Blues of a Small Town with Pink Palaces Landscape Narratives of Rajpipla Thesis Guide: Dr. Seema Khanwalkar
A Thesis Presented To Faculty of Architecture, CEPT University In Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree Bachelor in Architecture
Hriday Gami July 2012
Declaration This work contains no material that has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university or other institution and to the best of my knowledge does not contain any material previously published or written by another person except where due reference has been made in the text. I consent this copy of thesis, when in the library of CEPT University, being available for reference and photocopying.
Hriday Gami July 2012
Blues of a Small Town with Pink Palaces
Acknowledgements First and foremost, I offer my salutations to Dr. Seema Khanwalkar for patiently leading me through the rigorous and enriching journey of thesis, for it would’ve been impossible to come this far without her care, support and guidance. To tread this path with Dr. Khanwalkar was an honour and a humbling lesson in humanity. I would like to thank Prof. Ganesh Devy for introducing me to the town of Rajpipla and motivating me to know it like the back of my hand. I am particularly grateful for the assistance given by HH Prince Manvendrasinh Gohil whose insights about the town and its history proved invaluable. Deputy Collector Mr. Vijay Kumar was extremely supportive on each of my field trips to Rajpipla and saw to it that all the necessary arrangements were made. I’d like to thank my folks and friends who’ve helped me get till here, and get out of here! It’s been one hell of a ride! Over and out!
Blues of a Small Town with Pink Palaces
TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction
1
Representing Landscapes Rajpipla: A Potluck of Stories The Quotidian Landscape Landscape as a System of Signification Primary Research Questions
10
Secondary Research Questions
10
Methodology
10
Scope
11
Limitations
12
Overview of Chapters
13
Forming a Perspective: Weaving Concepts, Evolving a Method
15 15
Conceptualizing Landscapes Landscapes and Vision Landscapes as Systems Landscapes as Cultural Products Landscapes as Cultural Process Landscapes as Texts An Approach to Narratives
22
Narratives = Story + Telling Landscape Narratives Authorship and Intertextuality in Landscape Narratives Analytical Concepts
28
Structuralism The Semiotic Square Field Methods: ‘Little’ Ethnography
Narratives of Rajpipla: An Ethnographic Account
31 35
Journeys in the Landscape Narratives as Bounded Texts Segmentation of the Narrative Orientation in the Narrative The Royalty’s Memoires
38
On a Nostalgic Note: The European Connection The Royalty and the Tribals
42
The Town-Dwellers’ Outlook I
Blues of a Small Town with Pink Palaces
Encountering Rajpipla Myth of the Traveling Goddess The Institutional Discourse
47
Headquarters of a Disputed District The Education Town Interpretations from the Outside
51
Bhojpuri Chronicles Heir to the Throne
54
The Tribal Perspective Riding on a Paper Horse Tribal Folk Fair Bhadarva Dev nu Dungar Myth of the Beheaded God Forfeiting Rajpipla to the Rajputs Ritual Bonding with Nature Institutions of Opportunity and Oppression
Analysis- Decoding the Landscape Narratives
67
Culling out the Oppositions The Contradictions in the Rajwant Palace White Elephants Play of Authority in the Landscape Authority in the Myths Whose Land is it anyway? Outlook Towards the Built Environment Journeys in the Landscape Travelling Goddess, Unmoving God Rajpipla’s Mythic Context Spatiality in the Myths
Conclusion
83
Works Cited
87
Glossary
91
II
INTRODUCTION
How do people know the place they inhabit? How do they dwell meaningfully in their environment? How do they orient themselves within a landscape? How does the landscape become meaningful? What do narratives tell us about the place?
“It is not just that “places” serve to remind us of the stories that are associated with them; in certain respects, the places only exist… because they have stories associated with them.” (Johnstone as stated in Potteiger & Purinton, 1998: 7)
This study attempts to elaborate the relationship of a people with their surroundings, built, natural and imagined. These surroundings are places where people have dwelt, through which they have traversed day in and day out. These places, over time, have become records of a collective history in the form of stories and their narration. They serve as the tangible remains of the history of a people, remembered through stories, of which they are an integral part. These places in the landscape offer the impetus to historical imagination and act as nodes that anchor history. The landscape, as it is dwelt in over a period of time, gathers these stories about itself. These stories take the form of popular folklore, myths, legends and even dogmas.
Landscape narratives form the mesh of stories that link one place to another. They help in establishing the significance of one place with respect to another by linking them through a sequence of events. The narration of this sequence of historical events such as a popular folklore or myth positions the place imparting it its attributes and character. The character thus imparted to the landscape through the structuring of the narrative structures its perception at a quotidian level.
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The landscape of Rajpipla is dotted with places of importance, some more important than the other, some important only to a few and other places not important at all, yet that becomes the reason for their importance. Each feature of the landscape is remembered, reconstructed and relived through the story of its past. The story as remembered, interpreted and narrated by the people who are part of it. Each narration compliments or contrasts the other. Each narration is a representation of the imaginations of the collective history of the people.
The act of narration helps people reinforce their position with respect to the landscape, also with respect to the rest of society. Thus, the prejudices and conventions projected through these narrations reveal the underbelly of frame through which people experience the landscape. Narrations often complement, contrast and contradict each other, suggesting that there are structures through which the landscape is experienced. The imaginations about the landscape are structured through the structures established in the narration of the story.
Culling the structures that are immanent to the narrations reveals the underbelly of the landscape, suggesting that the collective past of a people critically influences their imagination and representation of the landscape.
Representing Landscapes: Landscapes have been represented through various artistic media, such as paintings, literature and cinema. Similar to landscape narratives, these representations of the landscape offer us a body of data that can reveal the underlying structures that mould and influence the reading of the landscape in a particular manner.
Landscapes in Paintings Landscapes have been the subject of artistic expression. Landscapes were, in the renaissance period, painted as backdrops to biblical 2
Introduction
scenes such as the betrothal of the virgin or were illustrations of gory battlefields. Impressionists such as Van Gogh and Monet brought into focus the landscapes themselves, bringing them from the background to the foreground through their paintings, from passive inert settings to active living and ever changing scenes, with an aim to capture the light, Figure 1: Van Gogh’s Road with Cypress and Star, a landscape painting that captures the ‘landscape as process’ (Far Left)
Figure 2: Claude Monet’s Bathers at La Grenouillère showing the ‘story in the landscape’ (Left)
the wind and the texture of the landscape. John Berger has described Van Gogh’s landscape paintings with much fervour,
“When he painted a road, the road makers were there in his imagination, when he painted the turned earth of a ploughed field, the gesture of the blade turning the earth was included in his own act. Whenever he looked he saw the labour of existence; and this labour, recognized as such, was what constituted reality for him.” (Berger, 2003: 462)
Landscapes in Cinema and Literature “…The context, like the other aspects of narrativity, is integral to the structuring of meaning inside the story, and conversely, the story reveals much about the context.” (Potteiger & Purinton, 1998: 54)
Cinema and literature, as a media of expression, have explored landscapes as the spine of the narrative. The landscape is not only an essential part of the storyline; it is the generator of the story, shaping the nature of events and characters. The plot in the cinematic epic Lawrence of Arabia is inlaid into the landscape, both politically and in its physicality. 3
Blues of a Small Town with Pink Palaces
Figure 3: The poster of Bollywood blockbuster Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, a movie in which the story is deeply grounded in the landscape of Mumbai and describe journeys of its inhabitants through the city
Figure 4: A pictorial representation of the world on the other side of the burrow in Lewis Carrols’ Alice in Wonderland (Far Right)
Star Wars, on the other hand, signifies the imaginative ‘outer-space’ that gathers popular imaginations and knowledge that existed at the time and cultivates the narrative around it.
Closer home, Bollywood flicks like Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron and from more recent times Slumdog Millionaire and Dhobi Ghat are narratives that belong to the city of Mumbai. The city of Mumbai is recreated in narrative imagination of these storylines. The imaginative existence of Mumbai depends upon these narratives as much as these narratives depend upon the city for their existence. The landscape of the city gradually unfolds through the cinematic expression of these narratives. In literature, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories are both narratives where the imagined landscape plays a pivotal role in the unfolding of the narrative. In Alice in Wonderland the landscape is vividly described and is integral to Alice’s experiences. The rabbit hole that Alice descends brings her to the ‘other’ landscape that is illustrated as the ‘imaginary’ opposite of the ‘real’ landscape. A large chunk of her experiences are enhanced by the peculiarities of her surroundings that are unarguably central to the narrative. In Salman Rushdie’s novel, Haroun moves through landscapes that bare close resemblance to real places but are interwoven with imaginations through a play of language. The Dull Lake in the Valley of 4
Introduction
K, the day lit city of Gup and the quiet dark city of Chup and the Sea of Stories are examples of the imaginations of a real landscape.
Figure 5: An impression of the Rajpipla as represented through narration
Landscapes in Narration Films, literature, poetry, dance, theatre and other forms of narrative art express the landscape in the act of narration. The act of narration may appear to be a purely temporal act and landscapes as something visual, spatial and an unchanging background and therefore thought of as non-narrative (Potteiger & Purinton, 1998). Narratives may be thought to have two dimensions in this sense, one that organizes events into sequences in time and the other that spatially organizes the sequence of events i.e. in a cyclic, linear, interwoven or labyrinthine manner. Landscapes become visual and spatial representations of the spatiality of the narrative.
“Space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plat and history.� (Bakhtin, 84 as stated in (Potteiger & Purinton, 1998) This thesis explores the landscape as the omnipresent context within which and about which the narrative takes place. The thesis attempts to reconstruct the landscape of Rajpipla through narratives as a totality within which individual occurrences have a meaning relying on 5
Blues of a Small Town with Pink Palaces
Ramanujan, who states, “Sometimes the best focused image of a city is a literary one, sensitive to both structural design and the significance of detail”(Ramanujan, 2006: 53).
Rajpipla: A Potluck of Stories Rajpipla has found its way to the big screen, not only within India but internationally. A town that Goodtimes (“On a royal trip to Rajpipla | NDTV.com,” n.d.) on NDTV popularized as a town with 11 Rajput palaces built in colonial style painted red and white, even pink. Bhojpuri Cinema has brought the town much fame, at the cost of decontextualizing its palaces as isolated objects that serve as successful backdrops for Bhojpuri plots. The gay of prince of Rajpipla seems to have put Rajpipla back on the map of India after it vanished post-independence after he was featured in The Oprah Winfrey Show. The tourism industry, advertisements, promotional brochures, the Government of Gujarat all project the isolated features of the landscape of Rajpipla endorsing it as a specialized landscape. These projections of the landscape orient us in the landscape and colour our experience of it.
Rajpipla is a fairly large small-town on the banks of the river Karjan, a tributary of the Narmada flowing northwards. The river wraps itself around on the south, north and west of the town, which sits in the shade of the Satpura mountain range located towards its southeast. The eastern edge of the town is more loosely defined with the Palace Road and the state highway both leading into the outskirts of the town and then into what is not-Rajpipla.
The Old Station Road is the spine of the town, which morphologically divides the town into two, the old part on the west and the new part on the east, yet brings together the happenings of the town, tradition and modern. The Old Station Road is host to loud religious demonstrations, to the bustle of street businesses, uncouth traffic, regimental cops, a tribal ghost temple and aromatic bakeries. Apart from being a 6
Introduction
ceremonial route for the tribal pilgrimage and for wedding processions the Old Station Road functions as the hearth of the town, connecting the scattered public spaces of the town.
This largish small-town seems to share certain characteristics and a certain past with other small towns spotted across western India. The land was under tribal law before the Rajputs trounced them to the seat of power, to be at the mercy of the British rule a few centuries later and finally to accede their property and powers to the independent Republic of India. The palaces of the Rajputs, bungalows of the Parsis, colonial institutions of higher education and civic amenities and the large and small infrastructure projects of post-independence India are omnipresent in towns that share a comparable history.
Yet the town is as distinct from other small towns as it is similar. For instance, the town and its surrounds such as the banks and reservoir of the river Karjan with the backdrop of the Satpura ranges and the forests are the favorite filming location for Bhojpuri Cinema. The prince of Rajpipla is the first nobleman to have openly announced his homosexuality and every chief minister of state, who has held a procession in the town, has lost his seat of power to the curse of the goddess Harsiddhi Mata.
Thus, the landscape must be viewed as ordinary and special, singularized and plural since the significant events of the past shape the experiences of everyday and the singular views of each agency come together to form the amalgam of the narrative whole.
The Quotidian Landscape The landscape needs to be perceived as an everyday landscape in order to understand in a coherent manner the isolated events and monuments in the context of the cultural fabric. All landscapes, including that of Rajpipla, are as much politically knotted as can be. It is the politics of everyday life that governs the landscape of Rajpipla, not projected 7
Blues of a Small Town with Pink Palaces
on television or in tourism posters but found in the undertones of its inhabitants.
The haphazard proceedings of the town and the built environment seem to have an apparent disconnect. Conversations with the locals gradually reveal the mysteries of the town, the stories of the past, the glorious legends and the popular gossip. These narratives tell of the collective past of the town, of the historical events remembered by everyone and of practices that are present until today.
The town of Rajpipla is present as much in its physicality as much it is in the realm of popular imaginations of its inhabitants. There are various interpretations of the landscape that yield into the different narratives. The most popular and overshadowing interpretations of the landscape come from the five agencies active in the landscape- the town-dwellers, the royalty, the government, the tribals and the media and Bhojpuri Cinema.
The landscape of Rajpipla is experienced through the lenses of these agencies, and each agency tints the narrative a different shade. The same events in history are narrated differently by different agencies. Each narration inscribes a different meaning about the landscape. The landscape becomes the common ground where people interact with their natural and built surroundings. Through this intimate interaction with the environment and through the narration of it, people layer the landscape with meaning.
Thus it is important to bring out the everyday politics, tensions, undertones that govern the everyday landscape of Rajpipla. The everyday experience of the landscape is subliminal since the landscape is not confronted like a new text rather it is read like one of which is known, at least in part (Boogaart II, 2001). The function of the landscape is greater than that of interpretation and therefore meaning is often 8
Introduction
obscured behind quotidian proceedings. It is often the day-to-day actions and immediate tasks that guide an inhabitant through the landscape, yet what shapes the experience is the subliminal individual and collective past. To conceive of landscape narratives means linking what is often treated as a material or visual scene with the less tangible, but no less real, network of narratives� (Potteiger & Purinton, 1998: 23)
The Landscape as a System of Signification Some signs in the landscape become more prominent and widely understood by everyone, they become the dominant codes, while some remain open to interpretation and in that sense more malleable. These signs are explicit in landscape narratives. A landscape narrative is then understood as a system of signification, as a text, since it is the subject of segmentation, it has a beginning and an end, it has an orientation and finally it has meaning. The meanings inscribed in the landscape and the rules governing these meanings can be readily dissevered by structurally dissecting these narratives.
Meaning is dissevered from the differences in the narration of the story. Difference is one of the fundamentals of a structural enquiry. Through the biases, preferences, careful omissions, political correctness and incorrectness expressed in the narration surface the different meanings about the landscape. Each of features of the narrative exists in relation to the other and the relationship embodies meaning rather than an isolated element with a stable meaning.
To inscribe a space with oppositions such as sacred/profane, inside/ outside, above/below, public/private is an act to make the space meaningful. People orient themselves within the landscape with the help of these oppositional relationships. These relationships are malleable; the signs in the landscape are shared, borrowed, interpreted, reinterpreted and finally translated to give rise to new meanings. This 9
Blues of a Small Town with Pink Palaces
process of translation of meanings keeps the landscape alive in the popular imagination of the people.
The individual and collective imaginations of the people gather the landscape, which exists as much within the collective subconscious as much as in the materiality of it. These imaginations are reflected through various cultural media such as cinema, paintings, literature, advertisements, folklore, myths, epics and the list goes on. Each medium has evolved its own ways of expressing the landscape, intertwining it with the characters and the events.
This thesis attempts to unfold the layered meanings in the landscape of Rajpipla by unearthing the deep structures implicit to the narratives. It covers an ethnographic journey through the town and enquires into the different narratives that govern the meanings about the landscape while relying heavily on structuralism and the semiotic theories of A.J. Greimas.
Primary Research Question: How do narratives inscribe the landscape with meaning? How do landscape narratives shape the meaning about the landscape?
Subsidiary Questions: What are the different narratives of the landscape of Rajpipla? Which are the agencies in the landscape that contribute towards the landscape narratives of Rajpipla? How do different agencies in the landscape construct their narratives differently? How do these narratives unfold the meaning in the landscape?
Methodology and Method: This study is a qualitative enquiry into how narratives inscribe a landscape with meaning. For the purpose of analyzing landscape 10
Introduction
narratives and in order to find the system governing the meaning about the landscape i.e. the deep structure, the thesis takes on the recourse of structuralism and the semiotics of A.J. Greimas. Thus, one of the assumptions of the thesis is that there is an underlying structural system that governs meaning within the landscape. The study is an attempt to juxtapose the theories of semiotics with the theories of landscapes and evolve a method to analyze the built and natural environments from a social science perspective with people at the centre.
Ethnography forms the backbone of the fieldwork for the study. Informal interviews, unstructured conversations, snippets from newspapers and websites, television clips, small talk over the counter and on-field third person observation form the body of data, which are then stitched together to form the five narratives of Rajpipla. The narratives are analyzed as cultural constructs that divulge clues to the meaning about the built environment.
Scope: Landscape studies, in the 20th and 21st century, have developed as a branch of humanities. Landscapes have been analyzed, similar to other cultural artifacts and processes, with the help of qualitative methods of research. Yet there is a dearth of methods that weave the physicality of landscapes and landscapes as mental constructions. Landscapes as cultural constructs have been dissected in literature and paintings but we lack methods to decipher the meaning about landscapes from an architectural perspective.
Rajpipla has been taken as an example that is representative of many small towns of Western India. It has a diverse history ranging from tribal roots to Rajput rule, from Colonial India to post-independence India. At the same time, the agencies that shaped the town’s history and landscape are still active in different proportions playing dynamic and dormant roles in the landscape. This study exhibits a method to 11
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understand the meaning in such a multifaceted landscape, focusing on how the meaning is inscribed rather than what the meaning is. Research in this direction attempts to contribute ‘methodologically’ to the field of architecture and landscapes applying the matured and developed conceptual frameworks of the structuralism and semiotics. Limitation(s): In a qualitative study, which relies on ethnography as its method of fieldwork, it is a must to have many people collecting data such that their differences, through reasoning and brainstorming, annul the discrepancies and fill the infinite gaps in the data. Being an individual researcher and an amateur ethnographer are both limitations of this study that cannot be overlooked. The list of binary oppositions prepared with the existing data does not exhaust all possibilities and with a more detailed and thorough data collection many more nuances of the landscape and the underlying structures of meaning are bound to emerge. While the thesis approaches landscape narratives as a texts, which are signifying systems consisting of multiple layers, projecting many meanings and open to divergent interpretations (Boogaart II, 2001: 39) the interpretations of the researcher/s may prove to be limiting. Another criticism of ethnography as a method of fieldwork has been the reliability and validity of data. Another most important limitation of this thesis (or method) is the representation of ethnographic data in terms of graphic techniques and drawings. The analysis offers limited scope in terms of interpretive drawings that do not offer an objective picture. The thesis is purposely devoid of any photographs as visuals in order to enhance the experience of the narratives and leave the reader to imagine the landscape in its
12
Introduction
spatiality. Postmodern critics have also outlined the representation of the field as a limitation of ethnography. Since this study focuses on the spatiality of landscape narratives and how they were used as a tool of orientation, the thesis does not attempt to capture the linguistic structure of the narration while that certainly is important to a study of this nature. Overview of Chapters: Chapter 1 gives an overview of the field of landscapes and cultural landscapes to clearly define the term landscape for the study. It elaborates the various methods of ‘reading’ landscapes with the emphasis on ‘landscape narratives’. The chapter outlines the concept of narratives and Greimassian structural semiotics as the theoretical framework for the analysis of these narratives. It ends with a short section on ethnographic methods of fieldwork. Chapter 2 introduces the agencies that govern the landscape narratives of Rajpipla and exhibits the narratives of each of these agencies as collected through ethnographic fieldwork. The five landscape narratives of Rajpipla, as recorded through informal interviews and first hand observations on field, form the body of this chapter, which serve as the data for the analysis. Chapter 3 illustrates the binary oppositions distilled from the landscape narratives of Rajpipla and arranged in the Greimassian semiotic square with all possible permutations in order to identify the meaningful combinations. Each narrative is analyzed using structural semiotics in an attempt to ascertain the deep structure governing the landscape. Conclusion is the final chapter of this thesis that outlines, in an interpretive manner, the ideas about the landscape in the landscape narratives of Rajpipla, effectively weaving the theoretical concepts of social sciences
13
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with those of the built environment. It is also suggestive of the scope of research possible in the field of landscapes and semiotics.
14
FORMING A PERSPECTIVE: WEAVING CONCEPTS, EVOLVING A METHOD
Conceptualizing Landscapes: The term landscape has evolved significantly over the last century. The methods of studying landscapes have also evolved simultaneously, with the aid of social science theory. Landscape narratives seems to have emerged as a genre bordering landscape and narrative studies, which can be analyzed using structural methodologies. This chapter traces the conceptual evolution of landscapes, from renaissance art to geography to anthropology, and defines the term for the scope of this thesis. It also elucidates the analytical framework by clearly outlining the theoretical concepts of structuralism and semiotics as employed in this thesis. The chapter ends with a short note on fieldwork and how ethnography was employed to gather data.
Landscape and Vision Landscapes evolved as painted representations of a natural or rural scene in the 15th and 16th century renaissance paintings in Europe (Jackson, 1984). The term landscape from renaissance till the late 19th century, as traced by Jackson, stood for paintings or the pictorial representation of natural scenery. So much so that the term was later used to describe the view of natural and rural scenery itself. Such usage of the term landscape signified the term’s ocular centric inclination. Geographers like Jackson and Dennis Cosgrove worked towards a holistic and material understanding of landscapes, as the common ground between human beings and their environment. This outlook towards landscapes seems to remain strongly engrained in our associations around the term, while geographers critiqued the visual bias of landscapes as paintings and vistas.
“Landscape [paintings] distances us from the world in critical ways, defining a particular relationship with nature and those who appear 15
1
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in nature, and offers us the illusion of a world in which we participate subjectively by entering the picture frame along the perspectival axis. But this is an aesthetic entrance not an active engagement with a nature or space that has its own life.” (Cosgrove 1985: 55, “Evolution of the Landscape Idea”)
Cosgrove has critiqued the dominance of vision to understand landscapes and has suggested that landscapes be studied from a holistic, humanistic perspective. In his work he has brought forward the political and authoritative connotations in the projection of landscapes in landscape paintings, emphasizing that, “One of the consistent purposes of landscape paintings has been to present an image of order and proportioned control, to suppress evidence of tension and conflict between social groups and within human relations with the environment” (Cosgrove, 1985: 46, “Evoluion of the Landscape Idea”). Humanistic geographers worked toward obliterating the Cartesian distinction between landscapes as the setting, as the subject, where human life ‘takes place’, as the object, pointing towards landscapes as the experiential, creative and human aspect of our environmental relations, rather than its objectified, manipulated and mechanical aspects (Cosgrove 1985: 45, “Evolution of the Landscape Idea”).
Landscapes as Systems Geographers hitherto were concerned with what exists in nature irrespective of human existence human activity with respect to natural landscape was approached as a succeeding event. Landscapes resurfaced with the humanistic turn in geography in the early twentieth century. Carl O. Sauer was one of the first to have written about landscapes and provided a definition that has continually evolved since the time. He suggested that the German term landschaft essentially meant landscape in English. Landschaft, unlike landscape as painted representations, was understood as a portion of land (land) that was 16
Forming a Perspective
shaped, ordered or systematized (schaft) (Sauer, 1925 as stated in Oakes & Price, 2008: 100).
Sauer stated, “a land shape, in which the process of shaping is by no means thought of as simply physical […and] may be defined as an area made up of distinct association of forms, both physical and cultural.” To begin with he cautioned geographers who chose to view landscape as an objective physical setting where human life takes place to a scene which itself is living and includes the works of man as an integral expression of the scene (Sauer, 1925).
The term was thought to have consisted of two parts, first the ‘site’ of the landscape i.e. the physical area that is the sum of all natural resources that man has at his disposal and the second part of landscape being a ‘cultural expression’ (Sauer, 1925). He clarifies his position on culture with respect to geography by concerning himself with only “the impress of the works of man upon the area” (1925).
The American geographer John Brinckerhoff Jackson provided the outlines of the concept of landscape in the mid-eighties of the twentieth century. According to Jackson the landscape is a ‘concrete, threedimensional shared reality’ (Jackson, 1984: 5). The word land in western European cultures was identified as a portion of land with a distinct and recognizable boundary. The word scape was possibly used to indicate the organizational or systemic aspect of the environment, similar to shape in order to carve out an order. Landscape, thus, is a system of man-made or man-modified spaces with a definite boundary and thus he argued that a landscape is a synthetic space that functions as the background of man’s collective existence (Jackson 8).
“The landscape concept itself is a sophisticated cultural construction: a particular way of composing, structuring and giving meaning to an external world whose history has to be understood in relation to the 17
Blues of a Small Town with Pink Palaces
material appropriation of land.” (Cosgrove and P. Jackson, 1987: 96, “New Directions in Cultural Geography”)
Landscapes as Cultural Products “To understand the expressions written by a culture into a landscape we require a knowledge of the ‘language’ employed: the symbols and their meanings within a culture” (Cosgrove, 1988). Cosgrove was one of the first to suggest that the landscape consists of culturally inscribed symbols. These symbols are usually embedded within a surface activity or norm, lost in the chaos of daily activities and are not easily found when one encounters the vastness and multiplicity of a complex landscape. More so the link between the signifier (the symbol in the landscape) and the signified (what it stands for) is tenuous, unlike in a photographs, a painting or a text.
The condition of the landscape in its natural setting became the basis of measuring change in the landscape by the impress of the works of man. Thus when a cultural landscape witnessed development of a culture or a replacement of cultures, the magnitude of change was measured from the landscape’s natural condition (Sauer, 1925). This becomes evident in Sauer’s diagrammatic representation of the cultural landscape where he FACTOR
Figure 6: C o s g r o v e ’ s Diagram illustrating culture as the medium that shape the natural landscape into a cultural landscape
Culture
MEDIUM
Time
Natural Landscape
FORMS Population Density Mobility Housing: Plan Structure Production Communication XX
Cultural Landsape
states, “the cultural landscape is fashioned from a the natural landscape by a cultural group. Culture is the agent, the natural area the medium, the cultural landscape the result” (Sauer, 1925)
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Forming a Perspective
Landscapes as Cultural Processes Raymond Williams approaches the landscape from a perspective that is not dominated by its physicality. According to Williams ‘the way in which people understand the landscape makes the landscape relative, changing, multiple and contradictory; they are reconstituted and reappropriated over and over again’ (Williams as stated in Bender, 1992) Eric Hirsch, an anthropologist, suggests landscapes are produced through local practice (Hirsch & O’Hanlon, 1995). Unlike Jackson and Cosgrove, Hirsch argued that landscapes emerge cultural processes rather than cultural products. He builds upon the notion of landscape by anthropologically dissecting the term’s evolution. The term has evolved from a painted representation of the scenery to the view of the scenery itself. Taking this further he says that landscape, as a social and cultural construct, is the common ground of the two poles of the representation and the image. Here representation is the ideal or aspirational notion of the landscape that forms the background of the lived reality of the foregrounded image. “Any landscape is composed not only of what lies before our eye but what lies within out heads.” (D.W. Meinig, n.d.) This relationship between the foreground actuality (the way we are now) and the background potentiality (the way we might be) of social life is the landscape of a people (Hirsch & O’Hanlon, 1995). The relationship between place and space is also one where a landscape is formed, place being the lived reality and space being its corresponding mental construct. “The landscape is implicated in this relationship in two ways: an active place making and a narrative of places”(Hirsch & O’Hanlon, 1995). The paintings of cities like London and Paris made during the Industrial Revolution in Europe or those of the English rural landscapes made during the late 19th century prove to be examples of the
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representations of a background potentiality that stand quite in contrast with the lived reality of those times.
Figure 7: Hirsch’s Diagram of the cultural landscape as existing between F o r e g r o u n d actuality and Background potentiality
Foreground Actuality Place Inside Image
Background Potentiality Space Outside Representation
Hirsch and O’Hanlon’s work is based on an anthropological understanding of landscape. This is different from other geographers’ writings on landscape as their primary focus is on material culture and they seem to be limited in the field of popular imaginations of the people, which had become an indispensable angle to the study. People, their perceptions, imaginations, aspirations and experiences are as important and real parameters to gauge and understand landscapes, as are the material and tangible artifacts such as buildings, monuments, infrastructure etc. and thus Hirsch and O’Hanlon put people at the centre while studying landscapes.
Landscapes as Texts Anne Whiston Spirn approaches landscapes as rich texts that contain a detailed record of historical phenomena, social relations and a spatial history of the people. The environmental relations of a people are embedded in the landscapes. “Like myths and stories, landscape narratives organize reality, justify actions, instruct, persuade, and even compel people to perform in certain ways. Landscapes are literatures in the broadest sense, texts that can be read on many levels.”(Spirn, 48) She argues that landscapes are similar to language; they have shapes, patterns, structure, material and a system of codification, as syntax.
Inglis (1977 as stated in Bender, “Theorizing Landscapes”) has also drawn the analogy between landscapes and texts. He states, “A landscape is the most solid appearance in which a history can declare itself. It is not a background, nor is it a stage…There it is, the past in the 20
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present, constantly changing and renewing itself as the present rewrites its past.”
Spirn’s elaboration of the concept of landscape takes into account the physical reality of landscape features like rivers, valleys, plateaus, bridges as well as the expression of landscapes in verbal language, in the imaginations of the landscape’s inhabitants. The existence of landscapes as physical and mental constructs becomes clear when she states, “every landscape has both real and potential form- what is, what has been, what will, what might be” (Spirn, 1998: 19)
She observes that all landscape features are coded with meaning, which its inhabitants have assigned. For Whiston the landscape is primarily a physical construct but she says that through narratives, myths and stories the landscape evolves and is able to contain and convey increasingly complex ideas, thus, landscapes are the world itself and may also be metaphors of the world (Spirn, 1998: 20). The anomaly of landscapes and texts is important because similar to texts landscapes can be considered as systems of representation and signification and form a system of communication. For the landscape to be read as a text it must satisfy the conditions of being a text, one of the most important being that every landscape, like every text is meaningful.
Whiston elaborates that every landscape feature such as a tree, a hill, a ridge, all are coded with meaning, which a reader of the landscape can read into. Meaning is also easily misread when a reader cannot adequately observe the text within its context. Thus, the meaning of a landscape feature depends upon what it is by itself, its constituent parts, and its network of relationships, its setting and its surrounding that is assigned to it by human culture (Spirn, 1998: 32). But she also clarifies that the meaning read into a landscape is always complex, layered, ambiguous and rarely linear (33). Barbara Bender (1992) elaborates that “landscapes are not only created by and creative of special cultural, 21
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social, political and economic configurations, they are also tensioned by the contradictory claims and counterclaims made upon them”.
An Approach to Narratives: The following section describes the approach towards narratives employed in this thesis. It illustrates how landscapes can be studied through narratives and landscape narratives analyzed as texts. The foundations for such an approach lie in structuralism and rely heavily on the work done by Vladimir Propp, detailed discussion of which is beyond the scope of this thesis.
Narrative = Story + Telling What is a narrative? The Oxford Dictionary defines “narratives as a spoken or written account of connected events, a story.” “The minimal condition of a narrative is a sequence of two events, one to establish an existing situation and one to alter it” (Potteiger & Purinton, 1998: 43). A narrative consists of a story, which forms its content such as the setting, events and characters and the act of narration itself, which is the manner in which these events and characters are structured, the way in which the contents manifest themselves during narration. Matthew Potteiger states, “Narrative refers to both the story, what is told, and the means of telling, implying both product and process, form and formation, structure and structuration” (Potteiger & Purinton, 1998: 3). The act of narration forms an inevitable part of the narrative yielding more about the underlying structure of the story.
Figure 8: Diagram showing narratives and its two constituent partsstory and its telling
Narratives
Telling (Expression) Structure/ Manifestation
Story (Content) Events Characters Settings
Film Verbal Dance Landscape
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In Ramanujan’s analysis of literary texts, he states that to draw inferences from a text one must rely on the structuring of the text rather than the ‘facts’ or fragments of information that form its content. He suggests that, “sometimes the best-focused image of the city is a literary one” (Ramanujan, 1999: 53). Through a structural decoding of the narrative one can learn about the people, their cultural beliefs, their fears and aspirations, morals and their worldview.
Narratives about the landscape such as myths, stories, taboos, legends, and epics that are passed on from generation to generation reveal intricate details about a landscape. This is when, according to Ramanujan, the act of narration becomes more important than the content of it (Ramanujan, 1999). Potteiger states, “Meaning resides not just in what is told but in how it is told” (1998: 4). Thus, when structuralists analyze a narrative they do not view the content as an isolated meaning carrier, instead engage in bringing out universal oppositions, like binaries of dark/light, order/chaos, raw/cooked, nature/culture, that structure meaning in the narrative.
Structuralists assert that rather than meaning being inherent to things, these structures are inherent to the human mind (Potteiger & Purinton, 1998: 32). The biases, preferences, careful omissions, political correctness or incorrectness become evident unfolding the structural qualities of a landscape that may or may not be able to manifest themselves in a physical feature. Thus, such texts, visual, written or oral, that inform us about the landscape in terms of its structural qualities are referred to as landscape narratives.
Landscape Narratives “The term landscape narrative designates the interplay and mutual relationship that develops between landscape and narrative.” (Potteiger & Purinton, 1998: 5)
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Landscape narratives divulge the meaning about landscapes through their narration. These narratives undergo a process of translation like any other text and in the process are constantly adjusted by the collective unconscious. This translation of the text may or may not result into a change in the physical or visible form of the landscape feature but its structural relationship within the framework of the narrative adapts to its new meaning. Narratives are a very fundamental way through which people shape and make sense of experience and landscape. Stories link the sense or time, event, experience, memory and other intangibles to the more tangible aspect of place (Potteiger & Purinton, 1998: Preface).
Narratives, like drawings, maps, photographs, videos or films are a way of documenting the landscape. Stories sequence and configure experience of place into meaningful relationships, narrative offers ways of knowing and shaping landscapes not typically acknowledged in conventional documentation, mapping [or] surveys (Potteiger & Purinton, 1998: Preface). Landscapes are embedded into the narratives through subconscious processes, which make it possible to capture them as mental constructions of the boundaries that people construct in their minds that may or may not get reflected entirely in the physicality of the landscape. “People map landscapes into the very texture and structure of narratives” (Potteiger & Purinton, 1998: 6). Thus, narratives offer access into the realm of landscapes which ‘objective’ documentation like drawings and mapping lack.
The following are the types of landscape narratives that have been included in this study of the landscape of Rajpipla. These types are as classified by Matthew and Potteiger in their book Landscape Narratives (1998: 11). • Narrative Experiences- routines, rituals or events that follow narrative structure (festivals, processions, pilgrimage, daily journeys etc.) 24
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• Associations and References- elements in the landscape that become connected with experience, event, history, religious allegory or other forms of narrative. • Memory Landscapes- places that serve as the tangible locus of memory, both public and personal. • Genres of Landscape Narratives- places shaped by culturally defined narrative forms or ’genres’ (legend, epic, biography, myth)
Authorship and Intertextuality in Landscape Narratives “Landscapes are shaped by environmental and cultural processes they do not have ‘an’ author or ‘a’ narrator. In turn the viewer must find the stories and become the narrator”. (Potteiger & Purinton, 1998: 10)
Landscape narratives, as stated by Potteiger and Purinton, do not have a single author and take shape through a process of continuous translation. The agencies that are active in the landscape construct the landscape narratives in order to represent the landscape to themselves: the landscape as inscribed with meaning within the context or their collective past. As a locus of individual and collective experiences, the landscape becomes a vast mnemonic device (Potteiger & Purinton, 1998: 20). Thus, each agency constructs a different narrative about the landscape through cultural practices.
These narratives are contested by the different agencies, reflecting the tensions present within the landscape, and are therefore always in the process of translation. As they develop from often competing interests, these landscape narratives lack clear individual authorship. Constantly in process of being made and unmade, they become open narratives without the closure and clear plot structures of conventional stories (Potteiger & Purinton, 1998: 19).
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“Every text is from the outset under the jurisdiction of other discourses which impose a universe on it.” (Kristeva 1974, 388-9 as stated in Chandler, 2007)
Landscape narratives, like other narratives, are texts and may be subjected to textual analysis. Similar to texts, landscape narratives are also subject to intertextuality i.e. a text exists in relation to other texts (Chandler, 2007: 201). Julia Kristeva refers to texts in terms of two axes: a horizontal axis connecting the author and reader of a text, and a vertical axis, which connects the text to other texts (Kristeva, 1980: 69 as stated in Chandler, 2007: 197). Every reading and text are read through the dominant codes established by combining the two axes (Chandler, 2007: 197). “A story, then, is intertextual in two senses: 1) the layering of texts and references to texts within the work itself that are considered relevant to its meaning and 2) the dissemination of meaning from the work across a network of texts, contexts, genres, and forms” (Potteiger & Purinton, 1998: 56).
The notion of intertextuality problematizes the conventional linear reading of narratives, suggesting that the meaning of landscape narratives is malleable, dependent on the context within which the text exists. It also problematizes the idea of a text having boundaries and questions the dichotomy of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’: where does a text ‘begin’ and ‘end’? What is ‘text’ and what is ‘context’? (Chandler, 2007: 203) “The intertextual realm of dispersed and unstable meaning can then be grounded in specific social contexts where meaning is not only dispersed but also gathered” (Potteiger & Purinton, 1998: 57).
Potteiger and Purinton (1998: 41) describe the three realms of a landscape narrative: 1. The Story Realm 2. The Contextual/ Intertextual Realm 3. The Discourse Realm 26
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The story realm is the world described in the story itself. The focus in the story realm is the characters structured into a sequence of events in a described setting. Yet, the meaning in the story is not independent of the reader, community and memory that form the context within which the story becomes meaningful. Redescribing narrative and landscape as cultural systems of signification, recognizing the importance of context, and expanding the notion of text and the role of readers in the production of meaning (Potteiger & Purinton, 1998: 32). This describes the intertextual realm of the story. The realm of discourse divulges the broader worldview and ideologies that are implicit in the telling. (Potteiger & Purinton, 1998: 41)
The way in which people understand and engage with their worlds depends upon the specific time and place and historical conditions; it depends upon gender, age, class and religion. At any given moment or place, landscapes are multivocal. (Bender, 1992) Landscapes are created out of people’s understanding and engagement with the world around them. They are always in the process of being shaped and reshaped. Being of the moment and in process, they are always temporal. (Bender, 2002)
Landscape features, such as a palace and its gardens, a graveyard, temple, an embanked river, a narrow stream or dense forests, all have the ability to evoke the imaginations of a keen observer, yet one must enquire into what is the nature of relationship between the people who inhabit this landscape to its various features.
An approach to understanding landscapes from the perspective of the inhabitants is necessary for an interpreter of that landscape as the boundaries that exist in the interpreter’s mind are overlaid onto the landscape. Each landscape is experienced with the knowledge and experiences of previous landscapes. The imaginary boundaries within 27
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the landscape that an interpreter might draw may vary significantly from the ones drawn by a person inhabiting the landscape. This is how landscapes are understood as intertextual narratives, where the existence and experience of simultaneously existing landscapes shape the way in which a particular landscape is read.
The narratives of Rajpipla some together like a collage and hold the landscape within them making the tensions visible. This study will explore what these narratives reveal about the landscape of this town, the connections with other landscapes, the way people relate events to places and vice versa.
Analytical Concepts: This study is grounded in structuralism as the methodology and employs structuralist theories and structural semiotics to analyze landscape narratives of Rajpipla. To describe the inception of structuralism and structuralist thinking is beyond the scope of this thesis. Thus, only the basic tenets of structuralism are discussed in the following section followed by a detailed explanation of the working of Greimas’ semiotic square.
Structuralism “A fundamental premise of Structuralism, the founding base of semiotics, is that meaning emanates from the relationships among elements which are in themselves meaningless.”
Structural analysis is concerned with identifying the structural relations (oppositions, correlations and logical relations) of the parts of a semiotic system at a given moment in history (synchrony) (Chandler, 2007: 83). “Meaning arises from the difference between signifiers: these differences are of two kinds, syntagmatic (concerning positioning) and paradigmatic (concerning substitution)” (Saussure as stated in Chandler, 2007: 83). The syntagmatic axis displays possibilities of combination 28
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and rules of sequencing (this-and-this-and-this) while the paradigmatic axis illustrates functional contrast (this-or-this-or-this), which involves differentiation. That is to say that the use of one signifier rather than another shapes the preferred meaning of a text (Chandler, 2007: 85). “Since the significance of any element in a system depends upon its differences from other elements in the system, it cannot be a uniquely meaningful element.” (Katilius-Boydston, 1990)
“Paradigmatic analysis seeks to identify the various paradigms (or preexisting sets of signifiers) which underlie the manifest content of texts” (Chandler, 2007: 87). The signifiers on the paradigmatic axis have a positive of a negative connotation that is revealed through preferring one signifier is over another. This positive and negative ‘moment’ constitutes of underlying ‘thematic’ paradigms such as binary oppositions. (Chandler, 2007: 87). Paradigmatic analysis compares and contrasts the chosen signifier (the preferred signifier) in a text with the absent signifiers or the signifiers that may have been used in order to ascertain the significance of the choice (Chandler, 2007: 88).
Roman Jakobson proposed that binary oppositions are indispensable to the structure of language (Jakobson as stated in Chandler, 2007: 90). Structuralist thought suggests that the real understanding of anything comes from knowing what it is not, rather than what it is (Valentine, n.d.). They believe that binary oppositions in language are a reflection of a universal human characteristic, that of perceiving in opposites. Thus the word dark only becomes meaningful when contrasted with light, black becomes in relation to white and vice versa. They outlined two kinds of relations- of contradiction and of contrariety (Chandler, 2007: 91). Binary oppositions constitute the relation of contradiction i.e. of mutually exclusive terms. Antonyms on the other hand constitute a relation of contrariety i.e. terms that are opposites but not mutually exclusive (Chandler, 2007: 91).
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Another important aspect of paradigmatic analysis is synchrony that is the study of systemic relations of a text at a given point in time rather than diachrony, which is the study of evolution of the text over a period of time or a historical study of the text.
The Semiotic Square A.J. Greimas developed the semiotic square on Jakobson’s principles of contradiction and contrariety. The semiotic square is an analytical technique applied to analyze paired opposites by mapping logical conjunctions and disjunctions relating key semantic features in a text (Katilius-Boydston, 1990). The semiotic square covers more possible positions of signifiers, in relations more than those offered by binary Figure 8: The Semiotic Square d i s p l a y i n g the positional possibilities of Black and White as oppositions/ antonyms
Black
White
Not White
Not Black
Relation of Contrariety Relation of Contradiction Relation of Complementarity
oppositions i.e. of either/or. The semiotic square exhausts the relational possibilities of signifiers and thus gives a more coherent and organized picture of the universe. It also considers and exhausts possibilities of combination that may be considered irrational. The semiotic square is a map of logical possibilities (Katilius-Boydston, 1990). In the semiotic square, the values of the individual words and signs or signifiers are not important as their value emerges in relation to the context. The analysis involves looking at elements that together create meaning in a system- ‘how’ meaning is constructed rather than ‘what’ is the meaning.
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Consider the binary oppositions of black and white. Even though these appear to be mutually exclusive terms, with the help of the semiotic square, their different positions and relations can be identified. Black and white are antonyms and exist in a relation of contrariety since they are not mutually exclusive terms. Black and not-black and white and not-white exist in a relation of contradiction to each other. Black being the binary opposition of not-black and white the binary opposition of notwhite. The relationship that is achieved vertically is a relation of simple implication working only one way i.e. the signifier at the bottom implies the signifier on top but not vice versa. Thus, not-white and not-black leave scope for the possibilities of black and white respectively but this relation does not function the other way around.
The semic unit of black and white is then mirrored by the semic unit of not-black and not-white which forms another level of oppositions. In this manner, semiotic analysis can be carried out many structural levels. In most cases, the semic unit that is obtained at the other i.e. as a combination of not-black and not-white is more generalized as compared with he semic unit formed by the oppositions black and white.
The semiotic square displays the fundamentals of structural enquirysynchrony, difference and structural levels. Greimas insists our understanding depends on a network of invisible relationships, which he developed into the semiotic square.
Field Methods: ‘Little’ Ethnography “Ethnography is the study of people in their naturally occurring settings or ‘fields’ by methods of data collection which capture their social meanings and ordinary activities, involving the researcher participating in the setting, if not also the activities, in order to collect data in a systematic manner but without meaning being imposed on them externally.” (Brewer, 2000: 6)
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How do we gather landscape narratives? What is ethnography? Ethnography is a detailed recording of how people represent themselves to themselves and to each other. “Ethnology is history from below, and history which often has its focus and starting points on individuals, in a local setting, and with the focus on their everyday life� (Syse, 1990). An ethnographic approach also attempts to not impose categories and meanings onto the data out there in the field by recording what a particular actions, events or rituals mean to the people.
Ethnography requires the reconstruction of conceptual structures as present in the field (Boogaart II, 2001: 43). It must describe the context within which cultural phenomena take place, the meaning and intentions that organize them and their processing (Denzin 1989: 31 as stated in Brewer, 2000). An ethnographic representation attempts to reconstruct culture as the realm in which people interpret and make meaning of their surroundings (Geertz, 1973).
Ethnography offers the flexibility to include various forms of data from informal interviews to television clippings, from newspaper articles and postage stamps to pamphlets and handouts. Ethnography captures the detail, context and emotion of a people and the place and thus establishes a significance of experience (Denzin 1989: 83 as stated in (Brewer, 2000). Through ethnography one can documents the words, images, institutions, behavior-in terms of which, in each place, people actually represent themselves to themselves and to each other. (Boogaart II, 2001: 43)
Ethnography focuses upon collective dwelling, the thick description of how people build, use, and conceptualize their environment and how this in turn cultivates certain ideas, relations and ritual actions in humans (Boogaart II, 2001). The exercise of ethnographic fieldwork is much easier to describe on paper as compared to actually collecting data on the field. 32
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While conducting interviews in the field the following questions became central to the conversations, yet their form was never revealed: • Whose story is told and why? • What systems of belief are established through stories? • How does one sort out the many layered (personal, ethical, regional) multiple and often contested stories of a place? • What are the ethics and politics of telling stories? • How are narratives implicit in the materials and processes of landscapes? • What is the role of the reader/participant in constructing the meaning of a story?
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NARRATIVES OF RAJPIPLA AN ETHNOGRAPHIC ACCOUNT
English, Gujarati and a tribal dialect of it were the three identifiable languages in which the interviews in the field were conducted. Even though this thesis does not attempt to capture the linguistic structure of the narration, the particularities of the language in terms of specific terms and phrases proved important in bringing out the oppositions.
Through the course of the ethnographic fieldwork in Rajpipla, five agencies were identified that play significant roles in shaping the landscape narratives of Rajpipla. These are identified as the following: 1. The Royal Family 2. The Town Dwellers 3. Institutional Entities such as the Government, NGOs, Schools and Colleges 4. The Bhojpuri Film Industry and Media 5. The Tribal Community of the Bhils
These agencies have constructed narratives about the landscape that exhibit their worldview and ideologies, aspects that are implicit to the narratives. These narratives are constantly being narrated and interpreted and are sensitive to the social and political situations. Thus, they adapt to the cultural and political scenarios and undercurrents incorporating present day activity and events to keep the narrative alive.
The agencies identified for the study narrate contrasting, often contradictory, versions of the events in history. Using the differences between and within the narratives it is possible to identify the positions that the agencies assume in the landscape. The naming of the town Rajpipla itself is a subject that invites a variety of historical accounts. The tribals believe that Bhil Raja, the administrator of the tribes held his court under the peepal trees at the banks of the river Karjan and thus 35
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the town came to be known as Rajpipla, the town where Bhil Raja gave justice to people under the peepal trees. The royalty believe it is a name that traversed with the Rajputs and came into being as a symbol of the Rajput ‘Raj’ or the land of the peepal trees. These two differences in the accounts suggest the positional differences of the two agencies with respect to nature.
Journeys in the Landscape Rajpipla is a town that is witness to many journeys. Journeys made by conquerors, goddess’, gods and people from different walks of life from devout pilgrims to the sceptical chief ministers of the state, from frugal tribesmen to the people running the Bhojpuri cinema. These narratives consist of real and imaginary characters and their movement through the landscape, drawing imaginary lines through the landscape, setting up boundaries and thresholds. Journeys through the landscape form an important aspect of the local narratives.
The building of the Harsiddhi Mata temple outside town, the underground tunnel connecting the palace with the temple, the existence of an ideal state of Junaraj somewhere in the hills, the tribal pilgrimage through the landscape, Bhojpuri Cinema and the Narmada pilgrimage are just a few of the important events and journeys that impart character to Rajpipla’s history, as recorded in the narratives.
Narratives as Bounded Texts While each narration has a defined beginning and an end, these narratives that are collected through various sources come together seamlessly and exhibit a finite point of beginning and end and can be considered as bound texts. The tribal pilgrimage and the myth is an appropriate example of bound texts. The tribal groups starts from their respective villages covering their journey dancing and beating drums through the landscape. They cross the town of Rajpipla and proceed towards the sacred mountain. At the foot of the mountain, they end their journey by 36
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offering the paper horse to Bhadarva Dev and sacrificing animals and celebrating with alcohol. This ritual pilgrimage parallels, also imitates in parts, the sequence of events of the myth about Bhadarva Dev and his life.
Segmentation of the Narrative Each narrative is also the subject of segmentation, constructed from a limited number of sequences of events that may be considered as segments of the narrative. For example, in the narrative of Harsiddhi Mata, her journey through the landscape may be segmented into three significant parts, the first being her position of rest at her abode at the top of the hill at the coastal town of Miyaninagar, second being her oscillating movement between the Ujjain and Miyaninagar, and lastly the abrupt ending of her journey outside Rajpipla.
Orientation in the Narrative The myth of Bhadarva Dev and the pilgrimage associated with the myth is an interesting example of orientation within the text. The ideological orientation within the text is emphasized upon by the various symbols that appear in the myth, such as the endless resistance to ‘outside’ invasion. These symbols are embedded in the ritual pilgrimage in the form of playing drums, wild dancing and swordplay. This reflects in the overall worldview of the tribals and their approach towards ‘outside’ governance, a rejection of externally imposed authority.
The boundaries and thresholds described in the narratives are what the people use as markers in the landscape in order to orient themselves. Different people construct different sets of boundaries such that these boundaries, which demarcate areas, become meaning-carriers in the landscape and in the narrative, rendering it meaningful.
Thus, the landscape narratives of Rajpipla exhibit the four conditions, as outlined by Jean-Marie Floch, for a text to qualify as one; firstly, they 37
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must have a beginning and an end, secondly, they must be oriented, thirdly the narratives should be subject to segmentation and finally the narrative must have meaning. (Floch, 2001: 16)
Five landscape narratives of Rajpipla are detailed in this chapter, as collected on the field, constructed through a series of interviews and from data such as local newspapers, handouts and pamphlets. A brief introduction to the agency preludes each narrative.
These narratives establish the ways in which the people, who traverse its boundaries, understand the landscape and make it more meaningful as they move through it. Sometimes the landscape extends to towns as far away as Miyaninagar, Ujjain and Pavagadh. Thus, there is no one clear marking of where the landscape begins and where it ends. Yet there is, in every narrative, its own conception of the landscape and its boundaries, its beginning and end, a strong sense of inside and outside. The following are the landscape narratives of Rajpipla and the journeys that shape the landscape.
The Royalty’s Memoires: Over the course of several interviews with the Prince of Rajpipla, HH Manvendrasinh Gohil and his uncle an interesting aspect to the landscape was revealed. Another source of the royalty’s collective outlook towards their past, the landscape and other agencies (the government, the tribals, the goddess and Bhojpuri Cinema) active in the landscape is on display at the Royal Trinity Museum of Rajpipla located in the Rajwant Palace Resort. Newspaper articles and videos on YouTube also contributed to the body of ethnographic data.
On a Nostalgic Note: The European Connection The royal family describes their past as a flourishing and prosperous one. They recall events and the way of life from the past, sometimes 38
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even celebrate anniversaries in fond memories. What came out of these conversations was a nostalgic view of the landscape’s past.
For the royal family it seems difficult to shed its customs and give in to the changing times. As the royal family’s dog wandered into the living room, where I was in conversation with the prince, I was told that the family is planning to get him married. I enquired further into this interesting piece of information only to find out that the alliance was being finalized with the dog princess of a neighboring erstwhile princely state. They planned on having a ceremony in Rajpipla and told me that the dog prince and the dog princess have already met several times. “The only issue being that the dog princess was elder than the dog prince and that she was much darker”, the prince added mockingly.
The prince recalls in a proud manner the achievements of his grandfather, then the Maharaja of Rajpipla, in the English horse races, who was the first Asian to have won a race at the Epsom Derby and an avid polo player. He points to the black and white photograph on the wall where the Maharaja and his polo team, mostly consisting of the members of the royal family, stand beside the visiting English team at the Rajpipla Polo Club. The royal family also commemorated the Epsom Derby win by issuing a First Day Cover on its 75th anniversary, which an avid stamp collector arranged for by requesting the Postal Department at Baroda.
The exhibits at museum at the Rajwant Palace Resort are a window to the royalty’s reading of their past, in terms of events as well as the way in which they remember the landscape. An entire room is dedicated to stuffed animals with the name of the hunters written on brass nameplates hanging besides the wall-mounted beings. The forests at the mountains were the playgrounds for hunters. It was a hobby they indulged in as rulers and entertained their foreign guests with at the same time. The forests were tagged as dangerous and only armed men dared to enter the forests as a sign of bravery and courage. 39
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On the other hand, another room displays the aspirations for a European way of life, from old silverware to the trophies won by the Maharajas during the horse races. This room was full of European dolls, instruments of navigation, photographs of the Maharaja with the Queen and many other artefacts that only revealed the aspiration for a European lifestyle and the obsession to please the foreign guests.
On this note I recall a conversation with the prince where I enquired about the bandstand at the northern end of the Old Station Road. The bandstand, according to him, was constructed for the Rajpipla Band. The band was brought from Goa. The band members were Goan catholic families and were brought to Rajpipla by the then Maharaja of Rajpipla since they were the only few in the country who were accustomed to playing western instruments like the clarinet, the bass and the drums. The prince also recalls that in order to impress the European guests with tunes from their land, the Maharaja brought records of compositions from his trips to Europe. The guests would’ve certainly been impressed with the European style architecture of the palaces, bungalows, the gates and towers, European games like polo, a guest house dedicated to them and to top it all a family of Goans playing English tunes at the bandstand. If this was not enough, they set up a brewery on the outskirts of town to make wine and rum. Rajpipla wine soon became a recognized one amongst the English.
But then, all this became luxuries of the past when the Maharaja of Rajpipla surrendered his state to the Republic of India. The government, as the royal family describes it, confiscated from them every piece of state owned property including documents of the princely state for which the government had no use. The shift in governance reduced the royalty to a notional head and took away something that seemed to be very dear to them; their extravagant and luxurious westernized way of life.
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The Royalty and the Tribals The last time the town had seen a change in governance was when the Rajputs ousted the tribal ruler Bhil Raja and took charge of the land. The prince described the transition as a friendly pact between the tribals and the royals. According to the royalty’s version of the story, the Kingdom of Rajpipla was under threat by the Mughals and the Pathans. The invaders had taken control of the state and to overthrow the Mughals from the seat of power, the royal and tribal armies strategized under the shade of the peepal tree and were able to successfully fight the battle to regain control of the land. This certainly is not the way the tribals remember their relationship with the Rajputs.
The tribal museum in the Rajwant Palace gives us cues to the relationship between the royalty and the tribals. The museum has on display a mock up of a tribal hut, guns, knives, swords and primitive hunting equipment like bows and arrows and spears apart from small artefacts made of terracotta and some samples of tribal artwork. It seems that the tribal culture and its dominance in the region were reduced to these few aspects of their lives. And yet the hunting and war equipment suggested strong undertones of rebellion, struggle against power and oppression. The tribal image projected in the museum lacked in most dimensions of cultural constructs of the tribals, projecting them as a one-dimensional entity.
One part of the museum seemed out of place, it was a trap door on the ground floor of the museum. When I enquired about the door I was told that it is the other end of the tunnel that connects the Rajwant Palace with the Harsiddhi Mata temple. The tunnel was built so that the Maharaja and Maharani could visit the temple to offer prayers without having to cross the dense and dangerous forests in between the palace and the temple.
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The Town Dwellers’ Outlook: The conversations on the streets, with pan and chai walahs, with the priests of the Harsiddhi Mata temple, with shopkeepers, restaurant owners helped construct this narrative, the landscape as viewed by the town-dwellers. This narrative emerged as the most generalized yet most dominating of the landscape narratives of Rajpipla. Mostly gathered through informal interviews and conversations with people at public places such as the bus stand, clock tower, bandstand and at the banks of the Karjan.
Encountering Rajpipla After a three-hour journey on State Highway 160 the GSRTC (Gujarat State Road Transport Corporation) bus rattles to a stop at the Rajpipla bus stand. It is a bus stand similar to the many in Gujarat, a large concrete roof cover the platforms, the walls have posters pasted on them, either rallying for a political leader or selling ‘manhood’ cures but most of the times advertising the unfathomable number of tuition and coaching classes for aspiring students, promising them degrees and a visa to another land.
Since the distances to the more developed cities like Bharuch, Surat and Baroda are relatively short, the frequency of busses decent, good connectivity along with the convenience of getting off at any small town and settlement on the highway, buses are the most preferred mode of transport around the region. It is also most likely that one arrives into town by bus, whether a traveller, a researcher or a resident. The bus stand is at the south end of the settlement and is built on the same land where previously the royal haveli stood.
This is important because the experience of Rajpipla begins not when one gets down from the bus at Rajpipla but when one boards it at Ahmedabad or Baroda. One is likely to come across a demographic mix of tribal families carrying sacks of ‘city’ goods, small-scale businessmen, 42
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the occasional pilgrims and for certain groups of students. Pilgrims prefer to travel by jeeps and chhakdas in groups while enjoying the freedom to go up in loud chants as and when they build up the energy.
The town of Rajpipla is famous for the Harsiddhi Mata temple and witnesses many pilgrims visit the temple each year. Conversations about the town with the pan-walas, the chai-wala and the local shopkeepers either begin with reference to the temple or the palace. The inhabitants view the Rajput rule, which includes the strong European influences, and the Harsiddhi Mata temple as the most important historical phenomena that shaped the town’s past. Fragments of the narrative placing the royalty with respect to the goddess emerged through conversations with an old instrument maker in the old part of town, a treasurer to the temple and the locals. The myth revealed how the locals view their landscape with respect to historical events, real and imagined.
Myth of the Travelling Goddess Harsiddhi Mata originally resided at the top of a small hill in the coastal town of Miyaninagar. From her elevated abode, which had a clear view of the town and the sea, she watched over the fishermen of the town who went into the high seas. The queen of Miyaninagar was a devout follower of the goddess. At the queen’s request, pleased by her devotion, the goddess would climb down the hill at night, assuming the form of a little girl, to attend the garba during Navratri.
The king of Miyaninagar was overwhelmed by the mysterious appearance and aura of the goddess who had disguised herself as a little girl. The king developed an unbearable curiosity about the whereabouts of such an exuberant personality and devised a plan to meet the girl in person. He hid himself behind a hut on the route that the little girl took to return to her residence, and as soon as she appeared around the corner he pounced on her and held her hand with a firm grip and refused to let it go till she had spilt out the entire truth. At such outrageous behaviour of the 43
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Figure 9: An artists impression of Harsiddhi Mata at sea protecting and blessing her followers. Her abode on the hilltop is also visible in the background (Right)
Figure 10: An artists impression of Harsiddhi Mata at Ujjain, where she resides from evening till morning after which she returns to Miyaninagar (Far Right)
king, the goddess cursed the king. She spoke “to know the entire truth you shall have to climb the hill where I reside every day, and everyday I shall fry you in hot oil. If you reveal anything to the queen or fail to perform the task then you shall meet your end the very same day.� After spelling out the curse for the king the goddess disappeared.
From then on, the king would climb the hill everyday and return with wounds. He was becoming weaker by the day and fresh wounds would appear on his body. The queen questioned him about his wounds but the king would not speak. The queen, worried and feeling helpless, called upon her brother, the great emperor Vikramaditya from Ujjain. He came to the rescue of his brother-in-law, who narrated the entire story to him upon his arrival.
Vikramaditya was a great devotee of Harsiddhi Mata, and decided to disguise himself as the king of Miyaninagar by applying various oils and spices on his body, he climbed the hill instead of brother-in-law the following day. As dawn broke king Vikramaditya climbed the hill and presented himself to the goddess as the king of Miyaninagar. As soon as the goddess put him in the hot oil she realized that disguised, as the king of Miyaninagar, was her devotee king Vikramaditya. She was very pleased at the sacrifice that Vikramaditya had made for his brother-in44
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law and decided to grant him a wish and forgive the king of Miyaninagar. The king requested the goddess to accompany him on his journey and take residence in the capital of his empire in Ujjain. At his request the goddess agreed but put a condition, she said, “during the day I am the protector of hundreds of fishermen of Miyaninagar who sail into sea in search of a good catch, therefore I will come to Ujjain after dusk and return to perform my duties at dawn.” The king readily agreed to this condition of the goddess and prepared for the journey.”
Since then it is believed that the goddess stays in Miyaninagar from dawn to dusk and takes abode in the temple at Ujjain in the dark hours. Therefore the prayers to the goddess are offered in the morning at Miyaninagar and in the evening at Ujjain.
“Meanwhile, the Rajput descendants of the great emperor Vikramaditya had established their stronghold in Rajpipla. The king of Rajpipla was also a devotee of Harsiddhi Mata and used to regularly visit her temple, with his family, in Ujjain. His son, the prince of Rajpipla, Virsalji, who was also a follower of the goddess, soon assumed the position of king after his father’s death. He used to perform various sacrifices in order to please the goddess. The goddess, please with the devotion of Virsalji, appeared in his dream and granted him a wish. The king of Rajpipla promptly asked her to come and reside in his palace, to which she agreed. The following morning the king woke up and prepared for his journey to Ujjain to bring with him Harsiddhi Mata on his return.
The king reached the temple, had a bath in the river and started chanting the hymns. The goddess decided to test the king and made him forget kum-kum, which is essential for the goddess’ prayers. The king remembered that he had forgotten the kum-kum but could not leave while the prayers were in progress. He decided to cut his finger and sacrifice his blood as kum-kum. This act impressed the goddess and she agreed to accompany him to his palace, but again there was 45
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another condition. She said that some of the gods would also accompany her; she will walk along the gods behind the king and if at any moment the king turned around the goddess would stop and the king would be obliged to build her temple at that very spot. The king agreed to her condition and prepared for the journey.
They set off from Ujjain, headed for Rajpipla. The goddess, assumed the form of a little girl, had worn payal that made a sound as the she followed the king on her tiger. To his disbelief the king could see the skyline of his town in a matter of hours, a journey that usually takes a few days. At this moment the sound of the payal stopped and the king, forgetting that he was under oath to not look back, turned around. The goddess immediately stopped and said, “Since you have stopped and looked back, my temple shall be built here.� They were still outside the town in the thickness of the forests but the king did as the goddess pleased. The temple of Harsiddhi Mata was built in the forests, outside the town of Rajpipla. Two years after the temple was established a severe drought took over the town and there was a large well that was dug in the premises of the Temple such that the town dwellers would be saved by the blessings from the goddess.� Figure 11: An visual narrative showing the spatial relation of the temple, the palace and the town in the myth. An underground tunnel was constructed that connected the palace and the town
Thus the goddess never reached the palace and the temple was constructed outside the town. It is said that the royal family had a tunnel dug out between the palace and the temple in order to avoid 46
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the treacherous route through dense forests. She is still the reigning deity of the royal family, who worships the goddess and visits the temple regularly for prayers. The royal family offers special prayers during the Navratri festival and it is one of the central festivities of the town. The town-dwellers do garba around the Harsiddhi Mata temple in the temple compound.
The myth around the Harsiddhi Mata temple has spread far and wide. Three chief ministers of Gujarat, it is believed, were ousted after they held a public meeting at Rajpipla. However, Narendra Modi, who in his tenth years as chief minister had stayed away from holding a public function in the town, has finally decided to test the belief that whosoever addresses a gathering in Rajpipla, loses his chair because of a curse by the goddess.
The Institutional Discourse: To gather/reconstruct the narratives of the political and institutional agencies was a complex task. A large portion of the narrative was constructed through conversations with officers of the lower rung of the administrative services. A few discussions with the District Collector and the Division Magistrate were insightful. Leftover parts of the narrative were constructed through first hand observations of these institutions in the field.
Headquarters of a Disputed District In 1997 Rajpipla was declared as the municipality of the newly formed Narmada district consisting of Shakbada, Dediyapada, Talukvada and Nandod Talukas. The town, at present, is the administrative headquarters of the Narmada district, its geographic and demographic location have contributed heavily to its political importance. The town is host to important government institutions, which are essential administrative and judicial functions for governance, such as the Jilla Nyayalaya (District Court), 47
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Prant Adhikari Karyalaya (District Collector’s Office), Jilla Van Karyalaya (Regional Forestry Office) and the Magistrate’s Office and the Sub Jail.
The presence of the District Collector’s Office seems to play a more vital role in the judicial system rather than the District Courts. Since the area is a demographically dominated by tribals, the cases of death, murder, disputes regarding land and the clashing of different tribal groups go through the District Collector. For the tribals it is more important to first abide by their own laws and norms of moral and social conduct. These often are in contrast to the laws and regulations set out by the Constitution of India, yet are valid in their own right. Thus the District Collector functions as the arbitrator and strives to strike a balance between the larger set of laws laid out by the constitution and the unwritten but largely accepted tribal laws of social and moral justice. Figure 12: A map showing the dominant institutions in the town
A large number of public institutions have also been established in the town. The Rajpipla Municipal Corporation, which operates from the Municipal Offices and two government hospitals, including the Municipal Hospital to name a few. These institutions, similar to the institutions of education, have adapted old bungalows of the royal family and the Parsis as their workspaces. If one views from the government’s perspective 48
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these old colonial style buildings fit the description of a government building from more than one point of view.
The buildings built in during the British Raj have magnificent facades, are symmetric, have ample space around them for the crowd to gather and have the stature and scale of an institutional building. These factors more than qualify and satisfy the image any institution is looking for in a town that about a decade ago plummeted from being a laid back largish small town to the district headquarters. More so, the buildings are located in close proximity with each other, towards the southern end of the Old Station Road. Their physical proximity contributes heavily to the image of unity that these government institutions would like to share.
As a result, the new government institutions and facilities that are mushrooming in town are also biased towards being located at the southern extreme of the settlement. Take for example the Circuit House and the Rajpipla Sports Complex, or for that matter the Regional Forest Office, they all find themselves forming a cluster of government institutional buildings. These patterns of organization seem to share common grounds with the manner in which the buildings and palaces of the royalty developed. The Palace Road is where most of the royal palaces, residences and the institutions are located. This road, instead of being one of the most important and busy roads of the settlement is one seldom traversed by the local. It springs perpendicular to the Old Station Road and moves further away from the settlement till one reaches the Vadia Palace, a half an hour walk from town.
The Education Town With a 97% literacy rate in the town (Census of India 2001: Data from the 2001 Census, including cities, villages and towns (Provisional), n.d.), the institutions of primary, secondary and higher level education in the town have become the factors contributing to its projected image as an education town. The history of these schools can be traced back to the 49
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colonial times. A number of schools such as the Govt. High School and Rajwant High School to name a few had been set up by the patronage of the royal families. Other schools were established in the bungalows of the Parsis and the noblemen, buildings that were large enough, with enough number of rooms, to start a school in. A conversation with HH Manvendrasinh Gohil, the Prince of Rajpipla, revealed how Rajpipla is home to the only school in the world with attached toilets, since the bedrooms of the erstwhile bungalows were large enough to serve as classrooms.
Rajpipla attracts students from all over the region, especially from Shakbada and Dediyapada. These students stay in the countless student hostels that have mushroomed around town. Apart from student hostels one can find the streetlights and compound walls bearing posters of home tuition classes ‘FOR ALL SUBJECTS, CLASS I to XII’, which the teachers run from their homes after school hours. Students throng the Old Station Road before and after school. As a result of spurts of activity on the Old Station Roads, sweet and farsan shops and street vendors have adjusted their timing according to the schools of the neighborhood..
The schoolteachers take pride while elaborating the array of colleges that allow students to pursue a career in physical education and training to a bachelor’s degree in arts and science, as well as vocational and agricultural training at specialized institutions. The Vadia Palace and its surrounding gardens were converted into organic farms where certain region specific medicinal plants are cultivated. The headmaster describes, “One of the three premier institutions in the country for forestry education is located here in Rajpipla at the Vadia Palace. Apart from that, another first is the institute for physical education in Gujarat.” Since the requirement for teachers in the town is so high, one can sometimes find a bus of teachers dressed in uniform like saris returning from teachers’ school, where they undergo training to teach. 50
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Educational institutions seem have become the face of the town for the neighboring villages and the region. Their effect has been as strong on the demographics of the town, which is now inhabited mostly by youth. Not only do these educational institutions form an important part of the program of the town, they also act as catalysts for other functions to evolve around them, such as student hostels, tuition classes, cheap and affordable eateries and farsan vendors.
Interpretations from the Outside: The orientations of the media, the tourists and Bhojpuri Cinema seemed to coincide and the representation of the landscape in the narratives seemed to singularize and specialize Rajpipla from its context. The narrative of Bhojpuri Cinema in Rajpipla was constructed through first hand observation in the field of a Bhojpuri film being shot at the Rajwant Palace Resort. The Royal Museum also offers a glance of the history of the Rajwant Palace and the town as a popular filming location for the last 3 decades. Since the three ‘sub-agencies’ are responsible for representing Rajpipla’s landscape to the ‘outside’ world large amounts of data were found on the Internet and in online newspaper articles.
Bhojpuri Chronicles The town of Rajpipla, in the past decade, has gained popularity for unconventional reasons. The most striking development at Rajpipla has been its growth as a prime filming location for mainstream Bhojpuri Cinema along with Gujarati Television and a few Bollywood Chartbusters. This has put a small, run of the mill princely state on the ambitious road to Mumbai, the dream city of Indian Cinema and urban life: a city that has been sought after by many, the image that an aspiring Gujarati carries with himself or herself.
The Bhojpuri Cinema seems to have found solace in Rajpipla after it faced a tough time establishing itself in Mumbai due to regionalist tendencies in the state. It has been 20 years now that the celluloid 51
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Figure 13: Montage showing Bhojpuri Films being shot at the Rajwant Palace Resort
shifted focus to this small town and has never looked back. Why would it? Rajpipla offers an array of palaces, especially the Rajwant Palace, better known as the Rajwant Palace ‘Resort’. Surrounded by hills, lush green forests (in the monsoons of course) and a large dam that forms the prefect backdrop for shootings. The erstwhile palace, which is now a resort, offers great deals for the entire filming crew, large suites for the director and actors, smaller rooms for everyone else.
Apart from these benefits, the cinema has grown its roots into the daily lives of the town-dwellers. Through my interviews I came across people who would wait for the news of a crew arriving. For them it is an easy buck playing light boys and crowd, along with other small chores that the crew requires them to do. They look at the Rajwant palace Resort as the future of their town, as a source of income and as a place of opportunity. The cinematographers on the other hand enjoy the convenience of trained personnel already being present at the shooting locations; it saves them the time, money and effort.
The town-dwellers are also proud of this intervention into their underplayed town. It is one of those few things that are able to cut across the tensions of the government, tribals, royalty and the police. Even though the numbers are not verified, I have been told that there have been at least 600 films and television serials shot at the various locations in and around Rajpipla. The Rajwant Palace Museum also 52
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proudly displays photographs of Dilip Kumar and Saira Banu among many others.
The Bhojpuri and Gujarati Cinema seem to have appropriated a disintegrating symbol of the past into a symbol of the glamor and opportunity. The Palace, which the Royalty once considered a liability, is the face of the town to the outside world. The codes of a disintegrating royal heritage and a nostalgic and glorious past seem to have transformed into the codes of a prospective future. The moment one enquires about the ‘things’ to see at Rajpipla the fingers pointed in two directions, towards the Harsiddhi Mata Temple and the Rajwant Palace Resort. Even though the Palace Resort is still home to the Royal Family, that fact is rarely acknowledged.
Heir to the Throne The Royal family in fact has gained its own share of popularity through HH Manvendrasinh Gohil. The Prince of Rajpipla, who was invited to the Oprah Winfrey Show and TED Talks for being the first heir of a royal lineage to openly declare his homosexuality, has become the icon of the Royal Family. The media, at national and international levels, has extensively covered his struggle for acceptance in the royal family as well as his work in the field of HIV/AIDS and gay and lesbian rights in the country.
This may be read as a point of departure for the Royal Family from being enamored by a European way of life and trying to recreate it as a small insulated bubble in this small town to becoming an active actor in the processes of social and cultural change. The prince has also established a community-based organization that works towards spreading awareness amongst lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community.
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The print and broadcasting media, at many levels, is responsible for the ‘image’ of Rajpipla that is projected to the ‘outside’ world, the prince’s homosexuality, Bhojpuri Cinema, the myth of Harsiddhi Mata, the myth of the Gujarat Chief Ministers losing their seat of power, the administrative headquarters of one of the most disputed infrastructure projects of the country are all parallel faces of the town.
A Tribal Perspective: Usurped land and ousting authority The interviews conducted with the tribals were conducted at various locations such as their farmland, villages, at the pandals and at their houses. The Gujarati they spoke was extremely accented and within themselves they conversed in their own language. With the help of the district magistrate, who was conversant in both the languages, the interviews and conversations could be transcribed.
Riding on a Paper Horse The town of Rajpipla echoes with tribal drumming a few days before poonam (full moon night) every month. There is not a place in the town where the tribals, primarily the Vasavas and the Tadvis, restrain from declaring their presence to the town-dwellers through their incessant drumming and ritual dancing, but it is the Old Station Road that seems to have become the ritual ground for this performance. They walk across the landscape from their villages, which are sometimes a few hundred kilometers away, towards the sacred hill where Bhadarva Dev, the chief god of the Bhils’, resides.
Dressed in bright clothing, turban and sunglasses they carry little or no belongings with them but their drums and the jvara (the sapling of the barley plant). One of the members of the group, usually the one who had taken a vow or whose wishes have been fulfilled, holds a paper horse around himself, as though riding upon it. The armature of the horse is made of bamboo strips, tied together with thread and the framework is covered with thin colorful paper on a white background. The imagined 54
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horseman carries with him an iron sword with a lemon squeezed through its tip in one hand and a whip in the other. The paper horse is symbolic of the battle in which Bhadarva Dev fought even after he was beheaded to protect the cows of his land against the Sindhis, Pathans and Mughals. The horseman offers the horse to the temple of Bhadarva Dev at the end of his journey. Figure 13: The myth of Bhathiji Maharaj and the ritual pilgrimage and folk fair at Dada nu Dungar
The women assume a state of trance, and dance with their heads hanging low and in repetitive, seemingly out of control, movements. The other members of the group play the drums and dance alongside the horseman. Keeping up with the times the pilgrims have diversified from traditional drums to electronic bands and blaring sound systems to add enthusiasm to the journey. The Bhuvas play with sharp swords, chains and knives leaves the spectators astonished. Their dance is particular with two steps forward and one step backward, and dancing they travel from their native villages to the temple of Bhadarva Dev, crossing Rajpipla on their way. In the larger groups some are also costumed in characters of the Ramayana.
The tribals move in groups of five to twenty, consisting of little children to middle aged, seldom old, men and women. They start from their villages 55
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and collect people en route. People from Rajpipla and neighboring towns organize pandals for the pilgrims, where they are served rice, pulses and lapi, a traditional Gujarati sweet made from sugar, milk and wheat. The pandals serve as places of rest for the Bhils who come travelling from various locations across the tribal belt in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra.
Tribal Folk Fair The Karthik Poonam Folk Fair, well known in the tribal regions is held at the mountain of Bhadarva Dev in the Karthik month of the Hindu calendar and attracts millions of adivasi pilgrims.
The ritual is that on the day of Karthik Sud Aatham (eighth day of Karthik month according to the Hindu calendar), the villagers plant the seeds of barley (jvara) in an earthen pot in the name of Bhathiji Maharaj Bhadarva Dev. From this day onwards they offer daily prayers to the jav-jvara (barley sapling), which marks the beginning of their pilgrimage. On the day of Karthik Poonam (full moon day of the month of Karthik month of the Hindu calendar) the pilgrims start walking towards the temple with the jav-jvara (barley saplings). On their way to the temple the groups of pilgrims pass through villages in an ecstatic state of trance, dancing with joy and bewildering the onlookers.
On the dawn of Karthik Sud Chaudas (the fourteenth day of Karthik month) the folk fair starts taking shape at the base of mountain. Hoards of pilgrims pour in through the day and by evening the fair is packed with adivasis. The crowd inches forward towards the temple in an atmosphere of untiring drumming and dancing passing along rows of roadside vendors selling the much needed refreshments. Even as the sun goes down on the night of Karthik Chaudas, the pilgrims continue their determined walk towards the temple oblivious to the time of the day. 56
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As the jeeps, tempos and chhakdas (indigenous three wheeled tempos) continue to bring in adivasis from far off villages, adivasis witness the much-awaited sunrise on the holy day of Karthik Chaudas, for which they had been preparing for fortnights. The trucks and jeeps are rendered invisible amidst the crowd of people who throng the landscape in the fair’s vibrancy. They pay their darshan (homage) to Bhathiji Dada and continue with their festive celebration. The celebrations involve the sacrifice of chickens and goats followed by a feast accompanied with locally brewed liquor from the fruit of the Mahuda tree.
Bhadarva Dev nu Dungar The mountain of Bhadarva Dev, where the Karthik Poonam Fair is held, is popularly known as ‘Dada nu dungar’. Located in the Narmada district on State Highway 5 on the Devaliya-Rajpipla Road, the mountain connects Tilakwada and Nandod talukas. Bhathiji Dada, known amongst the tribals as just ‘Dada’, is represented in the form of stone idols, which according to the villagers is a microcosm of the mountain. Generation after generation, Bhathiji Dada’s stones are worshipped along with idols of the king cobra.
The sacred mountain is primarily made up of red soil and in part red rock that imparts a distinct red color to it, which makes it stand out among the rest of the landscape. In earlier times the mountain was bare with only red rock and soil, but due to the intensive efforts towards afforestation through drip irrigation, the mountain’s vegetation seems to have been revived.
A local narrative elaborates how one could always find the currency of the neighboring states at the mountain. People in need of money felt free to borrow money from the temple promising to return it in the New Year upon the occurrence of a good harvest. This practice went on for generations to come, people borrowed money returned their dues in time. 57
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As the word spread in the region, a non-believer borrowed money from the temple and at the time of repayment moulded fake currency made of clay and returned it to the temple. As people came to know of the story, the incidents of foul play swelled in the region. This angered Bhathiji Dada who made all the currency vanish from the mountain and inexplicably the incidents and fears of snakebites increased.
It is said that as time passed the forests were destroyed and there came a day when Dada nu dungar became bare. The stones representative of the faith that were protected by the dense cover of trees were exposed and all that was left on the mountain were wild grasses. Even the poisonous roots that were used to make herbal medicines were wiped off from the mountain. Herdsmen came to feed their animals from the town of Bhadarva in the east and from Koyari gam (village) in the west. For centuries to come Bhathiji’s faith in the people could not be revived. Dada stayed on the mountain through torrential rain, unbearable heat and cold.
Though, at the moment, the mountain is devoid of natural vegetation, it is said that the mountain was lush green and there were forests from here to Surpaneshwar. Saints are said to have inhabited the forests in the past to practice asceticism amidst the wildlife of the dense forests. From the Bhadarva Dev Mountain, one can see towards the south the caves where saints and ascetics performed tapas. People from surroundings areas come to this religious spot to worship Bhathiji Dada where they offered the ascetics and the pilgrim offerings in the form of fruits of the forests in the name of Bhathiji Dada.
Myth of the Beheaded God During conversation with the tribals the stories of the paper horse unfolded into the life of Bhadarva Dev, who they consider as their ‘kuldev’ (kul- native, dev¬- god). The myth is as follows: 58
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Patan’s devotee Survir Sant Jaymal Rathod’s daughter NiralBai was married to Chittor’s RanaKumbha. It is believed that Niral Bai brought to life Rana Kumbha’s second queen through her devotion. In the 1600’s in Fagvel of the same lineage as the well-known Sant Jaymal Rathod, Kshatriya Rathod Takhatsangji was garasdar (landlord of the land gifted by the king). He married Akkal Bai, a native of Chikdol. Akkal Bai and Takhatsangji used to visit Pavagadh to worship their kuldevi Mahakali. During Navratri and on every poonam they would visit Dakor and Pavagadh with their son Hathiji, daughter Sonalba and Banjiba. Sonalba were married in Patan and Banjiba in Kapadvanj.
Takhatsangji, as per his routine, went to Pavagadh on durgashtami during Navratri to pay obeisance to his kuldevi. As Akkal Bai spread the cloth in front of the goddess’ idol, the coconut that Takhatsangji had offered to the goddess came rolling into her lap. This was a sign of the goddess’ faith in Akkal Bai’s devotion that left the onlookers awe struck. From this day on they started performing prayers in Fagvel. Takhatsangji was a prosperous man and cared much for the cows of his land.
At the dawn of Kartik Sud Ekam, while performing the coconut prayers in complete devotion, Akkal Bai gave birth to a hallowed son. The people of Fagvel and of the 42 surrounding villages were overjoyed and celebrated by playing drums and shahnai (trumpet), and singing bhakti songs. Takhatsangji held court in his darbar where well-wishers celebrated the birth of the child with opium and datura, and gifts for the kunwar (prince). Return gifts, sweets along with alms as compliments were distributed amongst the well-wishers who had come to court.
During the naming ceremony, the jyotish (soothsayer) saw the kumkum (vermillion powder) spread itself on the kundli (horoscope) of the kunwar. The awestruck jyotish suggested that this boy was devanshi (demigod) and in accordance with his moon sign, Dhan Rashi, the kunwar was named Bhathiji. 59
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At the tender age of five, Bhathiji started accompanying the village children in herding their cows for grazing. While the cattle grazed the children played under the coolth of the neem (margosa) trees. One afternoon, while engrossed in play, the children saw a big king cobra with open fangs outside its nest. Petrified at this sight of the venomous being they started running helter-skelter in fear.
Bhatiji, unlike the rest of the children, was amazed at the sight of this fanged creature and stared at the cobra in amazement. Without fear or panic he gazed at the snake till they saw each other eye to eye. At this moment Bhathiji ordered the snake to return to his place. The cobra retracted its fangs and returned to its nest. The children, on their safe return to the village, narrated the incident to Akkal Bai.
Bhatiji started schooling in the village school. By the age of twelve he was an able horseman and a skilled archer. He also trained in spear and sword fighting. The stories of his skilled horse riding and spear throw spread to the 42 villages around Fagvel. Apart from training to be a fine fighter he devoted the rest of his time in the service and care for the cattle of the village.
Bhathiji’s developed a strong build, glowing face and gleaming wide eyes. The people of the village had little reason to deny him the title of a devanshi (demigod).
Once while wandering on his horse in the forests he came across a large king cobra and mongoose engaged in a raging fight. In no time he realized that the mongoose would slay the cobra with its shrewd agility and in order to protect the cobra he let his arrow loose on the mongoose. The cobra, saved from the mongoose’s attack, gazed at Bhathiji, bestowed blessings silently and returned to its place. Bhathiji started feeding the cobra milk every day. The cobra would come, drink and the milk and return to its nest. 60
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In this manner Bhathiji continued to achieve magnificent feats till the time he turned 18 years old.
On the auspicious occasion of his 18th birthday Bhathiji’s father Takhatsang Bapu invited the garasdars (landlords) and darbars (courtmen) from the neighboring villages. Darbar Bhupatsing from Dudhatal was also present at the venue. He fixed the alliance of his daughter Kunwarba with Bhatiji the moment he saw him. On Bhupatsing’s return to his abode he consulted the rest of his family who were all in agreement with him. Shankar Barot was sent to Fagvel for the vevishal (betrothal) ceremony.
Takhatsang’s jyotish (soothsayer/astrologer) was surprised at the sight of the bride’s kundli (horoscope). She too had kumkum smeared on her kundli, and at this auspicious sight he urged the family to fix the wedding date as vaishak sud saatam (the seventh day of the month of vaishak). Takhatsing distributed gordhana (sweets made of grain and jaggery) among his court men, family and all present. The royal priest initiated the wedding ceremony by applying vermilion powder to Bhathiji’s forehead and blessed him. The women celebrated in song as the wedding procession was welcomed in Dhudatal.
They concluded the welcoming ceremony within the auspicious time. As the bride and groom were exchanging their wedding garlands after finishing their third round around the sacred fire Rayko Rabari came running towards the mandap (wedding pavilion) and started wailing in front of Takhatsang Bapu. Consoling him Bapu enquired about his state of despair.
Rayko informed Bapu that the Sindhis, Pathans and Mughals of Antarsuba and Kapadvanj villages were waiting for a suitable time to launch an attack on Fagvel. Since all the courtiers were at the wedding the Sindhis, Pathans and the Mughals had made way with a large herd 61
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of cows from their village. Grieving, Rayka delivered this news adding that they were helpless in front of their force and could not withstand their attack.
There was panic at the wedding venue. Bhathiji tore the wedding garland and immediately mounted a horse and sped to fight the attackers and retrieve the cattle. In the pitch-dark night he moved forward in the forest following their tracks till he came face to face with the attackers. Bhathiji single handedly faced a number of opponents and many lost their lives in the skirmish. Finding the opportunity a Sindhi slyly attacked and beheaded Bhathiji. Miraculously, hundreds of cobras emerged at the place of battle and attacked Bhathiji’s enemies with their venom.
The cobras spread their hoods to protect Bhathiji’s fallen head. But Bhathiji’s headless body continued fighting the enemies for hours to come. His mother and Kankuba arrived at the scene and successfully urged his body to calm down. Kankuba took Bhathiji’s body and head in her lap and sat on the funeral pyre. A Devi (divine aura) entered her body and ordered her that whenever a cobra should bite someone he shall be cured of the cobra’s poison by praying and taking vows in the memory of Bhathiji Dada. Stating this the divine aura became silent and the holy bodies of Bhathiji and Kankuba disintegrated into panch bhut (the five elements) by the fire of the funeral pyre.
Forfeiting Rajpipla to the Rajputs The tribals equivocally describe how the land, what is now known as Rajpipla, was usurped from the tribal ruler Bhil Raja by the Rajput rulers. According to one of the narratives Bhil Raja was the administrator of this land, who sat on the banks of the Karjan under the Peepal tree to hold court. They elaborate that there was no one ruler of the tribal communities of the region who united the region as a territory, rather Bhil Raja was known for imparting justice and resolving disputes amongst 62
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the tribals. From the narrative of the Bhil Raja holding court under the peepal trees, they say, Rajpipla earned its name.
Ritual Bonding with Nature The tribals settled in villages seem to garner a stronger and more intimate bond with the landscape. This is described in their rituals relating to the harvest of their fields. In a ritual to mark the harvest season, they worship the land and before every harvest they perform a prayer and sacrifice a goat or a chicken, along with a portion of their harvest, in order to please the land goddess Maghan Devi. They consume their produce only after the goddess has been served. They keep track of the wild vegetables growing in the forests and in the month of monsoon, fast till the forest produce is ripe and ready to eat. Then they make an offering of their harvest to Vaghan Dev, similar to the ritual for Maghan Devi.
In each tract of farmland one can find the sacred stone, this stone is worshipped at the beginning and end of each day. The sacrifices, of chicken and goat, are also made around the stone. The stone seems to be symbolic of the dungar (mountain). The tribal villages practice aakashi kheti (kheti-agriculture that depends upon the aakash-sky). Thus, most of the farming in these villages is dependent on monsoon and traditionally they do not have an irrigation system for farming. Even though post-independence large infrastructure projects have focused on developing an irrigation system in the region, such as the Sardar Sarovar Project on the Narmada River and the Karjan Dam on Karjan River, the agricultural practices in the tribal belt are still grounded firmly in the annual cycle of the monsoons.
Institutions of Opportunity and Oppression The tribals at the same time look at the town as a place for opportunity, economic, social and political. Families from smaller villages depend upon the town for selling yields of the forests, from firewood to medicinal herbs, bee’s wax to wild vegetables and animal products. They come to 63
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town to sell what they gather from the forests and with the money they earn buy what they need from the town market, clothes, grains, utensils, oil etc. They seem to see the town as a place of exchange, where the market becomes their interface with the town.
Families from the more well to do tribal villages send their children to Rajpipla for education. Rajpipla has established itself as an education town, where thousands of students from the neighboring villages, and far off, come to obtain an education. The aim of many is to become government officers. They seem to see a government job as a symbol of status and having monetary and social security. This trend is further fuelled by the reservation in government positions for SC/ST (Scheduled Caste/ Scheduled Tribe) candidates, who are in turn posted in the same region, more so for junior positions in the hierarchy.
This throws light on the two contrasting positions that the tribals take with respect to the region’s governing authorities. Through Dr. Ganesh Devy’s work on the tribals in this region one can derive that the tribals do not easily accept the moral and behavioral codes and frameworks prescribed by governing bodies. These institutional frameworks also impose systems of legalities and social operations that are in conflict with the tribal laws and norms, which a tribal holds first and foremost. Thus, the tribals are always subverting authority and are therefore looked upon as uncivilized and menacing.
This view of the tribals can be traced back to the colonial times when the British classified anyone opposing their rule as a Criminal Tribe. The Bhils had fought the British rule on the banks of the Narmada and were subsequently penalized under section 110 of the Indian Penal Code (Devy, 2006). Under the Criminal Tribes act, which later became the Habitual Offender’s Act, the tribals were classified as ‘born’ criminals. Thus, they roamed in their own land in fear of the authorities, earlier the colonial and then the government. Even though the tribes are now 64
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legally described as Denotified and Nomadic Tribes, the attitude of the authorities in matters of justice, and the overall outlook towards the Tribals is yet to transform (Devy, 2006). On the other hand, the tribals in villages that are closer to town or have developed into larger agglomerations of tribal communities aspire to become part of the governing bodies themselves in search of security. The government employees who are appointed in the reserved category for ST are well connected in the town and the villages. A large portion of the tribals is also employed in the town as daily wage laborers and as domestic help.
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66
ANALYSIS DECODING THE LANDSCAPE NARRATIVES
Landscapes are a latent part of everyday conversation. The landscape surfaces as the backdrop or the setting, where the events of the narrative take place. The landscape, as read and narrated by its inhabitants, is revealed through the act of narration. The occupation of space, the intent and manner of occupation, is not always guided by the deep structure, the biases, the unconscious. Most of our daily life actions are guided by day-to-day needs and immediate goals. Yet, they correlate to the deep structures and the system of feelings that surround the landscape.
Culling out the Oppositions The process of identifying the oppositions in a seemingly insignificant conversation began with identifying motifs that govern the orientation of the conversation and the speaker. The motifs, which are disclosed is the form of nuances such biases, opinions and paradigmatic choice of words as well as the overall orientation of the narrative and its differences from other narratives. These motifs are implicit in the narration. For example, the set of oppositions of dominance and submission in the myth of Harsiddhi Mata divulge the relationship of the Royalty with respect to the goddess, which spatially brings out the oppositions of inside and outside with respect to the town, the temple, the forest and the palace. Similarly the myth of Bhadarva Dev of the tribals reveals the oppositions of insider and outsider through which the tribal communities view outsiders or foreign figures of authority. The difference is evident between the tribal narration of how they forfeited Rajpipla to the fraudulent means of the Rajputs and the Royal narration that describes how the tribal king Bhil Raja fought alongside the Royals against the Mughals and most gladly acceded control of the land to them. The oppositions of dominance and submission are strengthened by the events in the myth when the Mughals, Sindhis and Pathans invade the tribal territories.
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Using a semiotic lens, in this manner, the thesis explores the structures that emerge in conversations and actions that shape the narrator’s understanding of the landscape. The list of binary oppositions is not exhaustive, which therefore leaves scope for a detailed study with more resources at the researchers’ disposal, yet is a modest attempt at developing a method to study the landscape through narratives. This analysis keeps the built environment in peripheral focus with respect to the culture and politics of the landscape.
The Contradictions in the Rajwant Palace Resort The below semiotic square displays the binary oppositions that govern the functioning of the Rajwant Palace Resort. The royal family is the owner of the palace, yet is a non-user. The primary user of the palace is the Bhojpuri Film Industry, and thus the palace has become functionally and symbolically a palace resort. The relationship of contrariety, which is of the owner and the user, subverts the relationship of complementarity of the owner and the non-user. Owner [Royal Family]
User [Bhojpuri Film Industry]
Non-User [Royal Family]
Non-Owner [Town Dwellers]
Relation of Contrariety Relation of Contradiction Relation of Complementarity
Thus, we can say that the Rajwant Palace Resort, a prominent feature of the built environment at Rajpipla, is governed by, in its occupation, by an outside agency, the Bhojpuri Cinema rather than its symbolic owner, the royal family. This also highlights the defunct status of the royalty in concerns of their own property, which may be considered as a microcosm of the condition of the landscape as a whole. 68
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On the other hand, the non-owners of the palace, the people of Rajpipla are in relationship of complementarity with the users, the Bhojpuri Film Industry. The industry has created an opportunity for seasonal employment at the palace by making it the central filming location. Thus, the non-owners are extending governance over the palace as a symbolic landscape feature through its occupation.
White Elephants The oppositions in the two squares seem to be closely. The Rajwant Palace Resort, like other palatial structures owned by the royalty, had become an economic liability for the blue blooded when the Princely State of Rajpipla joined the Republic of India and had to hand over all state owned property to the Republic. The private properties of the royal family became economic liabilities for its members, as they did not have Heritage Asset (for the town dwellers and outsiders)
Economic Liability (for the royal family)
Non-asset (for the tribals)
Non-liability (for the town dwellers)
an adequate source of income that would enable them to maintain these white elephants. Some of these structures were leased or sold to the government and converted into high schools, colleges and other public structures such as the Huzoor Office. The family retained the Rajwant Palace, as an icon of the royal lineage and Rajput rule. It was converted to a resort in order to make it financially feasible to retain the palace as part of family heritage.
The people of the town continue to appreciate their architectural heritage as a symbol of the Rajput rule and British influence. Similarly the Rajwant Palace is a favorite location for the filming of Bhojpuri Cinema. Television shows such as Travel and Living further reinforce the grandeur of the 69
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palace and projects it as a heritage asset of the town. Certainly for those who are not involved in the maintenance of the structure, the Rajwant Palace Resort becomes an iconic building of Rajpipla rather than an economic liability.
For the tribals on the other hand, this is neither as asset nor a liability. They do not consider the Rajput rule, nor any of the monumental buildings built by the Rajputs as representative of their culture or heritage. On the whole, the royalty and the people of the town as well as visitors view the built heritage of the state as a liability and asset respectively. The tribals on the other hand are relatively unaware and oblivious towards the structures built by the royalty in the town. Neither the people of the town, nor the media, Bhojpuri Cinema or tourists, the actual users of the Rajwant Palace Resort, feel an economic liability towards the Palace.
Play of Authority in the Landscape The government, through the occupation of the prominent buildings of the town, has asserted control over the landscape. These buildings earlier housed the public functions of the state while the Rajputs were in power. The royalty gave in to the government at the time of independence and has been disenfranchised ever since. Already coded with an image of power, control and authority, since the time of the Rajputs and later the British Raj, the state government converted these structures of authority into the administrative offices, structures that would establish a certain position of assertion over the people of the state. Assertion (Government of Gujarat- Structures displaying Authority)
Rejection (Bhils- Disregard for Structure of Authority)
Non-rejection (People of the townAdapting to changes in the occupation of space)
Non-assertion (Rajput GohilsDisenfranchised by the Government of India)
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The Government of India has inherited traditions of assertions over indigenous tribal communities from the British Raj. The tribals, according to a popular narrative, were tricked by the Rajputs and displaced from their territory. The tribals have rejected the authority of the Rajputs, the British and the Government of India. They abide the laws laid down by the community and their ancestors and have rejected all systems of law and order imposed on them from the ‘outside’. So much so that disputed matters of the tribals are kept from going to court, and are sorted out by the district magistrate as far as possible. They refuse to recognize the assertion of authority from any ‘outside’ agency. This trend of rejection can also be seen in the patterns of irrigation in the fields. The fields ploughed by the town dwellers depend on the irrigation system set up by the state government, the tribals on the other hand choose to rely on aakashi kheti, depending completely on the monsoon rain and being independent of the infrastructure projects of the Karjan Dam and Sardar Sarovar Dam that dominate the landscape. Large infrastructure projects seem to be other means of asserting control over the landscape. Rajpipla was made into the headquarters of the Narmada district that is home to the much-disputed Narmada Dam (Sardar Sarovar Project). The agencies in the landscape come together in this square that displays their positions with respect to each other. The goddess, through her curse on the figures of authority in the landscape, dominates the landscape in the minds of the people. The town-dwellers have created Dominance (Goddess, Bhojpuri Cinema)
Submission (Royalty, Government)
Non-Dominance (Town-Dwellers- Adaptive reuse of Available Public Spaces)
Non-Submission (Bhils)
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the myth of the goddess, as their way of dominating the landscape since through their actions they occupy a non-dominating position in the landscape. The other agency that dominates the landscape of Rajpipla is the Bhojpuri film industry. The film industry is an agency that captures the imaginations and aspirations of the people.
The government and the royalty have been at the submissive end of the spectrum with respect to the dominating presence of the female goddess and the Bhojpuri film industry. The tribal communities on the other hand have played and continue to play a no-submissive part in the landscape.
The below square outlines and categorizes the seven main actors who shape/modify the landscape. Authority in the landscape can be seen as directly reflecting in the occupation of the built environment. As described Authority (Government, Religious & Regulatory Institutions)
Follower (Town Dwellers)
Non-Follower (Tribals, Bhojpuri Cinema)
Non-Authority (Royalty)
in the earlier oppositions, the governmental, religious and regulatory institutions occupy the most significant of structures of the town, exhibiting power and authority over the landscape. They establish their authoritarian position with respect to the local town dwellers of Rajpipla, while the ‘outsiders’ i.e. the Bhojpuri Cinema and the Tribals play the role of non-followers by occupying the two most symbolic spaces of the town, the Rajwant Palace and the Old Station Road respectively. The royalty plays the role of a limp actor in the landscape, striving to keep their image alive yet without any real control over the landscape.
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Authority in the Myths The tribal communities’ myth of Bhadarva Dev reveals their reading of figures of authority and power. The tribals are submissive to natural phenomena such as floods, drought and epidemics. Their ritual pilgrimage to the mountain of Bhadarva Dev signifies the graciousness of nature to have been kind enough to have yielded a good harvest and kept the evils away from their villages. Before they consume any of their harvest, they offer a portion to the field gods and also sacrifice goats and chicken to please them. The tribals are however as unyielding to foreign authority as they are submissive to nature. The myth describes their god, Bhadarva Dev, as having fought the Pathans, Sindhis and the Mughals even after being beheaded. The British, Rajputs and the government of India seem to have had similar experiences while they tried to establish control over the tribals. The myth also includes motifs Submission (To Natural Phenomena)
Dominance (In the realm of the Mythsending the cobra to its nest)
Non-Submission (To externally imposed authority)
Non-Dominance (Trickster)
that suggest that the external figures of authority have attempted to establish control over the land through fraudulent and corrupt means. From the occupation of their land by the Rajputs, who tricked Bhil Raja into surrendering his land to them, to the British who usurped powers from the tribals by declaring them as criminal tribes under the Habitual Offenders’ Act, the tribals have always lost control over their land through duplicitous means.
Their submission to nature is also evident in their worship of Bhadarva Dev whose idol is a stone, a microcosm of the mountain where he is believed to reside. The myth also contains motifs of harmony with nature, which is displayed through the symbiotic relationship of Bhathiji 73
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and the King Cobra. They pay their homage to nature through rituals and sacrifices at regular intervals, marked by important dates in the lunar calendar. The motif of maintaining balance in the nature also appears in the myth when Bhathiji saves the cobra from the clinches of the mongoose. The final motif in the narrative is the disintegration of Bhathiji’s body into the five elements of existence, earth, water, wind, fire and ether.
The tribals read the city in a dialectic manner, their opinion split in their imaginations and in reality. They prefer to send their children to the town schools, go there to sell products from the forests and their farms, go to town to purchase daily household goods and clothes yet in their imagination the town exists in the territory of the authorities. It represents the Rajputs, the British and the Government of the state. It represent a trickster narrative that comes from their past experiences and collective history.
Whose Land is it anyway? The Bhils consider themselves as the original inhabitants of the landscape. Their myths and the legends contain motifs of land and power being usurped from them by ‘outsiders’. The myths suggest that the control of their land was taken over through trickery and fraud. The ‘outsiders’ who have come to take control of the landscape have always targeted the most prominent features of the landscape. The Rajputs earlier occupied the hill where the Karjan Dam is located at present. This location was surrounded by water bodies on three sides and with the Satpura mountain ranges on the other. They moved their capital from Junaraj to Rajpipla, during the British Raj, and built enormous palaces at higher ground little outside town in a so-called Italian style. The government as described earlier took possession of these structures and established their stronghold over the landscape post the country’s independence. The Bhojpuri Cinema is now one of the most active 74
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agencies that has taken control over the Rajwant Palace and governs the landscape narrative.
Outsider (Sindhis, Pathans, Mughals)
Insider (Bhils)
Non-Outsider (Town dwellers at Rajpipla)
Non-Insider (Town dwellers at Rajpipla)
Thus, the insider/outsider contradiction plays up repeatedly in the landscape narrative. The town-dwellers have always played a subdued role in the landscape. Their history of inhabitation in the landscape holds no mention in the popular landscape narratives of the region, nor does it mention a migration to this land. Thus the town-dwellers hold both ambiguous positions of non-insiders and non-outsiders in the landscape. Dominance (Government and Religious Institutions- of Law and Order, Civilian Control and Correctional Facilities, Education, Healthcare, Infrastructure Projects)
Submission (Royalty- Inert Bungalows, Dilapidated Structures, Destroyed or Transformed Properties)
Non-submission (Bhils- Self Governance, Non-recognition of Structures of Authority)
Non-dominance (Town-Dwellers- Adaptive reuse of Available Public Spaces)
The above semiotic square brings to surface the role of actors in the landscape that is reflected in the built environment. The Government and Religion seem to dominate the landscape. The religious discourse includes three major institutions and rituals: 1.
The Harsiddhi Mata Temple that is located in the centre of the
town and is one of the 56 shakti peeths in the country. It attracts many pilgrims every year and has also become one of the dominant images of 75
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the town. In fact the influence of the goddess seems to be so strong that it has given rise to a political myth. Every chief minister of Gujarat is said to have lost the elections after holding a rally in the town, a displeased goddess is believed to be the reason behind these electoral defeats. 2.
The Narmada River is the other religious institution that has a
stronghold over the landscape. Millions of pilgrims and devotees carry out the Narmada Parikrama every year. The Karjan is a tributary to the Narmada and needs to be crossed in order to continue with the Parikrama, the most accessible bridge across the Karjan is at Rajpipla and therefore the town becomes host to the innumerable pilgrims on the Parikrama. 3.
Yet another religious institution and ritual that dominates the
landscape is the tribal pilgrimage to the mountain of Bhadarva Dev. Unlike the other two religious institutions described above, the ritual pilgrimage of the tribals is not one that dominates the landscape, rather it opposes the dominance of the popular religious and other institutions in the landscape. The tribal pilgrimage declares its presence through loud drumming and vigorous dancing as it passes through the town. The pilgrimage clearly defines the non-tribals as the ‘other’ who become inert onlookers and ‘can-not’ become active participants. Thus, it declares the solidity of their beliefs and rituals at the same time excludes the ‘outsiders’.
The other institutions such as the Government High School, Arts and Science College, the Municipal Hospital, the Municipal Office, Huzoor Office, District Courts and Forestry Offices dot the landscape of Rajpipla. The Royalty plays a role of submission in the landscape, submitting to positions of authority since the time of the Raj and to the Government post-independence.
The town-dwellers play the subtlest role in the landscape, a role of non-dominance. They have appropriated public spaces such as the Lal Tower, the Karjan Nadi no Ovaro and the Band Stand seamlessly, 76
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integrating these spaces of grandeur into the everyday life of the town. The Band Stand has been converted into a well-maintained public garden accompanied by the khaugali (street food) that comes to life at dusk. The ovaro is host to a plethora of activities and is occupied by the most varied groups of people from fishermen, washerwomen, farmers, chattering housewives, noisy children, loafers and a few vendors. It also doubles up as a space for Muslim wedding rituals as well as a gateway to the river for the pilgrims who stop over to pay obeisance to the river, ascribing it with the role of mother nature/earth. Outlook Towards the Built Environment The built environment in Rajpipla is constantly undergoing transformation through the change in its usage. These patterns of change directly reflect back upon the agencies that are operational in the landscape, their roles in the landscape as transformers and preservers. The ‘outside agencies’ such as the government and the Bhojpuri Cinema are the most active in transforming the image of the structures of the royalty and inscribing them with new meaning. The Royal Family on the other hand is making attempts to restore the old buildings, not only in terms of their physical condition but also in terms of the high status that they enjoyed during the days of the Raj. Transformation (Bhojpuri Cinema, Institutions of Regulation)
Preservation (Royalty)
Non-preservation (Town Dwellers)
Non-transformation (Bhils)
Journeys in the Landscape The myth of the goddess’ journey through the landscape brings out the undercurrents governing the structures of feelings in the landscape. The primary discourse of the Harsiddhi Mata narrative is her journey through the landscape to the town of Rajpipla. The goddess is at the position of
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Cyclic/Continuous (Movement of Goddess between Miyaninagar & Ujjain)
Acyclic/Discontinuous (Abrupt end of journey outside Rajpipla)
Non-Continuous (Journey of Goddess)
Non-Discontinuous (Journey of Royalty to Temple)
rest at her abode at the top of the hill at Miyaninagar. The first movement of the goddess is cyclic, where the goddess descends from the hill for the festival of Navratri and returns to her abode at night. The king of Miyaninagar disrupts this journey. The next movement is the goddess’ oscillation between Miyaninagar during the day and Ujjain by night. The King of Rajpipla disrupts this cyclic movement and requests the goddess to accompany him to the palace of Rajpipla. The goddess then accompanies the king with two other gods but due to a broken promise is forced to discontinue her journey towards Rajpipla. This pattern reflects the relative positions of the three kingdoms. The Royalty continues to visit the temple regularly during the festival of Navratri.
Travelling Goddess, Unmoving God The tribals and the town-dwellers are in a relation of contrariety. The tribal god Bhadarva Dev and the goddess of the town, Harsiddhi Mata, are held in a relation of contrariety. Bhadarva Dev is represented as a microcosm of the mountain, his abode is on top of a mountain at the intersection of two rivers and the tribals sacrifice domestic animals in order to please him. They make a pilgrimage every fortnight from their villages to the mountain. This ritual of the tribals signifies their position in the landscape as mobile, for food, shelter and faith with respect to nature, which is stationary. Stationary/Static (Bhadarva Dev)
Mobile (Harsiddhi Mata)
Non-stationary/Non-static (Tribals)
Non-mobile (Town dwellers/ Royalty)
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Harsiddhi Mata on the other hand occupies a temple outside the limits of the town, was brought at the request of the king from Ujjain and has been a travelling goddess ever since she left Miyaninagar. The goddess moves according to the wishes of her devotees. The devotees are settled in one place, which is their kingdom. This movement of the goddess signifies their position in the landscape as stationary, while the resources are mobile.
Rajpipla’s Mythic Context The signifiers of control are in the goddess’ domain. The three kings’ and their kingdoms featured in the narrative occupy the other three positions of the square. The king of Miyaninagar is the first to renounce the aura and control of the goddess, who makes him pay for his misdeeds. The King of Vikramaditya shares a non-conflicting relationship with the goddess, sacrificing himself, offering prayers to please the goddess and convince her to visit his kingdom. Thus, through his devotion to the goddess he is able to assert control over the all-powerful female figure. The king of Rajpipla who performs prayers and rituals to please the goddess is able to convince her to reside in his kingdom but is unable to complete the task and remains in a state of non-control over the goddess. Renounce (King of Miyaninagar)
Control (Harsiddhi Mata)
Non-renounce (King of Ujjain-Vikramaditya)
Non-control (King of Rajpipla- Virsalji)
The goddess in Miyaninagar curses the figure of authority and is servile towards the town dwellers, the fishermen. In Ujjain, there is an absence of the interests of the people and the goddess’ blessings are limited to the figure of authority, king Vikramaditya. In Rajpipla, this relationship reflects a conflict between the interests of the people and royalty where the goddess does not function in the interest of the people or the people of the town. 79
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This reflects in the relationship between figures of authority in the landscape and the goddess, be it the royalty or the chief minister of state. The authority in Rajpipla as compared to its mother state Ujjain lacks a notable figure of authority, for comparison we may consider the king Vikramaditya to the underachiever king Virsalji. The curse of the goddess against the figures of authority reflects, in a psychoanalytical sense, the lack of powerful governance or a head of state in the landscape. This fear has manifested itself as a myth of cursed chief ministers in the present day context. Blessed (The City of Ujjain/ The Kingdom of Vikramaditya/ The Ideal Kingdom)
Cursed (Palace of Rajpipla/ The Kingdom of Rajpipla)
Non-cursed (Forests-Site of the temple)
Non-blessed (Town of Rajpipla)
These oppositions divide the landscape into bounded regions. In the myth, the Kingdom of Vikramaditya, Ujjain, is projected as an ideal kingdom that is blessed by the presence of the goddess who is pleased to visit the city everyday in the evening. The city of Ujjain is established as a blessed territory in order to set a scale for the non-blessed, the non-cursed and the cursed. The Palace and the Kingdom of Rajpipla are cursed entities. The King breaks his promise to the goddess and the goddess refuses to accompany him to his palace. The goddess argues that the temple shall be built wherever she stops and thus the marking a non-cursed site for the temple, which happens to be outside the boundaries of the town. Even though the goddess argues that she does not want to reside in the royal palace and would prefer to be at the service of the town dwellers and the royalty all alike, she sets up the temple outside town limits, regarding the town as a non-blessed entity.
Spatiality in the Myths In the myth of Harsiddhi Mata the positioning of the temple plays a critical role in defining the limits of the town. The temple is located outside the, 80
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Inside (Palace)
Outside (Harsiddhi Mata Temple)
Non-Inside (Forest)
Non-Outside (Town)
yet the town is at visible distance from the temple. The palace on the other hand exists in a mutually exclusive relationship with the temple. The goddess refused to reside within the palace limits. Thus, the palace was established as the inside realm, the temple as the outside and the town as the non-outside. A tunnel was constructed as the connection between the palace and the temple to avoid the dense forests and the wildlife. Thus, the palace and the forest exist in an inside non-inside relationship. Outsider (Rajputs, British, Harsiddhi Mata, State Government, Bhojpuri Cinema)
Insider (Bhils)
Non-Outsider (Town Dwellers)
Non-Insider (Town Dwellers)
The tribals have an extremely strong notion of identity. Thus, their myth reflects the conflict between the insider, themselves, and the outsider, the foreigner. The tribals describe themselves as the natives of the land, implying that they are the ‘insiders’ i.e. they are from within the landscape. The attacks and attempts of invasion in the myth are by the ‘outsiders’, which includes the Pathans, Mughals and Sindhis, the Rajputs and the British historically and the Government of India in the present context. The town dwellers occupy an ambiguous position with respect to the tribals. They do not hold any mention in the myths and in conversations, are not described as friends or foes and have never posed a threat to tribal governance of their territories. Thus, in this 81
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square the town dwellers hold the both the positions of non-outsiders and non-insiders relative to the Pathans, Mughals and Sindhis and with the tribals respectively.
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CONCLUSIONS
This thesis began with an attempt to reconstruct the image of the landscape in the minds of the people. The image of the landscape, as Fredrick Jameson suggests, is in the form of a “cognitive map” of the landscape (Jameson, 1991). A map that aids the individual to positions him or herself in the landscape with the help of individual and collective memory that manifests itself in the form of physical markers such as monuments and boundaries. “A cognitive map enables a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole.” (Jameson, 1991 as stated in Felluga, Dino. “Modules on Jameson: On Ideology.”) Jameson reasons that the Greimassian Semiotic Square is a kind of a cognitive map that helps the individual perceive the landscape in a manner of positional possibilities and orientation.
Landscape, as a cultural process, formed the basis of the enquiry and the people of Rajpipla were in the centre of the study. The people seemed to mold the landscape and it was their memories and narration that offered rich possibilities of discovering the texts of Rajpipla. To the people the landscape was meaningful and enmeshed with a network of relationships between humans, humans and nature and humans and the social structure.
The narratives of the landscape seemed to be accurate and meaningful depictions that came together seamlessly in the conversations in the field. Little ethnography proved to be an effective method of collecting the narratives and of laying them out on one table. The landscape of Rajpipla, in imagination and in materiality, which is intensely embedded in everyday conversations of the people sometimes, went unnoticed between their words. 83
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The reading, from the outside was wrought with difficulties that an outsider would face. The meanings and the relationships were layered and far too complex for a simple ethnographic interpretation to record. The methodological challenge was to understand the texts and organize them in relationship to each other and to the landscape. A structural outlook at the emerging narratives seemed inevitable and even though structural theory formed the groundwork for the study, it was not imposed onto the data rather it transpired from within it.
Yi-Fu Tuan reasons for a narrative-descriptive approach where he says that in order to study landscapes through narratives one must rely on a descriptive approach that is not bound by relatively categorical and thematic theoretical concepts (Tuan, 1991). The method followed in the thesis thus tread on a thin line relying on abstract thematic concepts that were interwoven with the description of phenomenon in the narratives such that the details of the texts are not compromised yet one is able to gather a sense of the deep structures in the landscape.
The first set of ethnographic readings revealed several disparate myths that seemed to link up to the landscape in almost like a rationale for the manner in which the city was established. The myth organizes the town, temple and palace in relation to each other using the oppositions of inside and outside. It also organizes the actors such as the people, the goddess and the royal family in relations of power and authority.
Further narration revealed tensions amidst sections of people to assert their claim on the landscape. The contradictory myths relating the Rajputs to the Tribals disclosed the manner in which the Rajputs view the tribals as a threat in the landscape and had to be ‘befriended’ since they found them difficult to overpower, while the tribals offer resistance to any imposition of authority, and continue to do so from the times of the Rajputs to the modern day government. 84
Some narrations, those of the tribals, were found to be contradictory in orientation. The tribals read the landscape and authority in a dialectic manner and see the town of Rajpipla as a stage of opportunity as well as that of oppression. The narration also threw light upon the non-action of the royal family. The royalty, which was at one point the primary agency shaping the landscape and in some sense had a monopoly over it, at present longs for control over the landscape. In the nostalgic tone of the interviews, many events and occasions surfaced where the royal family had made attempts to relive past glory and played the role of a scavenger in their own town. What began to emerge was a complex mesh of opposing, colliding, even indifferent narratives that needed a powerful analytical tool to lay it all down coherently and understand their relationship with the landscape. The ethnographic research revealed undercurrents of nostalgia, memories, of a lost glory, of receding presence of the royalty and a new hope from the outside in the form of Bhojpuri Cinema. The history of the town suggests a strong role played by outside influences- the travelling goddess, the trickster narrative, and now the Bhojpuri Cinema. This marks the orientation of the people towards the landscape emphasizing the parts that play a role and parts that don’t. On a concluding note, the thesis has tread through difficult terrain to bring the humanities and the built environment together on the same plane. It has attempted to leave behind a method that is able to negotiate the overpowering nature of ‘real’ and ‘material’ and the ‘taken for granted’ imaginary world of people. To end in Picasso’s words, ”Everything you can imagine is real.”
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Works Cited
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Cosgrove, Denis. “Geography is Everywhere: Culture and Symbolism in Human Landscapes.” Horizons in Human Geography (1988). Print. Cosgrove, Denis. “Prospect, Perspective and the Evolution of the Landscape Idea.” Transaction of the Institute of British Geographers 10.1 (1985): 45-62. Print. Cosgrove, Denis, and Peter Jackson. “New Direction In Cultural Geography.” The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) 19.2 (1987): 95-101. Print. Deely, John. “Semiotics and Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt.” Sign Systems Studies 32 (2004): 11-34. Print. Floch, Jean-Marie. “Are You a Surveyor or a Daydreamer? Developing a Behavioural Typology of Railway Users.” Semiotics, Marketing and Communication: Beneath the Signs, the Strategies. Dec 2001. Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Print. Hebert, Louis. “The Semiotic Square.” Tools for Text and Image Analysis: An Introduction to Applied Semiotics. 1991. 18-27. Print. Katilius-Boydston, Marvin. “The Semiotics of A.J. Greimas: An Introduction.” Lituanus-Lithuanian Quarterly Journal of Arts and Sciences 36.3 (1990). Print. Khanwalkar, Seema. “Television Narratives: Creating a Cultural Complicity- A Semiotic Reading of the Balaji Telefilms Discourse.” MICA Communications Review 1 (2003): 5-20. Print. Kull, Kalevi. “On Semiosis, Umwelt and Semiosphere.” Semiotica 120.3/4 (1998): 299-310. Print. Lotman, Juri, and Wilma Clark. “On the Semiosphere.” Sign Systems Studies 33 (2005): 5-23. Print. Lotman, Mihhail. “Umwelt and semiosphere.” Sign Systems Studies (2002). Print. Meinig, D W. “The Beholding Eye: Ten Versions of the Same Scene.” Western Humanities Review 1-9. Print. Oakes, T., and P.L. Price. The Cultural Geography Reader. Taylor & Francis, 2008. Web. 29 Sept. 2011. 88
Sadana, Rashmi. “On the Delhi Metro: An Ethnographic View.” Economic and Political Weekly xlv.46 (2010): 77-83. Print. Sauer, Carl O. “The Morphology of Landscape.” University of California Publications in Geography 2 (1925): 19-54. Print. Sharov, Alexei. “Pragmatism and Umwelt-theory.” Semiotica 134 (2001): 211-228. Print. Syse, K.V.L. “Moving About: An Ethnographic Approach to Landscape Research.”
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“Gay prince of Rajpipla to debut in Hollywood flick in 2010 - Indian Express.” Web. 22 December 2011. “Prince Manvendra Singh Gohil.” Web. 22 December 2011. “Saussure’s Lectures on General Linguistics.” Web. 30 December 2011. “Semiotics for Beginners: Paradigmatic Analysis.” Web. 23 April 2012. “Semiotic Square - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.” Web. 12 June 2012. “Trade bodies, lawyers join protest to save Rajpipla heritage - Express India.” Web. 12 June 2012. “On a royal trip to Rajpipla | NDTV.com.” Web. 15 June 2012. Census of India 2001: Data from the 2001 Census, including cities, villages and towns (Provisional). Census Commission of India. Web. 23 July 2012. Felluga, Dino. “Modules on Jameson: On Ideology.” Introductory Guide to Critical Theory. 26 July 2012 Image Sources: Fig.
1-
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/10/Van_
Gogh_-_Country_road_in_Provence_by_night.jpg Fig. 2- http://www.monetartprints.net/images/bathers.jpg Fig. 3- Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron Film Poster http://upload.wikimedia.org/ wikipedia/en/thumb/6/6e/Jaane_Bhi_Do_Yaaro_1983_film_ poster.jpg/220px-Jaane_Bhi_Do_Yaaro_1983_film_poster.jpg Fig. 4- Alice in Wonderland http://www.alice-in-wonderland.net/alicepic/ alice-in-wonderland/1book28.jpg Fig. 5, 11-14- Author Fig.
9-http://www.artoflegendindia.com/images/detailed/pbabe034_ vahanvati_mata.jpg
Fig. 10- http://jimesh0.tripod.com/mataji_pictures/Harshidhh_2520maa. jpg
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Glossary: Aakashi- from/of the sky Aatham- eighth day of the lunar calendar Adivasi- a heterogeneous set of ethnic and tribal groups claimed to be the aboriginal population Bhil- tribe of Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Maharashtra Bhil Raja- the administrative head of the Bhil people in Rajpipla Chai-wala- tea stall/ stall owner Chaudas- Fourteenth day of the lunar calendar Chhakda- indigenous three-wheeled vehicle similar to an auto rickshaw commonly used for public transport Darbar- court man Darshan- homage Dev- god, lord Devanshi- demigod Devi- goddess Dungar- mountain Farsan- fried or steamed snack like dhokla, khaman, fafda, chevda, gota, ghatiya Gam- village Garasdar- landlord Garba- ritual dance around the idol of Ambe Mata during the festival of Navratri Gordhana- traditional Gujarati sweet made from grain and jaggery Haveli- refers to a privately owned mansion Jav-Jvara- barley saplings Jilla Nyayalaya- District Courts Jilla Van Karyalaya- District Forest Office Jyotish- soothsayer Kartik maas- the first month of the Hindu calendar Khaugali- place famous for street food Kheti- farming Kum-kum- vermillion powder
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Kundli- horoscope Lapi- traditional Gujarati sweet made from sugar, milk and wheat flour Mandap- the pavilion made for carrying out sacred rituals Mata- mother, referred as the mother goddess Navratri- Hindu festival celebrating the nine avatars of Durga Ma lasting nine nights held from the first day of Bhadarva month to Dusshera Neem- margosa tree Pandal- temporary structure erected for a gathering usually made in bamboo/steel posts and cloth Panwala- shop selling betel nut leaves with lime and betel nuts Payal- beads worn on the feet, usually by dancers, that makes a ringing sound Poonam- full moon night Prant Adhikari Karyalaya- District Magistrate’s Office Vevishal- betrothal Rajputs- Rajputs are the warrior clan of Rajasthan who later spread across central and western India Rashi- sun sign decided by the position of stars and planets Saatam- seventh day of the lunar calendar Sari/Saree- a rectangular piece of cloth worn by women by wrapping around the body accompanied by a blouse and petticoat Shakti Peeth- place of worship consecrated to the goddess Shakti Shahnai- musical instrument similar to a trumpet Survir- courageous Taluka- a region, smaller than a district, containing a set of villages within its political limits Tapas- asceticism
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