The Thinning and Thickening of Places, Relations and Ideas

Poetics of the Bifocal “Fields” The place or field, for me, is a sea of glowing parrotgreen seedlings of rice––planted, transplanted, harvested, threshed, scattering into the air, rays of light and rice-dust, bouncing lightly on the ground before being swept into jute bags, loaded up on oxen carts, ready for the market––in Tamil, the word which overlaps this semantic space of “field” is vayal (paddy field)1. There is a different sense of the post-field for someone like me, as these rice fields reside in my memory, long before I have arrived back there, a returned child from the capital city, and long after I have left them, back to the cosmopolitan. These rice fields were fed by the Kavery river spreading over a massive delta-wide watershed, all the way to the sea, the Bay of Bengal, on the southeastern edge of the Indian sub-continent, and, in turn, fed my imagination, long before I became interested in the subject of my research–dry and wet ground rice flour threshold drawings–the kolam, a Tamil women’s ritual tradition. The kolam—meaning form, beauty, ornament—is made every day by Hindu women to honor the goddess Lakshmi, a feminine, wide-hipped, nurturing and mother-like figure draped with layers of golden jewelry, who stands on a large open lotus flower, with a soft, sweet, mysterious, empathic and beneficent smile. The kolam is a visual call to goddess Lakshmi every morning —“Come gaze at me, O Goddess Lakshmi”— announcing the continued healthy functioning of the household. She is the carrier of good luck and wealth; alertness and quickness, shine and radiate out of her; she is someone by whose gaze and grace you want to be touched. The “field”, in the sense in which anthropologists traditionally use the term, is one with which I have always felt uncomfortable, as it necessitates a distance of which I am incapable. I am not alone. I join many within anthropology and religious studies who have offered highly nuanced and compelling understandings of their reflexive positionings, and I feel deep kinship with those who speak of “crossing over”, and of “halfies”.2 The “field” of India was a return to my first home, the country my parents chose to leave when I was eleven, at which time I became a permanent alien resident in the United States. At that moment, America was the “field” in which I saw exotic, strange customs wherever I looked. But as I grew into a teenager I became more and more comfortable with my adopted home and its customs, reducing the perception of distance embedded in the word, “field”. Whenever I returned to India, I fell into my Tamil “mother” tongue quite easily, as it had been lodged intimately in my everyday life in my diasporic home in Washington D.C. My memory flooded in and sometimes even took over my present experience, especially when my mouth formed a Tamil word. It was this simultaneous bi-focal vision, an integral part of my upbringing, which came to the fore when I returned to the field of India, the proportions between short and long view shifting, here India becoming the larger view, and America the shorter one in a faded background. “Fieldwork” or, “ethnographic research”, for me, then, was about going home, having the chance to become the person I would have been had we never immigrated. And, yet, as time moves forward for everyone back home or away, “home” was always changing its directionality, like a changing root; each time I came to India, I tried to catch up with who and what India had become. Whenever I returned once again to my California “home” once imagined more as a “transit” zone, the horizon of the “field” oriented itself in quite a different direction, the proportionality shifting with the horizon, this American cultural frame, and increasingly filled with many different cultural orientations, and yet imbued for me always with the Indian inside myself. Yet, it is important to add that when I was doing research in India, and when I “hung out” with my fellow American anthropologists, retaining this bifocality gave me a deep sense of unease. I was with my American friends, I joined in the comraderie of being a fellow anthropologist studying India, though I was always deeply divided within myself, as to who I was at the particular moment. I became impatient and horrified at oversimplified stereotypes which would be bandied around in informal settings and I found myself trying to set them right. Some were happier that I did than other friends. When I was with my Indian friends, I inhabited more in the Indian English dialect, spoke vernacular Tamil, and felt that I was not seen as a fieldworker, or an anthropologist, but more as a young scholar and writer. This bi-focalness remains within me as I continue to teach and write about India in America.