the site of sixtyishness. The Kesari Jivan image articu
lates one of the two generational possibilities: the father strong, the son weak. The
choreography of the advertisement-its image of fial weakness with a soup-on
of paternal penetration-is reminiscent of the psychoanalyic arguments for In
dian adult male deferral to authority advanced by G. M. Carstairs and Sudhir
Kakar and of the tales of paternal aggression colected and discussed by Ra
manujan in "The Indian Oedipus. " 1 8 Carstairs and Kakar ofer narratives of In
dian male psychosexual development that make sense of ethnographic and clini
cal fndings by construing the self in question as more hierarchical and more
desirous of its subordination to powerful male others: "more, " that is, in relation
to an implicit Western self that is presumed to resist subordination and to engage
authority. The difculty with this Indian Oedipus is in its al-too-convenient vali
dation of the colonial construction of the Indian as desiring colonization, as sex
ually dependent on colonial diference.
1 9
Carstairs's The Twice-Born ilustrates the enormity of unrecognized counter
transference in the putative psychoanalysis of culture. Carstairs wrote within the
mid-twentieth-century idiom of Culture and Personality; his efort was to study
the "genesis of national character" in India through "events which occur in the
earliest stages of psychological maturation. "20 As in most studies of the "Indian
self" the defnition of "Indian" was limited to men of high status. Carstairs's ar
gument engaged as scientifc types fgures with a lengthy pedigree: the split mother
and the despotic father. He used careful ethnographic obseration in a Rajasthani
town to show that children, by which he meant boys, were pampered in early
childhood in a maternal environment and then moved rather abruptly into a far
more hierarchical world of paternal duty and demand, estranged from the
mother. Thus:
I suggest that this relatively late reversal of a previously dominating (although emo
tionally inconsistent) relationship with his mother has a profound efect upon the
child's later development. The underlying mistrust which seems to cloud so many of
my informants' adult personal relationships may well be derived from the phantasy
162 THE ANGER OF THE RI SHI S
of a fckle mother who mysteriously withholds her caresses and attentions from time
to time.
By inconstant, Carstairs referred to his observation that neither parent, in the
presence of their elders, could show strong afection toward his or her child. The
child, he suggested, would therefore experience the temporary and unpredictable
loss of the mother's love. The result of both the inconstancy of the mother and the
ultimate shift from the female to the male world was the fantasy and ubiquitous
sybol, in Hindu devotional practice, of the bad mother, "someone terrible, re
vengeful, bloodthirsty and demanding in the same limitless way . . . a horrifc
fgure, decapitating men and drinking their blood. " A chid's mother, in short, was
the goddess Kali, read as grotesque by Carstairs in a fashion more sympathetic to
lurid missionary accounts of Thuggee practice than to the detais of his own re
ported feldwork. Her relationship to her son had to be contrasted "with the West
ern chid whose familiarity with intermittent experiences of frustration and de
layed satisfaction has enabled him to indulge his aggressive phantasies in
moderation, only to be reassured by his mother's renewed afectionate attentions. "
Once the boy was deprived of maternal attention, hi s father became "intensely
signifcant":
From this time on his father's voice will be associated with commands which must be
obeyed. The pain of defeat by the father in the oedipal situation is greatly intensifed
by the frequency with which the child is an involuntary witness of parental inter
course. It is not lightened, as in the West by the creation of a warm relationship be
tween father and son. This has been prevented by the taboo upon the father's giving
expression to afectionate feelings for his chid. Instead, it appears to the boy that he
has no choice other than that of unconditional surrender before this strong intrud
ing stranger, his father. He must not only submit before this rival, but must deny any
wish to compete with him. This is clearly refected in the Hindu's later attitude to
wards his fellow men. To his father, and to fgures of authority in general he owes un
questioning obedience.
Fathers sapped their sons' bodies, demanding not only obedience but hot youth:
In efect all those who occupy the status of sons or younger brothers are required to
enact a symbolic self-castration, denyng themselves the right to lead an emotional or
sexual life of their own so long as the father-fgures stillive and dominate them. This
is implicit in the Hindus' willing subservience to autocratic Rajahs, to the rich, and
to important ofcials.
2 1
Sons not only castrated themselves i n the presence of powerful others, they longed
to be penetrated. Under the heading of "paranoia, " Carstairs obsered that Hin
dus were not only obsequious and passive, but that they could not be trusted and
trusted no one in turn. This fnding, too, could be laid at the door of the father:
According to Freudian theory paranoid reactions can be traced to one type of out
come of the Oedipus situation, namely that in which the boy assumes a passive role
THE ANGER OF THE RI SHI S 163
and in phantasy has a homosexual love-relationship with his father. But whie he
longs to be possessed in this way the child also fears and repudiates his desire; hence
the transition from "I love him", through "I hate him", to "He hates me", on which
delusions of persecution are based . . . . In my informants' phantasies . . . there is also
a powerfully-repressed homosexual fation on the father. This is shown not only in
the ever-recurring paranoid reactions, but also, in indirect and sublimated form, in a
man's feelings toward his Guru-the one context in which a warm afectionate rela
tionship (although a passive and dependent one) is given free expression. Since this
occurs at the stage of development when anal functions are the focus of keenest
emotional interest, the confict is usually expressed in anal terms.
Carstairs's vivid portrayal of upper-caste Rajasthani male Hindus as domi
nated by a singularly dysfunctional "covert pattern of irrational complexes"
stressing the "infantie" desire for authority and the "emasculate" desire for pene
tration-attempted to naturalize through a powerful and selectively applied
rhetoric of child development a particular narrative of the Indian male self The
most well known formulation of this narrative is Dumont's Homo Hierarchicus; one
of its most provocative critiques is that of Nandy in The Intimate Enemy.
Nandy examined both "the homology between childhood and the state of
being colonized which a modern colonial system almost invariably uses" and "the
homology between sexual and political dominance . . . the idea of colonial rule as
a manly or husbandly or lordly prerogative. " Using the same psychoanalytic ter
minology of the defensive identifcation with an aggressor that Carstairs drew on
in describing male generational relations, Nandy suggested that many Indians in
ternalized their colonial construction as less mature and less "male" (Nandy's
analysis, like Carstairs's, founders on the possibility of female subjects) . Against
the naturalized passive "homosexuality" and childlike dependence on authority
Carstairs roots in local child-rearing practice, Nandy argued that the psychody
namics of the gendered and generational ego must be evaluated in terms of the
macropolitics of the colonial and postcolonial engagement. 22
Juxtaposing Carstairs with Nandy we are confronted with a peculiar absence in
Carstairs's text. The Twice-Born presumes aggressive fathers who in the context of
the bad mother transform their sons into vrtual hiras, anal-receptive eunuchs, 23
but we actually learn very little about the phenomenology or psychodynamics of
being a father over time. Carstairs's constant identifcation of his male informants
with their flial position echoes the way British colonial ofcers articulated their re
lation to their native soldiers as being their mai-bap, their mother and father. His
efort to read experience through childhood precluded an attempt to make sense
of the structure of adult male afection and aggression over time. The model he
ofers leaves little room for a coherent unfolding of male power, aggression, strat
egy and heterosexuality; we do not learn how his informants get their genitals
back and how, in the interim, they manage the appearance of masculinity in in
numerable contexts.
16
4
'HE ANGER OF THE RI SHI S
For Nandy the absent father i s replaced by the colonial father, a position invis
ible in Carstairs's text as it constitutes the source of narrative, the position of an
thropolog24 A colonial gaze constituted the Indian as a split subjectivity: the in
fantile, narcissistic, and efeminate son (the subject of colonial rule) and the
senescent, softened, and despotic father (the essence of Indian culture). Deper
sonalized and dispersed as "culture, " the position of the father vanishes as a co
herent site in a psychological anthropology; we are lef with the son as the overde
termined site of selfood.
Kakar's treatment of the Indian family in The Inner Jrl is far more carefully
constructed; Indian selfhood, again gendered male, is not presented as maladap
tive psychopathology but successful adaptation to lived experience. The fractured
oedipal triangle-the son with an ambivalent relationship to the bad mother and
a passive anal eroticism towards the father-still predominates. The connection to
the sociology of India is more explicit; in a section entitled the "Ontogeny of
homo hierarchicus, " Kakar explores "this resolution of the oedipal confict by
means of a submissive, apprentice-like stance toward elder men in the family" a
stance that leaves
a psycho-sexual residue in the unconscious that infuences the rest of a boy's life; in
the identity development of Indian men, this has generated a passive-receptive atti
tude towards authority fgures of all kinds. The psycho-dynamic contours of this tra
ditional and nearly ubiquitous stance towards authority become markedly plain in
situations that reactivate the chidhood confict. Thus, for example, whereas in the
West the unconscious passive homosexual temptations of patients that emerge at
certain stages of psycho-analytic therapy invariably provoke intense anxiety, analo
gous fantasies and dreams among Indian patients have a relatively easier, less anx
ious access to consciousness.
Paralleling this obsered dif erence between Western and Indian analysands in the
degree of anxiety that "passive homosexual temptations" generate, Carstairs and
Kakar dif er in the concern they manifest about the meanin of such dreams and
fantasies. For Carstairs, the Indian male psyche is envisioned as passively homo
sexual and coprophiliac to boot; no such "intense anxiety" or "analogous fan
tasies" attend Kakar's treatment of similar material. Men may dream, in the West
and in India, about simiar things; Indian men seem to interpret and experience
one set of similar things with far less anxiety. "Homosexual" expression of male
hierarchy is universal, Kakar suggests, extending to other primates. India is re
stored to the order of the normal; "the West" becomes an aberration:
The erect penis and the ofer of the anus among human males, as among many
other primates, are symbolic of an attempt to establish a hierarchical order in their
relationships. The fantasy among Indian patients of anal assault by an authority
fgure refects not so much the occult pleasure and guilt of anal eroticism as it does
the (relatively unconficted) acceptance of the dominance of "those in authority"
and the wish to incorporate some of their power into onesel( The high frequency
THE ANGER OF THE RI SHI S 165
among adolescent boys and young men in India of swear-words with the general
tenor, "fuck you in the anus", is another index of the common masculine preoccu
pation with hierarchical status. 25
Kakar shifts the meaning of overt and fantasied references to anal sex away from
discussions of sex and the body to a universal phenomenology of hierarchy The
move is far from satisfing-India is still identied tout court with hierarchy; the
possibility of a psychology of women, identity and hierarchy remains at best
murky; and critical questions of violence and of a multiplicity of desiring positions
behind the language of "anal eroticism" remain26 -and yet Kakar's move from
pathology to politics ofers a powerful rereading of Carstairs. The invocation of
the primate order and the refex naturalness of anal display-though dependent
upon the circular reasoning involved in using models of primate behavior rooted
in assumptions about human behavior to explain human behavior, and though re
ducing the possibility of homoerotic intentionality to neural refex-shifts the
tenor of social analysis away from hierarchy as an essentiall Indian phenomenon,
something that must be explained by recourse to the primacy of structure (Du
mont) or familial pathology (Carstairs) .
Finally Kakar, unlike Carstairs, takes somewhat more seriously the study of In
dian adulthood: "culture" lacks the narrative presence it has for the foreign an
thropologist, and the father correspondingly rematerializes as a distinct subject.
Still, in his contribution to his edited volume Idntit and Adulthood, the adulthood
discussed is the ideal model of aramadarma: the father's disengagement is framed
as a refective and soteriologic individual process rather than a contested and am
bivalent interpersonal one. 27 I will return to Kakar's model of normative Hindu
adulthood; but to make sense of sityishness, we need yet to linger on the question
of the exchanges between sons and fathers, between sons and mothers, and on the
gifts entailed in these relationships.
Despite his signifcant interentions in reshaping the debate on Indian charac
ter, Kakar retains the young man's passive acceptance of older male authority as
fundamental to the Indian male psyche. The logic of the tonic ad is consonant
with such a retention. The young man feels weak, forgetful, and impotent at thirty
and is attracted to the inviolable body of sity. Through the purchase of the tonic,
which alters young men's old age weakness through the transfer of old men's
youthful strength, young men come to be as old men, satti t patti, sity there
fore strong.
This narrative of trouble in male intergenerational relations as embodied in
the son as opposed to in the political space between son and father assumes the
son's infnite deferral of all confict. The move from the construction of male self
through the sixty-years-strong power of older men to the attribution of sixtyish
behavior to older men happens only through a radical narrative break-the fa
ther's sudden development of serious physical, mental, and/ or social debility-al
lowing the son to become the father unambiguously Confict between generations
166 THE ANGER OF THE RI SHI S
over whether the father i s "sity therefore strong" or "sixtsh" i s not representable
within these tales.
But one can shif the primary locus of repression, from sons to fathers, to sug
gest that what is repressed in such narratives is not the possibility of intergenera
tional confict but rather its frequent enactment. Rather than simply deny the de
velopmental story of boys that is told by these analysts-though I share Nandy's
suspicion of such sorts of narrative, alternative modeling awaits far more and bet
ter studies of psychological development across gender, class, location, and famiy
size28 -I see it as but one part of a far more complex construction of the devel
oping sel( Confict may well be deferred, such deferral may well be adaptive (afer
Kakar and against Carstairs) , and such deferral may be more than the universal
refexes of homosocial relations (afer Carstairs and against Kakar), but the im
portance of such deferrals does not legitimate the erasure of all contest. Such era
sure may lie less in the psychodynamics of being a son and their basis in early
childhood than in the political economy of patriarchal control in the propertied
and landed households of the not-yet-gone-sixtyish.
Ramanujan obsered that most Indian "oedipal" tales of same-sex intergener
ational confict are narrated from the intentional perspective of the father; that is,
fathers hate sons and love daughters rather than sons hate fathers and love moth
ers. 29 More than Kakar, Ramanujan returned the father to the psychoanalytic
famiy scene from which he had been deleted. Within the myhological literature
Ramanujan cited, sons of course do defer engagement with fathers and willfully
accept castration-like volence; the classic example is the origin story of the ele
phant-headed god Ganesha, who allows various older male fgures (Shiva, Shani,
Vishnu, Parashurama) to cut of his head and one of his tusks. Though this story
has become a cynosure in the psychoanalytic study of Hindu myth, 30 its analysis
usually reads the repetition of Ganesha's actions, his continually entering conficts
and then accepting mutiation, as but an intensifcation of the primary deferral .
Yet the point that passes without comment is that Ganesha constantly returns to
the fray: his frequent bearing of the "castrating" blow must be read in the context
of his continued engagement in the feld of confict.
The acceptance of the burden of the father in such myhological narratives, as
in Ganesha's allowing Shiva's ax to cut of his tusk, does not presume the neces
sarily strong body of the father. To reclaim the importance of ongoing intergen
erational confict in the psychic structure of the family I examine two stories of
the relations between sons and their parents well-known in Varanasi: from the Ma
hibharata, the story of Yayati, and from the Ram
laTa, the story of Shravan (in folk
tellings in Varanasi, Sharan) Kumar.
COUNTING THE DAYS AND HOURS
The central family plot of the Mahabhirata-the horizontal and fraternal fssion
between the Pandava and Kaurava cousins-is preceded in genealogical time by
THE ANGER OF THE RI SHI S 16
7
the vertical fssion between King Yayati and his sons. For breaking his marriage
vow and taking his wife's serant and rival to bed, Yayati is cursed by his Brahman
father-in-law Ushanas with premature decrepitude. Ushanas, in cursing Yayati, is
portrayed as the archetypical angry rishi: "So it befell that Usanas in anger cursed
Yayati Nahua. Ad he lost his previous youth and fell instantly to senility"
Senility is here the generalized decrepitude of the body Ushanas curses out of
the quick anger of the sage, and aferard attempts to mitigate his harsh words:
"Such things I do not say idly You have reached old age, king of the earth. But if
you wish, you may pass on your old age to another. . . . The son who will give you
his youth shall become the king, long-lived, famous, and rich in ofspring." The
play of generations is extended: Old Ushanas gives his son-in-law old age for dis
obeying him. But if Yayati's son will take on his father's old age in turn, Yayati can
remain youthful, satthi t patti. The reward to Yayati's obedient son is the opposite
of Yayati's punishment for disobedience: the son who takes on the father's old age
wil receive long life and the ultimate deferment of his own old age. The young who
act young get old, the young who act old get young: again the logic of Geri-forte.
Al but one of Yayati's sons, however, resist his request to exchange ages. They
graphically cite the indignities and miseries of old age: their primary concern is
the powerlessness of the old man. Only the youngest son, Puru, who stands far
thest from the succession and therefore has the least to lose by deferring his youth
ful prerogative, is willing to take on Yayati's burden. Sons, the story suggests, do
not wilingly defer to the father, unless they have little to gain otherwise. Youngest
sons, therefore, bear their father's old age more commonly than do their older
brothers. Confict, not deferral, is more likely to characterize the exchange of
weakness between father and son.
Stricken with old age, Yayati repaired to his castle and addressed his eldest and dear
est son Yadu: "Son, old age and wrinkles and gray hairs have all laid hold of me, be
cause of a curse of Usanas Kavya, and I am not yet sated of youth. You, Yadu, must
take over my guilt with my old age, and with your own youth I shall slake my senses.
When the millennium is full, I shall give your youth back to you, and take over the
guilt and old age.
Yau said:
Gray of head and beard, wretched, loosened by senility, the body wrinkled, ugly,
weak, thin, incapable of achieving anything, and set upon by younger men and all
the people that live of you? I do not crave old age.
Yqati sai:
You were born from my heart, but will not render your youth to me. Therefore,
son, your ofspring shall have no share in the kingdom!
Turasu, take over my guit with my old age, and with your youth I shall slake my
senses, my son. Wen the milennium is full, I shall give your youth back to you and
take over my own guilt with my old age.
Turva sai:
I do not crave old age, father, which destroys all pleasure and joy, fnishes strength
and beauty and puts an end to spirit and breath.
168 THE ANGER OF THE RI SHI S
Yqat said:
You were born from my heart but wll not render your youth to me. Therefore,
Turasu, your ofspring will face distinction. Fool, you shall rule over people whose
customs and laws are corrupt and whose walks of life run counter to decency, the
lowest ones who feed on meat. They will lust after the wives of their gurus and cou
ple with beasts; evil barbarians that folow the law of cattle are they whom you wl
rule!
Yayati's third son, Druhyu, rejects old age as well, drawing attention to the pecu
liar voice of the old person: ':. old man enjoys neither elephant nor chariot nor
horse nor woman, and speech fais him. I do not crave such old age. " Au, the
fourth son, evokes the pathos of second childhood:
An old man eats his food like a baby, unclean, drooling, and at any time of the day
And he never ofers to the fre in time. Such old age I do not crave.
Yqat said:
You were born from my heart, but wl not render your youth to me. You have
spoken of the ills of old age, therefore you shall inherit them.
Only Puru, the youngest, accepts and is ofered the inheritance of the kingdom.
He trusts that his father will only hold on to power as long as is proper, and, the
epic narrative relates, so Yayati does.
When he judged that the millennium was full, afer having counted days and hours,
being expert in Time, the mighty kg spoke to his son Puru: "I have sought pleasure,
as I wished and could and had leisure, with your youth, my son, tamer of enemies.
Piru, I am pleased, I bless you. Now take back your own youth and likewise take the
kingdom, for you are the son who did my pleasure. " Whereupon the king Yayati
Nahua took on his old age and Piru took on his youth. 3 1
The text asserts that fathers are expert i n Time and that their counting of days
and hours is impartial. Yayati's sons demur; for them, his request is an overstep
ping of his hours and days and an appropriation of theirs. Old men, they suggest,
claim mastery of Time but have lost the ability to know it: they eat at random
hours, they cannot sacrice in time. The narrative does not allow them to claim
their prerogatives, but hints at a world of contest in which sons do not wait for but
overthrow fathers.
Unlike to the unsuccessful fial rebellion against Yayati's demand, the story of
Shravan Kumar in the RamiaTa ofers the idealized image of flial devotion and
deferral . Shravan's devotion, however, presumes the powerless bodies of his par
ents and points us to a far more nuanced understanding of generational deferral .
The story is popular in Varanasi. Baidyanath Sarasvati, in a book on emblematic
practices of Varanasi culture, includes a photograph of Shravan being portrayed
by a young man during the Ram Lila celebration. 32 In bazaars throughout the city,
sellers of calendar art posters ofer the image of the strong and youthful body of a
young ascetic bearing his aged parents in baskets suspended from a yoke resting on
his broad shoulders (see image on p. 152). The pair are calmly absorbed in reli-
THE ANGER OF THE RI SHI S 16
9
gious devotion, counting their prayers on their rudrias, rosaries of the same type
that becomes a leash in the Ghar Kali tableau. Aound this image are pictorial vi
gnettes of the story of Shravan's accidental death at the hands of Dasharath, the
man who wl be the father of the hero and divine incarnation Ram.
In Valmii's RamiaTa, the young ascetic is unnamed. Dasharath, when stil "an
intemperate youth, " was eager to use his skils as an archer to go hunting at night.
Like young Yayati, Dasharath seeks forbidden pleasures, here encompassed in his
desire for his arrow to hit home in the darkness. But Dasharath, mistaking the
young ascetic for an animal, mortally wounds him as he goes down to the river to
fetch water. Not yet knowing his attacker, the ascetic speak:
It is not for the loss of my own life that I am grievng so. It is for two others I grieve
that [ am slain, my mother and father.
For they are an aged couple and have long been dependent on me. When I am
dead what sort of existence are they to lead?
My aged mother and father and I all slain by a single arrow!
The son bids Dasharath to fnd his parents, and dies. Dasharath leads the pair,
both blind, to their son's body
The wretched couple drew close, they touched their son and collapsed upon his
body And his father cried out:
"My son, don't you love me any more? At least have regard for your mother then,
righteous child. Why don't you embrace me, my son? Speak to me, my tender child.
"Whom shall I hear late at night-how it used to touch my he
.
art-so sweetly
reciting the sacred texts or other works?
'1nd after the twilight worship, the ritual bath, and oferings to the sacred fre,
who will sit down beside me, my son, to allay the grief and fear that anguish me?
"Who wl bring me tubers and fruit and roots, and feed me like a welcome
guest-me an invalid, without leader or guide?
'1nd how, my son, shall I support your poor mother, blind and aged as she is,
wretched and yearning for her son?"33
The desolate father curses Dasharath to die yearning for his own son; Dasharath
recalls his deed when Ram has been exiled to the forest by his own unintended de
cree.
Shravan Kumar, as he is known to many who buy his calendar image, the son
as perfect ascetic devoted to his parents, has become old not in bodily terms like
Yayati's son Puru but in a deeper sense, of iamadharma. He is called a forest
dweller and ascetic; in his devotion to his parents, he has assumed the appropriate
dharma, or duty of old age. But Shravan's enactment of old age-the ability to
take on the burden that most of Yayati's sons refuse-presumes the powerful body
of youth. Shravan is the source of solace that he is in his father's lament because
he can carry both his parents. The image of the poster is far dif erent than the
generational embodiment of the Kesari Jivan ad. Shravan is upright and strong,
qo THE ANGER OF THE RI S HI S
and carries his parents easily Their bodies, seated i n the two baskets, are tiny in re
lation to his, almost doll-like. They are focused inward; the only sound the image
suggests we can hear is the clicking of their rosaries.
Shravan is the epitome of sevi, devoted service, to one's parents. Far from a po
sition of submission, the fantasied sevi of the Shravan Kumar image is represented
as originating from a position of power that assumes the static, reduced, and sient
bodies of the old parents. Svi, as embodied in Shravan Kumar, his parents, and
the king, is the impossible gi f b grown children o teir bod to aged parent whil their supe
rior position and the parent' passive and voicelss dienageent are maintained. Impossible,
as parents are not the reduced and almost weightless bodies of the narrative. Lie
Yayati, parents not only want and need sevi, they want to control the family, em
bodied as the youthful body contested by Yayati, his father-in-law, and his chi
dren. The transfer of such authority emerges through an extended process of
confict and negotiation. Children have powerful bodies, and parents have voices.
Old age is seldom silent; as parents grow increasingly dependent upon their chi
dren, they are perceived by the latter more and more as a singular voice: the re
quest. Yayati asks the same impossible question again and again and again: let me
be you. Sylvia Vatuk has noted how the elderly with whom she worked near Delhi
combined a sense of self as an ascetic with strong expectations of and worries over
maintaining their comforts and prerogatives and over the substance of their chi
dren's sevi. 34 Siranji, in challenging her children's gift of the tonic, suggested that
their sevi was but a performance. Her children, in protesting that they were doing
all that they could for her, suggested that the performance may be generated not
by callousness but love. The voice of parents, even those who perceive themselves
as ascetics, grows ever louder as they age. Children can never be Shravan, whose
success is framed by his parents' minimally transacting interiority Like Ram and
Dasharath, they are cursed never to be able to ofer complete sevi nor to enjoy its
fruits.
Old fathers cannot claim their sons' hot bodies for long. Their cooling and
weak physiologies prevent them from exercising adequate control, and their de
mands for continued authority become empty and inappropriate, bakbak-so
much nonsense or hot air. Sixtyishness points to the contested authority between
generations, embodied as a disjunction between a cooling body and a will or brain
that cannot recognize the process. From this perspective, the heat of old brains is
a reaction to the reality of old and cold; it is the proverbial rope of Indian philos
ophy, mistaken for a snake along the road at dusk, the symptom of false con
sciOusness.
Yet sons are no better counters of the hours than fathers. Parents resist hand
ing over control of Time, knowing like the patriarch of the flm Apne Begine that
most children, despite the assertions of Carstairs and Kakar, are not Shravan.
Sixty an age simultaneously old enough to convey the same inappropriate and
hot-brained behavior as seventy-two and young enough to convey the powerful
body of the paterfamilias, refects neither only the reality of the Bombay bus man
THE ANGER OF THE RI SHI S 1
7
1
and Devi Lal nor that of Shravan's parents, but alludes to their superimposition
and the contest, within families, involved in marking the body in time.
OLD WOMEN AT THE POLLS
Sau dq di ken, bid men danra miren.
[A hundred times they'll say "Grandmother"; aferward they'll beat you]
OLD WOMAN IN DELHI , ON WHY SHE NO LONGER VOTED
(
"
THE ELECTION CERTAI NLY HAS I TS LI GHTER MOMENTS = . , TIMES OF l.II, I g8g)
In Sobti's Ai Lrk, the old woman and her daughter together mark her dying
body: the space between mother and daughter, unlike those between father and
son or si and baha, suggests that the contest over the old body can be a produc
tive site of meaning and exchange. A pair of poems by the Indian English poet
Sukrita Kumar suggests a similar distinction: in "Fathers and Sons," cited in an
epigraph above, a father frames his son as replacing him, a relation of substitution
in which only one man at a time can occupy the position of virility; in "Mothers
and Daughters, " a mother frames an analogou realization of her daughter's ma
turing body as a relation of identir: mothers and daughters seeing themselves
refected in the aging of the other, and vice versa. 35 These ideal tyes of inter
generational dyads-mother I daughter, father I son, mother-in-law I daughter-in
law-structure a universe of discourse in which larger collectivities are continu
ally materialized.
The relationship between an old mother and her son, as in the apocalyptic vision
of modernity of Ghar Kali, may signif a larger frame than the intergenerational
dynamics of substitution and identity In this painting, later a popularly circulated
lithograph, the old mother's abjection suggests the fallen present of the babu's Cal
cutta. The reality of the Kali Age, of the collapse of righteousness and dharma in
the fallen present, is corporeally demonstrated in the fgure of the old mother trans
formed into an alley dog, dragged along behind her son and baha on a leash.
That the phenomenal universe ages, is destroyed and reabsorbed into the un
marked totality of God or Brahman, and after a period of cosmic night is created
anew is a central theme of the medieval Puranic literature in Sanskrit. Kali Yuga,
the Ghar Kali of the Bengali image, is the last of the four stages of devolution, in
which dharma or righteousness, imagined as a cow, totters on its fnal leg in hu
manity and the universe's last gasp before their destruction. Marriott has ofered
the most compelling discussion of the relevance of this temporal order of the
yugas to a contemporary sociology, reading the temporal axis as an index of "un
matching," the tendency of relations in the cosmos-between cause and efect,
signier and signifed, totality and individual or group-to become unglued, in
creasingly less coherent. 36 Within the analyic frame of Kali Yuga, social and sig
nifng relations will never be adequately encompassed by a structural logic of cul
ture as totality, be it that of Dumont or Marriott himsel(
The relation between the aging of the current universe, which takes place in
1
7
2 THE ANGER OF THE RI SHI S
four stages before its dissolution and rebirth, i s not explicitly predicated on the
aging of the person, in four stages before her dissolution and rebirth. Sannia is
not explicitly identifed with Kali Yuga in textual discussions of either. The third
and fourth positions of iamadharma are afer all steps or paths out of the illusory
world of birth and rebirth, out of the cycle of decay: it is the old person caught by
desire who fais to move on and leave the household, or the kingdom who decays
and dries up, like the foolish kng of the Katiartaara, like the cosmos in Kali
Yuga. Puranic descriptions of Kali Yuga and of the cosmic dissolution and reab
sorption that follow ofen include descriptions of the aging of the body, in which
old age is explicitly a sign of cosmic decay Thus in the Brahma Prana, which the
editors of the Motilal Banarsidass/UNESCO Puranic translation series assign to
a period between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, 37 a section on the "natural re
absorption" of the cosmos is followed by a section on the "ultimate reabsorption"
of the human body, a rather unpleasant meditation of the embodiment of igno
rance. In old age,
man undergoes many miseries as follows: His body is shattered by old age. His limbs
are enfeebled and faccid. His teeth are broken and loose. He is covered by wrinkles
and protruding sinews and neres and veins.
His eyes are incapable of seeing anything far of His pupils are fxed to the sky
Clusters of hair come out of his nostrils. The whole of his body shakes and shivers.
His bones are laid bare. The bones at his back are bent. Since his gastric fre does
not function, he takes but little food. He is capable of only a few movements.
He experiences difculties in rising up, in moving about, in lying down, in sitting
and in his movements. His eyes and ears become less keen. Saliva exudes from his
mouth and defes his face.
With his sense organs intractable, he looks up to his early death. He is not capa
ble of remembering anything experienced at the very same moment.
In uttering a sentence even once he has to put in great efort. He spends sleepless
nights due to the strain of ailments such as asthma, bronchitis (cough) etc.
The old man has to be lifed up or laid to rest with the help of another man. He
is disdained and insulted by his serants, sons and wife. 38
The description continues, and is followed by a discussion of the suferings of the
deathbed, the suferings of hell, and the suferings of the fetus in the womb and
during childbirth: the cycle rolls on. The description is naturalistic, the normative
order unless one acts to end one's ignorance, and the body in decline is gendered
male. The suferings of the old man under the sign of Kali Yuga, and in particu
lar his treatment at the hands of his sons and wife, are inevitable and point not to
Kali Yuga as metaphor for immediate cultural crisis but Kali Yuga as soteriologic
frame. The slippage between the body of the father and the dharma of the Father
is comprehended under the sign of Kali Yuga.
The decadence of Kali Yuga often includes reversals of gender: in a later text,
the Padma Prana, in the last age "all men will be subjugated by women": 39 the
fgure of the babu's wife, astride her husband. But the image of the body of the
THE ANGER OF THE RI SHI S 1
73
cosmos as an old woman is not a feature of the classic Puranic depiction. The ab
ject mother, when she appears, points with immediacy to the neglectful son and an
inexplicable lack and not, unlike the abject father, to the inevitable substitution of
son for father.
Colonial rhetoric added additional dimensions to the decrepit old woman as
sign of a lack. The Beal Hurkru depiction of the aged "houris of the East," men
tioned in the introduction, is predicated upon the colonial obserer's hope of
glimpsing young native women in wet saris. All rots quickly in the tropics, and the
old woman stands at the juncture of colonial desire and the senescent logic of the
Other. Orientalist writing drew upon local fgures of old women and repositioned
them. Sir William Jones, founder of the Asiatic Society and of many of the insti
tutional and discursive forms of Indology, prefaced his translation of Kalidasa's
drama, Santli, with a "modern epigram" that had been "lately repeated to
me," concerning the great esteem in which the dramatist was held:
Poetry was the sportful daughter of Valmic, and, having been educated by Vasa,
she chose Calidas for her bridegroom after the manner of Viderbha: she was the
mother of Amara, Sundar, Sanc'ha, Dhanic; but now, old and decrepit, her beauty
faded, and her unadorned feet slipping as she walks, in whose cottage does she dis
dain to take shelter?4
The source of the quotation and its exact age are not mentioned by Jones; what
ever its antiquity it is of signifcance that Jones was told it as a modn epigram,
refecting not just the decline of poetry under the general unmatching of Kali Yuga
but the particular decline of language i the world afer Kalidasa and his succes
sors. Jones's informant may have meant the fnal question and its accompanying
image as an unanswerable sign of contemporary cultural crisis, but in Jones's use of
it within his own project of translation and reclamation a dif erent sort of answer
emerges: in the cottage of Sir William Jones, and the Asiatic Society he founds.
Such an answer has litde direct relevance for the new urban world of Ghar
Kali; the presence of the British provides a new urgency to the question, but the
answer to the emerging dilemma of bhadralok culture took shape on dif erent ter
rain. Partha Chatterjee has discussed the consequent development of a split be
tween domestic and feminized interiority in which an authentic and uncompro
mised selfood could be maintained and a worldly and masculinized exteriority in
which the demands of colonial rule and cultural compromise could be sustained
with minimal loss of sel41 The power of Ghar Kali may lie in its troubling of this
gendered splitting, through its reconfguration of the interior world of woman as
a conficted substitution of daughter-in-law for mother-in-law. Age challenges the
seamlessness of gender.
The predicament of Modern India as the predicament of the aged mother
awaiting the missing sevi of her inattentive son becomes instantiated as a central
narrative of post-Independence electoral politics. Politicians in election years fre
quendy have their picture taken while bending down to touch the feet of an old
1
74
THE ANGER OF THE RI SHI S
woman, her body framed by the doorway of a slum dwelling. The image is of the
politician as the good son, healing the sufering of the citizen-as-mother by
reestablishing the proper fow of sevi and thus undoing the wrongs of the Kali
Age. On the front page of the Tmes r India on November 4, 1 989, the powerful
and by some accounts unscrupulous Congress politician Jagdish Tytler was pic
tured "seeking the blessings of an old woman by touching her feet during his cam
paign trail. " As if to demonstrate its neutrality, the paper ofered a candidate from
the then-opposition Janata Dal party being "blessed by an elderly woman" the fol
lowing week.42 The pra1im, the respectful obeisance to one's seniors, becomes the
populist gesture reminiscent of another society's kissing of babies.
Beyond their attempted appropriation by particular parties, old people and es
pecially old women come to sere as symbols of the franchised citizen, of the elec
torate in itsel( During the same national election, the Hindi daily Dainak ofered a
fgure of a shrunken old widow in white sari and dose-cropped hair walking stead
fastly with the support of two young men toward a village polling place; her age
was given as 1 20. 43 A Times r India article showed a grimacing old woman being
carried to the polling place by a young man, while young women in line to vote
look on. The article suggested, in discussing voting by the aged and infrm, that
"democracy in India has come of age, has in fact really become mature. " The
image, with the old woman in the arms of the young man and the younger women
displaced to the side, is the reverse of Ghar Kali. The son has come back to the
old mother; the early uxorious firtations of the babu have been replaced by a re
turn to the family through the old body, and democracy has "come of age" from
its unstated Indian infantilism. 44 Similar images and narratives circulated in the
1 996 Lok Sabha elections.
One particular photograph of the old woman voting was frequently recycled in
the Times r India: in 1 989 she was the Muslim voter, in 1 990 the archetypical In
dian. Clad in the burka of a Muslim woman, she peers, bespectacled, over the bal
lot box and holds her ballot over the open slot (see photograph on p. 290) . 45 A dis
embodied hand from the side of the picture points to the slot, directing her
attention and activit The pointing fnger directs our gaze as well, but we do not
know who points. The multiply subordinate fgure-old, shortsighted, female,
Muslim-may signif modern franchise in two ways: it suggests that even " the
weakest in society have the power of the vote, and conversely that the voter is but
an old woman, easily manipulated by interests dimly seen beyond the hand that
directs one to the hole wherein one's future lies.
THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE VOI CE
To locate the diference of old mothers and fathers more carefully we move from
vision to voice. When Banarsis in each of the four neighborhoods described what
made a given old person diferent than before, it was ofen in terms of the quality
THE ANGER OF THE RI SHI S 1
75
or quantity of their voice. I began to learn to take litnin seriously. Hot brain and
sixtyishness were less seen than heard in their recounting, and this hearing
emerged within a complex but bounded typolog In the neighborhoods, voices
were described most often as angry, as repetitive, or as the nonvoice of sience, sad
ness, or loneliness. Each of these voices had a moral quality, heard either as posi
tive and fuid (generative, wise, or transcendental) or negative and stagnant (selfsh,
meaningless, or pathetic) . In Marriott's terminology, the stagnant voice was "un
matching." It was a signifer that was increasingly dissociated from what it pur
ported to signify, registering, like Aitafa prlipa, only as incoherence. Its opposite,
the fuid voice, was not the more neutral everyday language of the young in which
the voice more or less signifed as its expected content but something superordi
nately "matching. " A fuid and powerful old voice was not only heard as its con
tent but it made incontrovertible demands upon a listener, interpellating all within
range as subjects of a generational economy
Anger was not just the selfsh demands of the hot-brained individual who could
not adapt or who was too weak to contain him or herself The angry voice of an
old person could be transformative, and its heat carried the force of its powerful
truth. In Nagwa slum, I was once sitting with a group of reglars at Secchan's tea
stall. Harinath Prasad, the local schoolteacher or Masterji, an old man with whom
I spoke frequently, came walking briskly by He overheard the conversation we
were having, one of those repeated discussions about how far away America was
and how expensive it was to go there, and joined in, shifing the talk to a discussion
of the earth and its spin. It was 1 988, a leap year, and Harinath said that in this cal
endar year, "in 366 days" the earth completed a revolution around the sun. "You
are mistaken, Masterji, " said Secchan, that afernoon as most afernoons slightly
drunk. "There are 365 days in a year. " Harinath was delighted; someone had
walked into his trap. But he looked furious. "Is that so? Are you contradicting me?
Write down your claim. Write it down! " Which Secchan, illiterate, could not do.
"You can't read or write! How can you know about these things?" A paper was
produced, and Harinath asked everyone to remember how many days there had
been in each month of that year. The tally totaled 366, and Harinath left in tri
umph.
"Why was he angry?" I asked, so used to hearing about angry old people. "He
wasn't. He was salf," correct, I was told by everyone, generating an opposition be
tween being angry and being right. And Secchan himself ofen an irreverent and
mean-tempered drunk who had al but abandoned his own aged parents, said, "I
am his son. He was teaching me. I know that a year has 365 days in it, but he some
how showed me that this time I was wrong. " A an uncle with no claims on Sec
chan's earnings, Harinath could remain the counter of hours and days; the rectitude
of the nonthreatening and the anger of the threatening speak with the same voice.
The voice was heard not only as hot but as prolic. Old people in several of the
neighborhoods were said to speak uselessly or to bakbak. Vatuk's informants noted
1
7
6 THE ANGER OF THE RI SHI S
that when an old person could no longer contribute due to hath pair k kmzot, the
weakness of hand and foot, then they were heard only as babblers. Against bab
bling, the voice of old age was often framed as incredibly productive, a wise and
inexhaustible source of experience and social memory. The classical fgure of the
endlessly productive wise voice, on television weekly that year, is that of the an
cient warrior Grandfather Bhishma, one of the great heroes of the Mahabharat.
Bhishma brings up three generations of Kshatriya warriors and is in the end kiled
through the agency of one of them, his great-nephew and the hero of the epic,
Arjuna. But Bhishma, his body immobilized by the innumerable arrows shot
through him and forming a bed upon which he rests, does not die. Gifed with the
boon of choosing the hour of his own death, Bhishma remains alive to narrate in
numerable matters of statecraft and cosmology to his great-nephew, the future
kng Yuddhishtara. Efectively bodiless, Bhishma becomes pure voice and takes
over the primary narration of the epic. He ofers a lengthy discussion of dharma
culled from his superannuated experience. Bhishma outlives most of the warriors
on the battlefeld and dies when the contest is over.
The line between productive wisdom and bakbak, as Vatuk's and my own infor
mants often suggested, depends not only on the content of the productive voice
but frequently on the politics of the hearing. Bhishma himself in popular media
discussions of the epic during its presentation as a two-year-long television serial,
was on occasion presented as the epitome of bakbak. In describing the universality
of Bhishma's character, the magazine India Tda noted that "almost every home
has an old, despondent man blabbering away, whose advice the younger lot may
listen to, but rarely follow"46
The third voice of old age was that of silence. In third-person terms, old peo
ple in Varanasi were frequently described as lonely and depressed. The voice of
the uncared-for elder could have been be sullen or tearful silence or a lament,
but it was not heard by those for whom it was intended. Lonely voices were less
heard than overheard, by others (relatives, neighbors, passersby) as neglected
and pathetic markers of a lack of sevi. Yet the old person who was not heard
might be spoken of by others as the old person who would not be heard, the latter
day forest-dweller. Silence, withdrawal , and a break in communication between
young and old pointed as well to the transcendent voice of thejlvanmukti, the re
alized in life, or in more everyday language, to an old person heard as religious,
as a serious bhakt, or devotee. The silent voice pointed toward a dif erent poli
tics of relationship and of knowledge, but one capable of making its own pow
erful demands upon the young. Kaszvisls who came to die and be liberated in
Kashi were alternately heard in the transfgured speech of the silently knowing
and otherworldly or the pathetic speech of the abandoned. The hearing of si
lence, like that of anger and prolifcacy, conveys a split moral understanding of
the relation of an old person to his family and surroundings, and requires inter
pretation.
THE ANGER OF THE RI S HI S 1
77
THE FAMI LIAL BODY
. . . recali hi motr i t kth, pot "Jamun, t aner q parent i never ane
UPAMANYU CHATTERJEE, THE LAST BURDE
The old woman who lived across the road from a friend of mine in a middle-class
Delhi colony frequently shouted and cursed at persons who were never there. Her
voice was ofen heard by her neighbors as angr I never saw the old woman in Delhi;
my friend seemed reluctant to arrange a visit. I was told she was frail and that she
lived alone, not with her famiy but with an attendant paid for by them. It seemed
her late son had distanced himself from his parents and had brought up his own chil
dren with closer ties to their maternal relations. To the neighbors the old woman
seemed clearly not well, soh! nahm as Banarsi friends might have put it, but what was
at stake in this not being quite right seemed to preclude a certain public articulation
of the meaning of her voice for those wishing to maintain a cordial relationship with
her childen. She was named neither as mad or diseased nor as the victim of a bad
family though both frames were implied in the sience in which al that could be ac
knowledged was some sort of unmatching, things no longer being as they should.
To understand what sufering entails, Kleinman and Kleinman remind us, we
must understand "what is at stake" for all those who defne and are defned by
particular moral worlds in which bodies are structurally fxed and intersubjec
tively livedY Very ofen during this research, what was at stake when an old per
son was heard as an unmatched voice was the moral coherence of her or his fam
ily To address the body of the old person is to address that body as embedded in
a family and in the transactions that structure and maintain a family. Unlike
other generational positions, the old body is not only embedded in its family but
is, in a very real sense, appropriated by and becomes its family The old woman's
voice in Delhi in its incoherence is an unmatching: the breakdown of
signifcation occurs simultaneously as a crisis in an individual body and in its
family The two are indivisible, the same thing. Her voice connotes a variety of
possibilities for her middle-class neighbors-undif erentiated "mental weakness"
or "seniity" some kind of disease, her refusal to adjust to the inevitable and thus
a state of "imbalance," the denouement of conficts played out over decades, an
exaggeration of already existing personality traits. But it denotes, in the immedi
acy of its hearing, an unmatching in the family a breakdown of generations. To
speak of her voice is to address the state of her family and of families more gen
erally; one therefore may defer from speaking. Again and again during my work,
I confronted what at frst I took to be a matter of stigma, the reluctance of those
with much at stake to share their hearing of a sah! nahln voice, one not quite right.
If it was stigma, it was not the stigmatized old body that was tainting its family
by association. The old body was not stigmatized as "itself" but a te bod i the
fmil.
In writing of the famiial body I reread the notion of the relational self in the
q8 THE ANGER OF THE RI S HI S
psychological anthropology of the "non-West, " particularly India. The "Indian
self" has been constituted through the central thematic of the sociology and an
thropology of India as being relational, primarily and refexively structured
through its relations to other "selves" and not in terms of an autonomous and in
teriorized individuality In the work of Dumont and Carstairs and in much of
Kakar, this relationality is read as hierarchy In the responses to Dumont by Veena
Das and Frederique Marglin and in the work of Marriott and his students, hierar
chy is but one dimension of the relationality of a "dividual" or "fuid" sel48 In
their discussions of Indian selfood, Marriott, Valentine Daniel, and others ex
tend this transactional framework to the body
The consequences of this sort of rhetorical fgures vary Their limitations reside
primariy in their oppositional and comparative origns. A "relational self" has lit
tle signifcance unless it is read from the position of a nonrelational self; the com
parative anthropology of selfood lumps together varieties of self-construction
with little in common save their not being defnitionally Western. In the case of
India, despite the careful work of scholars like Richard Shweder, 49 the literature
begins to lose its usefulness the more one weans oneself from crude comparison as
the primary epistemological framework of anthropology 5
The "famiial body" is in some senses a "relational" site, in which exchanges of
material sustenance, medicine, and afection between generations constitute the
lived body of the dependent elder. But I am neither interested in defning it prmar
il in contradistinction to the dynamics of age elsewhere, nor able to do so. If noth
ing else, there is an obvious comparative dimension to my use of the term, given
the basic hermeneutic conditions of a suburban Jewish New Englander working in
urban Varanasi. But I fnd the rhetoric I deploy here useful not because it helps me
defne aging in India against aging elsewhere; rather, the famiial body, the old
voice, and the dying space I write of below are ofered as a shorthand that helped
me understand and model relations between bodiy experience, social dynamics,
and particular universes of discourse in Varanasi and that may or may not be use
ful in other places. They are particularly useful in Varanasi and elsewhere in India
given the centrality of the Bad Famiy as one of the key sites of a contested moder
nit and indeed they may help explain the emergence of the Bad Family narrative.
But they may provide tools by which to rethink the embodiment of old age in
places where diferent narratives dominate, where rationalized terms like "care
giver" and even "disease" erase the centrality of the familial context of aging.
As a variant on the relational self the familial body of the old and dependent
person is not just constituted through "dividual" intergenerational exchanges. The
welfare of the old body becomes a refection of the welfare of family relations: it
is less a relational body in itself than a signifer of relations elsewhere, between
others. Old people become familial icons; their sufering, pleasures, and voice be
come increasingly exhausted in signifing the fami,y and can point less and less to
their distinct and separate needs, which become ever less signifable and more and
more identifed with what I will term below a dying space.
THE ANGER OF THE RI SHI S 1
79
Becoming one's family entails two linked processes: political marginalization
and performative centralization. One must be unable or unwilling to assert a sub
jectivity that maintains a distinction between oneself and the family Powerful old
fathers and mothers-in-law are set against sons and daughters-in-law: Sons be
come fathers and daughters and mothers-in-law are opposed. Only when the old
person can be politically encompassed by the family network, when there are no
signicant risks for grown children or gains in intergenerational opposition, does
the old person become identifed as not the superordinate but the symbolic center
of the famiy
These processes are complex. First, they are contested: thus the ambiguity of
sity composed of, on the one hand, the resistance by the aging person to being
identifed as inappropriate and the efort to hold onto authority on the other the
efort by children to assume control of household resources and family preroga
tives while maintaining the image of a stable generational hierarchy without dis
ruption. Second, they are played out diferently by various children, given what's
at stake for each. Like Yayati's fve sons or the three sons of Apne Begine, older sons
and daughters-in-law may seek to assume control and marginalize parental clout
whereas younger children may ally with parents. In most of the neighborhoods of
the study, old parents were more likely to live as part of their youngest son's house
hold: older brothers successively fssioned of, takng whatever share of joint fam
iy property they could.
Though younger chidren may remain in positions of political alliance or sub
ordination to parents, older children who have fssioned of-splitting entailing
separate expenses and food and, rarely shifs to new residences-may still request
their parents' presence and support in circumscribed but sybolically dense areas
in which the identity of family and household can be reasserted. These areas, in
which old parents who have been lef to younger siblings are reclaimed as familial
bodies, center on the maintenance and commensal delineation of a ghar, a house
hold: in rites of passage such as the Brahmanical sarski ras, in other rituals of the
household, in the training and sureillance of grandchildren, and in the greeting
of (but not obtrusive involvement with) guests.
Old parents, within the logic of this ideal typology are involved in two forms of
ghar the primary economic unit of the household, ofen with younger children, and
the ritually reconstituted famiy. The division is a heuristic, a structural efort to de
lineate the substrate of political action. I use it to suggest that the familial body
and the social construction of old age debility-must be set within the context of
the various strategies and overlapping structures of extended families and multiple
households. The hearing of the voice, and the power of authoritative interpreta
tion, are contingent on the community of listeners and their interrelationships.
For those on the periphery of a ghar, however defned, the sahi nahln voice of an
old person in Varanasi was often the sound of a morally "not right" family.
Throughout the neighborhoods of this study across class, outsiders-neighbors,
daughters or sons critical of their siblings, passersby-often heard neglect in these
180 THE ANGER OF THE RI SHI S
voices. I n interviews with me, they most ofen framed neglect as a transactional
defcit: they do not give him or her enough food, enough clothing, or enough love:
they do not ofer enough sevi.
The perceived lack of sevi goes beyond the economics and attributional politics
of households, families, and communities. If the self is relationally constituted,
and i
f
"family" becomes the monoglot index of relationality within the postcolo
nial context of the joint family story, then assaults on the inviolability of the fam
ily are particularly threatening. The assault, however, is unavoidable. Children,
economically and politically and symbolically, eventually take on the position of
their parents, but old parents do not necessarily disappear. No amount of sevi can
reverse the process seamlessly
"Respect" and "status" are ubiquitous and rarely examined constructs, either
of social gerontology or of forms of local knowledge mandating flial piety I sug
gest here that respect has two aspects: deferral to the powerful and performative
deference to the no longer powerful. In the negotiated and contested forums of in
tergenerational life the distinction may not be so clear, but it is performative def
erence that the frequent and cross-cultural exhortations to honor one's parents
imply. By performative I do not suggest "empty" practice, but rather that for the
normative order of a family to be maintained, the emergent political hierarchy of
children over parents must be reversed through symbolic action that generates a
normative hierarchy of parents over children and yet does so without endangering
the family's political order. By seeking parents' advice on decisions that they ulti
mately will not control, by placing their parents physically within shared family
space or at the threshold as a sign defning ghar, domestic space, and the house
hold, chidren identif their parents with the household and with authority over it.
The elder is the household; his or her performative control over it signifes the
moral integrity of the family
Challenges to this integrity emerge through the familial body, heard as a voice
of a neglected elder. Sources of the bad voice are multiple: they include the old
age weaknesses various actors in my story have called sixtyishness, hot brain, weak
brain, senile dementia, seniity senile psychosis, and Alzheimer's disease. They
also include more universal processes. Perfect sevi-the fantasy body of Shravan
Kumar-is impossible. Shravan must die: in dying, he recognizes his failure: "I
now see there is no reward for austerity"5 1 The order of things-here. framed as
the body of the king, Dasharath, who cuts the perfect son down-prevents the re
alization of perfect flial serce. Chidren cannot simultaneously be ascetics and
householders. Few adult children I interviewed could do "enough" sevi, and its in
evitable defcit was an anxiety central to many discussions of aged parents.
THE DYING SPACE
Isn't te clssical codication q an indivual li wie? Now and t I reect on it-ti
i te ee q the strm, I suppose-touh tat isn't entirel corrct, because the ee connotes
THE ANGER OF THE RI S HI S 181
stilless at t heart q tumult, doesn't it, and grasti i a1thi but. No, grathi i domes
ticit, te fmil, and a mortal li'd be faetr without it; fr sure, t tree ote runs are
alo sinicant to itgrat a li, but t years bire grasti seem t conduct you t it, and t
ae ar grati wind away fom it-it's the hub, t umbilicus, t skein q birt and deat,
and one' so enmeshed in it, in t bond and responsibilities q fmil, tat one desn't rumi
nat on t central questions, not much, a1wq-but there i in't much spunk--os, wron
word-lf in t years ar grasthi, and vanaprastha and san1as are euphei, are't
te,jr riection and dote?
UPAMANYU CHATTERJEE, THE LST BURDE
The identity of family and body is mediated principally through the space of the
home. Vatuk noted that "old people in India do most of their physical sufering,
and ultimately their dying, at home. "52 In Rajan Khosa's short black-and-white
flm Bodh Vr/a ( Widom Tee) , a young woman lives in a large house with her father
and bedridden grandmother. The flm is silent, save for a voice-over of the young
woman's thoughts. The father is distant, wrapped up in his own unhappiness; the
young woman is entirely responsible for the grandmother's care. As the old
woman's illness progresses, the image of the grandmother and the house fuse
through lingering shots of the house, the old body and the young woman's des
peration at being imprisoned by both. The house is empty shadows and wind.
The grandmother remains silent, immobile. The stillness is broken by the voice
over (translated from the Hindi by Khosa) :
Why is it so stil? What is it that inhabits the wind? Perhaps it is like me, watching it
all, in silence, in stilness . . . .
Within this windy silent body of vqu and this windy empty house, the grand
daughter senses heat:
Sometimes I can see it, a kind of grace, something pure and holy, which seems to
grow in her as her body withers away. Every moment the disease eats further into
her: her legs are rotten stumps, her bowels a mass of decay Slowly, steadily, the
whole house is bathed with her presence. There is a power-I have seen it. 53
The grandmother continues to grow older and to decay to die in a cold body and
in a cold house, and yet, for her granddaughter, to wax more powerful: " [S] he
burns in her pain with a fame of pure white heat. "
By the end of the fl m, the granddaughter has l ef the house. The camera re
turns to empty rooms. Has the old woman died? Eventually, the camera ap
proaches the deathbed. Grandmother is still there, silent. Ad then she stirs, slowly
turns, and for the frst time gets out of bed. Her immobility is somehow contingent
upon the sevi of her granddaughter. Younger generations f old bodies with their
solicitude as much as they are fed by the demands of care. The dying space,
Grandmother's miraculous recovery suggests, is socially constructed and continu
ally negotiated.
182 THE ANGER OF THE RI SHI S
I was several times struck, i n Varanasi, by chidren who spoke of taking care of
their "dying" [marnewal] parents, when to my eyes the old parents were not on
their deathbed. But literally, of course, they ofen were: for the bed of old age is
usually the deathbed, not the hospital bed, and without the intercession of the
hospital or a machine, old age and death are structured as a continuity These chil
dren defned a weak old age as a dying space, and to the extent that their parents
could not or chose not to contest their reconstruction as old bodies, they defned it
so as well.
The dying space may be an indoor bed, as in Bodh Vrka. In Ravindrapuri
Colony in Varanasi, Amita Mukherjee and her mother, both elderly widows, lived
in a large fat. Amita, in her sixties, taught at the Anandamai Ma Ashram girls'
school; her mother stayed at home and rarely left her room. She could get about,
and although she agreed with her daughter that she was quite weak and immobile,
whenever I visited them and found Amita-di not at home, her old mother negoti
ated the entire house with relative ease. A north Indian physician who moved to
Bangalore moved a television into his parents' bedroom so that they would never
have to leave their bed to watch a program; lie Amita's mother, they were less
bedridden than bed-gifed, the immobilized object of solicitude. Signifcantly,
these were years when the weeky Mahabharat episode was televised each Sunday
morning and was watched throughout the country by families and even entire
communities crowded together; at the Bangalore doctor's house, the old parents
sat on their own bed and watched apart.
The uncontested dying space is often
s
patially marginal to the hous.ehold while
remaining specularly central . The charpoy the kotted rope and wood frame bed,
is ofen placed near the threshold of the house or in a courtyard, and it suggests
both the liminal and the exemplary position of its aged occupant. Not quite part
of the household, the old person on the threshold was yet the frst thing one would
encounter in visiting. The "threshold function" of the family elder: for Sudipta
Basu's famiy in Calcutta, the fact that despite his anger, confusion, and forgetting
he could still greet visitors appropriately was very important. The charpoy was a
ubiquitous and narratively elaborated site of the liminal old body: outside small
dwellings in Nagwa slum, on the roofs and in the hallways of wealthy homes in
Ravindrapuri, and in local representations of the village elder or elderly mother
in-law on his or her charpoy, the image is simultaneously that of confnement and
repose, restriction and respect.
Another paradigmatic image conveying the spatial ambiguities of seva is the
mali the massage, classically by a dutiful daughter-in-law of her mother-in-law's
hat pair. A remembered image: I am sitting, up on the roof after a hot day in
Varanasi, enjoying the urban delight of rooftop breezes. Around me fit the myr
iad kites of children; on surrounding rooftops, the hour of the mali has arrived.
The sa lolls on the charpoy, and her daughter-in-law squats next to her, massag
ing her leg. The older woman's arms and legs ache: hat pair, the critical site of
generational weakness. Seva as mali mandates an immobile body and tired limbs
THE ANGER OF THE RI SHI S 183
even as it marks the hierarchy of the superior older woman giving her feet to the
younger and inferior.
TAKING VOI CES SERI OUSLY
But dying spaces are contested, and we need to move from third-person frames of
angry rishis and sityishness and second-person positioned accounts of the famil
ial body to the frst-person construction of experience, to the voices of old people,
in and of themselves. Questions postponed must now take precedence: Do indi
viduals experience their own aging as sixtyish or as powerful? As hot or as cold?
Are these rhetorics of attribution relevant to the experience of old individuals? Do
normative cultural frameworks like iamadharma map onto personal experience?
Ultimately do individuals experience themselves as old in the frst place? What
does it mean to be "old"?
I have until this point evaded these questions, those of the phenomenology of
the old body and the meaning of old in itsel They are important issues, some
times neglected in the cross-cultural study of old age, but in posing them as dis
tinct inquiries one may ascribe to the experience of old age a concreteness and
distinctiveness it may lack. Sharon Kaufman has made the point, in her work with
middle-class American elders, that
when they talk about who they are and how their lives have been, they do not speak
of being old as meaningul in itself; that is, they do not relate to agng or chronolog
ical age as a category of experience or meaning. To the contrary when old people
talk about themselves, they express a sense of self that is ageless-an identity that
maintains continuity despite the physical and social changes that come with old age .
. . . Being old per se is not a central feature of the self, nor is it a source of meaning. 54
Kaufman's elegant assertion challenged the tenor of the phenomenology of old
age, of projects like Cole and Garow's edited collection What Does It Mean to Grow
Ol?, of solicitous tomes lie de Beauvoir's L Viillsse,55 and more generally of
eforts to track the aging subject as a set of distinct selves through the life course.
In the next chapter, one of my informants will help me take issue with the univer
sality of Kaufman's particular conception of the self; here I would note that in
pointing out rather frequently that they do not feel old, Kaufman's informants
seem to structure self against if not through old age: as the Other to selfood here,
old age remains critical to a phenomenology of the body and self in time, ever
more the negative space as one ages, against which a continuity of lived experi
ence asserts itsel
Kaufman's resistance to the meaningfulness of old age is suggestive of the am
biguity of the term within the American academy Lie the enumerative obsession
of geriatrics with "normal aging," old age in American gerontology is organized
as a paradox: the unmentionable object of discourse. Books ofen replace old ae
with agn, a term that rarely refers to the process of aging across the life span and
far more ofen is a euphemism for old age. Thus Bernice Neugarten edited an
184 THE ANGER OF THE RI SHI S
early anthology i n the feld entitled Midl Ae and Ag, i n which the parallelism
of "Middle Age and Old Age" is abandoned for a tropaic structure in which the
whole must stand for the unspeakable part. 56 Gerontology as a feld of knowledge
presumes the importance of old age and old people as things to be studied, yet the
professional language of social gerontology is structured around its erasure: thus
the "World Assembly on Aging" and the ')ging in India" series.
For a generation of gerontological anthropologists, a corollary of the wl to eu
phemize was the difculty in articulating "old age" as anything other than a posi
tive experience: against this difcult some of the current calls for a "postmodern
life course. " In her early work, Andrea Sankar contrasted what she found to be the
"it's just old age" strategy of the Western medical tradition with traditional Chinese
medicine, which she argued avoided using old age as an excuse not to take sufering
seriously 57 Sankar's discussion of old age, embodiment, and social networks among
Buddhist nuns is among the more critically engaging work on old age in a Chinese
community but it was of necessity narrated through contemporary gerontological
and medical anthropological critique of a "biomedical" straw man. Similar com
parisons abounded in the medical anthropology of the 1 970s and 1 g8os, as in Nancy
Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock's classic article "The Mindful Body." The ar
ticle elegantly demonstrates the ways in which the body as simultaneously experi
enced, social, and political should ground the social analysis of bodily phenomena,
but then goes on to suggest that "Eastern" medicine does just that, easing in a sense
the anthropologist's critical burden. A haiku and a tertiary-care hospital are ofered
to demonstrate the Kiplingesque division between aesthetic and holistic East and
mechanistic and alienating West. 58 The apples and oranges comparison in the case
of the Sankar article is similar, contrasting the tertiary care medicine of the West
against the social miieus of Buddhist nuns of the East.
Beyond the comparison lies a central assumption: societies that label the expe
rience of sufering, debility, or change within an old body as "old age" are neces
sar( distancing themselves from experience and healing rather than confronting
the experience itself In the Varanasi neighborhoods, "it's just old age" was a way
frequently used by relatives and others to make sense of old people, as frequently
used as the assertion that "in the West, you don't care for old people. " Not only
their relatives but old persons themselves throughout the neighborhoods of the
study made use of statements of the "it's just old age" tye. False consciousness
awaiting gerontologcal pedagogy? Perhaps. Yet in denying the power of speaking
"old age" as a personal and performative source against as well as for meaning,
anthropologists may elide a dimension of the performative utterance (and nonut
terance) of old age, its dialogic construction as both the expression and denial of
experience and of sufering.
In rethinking the famiial body and the dyng space from frst-person perspec
tives, we need to follow Kaufman and question the "obvousness" of being an old
body, and to continually query the relation of the body in time to lived experience.
Sylvia Vatuk shows in her discussion of the anxiety her informants expressed
THE ANGER OF THE RI SHI S 18
5
about becoming old, useless, and abandoned, that old age in the processual sense
of becomin is critical to self-construction. 59 But becoming is not quite being. In the
case of John Kingery, the old man who was "granny-dumped" at the Idaho dog
track, the fact that the sympathies of the AP spokesperson were more with the
daughter who abandoned him than with the Alzheimer's victim suggests this. Lie
dependency anxiety the social elaboration of Alzheimer's refects the drawing of
a boundary by younger adults to defect the perceived transformations of their
own old age.
It is difcult to address bein old as a universal phenomenology or, pace Kauf
man, as its absence. Kaufman's model presumes the possibility of role continuity
a possibility itself diferentially available across class, gender, and other less pre
dictable correlates of life experience. Widowhood may create dramatically
dif erent challenges for women than for men. A routinized form of retirement and
the possibijities of pension are an option only for a minority of elderly; the efects
of old age on those who must work as agricultural or construction laborers or who,
like Dulari's cousin, pedal rickshaws unti they literally drop dead may mitigate the
possibiities of an ageless sel The various meanings of the charpoy for its occu
pant-repose, retirement, confnement, neglect, peripheralization-depend less
on old age itself than on the varied conditions for the uninterrupted fow of sevi
and the continued usefulness of the body
Aframadharma is simiarly limited in anchoring a universal phenomenology of
old age experience. Kakar ofers its last two stages as an alternative to a psycho
analytic typology of maturity, with the accent on yogic desocialization as a ratio
nal response to mortality.6 Few elderly informants, however, valorized disengage
ment from other persons as part of their sense of ideal sel Kakar's citing
iamadharma is reminiscent of a simiar controversy in social gerontology in the
1 970s over disengagement versus activty theories of frst-person experience. The
advocates of the former position suggested old people "naturally" disengage from
social and other ties and turn inward; advocates of the latter held that old people
when given the chance diversif and expand their sense of self once the limiting
tasks of work and family have been passed on: ties and involvements should in
crease, not decrease. 6 1 The controversy prevented analysis from focusing on the
ways individuals both disengage and broaden their ties and interests, on the im
portance but insufciency of the forest as a model of old age. In Non-renunciation,
T N. Madan suggested that adulthood is characterized less by a movement from
the dharma (duty), kma (pleasure) , and arta (proft) orientations of the house
holder to the moksha Oiberation) orientation of the renunciate, than that the po
larity of the bhog (the hedonist) and yogi (the ascetic) frame the extremes between
which individuals fashion life and sel62 Repose, the position of a good old age, re
mains as much a celebration of bhoga as yoga.
In spatializing the adult life course as a move from the household to the forest
to the peripatetic unmarked space of the sannyasi, iramadharma legitimates the
ambivalence of repose through its reconstruction as an ascetic state; lie disen-
186 THE ANGER OF THE RI SHI S
gagement theory i t also provides a normative rationale for the enforced marginal
ization of the elder by others. Kakar suggests that the system ofers the romantic
possibility of the quest in old age against the more ironic constructions of old age
in European thought, particularly psychoanalysis. Yet for old individuals, the
dying space as the forest within the household is laden with irony the same irony
that follows the lengthier quest of the old person who travels the length of the
country to die, transfgured but pathetically alone, in the holy necropolis of Kashi.
. The Philosopher 's Mother '
He was one of my idols; I had found his book Lkayata whie a college freshman,
wandering through the India stacks (Int and IndL) in the subterranean recesses of
Harard's Widener Library an imposing edifce gifed by the mother of a victim
of the Titanic who had collected books. Thomas Wolfe, in OJ Tme and the River,
had written of co;aing from the American South to Harard and trying to read all
the books in Widener, an attempt to master the place or at least to come to terms
with it. But knowledge had continued to expand, and so did the numbers of books
in the Widener stacks. Sir Henry Maine had obsered that these were the condi
tions of empire. He advocated cramming. Too sofened perhaps from television or
suburban liberalism, I went instead for the particular and tried to come to terms
with Ind and lndL, and did so not through cramming but by becoming a faneur
of the stacks.
I don't remember how I came to fnd the book. It was a very diferent sort of
thing than either the Orientalia of my frst year of college reading or the post
colonialism of my last, a dense amalgamation of Marxism, Hindu myth and phi
losophy, and nineteenth-century anthropology, a working through of Lewis Henry
Morgan and Frederic Engels to reread Vedic and later philosophical texts for the
remnants of an Indian materialism, a people's religion rooted in totemism and
Mother-right. It was messy and anachronistic, but it brought together in a dizzy
ing synthesis all the diverse knowledges necessary to being a Bengali Brahman and
Marxist theoretician in the 1 950s in Calcutta.
His name was Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya. He lived in Calcutta, in a large
and drafty old house a few blocks south of the Victoria Memorial . His ofce was
on the frst foor, full of books and fles, and he and his wife lived on the second.
He was a scholar of the history of Ayureda and of various schools of Hindu phi
losophy, an
d
he had spent years learning about the botanical medicine of the San-
IB
7
188 THE PHI LOSOPHER' S MOTHER
tal, "tribals" not too far from Calcutta and the object of both bhadralk and Marx
ist nostalgia. I went to see him to ask about rastana and its history, and as I
mounted the stairs to his frst foor ofce that frst time, I saw her, an old woman
in a white sari in a room next to the ofce, sitting on a bed and staring at the wall.
I wanted to ask about her, as the great historian and philosopher tried to an
swer my questions about rastana and seniity, but felt a bit embarrassed. Each time
I came calling, I would pass by the door of her room, hoping for something. What?
Some days she was lying down. Some days lie that frst one she was
s
itting up. She
never said anything, never seemed to do or notice anything, not me, anyway It was
very quiet in the big house. Her son the philosopher would be speaking, the sounds
of the street mufed by all the books in the ofce. My mind would wander, listen
ing for a sound from the next room.
He had written, in the book that I had come across in the library about the re
lationship between voice and desire. He was analyzing a story from the Chandoga
Upan4ad in which dogs chanted for food like Brahmans chanting the Vedas.
Against the usual interpretation, that the Upanisadic authors were mocking Vedic
ritualism, he suggested the chanting dogs revealed the totemic origins of high re
ligion, its rootedness in the desire for food and other material needs. Voice-the
chanting as both language and song-was a magical means to fulfll desire, here
for sustenance.
In Varanasi old people and dogs were seen to have a lot in common: abject de
pendence and a voice whose desire was no longer heard, so that it became more
and more desperate and repetitive in its demand: ultimately barkng. The philoso
pher's particular critique of what he called idealism did not allow him to hear the
chanting as an antinomian parody of this-worldly ritual. The dogs' chant was the
innocent though desperate desire of the primitive collective, for surival.
In the next room, never a sound. The clock on the wall ticked, the philosopher
spoke, from time to time the horns and yells from the street came through the cur
tains.
SIX
The Maladjustment of the Bourgeoisie
i which balnce, pressure, and routine anchor t expee
o the ol bod and it dgeneation, and multinational corporations t not
CIVI LITY AND CONTEST
Meena lived in a middle-class residential colony i n Pune, a city in western India. I
visited her and her Maharashtrian Brahman family in r g88, before setding down
in the Varanasi neighborhoods to begin my feldwork. Ater ofering tea to both
me and a mutual friend, she began to speak of her mother-in-law.
My si was in her last years a subject for your study The blood supply to one part of
her brain was too little for just a minute. One cell died, and this dead cell grew and
grew to cover much of the brain; she became more and more disoriented . . . .
To others? We would say she's old, not doing well. Would you say to others she's
crazy? We treated her well.
Record this: an example of at least one Indian family. She went to both a physi
cian and to a psychiatrist. And they conferred with each other. The physician took
care of the medical side of things. At home, she was always respected. My children
always knew she was the mother of their father. They never thought she was silly
When she began going down the stairs [to get out] , they didn't watch and let her fall,
but took her and said-this is not the way. She was never ridiculed, never "she is sick,
she is old . . . . " We had to change her, as you would a baby's diapers.
At that tie, a German woman was staying with us [as a paying guest] . She asked
me: "How can you put up with her? Why don't you send her to a home?" I explained
that she had given much to my husband when he was young, and now we are doing
the same when she needs it. But she did not understand. I asked her to leave . . . .
You know, I think it comes down to this. We have the idea that as we treat our
parents, so our children wl learn to treat us. So I suppose it is selfsh.
Meena ofered me a story of the good daughter-in-law. The seriousness of her
mother-in-law's condition, dramatized through a medicalized language invokng
the wild cell growth of cancer as much as the cell death of an infarct dementia,
190 THE MALADJUSTMENT OF THE BOURGEOI SI E
underscored the depth of the intergenerational commitment of "one Indian fam
ily" The Decline of the Joint Family narrative was simultaneously brought forth
and dismissed: against the presumption of the Fall, I was called to witness her fam
iy as perhaps the last outpost of Indian values. Against the hegemony of the West
in the fgure of the German woman, Indian families were then represented as car
ing for their parents. And yet, in describing her mother-in-law through the train
ing of her chidren, Meena again doubted the possibility of true altruism. We care
for old people as our social securit In describing the brain disease of her mother
in-law, Meena identifed herself with the old woman. We are, we become the old.
Brain disease did not render the si radically "other": My children do not mock
their grandmother. They do not say she is old. Old age, more than brain disease,
is the fnal gloss on the si, but her baku is at pains to sustain her presence as within
the continuity and connectedness of kinship: "the mother of their father. "
Within the house, old age was not spoken; outside, i t was used t o defer the blunt
reality of madness. Addressing the relational context of how to talk to the neigh
bors and to colleagues at work, Meena framed her si-or rather, explicitly did not
frame her-in terms of being mad. "We would say she's old, not doing well.
Would you say to others she's crazy?" In representing her family, Meena played
with two alternatives, old age and madness. Here the cellular model she began
with lost its signicance. Old age, which within the famiy was not spoken to pre
sere the unbroken continuity and identity of grandparents and grandchildren,
became outside the deferral of more serious claims suggesting the Bad Family.
Madness-paalan in Hindi, more commonly "mad" or "crazy" in English,
and most commonly a language of mental imbalance or maladjustment in Hindi
or English-was a frequent fgure in the Varanasi midde-class colony interiews
and in interviews in similar neighborhoods in Delhi and Dehradun. In this chap
ter I explore the particular salience of balance in these middle-class colonies, focus
ing at frst on Ravindrapuri and Nandanagar in Varanasi, but including interiews
in Delhi, Calcutta, Mussourie, and Dehradun in addition to Pune.
I was forced to cast my net widely. "You must fnd it difcult to research this
subject; I do not think any one wil talk with you about their old people, " a young
man from Delhi who worked for a multinational agribusiness concern had warned
me. I assured him that given my experience in asking people about religious difer
ence and about sexuality, two rather touchy topics, old age should not prove a
challenge, but he was right. As I began to make acquaintances in the colonies and
to be invited to people's homes to discuss my research, I found that most families
remained interested in the project by redefning it: "There are many lonely and
abandoned people, who have no one; this is an important work. " But whenever I
met the few families with old members who-according to whichever neighbor
who had pointed them out-were weak-minded, senile, not right, or mad,
younger family members were rarely willing to have me meet or even see the old
relative. Unlike Meena, who knew me through a mutual friend and for whom I
was a naive Aerican guest rather than a professional interloper, few in the
THE MALADJUSTMENT OF THE BOURGEOI S I E 1
9
1
colonies were interested in being an "example. " The connections that gave me le
gitimacy and eased my entry into the colonies' homes-my Banaras Hindu Uni
versity connections, my several years of work with prominent local physicians
simultaneously structured me as an external and ofcial presence, one apt not only
to hear bad sevi in the familial body of the old person but through an imported
medical gaze to see defnitively and f blame scientifcally
Against the challenges of most homes in the colonies, where most old people I
was sent by neighbors to inquire about were asleep or too old or too sick to meet
me, old friends in Varanasi, Delhi, Calcutta and elsewhere had no shortage of un
cles, aunts, or grandparents for me to meet. In grouping these meetings and infor
mal feldwork together with my intervews from Varanasi colonies, I risk enlarging
my "feld" far too broadly and introducing a lot of regional and structural difer
ences, confounding variables in the language of social science. I have tried to cen
ter my discussion on common political and rhetorical structures and processes, but
I alert the reader in each case as to just where the vignette and the data are drawn
from. I begin with the colonies, to locate the space between the home and the
world in which the familial body signifes within a local Indian middle-class cos
mology
Ravindrapuri lay just west of the old pakmahal, half a kilometer to a kilome
ter's walk from the river. It consisted of large separate homes along a wide thor
oughfare and numerous sequentially numbered side streets; at the southern end qf
the colony then bordering two abandoned cinema halls and a slum, were several
dry goods and tea shops and the carts of vegetable sellers. Vegetable sellers and
other itinerant merchants went from home to home calling out their wares. The
main street, two lanes with a divder, was one of the widest in the city but neither
end connected to a major trafc artery and the road, going nowhere and shade
less and unusable as common space, was usually deserted. For over a decade of my
visits to Varanasi, it has been in a state of perpetual disrepair, with the politics of
its forever-deferred or incompletely done paving shifing. The layout of Ravndra
puri was as much an iconic sign of its prestige and wealth and an index of its lack
of community consensus and common purpose as a geography relating it to the
rest of city Residents of the adjoining slum, in contrast, used their franchise to
construct a common "vote bank" in electoral appeals for basic resources.
Nandanagar hugged the great semicircular rim of Banaras Hindu University
midway along its span, fve kilometers south of the city proper. Less prepossessing
than Ravindrapuri, its large individual homes were connected by several rutted
dirt roads. It was smaller, more suburban, and more closely knit than Ravindra
puri. During the morning of the spring festival of Holi, groups of men, of
women, of young men and boys, and of young women and girls from the colony
gathered together, each traveling from house to house for Holi sweets and the
spraying of colored water and lampblack on each other. Nandanagar's celebration
was more controlled than the raucous color play and sexually explicit processions
of gangs of young, intoxicated men in the city proper. 1 After the exchange of
1
9
2 THE MALADJUSTMENT OF THE BOURGEOI S I E
sweets and color, neighborhood residents made their way to an empty lot at one
end of the colony Filed with scrub and lefover building materials, the lot was
transformed once a year into the neighborhood commons, the site of a bonfre for
the holiday.
One colony resident, a university professor who had spent many years teaching
about traditional Indian society and culture in the United States, tried to start a
civic association and turn the plot into a park and playground. Jyoti Sharma, a
housewife in the colony and for a time my landlady, expressed to me her contempt
for the plan, which received no community support: '1 stupid idea! He expected
everyone to give him money and wanted to build a park! A waste. He got al these
ideas-he thinks this is America. Well, we are not Americans. "
Despite the peacefulness of the colonies, they were the site of frequent conficts
and occasional murders. Several well-planned deaths in Ravindrapuri during my
feldwork were rumored throughout the city to be the fruits of one resident's heav
ily criminal dealings with "black money" A local reporter took me on a rickshaw
ride through the neighborhood, pointing out house afer house where she alleged
violent crimes had occurred. Residents feared theft and the murder of vulnerable
famiy members. Articles on the violent deaths of old people sleeping alone in res
idential colonies appeared from time to time in local and national papers.
PUNJAB! BAGH WOMAN STRANGLED
NEW DELHI, January 1 0: A 70-year old Leelawati of East Punjabi Bagh was found
strangled with leggings in her house this morning. Her legs were bound and cloth
stufed in her mouth.
Clothes were strewn all over the place and cupboards lef open giving the im
pression that the house had been ransacked. The police suspect the motive to be rob
bery . . . . Her daughter-in-law, Mrs Sneh Gupta, wife of her only son, Mr Subhash
Chand Gupta who is setded in the USA, was unable to provide much information.
She . . . said that the previous night they had all retired at u: 3o p.m. The next morn
ing her mother-in-law who normally slept in the "pooja" room was found strangled
in the adjacent room. The police suspect that she was strangled in the "pooja" room
and then dragged to the next room. 2
Colonies at night were relatively empty and vulnerable places. The death of
Leelawati in the puja room, site of the household prayers and one of the arche
typkal spaces of the old person within the household, chalenges the integrity of
the dying space. Readers of this article questioned whether the police, famiy ser
vants or the choukidar (the night watchman) might not be in cahoots with the
thieves, whether such deaths were inevitable when children abandoned parents for
places like Aerica, and whether the daughter-in-law herself conveniently alone
with her si without her husband present, might not have had a hand in the mur
der. Thieves, serants, the corrupt state, or relatives: there were few sources of se
curit
Alliances, given the ability of community harmony to degenerate, were made
THE MALADJUSTMENT OF THE BOURGEOI S I E 1
93
warily and along family and regional lines. Mrs. Sharma told of the founding of
Nandanagar. Her family had paid for several adjoining plots of land to plant a
small feld and garden next to the main house. Technically such overbuyng was
against district regulations, but Mrs. Sharma dismissed such concerns with a
brusque shake of her head: "Everyone does it . . . how else can a large family build
a house? This is India. " The colony resident in charge of land distribution, how
ever, a professor whose plot adjoined the Sharmas, tried to force the family to sell
back some of this land. This neighbor extended his own plot so as to prevent the
Sharmas from having enough access to get a car onto their land.
Mr. Sharma, a government ofcial whose posting was outside Varanasi in an
other city was away According to Jyoti Sharma's version of the tale, the neighbor
threatened to bring some "student leaders, " a euphemism on campus for gundi or
mercenary toughs, to rough up her and her daughters.
Late that night, my brother-in-law and I and my eldest daughter got tools and began
building a wall giving us the agreed-upon access to the lane. Several student toughs
appeared and began threatening us with curses. I had my daughter light the lamp.
The boys realized I was holding a revolver. I said, frst one to move gets shot. Then
one of them recognized me. He said: untie, I' m so and so's son, from Ghazipur."
I had grown up with that family; his father was my brother. Okay, I said. You come
in for tea; the rest of you, if you don't leave by the count of ten, you're dead.
Despite the civility of these new neighborhoods, there was ofen a violent edge to
urban elite life in the colonies. Power was not primarily "local, continuous, pro
ductive, capillary, and exhaustive"; 3 nor did it seem to be becoming so. There was
far more at stake in the boundary of the household and the volently embodied
moral economy of the community than the spontaneous communita of events lie
Holi suggests. 4
Ravindrapuri and Nandanagar were in some senses superfcial communities,
newly established and not yet "home" for their residents. Residents all had ghars
elsewhere, households of parents, siblings, or cousins with which they had exten
sive ties. Household size and generational composition were fuid, a core set of
members continually supplemented with the arrival of rural or small-town rela
tions taking advantage of the educational and bureaucratic opportunities of the
city. Old parents, if they were not involved in the establishment of the new home,
tended to spend more of their time in the extended family home with those chi
dren who could not establish a new urban or suburban household or who main
tained more direct and interdependent economic ties with the parental household.
BALANCE AND ADJUSTMENT
Discussions of balance were always framed in second-person terms, those of the
body of the known other. Once in Mussourie, a mountain resort in northwestern
Uttar Pradesh, I met a group of middle-class women in their thirties and forties
1
94 THE MALADJUSTMENT OF THE BOURGEOI SI E
from Kanpur. They were on a sightseeing tour, and we sat i n a lookout and dis
cussed behavior and mind in old age. Their stories and refections centered on
kmz:on-on weakness as the reason for old people acting diferently than they
used to-and they rooted this weakness in "tension. " In a Hindi conversation,
they used this English word. Mental weakness was exacerbated by tension. When
I substituted cinti, worry for tension in rephrasing what one woman had told me,
she corrected me: not worry, tension.
Tension points to a set of susceptible bodies. The Kanpur women noted that
women have more tension then men. Men in the colonies claimed the opposite.
Both groups noted that educated and respectable persons experienced more men
tal weakness, as they faced more tensions than the poor. The latter, noted the Kan
pur women, do little more than work, eat, and sleep, and seldom have any more
complex concerns. As the founder of Age-Care noted, "They can stand any stress
and strain. "
Midde-aged and old women and men i n the colonies ofen spoke of their lives
in terms of a polarity of tension versus shanti-peace, repose. Shanti was most
ofen presented as an elusive goal. Sources of tension were constant, from the
difcult responsibilities of marrying of one's daughters and settling one's sons and
from the inadequate attention paid to one by busy sons and daughters-in-law
Shanti could come both from without and within, from a sense of the constant
provision of sevi by children and from a balanced daiy routine, or nram. Within
the colonies, old men spoke more of nram than did old women; wealthier old men
and women spoke more of nram than did the less wealthy
Adult chidren, in confronting my or another's query about the sixtyish or weak
voice of their parents, inverted the language of tension: they themselves were
tense, but their parents had a dif erent problem, one of "balance. " Again, one of
several English words was frequently used: "He or she is fne; it's an ' adjustment'
problem. " From the perspective of balance, the anger of old people was at root an
inability to adjust to changing times and shifing famiial realities. Imbalance also
connoted insanit as it does in English elsewhere, but the central thrust of the
term was positional: the old person was literally no longer able to balance on the
increasingly thin line between high ascribed status and diminishing moral author
ity in the household. The avoidance of balance problems was for chidren rooted
in a moral hygiene of adjustment.
Not surprisingly in India the psychological literature on old age has centered
on the operationalization of balance and adjustment. 5 Adjustment has similarly
been a central theme of the sociology of aging literature, although overshadowed
by the elaboration of the Fall in the Agin in India series. This emphasis refects and
is partially derivative of a similar concern of American social science in the r gsos
and rg6os with the adjustment of old people,6 but the American theme has been
elaborated as the sine qua non of a social psychology of aging. In identifying ad
justment as the key theme anchoring the lifeworlds of old people, this psychology
THE MALADJUSTMENT OF THE BOURGEOI S I E 1
95
of aging has reifed a set of class-specifc concerns as universal processes demand
ing critical attention.
The invocation of tension (in discussing oneself) or balance (in discussing older
persons) exists within a semantic network that links the hydraulic physiology of
tensions and pressures to the heart and high blood pressure. The polysemy of hy
pertension and blood pressure has of course not been limited to India, but the
ways in which blood pressure was discussed in the Varanasi colonies are revealing.
Concern over "BP" difered across class and gender, being far more prevalent in
upper- and middle-class discussions of midde and old age than in discussions in
the slum or the poorer dwellings of the Bengali quarter, and with men "having
BP" whie women had "low BP" Viay Kumar, a lawyer from a well-to-do Bhu
mihar family in Tikri village outside of Varanasi, refected on his seventyish
grandfather becoming almost pial, mad, from time to time: it was due to his
blood pressure. His neighbor felt dif erently invoking mental against cardiovascu
lar balance: "When a man gets old he can no longer do all the work; he has to re
tire; but he still wants to do the work-from this comes frustration, and mental
problems. " Others among the Bhumihars, the dominant caste in Tiri, identied
these two models as versions of the same thing, dif erent aspects of a single phe
nomenon.
BP is a prerogative of superordinate gender as well as class. The imbalance of
old women was framed by family and neighbors more ofen in terms of a woman's
need to be surrounded by others, her inability to adjust to solitude. Low BP a com
mon diagnosis for urban middle-class women, articulates a relation of body to
pathology dif erent from havin BP The more masculine BP was an outcome of
possession: it is something one has.
The physiological systems of the body refect status positions. Both as sites of
pathology and as representations of the aging self bodily systems were diferentially
distributed across the Varanasi neighborhoods. Cardiovascular disease signifed the
costs of power and wealth. The Tmes q Indi ran a feature in 1 g8g, "Have a Heart,"
on the rise in cardiovascular disease among what was defned as India's emerging
"yuppies. " Cardiovascular diseases no longer signif old age, the article declared,
but rather wealth and success: no longer are they the exclusive province of the old.
Having a weak heart may be the in thing-a status symbol almost-amongst the In
dian yppies like neurasthenia and weak nerves were the fads of the Victorian age.
However, the fact remains that AI [acute myocardial infarction-note how
acronyms crop up as markers of a disease's designer status] has ceased to be a prob
lem exclusively of the elderly 7
When a new suburban housing complex outside Delhi (ilegally built without ade
quate permits and pitched to future retirees and their famiies) advertised its at
tractions to potential buyers, prominent on the list was a projected "New Open
Heart Surgery Hospital. " What was in hindsight a blatantly unrealizable claim
1
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6 THE MALADJUSTMENT OF THE BOURGEOI S I E
underscores the rhetorical invocation of the heart and high tech in the construc
tion of elite identity
Balance shifs the locus of weak mind from children who give too litde to par
ents who withhold too much; like BP it is a position of possession in excess. In
Ravindrapuri, B. K. Agrawal lived in an upstairs fat with his wife, their younger
son, and three grandchidren. A older son used to live with them but at the time
of my interiews with the family maintained a separate household. For B. K.
Agrawal's grown children, he was a poorly adjusted and therefore difcult old
man. If I were to have ofered a biomedical assessment of Agrawal, I would by no
means have diagnosed him as demented. He was known around the neighborhood
as a bit weak-minded, and his frequent complaints-"Old age is a curse"-were a
sort of bakbak. What was key for his family was that he refused to adjust to his elder
son breaking economic ties from the extended household, a break the sons relate
to the income disparity between them. For the senior Mr. Agrawal, what was key
was that he faced enormous tensions daily, still having to work in his old age (as a
legal clerk) to help pull his and his wife's weight and to contribute to the high
school fees of his younger son's children. "If I did not work," he said in his anxious
fashion, jerking his head toward the dooray through which his daughter-in-law
occasionally glanced apprehensively at us, "how would they treat us?"
BK: In old age you are treated very poorly Only if you have money and health
are you treated well. If I did not work . . .
LC: What of your wife?
BK: She has difculty too. If we could hire someone to work in the kitchen . . . .
LC: When does authority pass from si to baha?
BK: Well, when a baku frst comes, she doesn't know the household. But after
fve-six years, when she has adjusted, the fghting must begin. Then things sta
bilize. Then, when si is tired, she lets the baha take over.
LC: What if your wife didn't work?
BK: Our daughter-in-law would say "You're not working!" Ad she would have
to. Because she is still capable.
With the continued tensions of householdership and the impossibiity of re
nunciation given today's children, "Where," Agrawal fretted, "can one fnd
shanti?" ' 're there no sources of shanti, then, for old people?" I asked. He
paused. '1lmighty God is the only source. But," he cautioned, "one would have to
renounce material things and one's grandchildren, which I cannot do. There is a
point to which we cannot aspire, " Agrawal the clerk sadly noted: "the silence and
repose of the sannyasi. " For Agrawal, solace came only in the bhajan, the re
peated hymn to God alone or in a community of other elderly singers, through
which he temporariy experienced shanti. In bhaan his voice was again authori
tative, its trope of repetition not bakbak but divinely meaningful . But transcen
dence-the ilud tmpus of bhajan and the communits of the bhajan group-was
feeting. Between the never-ending tensions of ghastya (householdership) and the
THE MALADJUSTMENT OF THE BOURGEOI SI E 1
97
always deferred peace of sanria, Agrawal was unable to articulate the possibili
ties of vinaprasta, of a constructive rather than constrictive dying space. His chil
dren read this failure as imbalance and located it within the old father himself
Agrawal disagreed, locating balance in the spaces between family members and
not in the old person. This relational interpretation characterized his defnition of
sathiini: "This means, afer sity, the conscious declines, the intelligence declines.
Due to family environment, leading to a loss of mental balance and irritation. "
Next door to the Agrawal famiy, Aita Mukherjee and her mother lived to
gether, both elderly widows from Calcutta discussed briefy in the last chapter. The
younger woman, in her early sities, was not only a teacher in an Anandamai Ma
girls' school but was an adept of Ma, a well-known religious teacher and for her
devotees a divine incarnation who spent much of her time in Varanasi. Mukher
jee's mother at the time of our interviews was eighty-three. Mukherjee worked
most of the day, and her mother remained at home in her own room, lying on her
bed and getting up only to go to the bathroom. Other relations and a serant
helped take care of the older woman.
Bhajan and a community of religiously minded old people were important in
the lives of both mother and daughter. They had come to Varanasi in 1 950, when
the younger Mukherjee's husband was still alive, at the request of Ma herself The
younger woman has remained involved in various bhajan groups; she explained to
me that the strength resulting from the deep meditation of bhajan singing has en
abled her to both maintain her vigorous schedule and gain new insight on many
things, including her mother's health.
Didia, the elder woman, the other Ma in Amita's life, complained of difculty
in breathing and of deafness. She had no other problems, she said. The visiting rel
atives concurred. "She can walk to the market, and she does; she doesn't obey us! "
They laughed. They worried that she might fall en route and hurt herself but felt
no compulsion to restrain her. They ofered their concern not as vexation with her
poor adjustment-"She's completely fne"-but as signs of their desire to provide
an environment of total dependency I asked about bhzmrati and biattire, the sev
entyish Bengali variants of satiani. The relatives and Didima laughed-"How
did you come to know words like that?"-but made no link to Didima herself nor
felt pressed to deny a connection. Didima herself explained bhzmrati as a matter of
shock. "Due to a personal crisis, " her relations added, and contrasted the usual
efects of shock with Didima's strength in the face of adversity "She has had a
tragic life. Yet she is so happy She has adjusted. "
When the relations had lef, Aita told me that she had noticed signifcant
changes in her mother's memory "She forgets things. Not names. Her memory for
things past has improved; it is her memory of present things which has declined.
Perhaps this selective loss, I have wondered through my meditation, is a person's
refusal to deal with a present in which they feel neglected, if unconsciously"
Mukherjee noticed memory loss and associated it with familial neglect, but as a
subjective feeling in old age and not necessariy as an objective intergenerational
1
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8 THE MALADJUSTMENT OF THE BOURGEOI S I E
defcit. Thisfelinof neglect by Didima seemed to suggest to Amita some malad
justment on her mother's part. Unlike the relational signs of overtly poor adjust
ment, however, Didima's memory loss did not provide an obvious narrative.
Months later, Didima's health began to decline. She didn't leave her bed; she
refused things. A friend of Amita's, an old widower and fellow devotee, ofered a
"shock" model for Ma's health, drawing on the dangers of colony life and, indi
rectly of the vulnerability of old people being left alone by their children: ' bout
two or three years ago, she was alone in the house when some miscreants came by
and tried to rob the house. They hit her several times on the face. She has not been
the same, not in the same health. "
Old people living alone may deny their pathetic construction, claiming t o have
adjusted. A few houses away from the Mukherjees, Arnd Rai and his wife lived
in a fat by themselves. The neighbors who introduced me noted that the old man
had a "nerous condition. " Rai, a retired college professor, acknowledged no men
tal or other health problems. But he agreed that the failure to adjust was the pri
mary impediment to achieving shanti.
AR: People until sixty are very involved in material things. Then they become
more involved in religion, in spiritual things. After seventy one looks for a
peaceful feeling.
LC: What if they don't fnd peace, shanti?
AR: Here people are attuned to religious things from a young age.
LC: What about sa!!ini?
AR: People become irritated; they get angry This may be due to weakness.
LC: Is there a cure for this?
AR: No.
LC: What about tonics? Lie Chyawanprash?
AR: No. [ This process] is not weakness. But the mind stagnates.
LC: Is sa!!ini real? Or just what young people say?
AR: No it's real. For old people who may not adjust in old age they say "He's gone
sa!!i. " Like the old man who yells at the kids going to the flm because he
doesn't approve. My son went to the Netherlands. He met a girl and he married
her. He did not tell us. When we found out, he was married. So we adjusted.
My neighbor's son married an American, and she did not adjust. I told her:
"You have to adjust. "
The adjustment of old age is seldom to physical change in itself but inevitably an
accommodation to the desires of children. Unlike Agrawal, Rai neither needs nor
feels pressured to work. Though he and his wife are "alone," with many visiting
cousins but no sons in India, he has, unlike Agrawal, been able to adjust. For him,
li ramadarma is a meaningful model of disengagement. Do the iamas exist these
days? I ask him.
THE MALADJUSTMENT OF THE BOURGEOI SI E 199
R: Certainly, they exist. Haven't you seen the many sannyasis in Varanasi?
LC: But for ordinary people?
R: They don't become sannyasis, but still they leave the material things. Some go
to ashrams.
LC: And you?
R: Like a sannyasi. Not a pure sannyasi, as I am concerned about my granddaugh
ter's admission and so forth, but I read Mahibhiata, Gita, and go to the Ma
Anandamai Ashram. Bhakti is san'la.
The life of bhakti, of devotion and love for God and guru, transforms the neces
sity of adjustment into a realizable form of sanria.
When Sudipta Basu, the erstwhie chief engineer from Calcutta mentioned in
earlier chapters, began to forget words and appointments, his wife would get
angry contrasting his memory loss with his vast library and former position, literal
memory banks. But my friend their grandson related that his grandmother's con
cern really mounted when Sudipta forgot his daily puja, his devotional exercises.
Sudipta had turned to religion afer retirement, and it had become part of his suc
cessful and adjusted postretirement aging. "He has forgotten God," lamented his
wife, the supreme act of amnesia bound up to the sudden imbalance of a latter
day sannyasi.
SENI LITY AND MADNESS
The terms of metropolitan medicine-senility, dementia, and Alzheimer's-were
invoked within the colonies, but as in Zagreb they pointed as much to a defcit in
relationships as to the matter of the brain. The American preoccupation with se
nility as a disease had made few inroads in the late 1 g8os despite considerable
eforts by multinational pharmaceutical corporations sensing a tremendous un
tapped market. Unlike balance, which shifed blame of the Bad Family, explicit
disease models did not ofer an alternative imaging of the familial body but
begged the question of the family's role. They were not, at this juncture and for
these families, useful to think with.
A letter to the editor of the 1mes i India in 1 989 collapsed the language of vas
cular dementia with that of Alzheimer's, framing both within a moral economy of
balance and adjustment. Mahinder Singh of Delhi wrote:
In our country there is a misconception that senility sets in around the age of
70 o . . . When an Indian had his 6oth birthday . . . he is told by all and sundry to
"rest" and "enjoy". These well-wishers little realize that rest at this age means de
generation and senility An old person must be more active if he wants to remain
happy and healthy
It is well known that the most signifcant factor in the ageing process is the blood
fow to the brain which carries it (s] oxygen supply With age, the diminishing oxygen
supply leads to a deterioration of the neural function.
200 THE MALADJUSTMENT OF THE BOURGEOI S I E
Research done by modern psychiatrists and geriatricians in countries like the
United States shows that many of most fears about ageing are merely exaggerated.
Senility, the most dreaded of all disabilities, is sufered by only 15 per cent of those
above 65 years. Alzheimer's disease, considered the scourge of old age, accounts for
more than half that number . . . .
Research done by a psychologist of the National Institute on Ageing's Gerontol
ogy Research Centre in Baltimore, U. S. A. , proves that old age does not necessarily
doom people to senility . . . .
Mter retirement from routine work, a new life of learning and activity must be
started. New skils and knowledges must be sought and acquired. New habits and
new routines keep the brain and the body young. In this way the elderly won't be
come a burden on youth. 8
Seniity's links to both sixty and seventy are acknowledged and then contested.
Against the inevtabiity of mental weakness, Singh suggests a program of active
adjustment through mental hygiene for the old, ofered entirely in the imperative:
they must shape up, initially to avoid senility and ultimately to avoid becoming "a
burden on youth. " Mental weakness is encompassed by Vatuk's dependency anx
iety.
Internationalist science is repeatedly invoked as Singh ofers the geriatric ideol
ogy of normal aging by denying the geriatric paradox. Alzheier's and senility
are deemphasized through the same numbers that highlight the ubiquity of
Alzheimer's hell in the United States. Thus, senility is sufered "only by rs per cent
of those above 65 years, " and to further downplay concern we are told that
''zheimer's disease accounts for more than half that number. " Alzheimer's here
points to the need to shore up one's psychic defenses for the remainder of a life
that wl be increasingly spent adjusting to others.
In another Varanasi colony not far from Ravndrapuri, the extended family of
the noted pathologist and litterateur Dr. B. S. Mehta shared a large home. Mehta
continued to work part-time at the clinic he founded but which by then his son
ran, and devoted much of his remaining time to his grandchidren, to voluntary
public health eforts, and to the many cultural interests and commitments that
came out of a life steeped in theater and literature. He joked with me about his
own imminent senility; indeed, the phrase often came up in our conversations.
Mehta has written humorous articles on old age, on the necessity and the difculty
of adjusting to the changes of old age without a retreat into self-pity or anger.
Mehta's mother, he once noted to me, was "senile. " He used the term to imply a
pathological condition, senile dementia, drawing like Singh upon a combination
of diminished oxygen, "brain sofening" and "hardening of the arteries," lan
guage then out of favor in the United States but regnant in Indian allopathic prac
tice.
She takes things and steals them-puts them up on high shelves. Sometimes she falls
when she does this and then says, "It's nothing, it's nothing." She ofen sleeps in the
day At night she's up, and goes around the house. She gets angry and accuses us,
THE MALADJUSTMENT OF THE BOURGEOI S I E 201
and goes of next door to my brother's house. She fghts with my wife, who occa
sionally gets angry. She doesn't take interest-for example, when her brother died
she was not moved. She hides things-food-under her bed.
Mehta frst mentioned his mother in the midst of a discussion we were having on
social aspects of old age. "I am more interested i bodily change, " I told him. ' ,
softening, " he noted, and then described his eighty-eight-year-old mother having
a "second childhood" due to softening.
Mehta never returned to the subject and resisted my eforts, over successive
months, to do so. He would shrug his shoulders and make a dismissive gesture,
suggesting that we both kew what was going on with her. I eventually stopped ha
rassing him. A few months later, when I asked him, as I would routinely, how was
his mother, he looked at me and said simply, "She is not eating. " Curious about
why her refusal of food had framed the frst moment, Dr. Mehta allowed himself
to return to speaking of her, I later asked his wife if I could meet her mother-in
law. "She is not eating, " she repeated as she brought me into a large and spotless
room whose only contents were a mattress and an old woman lying on it. The old
woman, whom I called Dadiji, said that she was feeling weak and had no appetite.
She was oriented to her surroundings and seemed to have a clear memory of the
recent details of her illness. But for Dr. Mehta, his weakened mother was soft.
Memory loss was irrelevant for the famiy of an old woman who, unlie Sudipta
Basu, had never been crammed with imperial knowledge; but the litany of anger,
accusation, apathy, and theft they described-all famiiar to American "other vic
tims" of Azheimer's but peripheral to formal DSM diagnosis-presented an in
creasing chalenge to the Mehtas' constitution of the familial. In refusing to accept
food from her son and daughter-in-law, Dadiji undermined the authenticity of
their care and awakened the anxiety of the Bad Family. Her son, daughter-in-law,
and grandchildren never saw the fact of her not eating as fundamentally a rela
tional gesture, and yet their concern seemed to exceed the issue of Dadii's food in
take, to become a metaphor for her inability to adjust: the refusal of the gift of
well-intentioned sevi.
The position of extreme imbalance is madness. When the voice and body of
the old person threaten not only to stigmatize the family but cause great physical,
economic, and psychological stress to its members, insanity (pagalpan) or some
other rhetoric of bad mind (dimi karib) is invoked and healers, including psychi
atrists, may be sought out. Psychiatric care may consist of the prescription of neu
roleptics, other sedating agents, or ergot alkaloids, the classic "senility drugs. "
Even then, madness i s often but one contender within a semantic network cen
tered on the family.
Mr. and Mrs. Kaul, their daughters, and Mr. Kaul's elderly father used to live
in a government fat in Ahmedabad; Mr. Kaul was a senior cadre of the elite In
dian Administrative Serice. The old man had long since died, and I talked to the
Kauls and their grown children at their current fat. Whenever we began to talk,
202 THE MALADJUSTMENT OF THE BOURGEOI SI E
Mr. Kaul would say of his father: "Mad, just mad! Stark, raving mad! " Ignoring
him, Mrs. Kaul would tell me that her father-in-law was just the way he had been
in life, but in that exaggerated fashion characteristic of old age. The Kauls talked
about the father's behavior as an oscillation between two voices, silence and anger.
The anger also manifested itself as pererse behavior, such as his hiding excre
ment around the house, followed by a silence in which he would not admit to such
surprises. It also emerged against his son in confused episodes when he would
seem to mistake his daughter-in-law for his deceased wife and accuse his son of
misbehavior, a substitution reminiscent of the Kesari Jivan triangle.
The grandfather would wander away from the house; these episodes were pre
sented by the Kauls not as tales of the wanderer, as the moving body of American
institutional narrative that resists benign confnement, but as a willful voice that re
sisted being stilled. "I'm going to jump in the Sabarmati River! " shouted the
grandfather once as he stormed out of the house: his angry cry, more than his get
ting lost, defned the episode. Otherwise he would sit in his room and seldom re
spond to family members, least of all his son. "Mad! " interjected Mr. Kaul again.
For the Kauls, even Mr. Kaul , the old man's behavor was etiologically complex
yet rooted in a resentment of his son's control of family resources. It suggested an
efort by the old man to reach a position of minimal transaction with his son that
occasionally collapsed when balance could not be maintained. This resentment
was played out in his hiding his excrement and especially in his overtures to his
daughter-in-law who, for her part, seemed to have maintained a close relationship
of caring for the old man in part as an act of creating an autonomous space from
her husband. Although this triangle was never explicitly articulated, the Kauls
were quite open about both the old man's afection for Indira, his daughterin-law,
and about the exaggerated quality of her caring for him. The father's voice was
bound up to his son's frustration and his daughter-in-law's eforts to achieve
greater autonomy of a sort. Famiy dramas that emerged on lines of gender and
generation structured perception of the relational old body His madness refected
both the extremity of Grandfather's actions-hiding excrement, being unduly fa
miliar with his daughter-in-law, threatening to kl himself-and the extremity of
diference between father and son, the voice mad enough to fll the chasm of si
lence between them.
The categories of aamadharmaparticularly the disjunction between the be
havior expected of householders versus that expected of renunciates-on at least
one occasion ofered a further gloss on madness. Ashok Tambe was the older of
two brothers from Maharashtra, from a Brahman family with signifcant agricul
tural property Both brothers when young had studied at Banaras Hindu Univer
sity and had come into contact with the charismatic political and religious leader
Swami Karpatri, the inhabitant of the house on the river that I later shared with
his old disciple Marwari Mataji. Karpatri had been a tantric teacher and practi
tioner and a reactionary critic of pre- and post-Independence state policies that
he felt challenged the autonomy and sacredness of Hindu principles. He had
THE MALADJUSTMENT OF THE BOURGEOI S I E 203
gathered around himself a coterie of Indian devotees and foreign students.
Karpatri's mix of sexual and philosophical unorthodoxy and appeals to Hindu
nationalism tinged with Ayan purity had a particular appeal for European intel
lectuals in the heady years before the Second World War when Varanasi was an
international intellectual and cultural center; his particular conjunction of un
orthodox erotics and a Hindu nationalist theory of history can be found, further
transmuted, in the writings of his disciple, the French Indologist Alain Danielou. 9
Into the mix came the young Tambe brothers. When they returned to Maha
rashtra to run their family dairy and other businesses, the promise of Varanasi and
Karpatriji's particular vision of the Hindu nation lingered. As the brothers mar
ried, aged, raised daughters and sons and tried to get them well settled, tensions
between them over the joint ownership of the dairy began to come to a head. The
younger brother's sons saw Tambe senior as an unsympathetic tau, the classic
powerful uncle working against one's interests, in this case trying various schemes
to wrest control of the dairy for his sons alone.
The relationship between the aging brothers took a turn when the younger
brother, widowed as a young man, decided to return to Kashi in his middle age to
take up a life of study and eventually sannyaa. In the scheme of iamas, the rela
tionship between the two brothers was suddenly reversed: Tambe senior remained
a householder while his brother "passed" him in going on to the fnal stage and
taking on the legacy of their guru with greater fdelity. Tambe junior, now Swami
to the group of widows in the holy city who took him as a guru and came to the
talks he gave, maintained an interest in the worldly afairs of his sons, guiding their
response to their tau's eforts to gerrymander the inheritance. Tam be senior, for his
part, presented himself when I met him as being as disinterested in worldly afairs
as his sannyasi brother.
Their struggle over property had by the time I met the brothers shifed to a
struggle over the defnition of authority in old age. Tambe senior, still married,
had come to Varanasi two years before I met him in I g8g, to study the Vedas and
their ritual with his brother. Their discussions ofen returned to the themes of the
Karpatrii years, to the need for a particular marriage of modernity and Hindu
tradition that did not, like Gandhian nonviolence or Nehruvian secularism, emas
culate the nation. The discussion was sometimes framed as comparison between
the contemporary relevance and moral ranking of the brothers' respective paths:
asceticism and householdership. Tambe senior stayed in Varanasi for a year and a
half, during which time no resolution emerged vis-a-vis the contested dairy But he
returned to Maharashtra with a new plan to demonstrate the supremacy and
modernity of Hindu tradition, one that incidentally would require him to liqui
date the disputed assets and use the cash in the name of Hindutva.
The plan for most who heard it was simply raving mad. Tam be wanted to cre
ate a center for Hindu learning on the site of the dairy that would be organized
around the strength of the joint family and the rituals of married Brahmanical
life. In describing the plan in his ofen perseverating and manic fashion, Tambe
204 THE MALADJUSTMENT OF THE BOURGEOI SI E
would allude to various persons he i n particular wanted to impress, one of whom
was a Christian missionary who ran his district's local mission school . Tambe
spoke with well-founded concern over the continuing postcolonial expectation in
India that quality primary education demanded "convent" or "mission" schools.
He wanted to bring back the religious academy, or patali, and to train local boys
in Hindu rather than Christian morality. The school would be centered not on the
fgures of celibate nuns or missionaries but on those of the Hindu family and its
ritual. The guiding practice for students would be the Brahmanic ritual of the Ag
nihotra mantra, which Tambe planned to recite on a continuous twenty-four-hour
, basis. Admitting that he and his wife were unequal to the task of between them
staying up all day and night, Tambe hoped to kill two birds with one stone: his wife
had an orphaned cousin, the responsibility and considerable expense of whose
marriage he had earlier taken on, as yet unsuccessfully He proposed marrying the
cousin as a second wife. His household would remain an auspicious and fertile site,
and the three of them could split the task of superising the boys in the recitation
of the mantra. The intensive recitation of the mantra would bring rain. Tambe
proposed using his engineering background to set up giant sprinklers around Aus
tralia to increase cloud formation; the mantra would then pour rain into the desert
outback, converting it into an area as lush as the Gangetic plain. Tambe senior
was crazy.
I speak less in a psychiatric than a personal voice. Given the DSM-111-R crite
ria of the time, Tambe senior might have been labeled with "297. 1 0 Delusional
Disorder, Grandiose Type, " having a usual age of onset in "middle or late adult
life. " 1 0 He was not demented. Yet this rather irritating man resisted easy defni
tion: he was no fool, and he was efective in taking pains to convince others that
his ideas were not delusional. In 1 g8g, he returned at the age of seventy-fve to
Varanasi at the request of his brother. Swamii wished to dissuade him from the
marriage, from the selling of their family resources, and from the foolishness of
the project. Tambe resisted all eforts to deny the legitimacy of his plan. The tak
ing of multiple wives was sanctioned by numerous divine and Epic examples. The
efcacy of the Agnihotra mantra as a bringer of rain was oudined in fruti and smrt
texts. The desire to help Australia was a way of demonstrating the emptiness of
any rhetoric of European superiority According to Tambe: "The West tells us we
are failures, that we have no science, that we are not developed. They give us fer
tiizers which destroy nature. If the Western science is correct, then why has it not
worked there, in the West. Look at Australia. It's stil a desert! "
Tambe drew on the Karpatri days, on Karpatri's belief that Brahmanic tech
nology was the key to Indian development, and on Karpatri's great concern with
the emasculation of the Hindu nation resulting from Gandhian-based mixing
with untouchables: "To work the enormous areas of land [that] the mantra. with
the aid of ocean sprinklers which will increase evaporation and cloud formation.
will generate, we will solve India's population problem by sending all the harians
to Australia. "
THE MALADJUSTMENT OF THE BOURGEOI S I E 20
5
Swamii for his part had no doubt as to the sanity of his brother: "I tell you, the
man is crazy. I am going to have him locked up. He has these high ideas. He wrote
to the minister in New Delhi about his plan. He writes letters to young women,
wanting to marry them. He is crazy, and I may have him committed here for his
own good. Whatever he tells you, I want you to tell me. "
Tambe senior's sons and nephews dif ered on how they framed him, but all but
the one son who seemed likely to beneft from the liquidation of the dairy agreed
that he was old and weak-minded and could not adjust to turning the household
over to others.
Despite his tough talk, Swamii would not take matters to a head in attempting
to commit him. The forum for determining Tambe senior's sanity, appropriately
given the brothers' ideological commitment to Vedic science, was a local Varanasi
sabhi, or council, of Maharashtrian Brahmans. And the question they agreed to
debate was not whether Tambe senior was sane or insane, but whether he should
remain a ghat-a householder with the power to control his family's resources
and to marry again-or whether as an old man he should be forced to hand over
control of the family property to the next generation and take on vinaprasta, as
Swamiji wished. The logic of the iamas became the structure of confnement
through which Swamii hoped to control his mad brother. Afamadarma, though
elsewhere in my intervews not a central frame for confronting the extreme old
voice of madness, here became a tool through which the old person, his family,
and their community negotiated a contest over the nature of familial authority
The unexpected interention of foreigners, another echo of the Karpatri years,
ofered both parties new sources of legitimation. Eugene Thomas, an American psy
chologist studying old age and spiritual development in Varanasi on a Fulbright at
the tie, was introduced to Swamii by his research assistant Om Prakash Sharma.
Swami asked Thomas as an American expert to evaluate his older brother for senil
ity hoping to submit the evaluation to the Brahman sabhi. But Thomas was not a
psychiatrist, and he responsibly deferred the diagnosis. Swamiji gave me a copy of
the American's letter, wondering i I could advance his cause better. Thomas had
concluded: "Finally I have to say that I do not consider B. "crazy" Psychologically
to be declared incompetent a person must be shown to be disoriented . . . . B. clearly
does not fal into this category There may be some evidence of a senile brain syn
drome, but that would take exhaustive clinical tests to determine. " In sidestepping
the psychiatric question of whether Tambe's ideas were delusional in favor of a cog
nitivist emphasis on disorientation and memory loss implying the necessity of "cli
ical tests, " Thomas was able to miimize involvement with the Tambe afair.
Tambe senior, meanwhile, began to cultivate me extensively when he learned
that I was living in one of Karpatri's former residences and knew of Danielou's
Karpatri connection. Tambe hoped that I could be persuaded that Vedic science
was frmly a matter of this world and "not just the stuf of lectures to old Nepali
widows" (Swamii had a big following among old Nepalis in the city). Tambe ap
pealed to the ethos of the householder, making a strong case that the ghat and
206 THE MALADJUSTMENT OF THE BOURGEOI SI E
not the sannyasi was the ultimate Hindu exemplar of dharma. "Reason in mad
ness," to cite Lar again. He came by my house on the river nightly, presenting his
vision of a societal analysis based on authentically Hindu categories rooted in the
family
His appeal won over the counci, who decided in favor of Tambe senior re
maining a householder but placed restrictions on which of his projects were in ac
cordance with the shastras, the authoritative texts on dharma. In the case of Aus
tralia, the counci was not able to deny the efcacy of the Vedas and dismiss the
project entirely, but it made the suggestion that the application of Vedic technol
ogy to a foreign land, particularly given the presence of large unproductive tracts
of land within India, was inappropriate. When last I saw Tambe senior, he had
taken their decision to mean that the project was on and had jettisoned the out
back for the great Indian wasteland, the Rann of Kutch. The family had tri
umphed over the confnement of vinaprastha.
LONELINESS AND MENOPAUSE
In r g8g after I gave a talk at the ,asant College for Girls on Raj Ghat i n Varanasi,
in which I cited the experience of old people in Nagwa to argue that gerontologi
cal agendas were usually based on the needs of urban elites, several audience
members and college faculty approached me: "You haven't considered the loneli
ness of old people. " They of course had a valid point: in my bluster, any careful
attention to experience was missing. But what sort of experience did they expect
in the specifc demand that I address loneliness? Loneliness as a primary concern
had not been expressed by most of the old people of either Nagwa or the colonies
nor inferred by me. Over lunch following the seminar, students and faculty began
ofering examples of what they had meant: "On my lane, there are two old Ben
gali widows who live by themselves; their children never write them. " None of the
examples ofered addressed the old age of the speaker's own parents or relations,
nor of most old people in Varanasi who lived with or near their families. Rather
the ki zviz, and primarily the ki vil widow, came to stand for old age as a time of
loneliness. She was further distanced from the family of most at the luncheon by
being a Bengali widow; "in Bengal, " non-Bengali Banarsis said to me on several
occasions, "They talk much about their mothers; but then why do all these old
Bengali mothers end up being abandoned here?" In the intimacy and immediacy
with which these "interstitial" old women-inhabiting the interstices between do
mestic spaces, a point I wl develop in the eighth chapter-were brought forard
into our discussion, there was an exclusion of "domestic" elders, of the parents,
aunts, and uncles of the Vasant College faculty or of other old people who might
indexically represent them. These were absent from this discourse of the problem
of aging perhaps because construed as problems they would have threatened to
signif the Bad Family of the sel(
The lonely old person in the Varanasi colonies was as inevitably the Other as
THE MALADJUSTMENT OF THE BOURGEOI SI E 20
7
the tense and overly burdened old person was associated with the self Within the
gendered terms of public iconography and reminiscent of the literary forms dis
cussed in the third chapter, the old aunt rather than the old mother was the ac
ceptable image of abjection. Koki (Auntie) , a Bengali widow living in the stairell
of a wealthy family in Ravindrapuri, was quick to anger and was often spotted
screaming at small children, dogs, or other passersby along her daily route. She
was dressed in a ragged white sari and ofen had a wide-eyed glare, the image of
the matted-lock pagf, or madwoman. But for Ravindrapuri residents, she was, in
my hearing, never framed in terms of madness, imbalance, sixtyishness, or even
weakness. "She has no one," I repeatedy heard. No one heard Koki as malad
justed, for there was no one to whom she had to adjust. She was not imbalanced,
for there was no baha against whom to balance. The interstice was her own.
The widowed old auntie without children seldom threatened the moral in
tegrity of middle-class families or neighborhoods. Traditional behavioral restric
tions on upper-caste Hindu widows and concerns over whether these were fol
lowed closely seldom formed an explicit part of local discussions of the morality
of old widows. Younger and middle-aged widows ofered a sexualized threat to the
moral life of the colony; their behavior, particularly those women who were heads
of households and those who worked outside the home, was inevitably if vaguely
noted to be transgressive. One of the metaphoric registers through which the in
appropriate behavior of such a woman might be marked was old age: by being
prematurely marked as old, a widow could be seen to act in ways that were inap
propriate for her age. The language of balance and adjustment could be invoked
to frame what was wrong with such women in the contemporary absence of a
shared public discourse on widowhood.
.
In Nandanagar, I was frequently told by young and middle-aged women to
meet the old mad woman who rented a room from one of the colony famiies.
This "old" woman was in her late forties, an educated Bihari woman widowed at
eighteen with two children who managed to raise them without family support by
obtaining a position working for the government on issues of rural health. She had
married of both children; her son was posted in Rajasthan, she resented living
alone but saw no alternative, and she was reluctant to discuss why she could not
stay with the son and daughter-in-law. Unlike the many women in their forties in
Nagwa basti who were frequently called old, in Nandanagar colony chronological
age mattered and persons in their forties were simply not old. When I asked
women in the colony who had called the widow old why they had done so, they did
not answer directly but noted both her behavior and her bad family: her working
in ofces, her always coming and going, and her being abandoned by her children.
There were hints of liaisons and infdelities, and even a soupcon of incest with the
son ofered by one neighborhood know-it-all.
Mrs. Seth, the widow herself told me of great pressures and tensions. She
had to struggle to marry of a daughter and get both her children postings, while
workng full time and bearing with neighborhood approbation. Her doctor had
208 THE MALADJUSTMENT OF THE BOURGEOI S I E
prescribed her minor tranquilizers, she told me soon afer we began the interview;
she had been told by the neighbor who had introduced us that I was becoming a
dimail ditr a brain doctor or psychiatrist. She repeated throughout our con
versation the difculty of "tension, " the impossibility of peace of mind, and the
aid of medicine. This series was ofered to defect something, perhaps the sexual
rumors or the complexities of the life behind them. Her taking tranquilizers was a
fact several of the neighborhood women seemed to know and repeat. Though she
worked a demanding job and had few interactions with anyone other than her
landlords, she was ofered by several in the colony as "mad. " Descriptions of her
pathology linked her nerous behavior, including "strange emotional outbursts, "
her femininity and indirectly her widowhood, and her obviously troubled relations
with her children.
The menopause, during the 1 g8os, was emerging in settings like the Varanasi
colonies as an increasingly powerful frame legitimating the pathology of difcult
women like the Nandanagar widow1 1 Not (yet) a part of an everyday universe of
discourse, the menopause was better known as a medical problem faced by middle
aged and middle-class women in particular, requiring psychotropic medication.
Phenomenological descriptions of menopausal pathology i n India have stressed its
hysterical aspects, implying an opposition of cognitive male versus embodied fe
male age reminiscent of earlier European climacteric literature. A 1 981 study in a
Varanasi colony adjoining Ravindrapuri began:
The climacteric is a universal phenomenon which has received relatively little atten
tion from psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and social workers
all over the world, but almost no research on this subject has been carried out in the
Third-World countries. This study, carried out in India, has been conducted for the
purpose of unraveling the difculties that Indian women have to face during the cli
macteric. 405 married women between 40 and 55 years of age from the general pop
ulation were contacted and interviewed. The results, obtained with the menopausal
symptom checklist prepared by the authors, indicate . . . that hot fushes, night
sweats and insomnia seem to be clearly associated with the menopause . . . . Despite
embarrassment or discomfort experienced from these symptoms by a majority of
women, only 1 0% had apparently sought medical treatment. 1 2
The study, which introduced considerable bias i n ( 1 ) its preassessment of what
could constitute relevant experience (respondents were read lists of discrete symp
toms and asked which they had experienced) , (2) its lack of attention to the
breadth of experience that "hot fushes" and other syptoms may signif and
(3) the unrelentg programmatic goals of its ivestigators (who were seeking to show
that India has as forid a menopause as anywhere else), found that far more Indian
women reported symptomatology (for example, 59-61 percent of women across co
hor sureyed reported hot fushes) than most other populatons wordwide. 1 3
Searching for India's missing menopause, the authors discovered the mother lode.
Aother study of menopause and South Asian women, du Toit's on Indians in
South Mrica, simiarly downplayed the neutral or positive "menopausal" experi-
THE MALADJUSTMENT OF THE BOURGEOI SI E 20
9
ence of many of his informants, mentioned but not enumerated unlie sympto
matology more in keeping with contemporary metropolitan experience. 1 4 For
most women in the colonies with whom I spoke, however, menopause was not
pathologized in the forid way the authors of the Varanasi study describe. My own
fndings were far more consistent with George's study of immigrant Sikh women
in Canada: relative to other Canadians, George found that "traditional psycho
logical and psychosomatic symptoms ascribed to menopause in the literature were
notably absent in this group of women. " 1 5
The menopause was not a primary focus of my feld research, and I do not
want to ofer a thin ethnography against the hundreds of detaied interviews the
authors of the Varanasi study describe. Yet the excess of symptomatology they
suggest was al but absent in my interviews with older women refecting on their
own aging and on the menopause. Whie my own sex, age, and foreignness almost
certainly limited the sorts of discussions on the cessation of menses I was likely to
engender (the male authors of the Varanasi study asked their wives to do the feld
work), I stand by my sense that stories of anticipated or experienced bodily dis
comfort associated with the cessation of menses were neither public nor private
markers of age for most persons in the Varanasi colonies. Medicalization, less of
the menopause itself than of the postmenopausal body as a tremendous market
for hormone therapy may well change middle-class women's negotiation and ex
perience of the body in middle age, with the more far-reaching consequences
Lock has outlined in the case of Japan. 1 6 Far more frequent in the late 1 g8os than
the internalized medicalization of one's own body were attributions of pathologi
cal mood swings and more general bodily instability to other women, and particu
larly to those who, like the Nandanagar widow presented a vague challenge to a
local moral world.
The articulation of the seniity of an old women may draw on other gendered
life events. When I frst met Mrs. Mishra in the Uttar Pradesh hill station of Mus
sourie, she was in her seventies and lived alone with her husband. Their eldest son
was in government service in Orissa and the second had married and was living
with his family nearby; their eldest daughter also lived nearby a second was in
Delhi, and the third abroad. Several cousins also lived nearby I knew Mrs.
Mishra's husband, and when he learned of my interest he invited me to visit him
and his wife to help me with my book. As we walked down the steep hill to their
home, which Mr. Mishra, in his seventies, negotiated several times a day he told
me that a visiting foreign doctor had diagnosed his wife with Alzheimer's disease
and had told him that there was no cure. Mussourie was after all, as N. L. Kumar
had noted to me in discussing its role in the founding of Age-Care India, the
"headquarters" for many foreigners. Two of the Mishra children had married for
eigners, in one case leading to an estrangement between father and son that pre
vented Mr. Mishra from accepting his son's sevi and left him with sole responsibil
ity for his household and wife. As soon as we arrived at the house, he lef to do his
shopping.
210 THE MALADJUSTMENT 'F THE BOURGEOI SI E
I greeted Mrs. Mishra, who motioned t o me to sit down. She stepped outside
and began gathering twigs for a fre, placing them on top of the gas stove (which
her husband kept disconnected when he was out) and looking around for matches
to start a fre and make me some tea. When she went into the kitchen, I threw the
twigs away and she came out and began to process all over again. As I came to
know Mrs. Mishra and the rest of her family my clinical impression was that she
was diagnosable with senile dementia, probably Alzheimer's disease. She had had
steadily progressive loss of both short- and long-term memory and was seldom
oriented to person (confusing her husband with her long-deceased father-in-law),
place (wandering from the home each day and getting lost while her husband was
at school) , or time (she would frequendy talk as if she were a young woman with
small children). To frame what was wrong another way, Mrs. Mishra had grown
mentally weak, with frequent bursts of anger and an ofen bakbak voice.
Mishra coped with the risks of his wife's afect, wandering, and disorientation
through the help of many in the neighborhood. Neighbors and shopkeepers knew
to keep an eye on her if she left the house, and to steer her in the right direction as
she wandered about the market lanes. The nearby daughter came whenever her
full-time job and household responsibilities allowed her time, and other relations
helped with her care. For neighbors and for some of the relations, the cause of the
old woman's bakbak and angry voice was more immediate than a foreign diagnosis
and lay in what they saw as the improper seva of the younger son who had married
a foreigner. She had failed to adjust to his decision, they said; rather, it had caused
a shock that weakened her mind and precipitated her current voice. In retelling
the events of this marriage and her mother's decline, one of the daughters shifted
the chronology of events to maintain the clear causality of her brother as the
source of pathology
Yet even within the world of these accusing sisters and cousins, bad seva was an
inadequate explanation. Mr. Mishra clearly had adjusted, though at the cost of a
relationship with a loving son. He was neither sixtyish nor angry nor a bakbak type.
In framing the diference between the two old people, relatives drew on a notion
that I had heard a few times in the Varanasi colonies: women adjust more poorly
than men. Men in Ravindrapuri framed this diference more in terms of innate
diferences; women in terms of the gendered events of the life course. The daugh
ters of Mrs. Mishra recalled that their mother had become delirious during the
birth of her last child years earlier: they defned this temporary period as sanniat,
or derangement, a folk and classical Ayuredic term denoting a literal derange
ment of all three bodily humors. Childbirth, they noted, carries its dangers: it
weakens one and renders one vulnerable to shock. Women are less able to adjust
because they have had to quite literally bear far more. In turning to the relational
efects of childbirth to supplement the moral narrative of the bad son, the daugh
ters echoed the typological diference discussed earlier, between fathers who nego
tiate ali-or-nothing intergenerational relations of substitution and mothers who
constitute and are constituted by their children's voices and efects.
THE MALADJUSTMENT OF THE BOURGEOI SI E 211
BALANCE AND CARTESIAN POSSI BI LITY
Balance and the power to adjust were dif erentially located across gender as well
as the following chapter will detail-as class. Briefy in Nagwa slum, balance and
adjustment were far less salient ways of making sense of an aging voice or fore
stalling the accusation of improper sevi. The possibiity of balance is located
within a particular embodiment of socially located experience.
1 7
Dr. B. S. Mehta, in addition to his work as a pathologist and a student of the
ater, was a well-known raconteur. In 1989, he gave a talk on Al India Radio
Varanasi about growing old. In his talk, Mehta addressed a confict in the aged
construction of selfood reminiscent of Sharon Kaufman's informants: feeling the
same as one's youthful self but being socially and bodily marked as an old person.
He explored several variations on the disjunction between what he framed as the
ageless feeling of mind and age-bound experience of body Ultimately for Mehta,
unlike Kaufman's interiewees, both mind and body constitute authentic sources
of selfood. Rather than an alienation of identity from body he describes a split
ting of sel
In translating his address, I have included the original Hindi and Urdu terms
for old age Mehta used, in part to show the subtleties of Banarsi Hindi's rich lexi
con in the hands of a master and the ways Mehta can thus use local idiom to con
struct a thick phenomenolog of old age.
Whyget nervou at the comin r ol ae [iri]?
People tell you, you've gotten old [burhe] . It's for people who talk like that that it
is said: They neither listen to God's praise, nor sing His songs, yet claim they can
bring the heavens down. Only crookedness flters through: since they're washed up,
so others must be destroyed. Well, let them be damned. What do you think? Perhaps
you're humming: The heart remains young in love, and that, in the opinion of those
who know, age [ umr] is not measured in years but feeling. One sees them strong at
sity and aged [burha] at twenty.
The paradox of sixtyishness is cited by Mehta to demonstrate the essential youth
fulness of the self as heart and feeling. Yet sixtyishness is laden with irony, and
Mehta goes on to suggest that the consciousness of oneself as youthful is sham, a
denial of identity bound up with the prerogatives of mat, libertine pleasure. The
frst gray hair, a sign in Sanskit literature of sexual decline, is an appropriately lo
cated index pointing to inward and essential change. And the hair is that of
Dasharath, doomed to die of grief at the separation between generations for the
sin of killing the perfect sevi of Shravan Kumar.
I ow on the other hand, afer a time the mirror of King Dasharath seemed to say to
him: Near the ear, white hair. The lesson: the mind is aging [ara(pan] . And those
who ofer unsolicited advice say that when your hair is gray it is time to abandon wife
and property and follow the path of Ramanath. All well and good-but might one
not say: Old age [burhapa] is mine, but being called old [burke] has no support in my
heart.
212 THE MALADJUSTMENT OF THE BOURGEOI SI E
The split i s not of mind and body. Heart-that is, desire-is young, and the body
is old. Mind shuttles between, as mind is wont to do in Indian thought, refecting
Mehta's implicit insight that desire implies an absence, that the youthful heart of
old age is predicated on an identity cognizant of its transformation. This trans
formed but authentic self is expressed in kinship terms, as a shif in one's relational
identity from the lover to the "baba," the old man or uncle.
To hell with white hairs and black mouths-neither are particularly afectionate. Of
gray hair it is said that: White things all are fair, are fair save for hair, women won't
bend nor enemies press, save in respect. Kesav Das used to moan: Kesav . . . . No
enemy could do worse than these moon-bodied, doe-eyed ones. They call me baba
and go. Now times have changed. Now a stretch-fabric beauty queen calls me
"uncle" then disappears, leaving uncle scratching his head wth his fnger of wsdom.
A play upon embodiment: the mind as a contemplative "fnger of wisdom, " an
impotent and useless appendage and a confation of the weakness of dima with
that of bodily hath pair and of sexual potency. The very organ of refection gener
ating a sense of an ageless self is revealed as the phallus in decline, and the denial
of the body as a source of selfhood becomes a pathetic efort to regain the seam
less phallic hegemony of the body that does not signif its diference. 1 8 The multi
ple claims of heart, body and mind are consolidated in a confrontation with one's
mirror image: 'd it is truly said, one wants to stand in front of this matter and
to declare soundly: The world has come to witness a strange phase, continually
changing in many ways, with surprise I look into the mirror, to see the oldness
[burhi sa] of another one. The problem is that the perception of the mind [man]
and body [tn] difer. " 1 9
Unlike Kaufman's informants, who in Mehta's terms take the interior claims of
the mind and not the exterior ones of the body seriously in the constitution of the
self Mehta suggests that the self is siultaneously experienced as young and old
and as hot and cold. Failure to manage this set of apparent paradoxes tips the
equiibrium, and one becomes irritated and hot. Missing in Mehta's lexicon are
terms for old age that stress experience and wisdom, as opposed to decline and ab
jection: the Sanskritic vrda againstjari, wise against decrepit old age, 20 or in this
context the more neutral Urdu bu;;urg. Wisdom in this unmatching world is not a
phenomenological given of old age, but a precarious state of balance between
conficting sources of the sel
Many people in the colonies framed the mental health of old people in terms
of their nram, their rule of conduct, and felt that through a balanced lifestyle they
could maintain a state of shanti. For many in Nagwa and the poor of the Bengali
quarter, the contrast Mehta evoked between a youthful heart or ageless mind and
a weak body in old age neither paralleled experience nor was avaiable as a
rhetoric mapping intergenerational politics. Particularly in the lives of the Nagwa
Chamar, dependency anxiety was rooted in a chronic sense of marginality and
old age was experienced less as a new Eriksonian challenge than as plus fa change.
THE MALADJUSTMENT OF THE BOURGEOI SI E 213
Shanti was less a state of equilibrium than of asymptotic possibility, less the every
day coping with a dualism of self than the transcendence of extremit
The last line of Mehta's radio address cited above, on the split between man and
tn, mind and body, ofers a play upon a verbal pair ubiquitous in Hindi poetics.
Several variants of a couplet on man and tn in old age were told to me in Nagwa
slum, ascribed to the late medieval poet-saint Kabir. I heard the frst two versions
over snacks at Secchan's tea stall, the initial one declaimed by the local neti(polit
ical leader) Seva Lal:
Ni t mare ni man mare marmar jit sanr
A
ii li ni mare ka gqe di Kablr.
Neither body [tn] nor mind dies as the body [sanr] keeps dying
Hope and thirst wilnot die, it's been said by Kabir Das.
When Seva Lal spoke the couplet, someone responded that there was no open
ing "ni' in the frst line. But the tea stall audience was unanimous in hearing man
and tan as a conjoint pair in both versions, linked to hope and thirst as things that
lingered despite the decay of sanr (or fanr) , the corporeal body not split into tan
and man.
The two contradictory appearances of ' "body" in the couplet did not make
sense to me, and I asked about them. A serious discussion of these terms followed,
in which several people pointed out that man and tan were lasting ideational and
material aspects, respectively, of human experience, whereas sanr was the body tout
court. One man called tan and man the soul Giva), suggesting by the term that tn
was the "subtle body" of Indian cosmology that which transmigrated afer death.
Throughout, man and tn were not the ultimate and opposed alternatives they
were in much of Mehta's text; rather, two dif erent conceptualizations of body
one total (sanr) and one discriminate (man/ tn), constituted this framework of in
formal analysis. Against the transformations of age, mind and body were not op
posed but set together as a pair; the operant dualism was between a notion of
body that decays and body that surives. Man and tn do not in themselves gener
ate a sense of irony; as the next chapter will suggest, the irony of aging in Nagwa
lies in its meaninglessness, for all culturally elaborated frames for making sense of
its transformations-weakness, renunciation, and the split self of Mehta's piece
have been exhausted in the comprehension of the marginality of low-caste youth.
Ambiguity is in the eye of the beholder. Viewed by younger others across the
class spectrum, old people are split: experienced yet debilitated, peripheral yet
icons of the famiy, hot-minded yet cold-bodied. In making sense of themselves,
however, individuals experience the relationship of mind, body and self relative to
their own bodily histories, histories rooted in an individual's social position. The
frequent but ethnographically crude invocation of Cartesian/non-Cartesian dis
tinctions in medical anthropology-viewing cultures as more or less dualistic in
214 THE MALADJUSTMENT OF THE BOURGEOI S I E
their construction of body and mind-must be sensitive to the dialogic constitu
tion of the split self to the dangers of equating mind (rather than body or both)
with identit and, in particular, to the variable possibility of balance and dualistic
thought across class.
THE DEMENTIA CLINIC
In 1 989 I spent several weeks i n an empty ofce adjoining the psychiatric outpa
tient clinic of the Banaras Hindu University Hospital . I had been advised by sev
eral hospital physicians that the psychiatry clinic, as opposed to the general med
ical or neurological clinics, would be the place to meet persons referred with
diagnoses of senile dementia. Across the hall from where I would sit, several per
sons waiting for a consultation along with their famiy members crowded around
the desk of the attending psychiatrist whie he examined the patient whose turn it
was and then prescribed something. More than a hundred patients were seen each
day. Patients diagnosed with dementia by the attending psychiatrist were told
about my study and asked if they would agree to a second clinical interiew. At
least, this was the plan, proposed by the attending psychiatrist and gratefully
agreed to by me. During the month in which I scheduled these weekly sessions at
the clinic, the attending psychiatrist with whom I was working diagnosed only si
patients as potentially demented. They were all middle-aged adults, forty-fve to
sixty-fve, each with a chief complaint of memory loss. None could be diagnosed
as demented by DSM-III-R criteria.
1. KKB was a sixty-fve-year-old male retired police superintendent with the chief
complaint of memory loss. His past history was signifcant for a series of "nerous
breakdowns": in 1962 when he was posted to Nepal and at the same time was in
volved in arranging for the marriages of his six sisters, in 1982 from the shock of
having to cancel his daughter's wedding on the wedding day itself when he found
out she was having an afair, and attacks of "nerousness" over the past year not
associated by him with specifc events. His father died several months ago and
KKB became the head of the household; since then he had noticed a progressive
memory loss.
2. TNR was a forty-fve-year-old male stenographer living with his wife and two
sons, with the chief complaint of memory loss. He reported that he had sufered
from an "inferiority complex" and forgetfulness since childhood. He began "bad
habits"-by which he meant masturbation though he hinted at occasional sex
with female prostitutes or other men-in childhood, and accelerated them in the
army. He was impotent with his wife, got little sleep, and felt fearful and hopeless.
3 UD was a forty-eight-year-old housewife brought to the clinic by her husband for
refusing to eat; she was sent to me because of the attending physician's sense of
her continually worsening disorientation and memory loss. Five months earlier,
she began refusing food and became increasingly agitated. At that time she would
refuse to look at anyone else and would close her eyes, lie immobile in bed, and
refuse to move even to relieve herself elsewhere, would make vibrating noises but
THE MALADJUSTMENT OF THE BOURGEOI SI E 21
5
no clear speech, and "forgot everyone and everything." She had had intermittent
swelling of her face and extremities, intermittent abdominal pain and vomiting,
and episodes of incontinence. A medical workup was negative; she was referred
to the neurology clinic. One medical doctor suggested the symptoms were due to
the menopause and would in time resolve. The frst neurologist diagnosed her
with "? schizophrenia"; the consulting neurologist noted on his report "? Alzhei
mer's Disease, Progressive deterioration of intellectual function. No objective
neurological signs. " She was referred to the psychiatric clinic and placed on Val
Ium.
Simultaneously her husband consulted wth a pandit in the Sanskrit department
of the university an expert on astrology and mantra-tantra, spels and esoteric
practices. He was concerned that his wife's behavior might be due to possession by
a bhut, a type of spirit that frequently attacked vulnerable and particularly female
bodies. The pandit examined both the patient and her horoscope; he then pre
scribed an Ayuredic medication and the reading of the Drgi calia, a hymn to the
goddess Durga, after which the patient's symptoms improved but did not resolve.
4 UsD was a forty-six-year-old female school principal with the chief complaint of
memory loss and the continuation of headaches that she had had since a fatal
scooter accident two years previously that klled her husband and during which
she lost consciousness. She described fnding out about his death, a week afer re
gaining consciousness, as a great "shock. " She developed headaches whenever she
tried to do her work, could get little accomplished, and was afraid of losing her
position. Her "memory k kamzor" (weakness), lie her headaches, was associ
ated with her job and her feeling of failure and inability to work. She received a
provisional psychiatric diagnosis of "post-traumatic fear, psychosis" and was
placed on Ativan, another anxiolytic medication.
5 SR was a ffty-year-old male fle clerk with the chief complaint of memory loss.
He had been seen at the clinic for a year with the priary diagnosis of depression
and had been treated with antidepressant and anxiolytic medication. He felt the
memory loss was a new problem and that his "mental depression" was cured. His
past history was unremarkable, but he noted that he used to do too much "deep
thinking" about his worries, particularly about getting al his daughters married.
6. H was a forty-seven-year-old male shopkeeper from a village in the district, whose
chief complaints were memory loss and a hot brain (dimi) . He had a history of
several decades of ghabria! (nerousness, panic) to the point over the last few
years of paalpan (madness) . He had seen a series of medical doctors without relief
until he had met the attending physician at the psychiatric clinic the previous year.
Since then, he was receiving shanti from his medication, Halcion. He noted the
medication helped to cool his diml but ha not relieved his forgetfulness, a prob
lem in keeping his accounts straight for his business.
In addition to developing a dementia workup including a mental status exam,
I listened to whatever the patient and his or her family thought was most relevant
to their situation. Only UD, the woman who wouldn't eat and who had been re
ferred to psychiatry by the neurologists, had a score on the mental status exami
nation that could be correlated with dementia; she had been the one patient
216 THE MALADJUSTMENT OF THE BOURGEOI SI E
whose fe included the possibiity of Alzheimer's. But her score, like that of many
in Nagwa, seemed in itself little indication of much save her disinclination to be
examined. The memory loss of the other fve was not the demonstrable short or
intermediate term memory loss in theory demonstrable on such an exam. Nor
were UD's rapid course of decline, her sudden anorexia and aphasia, her history
of swelling, and her famiy's sense that she got better with mantra-tantra treat
ment indicative of a clinical picture particularly suggestive of chronic dementia.
The clinical data of A. K. Venkoba Rao, the frst psychiatrist in India to carry
out extensive clinical and community-based sureys of mental health in the el
derly suggests that at least in the south Indian city of Madurai old persons less am
biguously diagnosable as demented form a majority of those over ffty-fve re
ferred and brought to the psychiatric clinic by their families. 2 1 In Varanasi, my
own physician interviews, clinical interviews, and examinations of medical
records with psychiatrists, neurologists, and internists suggested that although
most old patients with cognitive defcits and behavioral or other "adjustment"
problems were diagnosed as being demented or having Azheimer's, few old peo
ple ever came to the clinic as patients for such things. More to the point, few old
people were ever brought to the Varanasi clinic for anything. As I noted earlier,
one answer to explain the dif erence between Madurai and Varanasi would be
quantitative, the efect of the demographic and health transitions of south India:
there are proportionally more old people and these live longer. Thus, there will be
more senile pathology and more dementia, leading to more clinic visits.
But the Varanasi clinic as of 1 989 was not characterized so much by fewer vis
its by persons over sixty-fve as by their virtual absence. The behavioral dif erence
of older people was seldom medicalized, independent of the proportion of per
sons over sixty-fve within the population. If the diference between Varanasi and
Madurai is related to the health transition of the south, it may be relted more to
the antecedents of the transition than to its efects. North-south dif erences within
India in terms of family structure and their efects on life expectancy and mortal
ity are a complex topic-as is evident in the data collected by scholars lie Pauline
Kolenda and Bina Agaral22 -and I do not think a satisfactory resolution of why
Venkoba Rao's data so difers from clinical experience in Varanasi can easily
emerge. What is missing from such a discussion is a sense of how the ideology of
the Bad Family relates to the everyday negotiation of intergenerational relations
and knowledge of the old body in dif erent regions of India.
In Varanasi, dementia-as a medical site linked powerfully to memory-drew
to it a host of life experiences that, unlie those of weak or hot brain, were em
bodied primarily through the idiom of amnesia. The memory loss of the patients
I have described and of persons in the colonies with similar complaints was at
tributed to sorrow, shock, masturbation, attacks of nerousness and panic, de
pression and deep thinking, and a range of somatic experiences. Many of these
persons' illness narratives were reminiscent of other idioms and frames of
sufering-of dhat, or semen loss,23 of bhit-pret, or spirit possession-sometimes
THE MALADJUSTMENT OF THE BOURGEOI S I E 21
7
with explicit diagnostic and therapeutic links. The associations of masturbation
and semen loss in particular evoked a semantic network of semen, capital, and
memory, the space of the neo-ratana tonic. The psychiatric clinic, with the
frames it tentatively ofered, was but one of several sources of healing considered
by suferers and their families, most relevant for the families of middle-class and
primarily male adults for whom memory loss as opposed to possession or deple
tion could be a primary idiom of experience.
The likelihood of physicians-and in particular psychiatrists and neurolo-
. gists-to consider pushing a diagnosis of dementia was, in the two years of my
primary feldwork, most closely correlated with their interactions with pharma
ceutical company representatives, or detail men. I followed the eforts of one
multinational corporation to market an antidementia product to Indian physi
cians. In 1 g88, the Italian frm Farmitalia, under a dynamic new American
manager of their Indian operations, began to promote nicergoline, a product
sold in Europe as the antidementia drug Sermion, under the Indian brand
name Dasovas. Company and product names difered in India, in part given
then-current restrictions on multinational corporations prior
.
to the economic
liberalization of the 1 ggos. Farmitalia did business under a diferent name, as a
company set up through the liquor baron and horse-racing enthusiast Vijay
Mallaya.
The challenge for the frm was to sell a relatively expensive dementia drug in a
market where, as Farmitalia's Indian medical director noted to me, senility was
seldom medicalized. In the beginning of the campaign, he was unsure of strategy
("It's a mystery to us"). Six months later, in 1 g8g, the company had formulated a
strategy and was set to launch the new drug; I returned to Bombay to visit the
medical director. He asked me what sorts of syptoms I was seeing in Varanasi.
Somewhat warily I answered that what I was seeing was that symptoms did not
correlate with mental status exams in the ways I had been taught to expect in
medical school. He responded "Frankly, we don't want doctors to do these tests.
We're trying to push these drugs. How can we pressure-no, that's the wrong
word-how can we convince doctors, GPs, that they should fnd out about mem
ory?"
The medical director and his marketing team had sensed that marketing Daso
vas as a memory tonic would reach a far wider market than marketing it as a
specifcally medicalized dementia drug. Curious, I asked him if he too had noted
that adjustment problems and afective change were more salient criteria of old
age weakness. He immediately noted: "Yes, but we want to stress memory We
want, when a ffty-year-old man comes in with other problems, the doctor to be
alert to memory-how is his memory-and to be able to say 'You need this drug'
and to treat the problem before dementia sets in. "
Nicergoline was thus from the outset ofered as preventive medicine
.
through
a radical pathologization of middle age. To legitimate the move, Farmitalia de
cided to begin with brain specialists but to advance the campaign quickly to
218 THE MALADJUSTMENT OF THE BOURGEOI S I E
include other practitioners: "We'll begin with the neurologists. Otherwise, no one
else would prescribe the drug. But we want to move beyond them. We recognize
that most, So percent, of people will only see a GP so we have to target them. But
how?"
The strategy was reasonable, and the question germane. Its answer came from
a surprising quarter: "We want you to work with us. Perhaps you could publish an
article-anonymously, if you wish-with us? Though I declined, Dasovas's med
ical, marketing, and management support team developed several successful
strategies; the product's appeal did not sufer. When some months later I was in
Madurai visiting the psychiatrist Venkoba Rao, several physicians connected with
Madurai Medical College mentioned to me they had been visited by Dasovas rep
resentatives, and asked me what I thought of the drug.
By early 1 990, when I again was in Bombay, Farmitalia had moved to new
and far plusher ofces, up from the basement to the fourteenth foor. Dasovas
was doing well, though the pattern of its success surprised some in sales and
marketing. Expecting the largest impact in urbanized areas of north India, par
ticularly Delhi, they found their best sales to be in south and central India.
Given feedback from detail men informing them that in central India Dasovas
sold well to the middle-aged concerned about memory, they began to consider
marketing the drug more explicitly as a brain tonic as a way to success in the
north.
What did I think of the drug? I found the answer tough. Nicergoline is an ergot
mesylate, a descendent of a class of drugs clinically labeled vasodilators and mar
keted extensively in the United States until the 1 g8os as treatments for senile and
vascular dementia. In the days before Azheimer's was a household word, when
diminished cerebral blood supply secondary to arteriosclerosis explained senile
behavior, vasodilators ofered the prospects of increased blood fow. By the late
1 970s, evidence had emerged to challenge the efcacy of these compounds against
placebo;24 simultaneously the concept of Azheimer's had shifted and was leading
to a rapidly changing research climate in which vascular models were being
eclipsed. By the mid- 1 g8os, Aerican vasodilator use was declining and behav
ioral interentions targeting the lingering "inappropriate prescribing" of the sub
stances were being undertaken. 25
Despite the American shift, European companies lie Farmitalia continued to
market and develop newer generations of ergot mesylates and to promote exten
sive clinical and experimental research. Cross-nationally it is possible that the de
gree of decline in vasodiator use was correlated with the centrality of Azheimer's
in professional and popular conceptualizations of senility The new generation of
ergot drugs was rechristened, their function fortuitously rediscovered: no longer
vasodilators, the drugs were now metabolic enhancers. A new rationale was ad
vanced for their efcacy Research fndings favorable to the efcacy of nicergoline
were extensively promoted by Farmitalia. Articles distributed by the frm were sel-
THE MALADJUSTMENT OF THE BOURGEOI SI E 21
9
dom paragons of impartial research design and reporting: sources of funding
were seldom revealed, 26 placebo controls were not always included in study de
signs, 27 and the efects of the drug on long-term prognosis and on severe demen
tia were downplayed or ignored.
To explain the signifcance of metabolic enhancement, Dasovas literature re
lied on a somewhat tautological category of "chronic cerebral insufciency" pre
sented through the use of an acronym (CCI) as an accepted and experimentally
confrmed biomedical fait accompli. CCI-which was a grab bag of lumped
together symptoms with complex dif erentials, including dizziness, depression,
anxiety memory loss, and "decreased performance"-was posited to occupy the
gray space between the poles of the normal and the pathological of geriatric ide
ology It was described as "a complex age-related degenerative process that can be
considered an exaggeration of normal ageing," and "its symptomatology could be
considered (as a working formulation) as lying midway between that of normal
ageing and the one of senile dementia. "28
CCI, like its liminal DSM cousin "benign senescent forgetfulness," allowed for
the maintenance of the sharp division between the normal and the pathological
through the containment of the geriatric paradox within itsel( Presented as nor
mal-thus universal-aging meriting consideration by physicians for all their pa
tients, and as a pathological syndrome with its own "symptoms" and "manage
ment, " CCI could become a synonym for the ambiguities of old age. In Dasovas
literature, its invocation was followed by a description of the various dementias,
further establishing a metonymic link between CCI and dementia and implicitly
suggesting that to treat one was to treat the other. CCI played on the weak but cer
tainly plausible evidence that nicergoline may in fact increase alertness and con
centration in old adults with mid dementias.
In its construction as a sophisticated medical object, Dasovas was ofered as a
gatekeeper, a cure for the climacteric period between aging and the fall into severe
dementia. The assumption throughout its literature was that if one could, through
nicergoline, make an impact at the limen of pathology, one could forestall de
mentia forever. Thus the medical director's attempt to get to all ffty-year-olds "be
fore dementia sets in. " Thus the picture, in an article reporting one of the Euro
pean clinical trials, of Lucas Cranach's Fountain of Youth. 29
What moral are we to draw from the ongoing saga of Dasovas? That the senile
body is being rampantly medicalized by the false promises of the encroaching
world system in the incarnation of Italian companies, German researchers, Amer
ican managers, and Indian medical directors? To assume that the usual excesses of
the medical marketplace are so powerful as to recreate the cultural construction of
the senile body in India is to assign the Indian consumer-physician, patient, bu
reaucrat, or relative-the thoroughly passive role of unwitting dupe in the play of
markets, practices, and representations. But Farmitalia has its echoes elsewhere.
Recall King Vinayashila, and the lesson of the Kathiartiara: it is the nature of
220 THE MALADJUSTMENT OF THE BOURGEOI S I E
physicians to promote their wares and to respond to the desires of some patients
to forestall old age indefnitely Recall Siranji's family and the gif of the tonic: a
drug was bought not as an agent of transformation but as a sign of sevl and the
love of chidren. In contesting her chidren's gif, Siranji argued that it was a
worthless tonic, that they needed to try again and not just to point to the aban
doned big bottle on the shelf every time she complained of weakness.
Dasovas was ofered as the cure for the senie climacteric: the drug that if given
early enough will prevent further decline. It used a neuronal language synchro
nous with Alzheimer's to legitimate its vague model of efcacy But its success may
draw on other needs and other languages: the desire for the powerful gif, the
quest for the neo-raiana tonic. Few physicians or famiies with whom I spoke
were particularly convinced of Dasovas's promise. "We can, " noted a Calcutta
psychiatrist, "only keep trying." The chidren, he said, need to give something.
Dasovas was not cheap; if metabolic enhancement was but old wne in a new
bottle, its being prescribed to those with marginal incomes would suggest phar
maceutical industry exploitation. But like the equally upmarket ginseng prepara
tion Thirty Plus, Dasovas's price is a marker of its transactional value within the
economy of the famiial body Whatever the ethics of Dasovas's availability or the
sources of its popularity, Farmitalia is not sufering; on my last visit to Bombay be
fore leaving India in 1 990, the concern had just added a ffh car to its feet of lux
ury vehicles. But to focus on the sale of upmarket tonics as sources of inequality in
the construction of the senile body is to miss the point. Treating the senile body .is
itself a conceptual possibilit only within a narrow window of the class spectrum.
Medicalizing senility presumes a senescent geometry of balance, not weakness.
The Way to the Indies, to the Fountain o Yuth
There were several roads into that part of Nagwa. One way to get in was to cross
the new bridge over the Assi River, against whose banks the slum was poised, then
to turn right at the lane between the Catholic Fathers' ashram and the house
where the red-haired American evangelist rented a room. The ashram Fathers,
unlike the evangelist and unlike the activist priest Paul, who lived farther in, didn't
interact with Nagwa residents too ofen but gave gifs on occasion, which angered
Paul as he felt it made people dependent and less liely to resist the ways in which
they perpetuated their own marginality. John the evangelist had little success in
spreading the Good News, in part a result of his lack of an ear for foreign lan
guage. The missionary girls up in Mussourie-the American headquarters with its
mission language school where Mr. Mishra and his children had taught-would
titter and call him Ji Han for the one Hindi word he had then been able to mas
ter and which he would in consequence interject incessantly} han, j han, Yes. Re
peated excitedly it sounded like braying. John's modest room overlooked the
bridge, which had been built when the government moved the course of the Assi
as a food prevention measure. The river, little more than a trickle most of the year,
had changed its course at least twice in the chronicles of the slum, the most recent
being the result of the government efort and the frst, according to a story I was
once told in Nagwa, being the work of an angry rishi who cursed the once broad
Assi afer it had refused to speed up at his behest, the power of his voice reducing
it to the diminutive stream that it remains.
A second approach was from the wealthier sections of Nagwa, of a road that
brought one from the university A colony of European expatriates, many of
whom were students of Indian classical music, was nearby prompting the Cardi
nal of Milan along with other curia ofcials to visit Nagwa and to conduct an in
quiry into what attracted so many Catholic youth to the wellsprings of Ganga and
221
222 THE WAY TO THE I NDI ES
Kashi. His Eminence, accompanied by some of the ashram Fathers, passed
through the slum en route, pausing briefy at the water pump across from the Ravi
Das temple. Other luminaries have taken this way in, including erstwhile Califor
nia governor and American presidential candidate Jerry Brown.
The approach into the slum most used by its residents led one through a series
of lanes that began by the police station, or thana, at Lanka crossing. The police
were also frequent visitors to the slum, but whereas the cardinal had limited his in
quiries to the young the police had an interest in the old as well. A lot of young
women in Nagwa worked in domestic service and were the prime suspects in local
robberies of jewelry and gold, a few of which they may have abetted but most of
which they clearly had not. Still, one ofen made oneself scarce afer a robbery in
an establishment where one worked, to avoid the trial-by-ordeal beatings of police
custody. Thus the police interest in the parents of the absconders as sources of in
formation about their children's whereabouts, and consequently the not-too
infrequent beatings of Nagwa elderly
The "elderly": many in their late forties through early sixties, yet very much
burh, old, in the terms of local kowledge. There were not too many persons in
their seventies or older in Nagwa. Some people went back to relatives in their vil
lages when they were too old to work; more died, failing to survive bouts of illness
in the absence of sustained nutrition and health care by their children or others. It
was a neighborhood of the young, a Shangri-La of the plains. A funny place to
study old age, standing in queue behind the missionaries and politicians and po
lice, each with their questions and each their good news: Yes.
SEVEN
Chapati Bodies
in which weakness, not maltustent, anchors t body in time
NAGWA BY ITS RESIDENTS
H ori fled hi tttred jacket carilf and plced it on t cot. "So you conside me an ol man,
do you? I'm not even fr yet. And m are still lusr a bull at sir. "
''ot ones lie you. G lok at your fce in t mirror Just how are you goin t be lusr when
you can't even get enouh mil and buttr t mak a .w drps q ointment fr your ees? It scares
me t see the condition you're in-akes me wonder how we'll manae in our ol ae? Wose
door will we beg at?"
H or momentar mellwness vanished a thouh consumed in t fames q realir. "/' ll never
reach sir, Dhania, " he sai, pi up his stick. "I'll be gone ln bire tat. "
PREMCHAND, GODAN1
If the meaning of a bad old voice is deferred in cosmopolitan discourse and in the
residential colonies through the invocation of the West as the origin of the Fal and
the parabolic geometry of balance as the mapping of the life course, in Nagwa
Harijan basti processes of deferral invoke the imposition of caste order as the ori
gn of the Fall and the linear movement of weakness as its geometry Weakness,
kmzor, is central to local experience and ideology in Naga. I again begin by lo
cating a neighborhood within a particular cosmos through the narratives of its res
idents.
Varanasi got its name, according to a popular if dubious etymology from the
two tributaries of the Ganga-the Varona River to the north and the Assi stream
to the south-which form one version of its sacred borders. In between lies the
city of Lord Shiva, held aloft on his trident and safe from cosmic dissolution, with
its promise of liberation for those who bathe, live, die, and who are cremated
there. Just south of the Assi the ground rises; on it sits the slum. Even when the
course of the Assi was shifted, splitting the neighborhood in two, the part of the
223
224 CHAPATI BODI ES
slum ofcially known as Nagwa Harijan basti remained outside the land between
the rivers. Nagwa overlooks the feld of liberation from the wrong side.
Most of the low-caste residents of the slum are Chamar, nominally a leather
working caste; fronting the slum on the Panchakosi Road are the homes of the rel
atively higher status Dhobis and the Catholic Kistapanthi ashram. On the oppo
site side of the road are a few homes, a small mosque, and felds that run along the
Ganga. Further south and to the west lies an area of middle-class homes and a few
wealthy estates.
The Panchakosi Road rings Varanasi and marks the route of pilgrims on a fve
day seasonal circumambulation of the city It is an alternative and more inclusive
framing of the boundary of the sacred city2 Most city dwellers living beyond the
greater circle of the Panchakosi Road were not particularly troubled by their lo
cation beyond redemptive space. For several slum residents, however, the question
of boundary was more of an active challenge. They stressed their location within
the Panchakosi Road-as opposed to beyond the Assi-as part of a move of in
clusion and totality consonant with the political language of the slum, its ubiqui
tous plaint that "all people are the same. "
Caste more than geography distanced Nagwa Chamar from the religious re
sources of their city Residents did not feel comfortable at most temples, festivals,
or processions, despite the successful struggle several decades earlier to open the
city's important shrines to them. Through the cult. of the ffeenth- or siteenth
century poet saint Ravi Das, a Chamar who lived in and around Varanasi, Nagwa
slum dwellers recreated the city as an accessible yet oppositional sacred center. His
purity and virtue challenged by Brahmans, Ravi Das demonstrated his inner
worth to the common people and to the king through a series of well-known mir
acles. In the most famous of these, when asked by his high-caste interlocutors
where he kept his sacred thread (which as a Chamar he had never been invested
with and could not wear) Ravi Das cut open his chest and produced not one but
four threads, internalizing the fourfold caste order within the body as a sign of
sameness.
Rav Das's birthplace and the river ghat where he spent his days (and cut open
his chest) are the sites of new temples. These were linked to low-caste bastis
throughout the city on Rav Das's birthday by a parade that wound its way
through city streets to the site of the birthplace, just beyond the BHU campus.
Nagwa, as one of the southernmost of the city's Chamar slums near the end of
the parade route, would greet the foats, trucks, elephants, and tractors from
throughout Varanasi district as they approached the fnal stretch. One of several
competing "Rav Das Committees" from the slum would raise funds for a foral
arch, draped with a broad banner welcoming participants on behalf of the
Nagwa committee. The subscription of funds and erection of the arch linked
Nagwa slum with other Dalit communities3 and appropriated the elaborate and
Brahmanic sacred geography of Varanasi as authenticaly Chamar through the
fgure of Ravi Das.
CHAPATI BODI ES 225
Ravi Das was represented on posters in homes in Nagwa, along with images of
a mother and child, the goddess Durga, and Dr. Ambedkar, the untouchable ar
chitect of the Indian constitution. There were two poster representations of Ravi
Das: a vigorous black-bearded man and an old and emaciated white-bearded rishi
te. The younger man tears open his chest to reveal his visceral caste and lots of
blood; the older man sits in a meditative posture, a world-weary expression on his
face.
A small shrine of the younger Ravi Das sat in an open area in the center of the
slum, across from a government-erected pump and latrine. To the east of this
clearing, the slum rose toward the Panchakosi Road. On the other three sides, the
ground sharply descended: to the Assi on the north; to a water-fled gully and a
feld to the south, which until r g8g sered as the slum's dish-washing pond or
"tank" and its recreational space; and to the other half of the slum, spilling over
into low-lyng and periodically inundated land, on the west.
Between the summer of rg88, when I frst began to interiew residents, and the
spring of r ggo, when I lef Varanasi for the United States, the physical environ
ment of Nagwa changed signifcantly A developer won the contested rights to the
slum's common land-its tank and feld-and the high brick and plaster walls of
a new middle-class colony began to rise several meters from the Nagwa slum
dwellings. The dense basti lost its commons; all that was left of the tank water
were several small and stagnant pools. Overnight, the geography of Nagwa Hari
jan basti was transformed, from a poor urban village into something more closely
resembling a Bombay or Calcutta slum.
Other physical transformations occurred in the basti during those two years.
The urban administration of Varanasi freed up funds for subsidizing the build
ing of household latrines, although the drainage system necessary for them to
become operative was not repaired. Still, unusable latrines began to appear in
most of the wealthier homes of the slum. Change came from other sources as
well . The European priest and scholar known as Father Paul had lived in the
slum since r g8o, forsaking the comfort of the Kristapanthi ashram. Paul raised
European funds to buy a plot of land a kilometer to the south of Nagwa basti,
build a pump house for irrigation, and set up a vegetable growers' cooperative of
slum residents. His eforts stressed self-reliance and communal control of the
gardens. Residents who joined had to commit to a periodic membership pay
ment and communal labor, but received the perpetual use of an irrigated garden
plot.
Many residents were distrustful of his motives; several questioned where the
cooperative dues went. Despite his years of serice i the community, Paul was an
ambiguous fgure, seen by some to enjoy elite prerogatives-travel, university
study connections in high places-without giving any gifs. Unlie the periodic
gif-giving of the ashram Fathers, his projects were not based on explicit gifing
but rather on the creation of autonomy and a diferent kind of local reason. Yet as
he was a foreigner, Paul's visa was continually subject to reexamination and to the
226 CHAPATI BODI ES
potential refusal of another extension. He could not guarantee that he would re
main in the community to ensure residents' invulnerability from the claims of the
powerful and to protect the security of their investment.
The fear that the community garden would go the way of the commons drew
upon the experience of time and social structure in Nagwa. The history of
Nagwa, for its residents, was that of a Fall from greatness into a state of depen
dency characterized by unstable sources of patronage. The destruction of the
commons, the latest incursion into the Nagwa slum by persons locally identifed as
Thakurs, members of several land-owning and latter-day baronial castes, was but
the repetition of a historical pattern. The Fall of Nagwa took shape within a local
ideology of Chamar and other Dalits as the autochthonous bearers of authentic
religion and polity, of an Adi Dharm. Several residents claimed that Nagwa's
sanctity antecedes that of Varanasi itsel( Adi Dharm is literally the original
dharma. It was described as the true Indian religion and polity, before the foreign
invasion of the Vedic Aryans and the imposition of caste and its naturalization.
The lowest "scheduled" castes and tribal groups were thus the true heirs of a pre
Aryan and pre-Brahmanical Indian religion.
Local versions of Nagwa's sacred geography demonstrated the area's claim to
precedence over the superimposed sanctity of Kashi. Several hundred meters
south of the basti along the Panchakosi road was a stone worshipped as a protec
tive demigod, Baru Baba. Ram Lakhan, one of the most articulate ideologues of
the slum, suggested that Baru Baba was a naga, a snake deit H.e suggested that
naga worship was central to Adi Dharm, and furthermore that the name for
Nagwa itself came from naga. Ram Lakan envisioned Nagwa as a forgotten cen
ter for naga worship. The woman who ran the tea stall across from Baru Baba
concurred. One day she noted, a motvili (a fat man, here a pejorative term con
noting power and position) came by to look at Baru Baba. The Fatman pointed to
the local mosque, located next to where her tea shop now stands. He told her that
Baba originally came from the top of a former temple, the site of which is cur
rently occupied by the mosque. Muslims, the motvili was suggesting, were re
sponsible for the destruction of Nagwa's heritage.
The indexicality of the Fatman's fnger was resisted. Muslims were seldom in
voked as the agents of decline in the history of Nagwa; they were viewed ambiva
lently. On the one hand, they were competitors for limited state and private pa
tronage for the poor, not as truly deserving as the Nagwa residents. On the other,
they were seen as living sah', correctly, as having good families and not getting
weak minded in old age, and as bearers of an egalitarian ideology. Eforts by char
acters like tea-shop Fatmen to pin the decline of Adi Dharm on Muslims begged
what for most residents was the primary source of their debility the upper-caste
triad of Brahman, Kshatriya, and Vaishya, who destroyed Adi Dharm and en
slaved and dehumanized its adherents. This original Aryan colonization was con
tinually relived in local narrative: people spoke of the collusion of "Brahman,
CHAPATI BODI ES 22
7
Thakur, Bania" (priest, landowner, merchant) in the ongoing appropriation of
their rights and resources.
The relationship of Nagwa residents to powerful others that emerged from col
lective memory was not just a simple opposition of us versus them. The antiquity
of Baru Baba notwithstanding, few in Nagwa were certain that their grandparents
or great-grandparents lived there; most had family ties in villages south of
Varanasi across the Ganga or northwest toward Jaunpur district. Several families
who rented in the colony were migrants from Bihar or Bangladesh. A alternative
origin story stressed not the antiquity of the area but its historical founding by
Bula Babu, a Bengali who built a grand house on what had formerly been only
felds. Jhalli Ram, an "old man" (burh) in his early sixties who continually shuttled
between the households of two of his sons, told me that many of the large man
sions near the Ganga had been built by Bula Babu and sold to various princes, in
cluding the King of Nepal . These rajas gave great gifts to the poor, who clustered
nearby Jhalli Ram thought that the emergence of Nagwa basti occurred in 1 93 1 .
Jhalli told of Bula Babu willing one of his mansions to his gardener, a story
suggesting the extent of Bula's largesse. But opportunists-again, rich Thakurs
wrested the house from the gardener. Jhalli Ram tied the founding of the com
munity to the gifts of outsiders, here Bengalis and Nepalis, and its decline to local
elites. The theme was repeated in other sets of narratives. Jawahar, a vegetable
seller in his sixties, noted that Nagwa's land was originally owned by the Maharaja
of Varanasi, but that the new Indian state took the land from him and sold it to
rich Thakurs. The Maharaja had given the land where the slum and its tank and
common feld were to the Harijans. But just as the Thakurs secured the other royal
lands, they have managed to appropriate the commons.
Narayan, a laborer and poet in his seventies, recalled that he used to work a
plot of land near the Assi River that was owned by the Maharaja. When the gov
ernment took over the land, he said, "the Congress Party workers urged me to
press my claims to the land. But I wanted [the land] to go over to the Rani [the
queen] . When my father came here, this was all jungle. They came from M. P or
Haryana to Banaras on pilgrimage, and felt that they should stay here. They built
these homes. Others came from elsewhere. The Maharaja gave them the land. "
Narayan suggested that through hi s fealty to the family of the Maharaja, hi s fam
ily's initial benefactor, he lost control of his former plot. Now, in his old age, he
could not depend on owning land and was far more vulnerable. He summed up
his state in one of his ballads, which he would sing to fellow patrons at a tea stall
in Lanka crossing. In the ballad a bull butts the narrator from behind when he is
not looking, knocking him down. Oh, Bull, went Narayan's refrain, why did you
hit me? The bul in Narayan's ballad refected the two "bulls" in his experience,
old age and his declining resources, both of which caught him unawares. He par
alleled the physical kmzon of old age with the economic weakness of being both
old and Chamar.
.
228 CHAPATI BODI ES
Others of Narayan's songs were less ironic. He sang heroic balads about Dr.
Ambedkar and Indira Gandhi, the latter whom he, like most other older people in
N agwa, considered a hero in contrast with her son, then prime minister. With Mrs.
Gandhi's policies, he would sing, the proud Thakur became a rickhaw puller and
the lowly Chamar a moneylender. Lie the Maharaja and Bula Babu, Indira
Gandhi was the paradigmatic giver, but like these others her gifs were appropri
ated when diferent rulers came to power.
Given the instability of gifs and the self-interest of the powerful, political
and religious ideology in Nagwa stressed self-reliance and strategies of mini
mization. Political machines were distrusted and local party afliations would
continually shif. As in R. H. Kare's study of "worldy asceticism" among Luc
know Chamar,4 politics in Nagwa were ofen framed in terms of a self-reliant as
ceticism. Many men and a few women in Nagwa had a guru, a teacher who trains
and counsels one in both political and religious matters. Gurus were usually older
men from outside the slum, ofen from other Dalit communities. Gurus were also
teachers from the past Religious life in Nagwa centered on a quartet of four his
torical and saintly gurus: Kabir, lsa Masi [ Jesus] , Guru Nanak, and, most of all,
Ravi Das.
As related by Nagwa disciples, the message of gurus-contemporary and his
torical, ethical and exemplary-challenged not the fact of low-caste weakness but
its meaning, suggesting that weakness demonstrated not the necessity of hierarchy
but the identity and, consequently equality of all people. The gods of Vaisnavite
and Saivite Hinduism and the pretensions to authority and purity of Brahmans,
Thakurs, and Banias were but the legitimation of exploitative practice. Local cel
ebrations of the historical gurus included the lampooning of caste Hindu piet
On the day before Ravi Das's birthday in 1 g8g, the local leader Seva La! and sev
eral friends acting as a Ravi Das Committee organized a performance in another
Dalit neighborhood, that of Seva Lal's guru. Secchan, the ever-inebriated tea
shop proprietor, was transformed into Lord Shiva; in leopard skin and colored
deep blue from head to toe, he held court over a celestial audience of prostitutes
and dancing boys.
As leather-workers, Chamar were called upon to drum in the celebrations of
many other groups in the city, events of varying sanctimoniousness. Part of
Chamar performance often included satiric skits, in which reversals of age, gen
der, and sexual desire along with those of caste and class ofered social satire rang
ing from barbed to highly muted, depending on the audience and occasion. 5 In
another skit, the weaver and part-time musician and comic Ramji played an old
and deaf village man, newly married to a young girl, who undertakes a pilgrimage
to the holy city of Varanasi with his bride. They meet an unscrupulous Brahman
panri, or religious guide, on the road, who ofers to take them around the city with
hopes of bilking and even cuckolding the old man. The deaf old man misunder
stands each of the Brahman's instructions, praying ''ai Murgi Mai" (Hail Mother
Goddess Chicken) instead of ''ai Durgi Mai" (Hai Mother Goddess Durga) at the
C HAPATI BODI ES 229
Durga temple, and so forth. The temples that the mismatched couple visit are
those that many of the Chamar audience work outside of guarding the polluting
shoes of worshippers.
WEAKNESS AS STRUCTURE
The fgure of the decrepit old man played by Ramji i s as central to Nagwa ideol
ogy as it is to Brahmanical and Buddhist thought. In Ramji's depiction, the old
man's weakness symbolizes both the perersion and ultimate failure of elite desire,
its object here the young woman. Elders, no matter how powerful, cannot hold
onto youth forever, and eventually confuse goddesses with chickens. Chicken,
murgi, is a dense signifer in N agwa, suggestive among many other things of the
humiliating and painful position the local thana policemen may have one assume
as a mider weapon from their armamentarium of torture. In the end, the skit in
sists, it all comes down to chicken. The weakness of the aged is a double sign in
Nagwa ideology, both part of the overall weakness of Adi Dharm people gener
ated by an exploitative society (the overdetermination of sufering in Narayan's
lament, the allusions to the police in Ramji's potted panegyrics) and proof of the
equality of all beings (the decline of generational power in Ramji's portrayal). In
the poetry of Ravi Das, both fgures (the old person as tragic victim and as hum
bled victor) are brought together:
A high as you can buid, as low as you can dig,
your size will never swell the dimensions of a grave;
Those lovely curls, that turban tied so rakishly
they'll soon be turned to ash.
If you've counted on the beauty of your wife and home
without the name of Ram, you've already lost the game.
And me: even though my birth is mean,
my ancestry by everyone despised,
I have always trusted in you, King Ram,
says Ravidas, a tanner of hides.
The house is large, its kitchen vast,
but only afer a moment's passed, it's vacant.
This body is like a scafold made of grass:
the fames wl consume it and render it dust.
Even your family-your brothers and friends
clamor to have you removed at dawn.
The lady of the house, who once clung to your chest,
shouts "Ghost! Ghost! " now and runs away,
The world, says Ravidas, loots and plunders all
except me, for I have slipped away
by sayng the name of God.6
Old age and death, framed as a unity give the lie to the pretense of social dif er
ence claimed by the powerful, the signs of an ephemeral world that "loots and
230 CHAPATI BODI ES
plunders all . " The old body i s presented simultaneously as sign of exploiter and
exploited, of the strong and the weak.
Weakness, kamzor, was as central to descriptions of aging and of particular old
persons in Nagwa as it was in the Bengali quarter and the residential colonies.
However, weakness attributions in Nagwa conveyed something additional and
quite diferent, for statements like "Look, he's old, so he's weak; his hands and feet
(i. e. , his ability to work) are weak, his mind, too, so what?" were enclosed within
famiy weakness narratives: "We are poor folks, not rich; we are weak; we cannot
gve (our children, our parents) decent food. " Transactional defcits central to nar
ratives of the famiy and the familial body elsewhere in the city were here linked
more forcefully to kam.or and quantifed. The quantifcation was usually in terms
of pieces of bread, roti or chapati: we can only give him so many chapatis. Bodies
were approached through chapati counts. A never-adequate rhetoric of self
justifcation soaked up all other dif erence. The experience of old age, the narra
tives of family members implied, is encompassed by the experience of being poor
and Chamar. 7 She is weak because we are weak. Far less ofen families looked to
faied processes of adjustment, adaptation, or balance to explain bad voices. And
to explain them away: weakness, like balance, worked as much against meaning as
for it, against the moral threat of certain kinds of old voices. Weakness encom
passed diference and diverted the need for intrafamilial accountability
Old age weakness was linked to caste weakness both causally and essentially
Causally old people were understood to be weak because they had not eaten
enough good food in life, because they did not have access to real medication as
opposed to tonics, and because they had to work until they dropped, lie Dulari's
cousin the rickshaw-puller. Essentially old people were said to be weak because of
their inherent social weakness as Chamar. Again and again in my interviews and
discussions in Nagwa basti, mention of hot dimi and other voices would glide into
old age weakness, which in turn would glide into social weakness. Lost in this
seamless glide was the familial body and the role of intergenerational politics in
the emergence of the aberrant voices of weak old people.
Before we can turn to individual families, to examine the relationships between
generations and individuals and the negotiation of the weakened body and its
meanings for dif erent actors, we might explore further the ideology of weakess
in Nagwa, to see what is at stake in this glide. I suggest that "weakness" is the struc
tural principle that both generates the order of castes for the residents of Nagwa
and provides the structural basis for its critique. In so doing I respond to a central
debate in the sociology of India since the 1 g6os regarding the relationship of in
dividuals to the social order, and respond in particular to a more specifc debate
about the relationship of "untouchables" to this order. These debates have a rou
tinized and somewhat cathartic form: the ongoing and perhaps compulsive need
to undo the work on India of the French sociologist Louis Dumont, principally his
Homo Hierarchicu.8 Thus the myriad critiques of his position that continue to
CHAPATI BODI ES 231
emerge long afer the beast was thought dead. My brief comments here are no ex
ception.
The Dumontian analysis placed the pure/impure opposition at the center of
the analysis of society in India and considered the discursive practices of Brah
mans as the sole authoritative source for a refexive Indian sociolog Earlier criti
cal responses to Dumont emerged on at least two levels, either as criticisms of his
privileging of the "ideological" against the material basis of caste ideology, or, for
those accepting the role of cultural structures as determinants of history as criti
cisms of the limits Dumont placed on what constituted the ideological. Discus
sions centering on low-caste groups often have tended to ignore or dismiss Du
mont, the assumption being that his domain of Indian society is a crude reframing
of the dominant ideolog9 Discussions of middle and higher castes and particu
larly of dominant and baronial castes have argued that the "political" domain of
the state is as central to the underlying ideological structure of Indian society as is
the "religious" domain of purity and pollution, and that this structure has a his
tory. 1 0 These post-Dumontian structuralist accounts of caste concern themselves
with the relationship between elites, their competing ideologies, rationalities, and
transactional styles, and their underlying epistemes. The central probU:matique is
the relation between king and Brahman and between princely and priestly au
thority with attention to the colonial delegitimation of non-Brahmanic ideologies.
Both sets of critiques are of limited appeal in approaching the body and soci
ety in Nagwa. Materialist objections to Dumont are powerful but frame the poor
and marginal as speaking truth to power with little efort to grasp the texture
o
f
necessity by which dominant and dominated ideologies and practices are repro
duced. Language and practice in Nagwa slum were layered and complex; their
structural contours pointed to more than infrastructures all the way down. Here I
focus on two opposed but ubiquitous themes explicit in local discourse and im
plicit in practice: idetit, the frequent assertion that "all persons are the same,"
and weaess, the tendency for people in Nagwa to rank others in terms of their
abiity to weaken or be weakened by them.
In so doing, I attempt a strategy in some ways parallel to the alternative criti
cal position on Dumont, focusing on the normalization of social diference
through a set of competing or, to paraphrase Charles Malamoud, 1 1 "revolving"
hierarchies rooted in complementary fgures of totality and gif. This alternative
critique has had widely difering formulations, 1 2 but few of them have been of
particular use in exploring the possibilities of this expanded and post-Dumontian
play of structure for the religion, politics, and embodied life of the socially mar
ginal and outcaste. Following R. S. Khare, 1 3 I want to look at the Nagwa Chamar
language of strength and weakness in structural terms, as an ideological genera
tion of a hierarchical world from a moral opposition rooted in a particular class of
transactions.
In noting the centrality of kmzon in the perception and negotiation of social
232 CHAPATI BODI ES
dif erence and political relations i n Nagwa, I want to suggest how hegemonic con
structions suc
h
as the naturalization of hierarc
h
y as organic dif erence-pollu
tion-simultaneously determine the position and experience of bodies and are
fundamentally reworked by them. Weakness takes shape, like pollution, as organic
and embodied dif erence, but as dif erence that preseres the moral integrity of
the weakened against the weakener. Residents are weak, kzor, in opposition not
to the wealthy or powerful as individuals but as the triad of Brahman, Thakur, and
Bania, who as corporate groups challenge the individual moral relationship of the
gif between patron and poor. The Maharaja's sense of feudal obligation and the
Bengali Babu's gif of his own home to his gardener narratively evoke an ideal
transactional frame in which class and weakness are not synonyous. This frame
is disrupted by Thakurs, by Brahmans, by petty bureaucrats and by the police in
the stories residents tell of where they live and who they are. These disruptive ac
tors reverse the moral order of society: they take rather than give, and they
weaken the poor.
Through the imposition of new transactional orders creating weakness within
a local version of the Fall, Chamar narratively come to have bodies diferent from
others. To speak of weakness constituted the recognition by basti residents that
their bodis were dif erent from those of Brahmans, Thakurs, and Banias, more
than their identities tout court. Kamzonwas not only weakness but thinness; all states
of weakness were embodied as lack. Kam;on is a depletion of bodily substance
semen and menstrual blood, but more particularly the coarser primary tissues:
food juices, blood, fesh, and fesh. Weak bodies were thin, dry and cold, in con
trast to t
h
e motvil, the Fat Ones, who came and made pronouncements on
Nagwa and who stole its land and its water and ofered in their place toiets. Weak
ening challenged the moral order of caste by substituting for it a diferent moral
order, one equally rooted in the inevitabiity of organic dif erence. Diference was
embodied as weakness, not pollution: caste was a medical condition.
Upper-caste diferences were reconfgured within a feld generated by the
dif erential strategies of each caste group as weakeners, drawing on stereoted
local transactional strateges of Brahmans, Thakurs, and Banias. Banias de
manded high interest and siphoned all one's earnings. Thakurs appropriated land
and intimidated residents through thugs or the police, particularly the infamous
Lanka thana. Brahmans controlled academic and service positions, maintained
the image of Harijans as gandi (dirty, polluted) , cloaked all action as moral imper
ative, and were more efective claimants of Thakur, Bania, and state patronage.
The ideology of weakness disguised as well as disclosed relationships. First, the
language of km;or refected the performative dynamics of feldwork. Like the po
lice, I came to take something: I was, and remain, another motvili. "The old
woman is weak because we are weak" was dialogic, referring not only to the old
woman and the "we" of the formulation but to myself: "She is weak because we
are weak-are you a weakener or a patron?" The language of weakness forced
me to remain aware of what was diferentially at stake in an interview, and pushed
CHAPATI BODI ES 233
me to defne myself transactionally "We are weak-what do you intend to do
about it?"
Thus I initially came, in the course of feldwork, to discount the signifcance of
kmzor, reading it as a rhetorical strategy on the part of those I interviewed, an ex
pression of need, dependency, anger, and at times sufering, but not as central to
experience as its frequent mention seemed to suggest. But rhetorical strategies
draw upon a limited universe of discourse. The more time I spent with families
and the more exposure to both daily life and social dramas that I gained, the more
I came to accept the language of weakess as indicative of the structure of lived
experience in Nagwa and to recontextualize my initial interpretive anxieties
within an unfolding social world.
Second, beyond these issues, the ideology of weakness blurs distinctions of
class and gender within Nagwa basti. The experience of rural migrants who ped
aled rickshaws versus established petty functionaries who worked for the munici
pal administration or the Banaras Hindu University difered vasdy but drew upon
the same language of weakess in framing the body in time. Ram Nath and his
brother and cousin had each recently rebuilt their houses; the houses were larger
and more frequently whitewashed than others in the area. Ram Nath addressed
the question of dimi k kmzonbrain weakness-through continual reference to
"them, " the illiterate others of Nagwa: "They cannot read or write-they are all
bevakuf[stupid] -so their minds go quickly I am older. I have survived severe in
jury [he detailed getting an electric shock and falling of a roof and suriving] , but
my mind and my health are still correct. " In speaking of the worries of old age,
Ram Nath and others like him were more likely than others in the slum to frame
a discussion of weakness in the supplementary moral terms of tension and bal
ance. Literally, in Ram Nath's case: he lost his balance, falling of a roof and in
juring his head, and yet through tenacity has surived both weakess and imbal
ance.
Third, kmzor was dif erentially constituted as a threat to men and women, a
distinction men tended to discuss in terms of the paired losses of semen and men
strual blood. This androcentric discourse in Naga took male fuid loss as a threat
to oneself and female fuid loss as the necessary control of women's heat. The
elaboration by men of these losses-in personal narratives, in restrictions against
menstruating women, and in the experience of semen loss anxiety-was more
muted than in middle-class and higher-caste neighborhoods. 14 Like the weakening
of old age, the weakening of sexual fuid loss was framed within a broader context
of diminished substance. For men, kmzon as impotence was overshadowed by
kamzor as thinness. Both men and women downplayed gender diferences in dis
cussions of old age weakness, framing it primarily in terms of limited roti and bad
families.
However, even in Nagwa diferences between men's and women's care of their
bodies bespoke a dif erential concern with the maintenance of the bounded male
body-but not the female-from threats of diminution and weakness. As in the
2
34
CHAPATI BODI ES
Bengali quarter and iore ofen than i n the colonies, men bound themselves, and
gurus and women bound men, with varieties of protective amulets, strings, vows,
spells, and rings. 1 5 Asl Bari /ndrajal ("True Great Magic")-the primary text of
Chaman La! the chi, the charismatic exorcist who was the guru of several men in
Nagwa-contained numerous spells to protect men from the diminution caused
by their enemies and by women, but few protective charms for women. 1 6
Menstruation, some men in Nagwa argued, was necessary to let out a woman's
heat. Secchan, who played Shiva on Ravi Das' birthday, noted that the process
was necessary for women's daily health and that amenorrhea, the absence of
menses, led to an accumulation of heat and thus fever, jaundice, tuberculosis, or
eye diseases. Other men at his tea stall disagreed, stressing that menstruation
weakened women incrementally and that they aged more quickly as a conse
quence: "They are old by ffty Have y

u noticed?" Women in Nagwa reversed the

male gloss, from a loss of heat or strength to a process of removing fatigue. Sev
eral women in Narayan's family contrasted the tiat (strength) of women and men.
His daughter-in-law told me, "Women get more tired. They give birth, raise chil
dren, and worry about them. " I responded, "But men work . . . ?" to which she
said, "But they eat more; they fl their stomachs. . . . Men are built stronger.
Women thus have their monthly [period] , when their fatigue comes out. With the
blood. So they won't become too weak. " Weakness does not come to women as
some "natural" consequence of menstruation, these women suggest, but rather is
a constituent feature of their social situation and its physical ramifcations
chronic undernutrition and constant labor. And weakness for women unlike men
is not just a lack, a diminution of substance, it is rather a quantity that can be ex
creted. Both the nature of a woman's life and the prerogatives of men maintain
her as weak, but the body and its fuids are claimed as a (quite literally) empower
ing responseY
What of the cessation of menstruation in the slum? The menopause as either
a pathologized or simply a marked category of experience did not seem to exist in
Nagwa in 1 988 and 1 g8g, in dramatic contrast to Sharma and Saxena's data for
the colonies. Despite the elaboration of menstruation as the excretion of weak
ness, the end of menstrual bleeding was described jokingly by most women as a
time of relie( Men sometimes had a dif erent perspective. Secchan, in suggesting
that amenorrhea led to illness, was concerned with the premature cessation of
bleeding and the buildup of heat. Old women, he noted, were inherently colder;
they did not need periods. The men who felt that strength was lost during the
menses viewed old age and the mental weakness of old women as a cumulative
efect of earlier menstruation and not due to a climacteric period such as the
menopause.
In my earliest discussions with men and women in Nagwa, including those
about menstruation and weakness, I worked with a BHU student, Rajesh Pathak,
who would come with me to Nagwa from time to time and would afterward edi
torialize. Rajesh felt that more was at stake for the women discussing the cessation
CHAPATI BODI ES 235
of menses than they were letting on. "This is a difcult time," he said, "when a
woman thinks, 'I am no longer a woman' and gets upset. " Lie Sharma and Sax
ena, Rajesh expected a gendered embodiment of the imbalance of old age. In
Nagwa, however, older women were amused when I tried to press the question of
a menopause against their assertion that if anything they experienced a relief at
the cessation of much fuss and bother. If these women's experience as women
changes, as Rajesh insisted, the change was not keyed to a bodiy event lie the
menopause. For women and men in Nagwa, my discussions of gender dif erence
obscured the centrality in old age weakness of being Chamar. Burhe hain, kamzor
hain, ganb hain, they are old, thin/weak, poor. Flesh and fat, more than blood and
semen, were at stake in kmzon and in old age.
MUSLIMS AND OTHER SAINTS
"What things characterize old age?" I would ask during interviews in Nagwa as
elsewhere. Sitting with Bageshera, Narayan the poet's elder sister, and her family
a volley of responses came from both the old woman and the younger people.
Bageshera began by listing problems:
their eyes
their teeth
they can't work well
their minds don't sit quite right.
Her grandchildren joined in, their responses less embodied:
they get agtated
they are weak
their minds rot
they just babble, pat pat pat pat.
Bageshera looked vexed: "He writes all this down. Say some good things about old
people! "
Lie Bageshera's family in focusing on imbalance, anger, and weak mind, I
ofer a skewed portraiture of old age in India. The problem is heightened in
Nagwa, where old age is almost inevitably called burhipi (the embodied and rather
decrepit state connoting weakness) and seldom vrddhivasthi (experienced and more
disembodied old age) and where weakness is the dominant metanarrative of social
relations. 1 8 Yet burhipi, in its privileging the hearing of old voices as bakbak or pa(
pa(, does not exhaust the experience of being old or knowing or loving an older
person. "Use buzurg, " Masterji the tailor suggested when I called someone vrddh,
ofering me the Urdu for the Sanskritized word, as "people will understand. " I sel
dom heard buzurg used in informal conversation, but in my more abstract discus
sions with Masterji , Ram Lakhan, and other ideologues of the neighborhood,
buzurg lie vrddh suggested an ideal and sahl, correct, old age.
A sahl old age was ofen linked to Islam, through the turn to a more Urduized
236 CHAPATI BODI ES
or Persianized construction of utterance as well as in narrative. "You should tal
to Muslims," I was repeatedly told in the poorer Hindu neighborhoods of the city
as during that boat ride early on. "Their dimi remains saki." Muslim friends, I
should note, were either amused by or suspicious of this generalization but they
rarely concurred with it, seeing in it the potential deployent of a Hindu strategy
of the dif erentiation and ultimately dehumanization of the Muslim body. But the
women and men in poorer neighborhoods who ofered the Muslim dimi as a gold
standard in old age were not being disparaging. They did not know why the dif er
ence occurred ("You're the doctor, you tell us! ") but it was somehow obvious.
When I asked people to speculate, their answers varied. In Nagwa, a man named
Lakan had this to say: "Hindu minds tend to deteriorate in old age but Muslim
minds tend to expand. Muslims are richer, more successful. They have less wor
ries, thus less mental problems. They are more hard-working, and single-mindedly
devote themselves to the task at hand. We are too gregarious, too outward
oriented. " Another response to why Muslim old people don't get weak minds was
that their family relations were better. Always implied was that Muslims did sevl to
their elders, that they presered their izzat, their honor. The Muslim self was more
directed and less selfsh, and the Muslim family tighter.
T N. Madan has argued that Indian male householders position themselves di
alectically between the poles of the renunciate yogi and the libertine bhog. To the
extent that his argument is relevant for poor men in Varanasi, the Muslim occu
pies the discursive positio"n of the yogi. He is a paradigm of the "worldly ascetic"
that Khare suggests is the exemplary actor in the ideology of Lucknow Chamar.
To be ascetic in domestic relations, the invocation of the Muslim suggests, is to
presere oneself and one's parents from mental weakness. The Muslim as sign of
the exemplary elder and family again suggests the anxiety surrounding the impos
sibility of true sevl. As other, the Muslim can occupy a position against the con
struction of the self Why Muslims? In the question, I sensed an unspoken narra
tive of sevl anxiety: "I am a creature of desire and selfshness; I am the imperfect
family In perfect families, composed of ascetics, there is perfect sevl, there is no
weakness in old age. Look at the other, look at the Muslim. " The Muslim can be
placed outside the opposition of weakening and weakened; his Otherness is in
theory exchangeable with one's imperfect selfood. Unlike Brahmans, Thakurs,
and Banias, who achieve a reprieve from weakened mind through their weakening
practice, which guarantees them access to good food and medical care and the ab
sence of worries, Muslims escape the economy of weakness (and become rich)
through a process of renunciation, not of taking but of not taking.
Muslims are ambiguous signifers in Nagwa. Some persons would speak of the
sahi mind of the Muslim, most had no opinion, and some, lie Muslims, felt the
whole question was ridiculous. Sannyasis, ubiquitous in Varanasi, are viewed less
ambivalently. True renunciation in old age in Nagwa is seldom identifed with the
Brahmanic ideals of vlnaprastha and sanraa. The classic renunciate is rejected as
the idealized self for four reasons: ( 1) sannyaa is an option by and large open only
CHAPATI BODI ES 237
to upper-caste Hindus; (2) sanrla is morally ambiguous for all householders, of
high and low caste, in its challenge of household morality; 1 9 (3) in Nagwa, upper
caste renunciates are held to be false claimants to local patronage who appropri
ate the gift from the deserving weak; and (
4
) all Banarsis have the jaded locals' ex
perience of numerous "false sadhus," faux holy men seeking easy money or on the
run from a criminal past. Against samla-neither available to nor desired by
Chamar-the ideal self is described as a person of restraint and self-sufciency
This worldly renunciate does not abandon-literally or symbolically-the house
hold. Renunciation is not in opposition to householdership, but rather is the ethos
characterizing the ideal householder. 2
0
The life stage model of lamaarma folds
into the constant asceticism of the weakened. Old age, as buzurg, is not a break
with material pleasure but a distillation of a lifetime of restraint into a powerful
voice. This voice is seldom heard-the silent voice of the ascetic-and when it is
heard it is as the legitimate anger of the rishi. Angry rishis, along with the Ma
haraja and Baru Baba, populate the history of Nagwa and of other slums and vil
lages around Varanasi. A rishi's curse, after all, had dried up the once mighty Assi
separating Nagwa from Varanasi, turning the river into a small stream.
In examining the ideology of worldy asceticism of Lucknow Chamar, Khare
helps us to place the transformations of age in political and ideological contexts.
Appadurai has summarized Khare's argument:
Instead of playng the impure foil to the Brahman, the Untouchable becomes his
civilizational critic and his moral conscience. No longer a product of some sort of
"karmic" Fal, the Untouchable becomes a brutalized representative of the ascetic
ideal i ordinary life. His degradation and oppression are no more regarded as a just
working out of the joint scheme of dharma (social law) and karma (cosmic causal
law) but of the blindness of the Brahmanic social order to the axioms underlying its
own existence . . . . In Dumont's own evocative usage, here is an Indic conception of
equality and individuality that "encompasses" Brahmanic notions of hierarchy and
social categories.
2 1
Through the directed learning or hearing of the message of a guru, many men
and some women in Nagwa spoke of themselves as this-worldly ascetics, both
framing their lives and struggles within a meaningful and spiritually directed dis
course whie embodying a direct critique of "Hindu" ideology and practice simi
lar to that which Khare outlines.
The position of ascetic engagement glided into the dying space. Vipat, the fa
ther of the two slightly higher-caste Dhabi men who lived in adjoining households
on the edge of the slum facing wealthier homes, was said by many to be the oldest
person in Nagwa. He was very weak, lying most of the day on his charpoy outside
the house of his younger son, and he was seen to be so. But he was not heard to be
so-that is, his mind was sah'. Vipat seldom spoke, and when he did, in measured
and quiet tones, he rarely complained or asked for much from his family He lay
out on the bed al day and all night, his time punctuated only by meals and long,
slow walks the half a kiometer or so to the banks of the Ganga to relieve himsel
238 C HAPATI BODI ES
Vipat's charpoy was an unambiguous dying space. He was a marnevili , a "dying
one. " Neighbors and famiy said he was very old. "Over one hundred, " claimed
an adult grandson. Using the age he remembered himself to be during famous
foods and Partition, my usual method, I had fgured him to be in his late seventies
or early eighties.
Vipat's two remaining sons were from his two sequential marriages, and he was
again a widower. His sons had split, according to Vipat, some ten or twelve years
ago. The elder, Hiralal, had had his own job at the time while the younger Lallu
had none, and economic "tension" between the brothers had mounted. Hiralal
had wanted Lallu and his other half-brother Motial (now deceased) to obey him.
They refused; and when Motial got married he and his wife began eating sepa
rately Mter Motilal's death, Hiralal separated completely from his brother. A wall
was buit dividing the house and the few square meters of land in front of it
roughly into halves. Vipat remained with Lallu, as his youngest son had no work
at the time; Vipat supported him and his family. Six years ago, Vipat gave over
ownership of the house to his sons.
Vipat cried when he recalled to me the split between his sons. Their feuding
and public split provided the context for the Bad Family that explains the weak
mind and angry voice of other old people. But Vipat did not have a weak mind,
and neighbors and relatives pointed to his sons' seva-he was receiving food and
drink, he was not wanting. Bodily weakness and the Bad Family were central to
the construction of weak and hot mind, but they were not sufcient.
Vipat had achieved a state of shanti, of repose. He did not allow himself-nor
was he impelled to by existential or neurophysiological crises-to be interpreted as
empty heat or bakbak. He was weak, but he interpreted his weakness as consonant
with his great age and the pain of his sons splitting-facts of life that must be ac
cepted. He would sit on his charpoy talk to the handful of other Nagwa residents
who had reached their seventies and eighties, eat, and walk to the Ganga. He em
bodied, in his shanti, his household as a still-unifed entity; he was an emblem-in
front of the two halves of the split house, linking them on his charpoy-of the
rightness of his famiy. Through Vipat, they were, against the inevitability of their
history, also saki.
Though family fssion did not generate weak mind, weak mind pointed to fam
ily fssion. In Nagwa, challenges to shanti were rooted in the economics of limited
famiy resources and the often bitter family splits and debilitative and untreated
chronic ilnesses that emerged in the context of these economics. Out of the seventy
fve households in Nagwa in which I did interviews, there were at most a dozen
"old old" persons, those whom I then estimated were about or over seventy-fve
years of age. Assuming an age-related peaking of clinical dementia in the ninth
decade of life, similar to that of Europe and the United States, there were fewer
old people in Nagwa who were likely to become demented, unlike in the residen
tial colonies. But the voices of old people whose minds were not sahz-he hearing
CHAPATI BODI ES 239
of anger and bakbak and even outright madness-were integral to the phenome
nology of old age in the slum. There were many threats to shanti.
Earlier I ofered Harinath Prasad's besting of the tea shop owner Secchan as an
example of the explicitly saki anger of the experienced elder. Harinath was
Narayan and Bageshera's younger brother. He was sixty-two when I frst met him,
a fact that he stated emphatically, daring me to challenge him. My age-estimation
questions about marriages and foods had become well-known. Mr. Prasad had
been a "Masterji, " a school teacher. He continued to "give tuitions" full-time afer
retirement, to ofer Memory Bank-style supplementary tutoring to petty bour
geois famiies somewhat wealthier than most of those in Nagwa. These were stu
dents trained in "Hindi-medium" institutions, not those schooled to remember in
the more bankable English. Like Vipat, his mind was sahz, though he seemed the
antithesis of the other man in terms of personal style. Forceful, direct, and proud,
he did not back away from argument. He was an angry old man, but his hot voice
was taken at its worth, as the mildly funny but desered chastisement of one of the
most educated older men in Nagwa. His mind was not weak.
Harinath controled this resource, staging infrequent and impromptu displays
of his mastery over time and space. Secchan, who when he got married told his
own father that he could not aford to contribute his income to that of his par
ents-efectively denying them any signifcant support in their old age-heard the
anger of Harinath Prasad as undemanding and useful. He could call himself Har
inath's son; his own father's angry voice, however, structured as the demand and
the lament, was too demanding and could only be heard as jharfu, all used up.
Harinath's wife died, and one of his two sons found a good job in a dif erent
part of the state. His other son, Chandan, was unmarried and an intercollege (pre
university) student. Chandan had worked as a dancer in a troupe like Ranji's; he
may have been a male prostitute as well, and sometimes dressed like a woman.
22
Chandan was devoted to his father. Harinath long ago had had a fght with
Narayan, and the two brothers were not on speaking terms. With a distant son and
daughter-in-law, with the need to work because Chandan brought in no income
yet, with his anticipated difculty in ever getting Chandan married, and with an
alienated brother and his family Harinath was not seen to have a peaceful old age.
He was denied the repose of a charpoy
But Harinath's learning, his having amassed some measure of symbolic capital
and his efective management of it, was not suggestive of repose denied. For
neighbors who did not know him so intimately, Harinath's continual activity
demonstrated his continued mastery over his world. He ilustrated the proverb
sat{hi ta pat{i, sixty therefore mighty and not the sixtyish mind. He gave neigh
bors no cause to invoke the Bad Family
Mangri, a widow in her sixties, lived with her daughter, who was separated
from her husband, and grandson in a small, one-room house. Her daughter
worked to support the family and her grandson was in school. Mangri managed
240 CHAPATI BODI ES
the household, as well as much of the communal afairs of her part of the slum.
Her voice, criticizing municipal workers who didn't do their job, neighbors who
stole from other neighbors, or anthropologists who wasted people's time, was well
known. But she leavened her scolding with humor and self-deprecation. Her re
quests, the substance of her angry voice, were rarely phrased as threatening com
plaints or outright demands. She interrupted me one day as I was talking to
someone else, about old age: " Thi old woman walks naked. You should give me
some clothes. " Young teenagers in the lane would jo
k
e with her, calling herjharuju.
But her angry voice was ofen listened to; it meant something. Mangri lacked Har
inath Prasad's learning and was poorer and less powerful than he. She had bouts
of weakness, and her neighbor Father Paul brought her fve "bottles of strength, "
vitamin tonics, which she said helped a bit. Though an old widow, like Harinath
she was able to maintain a powerful and sahz persona through the manipulation of
an angry voice. She was somewhat less successful than him in being heard as a use
ful and therefore meaningful voice; Harinath was never called jaTi. As in the
colonies, the voice of the marginal widow was at greater risk for being heard as not
sahz.
Most old people in N agwa who could no longer work as laborers or who feared
being consideredjha7i in the household attempted to develop new sources of in
come. One of the more common routes, for those who could advance the neces
sary capital, was to open up a small shop, ofen in a doorway or window of the
family house facing out onto the lane. There were several such shops in Nagwa
Basti, stocking biscuits, matches, cheap bidi leaf-wrapped cigarettes, paper kites,
and so forth. Raghu Ram ran one of them. He was, according to one of his sons,
ninety-fve years old; he himself was unsure, and extrapolating from the ages of
his children I estimated that !e was in his seventies. Lie Vipat, he was a widower
whose sons had split. Of Raghu Ram's nine surviving children, fve daughters
married and moved to their husbands' homes, and the families of the four sons
lived separately in adjoining compounds. Raghu ate with his second-youngest son,
Lallan. Like Vipat, Raghu Ram was represented as a superannuated icon of aus
picious old age by his family Still, Raghu felt compelled to work to avoid being a
potential burden to Lallu's family Vatuk has noted in her discussion of depen
dency anxiety that the elderly feared the consequences for themselves of their
physical incapacity and resulting burdensomeness to their children. In Nagwa, old
people with some savings forestalled the possibility of becoming a burden as long
as possible through small enterprises or outside labor.
Shanti, here as for Mr. Agrawal in Ravindrapuri, was continually deferred.
Raghu Ram's son Ram Lakhan, in speaking of his father and old people in gen
eral, located their dima, or brain, between cool shanti and hot anger: "There is
neither a lot of peace, nor a lot of heat. It is like India. Sometimes the weather is
hot, sometimes cold, and there are the monsoons. " Raghu Ram avoided being
considered jhaTi, but at the same time he relinquished his claims to a charpoy to
a position of repose. But his tiny shop, where he eked out a token income, was in
CHAPATI BODI ES 241
a sense a dying space. He was identied with the shop, could always be found
there, and was in a way restricted to it much as Vipat was restricted to life lived
from the charpoy His position, for his son, the elegantly philosophical Ram
Lakhan, was one of ambiguity neither the voice in repose nor that of anger. Still,
as long as he could maintain his shop, Raghu Ram remained sah'
GENERATI ON AND WEAKNESS REVISITED
When were ol d voices heard as mentally weak i n Nagwa? When di d angry voices
become willful and selfsh, and silences become lonely and pathetic? In the histo
ries of the families with whom I spoke, two transitions marked shifs in the per
ception of the old person's voice and weakness: t loss i autort and te loss i use
flness. Both were gradual and contested processes, but each marked, ftfully, a shift
in how an old parent was heard. The frst, the loss of authority over household de
cisions and resources, was associated with the emergence of anger and a hot dima.
The second, the loss of usefulness, that is, of any signifcant interpersonal role
within the household, was associated with emerging criticisms of the old person
babbling meaninglessly-bakba, pat pat, barbar.
"If you have property, " many across the four neighborhoods informed me, "or
if you have money, your children will do your sevi. " Few in Nagwa had sigifcant
property or savings to guarantee fial obedience. As in the colonies but more
quickly and not necessarily for the same incentives, brothers tended to fssion of
one by one starting with the eldest, ultimately leaving parents with the youngest
son. Thus Ganga Jali lived in a single room, literally a hole in the wall, with her
youngest, a repairer of bicycles and tires who some said was himself weak-brained
and who could barely earn enough to feed himself Across the lane lived Ganga
Jali's two married sons and their wives and children. Their households would oc
casionally feed Ganga Jali but were not responsible for her daily support.
Residents in Nagwa, unlike those in the colonies, did not seem to think that
such families were recent or unusual phenomena. Nor did they look to the mod
ern or to the West to ground a rhetoric of why famiies collapse. The rural villages
in neighboring districts to the south of the city from which many families had mi
grated were not remembered as places where the politics of intergenerational sup
port were that diferent, and these memories are consistent with Bernard Cohn's
data for Chamar family size thirty to forty years earlier in a vilage similar to those
that Nagwa residents or their recent ancestors had lef, where the majority of
households were nuclear and several composed of a single aged individual. 23
Vishwanath lived with his wife Juguli and three sons and their families in one
of the larger houses on the main road. He told me he was about seventy As usual
I asked my series of questions about foods, marriage, kids, and Partition, and es
timated he was in his mid-sixties. He no longer worked, but owned the famiy
house and had some savings. His sons drove or pedaled rickshaws or worked as
day laborers: none were fnancially secure, and all remained dependent upon their
242 C HAPATI BODI ES
parents' property and savings. They had not separated into separate ghar; Vish
wanath was proud of this fact. "I am the head of the household. They give me
their earnings. " His pride, unlike that of families in the colonies, did not rest on
being a ' )oint family"; the concept, as such, was rarely articulated in Nagwa.
Rather, the unifed house was testimony to Vishwanath's strength, to his ability to
fend of weakess.
Yet his sons fought among themselves. Why? "Because sons want to take over. "
Intergenerational stress, among the majority. of families in Nagwa, was usually
manifest as horizontal stress, particularly between brothers. The narrative of the
consequent theodicy-of the efort by parents to comprehend the bitter fghting
of their children-ran as follows: "If I had property, I could keep my sons to
gether." Without such imagined property, fathers could not become the powerful
bodies of the Kesari Jivan ad, sixty therefore strong. The ubiquity of the
Carstairs-Kakar construction of oedipal deferral, generated within their theoreti
cal formulations from a fgure of the powerful Father, is delimited by class and in
heritance. Vipat experienced his family's torment through the fghting between his
sons, not in their construction of his marginalized dying space. Vishwanath re
peatedly articulated the fact that if he did not have sufcient property his sons
would break apart; making him politically marginal. "They would take power
forcefully. If one has property, he is obeyed out of fear; if not, he is not. " Would
he, like Vipat, have transferred his property to his sons? "No. If I had no more
money, my sons might no longer take care
o
f me. "
In reality Vishwanath was not as autonomous as he claimed. His sons were not
giving him most of their wages, and they were making separate purchases for their
families. "But they tell me whatever they buy" His authority had already shifted,
from active control to performative validation. Vishwanath could still maintain
himself as ghar k mili, as the boss of the household, but the meaning of boss had
changed, givng his sons greater autonomy-from him and from each other
while preserving a sense of common purpose and coherence by maintaining the
father's centrality through performative sevi. Given the limited resources of Vish
wanath's sons, the lack of a signifcant diferential between their incomes, their fa
ther's property and the old man's unreadiness-unlike his neighbor Vipat-to lie
down on his charpoy, there was more to be gained by staying together.
Juguli, his wife, was about a decade younger than Vishwanath. She had two
daughters-in-law at home; her middle son's wife had died. Juguli no longer had
control over all domestic purchases, but she still organized the labor of her bahis,
her daughters-in-law Vishwanath said: "When she is too weak to work, the
daughter-in-law will take over. When, for example, if she were to make roti and to
do so would kill her. " There was no single contender for Juguli's authority: she
had two daughters-in-law, not one, and as long as the households remained to
gether Juguli was not the primary rival to her daughter-in-laws' control . She and
Vishwanath were both concerned about quarrels between the bahis, for they felt
that family fssion was rooted in daughters-in-law fghting. Juguli's role as a grand-
CHAPATI BODI ES 243
mother was heightened by her two motherless grandchildren. Given her abiity to
work, but more important her central role in running the household and in acting
as a surrogate mother, Juguli's voice, angry at times, was not heard as useless, hot,
and weak. 24
Next door, Tapeshwara's four sons had already spli
t
: each along with his family
occupied a small room in the house. A widow, probably in her late sities, Tapesh
wara ate with her youngest son, Gulam, and his wife. There was little room in the
small house, and Tapeshwara would say that she wished her sons would move
away But more, she wished they would stop fghting with one another. "We don't
think she is a burden, " her youngest daughter-in-law, with whom she eats, said to
me. Tapeshwara looked upset, and remained silent, I thought a bit sullen. Her
bahi looked at her, and then said: "Her sons have grown up and lef their mother. "
Tapeshwara sighed, and spoke afer some time. "In the old times, old people were
respected. Not now If you have money they pay attention. If not, they don't. "
Tapeshwara was lamenting a decline not so much i n an institution (the family) as
in a more generalized set of relations. The reciprocity of the gif relationship had
been replaced by self-interest. Tapeshwara's lament is the history of Nagwa, in
which relations of weakening replace those of true sevl.
Tapeshwara experienced her sons' fghting with one another, their denial of
her pleas for unity as feelings of weakness and worry Her dima "runs from here
to there. " She, and the daughter-in-law who had invested the most in feeding her,
said that these feelings were directly attributable to the behavior of the other sons.
Tapeshwara, more than her daughter-in-law blamed the local version of a de
clining cosmos in which people came to act for their individual interest and others
get weak, and not just her own sons per se. Her relatives deny bad-famiy expla
nations: She feels weak because she is old. She is weak because we are weak. Look
at how many rooms we live in, look at how many chapatis we can give our chil
dren.
In Chittupur, another Harian settlement not far from Nagwa but slightly
wealthier, the old patriarch Mausaji lived on a charpoy in a little wooden shelter
constructed in the middle of the
f
amiy courtyard. His sons had long ago sepa
rated, and his wife was stil receiving a steady income as a housekeeper. I learned
of Mausaji through his wife's niece, Tara Devi, who sometimes cooked for me. 25
"What do you ask old people?" Tara once asked me. I told her. "Well, " she said
after a pause, "my uncle is like that. "
7: Durga [his daughter-in-law] used to give hi m food. When she gave hi m a roti,
he would always ask for more: Aur do! and at frst she used to give it to him. But
he would keep asking, and she saw that he was hiding them under his bed.
LC: What does she do?
7: They don't want to give him food. It is expensive! The other sons don't give
him any it is only Durga who gives him. She says, he is my father . . . .
LC: What about Mausii [his wife] ?
244 CHAPATI BODI ES
7: She says, "I do not know this one. "
LC: And i f they don't give hi m [food] , that i s, anything more than i s necessary?
7: Then he wil keep asking for more. Ad he wil get angry . . . Ad he swears a
lot.
Tara began with food and its transaction. Food was given by some but not others,
food was demanded when there was not enough, food was hidden under a mat
tress. The currency of measuring food transactions-for what she was addressing
were moral challenges to a domestic economy-was the chapati. Hiding food was
here less importandy a sign of cognitive loss or of maladjustment and imbalance,
and more obviously a challenge to who wields authority over basic resources. On
the one hand, Mausaji unfairly demanded more chapatis when others should have
had them. He was the old fool of the Ravi Das poems who has not gotten beyond
ego; he was weakening his family by demanding more than his share. Yet his sons
had split and had in consequence forsaken Mausaji. His demands for roti could al
ternatively be read as the hot dimo of the abandoned elder, weakened by the Bad
Famiy the poor old man of the Ravi Das poems whose wife screams "Ghost! "
or in this case, "I do nt know this one. "
Tara was enough of an insider in Mausaji's family to know what Durga and
Mausiji might have said, but distant enough to broach the subject with me. What
she had at stake was dif erent from what was at stake for the other women, who
heard Mausaji's demands as the weak mind of the Bad Family "He is treated, " she
said at one point, "like a dog. " Mausii, however, put things diferendy: "This hap
pens with age. Yes, I'm fne now, but in time . . . "-she bent over like a hunchback
and felt her way along as one who could no longer walk or see. Invoking the gen
eral weakness of old age, Mausiji shifed the terms of the question I had put to
her, which had been about mata (brain, mind) , turning it through the fgure of the
blind and crippled hunchback to one on the nature of kmzon. When I frst visited
Chittupur, afer I had met Mausaji, Mausaji, his wife, was eager for me to meet
another old woman, their neighbor Shanti. Despite her name, she was presented
to me as a bakbakvaf. "She has no one," Mausiji said. Shanti was ofered for the an
thropologist's gaze as an example of true degradation and as a matter of voice and
of dimo, versus the understandable eccentricities of the frail old age of Mausaji.
Mausaji told me he was born in 1 go6; but given his children's ages and their
recollections, I felt that he was probably born some ten to ffeen years later. Over
a decade ago he could no longer work as a laborer and he opened up a small shop
selling pan, or betel lea( Six years ago he had to stop selling; he "got a wind" (havi
lagd and could no longer lif things with his left hand. "Getting a wind" might be
expressed in American lay culture as "having a stroke, " but conveyed more in its
utiization of the semantics of havi, air or wind. For the old person in particular
(for getting a wind was not restricted to the old) , wind and breath were key mark
ers structuring the experience of extremely weak old age. Mausaji's family framed
CHAPATI BODI ES 245
his weakness as hat pair; for Tara and for others who knew Mausaji from a greater
distance, his kmzor was embodied through an angry voice and a hot dimi. But
Mausaji himself experienced his weakness as a disability of breath and wind. He
had difculty breathing; he coughed; and hava had wasted his arm. The
identifcation of wind with the experienced old body and its narrative elaboration
is not surprising in the context of undernutrition, endemic tuberculosis, heavy to
bacco smoking, urban air pollution, inefectively regulated workplace hazards,
and the increased cardiopulmonary complaints of later life. The experience of
hava was rooted in the economic, environmental, and epidemiologic conditions of
working-class Varanasi.
Wind, viu or vat in Ayuredic and folk traditions, is the humor that predomi
nates in old age. It is associated less with pulmonary complaints than with ailments
often translated in allopathic terms as "nerous diseases. " Viu is the agent of mo
tion and direction. "It is so called, " the god Dhanvantari reveals in Sufut, "from
the fact of its coursing throughout the universe. "26 Zimmermann has reexamined
Ayureda as a science of cooking, the therapeutic manipulation of the relations
between classes of terrains, plants, animals, humans, and disorders in terms of the
food chains that link them and transmit and transform certain essences or favors,
rasa. "What the Rishis, the seers of Vedic times, quite literally saw was that the
universe is a kitchen, a kind of chemistry of rasa. ' m The function of viu was con
ceived of in Sufut as moving food and its successive incarnations through the
cooking vessels of the body 28
Excesses of viu are disorders of motion and are sufered as such: as convul
sions, paralyses, and problems with the feet, 29 and as changes in mental state.
Mind, manas, in several of the darfanas, or classical systems of philosophy, is that
which moves between sense organs, objects perceived, and the stuf of conscious
ness. Like hat pair k kmzor, the weakness of breath and application of wind for
Mausaji concern his inability to move about in several senses. Mausaji, however,
did not root his weakness and wind problems merely in his old age. "Kana nahin
hai, " he said bitterly, there is no food, referring both to his marginalized present
and specically to his getting wind six years earlier. His family immediately ob
jected to this accusation of bad seva: he lost his memory then, they told me, and
thus he wrongly thinks that he did not eat. Memory loss was thus invoked long
afer I was successively reintroduced to Mausaji's weakness by Tara, Durga,
Mausiji, his sons, and Mausaji himsel And it was invoked to explain a discrep
ancy between Mausaji's and his family's memory of a history of food transactions.
Memory loss in Chittupur was a second-order problem, not central to weakness
lie angry voice, hand-foot loss, or wind and breath trouble, but an obvious symp
tom of weakness that need only be mentioned to deny the Bad Family, here in
dexed by chapati counts.
The relationship between the hearing of hot brain and the loss of authority in
the family was clearest when there was a generational divide of the old parent or
246 C HAPATI BODI ES
parents versus a single son, daughter, or daughter-in-law. With these cases the con
test for control of the household was more vertical than with the successive split
tings of of multiple siblings. Kapura, in her sities, lived with her son, daughter
in-law and grandchidren. She took care of the grandchildren and kept the house
clean. Her daughter-in-law saw Kapura as a weak and meddlesome fool, harshly
calling her such-"Citi!" [a term of abuse]-whenever Kapura ventured to in
terrupt. Kapura was terried of this rather mean-tempered bahi, but the latter
heard Kapura as a wilful and meddlesome voice. In the case of Siranji, whose re
sistance to taking a tonic has been discussed, family relations were less of a cari
cature.
Siranji was "not less than one hundred, " as she put it; her grandchildren's
guesses ranged, but centered on about eighty My own guess was that Siranji was
in her mid-eighties. She was, in short, quite old, vying with Vipat for the distinc
tion of the oldest person in N agwa. She had lost three sons older than Babu Lal,
the only one lef alive and then in his ffties. Siranji lived with Babu Lal, his wife
Parbati, their fve sons and their unmarried daughters, the sons' families, and a
young village man who worked for Babu Lal in exchange for room and board. She
had a grandson from one of her older sons, but according to this man, Lakhan,
Siranji and Babu Lal cast out his widowed mother after his father died. The two
compounds, Babu Lal's and Lakhan's, were adjoining, but there was no matlab, lit
erally meaning or signifcance and connoting relationship, between them. Both
were among the larger households in Nagwa Basti, especially Babu Lal's with its
two courtyards, animal pens, and vegetable shop. Babu Lal and his sons were in
volved in several small enterprises, had some land, ran the vegetable shop, and
worked as drummers as did several Chamar families in Nagwa. The household
was large and, as a result of Babu Lal's success, has remained joint. Parbati man
aged the household with the aid of three daughters-in-law and their children, as
well as that of her remaining daughters.
With the emergence of Parbati's role as si, as the mother-in-law of this joint
family, her ongoing role as bahi to Siranji became increasingly redundant. Siranji
still attempted to direct many of the household's afairs, but Parbati increasingly
paid her no heed. She did not cross Siranji openly, and in some ways still main
tained the deference of a bahi, but there were no domains of the household not
under her frm control. Siranji knew this, and over the years, the forum of contes
tation shifed from the ghar and the calha (the hearth) and increasingly to the body
of Siranji itsel( This shift was that of Lar, of the progressive compression of the
king's domain from England to his court to a few retainers to his body and wits.
More and more, the primary item of contestation was davl, medicine. Siranji
lived in pain, which she described as an intermittent fever or a hotness in her stom
ach and a chronic difculty in breathing. She interpreted these experiences as sick
ness, bimln, and felt that with proper medicine she would be cured. Proper medi
cine consisted, for Siranji, of powerful pills from a good private doctor. It did not
consist of injections or of the big bottle on the shel( She recalled with anger and
CHAPATI BODI ES 247
some fright her visit "a long time ago" to the free clinic at the BHU Hospital,
when the doctors gave her "saline IV" which she hated. Siranji's constant de
mand-to her family and of me-was for good medicine, and when I tried to take
her to a doctor friend of mine who saw patients at the hospital, she got upset:
"They will make me stay at the hospital. If I go, they will give me an injection and
I'l die. So I will not go there. "
The bi g bottle of vitamin tonic sat on a shelf i n the small outer room that Sir
anji and her grandchildren slept in and where the drums were kept. Pointing to
the tonic, she told me, "It burns me. " In a stage whisper, Siranji added to me,
about Parbati, "She wouldn't care if I die. She abuses me." As Siranji pointed to
davi as an index of transactional inadequacy her son and grandchildren (Parbati
as the good bahi never openly criticized Siranji) pointed to the chapati count. Sir
anji, Babu Lal, his eldest son Amarnath and Aarnath's wife Gita, Rajesh Pathak,
and I were in the outer courtyard where the animals were kept and where, in win
ter months, Siranji would sit outdoors. She was fxing a basket as we others were
talking of types of food and of her illness. "I eat one chapati [daily] , sometimes
two, " said Siranji. Gita laughed and turned to me. "She eats four! " Babu Lal ,
Gita, Amarnath, and Rajesh all found this image, of the old woman and her four
chapatis, of the hypocritical abstinence of the hungry old, exceedingly funny Sir
anji denied eating four, angrily but her son kept giggling and telling me, sk her
if she eats four! Ask her if she eats four! "
Gita's joke was of a common pattern, the frequent teasing of Siranji by her
granddaughters-in-law and especially her granddaughters. Whereas Gita and her
fellow bahis were quiet in Parbati's presence, around Siranji more of a joking re
lationship prevailed, echoing the anthropologist Radclife-Brown's classic obsera
tion. 3 For the granddaughters, teasing Siranji was an art. Controlling her grand
daughters' demeanor was one of the domains Siranji had no intention of
relinquishing. When they would thus provoke her by acting "unseemly" Siranji
would get upset and begin abusing them: "Cutis! I'll break their teeth! " and so
forth. Getting Siranji to produce her hot and weak-minded voice was a favorite
pastime in Babu Lal's house. Within the walls of their compound, the family joked
with Siranji. She responded with her curses and mutterings, sometimes in anger
and, sometimes, it seemed, in disguised good humor. Through her weak and hot
persona, Siranji could take center stage and criticize her famiy for perceived ne
glect. Her complaints were ignored but her cursing was warmly received.
Outsiders difered on the causes of Siranji's hot brain-the ever-cursing voice
that could be heard from the lane-beyond the defnitionally obvious, that it was
due to the weakness of old age. The central explanation, again, was the Bad Fam
ily, her family's not giving her medicine, "especially when they have so much
money" Economic dif erence played a central role in neighbors' perceptions of
Siranji, for Babu Lal was among the richest men in his part of the basti. Siranji,
from this perspective, was not only a member of a rich family and therefore, given
the logic of weakening, not really all that weak, but as a superannuated old woman
2
4
8 CHAPATI BODI ES
she stood for her family and was an icon of its social and political position. Many,
therefore, identifed her with Babu Lal's various political and factional ties, and in
general, with a perception that this family was not weakened. Despite its literal
presence, day and night, in the lane, her voice was not really heard all that often,
unlike the ofen less heated voices of other elders like Dulari and Ganga Jali who
"had no one" and were thus unambiguously weak-brained. Siranji, for such out
siders, was weak to the extent that her weakness suggested the wrongness of Babu
Lal's family
For the family their hearing of and love for Siranji shifed frames outside of
household space. When my eforts to get her to go with me the BHU Hospital con
tinued to fai, I took Siranji one morning to a private doctor in the city Her grand
daughter Hoshila, then unmarried and still Siranji's chief tormentor in the house
hold, carefully dressed and wrapped a shawl around Siranji and led her outside
toward the rickshaw I had hired. I was struck by the pair of women, within the
household "madwoman" and "wretch" to each other, slowly and lovingly making
their way through the lane out to the main road.
Unlike Mrs. Mishra in Mussourie, Siranji was only hot-brained at certain times
and from certain perspectives. Her heat could be selectively produced by her fam
ily by joking with her, and Siranji was aware of this process. But both women were
called weak and hot-brained. Both engendered certain threats and certain re
sponses. Where Siranji's "weak brain" difered was in the fact that her famiy was
able to keep it within the household. Siranji for her part knew when not to speak.
Her batde was within; she did not challenge her children by shaming the house
hold. Her voice usually did not present the same threat to meaning. Mrs. Mishra's
weak brain, however, could not be contained. She wandered; she made accusa
tions to strangers; she had hit strangers on occasion; and perhaps more important,
her strained relations with her son and daughter-in-law were well-known. The
weakness of her familial body could not be convincingly reframed. The challenge
of old people like Mrs. Mishra, whom I would have identifed as demented, did
not demand a new set of categories, meanings, or models; she was encompassed
within the same idioms of distress as Siranji. What difered was in how and
when these categories were used, and in the implications for the quality of famil
ial relations.
]HAl AND THE SOUND OF DYING
Siranji, for all her frequent displays of hot mind, was never jhaTfi. She took care
of the family's goats and cow, repaired baskets and other housewares, and minded
her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Increasingly in the year before her
death in r ggo, she spent most of her time on her charpoy in the small outer room
or in the outer courtyard, but despite her pain she tried her best to be productive,
not to be a burden. Like Vatuk's informants expressing dependency anxiety, she
worried about not doing enough.
CHAPATI BODI ES 249
Though Mangri, the old woman who lived with her daughter and grandson,
kept house, took care of her grandson, and did minor repair work on the house,
she was calledjha by neighborhood kids. Unlike Siranji, whose charpoy was in
an enclosed courtyard (though not the main family courtyard where Parbati held
court) , Mangri's everyday space was far more permeable to public communica
tion. Though she was humorous and quick-tongued, in calling her a bakbak maker
children superimposed the expected voice of weak old age. Mangri's exposure to
public hearing as much as the content of her speech set her up for bakbak.
Bakbak could also be cultivated as a performative style, however, used by as well
as attributed to, the old. Several old widows in Nagwa bakbak'ed in public spaces,
especially like Dulari, at the intersections of lanes. Anupa lived with her only son
Mir Chand, his wife, and their younger son and his family Her oldest grandson
lived next door; the grandchildren's households had separated eight years earlier.
The family was poorer than most in Nagwa; Mir Chand as well as his younger son
pedaled rickshaws. Anupa, like Siranji, wanted to receive legitimate davi for her
illness, and like Siranji she resisted its defnition as weakness alone. She was weak
because she was il and needed medicine.
Unlike Siranji, Anupa was conceived of as a marnevilz, one at death's door, by
her family and neighbors alike. This judgment seemed to refect less an interpre
tation of specifc bodily signs than her location and voice. Anupa often sat by an
intersection across from her house. She would squat on the ground, her cane in
one hand, and rock back and forth muttering to hersel The content of her mut
tering, when I was close enough to hear, was a repetitive lament-an elaboration
of her losses and deprivations-and an appeal for some help. "Help me, baba,
help me, baba, baba . . . " At times the lament did not seem to make sense. Around
her, children played in the lane, and men and women went about their business.
Anupa's bakbak was seldom heard, or rather, it was heard as part of the dying space
of the very old and frail . "How is her dima?" I asked one of her grandsons. "She
is dying," he answered.
Anupa, despite her desire for davi and for a cure, knew she was useless and a
marnevat. Similarly, Ganga Jali complained of neglect through a routinized out
door bakbak lament and discussed her own imminent death. "He is paal" [crazy] ,
she would say of her youngest son, Biay, and his inability to bring in much money
"I go for days without food. " Unlike Siranji, what was ofen at stake for Ganga Jali
was enough food for her to eat, and she would explain her considerable sufering
and her reputation as a bakbak maker in terms less of sickness than of hunger. Her
older sons and daughters-in-law would repeat that her mind was sahz and that her
weakness was only the weakness of old age and of their mutual poverty She is
dying, very weak, and so sounds this way; who can aford medicine, who can give
her adequate chapatis? For Ganga Jali herself her ever-present death was proof of
her older children's neglect and sufering and yet at the same time the only respite
she had to look forward to.
Old people in Nagwa ofen discussed their deaths. The lament of bakbak may
250 CHAPATI BODI ES
include repeated wishes to die: "I want the Ganga [implying cremation and im
mersion] ; take me to the Ganga. " Mangri, whose brothers' families had long ago
abandoned her and her daughter, described her death with great relish. "Then
they wil all come," she once told me, referring to the family who never supported
her in life, "and they can behold my body as it turns into ash and is dumped into
the Ganga river. " She contrasted death with old age ironically: only in death was
the broken family reunited. The familial body of the old person is rendered whole,
she suggested bitterly, at the moment of its fnal destruction.
THE POSITION OF REPOSE
North of Nagwa was the neighborhood of Assi. Here i n numerous small ashrams
and rented rooms lived several hundred elderly sannyasis and ki viz widows who
came to live out their days in Kashi and die there. Most were Brahman. On Assi
Ghat itself however, by a pump next to the Sangameshwar Temple, one low-caste
old woman from N agwa appeared each morning. She would squat down next to
the pump and soon go into trance, loudly chanting bhajans, religious hyns,
sometimes violently shaking her body or getting up and dancing, and demanding
money from passersby. Some of the ghat residents said she was a madwoman; a
few children called ''aglz" out to her. Several grown-ups said the spirit of God had
descended upon her and caused her to sing lie this. Economic incentive and di
vine inspiration often coexisted comfortably in such ad hoc explanation.
When she frst began begging on Assi Ghat, the old woman used to shout her
possession. Virendra Singh, a well-known Hindi teacher, research advisor to for
eign scholars, and longtime champion of neighborhood quiet against the growing
use of loudspeakers, lived next to the pump. Annoyed by her constant noise, he
approached the shouting woman one day: "I said to her, why are you screaming?
People will give you much more money if you sing. And the next day she began to
sing. And she received more money" The Sangameshwar old woman modulated
her voice, moving from hoarse bakbak to the more upscale and marketable bhajan.
For those who understood her voice and passion as possession, she was able to shif
her presentation of self from that which was interpretable as bhat-pret or rain, as
the voice of a ghost or witch, to that which suggested God speaking through her.
The frst voice drew dramatic attention to her abject state, but put her at some risk
of harassment by police, local toughs, or children and challenged Singh's eforts to
construct a local civil society of balanced voice. The second, if presented like that
of most widows, might have faied to elicit much notice or patronage, but the
pump lady's bhajans combined the voice and vigor of a younger woman possessed
by malign forces with the lyrics and more upmarket claims to patronage of the
upper-caste widow She was able to draw upon both the pity of passersby for her
abject condition and their devotion to a God whom she had learned to embody.
Few aged and resourceless producers of a voice in Nagwa Basti could trans
form their laments and bakbak into such a resource. Even famiies who felt that an
CHAPATI BODI ES 251
old person was a burden and who gave her fewer chapatis resented the shame that
would befall them were she to go out and beg elsewhere. For most, the Assi Ghat
old woman remained a beggar even as she drew upon the social space of the re
nunciate and of the one possessed. First, Chamar men and women could not eas
ily be true sannyasis or ki vi widows. Second, possession remained a largely do
mestic space of afiction, and one particularly for the young. When old women
and sometimes old men from the slum went to ohi healers, it was invariably for the
exorcism and healing of a daughter, daughter-in-law, granddaughter, or grandson.
Ideal sanria, for those few men in Nagwa who spoke of their old age in terms
of it, came through the subjugation of the self: not to the upper castes or their in
stitutions, but to the self-chosen guru or teacher. Munna Lal was about sixty and
he lived with his wife and two sons in a house next to one in which his two younger
brothers and their families lived, not far from the house of Narayan the poet. He
spoke of old age in third-person terms, not of kmzor but of a polarjty of sadness
and anger, on the one hand, versus shanti, on the other.
,
If people follow a guru, stay in good company and try to know God, they will
achieve happiness and thus repose [shanti] . If they do not, they wl be sad. There
will not be peace; they will fght with family members in their old age. The guru can
be anyone. Ram and Krishna also had gurus. It is because Krishna did not listen to
the rishi Durasas, his guru, when he told Krishna to apply kir [rice and milk] to his
entire body, and neglected to put some on his ankle that he died. In this body, every
thing can be found. But how does one know this? One needs infor
,
mation and thus
knowledge; thus, the guru.
Kishna was kiled, incidentally, by a hunter named Jara, old age, the arrow strik
ing his vulnerable ankle. Shanti is opposed to decrepit old age, and one gains it
through submission to a guru. This submission was contrast by Mr. Lal with the
Brahmanical ideal of sanria:
Ravi Das was a sant siromaTi, that is, he was always living for others . . . . Listen: I'm in
the householder stage . . . its dharma is giving blessings to your children . . . . This is
greater than sannyaa. Ram, Ravi Das, Kabir, Nanak were all householders. Ravi
Das, as sant siromQi, said one should always look out for others. He was a shoemaker.
He only took three paie [cents] out of the four he received for a pair of shoes, and
returned the rest or gave it to the poor. I read a book on Isa Masi [ Jesus] , too. He
said religion is to love others; this is not what some others say it is.
The ideal old age, for Munna Lal, was one of continuity with adulthood. One re
mained a householder and continued to be the giver to one's children, no longer
of material substance but of irvi, of blessings. The debt remained, on the part
of one's children. Sanria is rejected, as is the religion of "others," as a philoso
phy associated with the powerful and their taking, and weakening. True knowl
edge could only come from a true asceticism that consisted of the giving of one
sel( Sanrisa is identifed here with a position of not giving, in this case not giving
252 CHAPATI BODI ES
the irvi of old age. Yet paradoxically i t was Munna Lal's own relative success
and comfort that placed him in the position of repose and pushed him to
reconfgure the languages of balance and of weakness in terms of one another.
Sannyasis in Varanasi were described by basti residents either as cheats or priv
ileged retirees. True ascetics were the weakened poor who have no choice. The re
lationship between the dialectics of weakening and the emergence of the ascetic
ideal was taken up by Raghu Ram's son Ram Lakhan in his discussion of Adi
Dharm. The Aryan invaders forced the peaceful original Indians to become their
slaves and degraded them. The emergent caste society ofered no possibiities for
mental peace. 1o one could be a giver: one either took or had nothing lef to give.
A ideology of sanria emerged, in which the original principles of Adi Dharm
were appropriated and placed at the end of a lifetime. Old age, the last stage,
came to stand for the entire personhood of the original Indian. But this new
scheme of the life cycle was warped, rooted in cultural theft and in the false split
ting of values between a time of exploitation and a time of renunciation. Old age
for Ram Lakhan, the preeminent Naga ideologue of his generation, was for the
elite a warped version of Adi Dharm and for Nagwa dwellers but the nadir of
their weakened status.
Neither the ideology of Khare's articulate informants nor the philosophy of
Ram Lakhan, however, map well onto the stories most Nagwa residents tell about
old age and weak mind. Munna Lal's description of aging stressed the possibility
of achieving shanti if one was true to the guru's word. But weakness and hot
mind, most residents argued, were unavoidable. Though Ram Lakhan suggested
that dualistic thinking was externally imposed through Hindu categories, few in
Nagwa could place themselves outside the framework of weakener and weakened.
The rootedness of the language of weakness extended beyond community iden
tity For weak brain suggested not only Chamar versus Brahman-Thakur-Bania,
but parent versus son or daughter-in-law. Nagwa residents spoke of themselves as
weakened in opposition to "Hindus," but they classifed themselves as Hindu in
speaking of each other as the weakeners of old parents, occasionally in opposition
to sahz-minded Muslims.
In the colonies, the sannyasi and especially the ki vit widow stood as markers
of abjection, the lonely old person who "had no one," the narrative foil to one's
ow parents. In Nagwa, sannyasis were at best irrelevant. There were, however,
several stock characters in Nagwa, individuals who "had no one" in dramatic ways
and who ofered an extreme picture of old age and weak brain against which most
families and individuals could positively frame their own sevi and their own old age.
Dukni lived in a small house with her two sons and their families. There was lit
tle room, and the sons often stayed with their in-laws. She was a widow in her
ffties; yet she caled herself and was called burhz, old. "She acts old," I was told,
perhaps a reference to her constant griping. As her name suggested (duk is sad
ness) , Dukni seldom found much enjoyment in life. Unlie Mangri who lived
C HAPATI BODI ES 25
across the lane and whose fnancial situation was far worse than hers, Dukni never
laughed.
In addition to her sons, Dukni had two daughters who lived nearby and who
ofen visited. The adjoining household was that of Panvasi, Dukni's stepson from
her late husband's frst marriage. Panvasi and his wife, Gita Devi, and their chil
dren lived separately They were an extremely ambitious couple, but without any
support from Panvasi's family they had virtually no capital upon which to draw.
They resorted to many schemes. Panvasi started a new Ravi Das committee, com
peting with the group ran by Seva Lal and Secchan. For a while Gita Devi ran a
little store on the main road, a wooden box from which she sold snacks, kites, and
matches. She was at pains to befriend all the "Fathers," all the missionaries associ
ated with the Kristapanthi Ashram and other foreigners who might be sources of
patronage. In r g88, when John the evangelist moved to the outskirts of the basti,
most of his hopes of winning converts were pinned on Gita Devi and her family
Gita Devi ofen asked me to steer any new "researchers" her way; I was able to
oblige.
The couple spent, or at least claimed to have spent, large sums (more than a thou
sand rupees) each year on the worship of Ravi Das. They took a vow of worshipping
the guru properly for several years to ensure the health of their three sons. They had
lost several infants, all girls, to illness already Gita told me, and wanted to ensure
their sons' health. A earlier Rav Das Committee had built an open shrine for an
image of the saint in the center of the basti, overookg what was then the neigh
borhood tank; the saint now overlook a large Thakur house. Each February when
Ravi Das' birthday rolled around, several groups wthin Nagwa competed for the
gifts to the guru each household might give. Panvasi would organize a Ravi Das puja,
the ofering of fruit and other items to the saint, each year, and would be entitled to
receive some of the money and gifts back as a dan, as a gift for his servces. Whether
or not he lost much money each year, few in Nagwa viewed him as disinterested.
One day Dukni appeared in the main alley of the slum with bruises on her
head, inficted by policemen from the Lanka thana searching for her daughter.
The daughter had been working as domestic help in a home in Ravindrapuri
from which several gold bars were stolen. The employer, "the Thakur, " had ac
cused Dukni's daughter, who then fed, deciding to resist the inevitable beating
as she was over eight months pregnant. Dukni would not reveal her daughter's
whereabouts. I had heard several stories of police beatings of old women while
I was working in N agwa. These stories were ofered as proof of the moral ille
gitimacy of the police and the district administration and their control by
"Brahman, Thakur, Bania. " They were, in efect, the fip side of the newspaper
images of old woman voting. The old woman's body, icon par excellence of the
individual in relation to the state, was in Nagwa materialized as the battered vic
tim of the police. In talking of Dukni's beating, however, her neighbors also
looked to her family. The rumor was that Dukni's daughter had been seduced
254 CHAPATI BODI ES
by her employer, and when her husband discovered this and went t o the Ravin
drapuri house to complain, the rich man accused the daughter of stealing his
gold to defect the charge of adultery. The loose morals of Dukni's daughter,
neighbors suggested, were in part responsible for her mother's condition.
Dukni's national body pointed to the police; her familial body pointed to her
daughter.
This daughter was eventually found and arrested; her husband was not in
Varanasi and so Dukni gave Panvasi 260 rupees to bail her out and bribe the po
licemen. The daughter returned to Shukulpur, another basti near the Sankat
Machan temple further west, and had the baby Several evenings later, Rajesh and
I were about to call it a day when we heard a commotion near Babu Lal's house.
We joined a group, including Siranji, wondering what was happening. We saw
Dukni's other daughter run into the lane and begin screaming at Panvasi: "How
could you beat my mother? Why not beat me instead? Go ahead! I am young! She
is old! " Dukni came up to our group, holding out her arms. "Look what he did to
me. He beat me. I will call the police. I wl go to the thana. " She turned to Pan
vasi and began to abuse him and Gita Devi: "Your wife is a whore. She has turned
you against me. You're a pair of sinners. " Panvasi screamed at her in turn, and
they began again accusing each other of eating the other's money unti the step
son again began to throw blows down upon Dukni.
The crowd separated them. Much of Nagwa had gathered by this time. Next
to me Siranji, with a ringside view, was taking it all in quietly Small groups broke
of Some accused Panvasi of being a bad son. "He should have helped her out
with her debts, and not demanded that she repay them. " Others blamed Dukni.
"She is a quarrelsome woman. Her mind is not correct. She is always abusing
him. " People turned to me, knowing the limited categories I
t
ended to think in,
and told me to note that the relationship between a stepson and a stepmother
would never lead to shanti or sevi.
What had been at stake was a loan for one thousand rupees taken from a
moneylender by the daughter whom Panvasi had bailed out of jail and the daugh
ter's husband. The two still owed eight hundred rupees on the loan. Panvasi, rais
ing money for his annual Ravi Das birthday puja, found that the moneylender had
put the word out that the family owed a signifcant sum of money and had no busi
ness collecting and spending further sums. Furious, Panvasi confronted his step
mother and demanded that she and her daughter pay back the eight hundred ru
pees remaining. He would front four hundred rupees if they would match it, and
the brother-in-law could pay him back in the future. Dukni denied she agreed to
anyhing. "I make ten rupees a day by scrubbing people's pots; where would I get
four hundred rupees?" She ofered the counteraccusation that Panvasi spent much
of the bail money she had given him on liquor.
The social drama of Dukni and her stepson framed a set of complex and
difcult issues for the slum-fnancial disagreements, false accusations, drinking,
the abuse of women, hot-brained elderly-within a coherent narrative of the false
CHAPATI BODI ES 25
family. Mangri and her daughter, Babu Lal, and Siranji, Ram Lakhan, and Raghu
Ram, all heard in Dukni's and Panvasi's accusations a family situation qualita
tively dif erent from their own. The fundamental distance between this mother
and son not related by blood generated an ideal type for understanding old age in
terms of a weakened familial body, and at the same time distanced one's own ex
perience.
The most extreme of bakbak voices in N agwa basti was that of Dulari, the mad
woman of the crossing who ended up with Mother Teresa's nuns and a purloined
Durga. She represented a picture of total deprivation and old age weakness, so
much so that neighbors would consistendy use the language of madness-bhut
possession, cracked mind, half mind, ruined mind-as well as that of kmzon to
speak of her. Like Dukni, she represented an extreme of the Bad Family-in her
case, the absent family The epitome of the weak voice of bakbak, Dulari moved
beyond the opposition of weakener-weakened. She had no one to withhold sevi
from her. Beyond the possibility of even the Bad Family, she was heard as pure
voice, pointing beycd itself-in her case, to nothing.
A Child Is Being Lied
July 1996. A woman drowned in the Varuna, the northern limit to the sacred city.
One week later, in trying to piece together what had happened, I found that her age
kept shifing. I was with the contractor Ratnesh Pathak, who had worked with for
eign anthropologists before and was writing a book about their pretensions. In the
early afternoon, we reached the lane in Orderly Bazaar where the woman had
been accused of being a child-lifer, or lrsunhvi, and had been apprehended by
a group of young men, tied up, held overnight, and either pushed or forced to jump
into the river. At the head of the lane, a woman was selling pan; she turned out to
be the one who had raised the alarm against the lrsunghvi woman. She eyed us
in anger and fear as she said to Ratnesh that the child-lifter was kre, tough, a word
suggestive of a powerful adulthood, less of youth or old age. "She got in the house
from the roo( I found her covered in oil , holding my one-year-old granddaughter
and leading my four-year-old grandson by the hand, stealing them. " The oil: sev
eral other rumored gangs of thieves were said to cover themselves in oil so as to be
too slippery to catch, including the fabled Underwear Gang (kccha-baniin). Fear of
the latter had led to several accusations and vigiante kilings in the past.
The lrsunghvi thief was strong and the oil prevented the grandmother from
grabbing hold of and restraining her, so she held on to the thief's hair and started
to scream for help. She held on until relatives and other neighbors appeared. Sev
eral of the men surrounded the child-lifer and tied her up. That was the last, she
told us pointedy, that she saw of the oil-covered woman. S
o
me of the pan-seller's
relatives had since been arrested and were in custody She repeated how strong the
woman had been, and how serious the threat to the family. Ratnesh, going over
the details of the interview after we lef Orderly Bazaar, did not doubt that the
drowned woman had been a child-lifer but thought the pan-seller was lying about
what happened after her capture: "She had to know what happened to her. "
2
57
25
8 A CHI LD I S BEI NG LI FTED
The local police i n the neighborhood thana concurred with some of what the
pan-seller said. They had been responsible for rounding up suspects once the
corpse of the lakarsunhvi woman had been found in the Varuna. The thana police
were less committed to the grandmother's claim that her grandchildren were
being kidnapped, but they worked in a world where kids were routinely sold or ex
changed by adults and took the possibiity of child-lifting gangs at face value. They
did not mention the recent explosion of popular rumors of mysterious child-lifting
gangs that had spread throughout this part of the state. They noted the age of the
lakirsunhvi woman in prosaic terms: "She was about forty-fve. "
In a busy ofce, the superintendent of police for the city was dealing with sev
eral recent deaths of suspected lakrsunhvis in the context of an escalating num
ber of child-lifing rumors. He knew of the case, one of three persons in the city
killed over the past month afer being accused of chid-lifing. He wasn't sure of
the woman's age, but presumed that she was old given the connection of such ru
mors to fears of witchcraft. To explain, he began to construct tpologies. There
are two kinds of cases in which persons are killed as child-lifers, he told me. Ei
ther an old enmity or land dispute is being settled under the cover of a child-lifing
accusation, or people come to believe that their victim is a child-lifer independent
of any such vested interests.
In either case, he continued, the kiling is justied in one of three ways. First,
the victim is said to be part of an organized gang who steal children for adoption,
bonded labor, prostitution, professional beggary, or, increasingly the theft of their
kidneys. Over the past fve years, more and more poor BaHarsis I knew had men
tioned the possibility of selling one of their kidneys in exchange for needed cash;
though donation of kidneys by live unrelated donors had been declared illegal and
though Varanasi was not a center for informal-sector black-market donation, the
possibility of such an exchange was universally believed and rumors of clinics
where these were carried out abounded. Second, the victim is said to be a 4ain or
a curail, a witch or a demoness. Though the two terms are distinct for many who
use them-4ains being old women who curse people with their angry voices, eager
for their misfortune, and curails being ghosts of dead women in the form of young
and beautiful enchantresses who kill people, eager for their livers-the superin
tendent of police collapsed them together as 4ain-curail and associated them with
old and poor women. Third, the victim is said to be a lakarsunghvi, a child's bed
time terror come to life. Lkirsunhvi carry sticks with a smell that attracts chil
dren, whom they kil, whose organs they may eat, and whose bodies they may
dump under bridges. Lrsunhvis are often thought of as babas, as wandering old
men or sannyasis. In z gg6, these several types of outsiders hungry for children
younger gang members, old 4ains, and lkarsunhvi babas-coalesced. For the su
perintendent of police for the city, the existence of such gangs was questionable,
and those killed as lakarsunghvis were usually old, poor, and therefore at risk. The
drowned woman became old: old women were necessary fgures in a tableau of
India as a Hobbesian world of vested interests and vulnerable individuals.
A CHI LD I S BEI NG LI FTED 2
59
This ofcer's superior, the senior superintendent of police, or SSP for Varanasi
district, was not in the city but in the spacious cantonment. For him, the woman
was old and half-naked, and he noted-using the language of the old Indian Lu
nacy Act-that her mind was probably unsound. She was most liely a doddering
beggar who wandered into a neighborhood where she did not belong. When
youth surrounded her and demanded to know why she was there and where she
was from, she could not, given her confused mind, articulate an adequate response
and confrmed her interlocutors' convictions that she was a child-lifer. Unlike the
other ofcers, the SSP saw the matter as one simply of superstition and baseless
rumor. Children had been mauled by wolves or hyenas to the northwest of
Varanasi, killings widely reported in the press, and the panic had spread to urban
areas like this one. If the police had been given rein to be more aggressive in com
bating the initial spread of rumor, he suggested in ending our interiew, the epi
demic would never have happened. The drowned woman was now not only old
but senile, her nonsense mirroring the nonsensical world of the superstitious
masses. In invoking the victim as old madwoman, the SSP ofered a world of mass
ignorance in which the police are not merely one more vested interest but an en
tity that ofers the redemptive deployment of force.
What had happened? On March r gg6, four months earlier, as the hot summer ap
proached and more persons began to sleep outside, reports of hyenas coming into
villages at night and stealing sleeping children began to spread in Sultanpur, Jaun
pur, and Pratapgarh, three eastern districts of the state. Some of the missing chil
dren's bodies were recovered, with fesh and internal organs gouged out. The word
for hyena, larbaghi, is consonant with the word for child-lifter, lakrsunhvi, and
refects local knowledge that small children are at particular risk, especially when
sleeping outdoors, for being caught by predatory animals. Lrbag hi stories, lie
lakrsunhvi stories, are told to children to keep them from wandering of
As the number of reports of missing children grew, hyena tales were supple
mented by those of larsunghvi, witches, and child-lifing gangs. The number of
deaths of persons . thought to be culpable soon surpassed the number of missing
children. Such explosions of child-lifting, or of child-lifing rumors, had occurred
periodically in eastern Uttar Pradesh, the last a little over a decade earlier. Like the
r gg6 events, previous occurrences of rumor have combined fears of wild animals,
old babas and witches, gangs, vested interests, and the stealing of children by
physicians. But whereas during earlier episodes the actions of gangs and of physi
cians centered on international adoption, beggary, and sex work markets-often,
it was said, fnanced by the desire of Gulf states for cheap Indian materiel-the
r gg6 rumors stressed the new world market in children's kidneys. One nursing
home in Varanasi, and the physician who ran it, were at the center of kidney
stealing rumors, to the extent that he was forced to take a leave of absence and
efectively shut down the home. 1
260 A CHI LD I S BEI NG LI FTED
In the districts where most of these children had died, local leaders organized
fearful and angry vilagers against perceived inaction by district administrations. A
Varanasi-Lucknow train was stopped and some of its coaches were burned. A se
nior police team investigating the matter was waylaid and its members humiliated,
forced to admit publicly the existence of a conspiracy that a lrsunghva and not a
mere lrbag ha was behind the deaths. Medical teams doing health checkups and
vaccinations of children were simiarly waylaid, and the summer's child health
campaign came to a standstill. 2 In Lucknow and Delhi, such local responses were
said to be the work of vested interests; still, pressure on the local administrative
services mounted, and in late June after an intensive search a den of "man
eating" wolves was fnally found and dispatched. The event was carried in the na
tional press as the truth behind the rumors from backward eastern Uttar Pradesh.
Locally wolves were ofered as a less sinister alternative to the dangerously alliter
ative lrbag ha s.
Yet within hours of the capture, new missing children were being reported
throughout the region. 3 Stories of captured wolves now competed with those of a
new category collapsing lakrsunhva and lrbagha: according to the Pat of
July 2, "The [Pratapgarh] District Hospital was thronged today by people who
wanted to have a glimpse of the alleged human hyena who was caught and
handed over to the police . . . . The alleged human hyena is under police custody
in the paying ward of the District Hospital and nobody is permitted to meet him.
He behaves like a lunatic, which people say is a coverup to escape police action. "4
The human hyena was eventually released, but reports of "a black thing"-"an
animal-like fgure which could run on two hind legs" -spread. 5 Gangs were said
to employ persons expert in mimicking animals. Other government teams began
to systematically hunt down wolves and the mainstream Hindi press began in
cluding tips on how to diferentiate dogs, hyenas, and wolves. 6 On the side of the
animals, Maneka Gandhi-member of parliament, daughter-in-law of the late
prime minister Indira Gandhi, and longtime animal-rights activist-argued that
innocent wolves and hyenas were being kiled so that the state could avoid taking
the prevalence of organized gangs and their convivial relationship to political
leaders seriously
Meanwhie, the beatings and kilings of suspected lifers escalated, the victims
usually being some combination of old, female, homeless, and mad. 7 A ragpicker
woman in Kanpur was, in the words of a local headline, "roasted alive"; following
her death, beggars and ragpickers in the city went into hiding.8 An old man was
walking with his grandson and was taken for a lrsunghva baba, beaten, and de
livered to the police. Whether because of the man's shock, the fact that no one
would listen to him, or his unsoundness of mind, the police were no more able to
hear his protests as intelligible than was the crowd that frst caught him, and they
beat him too. 9 And in Varanasi, a woman drowned. Her estimated age varied, de
pending upon whether one saw and heard her as a criminal, an accused witch, or
an old madwoman, depending upon whether the grandmother's panic, the super-
A CHI LD I S BEI NG LI FTED 261
intendent of police's realpolitik, or the senior superintendent of police's rational
ism was most compelling. 10 Something was badly amiss, and a cavalcade of shape
shifting outsiders threatened the only sure entitlement of even the poorest families,
their children. Old witch women and babas, doctors promising health for all, and
human hyenas stood in for one another-each the uncanny incarnate, the Other
to the family.
Elder's Day. Reproduced by arrangement with The Times of India Group.
EIGHT
Dog Ladies and the Beriya Baba
i which te gendered old bod i heard dif eretly at home and i t intrstice
DOGS AND OLD WOMEN
Mashima, Auntie, lived in the Bengali quarter. Early each morning she left her
small rented room with a bag of just-baked chapatis, made with four bought from
her monthly allowance. She stopped at the homes of several families in the quar
ter, Bengali Brahmans lie herself and collected a chapati or two from each. Thus
armed, she would proceed slowly along the long lane running the length of the
quarter. Her hungry companions would begin to follow, but Mashima was not yet
ready for them and kept a steady pace. At Sonarpura crossing, she emerged from
the network of lanes and crossed the main road to a well-known sweet shop, the
Ocean of Mik. The owner was fond of Mashima and would give her sweet curds
leftover from the previous day: "But they're not for humans, Mashima. " Mashima
reentered the lanes where her companions awaited her eagerly: they were all dogs.
They followed behind her in a growing pack and growled furiously at any passerby
who appeared in their dog's-eye view to threaten Mashima. When she reached her
destination, a small clearing deep within the lanes where more dogs were waiting,
Mashima sat down for a moment to catch her breath. Then she began her day's
work, feeding the dogs of Varanasi.
Dogs were not beloved in the city My friends the Banerjees, one of the
Mashima's sources for chapatis, then had two pet dogs that they had trained; the
family was considered eccentric. For Mr. Banerjee, a civil engineer who had in
sisted his wife attend graduate school against her initial wishes, and who then de
cided to raise his two daughters like sons so that they would always be self
sufcient, training purebred dogs was part of a consciously modernist fashioning
of life and famiy. But for his neighbors, dogs were dirty-skulking in dank and
odorous corners, barking incessantly at night, wandering over the cremation
ghats, feeding on whatever they might fnd there-and not worth the efort. Chil-
263
264 DOG LADI ES AND THE BERI YA BABA
dren i n the quarter played with dogs, learning from their siblings and friends in
early chidhood to elicit yelps by hitting, kicking, and stoning them. Dogs were in
terstitial creatures, essential inhabitants of the space between households, and as
such had no strong claims to domestic support.
Dogs, Mashima told me, were her children. She would talk to, scold, and com
fort them. She was always enlarging her route, waxing ever more powerful in old
age by including more lanes and more dogs. "She has no one, " noted her neigh
bors, framing her as the pathetic kviz woman whom the professors at the Vas
ant College luncheon had once told me was the typical old person, the abject
fgure who comes to stand for the old age of others. She was a child widow, one
who had lost her husband when she was fourteen and already the mother of a
baby daughter. The daughter had been married for many years and lived in Cal
cutta. Mashima herself had lived in Calcutta unti the early 1 970s when she came
to Kashi. She was now in her seventies. Her family was wealthy and, she told me,
its members were cultured bhadralk she had nephews in Canada and other for
eign places and had met the fmmaker Satyajit Ray Some of her brothers and her
daughter sent her small monthly remittances, and she received a Central Govern
ment pension (minus fve rupees to the postman to guarantee its delivery). Alto
gether, it was enough to live simply and pay the rent, with some funds left over for
the dogs. Still, Mashima described herself as a religious mendicant oblivious to
gain and surving of the daily kindnesses of others.
"Why not feed . . . the cows?" a neighbor who objected to the daily parade of
dogs once suggested. Other people fed cows, Mashima responded, but dogs too
had claims upon us. Dogs, she used to say, were also mendicants, lie the old peo
ple of the city But most neighbors to whom I recounted the story of the Dog Lady
resisted the explicit connection of old people and dogs that Mashima put forth.
Dogs did not explicitly anchor the discourse of old age in the quarter or in the
other three neighborhoods. Others besides old women and dogs shared the inter
stice; the neighbor's comment about cows suggested a more meaningful associa
tion. Like the old, cows were in theory objects of veneration found throughout the
sacred city. But in practice both cows and widows were obstacles that blocked
one's path. Banarsis frequently recited a couplet on the things visitors trip over
when they reach the holy city:
Ran4, sanr, nrhz, sannyiz
lnse bache sevi t Ki! 1
Widow, bul, steps, sannyasi,
Avoiding these one can enjoy Kashi.
Varanasi was the city of holy things in painful excess-liberated renunciates, steps
descending to the Ganga, auspicious animals, and pious old widows-but it was
also the city of a cultivated insouciance and joie de vivre. Widows, classically in
auspicious in Hindu India, did, like cows, steps, and holy men, become part of the
DOG LADI ES AND THE BERI YA BABA 26
5
spiritual capital of Kashi as pilgrimage center. But for those who had to live in
Varanasi everyday, the couplet suggested that life was more pleasurable to the ex
tent that one avoided the claims of the pious and pure and their self-appointed
protectors. The ambivalent image of widows in excess was perhaps more extreme
in the temple town of Brindavin in western Uttar Pradesh, where a tout once ac
costed me and urged me to make a contribution to his family's temple where every
night "ten thousand Bengali mothers" were fed. Fortifed by my contribution, he
promised, this gargantuan mass of widowed mothers would sing bhajans, hymns,
to God, and garner me the resulting merit.
Mothers had to eat: thus the tout's claim upon me and the source of his not in
signifcant income. Mothers and cows were never of the interstice but belonged to
someone and somewhere. Bhajan ashrams, homes for upper-caste Hindu widows
where their voices could be collectivized and routinized as maternal blessing
through the bhajan, transformed the threat of the individual widow's voice.
Whatever limited resources such widow houses ofered, old women who lacked
even the slender protection of the domestication of their voice as bhajan were sel
dom heard as mothers. In the lanes of the old city, the voices of old kzvawomen
were heard less as mothers than as madwomen. Mashima did not mind the chil
dren who taunted her and cried ''agl, she told me; she could talk back to them.
The adults who made fun of her, who pulled at her clothes, or who accused her of
being a witch and giving the dogs poison were less easily dismissible. She could
talk back, but her Hindi was poor and in any case she tended to be misunder
stood. A much as the conditions of mendicancy this inability to make her voice
heard as other than degraded or repetitive noise grounded Mashima's dog
metaphor.
Like other elderly widows and old men of the quarter, Mashima spent the early
mornings visiting friends and aiding those less mobile. The maintenance of these
networks required considerable efort and mobility The ki vawas constantly be
tween households as she worked to domesticate the interstice. A the Dog Lady
Mashima was the most vivid example of an interstitial elder I knew, because in do
mesticating the interstice she attempted to transform its most pathetic signs-alley
dogs-into a family Her economic security her Brahman and bhadralok status, and
her personality all contributed to her fragile success. But most ki vawidows, and
other widows whose caste did not privilege ki vt as a solution to the threat of des
titution, were in danger of becoming Dog Ladies in a diferent sense, of being read
through the interstice as embodiments of not only pathos but of a threatening bark
and complete degradation. The genius in Mashima's eccentricity was in this: that
she explicitly spoke of the condition of the ki vt' elderly in refusing the lure of the
bovine and claiming kinship with dogs.
Though not self-consciously invoked by most old people, dogs were powerful
signs of the interstice and were frequently juxtaposed with fgures of interstitial
old women. The juxtaposition was sometimes iconic, that is, dogs and old women
266 DOG LADI ES AND THE BERI YA BABA
were associated because they appeared to share certain qualities. Thus on the oc
casion of the United Nations-sponsored "Elders' Day" an internationalist holi
day locally advocated by groups like HelpAge India, the Tmes q India in rg88
commemorated the occasion with a large photograph of three old women clad in
the white saris of widows and shown next to a sleeping dog, seemingly white in the
picture (see photograph on p. 262). One of the widows has her back to us, the sec
ond has her mouth open, and the third is severely hunchbacked and holds a small
cane. The sleeping dog was one more marginal white-clad fgure in the gutter. 2
The Elder's Day image also conveyed a symbolic juxtaposition, that is, a con
nection between dogs and old women based upon particular cultural associations.
In both classical Hindu and popular local narrative, dogs were one of several ar
chetypical denizens of the ultimate dying spaces of the Hindu polis, the cremation
ghats. In Varanasi, necropolis par excellence, the ferce form of Lord Shiva known
as Bhairava was an important and powerfully transgressive deity and was closely
associated with dogs. 3 Each night, alongside the Ganga, dogs howled and barked
in menacingly lupine cadences: Bhairava was wandering the lanes and ghats, seek
ing expiation for his sin, the death of Brahma, the old man of the gods. David
White, in his essay "Dogs Die," examined the dog as hellhound in Vedic and other
Indo-European traditions. 4 In Varanasi, dogs signifed degradation and putres
cence as much as death: they not only frequented cremation grounds but ate what
they could fnd there. To be "treated like a dog" thus conveyed a complex set of as
sociations suggesting both iconic dependency and noise and symbolic pollution
and threat.
OLD WOMEN AND MADWOMEN
As te str goes, the kin did and the queen lost her mind and the kingdom turned into
a wastland.
BHI SHAM SAH:l , "J_r. j .\EITO"
Mashima recognized and could contain her dog-ness. She received family assis
tance and could aford to accept no cooked food for hersel( She took chapatis
and in doing so maintained a social network-only for the dogs. By refusing food
for herself and by transforming dogs into cows, she challenged what it meant to be
old and dependent on the interstice. If dogs could be cows, then Mashima
through her practice was not the abject aunt but the good mother, daily distribut
ing the largesse of the Ocean of Mik.
Still, for most passersby she seemed pathetic. One neighbor was my friend
Biay through whom I had frst met Mashima. He told me that he knew that I was
on the lookout for crazy old people. "She's been in the lane just outside my house
every morning for years, " he told me one morning, "I wouldn't have noticed that
she was quite mad but for you. " The powers of the imported gaze aside, however,
many local kids didn't need me to tell them the Dog Lady was a mad old pagf. The
frequency with which local children sought out and teased old women-calling
DOG LADI ES AND THE BERI YA BABA 26
7
them madwomen-was one of the reasons the project of studying senility in
Varanasi had evolved in the frst place. In 1 983 during an earlier stay in the Ben
gali quarter, I was sitting outside my rented room on Pandey Ghat while fve or six
children were playing nearby A hunchbacked old woman wearing a dirty white
sari appeared in the lane and quietly set about collecting some dung patties that
were not her own from a wall on which they were drying. One of the children saw
her, motioned to his friends, and the whole gang ran over, shouting "Paglz! paglz!"
and pelting her with small stones. The woman began cursing the children. Strong
and archaic curses from the frail old hunchback sounded funny to the kids, and
they laughed and laughed. The paglz lef of stealing dung patties and limped away
Koki, the old Bengali widow who lived in the Ravindrapuri stairwell, was sim
iarly an interstitial elder at high risk for becoming a palt. Though she called her
stairwell home, Koki spent her days going from house to house and from institu
tion to institution-visiting friends, receiving foodstufs, going from the Ganga to
the Durga temple. Continually on the road at a vigorous gait, Koki brooked no in
terruptions. Whenever I tried to talk to her in motion, she would tell me that she
was busy: "Get lost! " Dogs and chidren were her other betes noirs. If a dog fol
lowed at her heels, Koki would turn and begin scolding it. Chidren, both those in
the colony and from the slum across the road next to the abandoned cinema hall,
would come running to watch the mad widow talk to dogs. Children found
Koki-with her busy gait and sharp voice-a delight to mock and call pal. Koki,
unlie genteel Mashima, would quickly let loose with a string of Bengali curses
that few of the chidren could understand. The heteroglossia of the old voice-its
incomprehensible and varying cadences of class, rural life, region, and level of ed
ucation-added to the pleasures of its elicitation.
Years after the Bengali quarter stoning, I asked many of the younger brothers
and sisters of the erstwhile Pandey Ghat gang what was the reason for stoning a
pagl. The kids all said that you teased a pal because of her voice. In particular,
they hoped for the following sorts of things: gals, or abuses, ofen quite obscene
and usually in the form of a curse; errors, which widows-often from distant re
gions of India, Bangladesh, and Nepal-made when they spoke quickly in Hindi
or Bengali; and bakbak, or utter nonsense.
Pagls would curse, but their curses were empty and powerless. They were mad,
but mad in the way usually only kids could see. Biay and his neighbors saw
Mashima as eccentric, but it took the transposed gaze of the ethnographic mo
ment-"! wouldn't have noticed that she was quite mad but for you"-to trans
form pathos into pathology Chidren, not yet mature enough to hear the familial
body or its lack in the old voice, tended to hear its humor. Small children were
sometimes frightened by such old women, and their older siblings and playmates
might tease them with the threat that the old witch, like some lakrsunghvl, would
get them. But for most kids, most of the time, old women's voices were not threat
ening in Varanasi. The madness heard by children in old voices was gendered;
there were also paal, madmen, in the lanes of the quarter, but they were usually
268 DOG LADI ES AND THE BERI YA BABA
far younger men. The old men or babas who wandered the interstices of the city
were heard dif erently. And yet the r gg6 larsunhvi murders suggested that the
hearing of interstitial voices in moments in which the familial and
.
domestic ap
peared critically under attack could transform the usual scafolding of gender and
age in what rendered voices crazy, dangerous, and witchlike.
MADWOMEN AND WITCHES
The uncan' ef ct r epilps and r madness has t same orn. The lyman sees in t
the workin r frces hitherto u'pected in hi flowmen.
SI GMUND t" REL' D,
"
THE
'
U:CA!SY
' "
Stolen dung, the voices of old women, and the movements of children mattered
diferently in Varanasi's rural hinterland. On the rare occasions when such things
happened, suspected witches or lrsunhvis were attacked less as strangers whose
voices could not be heard as meaningful other than indexing menace, and more as
neighbors or relatives whose voices made demands that challenged shifting
confgurations of land, capital, and sevi.
Martha Chen and Jean Dreze's work on the survival and quality of life of In
dian widows and Bina Agaral's examination of the relation between land own
ership and the survival and quality of life of women more generally have drawn
attention to the correlation of witchcraf accusations and the contested ownership
of land by unmarried, separated and widowed women. 5 Witchcraft has fourished
in areas that have been rendered marginal through the intensication of a cash
economy the Sanskritization of practices of land tenure and patriarchal author
ity, and the delegitimation of women's rights in land. Earlier ethnographic work
on rural witchcraft accusation and death in north India, such as Carstairs's Deat
q a With, has been reread by Chen in terms of the contested land ownership of
the suspected witch. 6
Such economic interpretations of witchcraft accusation have been lacking and
are critical. Broader socioeconomic reasoning may also be useful to analyze why
periodic intensifcations of witchcraf and child-stealing accusation-as in r gg6-
occur when they do. Several social facts may lie some distance behind the lr
sunghvi rumors: the everyday violence, to use Nancy Scheper-Hughes's phrase/
when parents and other family members feel they are forced to bond or sell not
only their children's labor but the rights to their bodies; the widespread knowl
edge, in eastern Uttar Pradesh, that there were brokers to whom one could sell one
of one's kidneys for a relatively high price, thus the knowledge that the global mar
ket had an interest in separating one into salable parts; and the recent rise in the
cost of numerous basic commodities with the decline in government controls and
subsidies in the wake of neoliberal "structural adjustment," and its potential efect
or people's sense of vulnerability within a growing space of marginality
The question for us here is why and how certain old people become represen
tative of the forces that seem to impinge upon households and communities, in
DOG LADI ES AND THE BERI YA BABA 26
9
both the normalized theodicy of everyday misfortune and violence and the extra
ordinary theodicy of social panics. How witchcraf may work as a way to confront
misfortune has been one of the central themes in the anthropology of sufering. 8
My approach here will be to ask what is it that in extraordinary times makes the
voice and appearance of certain persons not humorously or abjectly witchlike but
frighteningly and uncannily so, and, moving in the other direction, to ask how the
possibility or social memory of the uncanny may structure the everyday abjection
of the interstitial dyng space. How does the repetitive request of the elder for sup
port become heard as a dangerous curse, and how do memories of the curse struc
ture more everyday hearings?
In his essay on the experience of the "unheimlich" or "uncanny" Freud begins
with two obserations. First, afer the philosopher Friedrich Schelling, he describes
the class of things that tend to provoke an uncanny feeling in us as follows: "Every
thing is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to
light. " Second, he notes that the word's contrary heimlich (and the same is true in
diferent ways for "canny" and the more literal translation "homely") , can suggest
not only the comfortable, trusted, and familiar but also the secretive and unpleas
ant, "so that 'heimlich' comes t have t meanin usual! ascribed t 'unheimlich. ' "9 The fa
miliar is suddenly strange: a rupture appears in the taken-for-grantedness of
things. The old woman's everyday bakbak is suddenly weird and threatening.
This return of the repressed works on the usual two levels for Freud, suggesting
both an earlier developmental stage of infantile narcissism and an earlier societal
stage of primitive animism. Freud goes on to question why "the phenomenon of
the 'double' "-the perceived repetition of events, likenesses, and experiences
often generates an uncanny feeling. For readers of Freud less committed to his
specifc narratives of child development and cultural evolution, the experience of
the uncanny and particularly of the uncanny double has come to suggest a rup
ture in the symbolic order and a confict between the meaning of a sign and its
materialit
The unexpected strangeness of the old body is rooted in the disruption of its fa
miial signifcance. The familial body of the old person, whether literally displaced
from its expected charpoy or hearth into the liminal space between households or
discursively displaced from its familial context into a new administrative science of
old age, regains a voice and is no longer the unbearable inhabitant of a dyng
space. For the urban middle class, over the past century this displaced and
sufering elder has periodically embodied a colonial and postcolonial predicament
of culture in which the familiar and foreign form shifting hybrids.
For the rural and urban poor, we have seen how the politics and phenomenol
ogy of everyday weakness diminishes the unique signifcance of the old body. If
the rupture of the familial itself is to an extent normalized, sufering old bodies
may have less apocalyptic signicance for the poor than for the bhadralk and struc
turally similar groups. Old bodies that bespeak millenarian promise-such as, per
haps, the old woman of the Balua afair who took no food for fve days and
270 DOG LADI ES AND THE BERI YA BABA
nights-seem to do so by radically renouncing any familial dependency Within
the transactional networks sustaining persons and families in communities lie
Nagwa, the bodies of vulnerable children more than those of vulnerable elders
may become metonyms of family and ghar and of their transactional health. For
Siranji's family the old woman was a far more ambivalent vehicle of the adequacy
of their gifts than was her grandson Raju. Throughout Nagwa, old people were at
risk for being perceived as useless mouths continually demanding chapatis des
tined for the equally vulnerable but far more promising young. When as in 1 996
the relation between a marginalized community's health and the well-being and
survival of its children appears radically threatened, particularly given the chapati
counts that frame the young and old as contestants for surval, old persons may
be at greater risk of becoming strange threats: witches, lrsunhvas.
In gerontopolitan Varanasi, the ubiquity and ideological centrality of intersti
tial old bodies and voices renders them part of the normalized topography of the
urban exterior: rant, san4, nrhz, sannyasi. Like cows and steps, widows and babas
are familiar and only occasionally irksome features of the landscape. Interstitial
old voices in the city do not threaten any but the youngest children. These are
ofen teased by their older playmates-see the old woman, she's a witch, a tain
and are shushed into bed by the admonitions of mothers and aunts: hush, or the
lakrsunhva will get you. Such scary tales might be seen to evoke and rehearse the
crises of child development, afer Freud, but in the context of everyday and ex
traordinary concerns surrounding chid surival their ubiquity takes on a diferent
cast.
The fgure of the old baba or witch of play and bedtime fantasy ready to de
vour or steal young chidren, recalls an uncanny circulation between the very old
and very young, ofering a grammar for a dif erent sort of intimate enemy than
the alienated familial bodies of Ghar Kali. In everyday play the monstrous elderly
are invoked to stabilize dif erences of age: the old but not very old tell of them to
their children; the young but not very young tell of them to their younger siblings:
young is to old as innocence and vulnerability are to knowledge and danger. But
witches recall the fragility of the familial . At critical moments when the hege
monic obviousness and necessity of the social order threaten to collapse-when
the strangeness of the order of things overwhelms its functional content-the
order of generation itself is rendered unstable and opaque.
Michael Taussig in The Devil and Commodit Ftishim in Sout America described
how Bolivian peasants in the context of the introduction of tin mining, the in
tensication of wage labor, and the commodifcation of body time, land, rela
tionships, and life, "captured" the transformations of commodity fetishization by
"subjecting [them] to a paganism. " The devil in peasant narrative is monstrous
but not terrifying, an ambivalent fgure refecting the conficted yet critical con
sciousness of peasants regarding the source of their growing afiction. 1 0 Witches
and dangerous old babas are ambivalent in a diferent sense, humorous fgures of
everyday generational diference periodically transformed into monstrous fgures
DOG LADI ES AND THE BERI YA BABA 271
of emergency The oscilation between these may refect an efort to capture a set
of social processes by which both rural peasants and urban slum-dwellers are con
stituted as subjects through intensifying forms of commodifcation-of one's chil
dren, of one's body parts-that explode the borders of both the family and the
body
In the everyday play of children as well as in the literature of afiction of the
region around Varanasi and more generally in north India, the relation between
terror and abjection circles around the female witch. 1 1 Old men as babas, as I will
discuss below, draw upon the dense feld of the renunciate and the rishi. The am
biguity of the doubled fgure of widow-witch specifcally indexes the ambiguity of
mother-aunt in the narrative of the Bad Family Dogs, ghouls, and Bhairava are
joined on their cremation ghat perambulations in urban folklore by the fgures of
qis and curail-like vampiresses; the old woman as dog and madwoman draws
upon the stock fgure of the ri in.
The psychoanalytic readings of Carstairs and Kakar identify the ubiquity of
wtches and demonesses in north Indian folklore and mythology in terms of the
bad mother so central to their analyses: the demonic or witchlike bad mother is an
oedipal archetype of the Indian child's perceived rejection by his inconstant
mother when extended family pressure forces her to relinquish him to his father
and uncles. 1 2 Such bad-mother explanations are impoverished, ignoring the expe
rience of girls and women, the cross-societal frequency of witches and their his
torical transformations, the relation of witch accusations to land disputes, and the
oscillation between the everyday and the monstrous. Even from within a psycho
dynamic framework-one attentive to the relation of sociocultural dimensions of
child-rearing to the constitution of local worlds, to what Gananath Obeysekere
has called deep structure 1 3 -the bad mother narrative avoids more interesting
questions. Old witches are grandmothers or aunts far more than mothers. To ex
haust their meaning within the framework of kinship in terms of the mother or
her transformations is to elide the importance of other kin in family structure and
particularly in the raising of children. 1 4
In his discussion of the accused "witch" Dhapu in a Rajasthani vilage,
Carstairs attempted to suggest that the old woman's aggressively angry voice-f
which other villagers had long been resentful and sometimes afraid-laid the
seeds for her eventual accusation as having caused various severe illnesses and mis
fortunes and her being hacked to death. Dhapu looked out for her own family's in
terests to an extreme; she was resented by all the other women and men of the vil
lage. Dhapu may have been at risk because she had "acted in such a manly
fashion" throughout a series of land disputes. Chen has reinterpreted this mate
rial, showing the centrality of these land disputes to Dhapu's accusation and
death. 1 5
The relation between the exploitation of interstitial old women and the con
tested hearing of their voice emerges sharply in a 1 91 1 short story by the Hindi
writer Premchand, Ganb k hai, "The Lament of the Poor. " Premchand often
272 DOG LADI ES AND THE BERI YA BABA
wote of life i n the villages near Varanasi where he grew up. Manga, a Brahman
widow lie Mashima and Koki, entrusts her late husband's pension to the wealthy
village advocate, Munshi Ramsevak, for safekeeping. She discovers only too late
that he has spent much of it and has no intention of returning any. Manga goes to
the vlage counci for justice, "but a poor widow's anger is just the sound of a
blank bullet that may scare a child but has no real efect at al. " Manga stops work
ing, stops keeping house, and devotes herself single-mindedly to her hatred of
Munshi Ramsevak. Her progress from anger to bakbak to silence, culminating in
her death, is narrated by Premchand as a chronicle of the metonymic voice.
This voice is at frst barely present: there is no one, Premchand reminds us, who
will listen to the voice of an old and poor widow But her obsession transforms
Manga dramatically from a weak and unheard body into one increasingly
identifed entirely with her voice: day and all night, walkng or sitting, she had
only one idea: to inveigh against Munshi Ramsevak. Seated day and night at the
door of her hut she ferently cursed him. For the most part in her pronounce
ments she employed poetic speech and metaphors so that people who heard her
were astonished. " Manga's voice moves from a direct language of complaint,
which cannot be heard, to a rich and bloody use of metaphor, which is. As she
shifs into a metalanguage in which she conveys her anger through the poetry of
madness, Manga as voice fnally gains an audience. There is, however, a price in
becoming-just a voice. Adults are astonished, chidren make fun of her, and "grad
ually her mind gave way Bare-headed, bare-bodied, wth a little hatchet in her
hand, she would sit in desolate places. She abandoned her hut and was seen wan
dering around the ruins in a cremation ghat along the river-disheveled, red-eyed,
grimacing crazily her arms and legs emaciated. "
The repetitive voice i s located within the social marginality of the interstice,
and precedes the fact of madness. A she becomes increasingly demonic, Manga
moves from object of derision to one of fear: "When they saw her like this people
were frightened. Now no one teased her even for fun. " Manga becomes like a fe
male ascetic, immersed in the signs of death; she is like a bitch, scrounging around
the cremation ghat. And these transformations are expressed through her voice:
"She had earned the title of the local mad woman jaf] . She would sit alone,
talking to herself for hours, expressing her intense desire to eat, smash, pinch and
tear Ramsevak's fesh, bones, eyes, liver and the like, and when her hatred reached
its climax she would turn her face toward Ramsevak's house and shriek the terri
ble words, ' I' ll drink your blood! "'
Manga's voice is now that of the vampire witch. It i s no longer the ol d person's
lament for food: like the old woman of Balua, Manga refuses al transaction.
"Manga ate nothing. . . . Even afer a barrage of threats and abuse she refused
to eat. " Al that remains is the primal voice-as witch, as beast, and as that epi
tome of inauspiciousness and danger, the owl: "More terrible than her words was
her wild laughter. In the imagined pleasure of drinking Munshii's blood she
would burst into laughter that resounded with such demoniacal volence, such
DOG LADIES AND THE BERIYA BABA 2
73
bestial ferocity that when people heard it in the night their blood was chilled. It
seemed as though hundreds of owls were hooting together."
Manga lies on Munshi Ramsevak's threshold. Only one child-Ramsevak's
own wayward son Ramgulam-continues to torment her. Eventually her cry sub
sides, she retreats into the last, silent voice of old age, and she dies on Ramsevak's
doorstep. The advocate is ostracized for the murder of a Brahman, but for him
and his wife a greater torment than the now-angry villagers is Manga herself bod
iless but still present as a voice. "Several times a low voice reached them from
within the earth: "I'll drink your blood . . . . "
1
. 6 Ramsevak's wife dies of fright,
Ramsevak ultimately immolates himself taking on the classic fate of the abject
widow, and Ramgulam, the mocker of old pagl', winds up in the reformatory
Premchand as social critic transforms the pali from object of derision into
agent of retributive justice. He does so through her voice, drawing on a heteroglot
complex of interstitial voices contained in the lament of the paglz: dog, owl, fear
some ascetic witch. Yet Manga's victory requires her death: only the killing of a
Brahman on his doorstep explodes the fction of Munshi's reputation for sevi, the
source of his moral standing. His family unravels. Manga's voice, previously dis
countable as that of the interstitial old woman and then bewildering as the curse
of the madwoman, is ultimately located on the threshold of a bad family-which
explains and redeems it. Again, Ghar Kali.
The old woman of Ghar Kali is bare-breasted, a complex sign of her disen
gagement from material concerns and of her degraded treatment. The sexually
explicit old widow also draws upon the erotic connotations of the wdow as the
unhusbanded woman and as the prostitute. A common word for "widow" also
connotes whore. Saraswati, in his study of kivi widows, noted the association
frequently made by his Varanasi informants between widows and prostitutes.
Young widows in particular were seen as having few other sources for meeting
their economic needs and sensual cravings.
1
7
The threat of both the young widow's body and the old widow's voice was medi
ated through its institutionalization in bhajan. Bhajan was central to middle-class
piety in the colonies. Amita Mukherjee and many of her neighbors attended groups
of older women and sometimes men who sang hymns together, daily or weekly For
indigent widows, bhajan was not only a site of community but a source of livelihood.
On Mir Ghat, not far from the cremation pyres of Manikarnika Ghat, a beau
tiful old red brick building that had seen fner days housed one such bhajan
ashram. Here both young and old widows stayed in exchange for their voices.
They sang bhajans throughout the day fnanced by patrons who accumulated
merit through both the gif itself and the praises of God sung. The threat of the
widow's body was inverted: in the ashram, nonwidows threatened. The building
was well-guarded by neighbors and the widows themselves. On an early visit, a
widow who decided that I was up to no good chased me up the steps of the ghat
with a stick. The separation of the bhajan ashram from the dangers of the inter
stice was aggressively maintained.
2
74
DOG LADIES AND THE BERIYA BABA
The production of bhajan transformed the repetitious voice from bakbak to di
vine rhythm, and ofered a space to contain the simultaneously dangerous and en
dangered body. The voice rthe body-the complaint of the destitute or uncared
for or sexually ambiguous widow-is silenced; it becomes the voice witout a body
or rather, is given a new body the divine body of Krishna. But constant disem
bodiment was a burden for most of the ashram widows; they tended to grind
through their bhaans soullessly Their rather mournful noise, early in the morn
ing on Mir Ghat, was occasionally punctuated by the voices of women on pil
grimage-as the boats of the latter drifed by the windows of the room-chanting
bhajans joyously For its hearers, there was irony in the institutionalized bhajan; it
could not but point elsewhere. "How is their health?" I asked a young man who
lives behind the Mir Ghat Bhajan Ashram, about the widows. He shrugged,
"They are old." ''nd how are their minds?" I continued. He shrugged again,
"They sing bhajans. " Safe from being heard as doglike or witchlike, these voices of
God still spoke to the absence of family and to the unhappy mind of the intersti
tial old woman.
DOGS AND OLD MEN
In his well-known story "Burhz k" ("Old Aunt"), Premchand tells of an unnamed
elderly aunt, a childless widow, whose nephew Buddhiram ceases to care for her
once she makes over her property to him. Like Manga, the old aunt sufers because
she has "no one," but though she is treated like a pal' she does not become one.
Her two grandnephews persecute her because "chidren have a natural antipathy
to the old": "One would pinch her and fee; the other would douse her with water.
Auntie would shriek and start to cry But it was well known that she only cried for
food, so no one would have paid attention to her grief and cries of distress. "
The aunt is reduced to a voice identifed solely with her demands upon her
family for food; she is not heard otherise. She is treated like a paglz but her voice,
within domestic space, never threatens to become inhuman. The confict between
the si and bahu is lifelong. Though the aunt is marginalized, she remains con
ceived by her relations as an active combatant in the chapati wars, in the contested
economy of the hearth. The domestic old woman is here less a dog than a chid.
In the context of the old aunt, Premchand notes that "old age is often a return to
chidhood. " Childhood is here a return to a less abject orality than that of the dog,
to the mind's identifcation with the mouth and its paired functions of eating and
lament: "The old aunt had no efort lef for anything save the pleasures of the
tongue, and to attract attention to her troubles she had no means but to cry" 1 8
The child suggests the inversion of power and of role, but it remains within the
language of kinship, within the space of domestic logic.
Buddhiram organizes a feast to celebrate his son's engagement ceremony, or
tilak. The old aunt is beside herself smelling all the food being prepared. But she
is afraid she'll incur her nephew's wife's wrath if she should step near the hearth.
DOG LADIES AND THE BERIYA BABA 2
75
She cannot control herself however, and twice comes out of her room at inap
propriate times to ask for a pun, a piece of bread. Both ties she is soundly scolded
and sent back without anything, and in the end she is forgotten about. Her grand
niece, the one family member sympathetic to her, leads her during the night to the
soied plates of the guests, where the old Brahman aunt stufs the polluted lefovers
into her mouth. She has at last become a beast. Her nephew's wife discovers her
there, and at last recognizes the Bad Family in the unexpected image of the dog.
The story ends not in the chaos of the voice and then death, but in the return from
second childhood toward a reclaimed adulthood. The voice of the old aunt comes
again to represent her reasonable needs and claims to status and is no longer an
icon of an infnite desire. Once ttansactional fows are restored, once the nephew's
wife allows the Bad Family to heal, the question of second childhood recedes.
As old kivi women are more frequently the dogs of the interstice than are
old babas; old men are more frequently the dogs of domestic space. Mausaji was
frequently described as a dog by his family in Chittupur: eating, shitting, pissing,
barking. The identifcation of the old man with the dog recurs in classical Puranic
and Ayuredic descriptions of old age. When the old man-who had symbolically
maintained his youth, "sixty years young," against the weakness of the son
fnally does fall into powerless decrepitude, the move from head of household to
supplicant conveys a far more abject reality than the cyclical politics of bahi and
si. Old men who give up household power are described in the Bhigavat Prna:
Being unable to maintain his family, the unfortunate fellow, whose all attempts have
ended in failure, becomes destitute of wealth and miserable. Being at a loss to know
what to do; the wretch goes on brooding and sighing. Just as miserly farmers neglect
old (and hence useless bulls), his wife and others do not treat him with respect as be
fore, as he has become incapable of maintaining them .... He is now nourished by
those whom he had brought up. He stays in the house like a dog eating what is con
temptuously thrown to him.1 9
In the Bengali quarter, an old friend of mine had announced along with Biay
his interest in helping me fnd crazy old people. Bijay "realized" the appropriate
ness of the Dog Lady within several days, but my friend Bishwanath waited six
months before suggesting one day that I visit his maternal grandfather, his daa,
who talked funny in a way he thought I would fnd interesting. When the invita
tion came, I had already developed my little symbolic interactionist tool kit and
decided without too much refection that Dadu's sahz nahzn voice had of course
suggested the threat of bad sevl to his family, and my being introduced to him thus
carried some risk. I was less interested in plumbing the violence and grace sur
rounding a friendship.
There was another issue. That I was introduced to Dadu at all may have had to
do in part with the diferent connotations within domestic space of the weak old
voice across gender. I was introduced by friends to far more "not right"-voiced old
men than old women. A famiy was more ofen on the defensive about the nature
2
7
6 DOG LADI ES AND THE BERI YA BABA
of an old woman's voice. Much might explain such an "obseration, " but within
the sorts of diferently gendered semantic networks I was exploring I found the
more naturalized state of domestic old men being-the-dog at least a partial way
into thinking about their slightly diminished threat of bad seva. To frame the
diference another way: old men were less ambivalently placed within a dying
space than were old women.
At a friend's anniversary party in New Delhi, a rather drunk businessman in his
ffties from Chandigarh told me a story about aging and becoming a dog. He ap
proached me and asked me what I studied, and I answered "senilit" He said:
"You know what we call this here . . . . "
"Sa(iana? I fnished his sentence for him, eager to demonstrate some cultural
legitimacy "Yes," he said, although he was about to ofer a diferent answer and
tried the question again. "But in Punjab, do you know that we say . . . " "Sattar
bahattar," I jumped the gun again. "Yes." He paused. nd why do you think there
is a twelve-year diference between the UP-walas and Biharis and the Punjabis
. . . ?" A group had gathered by then, and we laughed at the joke, although we
never did articulate just what that diference might be. The man went on to bring
up the Bengali term "biattire" as well, and the group played with the ethnic dis
tinctions the terms allowed. A Bengali man joined the group and began to explain
the distinction between the Bengali and Hindi terms through elaborate references
to astrology and the life cycle. His explanation went on for some time, and people
began to drift away until the frst man jumped in with a joke:
When God was handing out life spans to althe creatures of the world, they all stood
in line. Each animal was handed a packet of forty years. For this animal, for that one.
Alreceived the same amount. Last in line was man, and God handed him a packet
with forty years in it, too. I'm sorry, said God, but that's all I have left. You're last in
line. I'm all out of years to give.
But the ox said to man, "I really don't want forty years of hard labor. I'll be glad
to give you twenty of mine.
And then the dog said, 'd my life isn't worth forty years. I'll give you twenty,
too."
Finally, the monkey too decided that forty years of hopping about trees was more
than enough and gave twenty of his years to man.
So now man had a life span of one hundred years.
For the frst forty years of our life, therefore, we are truly men-the years God
gave to us.
Then, from forty to sixty we are living the years of the ox, working for the wife,
for our sons, supporting everyone else in the family, nothing for oneself
Then, from sixty to eighty, we are a dog! [e laughed.] The son asks us to mind
the house, mind the children-"We're going out." And so we stay at home, guard
ing the house. And barking: Always asking for this or that, again and again and
again. Like the dog.
And then, from eighty to one hundred, we're living the monkey's years, witho- ut
teeth, without speech, just making the motions of being human.
DOG LADIES AJD THE BERIYA BABA 2
77
A man's aging is illustrated through a bestiary Against the cosmic theories of
iamadharma the other man was ofering, the frst man ofers a refguring of the
life course in terms of three distinct but each unpleasant forms of dehumaniza
tion. Adulthood here peaks at forty envisioned as the burden of carrying along
one's wife and weak sons. Sixty remains the time of political inversion, when the
meaning of debiity shifts from the burden of the powerful (the father as ox) to the
subordinate duties of the grandfather (the father as dog) . Mter sity, the voice be
comes central, the abject request of the man forced to beg from his own son. At
eighty, a diferent meaning of seniity is ofered, not the political abjection of the
dog, but the far more embodied decay of the voiceless old man, for whom the re
quest has degenerated thoroughly into meaninglessness: the monkey
Dogs, within the bestiary of human abjection, draw upon particular genealogies
of the gift. In a lengthy enumeration of the duties of the mature householder, the
Bhaavat Prana places the food-giver at the center of the cosmos. Al creatures are
his chidren: "One should look upon beasts, camels, donkeys, monkeys, rats, ser
pents, birds and fies lie one's own sons. " One should allow, the text suggests, these
animals access to one's house and felds. Rats and snakes and monkeys, like sons,
take. Beyond taking, the text goes to defne a specifc category of those who must be
given to: "He should duly share his objects of enjoyment with all down to dogs, sin
ners and people belonging to the lowest strata of the society"20 Dogs are the em
bodiments of those too degraded even to take, within a gendered mode of exchange
between fathers and sons in which the gift does not rehumanize, as it does for Prem
chand's Old Aunt, but marks the end of manhood and thus one's humanity
OLD MEN AND BABAS
Near my house in the Bengali quarter, an old East Bengali Brahman school
teacher lived alone in a small room. "His family didn't want him, " my neighbor
told me, her story thoroughly unsubstantiated. The room was dark and only four
feet in height, and the old man would crouch inside, making his food, his voice
eerily projecting from his little cave. Unlike the old kivazwomen in the area, the
old safon-dad man was seldom teased, though he seemed to have all the ingre
dients: no apparent family an eccentric manner, frequent requests for raw food
stufs, and a funny voice. Two doors down from this man lived another former
Bengali schoolteacher, in his seventies, with his family. Unlike the safron man they
called Baba, the children of neighbors made fun of this man for his frequent and
pathetic complaining. In hearing Baba, however, kids and passersby drew on a
more complex hermeneutic of generosity: Baba seemed to be a sannyasi, and his
voice was many things to diferent people-benefcent, guieful, hypocritical,
transgressive, or enlightening-but seldom meaningless or strange.
The old man in the little room was not attached to any sampradaa, any partic
ular ascetic order. In the late rg6os, Surajit Sinha and Baidyanath Saraswati stud
ied the sannyasis of Varanasi and calculated that the number of ascetics residing
2
7
8 DOG LADIES AND THE BERIYA BABA
more or less permanently in the city in monastic institutions called maths was
1 ,284. About 300 ascetics were not attached to a math, but maintained ties to a
sampradaa while living on their own. Sinha and Saraswati suggested that of the
total population of the city during their study in the 1 970s, in 240 persons was an
ascetic. 2 1 This ratio did not include the considerable numbers of sadhus (holy
men) of various sorts who arrived and stayed in the city seasonally; nor did it in
clude individuals like this old Baba, who did not belong to any religious order but
dressed the part, participated with friends in any of a number of the myiad de
votional, educational, and recreational opportunities of Kashi, wandered the
lanes of the city, and worked the foreign "hippies" for a living.
The last task was one of Baba's more challenging but remunerative. He spent
time on Dasashwamedh Ghat, the busiest and the most central of the ghats, strik
ing up conversations with the many young foreigners who arrived each day in the
city Varanasi remained one of the principal stops on another latter-day touristic,
that of ''sia on a shoestring" budget travelers, for whom the city's yogis, musi
cians, and cremations-along with Goa's beaches, Mother Teresa's Calcutta
homes for the dying, Dharamsala's Tibetans and treks, and Kathmandu's ever
green psychedelic scene-reworked the colonial grand tour Cohn has described.
Within the narrative of the budget tour, Varanasi was a microcosm of India, par
ticularly in being a "love it or hate it" kind of place, the mother lode of the nega
tive currency of the young traveler, "the hassles. " An inveterate teacher and rela
tively fuent English speaker, Baba delighted in introducing interested young
tourists hassle-free into the mysteries of Hinduism. The challenge was to make the
foreigners, who tended to take Baba along with the river, the cremation fres, and
the cows as a found object, and who got nerous at the hint of a quid pro quo,
lighten their own material burden a bit without losing their feeling of control.
Banarsis heard the voices of sannyasis with some ambivalence, either as the
wheedling of charlatans or the blessing of the god-realized, or both. The former
hearing dominated; Banarsis, who contend with sannyasis on a daily basis, were
apt to be jaded. Like old widows, old babas were part of a topography. But the in
terstitial location of their voices redeemed them. Sannyasis and other sadhus and
babas who lived throughout the Hindu neighborhoods of the paki mahal had
voices that were hearable as benign and on occasion positively transformative:
those of latter-day rishis. One could make fun of Baba on Dasashwamedh, with
his hippies, but in the neighborhood he was neither a fgure of derision or pit
And the hearing of his voice drew upon more famous, and archetypal, voices, of
renowned old holy men in the city or the state whose voices were distinguished by
their radically unusual tenor. Some of these men blessed through swears, sexual
language, and curses; some spoke on rare occasions only; some never spoke.
On Assi Ghat, a few feet from where the woman from Nagwa would come to
sing by the Sangameswar Temple, was a small Saivite math, a place for sannyasis
headed by Ramu Baba. Like most strangely voiced babas, Ramu Baba was said to
be superannuated by the men from the community who frequented the math's
DOG LADIES AND THE BERIYA BABA 2
7
9
nightly iraf, the worship service, in the small shrine adjoining his room. He was
eight, ninety, one hundred, or more. Ramu Baba remained in his room all day in
meditation. He came out publicly once a day in the evening afer the iraf, to give
these men a darshan, a viewing of hi. He would say nothing; he never spoke. His
nazar, his gaze, seemed all the more powerful. His eyes burnt into you; they seemed
to know all that needed to be known about you. They were joking, thoughtful,
deadly serious. Ramu Baba was an archetype of the silent voice, of thejzvanmukta,
the realized in life.
Samne Ghat was on the Ganga bank just south of Nagwa and east of the
sprawling BHU campus. At that time, it was the staging point for the passenger
ferries across the river to Ramnagar during the monsoons; the rest of the year, a
pontoon bridge linked the city to Ramnagar via the ghat. Since the mid- 1 ggos, a
bridge has been buit spanning the river; its pylons were, according to a persistent
but usually humorous rumor, build on the bodies of chidren collected by the state
through its larsunhvi agents. In the late 1 g8os, one took a ferry or hired a smal
boat. A Banarsi friend once cryptically told me that halfway between Ramnagar
and Samne Ghat, on the water, I would meet someone "for your project. " Later,
after I had met the Beriya Baba, I returned and asked the friend why he thought
to mention him to me. I got an answer simiar to the one Biay gave me about
Mashima; contemplating my project, this man for the frst time decided that the
Baba might be mad.
I went down to Samne Ghat, that frst day Across the water I saw a small
wooden houseboat. "Who lives there?" I asked the tea shop regulars presiding
over the coming and going of boats.
"That's Beriya Baba. "
"Who is he?"
"He's an old baba. "
"How old?"
"I don't know . . . about eighty?"
"Can I visit him?"
"He doesn't ever want to be bothered. He'll just curse you. "
But one of the boatmen agreed to take me across. On the way, he told me to be
extremely respectful.
"Make sure you greet him very politely [raam krna] . He's very old. "
"How old?"
"Oh, at least a hundred."
"Where does his name come from?" I asked. "From a be (plum or jujube) tree,"
said the boatman. "He uses it for his worship. " Another friend later said that
Beriya Baba used to live up a tree, and had vowed never set foot on the ground.
That was why he now lived on a boat, neither on one shore nor the other. The
image of King Ajara's former sannyasi body in the Katiartaara story hanging
from a tree, came to mind. Several superannuated babas were famed for their
280 DOG LADIES AND THE BERIYA BABA
never having touched the ground in recent memor The most famous was Dev
raha Baba, at 1 40 the oldest of them al. Devraha Baba lived in small stilted huts,
and when he was transported was lifted into the car or boat by which he was trans
ported. Both babas structured their practice as radically disjunctive from the ma
terial world through their literal embodiment as luftmenschen.
The Plum-Tree Baba was sitting crouched in the small enclosed deck that dou
bled as bedroom and kitchen. He was naked except for a sweater. "Parim, Ma
haraj, " I perhaps too obsequiously intoned, trained less by the boatman's admoni
tion than by my frequent watching of the t serial Mahabhirat in which all old
rishis as well as kings were so addressed. "Sister-fucker," Baba immediately
replied. He showered a variety of curses down upon me, and then began a dis
course on proper dharma, punctuated by references to sex and illustrated by fre
quent obscene gestures: his continually simulating sex with his fngers and his
panting out "thrust, withdraw, thrust, withdraw" For Beriya Baba, material real
ity without God was bestial, just eating and having sex.
If people don't sing bhoan, if they don't keep their mind on God, they are no better
than a dog or a bitch. Thrust withdraw thrust withdraw. The government-the po
lice and the inspectors-are just hungry animals. Thrust withdraw thrust withdraw.
They rape everyone's daughters. They like to fuck their own daughters. Thrust with
draw thrust withdraw All the government wants is cunt, is ass . Sister fuckers. Ass
fuckers. Split everyone's ass right open by the fucking inspectors. Thrust withdraw
thrust withdraw. Just dogs. Bitches.
Somewhat taken aback by the force of Baba's discourse, I nerously changed the
subject. "How old are you, Baba?" "120 years. " I looked at him; he didn't seem a
day over 8o. Perhaps sensing my questioning gaze, he downplayed his age. "But
that's nothing, Devaha Baba is 1 40!"
Young at 1 20, Baba resumed his lesson, describing citizens as policemen's
daughters, seeking incestuous liaisons with power. I left some money as my gif,
and Baba gave the boatman and me some sweets as prasad, the materialization of
his grace, in return. We returned to shore. I asked the tea shop crowd why Baba
swore so much. "Well, to keep people away, " one man answered. But some had
other ideas. Baba used insults to tell us: You are a bhog, a seeker after pleasure. I
am a yogi. So you should not come here. Ad you should give up acting like ani
mals if you want to discover God.
But why I persisted, if Baba is indeed ajvanmukt, one liberated in this life, is
he so obsessed with sex? The men in the shop concurred in their answer: "It's be
cause you are the bhog that Baba is goaded to challenge your right to be on his
boat. He is a mirror of yoursel(" Baba combined one of the great ascetic arche
types of the city the aghori baba, the transgressive ascetic who curses, drinks, lives
and meditates in the inhuman and impure space of the cremation ghat and eats
the ashes from cremations. 22 Lie an aghori, Beriya Baba cursed to bless. His
DOG LADIES AND THE BERIYA BABA 281
words were transformative, cutting through the fondness for pleasure that deafens
one to reality Like the anger of the rishis, the curses of the babas give.
I left Samne Ghat, and went home to Nandanagar colony where I was then stil
living. I mentioned meeting Beriya Baba to Mrs. Sharma; she doubted that he was
1 20 or that his words were of any spiritual import. He was a fake, "not the same
thing as Devraha Baba," she concluded. Beriya Baba was not always heard as a
spiritual cynosure. But though he was considered a charlatan by quite a few, his in
terstitial role cut of any connection to a familial body and its associated critical
hearing. One did not say of any of the many babas, big or small time, in the city:
"He has no one. " Old men were heard diferently in the interstice. And every local
fake pointed to true ones. Beriya Baba might not be 120, but Devraha Baba's 140
years were seldom challenged.
BABAS AND THE STATE
Though Beriya Baba criticized the sarkar, the government, and its representatives
the police, he proudly told us that the Prime Minister Indira Gandhi herself had
sent him a letter. The tea shop men told me that another prime minister, Charan
Singh, had visited Baba years back. "He swears at all of them, " they assured me.
Baba's curses are not only heard to be powerful, they are powerful. Politicians
come to collect them.
Stanley Tambiah, in his study of the Thai Buddhist cult of amulets, broadened
the Weberian notion of charisma to include its objectifcation and translocation
through economies of force or exchange. In concluding, he notes that ascetic mas
ters claiming supranormal powers "have been taken up and assiduously vsited by
the country's politicians, bureaucrats, and intelligentsia-especially from the me
tropolis. " Lie the amulets in which a saint's charisma is recognized to be embed
ded, the visit to a saint itself becomes a fetishized commodity, which ruling elites
with increasingly questionable legitimacy collect. Tambiah indicates: "The politi
cal center is losing its self-confdence, but it has not lost its might; it searches for
and latches onto the merit of the holy men who are the center of religion but pe
ripheral to its established forms. "23
The visit, in Uttar Pradesh in India, to a superannuated saint allows for the
transfer of charisma through the several sensory pathways through which the
baba and the political visitor mix their substance, and the various media record
and disseminate the transaction. Intergenerational charismatic transfers increas
ingly depend upon the image of the transfer, suggesting that the process Tambiah
records is dual: the politician's personal need for a renewable source of old age
charisma, and the necessary production of simulacra of the transaction for its
efectiveness.
Each of these sensorial modes can be thus approached both in terms of an an
thropology and a political economy of the senses. 24 Seein the baba, in the frst in
stance, is a form of darshan. As Eck has noted, darshan can be a central act of
282 DOG LADIES AND THE BERIYA BABA
Hindu worship; seeing and being seen potentiates a transfer of substance between
deity and devotee, and the act extends to holy persons:
When Mahatma Gandhi traveled through India, . . . they would throng the train
stations for a passing glimpse of the Mahatma in his compartment. Similarly when
Swami Karpatri, a well-known sannyasi who is also a writer and political leader,
comes to Varanasi to spend the rainy season "retreat " period, people fock to his
daily lectures not only to hear him, but to see him. However, even an ordinary san
nyasi or sadhu is held in esteem in traditional Hindu culture. He is a living symbol. `
The examples of Gandhi and Karpatri are instructive in other, quite diferent,
ways. Shahid Amin has explored the complexity of Gandhi darshan in eastern
Uttar Pradesh, suggesting that peasants and landords took away diferent and
ofen opposed forms of charismatic empowerment from the phenomena of mas
sive Gandhi darshan rallies in the early 1 920s. 26 The darshan of the late Karpatri,
whose house I chanced to rent and who haunted the memories of Marwari Mataji
and of the Tambe brothers discussed above, diferenty helped to realize the vari
ous projects of his urban anti-Chamar supporters and his royal patrons. Similarly
the charisma of the politician's Devraha Baba darshan became an increasingly
contested site in the 1 g8os, and the efectiveness of living symbols came to depend
upon the efectiveness of media management.
Tasting as a mode of charismatic transfer establishes a symbolic hierarchy be
tween the charismatic source and the recipient who is willing to accept the theo
reticaly polluted but auspicious lefovers of the deity or saint. In the commensal
transaction of a puja, the worshipper ofers appropriate foodstufs to God, who
consumes the essence of the gif and allows the giver to partake of the seemingly
intact but now "lefover" portion as the grace of prasad. Beriya Baba ofered me
his own food-literal leftovers, in his case-as prasad. The transaction was more
complex because as a patron I had given him money The hierarchy established
through an exchange of coded substance, in the sense of Marriott and his stu
dents, which confrmed my willingness to accept his pollution, rhetorically extin
guished the traces of a diferent hierarchy in which Baba was a client. When one
gave to widows, the gif was unidirectional, save in the collective institution of the
bhajan ashram hrough the mediation of a management who kept most of the
gif, and here food was exchanged solely for voice.
Touching is similarly a mode of establishing the unambiguous direction of the
fow of charismatic power. The tea stall men and the boatman reminded me to
stay of of Baba's boat. To step aboard would have been to lift myself above him
as well as to bring to earth, i

a sense, his distanced position. Central to the em
bodied performance of hierarchy was the polarity of head and foot. For Devraha
Baba, given his position on a platform on stilts, encounters with visitors were more
easily managed. The main practice for the politician taking darshan of Devraha
Baba was to have Baba place his feet directly on the politician's head. The
image-simultaneously that of extreme obeisance and powerful legitimation-
DOG LADIES AND THE BERIYA BABA 28
3
appeared in newspapers throughout the country whenever an important politician
came to Devraha Baba for darshan. More than any other sensory mode, the
choreography of the touch translated into the national darshan of the aged saint
with his feet on the prime minister, an image akin to the politician-son touching
the feet of the old widow-mother but with one critical diference: no matter how
opportunistic politicians might try to stage-manage their encounters with Baba,
he remained a source of charisma whose presence was never exhausted by the
hyocrisy of the flial scene.
Finally charisma is transferred through its hearing. Beriya Baba cursed, and his
supplicants took away blessings. Devraha Baba would sit silenty in front of his little
hut during those festivals when he was available for darshan, and would not speak.
The tension for the listener would grow, until Baba would suddenly begin to ofer a
discourse, usually on Kishna devotion as a path opposed to the pleasures of this
world. Like Beriya Baba's voice, Devraha's voice challenged in its unpredictability:
he would withhold his presence and voice, sitting hidden inside his aerial hut and
then would suddenly appear, sit siently in view, and then suddenly speak.
The importance of the voice draws more on generational than divine transac
tion. The old body becomes a source of powerful charisma when it no longer con
stitutes a threat to children seeking legitimation of the morality of their appropri
ation of the household. Like Buddhist amulets, old bodies enshrined in well-kept
dying spaces become powerful icons and indices of the moral legitimacy of a fam
ily The old body, in a sense, is fetishized, and as such becomes available as a criti
cal marker within the legitimating discourse of the nation-state and its discontents.
But familiar old bodies degenerate, provoking the continual crises of sevi anxi
ety. The charisma of older male authority-among politicians, fgures from Devi
Lal and Laloo Prasad Yadav to the late N. T Rama Rao and M. G. Ramachan
dran before their fnal decline come to mind-must eventually give way to the ab
jection of the weak old father forced to beg like a dog. The baba out there-as a
sannyasi already ritually dead, as a latter-day rishi living apart from society
ofers a voice that cannot devolve into lament. When babas threaten, as in the
nursery stories of child-stealing babas with large sacks, told to children, or as in
the collapse of the language of witchcraf, international conspiracy and child
lifing babas into the 1 996 larsunhvi panic, they threaten in an uncanny con
juncture of the domestic and interstitial old man, as a double to the father. As au
thority and charisma out there, they mirror the father as a site of male authority;
as the domestic old man, they are a simulacrum of male authority its pale
shadow-"without speech, just making the motions of being human"-save for
the sound of an infnite and ever more impossible desire, the bark.
The old "babas" beaten in 1 996 were often with children, usually their grand
children or other relations, when they were seen and heard to be uncanny and
dangerous, and what was very hard to read was the nature of their desire. For most
old men with access to the rhetorical possibilities of san
r
ia, even a partial relo
cation of their identity from home to interstice was insufcient to transform their
28
4
DOG LADI ES AND THE BERI YA BABA
relations with family and neighbors from the pathetic request of the old grandfa
ther to the inviolate liminality of the luftmensch.
Every siteen years, the great astrological festival the Kumbh Mela is held in
Allahabad, the closest city of similar size to Varanasi and also a pilgrimage site of
long standing. Sannyasis and other interstitial holy men and women from
throughout the country gather along with millions of pilgrims in what has become
perhaps the largest single assemblage of persons in human history A city is
erected for the sannyasis and others, a literal center out there in Victor Turner's
sense. 27 In 1 989 as in previous Kumbh Melas, Devraha Baba would not camp
within the bounds of the interstitial city, this decentered center. A sannyasi's san
nyasi, he maintained his separation even during the festival's collapse of the
boundaries.
I attended the Allahabad Kumbh Mela that year along with my friend Panka
Mishra and an estimated 15 million others. To visit Devraha Baba, we had to walk
for several kilometers away from the tent city at the confuence of the Ganga and
the Yamuna, along the sandy banks. Hundreds of pilgrims formed a line across
the sand ahead of us, making the same trek. Baba's management had set up a cor
ral of sorts, into which we pushed our away Inside, I saw Baba's familiar hut on
stilts; I had seen it at other pilgrimage centers, but had never had the chance for a
Devraha darshan. Baba was inside the hut, not visible to us, when we drew as close
as we could. Hundreds of villagers were waiting for darshan and a sermon. Clos
est to Baba's hut, several well-dressed people in suits and fashionable saris waited
with photographers in attendance. Someone nearby told his companion: "Politi
cians. " They too were part of the expected scene.
While we all waited, a man in a politician's pressed white pajama-kurta and
paunch gave us a long talk on the message of Devraha Baba and Hindu dharma.
The talk was uninspiring, save for the fact that already by 1 989 any linkage of the
importance for the nation of "Hindutva, " or Hindu-ness, particularly in the pres
ence of politicians, suggested the then-coalescing rhetoric of the recently revital
ized populist Hindu right. Despite his ofering his feet, with detached equanimity
to Congress, Janata Dal, and Bharitiya Janata Party [BJP] supplicants alie,
Baba's superannuated charisma was coming to signif the meaning of tradition in
very specifc ways. The man exhorted the audience to go and buy a three-volume
set on the life and worship of Krishna, available at the edge of the enclosure,
which Baba would then bless with his feet. A line of peasants formed by the book
counter.
Baba's head briefy stuck itself out the door of the hut and then disappeared
back inside. He looked, I thought, far older than Beriya Baba. Many Banarsis with
whom I talked about Devraha Baba told me the same routinized narrative of how
old Baba must be:
Wen I was a boy, my grandfather took me to see Deoria Baba [another name for
Devaha, who is said to come from the town of Deoria] . He looked the same then as
DOG LADI ES AND THE BERI YA BABA 28
5
he does now. And my grandfather told me that when he was young, he was taken to
see Baba, and was old then, too!
Grandfathers take grandsons who become grandfathers themselves; Baba remains
the stable icon anchoring this narrative of skipped generations. The vsit to the
baba suggests a framing of time-the infamous "cyclical time" of the non-West2
8
-distinct from the proximate temporality between father and son dependent on
the father's ageless-sixty but strong-body; A. R. Radclife-Brown long ago sug
gested that the social reproduction of culture and time worked through these two
modes, parents to children and grandparents to grandchildren. 29 Each mode pre
sumes a certain sort of body in time: the relation between father and son presumes
the ageless body of the father, able to carry its hegemony agelessly without the
signs of decrepitude locating and delimiting its power; the relation beteen
grandfather and grandson presumes the body of the ageless-but agedbaba, not
that of the grandfather himself who may relationally framed as weak and in de
cline but of Old Age out there, transfgured. Devraha Baba's old age is the sign of
a diferent order of culture and power, and it is an order intensely appealing to
politicians constituted by a diferent order. I heard the grandfather story fre
quently, its details seldom varying from telling to telling. As an urban folk tale, it
refected both the importance of Devraha's really being old-against the easy sus
picion lavished on lesser fgures lie Beriya Baba-and the power of the intersti
tial old man as a sign of an alternate masculine order of age and power than the
dynamics of generational domesticity
Devraha's authenticity was maintained by his frm colonization of the periph
ery Not only Indira Gandhi but members of both Congress and the various op
position parties in the 1 989 national elections sought out Baba's feet; photogra
phers on hand. The home minister in Rajiv Gandhi's cabinet, the Sikh Buta
Singh, came to Devraha Baba in search of Hindu legitimacy BJP politicians
brought bricks for the Ram temple to be built on the site of the disputed mosque
in Ayodhya; Baba placed his feet on these, too. In the year following the Kumbh
Mela, the last year of his long life, Baba became increasingly identied with a
"pro-Hindu" political stance, less and less of the antinomian center out there.
Brought down to earth perhaps, in the end, by the colonization of the forest as ex
plicitly Hindu, as opposed to antinomian, space, Baba died in 1 990.
Until the end, many besides the powerful continued to take Baba's darshan, his
voice, his books, and if fortunate, his feet. Baba's longevity I was frequently told,
came from his mastery of yoga. Many yoga masters in Varanasi were kown to
have lived for generations through both their accumulated siddhis or "mind-over
matter" powers, and more specifcally through breath control. A the number of
one's breaths in the course of a lifetime is fed, a venerable yogic idea, a key to
longevity is learning to breathe less ofen. Even if one didn't attempt the practice
of yoga, the charismatic transaction with the master of his or her body was itself
an embodied encounter. Devraha, the master of the body, ofered its gifs as so
286 DOG LADI ES AND THE BERIYA BABA
many siddhis: health, fertility potency, power, wealth. Unlike the hegemonic order
of the politician and father, which worked time by denying its efects-lie the
agelessness of the "sixty years young" adult able to defer the claims of old age
the order of the charismatic baba insisted on its elaborated embodiment: the 1 40
year old visage, the matchstick limbs, the feet gingerly lowered, the careful location
in a tree, or on a boat.
The Age o the Anthropologist
The problem, said the Friend, one of the closest I had made during the years of
.o Agn in India, is that we have grown up. It was over a decade since both project
and friendship had been conceived, and I was back in Delhi writing another fnal
draf. New timetables had intruded: a job, a relationship, changes in the economy
the imponderabilia of life. Things seemed diferent, and we waited for a sign from
one another across the minor embarrassment that was our sense of ourselves in
time.
Barbara Myerhofwrote that to be an anthropologist in the country of the Old
was to study the Other that is one's future sel( 1 Myerhof died of cancer before be
coming the old lady of her imagined future, and the tragic irony of her efort to
number her days-to see how the self and the world were unmade and remade in
time and therefore to know oneself in it-gifted us with a sense of the gerontolog
ical sublime. A teacher of mine once said we become doctors because we are afraid
of death, and something similar could be argued for gerontologists and more gen
erally for moderns. Gerontology in this sense may be the quintessentially modern
social science, marking of the shifing limits to interiority and to life. The failure of
its sublime for me may lie in being part of a cohort of persons hard hit by ADS,
many of whom did not or will not live to be old-and thus the fears I seem to carry
with me each day and which infect and infect my sense of a horizon-though I
distrust my sentiments here. This book has charted some of the many other places
and reasons for the failure of such a sublime, the "No" of its tide.
But it is not just as a body set against death that one does and writes, but as one
set against time, and change, and decay These are obviously related but distinct
things, and the book has been centered on the last of them. The decay of the body
the social and material fact against which modern gerontology was organized and
around which "postmodern" gerontology is being articulated, has presented a crit-
288 THE AGE OF THE ANTHROPOLOGI ST
ical problem to anthropology since its origins. One of the discipline's charter nar
ratives was that of the dyng and regenerated god-king of James Frazer's T Gle
Bouh. Primitives and tropicals make tropaic errors, in Frazer, and confuse the wel
being of the social body wth that of the individual body of the king or priest totem
ically standing for it. At the frst sign of physical decay the individual body must be
replaced by a younger one: the struggle in the sacred grove, the regeneration of the
social body through the killing of the king and his replacement by a body once
again ageless, like the substitution of Ajara for Vinayashila in the Katiattaara.
Frazer can be read as more than an armchair anthropologist brandishing a the
ory of primitive error; his category of "magic, " the nexus between the decay of
the individual and the social body, becomes the realm of the symbolic for both
later anthropologists and for psychoanalysts. The story of the Golden Bough, of
the violent rupture at the heart of the sacred, ofers a way to think about the rela
tion of the body in time to the totalization of social relations as a seamless, pur
poseful, and atemporal hegemony the anthropologist's Culture. The position of
the king, priest, or god-in psychoanalytic terms the position of the father-is not
only a position in and of language (as it was for Max Muller and would be for
some Lacanians) but is, for Frazer, a fundamentally ebodid stance: when the body
reveals its temporality with the frst recognizable signs of old age, the
king/ god/father must die. The body of language and culture is not simply the
body of the powerful but of the powerful able to stand outside of time, a body
hegemonic in not revealing its temporal contingency but appearing just so. The
powerful individual body and the social body are metonymically linked as pres
ences out of time, obviously and necessarily just so, totalities whose comportment
and confguration are maps of the self-evident relations between their parts.
But the "ageless" individual body becomes markd: age comes to matter. The
recognizable signs of decay-the white hairs that alert Vinayashila to the colapse
of his world, framed as his abiity to hold onto his subjects and to younger
women-reate a scene in which the hierarchical relations between king and sub
ject, man and woman, and old and young become palpable and contestable. A
younger body, one not recognizable as an, must be substituted so that the seam
less continuity of the social world can be maintained.
This need for the continuity of the world in time is formally a matter of prim
itive error for Frazer, but one that as cultural critique he implicitly extends to his
own modern Christian world. Primitive error in The Glde Bouh-the desire for
the maintenance of a totalized world in space and time through signifying prac
tices of metaphor and metonymy-suggests the potential for an analytics of cul
ture that recognizes the problem of history-of change, death, and time. If cul
ture is the possibility of the coherence of things in time, the story of the dying and
regenerated king in Frazer locates the violence at its heart. The act of suture,
which preseres the order of things through a substitution of bodies, is an act of
destruction, the heart of darkness that for Frazer ultimately lies not in the nature
of primitivism or civilization or the desire of the child but in the possibility of
THE AGE OF THE ANTHROPOLOGI ST 28
9
meaning, of the move from time to totality hegemony to culture, body to sign.
And if modernity and coloniality replace this possibility of the coherence of
things in time with a normalizing reason and a frozen metanarrative of absence
and loss, then the decaying body moves from its secret place in the sacred grove
into the full light of day and the body of the kng and the father is replaced by the
new corporeality of the citizen, of the old woman at the polls.
Old woman voting. Reproduced by arrangement with The Times of India Group.
NINE
The Body in Time
in which thins diappear or mere? seem to
MY GRANDMOTHER' S LETTERS
"/notice," I said, "tat most q your trips ended in diaster q some sort or anothe and yet you
went on makin tem, which strkes one as a littl strane. "
M. 818 MAGGAO A AALL I` JM8L LLNS

`
Three decades before me, my grandmother came to Varanasi. She and my Grandpa
Bil, a carpet distributor and later a sales manager for a Bible Belt carpet manufac
turer from Tennessee, traveled around the world combining business and pleasure.
In their later years of globetrotting, they were joined by Mr. and Mrs. J., the carpet
manufacturer and his wife, to form a quartet. The Tennessee couple were devoted
to spreading Jesus's message, and a friend once suggested to me the source of my
grandfather's unlikely friendship with Mr. J: "Your Grandpa sold carpets, he sold
Jesus. " While the men were seling, Grandma and Mrs. J. took long wals through
the parks and museums of whichever city they were in, and wrote. Grandma kept a
travel diary and Mrs. J. wrote poetr This vlnaprata idyll did not last: my grand
parents grew older, during their African safari a vulture made of with part of Mrs.
J.'s hand, and then my grandfather died suddenly in a hotel room in Tokyo on one
of his trips alone. Some years later, still struck by the manner of his exit and desirous
of some greater connection wth that generation, I tried to enrol in a course on
Japan at colege. The professor was not captivated by the origins of my interest, and
declined to admit me. At the suggestion of a friend I joined another seminar that
had an opening, one on religion in India. The rest, as they say, is history and though
Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson appropriately dismiss such banal accounts of the
anthropologist's "choice of a feld"2 (a concern that is of a piece with Bourgois's cri
tique of the anthropology of suburbanized alienation), of such cloth are redemptive
encounters fashioned for many
292 THE BODY IN TI ME
My grandmother was less rufed, either by vultures or her place i n history She
fondly remembered her Benares and that early morning boat ride on the Ganges.
When my grandfather was still alive, the two of them would give slide shows in the
lobby of their co-op apartment in Florida: the round-the-world adventures of the
footloose Cohens. Grandpa drew on Hollywood images in advertising the shows:
"Call Me Bwana" and the Crosby-Hope Road to . . pictures. I remember being all
of eleven and fascinated, sitting in the lobby during Christmas vacation, by the ad
venture and the animals. Sensing this, Grandpa took me to Lion Country Safari
the next day. But Grandma's advice for me, on the eve of my frst departure for
India, was more practical . "Don't give the beggars money, dear," she warned me,
and then explained: "If you give something to one beggar, then they alcome afer
you and follow you for hours, and won't go away until you give each one some
thing. " She paused: "It will break your heart. "
Years later, uncomfortable with that heartbreaking vision of the sightseer, I
tried to defect the family legacy of beggars and beasts through the mediations of
anthropology Yet the feld as it was ofen taught reenacted a more subtle touristic
mode. The Grand Tour for the anthropologist of South Asia in the r g8os did not
skim along the Ganga at sunrise, but dipped into the equally overdetermined wa
ters of the relational sel( Though I became critically engaged with the liquefac
tions and sofenings of the embodiment of colonial diference, I somehow man
aged to replicate them through participation in the fuid dynamics (selves, signs,
polities) of the Chicago School and its dispersed successors. 3 The traces linger. In
dians, when push comes to shove in much of this book, are written of through a
relational, fuid, and sof language of anger and afect, and Europeans and Amer
icans through a monadic and hard-wired one of memory and cognition.
This tenacity of troublesome metaphor within the contemporary touristic
mode of the anthropologist-the continual faiure of the best of intentions-re
mains rooted in the attempt to capture diference within the language of "they're
not like us. " This linguistic awkwardness cannot be avoided; diference as the or
ganizing principle of anthropological knowledge attracts normatively polarized
statements like fypaper. My sense that in Varanasi memory was seldom as central
as anger in anchoring discussions of behavoral change and of the self in old age
was one such two-edged sword. The language of hot brain allowed me to question
the "naturalness" of forgetfulness as a necessary fguration of the senile body. But
in suggesting that afective, rather than cognitive, change was strongly marked in
the social construction of seniity in India, I managed to resuscitate an older and
less liberating opposition: the Occident as the rational brain, the Orient as the
emotional body Like the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European cli
macteric theorists I have discussed who distinguished between male cerebral de
mentia and female genital menopause, I have perpetuated a reading of the Self as
cerebral and its Other as quite literally subcortical: Reason versus Nature.
What is to be done? The irony is not simple; I remain committed to the project
of interrogating naturalized categories like dementia, memory and cognition.
THE BODY I N TI ME 2
9
3
Emotion and afect are complex domains of thought and are not the antithesis of
reason; one could make strong neurobiological arguments for their importance to
dementia research and treatment, despite the language of DSM-IV A cultural
politics of generation that hears old voices as hot and dry and unstable, and
younger voices as colder and wetter and more stable, may indeed revisit simplifed
structuralisms that can only work through colonial erasures of much of social life.
But to assume that the generational politics of the former is simply encompassed
by the colonial politics of the latter is naive and risks yet a more powerful erasure
of the subject. To work through these and several other frames of diference, con
joint but not congruent, I have sketched a perspectivist model whereby the an
thropologist pays attention to frst-, second-, and third-person "knowledges" as
distinct windows onto local processes.
Generational diference, like colonial diference, is here not simply an object of
social science; it forms a central question of method. The study of generational
diference is fraught with its own colonialism; most gerontologists are simply not
all that old. The tourism in gerontology is less overt. But like Cohn's description of
the touristic mode for knowing India, the country of the old has its route, the pas
sage to and through an exotic realm by those who wish to master it. The stops
along the route-the appeals to ageism, the bittersweet oral history, the reproduc
tion of the "aging enterprise" through the necessity of grant hustling and the re
duction of anthropology to "qualitative methods" and cookbook methodology
are well marked.
At a frst glance, the politics of this engagement difer from that other, overtly
colonial encounter. The natives of the country of the old, for those of us who visit
as tourists, are our own future selves. There are no hermeneutic impasses to be
broached; we are all aging. Yet I always pause when I discuss my work with my
grandmother. Wy? The hesitancy-and the slight embarrassment that generates
it-is in the frst place my sense of the hubris in proclaiming myself to her as an
old age expert. I may be aging, but I am not old. The aging enterprise reminds me
of the Varanasi land sureyors standing outside Nagwa slum and its pond and
measuring the commons: it would soon be a well-groomed colony but not for its
current users. Gerontology as colonialism ofers a self-conscious theory of im
proving the natives-"to make old age a good age" is its frequent refrain, another
hint that without the feld there would be "no aging"-and for me to claim the sta
tus of future native is of necessity to imagine a world in which parents and grand
parents have been erased, in which I wl be the redeemed old body of this imag
ined horizon.
Time and generation, the markers of colonial diference, are imploded by
gerontological theory in several ways, blurring the political context of its practice.
Thus the ever imminent demographic explosion glides the anticipated future
too many old people, requiring new forms of generational regulation-into the
present. The urgency of the apocalypse legitimates the delegation of gerontologi
cal authority to experts. Disaster scenarios ofer the postapocalyptic old bodies of
2
9
4
THE BODY I N TI ME
their authors as truer objects of gerontological practice, practice that i s imposed
on the present bodies of pre-apocalyptic elders: we will sufer from the explosion's
fallout, so we study you. Like the "other victims" of Alzheimer's, apocalyptic
gerontology hints at a truer victimhood than that which can be claimed by the
proximate objects of practice, old people here and now.
The move is similar to the American deployment of other, nondemographic,
forms of apocalypse: particularly given market-driven anxiety over the costs of
the increasingly mechanized and expensive but still low-yield intensive care of the
elderly, the deployment of a rhetoric of "futiity" and "rational death" by an in
teresting alliance of rational-choice theologians and policy elites under the sign of
Ethics.4 Not surprisingly, those most resistant to the rationality of withholding fu
tie care are groups with disproportionately lower access to basic health. 5 The ra
tional calculus of appropriateness and limits presumes a world of avaiable care
challenged by an aging population: the old become those who would take re
sources from the poor, an equation of particular signifcance in the Aerican con
text of corporate medicine.
Throughout the two years I lived in Nandanagar and in the Bengali quarter,
my grandmother's regular letters from Montreal or Florida reminded me of the
complexity of what was at stake in being old back home. The letters never men
tioned "old age," either in Grandma's questions about my work or in her discus
sions about hersel She wrote about my aunts, uncles, and cousins, about who had
had a baby or a bat mitzvah, and about the annoying habits of her neighbors in
the Florida co-op where she had lived for over two decades. Like Kaufman's in
terviewees, my grandmother did not write "as" an old woman. She wote as her
sel
My other-maternal-grandmother, who migrated from a violent corner of
Europe between the world wars and who lost much of her extended family to the
Holocaust, was neither comfortable in English nor with the particular civilities of
middle-class Anglo-American life in which both myself and my paternal grand
mother had been raised. She never wrote. But in phone conversations before, dur
ing, and after my period of feldwork, she mentioned old age frequently. "What
can I tell you, Lawrence? I'm an old lady. I have problems, problems, you
shouldn't know what problems. " (In a sense, I can only rewrite her voice as shtick:
its bakbak insistence on idioms of the body became a nostalgic site for a generation
of American Jews marking an afectionate diference from their parents, and is by
now a national cliche. ) Then, and since, old age has remained a central interpre
tive category for her. It is not a conspicuous silence, marked by the ominous
changes noted in everything around her, as in the letters of my other grand
mother. Old age is proclaimed from the rooftops. "I am old" appears to soak up all
meaning.
I thought ofen, in the course of this work, of the disparity between my grand
mothers' refection on their embodied worlds. Their experience of their age and
of their bodies has difered radically though their clinical histories do not difer
THE BODY I N TI ME 2
95
considerably and they are only a few months apart in age. But they are old quite
diferendy. They both came into the world the daughters of eastern European
Jews, but on diferent continents and in radically diferent social and economic cir
cumstances. They both lived most of their adult lives in Montreal, but in diferent
neighborhoods amid diferent institutions: home/factory/market/clinic/old age
home versus home/college/synagogue/golf club/retirement co-op. The logic of
geriatrics, embodied old age as unremitting normality, makes sense for the life
world of only one of them. The meaning behind the intensely embodied life world
of my other grandmother was taught to me during my formal training in geri
atrics: "hypochondriasis. " Some old patients, I was once told by a caring precep
tor as we strolled the regimented and kinless foors of the old age home where I
was clerking, only speak of their ailments: they have a pathological need for at
tention. He spoke without irony
The seeming universality of old age draws simultaneously on the hegemony of
certain representations of the old and on the universals of the body Around the
world, for those who surive into old age, eventual debility and death are certain
ties. But the material efects of death are as variable and specic as are those of
taxes: death for Anupa, who mutters, "I want the Ganga, take me to the Ganga, "
over and over in her corner of the slum, is not the same as death for the poet
Narayan, who celebrates life in all its indignity Debility in Nagwa means some
thing quite diferent from debiity in the colonies or debiity, for that matter, in
Montreal.
Though my paternal grandmother never mentioned being old in her letters,
old age was addressed obliquely throughout. She favored a vigorous morning con
stitutional and swim. The letters frequendy mentioned other residents of the co-op
who would sit by the pool all day and talk, too complacent to consider an ocean
swim or a walk along the shore. Immersed in accusations of Banarsi bakbak, I
sensed congruencies. "Some old people, " she would write, "do nothing but com
plain all day of all their troubles, or of how their children never visit them.
They're bored, and boring. They have nothing to do because they do nothing. No
one visits them because they just complain and complain. "
Old age, throughout our correspondence, was represented by its absence. I
avoided old age in avoiding discussing the content of my research. My grand
mother projected old age onto other "old people. " These old people were the oth
ers of the apartment complex. Over two years of these letters, the inertia and bak
bak of the co-op crowd grew and grew. My grandmother chronicled the aging of
her world, a change that touched her deeply and yet was kept at arm's length. "I
have more things wrong with me than she does, but I just keep my mouth shut.
What's the point of dwelling on such things?"
Behavioral diference and threats to autonomy in the lives of these others were
particularly noted by my grandmother. More and more of the women who had
been her friends for years were increasingly described by her as "changed. " Few
old friends escaped her disapprobation. Some of my relatives wondered if my
296 THE BODY I N TI ME
grandmother herself was developing Alzheimer's, "forgetting" all her old friends.
They asked me as a student of dementia what I thought. What I thought was that
something particularly important was at stake, for all of us in the family, in this
question of mental status. Alzheimer's was simultaneously something feared and
denied and yet the ever-present idiom, in North America, of the old body in rela
tion to others. In the middle of feldwork, I returned to Montreal for a famiy wed
ding. I learned that a great aunt had been put in an old age home two blocks from
where I was staying. I asked my paternal grandmother if she wanted to come visit
her sister-in-law. She said no, but when I decided to go anyway she changed her
mind. When we arrived on the foor, my great aunt was in the day room along
with the other residents, awaiting her lunch. She didn't recognize me but did rec
ognize my grandmother. But the residents were being wheeled in for lunch. After
several months of being socialized to the imperatives of the total institution, my
aunt became nerous at our potential volation of the routinized meal time. Afraid
of missing her meal and more afraid of asking the nursing aide if she could delay
eating or take the meal in her room, she urged my grandmother to wait outside
the dining room for ten minutes. We waited, on a bench in the hallway by the
nurse's station, near the physiological monitors. Across from us, an old man sat un
attended in a wheelchair, staring fxedly out in space, a line of drool coming from
his mouth. My grandmother grew increasingly uncomfortable, and afer a minute
and a half into the ten she told me she would wait downstairs.
My great aunt represented the sort of threat for my grandmother that I have
rarely seen in India, a threat magnifed but not encompassed by the old age insti
tution. More than old age in itself senility and dementia were the silence in my let
ters to Grandma, the things it seemed bad form to mention to the grandmother
for whom bad form would matter. Despite her frequent discussions of the old
complainers, my grandmother seldom brought up demented or institutionalized
persons lie her sister-in-law My grandmother was herself old, equally subject to
the paradoxes of geriatrics. She could not constitute herself as the primary,
"other" victim: she was no tourist.
When my other grandmother decided she wanted to live in the Jewish Cente
d'ccul, another Montreal old age home, she was from the beginning openly con
cerned about "the crazies" she was now forced to endure. They were upsetting to
her-one rather vcious old woman in particular-but they were not things from
which one averted one's gaze or noted through silences or displacements. Though
she was not as sharp as she used to be and afer a year in the home was noted by
my family to have lost some short-term memory encounters with other demented
people were for her from the outset not some grim foreshadowing of a future with
out personhood but one more set of embodied incidents, confrming a continuity
of experience.
These are ')unt Minnie" stories, invocations of one's own old relatives in
gerontological argument analogous to the anthropological defense: "Not in my vil
lage. " But not only does it seem fair play to invoke one's own grandmothers if one
THE BODY I N TI ME 29
7
is in the business of writing about everyone else's, but their quite diferent embod
ied histories and second-person experience of other people's old age are cautions
to a parceling out of styles of embodied old age along simplistic cultural lines. The
Varanasi stories I have told are similarly varied, though they share a world in
which biomedicine, as of the late r g8os, had failed to articulate signifcantly with
the practices of being old, being old and sick, or dying. The fnal vignette turns
back to Somita Ray in Calcutta, whose children's understanding of their mother's
strange behavior-hiding utensils, calling out to the neighbors that she was being
beaten-was that these actions were of a piece with a lifetime of distrusting her
daughter-in-law But then the plaques and tangles of Azheimer's-through the
mediation of the superintendent of the Nava Nir home, of the detai men from
Farmitalia, of the geriatrics collection of the British Library, and of a foreign an
thropologist-came to matter, in an interesting way
NO ONE HERE CARES ABOUT ALZHEIMER' S
Somita Ray and her husband the professor had had one son, Mithun; as a result of
the estrangement between the mismatched couple, Mithun became the primary
outlet for his unhappy mother's afections. The anthropologist Manisha Roy has
written of this particular triangulation as common among the Bengali midde class,
Sudhir Kakar has suggested it is common to the Indian family6 and others have
framed it as a more general fgure of male narcissism and female dependency But
for Mithun and particularly for his wife, Sharmila, Somita's dependence on her son
and her consequent dislike of her daughter-in-law were unique and extreme.
Mithun became a photographer; Sharmia, a librarian at the British Library.
Sharmila resented her mother-in-law's dependence on Mithun; Somita, she felt,
had never made any eforts to acknowledge her from the wedding day onward.
Mithun could not fnd steady work and grew increasingly depressed. Sharmia
continued to work full-time in the library. Her salary supported the famiy and
after Mithun's father, the professor, died the three were forced to move to a down
stairs fat in her parents' house.
In the house of her daughter-in-law's parents, Somita increasingly began to
wander. She would get lost in the neighborhood; Sharmila began to feel embar
rassed. What kind of daughter-in-law was she, people must be asking, who allows
her mother-in-law to go about like a beggar? She began noticing more and more
utensis missing, fnding them among her mother-in-law's possessions. Mithun
began spending most of his time at home to watch his mother; he stopped looking
for work. One day Somita called out the window, "Get the police, get the police,"
accusing her family of maltreating her. Sharmila interpreted all these episodes
to her husband, to a few close family friends, and to myself-as an exacerbation of
Somita's hatred of her. She accused Somita of destroying Mithun's career to keep
him home with her. The strains between the three in the small, one-bedroom fat
were considerable.
298 THE BODY I N TI ME
Mithun had a wealthy cousin, Aloka Mitra, whom we have earlier met as one
of the founders of the Nava Nir homes in Calcutta. At Sharmila's urging, he ap
proached her to see if Somita might be admitted to one of the homes. Like the
other "old a unties," the poor relations of the Nava Nir founders, Somita was even
tually admitted. But the old age home is here the beginning, and not the end of
the story Three days later, the superintendent of the Nava Nir sent word to
Sharmila and Mithun that they must take back their mother: she was unaccept
able for the home.
The couple arrived at the institution to fnd Somita sitting outside. Sharmila's
description of this moment, several months later, is vivid. A transformed Somita
crouched on the stoop; her eyes were fashing, her hair was in wild disarray The
fgure Sharmila paints is the classic pagl. In her retelling, the institution itself had
transformed Somita, or at the least brought out a truth concealed until then. The
superintendent, however, a short woman with the demeanor of a drill sergeant, re
fused to believe that anything had changed. "You lied to me," she angrily accused
them. "She is crazy She doesn't belong here; she is your responsibility"
Craz ol peopl do not belon in ol age homes: they invoke the Bad Family and chal
lenge the institution's benevolent self-construction. Somita required considerable
care, the one thing the N ava Nirs could not provide, despite their rhetoric of neo
local kinship. The superintendent took refuge in the Bad Family only at this junc
ture; earlier, Somita was defned as the poor old aunt of a board member.
The image of the pal articulated and legitimated a next move for Sharmila,
her seeking out psychiatric care with the hope of diagnosing her mother-in-law as
mad, like the superintendent had said, and having her admitted to a psychiatric
nursing home. Though madness in itself was stigmatizing, it was less of a threat
than the dangers of the Bad Family that a screaming mother-in-law at the window
or an accusing superintendent evoked. The couple took Somita to the clinic of
one of Calcutta's best known psychiatric families. They were seen by the junior
member of the family, Dr. S. Nandi. Recendy trained, Nandi was familiar with the
diferential diagnosis of dementia; its limited clinical salience was less of a prob
lem for him than its importance in the texts of international cosmopolitan medi
cine. He had been visited the previous month by detail men pushing Dasovas.
They had stressed the increasing prevalence of Alzheimer's disease and the need
for vigiance: Ask about memory. They gave Nandi a free sample.
For Nandi, Somita ofered a rare opportunity to do a dementia workup and to
evaluate the claims of the Farmitalia men. He told Sharmila that he felt her
mother-in-law had a serious disease of the brain tissue known as Alzheimer's,
about which there was much information in the West but little yet in India. He
noted that few medicines appeared to have much efect. He admitted his uncer
tainty as to whether Dasovas would work, but Sharmila and he agreed to try it for
Somita. He said that Sharmia should not feel guilty; Alzheimer's was a biological
condition.
The psychiatrist told Somita that he could not be certain if Alzheimer's were
THE BODY I N TI ME 299
the problem. He therefore recommended a computerized tomography (CT) scan
of the brain to enable him to make a more defnitive diagnosis. Following the scan,
he told the family that the result confrmed his opinion: Somita had Alzheimer's.
An unfamiliar diagnosis is afrmed through the largely symbolic use of high tech
nology CT scans are neither necessary nor sufcient tools for diagnosing demen
tia; the changes in cortical and ventricular size they measure are nonspecifc. They
may rule in a rare diagnosis, normal pressure hydrocephalus, but NPH can be sus
pected by a classic set of symptoms that did not characterize Somita's behavior.
More than ofer the psychiatrist new information, the CT placed Somita in a new
framework of high technology Like Dr. Bharati's electron microscope in the India
Tdq article, "The Better Brain, " the CT scanner can reveal the truth about
brains, truths hitherto unavailable in India. The machine allows for the possibility
of Alzheimer's.
Armed with a diagnosis of a complex biological disease, Sharmia. was consid
erably relieved. To friends and acquaintances who knew of the family situation,
she announced the fact that Somita had a brain disease. The medications did not
seem to have much efect, but Somita was diseased and a legitimate candidate for
a psychiatric nursing home. The couple began investigating homes with great ex
pectations. Then came the surprise: Despite the old woman's diagnosis, none
would consider Somita. Even armed with the elaborate medical diagnosis of
Alzheimer's, Sharmila was made to feel that responsibility both for Somita's care
and her condition lay with her. Her new lament: "No one here cares about
Alzheimer's. " The couple were advised to care for Somita at home, the same ad
vice they had been receiving before the diagnosis of Alzheimer's. The only homes
that would take her were very expensive facilities.
One home, in the far north of the city near the airport, eventually accepted
Somita. It was a one- to two-hour commute in Calcutta trafc, and her family
rarely could visit Somita. When I visited her there, her nurses reminded me-de
fensively, it seemed-that this old woman had a serious medical condition.
What was wrong with Somita? Diagnosis is contested, as is the future of her
body Sharmila believed Somita had always hated her and that she had just gotten
worse in old age. The relation echoed classic si-baha narratives. Sharmia repre
sented Somita as the cruel mother-in-law Somita, although conversations with her
had litde evident give-and-take, suggested through gesture and the occasional ac
cusation that the problem lay with the evil daughter-in-law who was trying to turn
her son against her and even to kil her. Her accusations gained in coherence from
the fgure they drew upon, the selfsh wife and weak husband of Ghar Kali.
Sharmila's frm control over her husband and their unusual matriocal residence
reinforced the meaningfulness of Somita's words and the locus of pathology in the
si-bahu relationship and not merely her aged body
Sharmia resisted the Bad Family, blaming Somita's lifelong inability to adjust
to her for all that is wrong with her life, chiefy her husband's faiure-and conse
quendy hers-to amount to much. The episode at the old age home pathologized
300
THE BODY I N TI ME
what had until then been a contested family matter. In hearing and labeling
Somita a crazy woman, the superintendent meant by madness less an index point
ing to the old woman than a sign of family neglect. When Sharmila arrived for
Somita, she for the frst time saw her mother-in-law as a madwoman, with the
pathognomonic Medusa-like eyes and hair of a woman possessed. She reinter
preted the accusation of madness to point to the old woman and went to see Dr.
Nandi.
With the diagnosis of Alzheimer's, mediated through the fortuitous appear
ance of the drug salesmen and the visualizing power of expensive machine tech
nology the family could shif the locus of pathology from themselves onto
Somita's brain. The diagnosis also ofered them an armamentarium, drugs like
Dasovas. But these did not seem to work very well, nor did the diagnosis of
Alzheimer's gain Somita admission into a psychiatric institution during an anxious
year of application. Alzheimer's, as of 1 990, could not displace the stigma of the
Bad Family It did not cure Somita and was an inefectual response to the famiy
drama delineated by her weak body and angry voice. Sharmila's considerable
pain at the rigors of putting up with Somita and the added insult of being seen as
the cause of her own sufering was healed by the understanding that she was not
to blame, much as families in Varanasi used understandings of balance or weak
ness to defect the Bad Family stigma.
But balance and weakness point simultaneously to the old person and her en
vironment; not so Azheimer's. Rather than responding to the critical issues of fa
milial interdependence and the maintenance of a familial self the disease isolates
the body of the old person and denies her intersubjectivity Sharmila has a diag
nosis, a CT scan, and a drug, but her newfound explanation does not engage
Somita's famiial body or its location in postapocalytic time and space as fully as
its scientifc and global origins initially promised.
Did Somita have Alzheimer's? Quite possibly. Alzheimer's disease makes ratio
nal sense of Somita's situation in the process of unmaking the sense of her family
It suggests to Sharmila that Somita does not hide household objects under her bed
to spite her; it might suggest to neighbors, friends, and passersby that Somita is not
necessarily the tortured and neglected old woman she is heard to be. It ofers her
famiy the hope of a cure and-even if Dasovas is not signifcantly better than
placebo over the long run-it ofers them at the very least the opportunity of the
gif, a chance to maintain the fow of sevi.
Yet in locating the problem solely in the old person's brain, Azheimer's denies
these multiple frames of diference in the constitution of the senile body Somita's
family is unhappy in a Ghar Kali sort of way Sharmila all but silences Mithun
while blaming all their troubles on his mother; he for his part has consistently re
fused to interene to efect some kind of truce between the two women in his life
that might have laid the grounds for a less traumatic negotiation of what the fam
ily now faces. To fip the si-bahu narrative around: Somita has long been jealous
of her daughter-in-law and has done little to make her life easy The tensions and
THE BODY I N TI ME
301
silences that riddle the history of these three frame their responses to each other's
behavior. The family share a small, one-bedroom apartment in a crowded city
There is little room for any of the three to escape the others, even for a moment.
The presence of Sharmila's parents upstairs adds to the intensity of a sak' nahzn sit
uation.
The family's economic position structures both the possibility of Somita's sur
vival and the inability of a way out. The old man in Nava Nir who angrily
refected on the old age of his class fellows, dumped in a handcart, reminds us that
far more than even Nagwa slum, the majority of Calcuttan elderly simply aren't:
that is, they are unlikely to surive as old for very long. Kamzon is its own cure:
weakness, thinness, and death are all bound together. Somita eats-there is barely
enough money for rent, but there is no shortage on food in this family-and sur
VIves.
The invocation of Alzheimer's and other dementias pushes the complex
sources of the hearing of a bad voice aside. The multiple valences of weakness
and balance, the culture and politics of the family, the commodication of mem
ory loss by Dasovas detail men, and the local moral world of this family and their
community are silenced. Like balance, weakness, and the narrative of the Fall,
Alzheimer's is as much knowledge against as for meaning, allowing families to
move the locus of aging from transactions between family members onto the old
person or onto larger social processes.
A classic debate in medical anthropology centers on the status of what Klein
man and Byron Good, along with several colleagues, defned as "explanatory
models. " In an early work, Patient and Healrs in the Contxt o Culture, 7 Keinman de
veloped the explanatory model (or EM) as a heuristic to suggest that a similar nar
rative process constitutes professional, folk, and popular discourse on the body In
so doing he created a useful tool to challenge the marginalization of patient nar
rative and experience by physicians as being peripheral to well-being. "EM the
ory" advanced a model of clinical engagement as communicative action, the con
tinual renegotiation of the meaning of an illness experience among and between
patients and healers.
Allan Young in a 1 981 article criticized EM theory for what he took as its car
dinal assumption: that the practice and experience of people confronting ilness
are structured primarily as organized and rational models. People who fall sick do
not so much construct models, Young suggested, as draw upon diferent types of
what he termed prototypical knowledge.
8
Here I would focus less on the debate
than on some shared assumptions that may have made it possible: that theodicy is
the work of culture, that people make and live their worlds to "make sense" of
sufering and loss, and that the business of the anthropologist is to come up with a
framework to represent this process of making sense and its diferential constitu
tion.
But the important question of how people make sense of sufering may obscure
a diferent anthropological question. The work of culture is not only or always to
302 THE BODY I N TI ME
make sense of illness, particularly when what i s at stake i s the ontology of the non
sensical. The bad voice of old age threatens because its hearing already and pow
erfully presumes a sense, in this case that of the inadequate transactions that have
failed to sustain a familial body. The meanings given to the senile body are not just
a making sense of experience, but a response to the already meaningful world in
which bodies in time mean far too much. I have suggested three sorts of knowl
edge that are drawn on to resist the excessive signication of the old voice.
First, bodies decay and die and are politically marginalized, so persons turn to
other frames of self and change-indignation, nram, sa
m
aa, the joke, grandpar
enthood, retirement, and the construction of a new category of "senior citizen"
to forestall particular anxieties of loss and dependency Second, children become
their parents and yet old parents do not go away, so children turn to the experi
ences of balance and weakness and to the ideological assemblages that gloss these.
And third, societies are confronted with new circulations of technology and capi
tal and new hierarchies of embodiment as their forms of marginalization within a
world system shif, so they struggle for coherent narratives of the national and the
modern-the Bad Family the Forgotten Elder-to locate the absences of post
colonial modernity through bodies and in history A meaning-centered analysis of
the body is inadequate without tracing the ways in which knowledge is appropri
ated both for and against meaning, resists as well as creates coherence, and de
forms as well as demands the possibility of a scintia senili.
LOST AT THE FAIR
During the Kumbh Mela, whie Devraha Baba gave his darshan, local newspapers
contained several reports of lost old people. 9 Distraught children were inter
viewed; their parents had wandered of and were nowhere to be found. Reporters
described the plight of the children, wandering among the hundreds of thousands
at the fair, looking for their mother or father. Many Banarsis were cynical about
such stories of missing parents. The many ki vi old people of the city, they sug
gested, did not come there solely out of a desire to die in holy Kashi, far from their
land and their family Children abandon their parents, people kew, sometimes
just dumping them at the station. Whether or not it was a Forest of Bliss, no old
householder would wilingly renounce his or her home for Varanasi.
The lost old person was a familiar fgure on television news. Local stations in
the 1 g8os were given airtime to show photos of missing persons of all ages and de
scribe their last known whereabouts; frequently such missing persons were elderly
Their stories were similar: a family from a vlage or small town visits a big city
The old person wanders and gets lost in unfamiliar surroundings. The children
consult the police; a report is fled. The old person is seldom found. When pressed
by reporters, families of such persons noted that the lost person was old and men
tally weak. The police inspector in the old city of Delhi responsible for missing
persons concurred, telling me that most of his missing elderly cases were people
THE BODY I N TI ME
303
with a "mental defect. " Yet he also noted that many lost old persons in Delhi were
eventually found at or near train stations, reinforcing the Banarsi hermeneutic of
suspicion. "But I don't know for certain, " he concluded. 'though we record and
report these cases, our work is with the children. " The sisters from Mother
Teresa's Varanasi ashram, where Dulari from Nagwa eventually moved, regularly
combed the train stations of the city for destitute old and sick people. They, too,
agreed with local accusation: a son brings his mother on pilgrimage to Kashi and
"loses" her at the train station, leaving her to die, liberated.
"You didn't speak of the lneliness of old people," the Vasant College faculty had
told me. The wanderer wanders because he has been abandoned; the bakbak dog
lady barks because she has no one. The Bad Family soaks up all meaning. Neither
the policeman nor the nuns, whatever their institutional concerns with the trafc in
chidren or Christians, were wrong. Wandering and being lost point in several di
rections. The sufering old body is simultaneously an autonomous entity in physi
cal decline and a socially constituted entity in political decline. Both illuminate why
so many lost old people get on television news. Old people may get disoriented, and
confused; old people may be at greater risk for being neglected or abandoned by
their younger relations. And old people are good to think with: their abjection be
comes a sign that fxes the blame for the decay in the order of things, assigns it to
bad children, an exploitative society the seductions of modernity, the cruelties of
Western culture. And perhaps, if demographic transitions take hold in north India
and if certain knds of medical knowledge become more useful, the decay in the
order of things can be laid at the door of the brain, the cell, and the gene.
Though a century from now a diferent paradigm may have replaced it, I am
of my time and irrevocably committed to the usefulness of Alzheimer's as an ex
planation for a set of behaviors contingently demarcated and grouped as demen
tia. But invoking Alzheimer's within the globalizing discursive milieu of Alzhei
mer's hell asserts that the cognitively organized clinical syndrome it represents is
in every case the most real and relevant representation of what might be at stake.
Invoking Azheimer's asserts far more, asserts enough to send Janet Adkins into
that fnal embrace with Dr. Kevorkian in the Michigan trailer park. Plaques and
tangles point to embodied processes, however overdetermined their fguration of
indelibility and plenitude, but they are not the font of all sufering nor of the
meaning of a mindful body facing its decline. Alzheimer's ideology posits normal
aging against total and unremitting pathology; in so doing, it both denies the com
plex experience and the personhood of the old persons it would represent and
shifs attention away from the social origins of much of the weakness of the old.
Like suspicions as to how one gets "lost" at the fair, debates on Kevorkian have
been a way for the American media and its various experts to raise the issue of a
social constitution of a dying space. Unlie the triumphalist narrative of Adkins's
authorizing her death, the 1 996 case of Gerard Klooster, a retired physician from
the San Francisco area diagnosed with dementia whose wife had considered the
serices of Dr. Kevorkan, was reported with greater ambivalence. One of
304
THE BODY I N TI ME
Kooster's children, also a physician, spirited his father away from the rest of the
family when he became convinced they were trying to kill him, and the case ended
up in the courts. Unlike Janet Adins, Gerard Klooster could not ofer a voice in
the moment of its own extinction, and the question of assisted suicide versus
forced euthanasia could not be resolved. The irony of the tears of the other vic
tim, usually restricted to tabloid reality, could here break through into the main
stream press. 1 0
As sorts of places to be abandoned, gerontopoli like Varanasi or Allahabad are
diferent from the embrace of Dr. Kevorkian, if only in the ideology of renuncia
tion they seem to embody, the radical frame by which families can divest them
selves of the expectations of seva. But Kevorkian's relationship to the disenchant
ment of the dying space is anything but obvious. In the summer of 1 gg6, he
responded to his critics in an address to the National Press Club in Washington,
D. C. Against concerns that he and his various instruments of assisted suicide-the
"Thanatron" and later the "Mercitron"-promised a less dignifed death than his
advocates claimed, the Michigan doctor responded:
Well let's just take what people think is a dignifed death. Chrt. Was that a dignifed
death? Do you think it's dignifed to han.om wood with nail throuh your hand and fet
bledin, hang for three or four days slwl din, with people jabbin spears into your
side, and people jeern you? Do you think that's digifed? Not by a long shot. Had
Christ died in my van, with people around Him who loved Him, the way it was, it
would be far more dignifed. In my rus! van.
I I
The space of Kevorkian-death is not that of a household, but neither is it the mod
ern institution of the hospital or the institutions-the legislature, the judiciary, the
media, the church-which Kevorkian sees as ranged against him, sustaining the
hospital's algorithms 1 2 of alienated machine death. Neither home nor hospital
work as dying spaces here, but a middling space in between, characterized by an
accessible pioneer ethos of the trailer-park wild, the rusty-van West, and the trash
technology of tubes and gas masks and crazy pathologists who get of designing
ever simpler and less alienating death machines. Jesus is reclaimed for this new
world, but not the Crucifion, not the resistance of sufering and death to their
rational management. Kevorkian's rusty van ofers a bloodless Pt, a seamless
move from life to the arms of the Mercitron, Mother of Death. Old age vanishes.
Perhaps the exemplary fgure of this new bloodless comfort at the Aerican
end of the milennium is not Doctor Death but the man I see as his counterpart,
a Doctor Life fashioning not middling death but middling life, and not out of
tubes and the pioneer West, but out of exotic Indian wisdom, the language of hor
mones and genes, and the imagined Arthurian and pagan past of whiteness.
Deepak Chopra, the great pureyor of neo-racana to the world, in book after
best-selling book and in repeatedy broadcast television shows and videos and mo
tivational seminars, ofers Unconditional L and an Agelss Bof, Tmelss Mind. 13 His
1 ggos writing has turned ever-more toward Athurian and other European imag-
THE BODY I N TI ME 305
ined pasts of enchantment, integrating these with the ancient truths of
Ayureda. Life and death, within Chopra's world of the ambient, are a nondu
alist blur, and middle-aged adults make their quietus by both ignoring and em
bracing decay yet seemingly never having to sufer it. Kevorkian-death and
Chopra-life refashion the ends of time and the body emptying sickness and frailty
and confusion of any presence.
That a migrant from India can briliantly recommodify his heritage into such a
gift of no aging seems telling, at the close of the century amid the World Bank and
Government of India's eforts to achieve a far greater articulation of India into the
global market. Rishis travel well, though in the process they seem, like sage Chya
vana, to grow younger. Chopra began his New Age career by trying to help his
guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to bring Ayureda to America. But at some point he
seems to have outgrown Maharishi, and the fgure most Aericans associate with
Ayureda is not a white-bearded old rishi but his former disciple, the middle-aged
Chopra, in business suit or leisure wear. Chopra ofers an India without guilt, and
for those who would embrace the other India, there is always Mother Teresa,
ready like the Mercitron to make Third World death a good death. The Indian an
thropologist at Zagreb could ofer the good family against the cold biologism of
the available West, though back at home the Bad Family awaited, and the absence
to which it tried to speak. To that absence and to several of its own, such a West
could in turn ofer Reason, and Mercy
x A Last Few Tips up the River '
Bakbak. My last morning, I got up at fve and went out on the river in Shankar's
boat to immerse my image of Saraswati, goddess of Culture, and have a fnal look
at the fabled city Shankar pushed of from the bank; I held Saraswati in my lap. I
had learned about the immersion of festival images in that frst class on Indian re
ligion. Four years later in Calcutta, my frst day in the country, I asked the physi
ologist who had picked me up from the airport (the nephew of the mother of a
former tenant of my mom's secretary) to stop the car his aunt had hired so that we
could watch a crowd of young men immersing a large image. I had arrived in the
city the day after a major Puja, and I had been taught that after the period of wor
ship God's presence no longer inhabited festival images and they were supposed to
be immersed, returned to the river and to the elements. We had been talkng
about cancer research; he looked at me strangely and declined to join me in run
ning afer the young men to the river's edge.
I had bought this particular image before Saraswati's annual celebration in
rg8g, from a lane lined with hundreds of Saraswati statues. Having the embodi
ment of Culture in the house of an ethnographer seemed a good idea. I no longer
ran after processions and was spending more of my time talking to scientists; still,
old habits die hard. But I held of immersing my r g8g Saraswati in the Ganga on
the day afer the Puja. It was a lovely image, and it seemed wise to keep it intact.
But feldwork was over.
Marwari Mataji, as always, watched from her window as Shankar pushed of
Far to the south, I could see Nagwa slum beyond the line of ghats and temples.
When I was working full time in Nagwa, I had stopped coming to the ghats. Their
dense groupings of religious things seemed to reinforce the exclusion the Nagwa
Chamars ofen talked about. But such truths were difcult to live by for one
brought up on the glories of ageless Varanasi, and when I turned to middle-class
J
0
7
308 A LAST FEW TRI PS UP THE RI VER
feldwork I allowed myself t o move back into the old city, t o the home by the river
that turned out to be the former residence of Swami Karpatriji, he of anti
Chamar politics.
It was stil quite early, that fnal morning. This was the boat we had used when
the two men from Mughalsarai had asked me why Muslims didn't get sixtyish. I
had not been able to give them the answer they wanted. When I turned the ques
tion back to them, the man who replied had said it was all about who had bad
families, and who didn't. But he thought there was more to it.
The two men had eventually disembarked, and I had stayed put, sitting there
on the boat working it all out. Shankar had grunted and with a long oar pushed us
back out onto the river. He began rowing upstream again-past Brahman experts,
tourist vendors, old women bathers, appropriate-technology-armed Ganges
savers, practicing wrestlers, argumentative babas, strolling policemen, and fsher
man putting away their nets-and I theorized. Then Shankar spoke: "Don't listen
to them, brother. Everyone is the same." Meaning Hindus and Muslims. He
paused. "Except for money If we poor people had some, we would never get so
old and weak. "
Shankar rowed hard against the current. I sat there. Each of us, on his own side
of the boat and in his own way, imagined something like no aging in India. And
on the bank, the timeless vision of Varanasi and its ghats drifted by, propelled by
Shankar's hands and feet. No shortage of metaphor, in anthropology
On that last day, we again sat silent and midstream, watching Saraswati the god
dess of Culture sink and dissolve under our mutual gaze. Something about
tourism in my family: "It wil break your heart. "
Shankar spoke: "Where to now?"
NOTES
THE GROUND OF THE ARGUMENT
1. Sahlins 1976: 55
2. Rabinow 1 992, Haraway 1 991 , Latour 1 993.
3 Kierkegaard 1988: 9-1 5; I am indebted to Veena Das for many discussions about
Kierkegaard's relevance for a philosophy of age (see Das 1 996).
4 Strathern 1 981 .
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
1. Cohn 1 996.
2. Scheper-Hughes 1 990.
3 Scheper-Hughes 1 992.
INTRODUCTION
1 . Kali was a larger-than-life fgure for British correspondents, the emblem of al that
was uncanny about the conditions of colonial rule and its efects, and one need take the at
tribution of the letter to her-along with most other religous specifcs of the Balua afair
as the sediment of the available descriptive language of the tie. Thus the otherwise con
fusing concatenation of Kali, Shani, and LOrd Ram in the telling of the deaths at Baua.
2. Dirks 1992, Oddie ' 995
3 "Benares, Apri 1 5 " 1 865.
4 "Benares, April 1 7 " 1 865.
5 "The Gathering at Hurdwar " 1 865.
6. The list is by now endless; see Parker et al . 1 992, Chatterjee 1 993, Mani 1 989, Mc
Clintock 1 995.
7 Cowley 1 989, Gelman, Hager, and Quade 1 989, Kantrowitz 1 989.
8. Agar 1 986.
310 NOTES TO PAGES 6-22
g. Lyan 1 g8g.
10. Gubrium 1 g86.
1 1 . Barthes 1 g76.
1 2. Inden 1 ggo, Madan 1 gg4: 85-1 07.
1 3. Nader 1 ggo.
1 4. See discussion of Haraway's eat's cradle in Allucquere Rosanne Stone 1 gg5: 2 1 -22;
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty 1 g76.
15. Kumar 1 g88.
1 6. In the context of contemporary India, these terms-working class, middle class
elide as much as they reveal. The ongoing genealogy of class formation difers from that of
European, American, and other contexts, a matter obscured by any common terminology
(Chakrabarty 1 g8g, Oberoi 1gg4). I use the terms in part as a shorthand, acknowledging the
problems with them, and in part in the way they are often used locally in Varanasi, in En
glish and in Hindi.
DULARI
1. Ginsberg 1 g84, Raja Rao 1 g8g.
2. Chen 1 gg6, Chen and Dreze 1 gg2, Dreze and Sen 1 g8g, Agaral 1 ggo, 1 gg4.
CHAPTER I . ORIENTATIONS
1. The XII International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Science was
held from July 24 to 31 , 1 g88.
2. Turner 1 g74-
3. I am indebted to James Bono for a conversation on Candide.
4 At the time, the group was known as the Alzheimer's Disease and Related Disorders
Association.
5 A. Kleinman and J. Kleinman 1 gg1 .
6. Venkatramani 1 g85.
7 The equation of science, development, and culture in the frst decades of indepen
dent India under Nehru was repeatedly articulated through the immensir of artifacts: dams,
planned cities, new universities (lnden 1 gg5, Visvanathan 1gg5).
8. I use matlize here rather than, for example, construct to avoid the frequent mis
reading of social constructionist language as idealist and antimaterialist by both its critics
and some of its adherents and to suggest that any theory of the social and the subjective
must articulate itself in careful relation to body and environment. This entails not only tak
ing the body as the sit of the social in the sense of Mauss (1 gg2) and Bourdieu ( 1 ggo) but as
a more robust presence in theory (Rabinow 1 gg3, 1 gg4, A. Kleinman 1 g8g, 1gg5). I wil sug
gest some of what I mean by robust below My use of matalize is in part indebted to But
ler's Bodis That Mattr ( 1 gg3).
g. Maclachlan 1 863, Charcot Cliical Lctures on te Deases 1 88! , Nascher 1 g1 4.
1 0. Durrant 1 865, Nascher 1 g15, Podolsky 1 g33.
1 1 . Montesquieu 1 g8g.
1 2. Kipling I gm, Forster 1 g24, Haggard 1 885, 1 886.
1 3. Hegel 1 g56.
1 4. Moore 1 989 [ 1 907] :74
15. 1 876:275, my emphasis.
! 6. 1 921 : 1 82.
1 7. Menon 1 992.
1 8. Palthe 1933.
1 9. Naraindas 1 996, Anold 1 993, Harrison 1 994.
20. Beotra 1 965: iii.
NOTES TO PAGES 22-
3
6 jll
21 . Chaudhari and Chaudhari 1 963, Roy Chowdhury and Saharay 1 988, Hidayatullah
and Hidayatullah 1 985 [ 1 977] , Ramamurti 1 980.
22. AlIndia Reporter (Madras) 1 940: 73
23. Roy Chowdhury and Saharay 1988: 1 1 8.
24. Beotra 1 965.
25. Roy Chowdhury and Saharay 1 988: 1 1 2.
26. Chaudhari and. Chaudhari 1 963: 256.
27. DSM-IV 1 995.
28. DSM-III-R 1 987.
29. DSM IV 1 995.
go. 1 989: 8o6.
31 . ICD-1 0 1 992, ICD- 1 0 1 993.
32. Clarfeld 1 988.
33 Meyer et al. 1 986.
34 Chui 1 989, Graves et al. 1 994.
35 WHO Scientifc Group on Senile Dementia 1 986, Graves et al. 1 994, Homma and
Hasegawa 1 989.
g6. Jorm et al . 1 987.
37 Graves et al. 1 994, Katzman et al . 1988, Rocca et al . 1 990, Sulkava et al. 1 985.
g8. Graves et a!. 1 994, Jorm et al. 1 987.
39 Henderson 1988, Meyer et al. 1 988.
40. Wadia 1 992; Osuntokun et al. 1 991 .
41 . Osuntokun et a!. 1 991 .
42. Gelman, Hager, and Quade 1 989.
43 Marriott 1 976.
4 Cliford 1 988.
45 Moore 1 986.
46. Johnson and Johnson 1 983.
47 A. Kleinman 1 977
48. Lutz 1 985: 89.
49 I began the process of developing appropriate MSEs frst through training to use
the Folstein MMS in clinical settings (Folstein et al. 1 975), then through obseration of the
community-based home follow-up MSE testing of the East Boston Senior Health Project
(n. d. ), then through intensive literature reviews (Venkoba Rao et al. 1 972, Pershad and Wig
1 979, Venkoba Rao and Madhavan 1982, Chandra et al. 1 994) and interviews with neurol
ogists in fve cities in India.
50. Chandra et al. 1 994.
51 . Department of International Economic and Social Af airs 1982, Keyftz and Flieger
1 990.
52. Department of International Economic and Social Af airs 1 982.
312 NOTES TO PAGES
3
6
9
53 Venkoba Rao 1989; Bharucha et al. 1987.
54 Krishnan 1 976.
55 Wadia 1 992.
56. Butler 1 993, Althusser 1 971 .
57 Cohen 1 996.
58. Schweitzer 1 936.
59 Kumar 1 988.
6o. Patrick Olivelle ( 1 993) has convincingly argued that ii amadharma emerged in dr
maiitra, Hindu writings on normative social order, more as an edice to encompass
diferent prescriptive models of the religious life by containing them within a single scheme
of "stages of life, " and less as an efort to theorize the life course. His work is consonant with
Sylvia Vatuk's more contemporary fnding in a vilage in the vicinity of Delhi that people
did not frame their old age in correspondence with the tpology of ii amadarma ( 1 g8o).
Still, as Vatuk notes, though the last two stages of vinaprata and san'isa are not models
for old age in any strict sense, they are critical in how many persons refect on their old age
or that of others. Whatever the origins of the four stages, they have become part of the ex
plicit or implicit terms by which many persons may think about age.
61 . Parry 1 994, Kumar 1 988, Ater 1 992.
62. See Mani 1 990, Gupta and Ferguson in press.
WORLD WIDE WEB
1 . http: / /inf.net/ -combsd/ ALG.htmlpostings, http: / / .inf.net/ -comb
sdm/Secur-Book-Order-Form.htl, ht: / /wwalz.org/asoc/media/isttut.htl, ht: / I
alz.org/asoc/medial25.htl, http:/ /mentalhealth.com/ /icd/p22-oro4. html,
http: / / .biostat.wustl.edu/alzheier/ (allast downloaded 1 0l22/g6).
2. http:/ /biostat.wustl.edu/hyperists/alzheimer/g51 2/o21 8.html Qast downloaded
1 0/22/g6).
3 http: / /wwbiostat.wustl.edu/hyperlits/alzheier/g5o2/ooo2.ht Qat dowloaded
1 0/22/g6).
4 http: / /biostat.wustl.edu/hyperlists/alzheier/9502/oo52.htl Qat dowloaded
! OI22/g6).
CHAPTER 2 . ALZHEIMER' S HELL
1 . Michals 1 992.
2. See Lock 1 993 for an excellent example, in medical anthropology, of the selective use
of European history in the construction of a Japanese ethnography and history of the pres
ent.
3 New genetically engineered subspecies of mice marketed as viable animal models of
Alzheimer's disease for laboratory research have been patented in the United States. News
paper reports of this research have been as likely to appear on business as science pages of
Aerican newspapers. See King 1 995, Kalata 1 995, Riordan 1 995, zheimer's Work
Aided by New Breed of Mouse " 1996.
4 Rabinow 1 989:7.
NOTES TO PAGES
4
9-2
313
5 Comment made at a seminar at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies,
Delhi, 1 990.
6. A. Kleinman "Illness Narratives" 1 988. See Good and Good 1 981 .
7 I am grateful to Linda Hunt for providing me with a supply of supermarket tabloids
when I was in Varanasi.
8. Donaldson 1 988.
g. Cowley 1 989, Gelman, Hager, and Quade 1 g8g.
1 0. Fox 1 989.
1 1 . Cowley 1 989, Gelman, Hager, and Quade 1 989, Kantrowitz 1 g8g.
1 2. Mace and Rabins 1 981 .
1 3. Ibid.: 14.
14. Turner 1 g6g
.
1 5. Egan 1 990.
1 6. One might compare the publicity over Adkins's case with that over Gerald Kooster,
a California obstetrician apparently diagnosed with Alzheimer's whose wife, Ruth, al
legedly tried to involve Kevorkian in a hody contested "assisted suicide" for her husband. A
custody batde erupted, one son winning custody of Kooster in a Michigan court, "saving
his life" from Kevorkian and Ruth Klooster, and a daughter regaining custody in a Califor
nia court. Legal and other representatives of both children framed the issue to the court
and press in terms of Kooster's sufering, but descriptions of this sufering invariably in
voked the "other vctim" (Lewin 1 996, see pp. 303-4).
1 7. Ramos 1 995, Stone 1 994-
1 8. Sidey 1 994
l g. Ibid.
20. Morris (1 995) points out the additional importance of Reagan having written out
the letter by hand.
2 1 . There are other ways children of parents diagnosed with dementia have ap
proached its twin victimizations, avoiding both the pious silencings of Alzheimer's profes
sionalism and its gerontocidal tabloid parody Deborah Hofann's 1 994 fm, Complint o
a Dutl Dauhtr, ackowledges her ambivalent and at times difcult relationship with her
mother before and during the latter's illness, without the story ever faling into either

Grand
Guignol or granny-dumping. The mother in the fm never ceases to be a person, however
difcult or impoverished her relationships with others become. The flmmaker reports re
alizing that her initial problem with her mother during the progressive course of the latter's
dementia lay in expecting her to be someone she no longer was. The message is that of Th
3
6-Hour Dq, but unlie its realization in the ADRDA meeting, the message here never de
generates into the denial of selfood. Alzheier's is acknowledged, but the acknowledg
ment does not replace the old woman as the heart of the story.
22. Cole 1 992.
23. Angier 1 990.
24. "Researchers Say Skin Test May Identify People with Brain Disease" 1 993.
25. Humphry 1 991 .
26. Cited i n Lyman 1 989:599; see Gubrium

1 986.
27. Lyman 1g8g: 599
28. Dawson and Reid 1 987, Rader 1 987.
29. Lyman 1 g8g: 602.
314
NOTES TO PAGES 62-6
9
30. Thewlis 1 941 .
31 . Nascher 1 914.
32. Canguilhem 1 g8g.
33 Charcot 1 866, considerably revised as Charcot 1 867. Early English versions in
cluded Tuke's Clinical uctures on Snil and Chronic Deases ( 1 881 ) and an American edition,
Clinical uctures on t Dseases q Ol Age, trans. L. H. Hunt ( 1 881 ) . Alain Lellouch (1 992) ofers
a far broader catalogue of Charcot's writings on "Ia pathologie senie. "
34 Charcot, Clinical uctures on the Deases: 1 7. See also Lellouch 1992: 86.
35 Prus 1 840.
36. Lellouch, p. 940 "The medicine of old people is still to be made. "
37 Charcot, Clinical uctures on t Deases: 20.
38. Thomas Cole, attempting to insert Charcot into a narrative of the ever more rou
tinized split of the normal and the pathological in the movement toward geriatrics, down
plays Charcot's obseration that the distinction collapses in old age (1992: 201 -2). But Can
gilhem's discussion, cited by Cole, troubles the seamless movement Cole suggests, as I will
discuss below
39 Canguilhem 1 992: 1 04.
40. Cole 1 992: 1 06.
41 . Ibid. : 1 99-200.
42. Nascher 1 914: 1 95
43 Maclachlan 1 863.
44 Rostan 1 823: 21 7, 244.
45 Weiner 1 993: 1 88-8g.
46. Cohn 1 996, Rabinow 1 g8g.
47 Rowland 1 851 : 50-55.
48. Jac
k
on 1 875.
49 Dieulafoy 1 91 8: g83.
50. Kraepelin 1 968 [1 904) , Bleuler 1 924.
51 . Maclachlan 1 863: 24, see also Sicherman 1 981 . Flint 1 879: 66g.
52. See Cole 1 992.
53 Bacon 1 683: 1 1 .
54 Smith 1752.
55 Maclachlan 1 863: 2 1 .
s6. Kraepelin l g68 [1904) : g.
57 Ibid. : 221 .
s8 . Tanner 1 86o, cited i n the O,rd Enlih Dtionar (OED) l g8g (8): s6.
59 Power and Sedgwick 1 888, cited in OED 1 989 (8): 56.
6o. Nascher 1 91 5, discussed below.
61 . On Alzheier, see Kraepelin 1 987.
62. Warthin 1 929: 77-78.
63. Ibid.: 1 1 3, 1 1 5.
64. Barrett 1 91 0, Simchowicz 1 91 0, Fuller 1 91 1 , Tif any 1 91 3-14.
65. Gubrium 1 987.
66. Fox 1 g8g.
67. The lone voice in the wilderness was the Canadian neuropathologist Vladimir
Hachinski (e.g., Hachinski 1 990) .
68. Curtin 1 972, de Beauvoir 1 972, Blau 1 973, Buder 1 975, Gubrium 1 975.
6g. Sankar 1 984.
NOTES TO PAGES
7
1 -82 31
5
70. Luborsky and Sankar 1 993; see also Cohen 1 994.
71 . Cole 1 992.
72. Callahan 1 987, 1 993.
73- Cohen 1 994
74 Cited in Mora 1 991 : !viii.
75 Ibid.: lxii.
76. Weyer 1 991 [1 583] : 523-24.
77- Ibid. : 285.
78. Scot 1 964 [1 584] : 33
79 Kramer and Sprenger, 1 948: 44
8o. Scot 1964: 29.
81 . Macfarlane 1 970. See also Demos 1982 for attention to why the voices of cer
tain women, particularly at midlife, presented a threat in seventeenth-century New En
gland.
82. Pliny as translated by Philemon Holland ( 1 601 : vii: xi: 1 82).
83. Kennedy 1 844: 245-46.
84. Lock 1 993: 303-29.
85. Laqueur 1 990.
86. Durrant 1 865: 233.
87. Halford 1 833: 1 0-1 3.
88. Skae "Climacteric Insanity " 1 865, Skae "Climacteric Insanity i n the Male " 1 865.
8g. Podolsky 1 933: 70.
go. De Fleury 1 91 0, Gleason 1 91 6.
91 . Galloway 1 933: 1 29.
92. Moinson 1 934
93 Nascher 1 914: 1 .
94 Nascher 1 91 5: 541 -43.
95 Nascher 1 914: 6.
g6. See, for example, Walker 1 985.
97 See, for example, Martin 1 987.
g8. Nascher 1 914: 1 6-1 7.
99 Ibid. : 1 8-l g.
1 00. Nascher 1 91 5: 541 -44.
1 01 . See Aaducci, Rcca, and Schoenberg 1 986, Beach 1 987, Berrios 1 990, Berrios
and Freeman (eds.) 1 991 .
1 02. Berrios 1 990: 363.
1 03. Ibid. : 362.
1 04. Azheimer 1 907.
1 05. Berrios 1 990: 359-63.
1 06. I am less certain than Berrios appears to be as to whether the Azheimer of the
1 907 paper is as much a part of this consensus as Berrios seems to suggest. Azheimer re
peatedly stresses, in that paper, the failure of existing classifcations to capture the peculiar
ities of the case in question.
1 07. Wolfenstein 1 955, FitzGerald 1 986.
108. Egan 1 992.
1 09. Chui 1 989.
316 NOTES TO PAGES 82-
9
7
I 1 0. Shakespeare I 974: II: iv: 204.
1 1 1 . Fuller I 9I 2: 452-53, 453-54.
1 1 2. Ibid.: 54I -43
1 1 3. Ramaseshan and Martin (eds.) I 992.
1 1 4. See, for example, the cover of Berrios and Freeman (eds.) I 99I .
NUNS AND DOCTORS
1 . "Study Suggests . a . " I gg6.
2. Herrnstein and Murray I 994
3 Daly I gg6
.
CHAPTER
3
. KNOWLEDGE, PRACTICE, AND THE BAD FAMILY
1 . In an earlier draf of this chapter (Cohen I 992), I used pseudonyms for the four in
divduals I discuss at length here; in this version, I use the real names. With refection, issues
of honesty and accountability (mine) seemed of greater concern than an imagined and
never requested need for confdentiality.
2. Bose and Gangrade I g88. Pati and Jena I g8g.
3 Soodan I 975, Bose and Gangrade (eds.) I g88, Desai (ed.) I g82, Sharma and Dak
(eds.) I 987, de Souza and Fernandes (eds.) 1 982, Biswas (ed.) I 987, Pati and Jena (eds.) I g8g.
4 Obviously there have been books with other titles; the point here is to stress the de
gree of routinization and the epistemological consequences of social science that must be
nominated as "in India. " Other works with dif erent titles but similar narratives include
Bhatia I 983 and Viaya Kumar I ggi ; works with diferent narratives are fewer, and include
Marulasiddaiah's classic I g6g study
5 See George Basalla's discussion of "the spread of Western science " in three similar
but less ironically treated phases ( I g67), as well as Deepak Kumar's critique ( I 995) .
6. Soodan I 975: 1 .
7 Ibid.: I I .
8 . Subrahmanium I g88: v.
g. Gangrade I g88: 27.
IO. See Cohen I 983.
I I . Desai I g82, Desai I 987, Goyal I g8g, Kohli I 987, Mishra I g8g, Mohanty I g8g, Ram-
nath I g8g, Saxena I g88, Sinha I g8g, Srivastava I g88, Subrahmanium I g88.
I2. United Nations Word Assembly on Aging Ig82.
I 3. United States Department of State Ig82.
I4. India, Ministry of Welfare I 987.
I5. United Nations Ofce at Vienna I g88.
I6. India, Ministry of Welfare I g88.
I7. United States Department of State Ig82: 1 .
I 8 . Ibid.: 3 , my italics.
I g. Cowgill and Orgren I 979= 503-4
20. Cowgill and Holmes I 972. See Robertson I 984.
2 1 . Parsons I 949: 230-31 .
2 2 . Burgess I g6o.
23. De Beauvoir 1 972: 321 -22.
24. Palmore and Manton 1 974: 21 0.
NOTES TO PAGES
97
- 1 1 2 31
7
25. See Dreze and Sen 1 g8g, Agaral 1 990, 1 994, Chen and Dreze 1 992.
26. De Souza 1 981 , De Souza and Fernandes (eds.) 1 982.
27. Laslett 1 985.
28. Nydegger 1983.
29. Townsend 1981: g.
30. Neysmith and Edwardth 1 984: 39
31. Cowgill and Holmes 1972: 31 0-1 1 .
32. Quadagno 1982: s-6.
33 Fischer 1 978. See also M. Johnson 1 973.
34 Minois 1 987, but see Cohen 1 994 for a critique.
35 Fischer 1978; Achenbaum 1 985.
36. Stearns 1 977-
37 Quadagno 1982: 22-23.
38 . Rhoads 1 984: 249.
39 Reid 1985: 92.
40 . Nydegger 1 983 .
41 . Ross 1 982: 286-go.
42. Bailey 1 957.
43 Epstein 1962.
44 Epstein 1 973: 2 1 0.
45 Desai 1 956.
46. Epstein 1 973: 201 , citing Desai.
47 Kolenda 1 967, Y Singh 1973.
48. Epstein 1 973: 206-10.
49 Cohn 1 g6o, Madan 1 965, Rao 1 968, Gore 1 968, Shah 1 974, Van der Veen 1 976.
50. Gray and Mearns (eds.) 1 g8g.
51 . Propp 1 968.
52 . Nandy 1 983.
53 See Shweder and Miller 1 985, Ramanujan 1 g8g, Daniel 1 984, Marriott 1 976, 1 g8g,
Roland 1 988.
54 Tharu 1 g8g: 1 27.
55 Ahmad 1 992 .
56. Djurfeldt and Lindberg 1 g8o. See de Souza 1 981 : 42 for the application of Djurfeldt
and Lindberg to the study of the poor elderly
57 Walford 1 983.
58. Mahdihassan 1 979 .
59 Ojha and Kumar 1978.
6o. Capra 1 975 .
6r . Francis Zimmermann has recendy ofered a fairly lengthy critique of my work
based upon the following few paragraphs on Chyawanprash ( 1 995). Charging me with the
faults of being on the one hand a "cultural relativist" and on the other a champion of bio
medical primacy in the tradition of the medical anthropologist George Foster, Zimllr
mann righdy suggests that any attention to the bodily politics of Chyawanprash is incom
plete without an efort to analyze its efcacy and locate this efcacy within a genealogical
narrative of herbal medicines (" Si nou nous limitns a decrire ls ressort du succis de l'indust
318 NOTES TO PAGES 1 1 2-1 2
7
aurviique qui satifit a un deand artcillment suscite par L publiit et l'ideolg hidoue, comr
I fit Cohen, san pose L question d l'ef acit, nous sombrns dans I reltivi culture[ et I gnicime
des obsevaturs cU Gorge Fostr . . . ") . His efort to take my argument on the tonic in a
dif erent direction is welcome.
Unfortunately, Zimmermann seems less interested in engaging the arguments on
the old body presented here than in reading them somewhat awkwardly within what seems
to be a contemporary French anxiety over cultural relativism and the associated dangers of
the American style. But the point in the paragraphs above is not that Chyawanprash is or is
not reducible to the politics of its contemporary commercial or generational dyamics.
Rather, it is that the old body is ambiguously framed U a legitimate medical object within
a variety of textual and ethnographic materials, that this ambiguity can be heightened and
exploited for a variety of clinical or other practical ends, and that eforts to think in third
person terms about the relation of "the old body " to particular old bodies in space and time
need engage such uses of ambiguity Thi point i relvant fr t deplymet o allat fr
tat o Ayurveda.
62. Somadeva 1 968 (1 88o] .
63. See Cohen "The Epistemological Carnival " 1 995.
64. Jordens 1 978: 150-52.
65. Bakshi 1 99 : 88, 1 74.
66. Butalia 1 993.
67. Gofan 1 961 , Gubrium 1 975.
68. Langer 1 g8g.
6g. Estes 1 980.
70. Stevens 1 987.
7 1 . Foucault 1 977.
72. Banerji 1 990 (1929] ; Premchand 1 978 (1 92 1 ] .
73 Paul 1983.
74 Banerjee 1 989.
75 Sarkar 1 g8g: 38.
76. Nandy 1 980: 7-g.
AITA
S
A PRA
L
PA
1 . Atv J X: 1 29-32. Grifth 1 895-g6: 437f
CHAPTER
4
. MEMORY BANKS
1 . Denby 1 994.
2. /n Lar III: iv: 1 1 -1 4.
3 /n Lar II: iv: 1 08-1 0.
4 Vatuk 1 990: 67.
5 Sontag 1 978.
6. Berrios 1 990. See also Amaducci, Rocca, and Schoenberg 1 986.
7 Freud 1966.
8. Zimmermann lg8g.
g. Brass 1 972, Leslie 1 976.
NOTES TO PAGES 1 29-1
54
319
1 0. D. Ojha and A. Kumar 1 978, Zimmermann 1 992.
1 1 . Filiozat 1 976.
12. Cohen "The Epistemological Carnival" 1 995.
IS. Capra 1 975.
14. Suta (Cititiam XVII: 6) 1 981 [1 91 1 ] : vol. 2: 51 6-1 8.
1 5. Caral ( Cititi nam 1: i: 7) 1 98s: vol. 2: 4
1 6. Srikanta Murthy 1 984: iii.
17.
S
aradara (1: vi: 20) 1 984: so.
18. Varma 1 987.
19. J. Ojha 1 978: vii, 1 4-15.
20. Cara/ (Cititi nam 1: i: 68-74) 1 98s: vol. 2: 9-10.
21. Ibid. (1: i: 17-21 ) I 98s: vol. 2: 4-5
22. Ibid. (1: iv: 27) 1 98s: vol. 2: SI .
2S. Good and Good 1 981 .
24. Nichter 1 980.
25. See A. Kleinman ' ' Widow on Mental Health" 1 988.
26. Boral et al. 1 989.
27. Hubert and Mauss 1981 [1 898] : 21 -28.
28. Cara/ (Cititi nam II: 2: 1 4-1 7) 1 98s: vol. 2: 41 -42.
29. Maine 1 876: 28s-9o.
so. Both of these persons are described through pseudonyms: in one case the family re
quested not to be named and in the other I did not have the opportunity to meet alof the
relatives I discuss in order to ask permission.
SI . Biswas 1 968: 892.
s2. Potter 1 977: 1 72-73, Larson 1992.
SS Matilal 1 985: 208.
S4 Larson 1 992.
S5 Potter 1 981 .
s6. Ibid. : 69.
S7 Marriott 1 976.
s8. O' Flaherty 1 984: 209-1 0, 220, 224.
S9 Babb 1 987: 1 2s.
40. Somadeva 1 968: S74-75
41 . Edgerton 1 926: lii-liv.
42. Vzramacart 1 926: 6-7.
MER/ LTA MAH
A
1 . Discussion wth the journalist and media critic Amita Malik, 17 June 1 996.
CHAPTER
5
. THE ANGER OF THE RISHIS
1 . Subramaniam 1 965: 49
2. Benson 1 975.
S Ninan 1 991 .
4 Marriott 1 989.
320
NOTES TO PAGES 1
55
-1
74
5 Trawick I ggo.
6. O' Flaherty I 981 .
7 Marriott I 976, I 98g; Daniel I 984.
8. Varma I 987.
g. De I 986: I 57
1 0. B. Mishra and V Mishra I 965.
I I . The connections between contemporary rasqana and urine therapy are minimal but
do exist and are far from Desai's idiosyncrasy alone. See Mithal I 979, Patel I 978.
I 2. Myerhofi g78.
I 3. The discussion of such triangles leads from Lvi-Strauss on the circulation of
women to Rubin I 975 and Sedgick I 985.
I4. Ramanujan I 983.
I S. See Das I 982.
I 6. Sobt I 99L
I 7. See Das I 9g6.
I 8. Carstairs I 958; Kakar I g8I .
I g. Nandy I983.
20. Carstairs I 958: I 38, I53
21 . Ibid. : I58-6o, my emphasis.
22. Nandy I 983: 4-I 8.
23. Such a description of Hijras, the "third gender" of India, i s not mine but that of
Carstairs, who saw Hiras as living metaphors for Rajasthani men. See Carstairs I 956,
Cohen "The Pleasures of Castration" I 995
24. Nandy I 983: I 7-I 8.
25. Kakar I g82: I 34-35
26. See Cohen "Holi in Banaras" I 995
27. Kakar I979: I 25-26.
28. Despite the emergence of several iportant works in psychological anthropology and
sociology, such U Stanley Kurtz's critical rethinkng of Oedpus in India literature (I 992), U
well as work on aspects of adult masculinity in Varanasi by Nita Kmar ( I g88), Joseph Alter
( I 992), and Steven Derne (I 995), work on family relations and child development in north
India paralleling Margaret Trawick's seminal work in Tamil Nadu ( I ggo) has been limited.
29. Ramanujan I983: 252.
30. Leach Ig62, Courtright I 985, Obeysekere I 990, Cohen I 991 .
31 . Mahabharat ( I [7. c] . 78: 3o-8o:
I 2) I 973
=
I gi -94
32. Saraswati I 975
33 Ramiyana (yodyaknda 57. s8) I g86: 205-1 0.
34 Vatuk I 98o: I 47
35 Poems read at the Indian Institute for Advanced Study Simla, June I g, I 996.
36. Marriott I 989.
37 Brahma Pria, Part I, I g8s: xix.
38. Brahma PriTa ( I 26: 27-33), Part 3, I g86: 687. The editors' license in translating the
text using contemporary medical terms (asthma, bronchitis) should be noted.
39 Padma Pria (Kri yiogaaroaTa 26: 26) Part 10, I992: 3547
40. Jones i 807: 368-6g
41 . Chatterjee I 993
42. Chadha I 98g, "The Janata Dal candidate" I 989.
43 "Paschim Bangal" 1 989.
44 Bali 1 989.
NOTES TO PAGES 1
7
42 1 6
321
45 [Old woman voting] 1 989. [Old woman voting] 1 990.
46. Raza 1 990.
47 A. Kleinman and J. Kleinman 1 991 .
48. Das 1 982; Marglin 1 977-
49 Shweder 1 989, Shweder and Miller 1 985.
50. See Das 1 995.
51 . Rami yana (Ayodyaknda 57: 32) 1 986: 206.
52. Vatuk 1 990: 82.
53 Khosa n. d.
54 Kaufman 1986: 7
55 Cole and Gadow 1 986; de Beauvoir 1 972.
s6. Neugarten I g68. See also Cohen ' 994
57 Sankar 1 984.
58. Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1 987.
59 Vatuk 1 990.
6o. Kakar 1 979.
61 . J. Levin and W Levin 1 980.
62. Madan 1 987.
CHAPTER 6. THE MALADJUSTMENT OF THE BOURGEOISIE
1 . Kmar 1 988, Cohen "Holi i n Banaras" 1 995
2. "Punjabi Bagh" 1 990.
3 Fraser 1 g8g: 22.
4 Turner 1 969.
5 Anantharaman 1 979, Ramamurthy 1 979, Saraswathi and Dutta 1 988: 1 20, S. Mishra
1 989, Sinha 1 g8g.
6. Burgess 1 954, Havighurst 1 954, Cumming and Henry 1 961 .
7 Dalvi and Gandhi 1 989.
8. M. Singh 1 989.
g. See for example Danielou 1 964, 1 982.
1 0. DSM-III-R 1 987.
1 1 . See Lock 1 993 for a more extensive discussion of the issues raised here.
1 2. Sharma and Saxena 1 981 .
' 3 Lock 1 993: 34-36.
1 4. Du Toit 1 990.
1 5. George 1988.
1 6. Lock ' 993
1 7. See Laura Nader's critique of "harmony ideology" for a related discussion of the
limits of balance as rhetoric ( 1 990).
18. See Woodward 1 991 for an exemplary efort to work through questions of subjec-
tivity in old age in terms of a Lacanian concern with mirroring, identity and dif erence.
19. Mehta 1 g8g.
20. Cohen 1 983.
2 1 . Venkoba Rao 1 989.
322 NOTES TO PAGES 2 1 6-2
34
22. Kolenda 1967; Agaral 1 994
23. Obeysekere 1 985, Bottero 1 991 .
24. Yesavage et a!. 1 979, Cofan 1979.
25. Avorn and Soumerai 1 983, Soumerai and Avorn 1 987.
26. Kugler and Agnoli 1 988.
27. Kugler 1988.
28. "Therapeutic Efectiveness" n. d.
29. Kugler 1 988.
CHAPTER
7
. CHAPATI BODIES
1 . Premchand 1968.
2. Eck 1982.
3 Dalit has become a term by which an increasing number of Varanasi Chamar iden
tif their political commonality with other "untouchable" or "Harijan" communities; at the
time of research in the late 1 g8os, however, it was seldom used by people in Nagwa to de
scribe themselves and wlnot be used here. Chamar can be an ofensive term in some con
texts, but not it is hoped in the kind of writing ofered here.
4 Khare 1 984.
5 See Freeman ( 1 979) for some discussion of untouchable caste performance.
6. Ravdas 1988. By permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.
7 For a structurally analogous situation, see Gaylene Becker's study of hearing
impaired old people, for whom lifelong identication as deaf transforms the everyday
knowledge and experience of being old (1 g8o).
8. Dumont 1 980.
g. Berreman 1 971 , Mencher 1 974.
10. Marglin 1977. Dirks 1987.
1 1 . Malamoud 1 988.
12. Appadurai 1 986, Das 1982, Dirks 1 98], Marglin 1 977, Marriott 1 989, Quigley 1993,
Raheja 1 989, Uberoi 1996.
1 3. Kare 1 984.
14. See Searle-Chatterjee ( 1 981 ) for a related fnding.
15. The string amulet as dif erential signifer of the male body across class has been
used in contemporary advertising campaigns, perhaps nowhere as explicidy in terms of its
complex relation to kon d in the television ad in which a wife enters the bedroom to fnd
her husband, Bi-joy (a homoerotic play on the Bengali name Bioy}, in bed with a thinner,
amulet-wearing bhari (north Indian lumpen) . The husband panics and scrambles to get
dressed; the bhari is thoroughly unconcerned. The ad, somewhat mysteriously designed to
sell television sets (the wife drops their televsion in surprise}, ofers a doubled and inverted
reading of kmon: both the rich Bijoy versus the lumpen bhari, thin and protected by his
amulet, and the unprotected and anal-receptive (notably Bengali) Bi-joy versus the amulet
protected and active bhari. Televisions that do not break are being ofered as protective
wrapping to prevent middle-class weakness in the face of the receptivity of the new con
sumensm.
1 6. Ast Bara lndrqal n. d.
NOTES TO PAGES 2
34
-26
4
323
1 7. One uses "empowering" with caution, given its overdetermined and class-laden
context; yet menstrual blood in this context is literally empowering through its removal of
embodied weakness.
1 8. See Cohen (1 983), where I contrast the use ofjara and udhati in Epic and Puranic
texts.
1 9. See Madan 1 987.
20. See Khare 1 984 for a lengthy discussion of similar themes.
2 1 . Appadurai 1 986: 752.
22. See Cohen "The Pleasures of Castration" 1 995 for a discussion of Chandan.
23. Cohn 1 955, 1 960.
24. The eponymous grandmother of the internationally televised documentary flm
Dadi a He Fami! ( 1 982) is in many ways similar to Juguli in her concerns over the ba as
the cause of brothers separating and old parents being neglected.
25. Tara Dev's name is kept, at her request; the others have been changed.
26. Suirut (Nuiitiam I: 3) 1 981 [ 1 91 1 ) : vol. 2: 2.
27. Zimmermann 1 987: 8.
28. Suiut (Nuiitiam I: 4-1 2) 1 981 [ 1 91 1] : vol. 2: 2-4.
29. Dash 1 978: 24.
30. Radclife-Brown 1 940.
A CHILD IS BEING LIFTED
1 . See ':anpad men bheriye se zyada aphvahon kajor" 1 gg6.
2. ':anpad men bheriye se zyada aphvahon ka jor" 1 gg6, "Lakapnghva ke aphvah
se svasthy panksal nahin ho saka" 1 gg6.
3 "Wolves Strike Again in Pratapgarh District" 1 996, "Hyena Hunters Fai to Con
vince People" 1 gg6.
4 "Human Hyena?" 1 996.
5 "Hyena Strikes Again, Baby Saved" 1 996, "Hyena Menace Stil in Vilages: Police
Forced to Hand Over Kiled Girl's Body" 1 gg6, "Child-Kling: Police Still in Dark about
Black Figure" 1 996, "Three 'Wolf-Men' Lynched i UP" 1 gg6, "Mysterious Disappear
ances of Two-Year-Old Girl" 1 996.
6. "
A
damkhor janwar ne adhikariyon vajanta k nind ura" 1 gg6.
7 nother Lynching b Mistake," Nortrn Indin Patl 1 gg6, other Burnt Alive
in Kanpur" 1 gg6.
8. "Kanpur Mob Roasts Woman Alive" 1 996.
g. "Lakarsunghva ke bhram men baba ko pulis ke havale kiya" 1 996.
1 0. See Scheper-Hughes ( 1 990) for a discussion of the complex truths behind child-thef
rumor.
CHAPTER 8. DOG LADIES AND THE BERIYA BABA
1. I have heard several versions of this couplet. I cite the variant printed in the 1 909
Beares G<ette(Nevill 1 909: go-g1 ) , reading Nevill's "sewa" in the second line as the more
grammatical sevan.
324
NOTES TO PAGES 266-2
94
2. Chadha 1 988.
3 Eck 1 982.
4 Wite 1g8g.
5 Dreze and Chen 1 992; Agaral 1 994.
6. Carstairs 1 983; Chen n. d.
7 Scheper-Hughes 1 992.
8. Evans-Pritchard 1 937; Favret-Saada 1 980.
g. Freud 1 995: 1 26, 1 27.
1 0. Taussig 1 980: 1 81 , 230-31 .
. See the ethnographies of Saletore 1 981 and Kapur 1983 and the witing of Prem-
chand 1 988, Bandyopadhyay 1 990, and Devi 1 990.
12. Carstairs 1 958, Kakar 1 981 .
1 3. Obeysekere 1990.
14. See Kurtz 1992.
15. Carstairs 1 983: 6$ Chen n. d.
16. Premchand 1 988: 35, 36.
1 7. Saraswati 1 984.
18. Premchand 1978 [1 92 1] : 1 44, 145 (my translation).
1 9. Bhaavat Pria (III. 30. I 2-1 5), Part 1, 1976: 398.
20. Bhiavat Pria (II. 14. g, } Part 3, 1 976: g8o, g81 .
21 . S. Sinha and Saraswati 1978: 50.
22. Parry 1982, Svoboda 1 986.
23. Tambiah 1 984: 345
24. For the former, see Howes (ed.) 1 991 .
25. Eck 1 981 : 4-5.
26. Amin 1988.
27. Turner 1 974: 1 93-g6.
28. Munn 1 992. ,
O
stor 1 993.
29. Radclife-Brown 1 940.
THE AGE OF THE ANTHROPOLOGIST
1 . Myerhof 1978.
CHAPTER
9
. THE BODY IN TIME
1 . Haggard 1 88g.
2. Gupta and Ferguson n. d.
3 Daniel 1 984, Marriott 1 976, 1g8g.
4 See Callahan 1 987, 1 993.
5 Several white staf members at the American hospital on whose ethics committee I
have been an obserer noted with some exasperation, in a committee discussion of futility
and appropriate care, that Mrican American family members were far more liely to resist
staf eforts to get them to agree to the withholding of intensive care when it was likely to be
futie. The staf understood this resistance, for the most part, as suspiciousness-based upon
a history of discrimination-that prevented rational decision-making.
6. Ry 1 975; Kakar 1 981 .
7 Kleinman 1 g8o.
8. Young 1 981 .
NOTES TO PAGES 2
97
-
3
0
5
325
g. "Thousands Lost in Mela Yet to Be Reunited" 1 g8g.
1 0. Lw 1 996.
1 1 . Kevorkian 1gg6.
12. Farmer and Kleinman 1g8g.
13. Chopra 1992, 1 993
14. Chopra, T Retrn o Melin 1 995, Th Wq o t Wiard 1 995
GLOSSARY
ii ama forest retreat; one of the four ideal stages of life
ii amadarma the prescribed duties of the four ideal stages of life
baba old man; grandfather; mendicant or holy man
bittire seventy-two; Bengali expression for senility
bakbak pratde; chatter
basti slum
bhadralk the urban Bengali elite
bhajan devotional song
bhlrati Bengali expression for senility
bhat malevolent spirit that can possess people and make them il
darshan auspicious sighting (of a sacred image, person, or place)
davi medicine
dharmaiitra classical Hindu legal codes; the authoritative literature on dharma
dimi brain; mind
ghar home; household; in "Ghar Kali, " cosmic age oryua
hath pair hands and feet; used with kmzon (weakness) to suggest general bodily fa-
tigue or disability
}arbi( herbal medicine; Ayuredic remedies
kmzon weakness; fatigue; impotence
kaivi one who moves to Kashi (Varanasi) to live out one's fnal years
ohi bhit (malevolent spirit) exorcist
32
7
328 GLOSSARY
pat
pakimahal
pancarma
raiana
rishi
so!
sfki ra
san'ia
sae!ini
sevi
shanti
tamasha
thana
vinaprata
madwoman
the 'fnished' or solidly built neighborhoods, the area of Varanasi closest
to the Ganges
radical Ayuredic purication treatment, the prerequisite for many al
chemical (raiana) longevty therapies
alchemy; the branch of Ayuredic medine concerned with extending life
and forestalling old age
literally a seer; a semi-divine sage who imparts sacred knowledge
right, correct (sah! nahin: incorrect)
karmic memory trace from the past or a previous life; life cycle rite for
caste Hindus
renunciation; the fourth stage of life
to go sityish; to become senile, stubborn, difcult, or confused
fial respect, caring, servce
peace, repose
spectacle; show
local police post
forest-dweling; life apart from the family the third stage of life
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Srivastava, R. S. "Service Centres for the Aging." The A i India: Poblms and Possibilitis.
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INDEX
abjection, 23, 74, 1 37, 159, 173, 207, 250, 266,
26g, 271 , 275, 277, 303
absence, s, 20, 31 , 3a-3g, 49> s6, sa-sg, 1 20,
173, 274, 2ag, 2g5, 302, 305
accusation, 72-74
Achenbaum, Andrew 1 01 , 31 7
activity/disengagement, 2 1 , 65, 1 1 5, 1 a5
adaptation, 230
adaptogenic, 1 33
adyaa, 1 4 3
Adi Dharm, 226, 229, 252
adjustment/maladjustment, 1 41 , 1 94, 196,
Iga-201 , 205, 207, 21 0-2 1 1 , 21 6-21 7, 230,
244, 299
Adkins, Janet, sa, 6o-I , 303--04, 3' 3
af ect, 24, 2a-2g, ao, I 26, 2I 0, 2 1 7, 292-293
Africa, 30-31
Agar, Michael, 6, 309
Agaral, Bina, 14, gg, 21 6, 26a, 31 0, 31 7, 322, 324
Agaral family, Nandanagar, 207-2oa
Agnoli, A. , 322
Agrawal family Ravindrapuri, 1 96-1 97, 240
Ahmad, Aijaz, 31 7
" Ahmedabad, 201
AIDS, 54
Aitareya Brahmana, 1 21
Aita pralia, 1 21 , 1 75
Ajara, 1 45, 1 79, 2aa
alienation, 64, 293
llahabad, 4I , 2a4, 304
allopathy, 40-41 , 1 27, 1 36-1 37, 31 a. Se alo bio-
medicine
Alter, Joseph, 43, 31 2, 320
Althusser, Louis, 3a, 31 2
aluminum, 31
Alzheimer, Alois, 27, 67-6g, 79-ao, a3-a4, 1 27,
31 4-31 5
Alzheimer's and Related Disorders Society of
India (ADSI, 20, 36, 3a
age: incongruities, 47; materialization of 2ag. Se
Alzheimer's Association, 7-a, 1 6-1 7, 20, 32, 45,
5s-5a, 6o, 3, o, 3, 3
alo diference, age
Age Ad India, go, 1 06-1 07
Age-Care India, aa-go, 1 06-1 09, 1 94, 209
ageism, 1 6, 61 , 6g-7o, ao-a1
aghori, 155, 2ao
aging, aa; enterprise, 95, ga, 1 1 6, 293; eu
phemism, 1a3; normal, 6o, 69-70, ao-a1 ,
1 a3, 200, 21 9; premature, 20-22, 222

g in India," 4, aa-93, 99, 102-104,

1 06-1 07, 1 1 a, 1 20, 1 a4, 1 94
35
Alzheimer's disease, 1 23, 1 41 , 1 a5, 199-201 ,
209-210, 2 15-21 6, 2 I a, 220, 296, 2ga-301 ;
American discourse of 7, 1 6, 20, 32, 45,
ss-sa, 6o, ai -a6, 1 25-127, 303, 3' 3; Ameri
can movement of ao-a1 ; animal model of
s, 49, as, 31 2; defnition of XV s-6, 26-27;
diagnosis of 33, 1 25-1 26; epidemiology of
29-32, 36, 3a, 1 25; gene for, 5, 1a, 31 , 49, 61 ;
globalization of, a1 , a4, 156; histor of,
26-27, 6a-6g, 79-a4, 1 26, 31 5; Indian
3
54
I NDEX
Alzheimer's disease (contUI d)
discourse of, 15, I 8-I g, 20; Indan movement
of 20, 36; irony and, 51 -53, 59> 81 ; material
ization of 85; metaphor for old age and
death, 47, 6o, 85, 1 26; as "nation's fourth
leading kiler," 6o, 85, 1 25-1 26; ontology of
1 26; plaques and tangles of, 1 8-20, 27, 31-32,
36, 38-39, 56-57, 61 , 68, 79-Bo, 82-83, 85,
1 26, 297, 303; pneumonia and, 1 25; as pro
cess, 33; test for, 5, 61 , 85-86, 1 26. Sealo de
mentia; senility
Alzheimer's Disease International (A I, 1 8, 20,
29, 84
Alzism, 1 26
Amaducci, L. A. , 31 5, 31 8
Ambedkar, Dr., 225, 228
ambiguity, 1 1 2, 1 83, 213, 241 , 271
American Association of Retired Persons
(AARP), 81 -82, 1 85
Amin, Shahid, 282, 324
anality 23, 1 63
..
' 65
Anantharaman, R. N. , 321
Andrews, Dana, 47, 50-51
anger, 74, 1 54, 1 58, 175, 1 77, 1 94, 198, 201 -202,
207, 21 0, 233.
235
.
238, 240-241 , 24-247
.
251 , 272, 292. See ao rishi, angry
anthropology, 7, 257, 287-288, 292, 308; Indian,
15; medical, 70, 21 3; multi-sited, 8; psyho
logical, 178
Anupa, and family, 249
anxiety 1 23, 1 25-127, I 4Q, 20I , 2I 6; dependency
1 24, 1 85, 2oo, 21 2, 240, 248, 3o2; ghbrilt,
21 5; sei , 1 8o, 236
anxiolytics, 21 5
Apn &gine,
1 23, 1 25, 170, 1 79
apoplexy 64-65
Appadurai, Arjun, 237, 322-323
Arnold, David, 3 1 1
ars morndi, 7 1
arteriosclerosis, 64-66, 6g, 76, So, 21 8
a, ! 85
Arya Samaj, 1 1 3-1 1 4
ashram, 41 ; bhajan/widow, 41 , 1 1 3, 1 15, 265, 273;
Vanaprastha, 41, 1 1 3-1 15; Vriddh, 1 1 5
ii lri , 251 -252
Asli Bara lndrqal, 322
ii ar, 40, 1 1 3-1 1 5, 1 42-143, 153, 1 65, 1 6g,
172, 183, 1 85, 198, 202-203, 205, 237, 27
7
, 31 2
astrolog 1 37, 21 5
Athara Veda, 1 21 , 31 8
atherosclerosis, 21
atrophy, 65-68
attribution, 1 83
aunt, 1 1 6-1 20, 159, 193, 206-207, 266, 270-271 ,
274-275, 277, 296, 298; '\unt Minnie" stor
296; mashima, 1 1 6, 1 1 8
authority, 1 21 , 241 -242, 283
autonomy 91
Avorn, Jerry 322
A
yreda, 33, 40-41 , 93, 109-1 1 2, 1 27-

38, 153,
I 87, 21 0, 2 15, 245> 275>
305, 3I7-31 8
baba, 155, 21 2, 258, 26o-261 , 268, 270-271 ,
278-28! , 283, 285-286, 308
Baba, Bengali Quarter, 277-278
Babb, Lawence, 144, 3
'
9
babu, 1 1 9-1 20, 159, 1 71
Bacon, Roger, 66, 31 4
Bageshera, and family 235, 239
bii ttire, 157, 1 97, 276
bau. Se daughter-in-law
Baidyanath, 1 36
Bailey F G., 102, 3'7
baba, xxn, 1 3-14, 1 25, 1 70, 1 75-176, Ig6, 2 I O,
235-236, 238-239, 241 -244, 249-250, 255.
267, 272, 274
.
294-295
.
303, 307
Bakshi, S. R., 31 8
balance/imbalance, 8, 1 90, 1 93-199, 201 , 207,
21 1-21 2, 220, 223, 230, 233
.
235, 24, 250,
252, 300-302, 321
Balua. See old woman of Balua
Banaras. SeVaranasi
Banaras Hindu University (BHU), 42, 1 1 2, 1 29,
' 33
. ' 35
. '
9
' '
93
.
202, 21 4-21 5, 221 , 224,
233-234, 247-248, 279
banirsn, 10, 40, 43
Bandypadhyay Tarashankar, 324
Banerjee, Sumanta, 1 1 9-1 20, 31 8
Banerjee famiy, 263
Banerji, 1 1 9, 31 8
Bangalore, 39, 4
'
84, 1 09, 1 82
Bania, 227-228, 232, 236, 252-253
Barrett, Albert M., 31 4
Barthes, Roland, 7, 1 04, 31 0
Baru Baba, 226-227, 237
Basalla, George, 31 6
Basu family, 1 41 -1 42, 1 82, 1 99, 201
Bawa, A. S. , 1 07
bawd, 67, 79
Beach, Thomas G. , 31 5
Becker, Gaylene, 322
Benal Hurkru, 3-4, 25, ' 73
Bengali Quarter, 42, 1 05-1 06, 108, 157, 1 95, 230,
234-235, 263-264, 267, 275, 277, 294
Benign Senescent Forgetulness (BSF, 61 , 1 26, 21 9
Benson, Herbert, 1 53, 3' 9
Bentham, Jeremy, I I 6
Beotra, Rai Sahib B. R. , 24, 3"
Beriya Baba, 279-285
Berreman, Gerald, 322
Berrios, G. E. , 79-80, 126, 31 5-31 6, 31 8
"Better Brain," 1 8-2o, 32, 35-36, 84, 299
blu ralk, "7
'
1 20, 1 73, 264-265, 269
Bhiavat Prna, 275, 277, 324
Bhairava, 266, 271
bhajan, I g6-1 97, 250, 265, 273-74, 280. See alo
ashram, bhajan
bhati, 176, ' 99
Bharati, 299
Bharati, R. Sarasa, 19, go, 34, g6, g8-gg
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 285
Bharucha, N. E., 31 2
Bhatia, H. S. , 31 6
bh!mrati, 157, 1 97
Bhishma, 176
bhogal bhog', 1 85, 236, 280
Bhumihar, 1 95
bhit-pret possession, 21 5-21 6, 250-251 , 255, goo
Biggers, Janet, 52-53
Bijay, 266-267, 275, 279
biomedicine, 6, 37, 40, 70, 1 27, 1 33, 1 84, 297. See
alo allopathy
biopolitics, 22
birthday par 158
Bishwanath, and family, 275
Biswas, Suhas K. , 31 6
Blau, Zena Smith, 329
Bleuler, Eugen, 65, 3' 4
blood, 22; menstrual, 233; pressure (BP), 65,
1 08-1 09, ' 95-196
body, xvi, 21 , 37-38, 6g, 75, 79, 84, 132, 1 40, 1 55,
1 61 , 232, 270-271 , 285, 288-28g, 292,
294-295; ageless, 285, 288; dismembered,
1 35, 140; divine, 274; examinable, 1 37; famil
ial, 177-1 83, 1 91 , 199, 220, 230, 250, 254,
269-270, 281 , goo, 302; Hindu/Muslim, 236;
as machine, 68; "mindful," 1 84, gog; na
tional, 4, 254; old, xvii, 3, 6, 9, I I , 22, 25, 62,
67, 74, 76, 83, I I 2, I l 4, 1 31 , 1 38, 1 45,
15g-I 6o, ' 74, 21 2, 21 6, 230, 245, 26g, 283,
I NDEX
35
2gg; senile, g2-34, 52, 62, 72, 77, 87, 1 25-126,
1 40, 1 45, 2I 9, 292, goo, go2; subde, 2I 3; tn
versus sanr, 21 2-21 3; translocatable, I g8-I gg;
tropical, 23; young, 1 30-1 38, 146, 1 50-I 5I ,
1 69-1 70, 289
Bombay (Mumbai), 41 , 46, I I 2, I l 4, 132, 1 34, 1 37,
, 58-, 59, 1 70, 21 7-2 1 8, 225
Boral, G. C., 3' 9
Bose, A. B. , 8g, 31 6
Bottero, Alain, 322
Bourdieu, Pierre, 1 55, 31 0
Bourgois, Philippe, 291
Brahma, 266
Brahman, 146, 1 54, 1 66, I 88-I 8g, 202-204, 224,
226, 228-229, 231 -232, 236-237, 250-253,
263, 265, 272-273, 275, 277
Brahma Prana, 1 72, 320
brain, 75, 77, 240, 292; goss pathology of 21 , 6o,
64-65, 79, 82-83; Indian, 19; Western, 20.
Se alo mind; weakess, of brain/mind
Brass, Paul, 1 26, 31 8
breakdown, Heideggarian, 6, 1 6
breath control, 285
Brinda, 41 , I I I , "5, 265
Browne, Richard, 66
Buddhism, gg, 229, 281 , 283
Bula Babu, 227-228, 232
Burgess, Ernest, 97, 31 6, 321
Butalia, Pankaj, "5
'
31 8
Buder, Judith, g8, 31 0, 31 2
Buder, Robert, 3' 4
Calcutta, 24, 41 , I I 6-I 20, 1 39, 1 41 , 159, 1 71 , 1 82,
1 87-1 88, 1 90-1 91 , 1 97, 1 99, 220, 225, 264,
278, 2g7-2gg, goi , 307
Callahan, Daniel, 71 , 31 5, 324
cancer, I I O, 1 89
Canguilhem, Georges, 6o, 6g-64, 3' 4
capital, 22, g8, 1 38, 21 7, 268; health, g6; spiri-
tual, 265; symbolic, 1 33
Capra, Friof 1 29, 31 7, 3' 9
Cara Samhiti , I 1 0, 1 29-1 30, 1 32
caregiver I caretaker, 33, 54-56
Carstairs, George Morris, J 6J -J 66, 170, 178, 242,
268, 271 , 320, 324
Cartesian dualism, 1 24, 21 3-214
caste, 33, 49, 223. See alo Chamar; hierarchy
category fallacy 34-35
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 31 0
Chaman L, and family, 234
3
56 I NDEX
Chamar, xxii, 41 -42, 1 g7, 21 2, 224, 226-2g2,
2gs-2g7, 241 , 246, 2SI-2S2, 2S2, g07-goS,
g22. Sealo Dalit; Harijan; Untouchable
Chga Upaniad, 1 SS
Chandra, V, g1 1
chapati, 2go, 2gg, 24g-24s, 247, 24g, 2SI , 26g,
266, 26g, 274
Charcot, J. M. , 62-6s, 67, 72, Sg, Ss, g10, g1 4
charisma, 1 2S, 2S1-2S6
charpoy, 1S2, 1 Ss, 2g7-2gg, 241-24g, 24g, 26g
Chatterjee, Partha, 17g, gog, g2o
Chattopadhyaya, Debiprasad, 1 S7-1 SS
Chaudhari, A. D. , g 1 1
Chaudhari, D. H. , g 1 1
Chen, Martha, 14, gg, 26S, 271 , g1 0, g1 7, g24
Chicago School, 1 54, 2g2
chicken, 22S-22g
childbirth, 21 0
China, 1 S4
Chittupur, 24g-24, 27S
Chopra, Deepak, 1 2S, go4 -3os
Christianity, g4, 1 1 S, 204, 221-222, 224-22s, 2S3,
2SS, 303-30S
"Chronic cerebral insufciency" (CCI), 21 g
Chui, Helena Chang, 2S, g1 1 , g1 s
Chyavana, 1 1 2, 1 31 -I g2, 30S
Chyawanprash, 1 1 2, 1 31 -I g7, 1gS, 31 7-g1 S
Chyawanshakti, 136, 1 3S
circulation, I SO; of sufering, 4g, sg-54, sS
citizen, 1 74, 2Sg
civil society 2so
Clarfeld, A. M. , 31 1
class, 3g, 41 , 4g-so, 1 gs, 21 3-214, 23g, 242, 267,
301 , 31 0
classifcation, 2S
Cliford, James, 33, g 1 1
climacteric, 21 , g3, 72, 74-7g, S3, 20S, 21 g-220,
234, 2g2
climate, 21 -2g
Cofan, J. D. , 322
cognitive, 27-2g, s7, 77-So, 1 26, 2os, 2oS, 2I 6,
244, 2g2
Cohen, Lawence, 31 2, gi S-321 , 323
Cohn, Bernard, xii, gg, 241 , 27S, 2g3, 3og, g1 4,
31 7, 323
Cole, Thomas R. , 1 S3, 31 3-31S, g21
commodity/commodication, 1 2S, 1 3g-1gS, 1 40,
147, 270-271 , 301
commons, 1g2, 22S, 226
communit, s6, Igg, 1 g6
confessional, 1 7, 20, s7-sS, Ss-S6
Congress Party, 14g-1so, 1 74, 227, 2Ss
Connolly family S3-ss, sg-6o, SI -S2
consciousness, conficted, 270
corporealit 22, 2Sg
Courtright, Paul, g2o
cow, 264-266, 270
Cowgl, Donald, g6, gS, 1 01-1 02, 31 6-31 7
cramming, 13g-140, 1 S7, 201
Cranach, Lucas, 21 g
cremation ground, 266, 272, 2So
culture, 7, 22, g2, 4S, l OS, ISg, 2SS-2Sg, 2g7,
301 , 307-goS
Culture and Personalit idiom of 1 61
Cumming, Elaine, 321
curail, 2sS, 271
Curt Se, S4
curse, 247, 267, 26g, 27g-2S1 , 2Sg
Curtin, Sharon R. , 31 4
daa IS7
ta, 2SO, 2SS, 270-271
Dainik, 1 74
Oak, T N. , 31 6
Dalit, 224, 226, 22S, 322. Se alo Chamar
Day Mary S6
Daniel, E. Valentine, ISS, 17S, 31 7, 320, 324
Danielou, Alain, 2og, 20S, 321
drfana, 24S
darshan, 27g, 2S1 -2Ss
Das, Veena, 17S, gog, 320-g22
Dash, Bhagan, 323
Dasharath, I 6g-1 70, 1 So, 2 1 1
Dasovas, 21 7-220, 2gS, goo-301
daughter, S4, 1 1 S, 1 2g, I 2S, 1 g1 , I 6o-1 61 , 1 66,
1 71 , 173, I7g, I S2, I Ss, I g3-I 94, 207,
20g-21 0, 21 4-2 IS, 23g-240, 246, 2SI ,
2S3-254, 26g-264, 2SO
daughter-in-law (bau), 1 1 g, 1 23, 141, ISg-I 6o,
1 71 , 173, 17g, 1S2, I Sg-I gO, 1g2, 1 94, 1 g6,
201 -202, 209, 23g, 242-243, 246, 24S, 2SI ,
27S, 2g7, 2gg-300, 323
De, Sushil Kumar, IS7, 320
deat, 63, 71 , l i S, 1 24, 1 61 , 1S2, 1g2, 21 3, 22g,
2S0, 273, 27S, 2Sg, 2S7-2SS, 301-302, 304
de Beauvoir, Simone, g7, 1 S3, 31 7, g21
decay (decrepitude, degeneration), xvii, 1g,
20-22, 24, 6g-64, 66, 76, I go, 172, 27S, 2S7,
2SS, 2Sg, 302
deference, 1 S0, 246
deferral, 1 61 , 1 66, 1 68, 1 80, 1 90, 223, 240, 242,
286
De Fleur Maurice, 315
Dehradun, 41, 1 07, 1 09, 1 1 5, 190
Delhi, 41, 87, 1 00, 1 07-109, 1 1 4, 1 24, 158, 1 77,
190-1 91 , 1 95, 1 99, 205, 209, 260, 276, 287,
302-303
delirium, 29
dementia, 1 27, 1 99, 292-293, 303; Alzheier's
type, 26, 29-30, 45; atherosclerotic, 26, So;
"biomedicalization" of, 6, 61 ; causes of 21 ,
78; "cross-cultural" research on, 29; defi
tion of xv, 15, 24-26; diagnosis of 30, 32, 36;
epidemiology of 15, 1 7, 1 9, 29-32; gender
and, go; globalization of 46; irreversible, 29;
mixed, 27; multi-infarct, 26-27, 31 , s6, 6g;
ontological status of 26-27, 29, 33; presenile,
27, 68-6g, So; pseudo, 29, 56, 6o; reversible,
29, s6, 6o; rhetoric of, 37-38, s6-s7; senile,
IS, 18, 23, 32, 34. 64, 67, 6g, 87, 200, 21 0,
21 4-21 8; treatment of, 48; vascular, 26-27,
29-32, 6g, 21 8. See alo Alzheier's disease;
senility
demographic transition, 35-36, 21 6, 303
demography, 31 , 36, 92; alarmist, 4-5, 6o, 71 ,
8g-g1 , 293-294
dependency, 3, 5, 59, 74, 81 , 83-84, 91 , 1 1 7, 1 70,
197, 233, 266, 270
dependency theory, I 00-1 01
depression, 29, s6, 1 33 21 5-21 6
Derne, Steven, 320
Desai, I. P, 103, 31 7
Desai, K. G. , 31 6
Desai, Morarji, 158, 320
des
i
e, 33, 78, 144-1 47, 1 72-1 73, 1 88, 198, 21 2,
220, 236, 275 283
De Souza, Alfred, 1 00, 31 4, 31 7
detail men, 1 27, 21 7-2 18, 297-298, 300-301
Devi, Mahasweta, 324
Devraha Baba, 41 , 28o-285, 302
Dhanvantari, 1 29, 245
dharma, 39, 176, 1 85, 206, 237, 251 , 280
dnaa, 4o, 1 1 3, 142, 2o6, 31 2
dat, 21 6. S

e alo semen loss

Dhobi, 224, 237
Dost a Stttal Manual (DSM), 26, 66,
201 , 21 9; 1/-R, 26-29, 204, 21 4, 31 1 , 321 ; IV
26-2g, 293 3 1 1
dialectic, 22
diaspora, Indian, 128
diet, 31
Dieulafoy G. , 314
I NDEX
3
7
dierence, I 9, 22, 2g, go, 38, 4B-49, 21 2, 232,
292-293; age as, x,
4-5, 33, 49, 71, 79, 21 3;
behavioral, 21 6, 295
Dirks, Nicolas, 309, 322
"disadvantaged elder, " Bg, 92
disease, ontological conception of 63-64
Djurfeldt, Goran, 1 08, 31 7
dog, I 7I , 207, 24, 263-268, 27I , 274-277

283,
33
domestic, 251 , 268, 274-276, 283, 285
Doniger, Wendy, 8, 14, 31 0, 31 9
Doordarshan, 41
dotage, 72-74, 7B, Bs, 1 24
doublig, 26g, 271 , 283
Dreze, Jean, 14, gg, 268, 3I 0, 31 7, 324
dualism; anthropological, xvi, 38; Cartesian, 1 24,
21 3-214; Nascherian, 71
Dulari, 1 3-14, 35, I BS, 230, 24B-249>
255, 303
Dumont, Louis, 1 54, 1 63, 1 65, 1 71 , 178, 230-231 ,
237
Durrant, C. M., 75, 310, 31 5
du Toit, 208, 321
Dutta, Ranjana, 321
dying space, 37, 52-53, 178, I Bo-1 83, 1 86, 1 97,
237-238, 24I , 26g, 276, 283, 303-304
East Boston Senior Health Project, 3 1 1
Eastern Master, 1 28
Ecclesiastes, 66
Eck, Diana, 281 , 322, 324
Edgerton, Franklin, 31 9
Edwardth, Joey IOO-I OI , 1 03, 31 7
embodiment, 24-25, 32, 37, 51 -52, 71 , 75, 1 20,
1 23-1 27, 1 40, ! 61 , 170, 1 84, 208, 21 1 -21 2, 21 6,
232, 238, 2S0, 274. 277, 282, 286, 288, 2g2,
294-297. 302-304
enchantment, 84
endocrine, 76
Engels, Frederic, 1 87
English medicine (aev da, 1 33-1 34
Epics, 93, 1 1 3, 142
epistemology, go, gs-g6, 106
Epstein, T Scarlett, 102-103, 317
ergot mesylates, 201 , 218
Erikson, Erik, 21 2
erotic triangle, 159 Se alo Kesari Jivan, triangle
Estes, Caroll, 1 1 6, 31 8
eugenics, 67-68, 76
3
58 I NDEX
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. , 324
excess, 20, 28, 31 , 45, 49-50,
5,
6o, 63, 65, 83,
85, 1 1 9, 196, 31 0
excluded middle, 1 8
excrement, 23, 146, 202
exorcism, 41
explanatory model (EM), 75, 301
F
al
, go, g3, 1 03-I o6, 1 94, 223, 226, 232, 237
falling, 52-53
family, 1 1 4-1 1 5, 1 80, 206, 261 , 270-271 , 301 ; bad,
I I , 19, 33, 49, 84, 87, 1 03, 1 1 5, 1 23-1 24, 1 90,
I gg, 2oi , 206, 238-239, 243-245> 247, 255,
270, 275, 2gB, 302-303, 305; Hindu/Muslim,
1 0-1 1 , 204, 236; joint/extended, 93, 1 1 3, 203,
242, 271 ; joint/extended, decline of, 7, 17, 87,
92, 1 02-1 06, 1 15, 1 1 8-1 20, 1 80, 1 go; "Rosy, "
1 00; Western, 1 7, 1 9
Fanon, Frantz, 1 04
Farmer, Paul, 325
Farmitalia, 21 7-220, 297-298
father, 68, 1 21 , 1 23-1 24, 1 33-1 34, 138, 140, 142,
144
-
145> 157, 159-174> 179, I BI , I Bg, 1 93, 1 97>
201-202, 209, 239, 242-243, 271 , 277, 283,
285-286, 288, 302, 304; absent, 1 63-1 65
Favet-Saada, Jeanne, 324
Ferguson, James, 291 , 31 2, 324
Fernandes, Walter, 314, 31 7
Filliozat, Jean, 1 29, 31 9
flm, Hindi, 1 5, 25, 43, 1 23-1 24, 1 36
Fischer, David, 1 01 , 31 7
FitzGerald, Frances, 31 5
Fletcher, Mrs. , 52, 70
Flint, Austn, 31 4
fow models, 26, 65, 6g, 1 99, 21 8
fuidity, 1 05, 1 54-1 56, 1 75, 1 78, 292
Folstein, Marshal F, 31 1
Folstein MMS, 3 1 1
forgetfulness. See memory loss
Forster, E. M., 21 , 31 0
Foucault, Michel, 1 1 6-1 17, 31 8
Fox, Patrick, 6g, Bo-81 , 31 3-31 4
frailty 81
Fraser, Nancy 321
Frazer, James, 288
Freeman, H. L. , 31 5-31 6
Freeman, James M. , 322
Freud, Sigmund, 126, 1 62, 158, 268-270, 31 8,
324
Fuller, Solomon C., 31 4-31 5
futility 71 , 294
Gadow, Saly A., 183, 321
Galenic medicine, 74-75
Galloway D. , 76-17, 31 5
Gandhi, India, 94, 136, 1 49, 1 50, 228, 260, 281 ,
285
Gandhi, Mohandas, 203-204, 282
Gandhi, Rajiv, 149-150, 228, 285
Ganesha, 166
Ganga (Ganges), 1, 3, g-10, 39-42, 22 1 , 223-224,
227, 238, 250, 264, 266-267, 279, 284, 295,
307-3o8
Ganga Jali, and family, 241 , 248, 249
Gangrade, K. D. , Bg, 31 6
Geertz, Cliford, xvi
gender, 5, 33, 74, 77
-
9, 1 60, 1 95, 2 1 1 , 233, 235,
267, 275-276
generaton, 51 , 53, 93, 1 21 , 156-157, 1 60,
I 65-I 66, 2I 6, 23o, 24I-242, 270, 28I , 293
George, T, 2og, 321
geriatrics, 29, 41 , 62-63, 6g, 86, 1 09-1 1 2; dis
course of 77; geriatric paradox, 60, 6g--I ,
200, 219, 2g6; ideolog of, 77, 79, 295
Gts, 62, 6g, 76-77
Geri-forte, 1 1 1 , 1 33-1 34, 150-I5I , 1 67
gerontological sublime, 287
gerontological utopia, 91 , 97
gerontology, 4, 7, 15-17, 6o, 70-71 , 87-1 06, 1 1 9,
183-1 84, 287, 293-294; international,
94-1 00. See alo object, gerontological
gerontopolis, 81 , 270
gl
r, 179-I Bo, 1 93, 242
Ghar Kali, 1 1 9-1 20, 150, 1 59-I 61 , 1 6g, 1 7I -1 74,
270, 273, 299-300
gift, 81 , 1 38, 146, ! 65, 1 70, 220, 225, 227-228,
231-232, 243, 251 , 2
53, 270, 277, 280-282, 285
Ginsberg, Allen, 14, 31 0
ginseng, 133-1 36, 138, 220
Gleason, W Stanton, 31 5
global/local, 37, 43, 45
-
46
globalization, 25, 32
Gofan, Erving, 1 1 6, 31 8
Golden Age, 93, 1 00-1 03, 1 05
Golden Isles, 1 00, 1 02-103
Good, Byron, 301 , 31 3, 31 9
Good, Mary:o Delvecchio, 31 3, 31 9
Gore, M. S. , 31 7
gothic, 21
Goyal, R. S. , 31 6
"granny" 47, 51 -52, 72, 81 -82, 1 85, 31 3
Graves, Amy B. , 30, 31 1
Gray John N. , 31 7
Grifth, Ralph, 1 21 , 31 8
Gubrium, Jaber, 7, 61 , 8o-81 , 31 0, 31 3-314, 31 8
Gupta, Akhil, 291 , 31 2, 324
guru, 1 1 0, 137, 1 63, 1 99, 203, 228, 234, 251
Hachinski, Vladimir, 6g, 31 4
Haggard, H. Rder, 22, 291 , 31 0, 324
Halford, Henry, 75, 31 5
Haraway Donna, xvi, 8, 309-31 0
Hardwar, 3, 41 , 1 1 3
Harijan, 227, 243. Se alo Chaar
Harinath Prasad (Masterji), ad family 175, 235,
239-240
Harrison, Mark, 31 1
Hasbro, 1 39
Hasegawa, K. , 3 1 1
kaa/wind, 1 54, 24-245
Havighurst, Rober J. , 321
health transition, 84, 21 6
heart, 1 24, 1 95-196, 21 2
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 22, 31 0
hegemony, 6, 37, 79, 93, 103, 1 1 4-1 1 5, 1 20, 1 35,
1 90, 21 2, 232, 270, 283, 286, 288-28g, 2g5
Helmont, Jean Baptiste, 76
HelpAge India, 88, go, 1 06, 266
Henderson, A. S. , 31 1
Henry Wiliam H. , 321
heteroglossia, 267
Hidayatullah, Arshad, 31 1
Hidayatulah, M. , 31 1
hierarchy, 20, 1 64-1 65, 178-179, 1 83, 228,
231 -232, 237; revolving, 231
hira, 1 63, 320
Himalayan, 1 33-1 34
Himalayas, 58
Hinduism, 1-4, 1 0, 39-40, 93, 1 43-1
4
4, 202-204,
206, 228, 237, 252, 264, 278, 282; Brahma
Kumari, 1 4-1 45; nationalist, 203-204,
284-285; Vaishnavite, 142
Hindu Succession Act of 1 956, 25
Hofan, Deborah, 55, 31 3
Holmes, Lowell, g6, 1 01 -102, 31 6-31 7
homeopathy, 40
Homma, A. , 3 1 1
homosexuality 68, 1 35, 1 61 -1 66, 239, 322
hook-swiging, 2
hot/cold, 23, 153-155, 1 81 , 21 3, 233-234, 238,
246, 293
hot brain/mind (dii ), 1 47, 153-157, 170, 175,
215-2 16, 230, 238, 24-245, 247-248, 252,
254, 292
I NDEX
3
9
householdership/householder (ghastyalghast),
1 1 3-1 15, 196, 202-203, 205, 21 4, 237, 251 ,
275. 277
Howes, David, 324
Hubert, Henri, 31 9
Humphry Derek, 61 , 31 3
hybridt 26g
hypochondriasis, 67, 295
hysteria, 208
icon, 8g, 1 28, 178, 1 91 , 21 3, 253, 265
identit 1 20, 1 23, 1 71 , 21 4, 228, 231 , 283, 286,
288-289, 295
illusion of control, 1 1 6
ipotence/potency, 1 33-136, 1 65, 21 2, 21 4
Inden, Rnald, 7, 1 54, 31 0
index, 1 28
Indian Lunacy Act of 1 91 2, 24, 259
"Indian Mutiny" 2
Indian Succession Act of 1 925, 24
India Tdo, 18, 23, 30, 32, 176, 299
industrialization, 17, 31 , 8g, 92
infantalism, 21 , 1 74
Inquiition, 72-73
institutionalization/ deinstitutionalization, 33,
46, 56-57. 61 -62, 71 -12, 83-84, 86, 1 1 6-1 20,
1 25, 274. 298
internalization, 1 63
International Association for the Study of Tradi
tional Asian Medicine (IASTAM), 1 1 2
internationalism;g1 , 93-1 00, 1 04
International Statistical Classifcation of Dis-
eases (lCD), 28-29, 45, 66
International Year of the Aged, 93
International Year of the Woman, 1 1 7-1 1 8
interpretive, 1 21 , 159, 178, 233
interstice, 206-207, 265-275, 278, 281 , 283-284
intersubjectivty, 300
involution, 67-68, 76
irony 21 3, 250, 274, 295
Islam/Muslim, 150, 1 74, 226, 235, 252, 308
iteration. Se repetition
"It's just old age, " 62, 6g, 71 , 1 84
Jablonsk, Henryk, 94
Jackson, J. Hughlings, 65, 31 4
Janata Dal, 1 49, 1 57, 1 74
Japan, 29-30, 209
jutr, 1 28, 1 34
jivani, 153
Jawahar, and famiy 227
3
60 I NDEX
Jena, B. , 31 6
Jensheng, 1 34-1 35
Jesus, 228, 251 , 291 , 304
Jhalli Ram, and family, 227
jlTu, xi, 1 37-138, 1 51 , 240, 248-249
jiva, 143, 21 3
}nmu, 176, 279-280
John the evangelist, 221 , 253
Johnson, Colleen, 33, 31 1
Johnson, Frank, 33, 3 1 1
Johnson, M. , 31 7
Jones, William, 1 73, 320
Jordens, J. T F, 31 8
Jorm, A. F, 31 1
juxtaposition, x, 6-8
Kabir, 21 3, 228, 251
kcci mal, 41
Kakar, Sudhir, 1 61 , 1 64-1 66, 1 70, 1 78, 1 86, 242,
271 , 297, 320-321 , 324-325
Kali, 1-2, 4, 1 62, 309 Sealo Ghar Kali
k, 1 85
/on. Se weakess
Kanpur, 1 94, 26o
Kapur, Sohaila, 324
Kapura, and family, 246
karma, 1 4-145, 237, 284
Karpatriji, Swami, 10, 202-205, 282, 308
Kashi. Se Varanasi
ki tvi , 1 76, 206, 302. Sealo widow, klvi
Katltiara, 1 1 2, 1 45, 1 72, 21 9, 279, 288
Katzman, R. , 31 1
Kaufman, Sharon, 1 83, 1 85, 2 1 1-21 2, 321
Kaul family, 201 -202
Kennedy Henr 74-75, 31 5
Krala, 23, 36
Ksari Jivan, 1 33-1 34, 1 36-1 37, 1 51 , 1 98, 242;
triangle, 1 34, 1 58-I 6I , 202
Kevorkian, Jack, 58, 60-61 , 303-305, 31 3, 325
Khare, R. H., 228, 231 , 236-237, 252, 322-323
Khosa, Rajan, 1 81 , 321
K.erkegaard, Soren, x, 89, 309
kng, 1 45-146, 158, 1 62, 1 67-1 69, 172, 288-289
Kingery John, 81 -82, 1 85
Km L
ar, 5, 15, 1 8, 51 , 74
,
1 23-1 25, 206, 246, 31 6,
31 8
Kipling, Rdyard, 21 , 31 0
Keinman, Arthur, 1 77, 301 , 31 0-31 1 , 31 3, 31 9,
321 , 325
Kleinman, Joan, 1 77, 310, 321
Klooster, Gerard, 303-304, 31 3
knowledge, 251 , 270, 301-302;
frst/second/third person, 33-34, 1 27,
1 54-156, 176, I 84-I 8S, 193, 2SI , 293, 297;
iperial, 1 39, 201
Khli, D. R. , 31 6
Kok, 207' 272
Kolenda, Pauline, 2 1 6, 31 7, 322
Kraepelin, Emil, 6s-68, 79-80, 84, 1 26, 314-31 5
Kamer, Heinrich, 31 5
Krishna, 141 , 251 , 274
Krishnan, T N., 31 2
Kugler, J., 322
Kumar, Deepak, 31 6
Kumar, Ashok, 31 7, 31 9
Kumar, N. L. , 87-88, go, 1 06-uo, I I 2, 209
Kumar, Nita, 40, 43, 31 0, 31 2, 320-321
Kumar, Sukrita, 156, 158, 1 71
Kumar, Vgay and famiy 1 95
Kumbh Mela, 41 , 284-285 302
Kurtz, Stanley, 320, 324
k!fravi , I 32-I 33
Whag hi(hyena}, 259-261
rshv, 2s7-26o, 267-268, 270, 279, 283
L, Devi, 157-158, 1 71 , 293
Lnger, Ellen J. , 31 8
Laqueur, Thomas, 75, 31 5
Larson, Abigail, 51 '" 53
Lrson, Gerald, 142, 31 9
Laslett, Peter, 1 00, 3 I 7
Ltour, Bruno, xvi, 309
Lach, Edmund R. , 320
Lekhraj, Dada, 1 4
Lllouch, Alain, 31 4
Leslie, Charles, 1 26, 31 8
Lvin, Jack, 321
Lvin, William C. , 321
Lvi-Strauss, Claude, 1 50, 1 54, 320
life course, 223; disenchantment of 75; postod-
ern life course, 6o, 70, 1 84
life extension, 1 1 o
Lindberg, Stafan, 108, 31 7
liquefaction, 2 1-23
"little old lady" 70
Little Sisters of the Poor, 1 1 8
Lock, Margaret, 1 84, 209, 31 2, 31 5, 32 1
loneliness, 175-176, 1 90, 206, 241 , 303
longevity, 66-67, uo, 127, 1 30, 155 See also
raiana; superannuation
Lubarsky, Mark R., 31 5
Lucknow, 90-91 , 228, 236-237, 260
Lutz, Catherine, 34, 3 1 !
Lyman, Karen, 6, 61 -62, So, 31 0, 3 1 3
Mace, Nancy L. , 31 3; T 36-Hour D, 54-55, sS
Macfarlane, Alan, 74, S1 , 31 5
Maclachlan, Daniel, 66, 6S, 31 0, 31 4
Madan, T N. , 7, 1 S5, 236, 31 0, 31 7, 321 , 323
madness, 1 23-1 25, 1 90, 1 95, 201-202, 205,
207-2oS, 239, 2SS, 266, 279 See rso
plalan; palr
Madras (Chennai}, 1 S, 36, 41 , 1 09
Madurai, 36, 41 , 1 09, 21 6, 21 S
M. A. G. S. ; 1 09
Aaabharma, 1 02, 153, I 66-1 6S, 1 76, 1 S2, 1 99,
2S0, 320
Maharaja of Varanasi, 227-22S, 232, 237
Mahdiassan, S. , 31 7
mi-bip, I 63
Maine, Henry, 22, 1 39-1 40, 1 S7, 31 9
Mramoud, Charles, 231 , 322
ml li, IS2
Mallah, 1 -5
Malaya, Vijay 21 7
Manav Kryan Kendra, I I 3-I I 5
Manga the widow, 272-274
Mangeshkar, Lata, 149-1 51
Mangri, and family, 239-240, 249-250, 252, 255
Mani, Lata, 309
Manton, Kenneth, 9S, 1 01 , 31 7
mantra-tantra 1 37, 21 5-21 6, 234
maity 1 24, 1 79, 2 1 2-2 1 3, 220, 242, 26S,
270, 274, 302
Marglin, Frederique, 17S, 32 1-322
mnli , 23S, 249
Marriott, McKim, 144, I S4-155, 1 71 , 1 75, 17S,
31 ! , 317, 31 9-320, 322, 324. Se alo unmatch
ing
Martin, G. M. , 31 6
Marari Mataji, 1 0, 23, 202, 2S2, 307
Marm, 1 S7-1SS
Mashima (of Bengri Quarter), 263-267, 272,
279
mt, 2 1 !
masturbation, 1 35, 21 4, 21 6-21 7
materiruization, 32, 3S, 4S, 71 , 1 71 , 2So, 31 0
math (monastery}, 27S
Matilr, B. K. , 142, 31 9
Mausaji, and family 243-245, 275, 323
Mauss, Marcel, 31 0, 31 9
meaning, IS3, 22S, 246, 24S, 269, 30I -303
meaninglessness, 2 1 3, 277
Mearns, David J. , 31 7
I NDEX
3
61
medicruization, 29, 62, 72, So, 1 40, 209, 21 6, 21 9
Meena, and family, 1 S9-1 90
Mehta, B. S. , and family, 200-201 , 2 1 ! -21 3, 321
melancholy 72-74
memento mori, 66, 74
memor 22, 24, 27-2S, 59, 61 , 67, 1 21 , 1 23,
1 26-1 27, 1 29-1 33, 1 36-1 47, 21 6-21 7, 292,
29S; loss, 40, so, 53> 59, 6!, 79, 126, 1 30, 156,
197, 1 99, 201 , 205, 21 0, 21 4-21 6, 245> 292,
296; socir, 1 04; subtle, 1 4
"Memory" (game}, 1 39
Memory Banks, 1 3S, 239
Mencher, Joan, 322
menopause, 6S, 75-79, 206, 20S-209, 21 5,
234-235, 292
Menw Status Examination (MSE}, 33-35, 37,
21 5, 3 1 !
Aei Bi rat Aahan, 1 49-1 50
Mercitron, 304-305
metabolic enhancer, 21 S-220
methodology 6-S, 1 0
metonym, 1 04, I I 4
Meyer, J. S. , 3 1 !
Martin, Emily, 31 5
middle age, 27, 79-So, 1 26, 214, 21 7-21 S, 31 0
middle class, S, 36, S9, 1 04-1 0S, 1 20, 1 27-12S,
1 36, 1 77, I S9-1 91 , 1 93-1 95, 207, 225, 26
g
, 307
millennarian, 1 -5, 269
Miller, Joan G. , 31 7, 321
mind, 25, 1 24, 1 27, 21 2, 255; budi, 1 31 , 156;
dimi , 240, 243, 249; 0 21 2-21 3; maa,
1 30, 245; m1t, 24; mdi , 130-1 31 . Se alo
brain; weaess, of brain/mind
Mintry of Welfare, Government of India, 41 ,
94-95, 31 6
Mino, Georges, 101 , 31 7
mirror, 21 2, 2So, 2S3
Mhra, Saraswati, 31 6, 321
Mishra family 209-21 0, 221
mrecognition, 25
msing persons, 41
Mithr, c. P, 320
Mitra, Aloka, S7, I I 6-I I S, 29S
modernity, 19, 31 , 62, 1 04-106, I I 3, I I 7,
1 1 9-1 20, 1 36, 159, 173, 203, 241 , 2S7-2S9,
302-303
modernization, 17, S9, 96-9S, 100-105
Mohanty S. P, 31 6
Moinson, Lou, 31 5
mo
kha, 39-40, 143-1 4, 1 S5
3
62 I NDEX
monstrosit 270-27I
Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, 2I, 3I O
Moore, Sally Fal, 3 I I
Moore, Wiliam, 3 1 1
Mora, (eorge, 3I 5
moral, I 7, 20; decay 2I , 66; economy 66, 79, I 3B,
24; hyiene, 65, 67; wo
r
ld, I g, 33, I 77, 30I
Morgan, Lw Henr I B7
Morris, Edmund, 3I 3
moti li , 226, 232
mother, I I 6-I 20, I 26, I42, ISO, ISg-I66, I 6g,
I 7I , I 73-I74> I B2, I B7, I Bg, I 97-IgB, 200-20I ,
2I 0, 243, 2S4-255, 265-266, 270-27I , 297>
302-30$ "bad," I 62, 27I
Mother India, I SO
mother-in-law (sa), I 6o, I 7I , I73, I 79, I B2,
I Bg-I gO, I g6, 20I , 246, 275, 297-300
Mother Teresa, I4, I B, 255, 27B, 303, 305
Mughalsarai, 30B
Muller, F Ma, 2BB
Munn, Nancy D. , 324
Munna L, and family 25I-252
Mussourie, I Q?, 1 09, I go, I93, 209, 22I , 248
Myerhof Barbara, ISB, 2B7, 320, 324
Nader, Laura, B, 31 0, 32I
naga, 226
Nagwa,
xi,
I3-I4, 35-36, 42, 106, 10B, I37, I75,
I B2, 206, 2I I -2I3, 2I 6, 22I -243, 246, 249-255>
270, 27B-279, 293, 295, 30I , 303, 307
Nanak, (ur, 22B, 25I
Nandanagar, 24, 37, 42, Igo-Igs, 207-209, 2BI ,
294
Nandi, S., 2gB, 300
Nandy Ashis, I 04-I OS, I 20, I 63-I 64> I 66,
3I 7-3I B, 320
Naraindas, Harish, 3 I I
Narayan, and family 227-229, 235, 239, 25I
narrative, I7-IB, 3I, 7I, B4, 1 03-1 06, I 23, I59,
I 6S-I 66, I 6B, I gB, 202, 2 I 0, 232, 242, 300; il
ness, 2I 6
Nascher, I. L. , 62-65, 67-6g, 7I -72, 76-79, BI ,
B3, 31 0, 3I 4-3I 5
nation, 4, I I , I g, 59
National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro-
logical Science (India), 39
National Institutes of Health (. S.), 6g
Nava Nir, 1 1 6-I 2o, 2gB, 30I
Nayr, S. K. , I 09-I I O, 1 1 2-I I 3
Nehru, Jawaharlal, I 49-I SO, 203, 3I O
neo-ra<ana, I 33-I36, 2I 7, 220, 304
Neugarten, Bernice, IB3, 32I
neurasthenia, 76
neuroleptcs, 20 I
neurology, 4I
New Age
,
45,
305
Newswee, 5, 32,
53
-54, sg-6o
New YoT res, 6I
Neysmith, Sheila, I oo-I OI , 1 03, 3I 7
nicergoline, 2I 7-2I B
Nichter, Mark, 3I 9
Nigeria, 30-3I
n!am, I4I-I42, I 94, 2I 2, 302
"no aging," 5,
BB-Bg, 95, 2B7, 293
nongovernmental organization (N(O), B7
normal/pathological, 24, 49, 6I -64, 66-6g, 7I ,
76-77, 79-Bo, B2, 2I g. Se alo aging, normal
Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus (NPH), 299
nursing home. Se old age home
Nydegger, Corinne, I oo, I 02, 3I 7
Oberoi, Harjot, 3I O
Obeyesekere, (ananath, 27I , 320, 322, 324
object, gerontological, B7-Bg, 92, 106, 1 1 3, I I 5
Oddie, (eof A., 309
Oedipus, IS2, 242; Indian, I59, I 6I , I 66, 320
O
'
Flaherty Wendy Doniger. See Doniger, Wendy
ohi , I37, 234, 25I
Ojha, Divakar, 3I 7, 3I9
Ojha, J. K. , 3I9
old age, xvi, 4, 2I, 33, 63, I 23-I 24, I 27, I 30, I 72,
I B3-I B4, I go, I 95, 205, 2I 2, 239, 250-25I ,
275, 2Bs, 2BB, 294-2g6, 304; burhi pa, 235;
buzurg, 2I 2, 235, 237; defnition of 235; jara,
I I 2, 2I 2, 25I , 323; split, 24, 47, 6o, 66, 7I , 2I $
udi vti , 2I 2, 235, 323
old age home, 4I, 52, 55-57, 6I, BI -B2, 1 07,
I I 3-I 20, 2g6, 2gB
old man, I 67, I72, 2I 2, 26B, 27I , 274-277, 2BI
old woman, 3-4, 62, 67, 70, 72-79, B2, B5-B6,
1 1 6-I 2o, I73, 206, 240, 253, 25B, 263-276; of
Balua, I -6, I I , 20, I50, 26g, 272, 309; voting,
I 73-I74, 253, 2B3, 2Bg
Olivelle, Patrick, 3I 2
Orgren, Rosemary, g6, gB, 3I 6
Orientalism, 37, 40, 42, ISO
Ostor, Akos, 324
Osuntokun, B. 0. , 30, 36, 3 I I
Overbeck-Wright, A. W, 23
PaPrana, I72, 320
paalan, 20 I, 2 I 5, 249 Se alo madness
paglr
3, 1 3, 207, 250, 265-26S, 271-274, 29S, 300.
See alo madness
pak m 41 , 1 91 , 27S
Palmore, Erdman, 9S, 1 01 , 31 7
Palthe, Van Wulfen, 31 1
pancakrma, 1 29, 1 32
Panchkosi Road, 224-226
Pandiyi, 1 14
pantaloon, 67, 79
paraphraxis, 1 26
Parashurama, 1 53, 1 66
parody 4S, so
Parry Jonathan, 43, 31 2, 324
Parsi, 36
Parsons, Talcott, 97, 31 6
Patel, Raojibhai Manibhai, 320
Pathak, Rajesh, 234-235, 247, 254
Pathak, Ratnesh, 257
Pati, R. N. , 31 6
patua, I I 9 -I 20
Paul, Father, 221 , 225, 240
pedagogy 22
pensioner, S9, 92, 1 03, 1 1 3, 1 1 5
perfectionm, 63, 67, 7S
performative, 1 7, s6-s7, 77> 79, 1 04, 1 70, 179,
I S4, 232, 242, 249, 2S2
Pershad, Dwarka, 3 1 1
personal law, 24-25
pharmaceutical industry, 29, 3S, 41 , So, S4,
1 27-1 2S, 133, 1 99, 21 7, 220
phenomenology 1 23, 1 63, 1S3, 1 S5, 20S, 21 1 -21 2,
239, 269; of voice, 37
Pinel, Philippe, 65
Pne, 1-3
piti , 153
placebo, 21 S-21 9
pneumonia, S3
Podolsky, Edward, 75, 31 0, 31 5
police, 2, 22, 35, 41 , 222, 232, 250, 253-254,
25S-26I , 2S0-2SI , 302-303
poverty panorama, 1 0S
Potter, Karl, 31 9
practice, xvii, 33, 37, 4S, S4, S7, 94, 1 26, 297
prama, 3, 142
praTlm, 1 74
Premchand, 1 1 9, 1 35, 223, 271-274, 277, 31 S, 322,
324
print meda, 12S
probate, 24
process, xvii, 33, 79
Propp, Vladimir, 1 04, 31 7
Prus, C. R. , 62-64, 31 4
I NDEX
363
psychiatry, 41 , 6s-66, 1 1 2, 1 33-1 34, 1S9,
200-201 , 205, 20S, 21 4-2 1 7, 29S-300
psychoanalys, 159, 1 61 , 1 64, 1 66, 1 S6, 271
psychos, 64; involutional, 66-6S; senile, 65
puja, 199, 253, 2S2, 307
Pune, 1 S9-1 90
Puranas, 93, 142, I 71 -173, 275
pure/polluted, 231 -232
Quadagno, Jill, I OI -1 02, 317
Quigley Declan, 322
Rabinow, Paul, xvi, 49, 309-31 0, 31 2, 31 4
Rabins, Peter, 31 3; T36-Hour Dy, 54-55, sS
race, 23
Radclife-Brown, A. R. , 2S5, 323-324
Rader, J., 31 3
Raghu Ram, and family, 240-241 , 252, 255
Raheja, Gloria Goodwn, 322
Rai family, 1 9S-1 99
Ram, 3, 93, 1 1 3, 1 69-1 70, 251 , 309
Ramachandran, M. G. , 2S3
Ramamurti, Mantha, 31 1
Ramamurthy, P V, 321
Ramanujan, A. K., 1 59, 1 61 , 1 66, 31 7, 320
Ramaseshan, S., 31 6
Jya, 1 02, 1 66, I 6S-1 69, 320-32 1
Ramji, 22S-229
Ram Lakhan, 226, 235, 240-241 , 252, 255
Ram Lan (fm), 25
Ram Lila, 1 6S
Ram Nath, and family 233
Ramnath, Rajalakshmi, 31 6
Ramu Baba, 27S-279
Rao, M. S. A. , 31 7
Rao, Narasimha, 153
Rao, N. T Rama, 2S3
Rao, Raja, 14, 31 0
raa, 245
rai, 93, 1 1 1-1 1 2, 1 27-13S, 1 45-146, 150,

5
s
-159, 32o
Ravi Das, 222, 224-225, 22S-229, 234, 244, 251 ,
253-254, 322
Ravindrapuri, 41 -42, 1 3S, 1 S2, 1 90-200,
207-20S, 2I 0, 240, 253-254, 267
Ray Dijendra, 157
Ray family Calcutta, 141-142, 297-301
Reagan, Rnald, 25, 46, 53, sS-6o, 94
reason, 2I -22, 49, 225, 2S9, 292, 305
recognition, 1 23, 170, 2SS
recollection, xvi-xvii
recuperation, xvii
Rid, Janice, I 02, 3I 7
rejuvenation. See raiana
renunciation. See sannyaa
request/demand, 73-74, 83, I 7o, 269, 284
repetition, 7, I7-I8, 49, s4, 89, I03-IOS, I 66, I 7S,
26S, 272
retirement, I OI , us-us
Revital, I 36
Roads, Ellen, I02, 3I 7
rishi, I I 2, I 43-I4S, 24S, 27I , 283, 28o, sos; angr
ISO-ISI , IS3-ISS, I 67, 22I , 237, 28I
ritual, I 32, 203-204, 283
Rbertson, A. F, 3I 6
Rcca, W A. , su, 3I S, 3I 8
Roland, Alan, 3I 7
Ross, Aileen, I 02, 3I 7
Rostan, Leon, 64-6s, 3I 4
Rowland, Richard, 6s, 3I 4
Roy, Manisha, 297, 32S
Roy Chowdhury, Salil K. , 3u
Rbin, Gayle, 320
rupture, xvii, 288
sadhu, 237, 278, 282
Saharay, H. K. , 3u
sahtlsaht ni, I o-u, I 7S, I 77, I79, I 90, 226,
23S-24I , 249, 2S2, 254, 27S. 30I
Sahlins, Marshall, xvi, 309
Saletore, R. N. , 324
Salpetriere, 62-6s, 72, 8s
sampling, xv, I 9, 3S
samsara, I 43-I 4
saTki a: impression, I 30, I43-I 4S; rite, I I 3, I 79
S Francico Chrnicl, 86
sanitation, 22
Sanjay I 3S-I38, I 40
Sankar, Andrea, I 84, 3IS, 32I
sanniat, 21 0
san'tal sannyasi (renunciation/ renouncer),
40-42, us, I 33, I 42-I43, I 4S-I 46, IS3,
I S3-I SS> I 69-I 70, I72, I 8S, I 96-I97, I 99,
202-203, 2I 3, 236-237, 2S0-2S2, 264,
270-27I , 277-279, 283-284, 302, 304
Sarasvati, Dayananda, u3
Saraswathi, T S. , 32I
Saraswati, 307-308
Saraswati, Baidyanath, I 68, 273, 277-278, 320,
324
Sarkar, Sumit, u9-I 20, 3I 8
Smadara sa,hiti , I 3 I , 3 I 9
sa{!. Se sixtyishness
sattr-bahatlr, IS7, 276
"sal{l t Pa!ta, " I 34, I38, IS7-IS9, I 6s-I 67, 2u,
239, 242, 27S
sattva, I30
Saxena, D. N. , 3I 6
Saena, M. S. , 234-23S, 32I
schema, 6
Scheper- Hughes, Nancy xxiii, so, I 84, 268, 309,
32I , 323-324
schiwphrenia, 2I S
Schoenberg, B. S. , 3I S, 3I 8
Schweitzer, Albert, 3I 2
scintia seiti; 302
Scot, Rginald, 72-74, 8s, 3I S
Sear-Chatterjee, 322
Secchan, and family, 2I 3, 228, 234, 239, 2S3
second childhood, 24, 76, I 24-I 2S, I 68, 20I ,
274-27S
Sedgck, Eve Kosofsky, 320
self 2I 2, 236, 2SI ; ageless, I 8s, 2I 2; aging, 2 u;
Indian/Western, 32, I
G
I , I 63-I 64, I78; loss
of 7, so-si , ss-6o, I 24, I 26; and memor
I 26-I 27; relational/transactional, 3, l OS, ISS,
I77-I78, I 8o, 292; subjugation of, 2SI
semantic network, I33, 20I, 2 I 7, 276
semen, I 33, 2 I 7, 23$ loss, I 3I -I 32, 2I 6-2I 7, 233
se
m
iotic frottage, 7
Sen, Amartya, I4, 99, 3I O, 3I 7
senility, I 7, I 9-2o, 27, 38, 4I , 64, 87, I 27, I 67,
I99-200, 207, 276-277, 292, 296; versus
Alzheimer's, s, I 7, 32, 6I ; defnition of
x-xi,
24-26, 32-34; history of, 47-48,
7I -84; as trope of imperial appraisal, 22-23
senior citizen, 88, 92, 302
Sermion, 2I 7
sevl, us, u7, I 20, I70, I73-I74, I 76, I 8o, I 82,
I 8S, I 9I , I 94, 20I , 209-2u, 220, 236, 238,
24I -243, 24S, 2S2, 254-2SS, 268, 273,
27s-276, 283, 300, 304. Sealo anxiety, sevi
Seva L, and family, 2I 3, 228, 2S3
Shah, A. M., 3I 7
Shangri-La, 222
Shani, I 66, 309
Shankar the boatman, 9-I O, s6, 307-308
Shankara, I 43
Sharma, J. P, 87, u4
Sharma, M. L., 3I 6
Sharma, Om Prakash, 205
Sharma, V K., 234-235, 32I
Sharma family 24, 35, 37, 42, I 92-I93, 28I
shanti, I 94-I 98, 2I 3, 2I 5, 238-24I , 2SI-252, 254
Shiva, 39, I55, I 66, 223, 228, 234, 266
shock, I 98, 209, 2I 4-2I 6
Shravan Kumar, 93, I 66, I 68-I 7I , I 8o, 2 1 1
Shweder, Rchard A. , I78, 3I 7, 32I
Sicherman, Barbara, 3I 4
siddhi, I SS, 285-286
sig, 288-289
sience, I 24, I70, I 7S-I 76, I 8I , 202, 237, 24I , 272,
279, 283, 296
Simchowicz, Teofl, 3I 4
Singh, Dr. (Varanasi psyhiatrist), I 33-I 34
Singh, Mahinder, I99-2oo, 32I
Singh, R. H. , I l l-1 1 2
Singh, Virendra, 250
Singh, Yogendra, 3I 7
Sinha, J. N. P, 3I 6, 32I
Sinha, Surajit, 277-278, 324
Siranji Devi, and family I 37-I38, I 4Q, I 70, 2I 3,
220, 246-249, 254-255, 270
sixtshness (satiana}, 10, 33, IS6-Is8, I 6s-I 66,
I70, I 75, I 94, I 97
-I98, 207, 2 1 1 , 239, 276, 308
Smith, John, 66, 3I 4
sr: literature, I 42-I 43, I46, 204; memory
I 29-I 3I
Sobti, Kshna, I 53, I 6o-I 6I , I 7I , 320
social drama, 233
sociology of India, 22
softening, I39-I40, I 64> I 87, 200-201 , 292; cere
bral, 20-23, 64-66, 69, I40; tropical, 2I-23,
33, 49> 64-65
Somadeva, 1 1 2, 3I 8, 3I 9
son, 68, 1 1 7-1 1 9, I 2I , I 23, I 33-I 35, I 37, I 4I , I 4,
ISO, I S9-I 75> I 77, I79, I 88, I 92, I 94, I96,
I98, 20I-203, 205, 207, 209-2I0, 2I 4, 228,
237-249, 25I -2SS, 263, 275-277, 285, 297,
33
Sontag, Susan, 3I 8
Soodan, K. S. , 89-9I , 3I 6
Soumerai, Stephen B. , 322
South Asian Studies, 42
South India, 2I 6
Sprenger, James, 3I 5
Srikanta Murthy K. R. , 3I 9
Srivastava, R. S. , 3I 6
ft, I 42-I43> I46, 204
state, 8I , 88, 9I -92, 98-99, 1 06, 253, 28I
status, I 02
I NDEX
3
6
5
stgma, 20, 33, 46, s8, 83, 86, I77, 3oo
Stearns, Peter, I OI , 3I 7
Stevens, Preston S. , 3I 8
Stratern, Marilyn, xi, 309
structuralism, I 54-I55> I 7I , 230-23I
subaltern, 1 05-1 06, 1 1 9; physiology, 76, 83
subjectivit 37, 53-6o, 97, I 64, I79
sublime, genrontological, 287
Subrahmanium, C., 92, 3I 6
Subramaniam, Kamala, I 53, 3I 7
substitution, I 7I , 21 0
sufering, I 77, 233, 26g, 30I , 303
Sulkava, R., 3 1 1
Sun Cities, 8I , 1 1 4
superannuation, 4I , 68, 1 1 0-1 1 3, I 76, 247,
278-28I , 284-286
Sushruta, I 29
Sut Smiti , 1 1 0, I 29-I 30, 245, 3I 9, 323
suture, 288
Svoboda, Rbert E., 324
symbolic, I 79, 288; Hegelian, 22
system, bodily, 22
tabloids, 47-53, 304
tamasha, I S-I 6, I 8, 37
Tambe family 10, 202-206, 282
Tambiah, Stanley 28I, 324
tapas, I SS
Tapeshwara, and family, 243
Tarunachandra, I45
Taussig, Michael, 270, 324
technobiological aract, 84
technology, symbolic use of 20, 32
television, I 28, 302
tension, I94-I 95, 207-208, 233
testamentary capacity, 24-25
Thakur, 226-228, 232, 236, 252-253
Tharu, Susie, 1 05, 3I 7
teodicy 53, 63, 242, 26g, 30I
Thewlis, Malford, 69, 3I4
thick analysis, x
Thirty-Plus, I36, 220
36-Hour D T, 54-55, 58
Thomas, Eugene, 205
"303" (tonic}, I 35
Tifany, Wili J. , 3I 4
Tikri vilage, I45
time, I 68, I 7o, 270, 285-286, 288-289, 293; col
lapse of s8-s9; as violence, 32, 54
3
66 I NDEX
Tus q Indi, 1 74, 1 95, 1 99, 266
tir, 39> us
Tiwari the lawyer, 24-25
tonic, 1 31 -I 38, 1 45, 1 68, 198, 21 7-21 8, 220, 240,
246-247
total istitution, u6, 296
totality 32, us, 1 20, 1 54, 231 , 288-289
totalization, 7, 79, 89
touristic, 9, 14, 39, 292-293, 296
Townsend, Peter, 100, 31 7
toxemia, 23, 76
transactional, 22, 1 37, 144, 170, 220, 231-233,
24-245, 270, 281 ; defcit, 230, 247, 302; fow,
275; refusal, 201 , 21 4, 266, 269. Se alo gt;
self relational/ transactional
transmigration, 21 3
Track, argaret, 1 54, 320
"trope of ambigity, " 71
tropical medicine, 21 -22
Turner, Victor, 1 6, s6, 284, 31 0, 31 3, 321
Tytler, Jadgish, 1 74
Uberoi, J. P S. , 49, 322
Unani, 4o
uncanny, 268-270
uncle, 136, 1 75, 206, 21 2, 243, 271; tu, 157-I 58,
203
undernutrition, 245
United Nations, 38, 266
United States, 62, I og-ui , 200, 21 8, 292,
294-295, 303-305; feldwork, 6, 48-so,
53-61 , 70, u7; history of old age in, 62-64,
69, 73-74, 76-79, 81 -84, 1 01 ; policy debate
in
,
71 , 94; West of 53, s8-6o, 304
University of Kentucky study, 85
unmatching, 1 71 , 173, 1 75, 1 77, 21 2
Untouchable, 204, 237 See ao Chamar
urbaniation, 17, 89
Uttar Pradesh, 10, 35, 281 -282
utopia, gerontological, 91 , 97
Vaishya, 226
viaprata (forest-dwelling stage), 1 1 3-I IS, 1 96,
202-203, 20S, 2I 4, 237, 25I , 275, 277 Se ao
ashram, Vanaprastha
Van der Veen, Klaas W, 31 7
Varanasi (Banaras, Benares, Kashi}, 1-4, 9, 14,
24, 31 , 34
-
37, 39-43, 1 05, us, 1 21 , 1 27-1 29,
1 31 , 133-1 39, 150, 1 54-155, 159-1 6o,
1 66-! 68, 1 74> 179, ! 86, ! 88-200, 203-206,
208-2u, 2! 6-2 17, 222-228, 236-237> 245>
2S2, 254, 258-26o, 263-268, 27o-273,
277-278, 282, 284-285, 291-293, 295, 297,
300, 302-304, 307-308, 31 0, 31 3, 320, 322
Varuna, 223, 257-258
vana, 1 43
Vasant College, 206, 264, 303
vasodilator, 6g, So, 21 8
Vatuk, Sylvia, 1 24-1 25, 1 40, 1 70, 1 75-176, 1 81 ,
! 84; 200, 240, 248, 31 2, 31 8, 320-321
Vu, 1 53, 1 81 , 245
Vedanta, 1 42-143
Vedas, 1 35, 1 42-143, I 87-I 88, 203, 206, 226, 245
Venkoba Rao, A. K. , 21 6, 21 8, 3u-31 2, 321
victimhood, 33, 47> so, 53-54, s6, 59, 6! , 6g;
"other victim," 51 , 53-54, s6, 6g, 201 , 294,
296, 304
vana kla, 1 29, 1 32
Vgaya Kumar, S. , 31 6
Vrramarit, 1 46, 31 9
Vmayashila, u2, 145, 21 9, 288
violence, 54, 268
Vipat, and family 237-242
Vishwanath, and family, 241-243, 323
Visvanathan, Shiv 31 0
Vivekananda, Swami, 93
voice, xv, 47> 54>
s8-s9, 73-74, 78, 1 24, 1 49-1 51 ,
153-158, 170, 174-1 81 , ! 83, ! 88, 1 94, 202,
21 0, 221 , 223, 230, 237-238, 240-241 ,
24-246, 248-2S0, 255, 26S, 267-26g,
271-279, 282-283, 285, 293,
300
Wadia, Noshir H. , 3u-31 2
Walford, Ry, uo-u2, 1 29, 153, 31 7
Walker, Barbara, 31 5
wandering, 51 -53, 61 , 202, 21 0, 303
Warthin, Aldred, 68, 78, 31 4
weakener/weakened, 232, 236, 243, 252, 255
weakness (or}
, 37, 78, 1 30, 134-1 35, 1 38, 1 61 ,
1 82, 190, 1 94, 198, 207, 21 3, 21 7, 220, 223,
227-238, 240, 243-24, 247, 249, 251-252,
255, 269, 300-302, 322; of brain/mind
(dml, 10, 37, 1 47, 1 96, 200, 205, 21 0, 21 2,
21 6, 233-235, 238-239, 241 , 24, 248; of
hands and feet (hi t pair}, 1 24-1 25, 176, 21 2,
245; of memory, 21 5
Weber, ax, 281
Weiner, Dora, 64-65, 31 4
welfare, 4, 48, u6-u7, 178
West, 8-9, 1 7, 1 9, 37-38, 93, 98, 1 04-1 06, 1 29,
1 35, 178, ! 84, 190, 223, 241 , 285, 305
Westernization, 17, 89
Weyer, Johannes, 72-74, 78, 31 5
White, David, 266, 324
widow, 40, 77--9, 81 , 1 1 3-1 14, 1 1 6-1 20, 185,
205-208, 239-240, 243, 264-268, 270,
272-274, 278, 283; ki li 206, 250-252,
264-265, 273, 275, 277
Wig, N. N., 31 1
wisdom, 1 23, 21 2
witchcraft, 22, 72-74, 78-79, 81 , 85-86,
258-261 , 265, 268-274, 283. See also 1oin;
fd]ail
Wolfenstein, Martha, 31 5
Women's Coordinating Council (WCC), 1 1 6-1 1 8
Woodward, Kathleen, 321
World Assembly on Aging, 93-95, 99, 1 84, 31 6
I NDEX
3
6
7
World Health Organization (WHO), 28
World Parliament of Rligions, 93
"worldly ascetic, " 236
world system, 48, 100, 21 9
Yadav, Laloo Prasad, 283
Yayati, 1 66-170, 1 79
Yesavage, J. A., 322
Ygav1
, 144
yogi/yoga, 1 1 0, 1 1 3, 142, 1 45, 1 85, 236, 285
Young, Allan, 301 , 325
Zagreb, 7, 15-19, 31 -33, 38, 48, 87, 1 99, 305, 31 0
Zandu, 1 34, 1 37, 159
Zimmermann, Francis, 245, 31 7-31 9, 323
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