Dining Across the Decades in Rajasthan, India: A Culminating Feast on a High of Religious Holidays

Abstract

I tell tales of dining and drinking across three decades in Rajasthan, India, evoking memories of challenge and character defining choices. From whom and with whom I dine or drink proves to be an act expressing relative purity (shuddha) and adherence to principle (dharma). Each heartfelt choice leaves he investigators from a foreign land wondering about consequences upon our stature and rapport for subsequent research. Meanwhile the local community and I research a folk system of knowledge and practice in irrigated farming. Farmers are guardians of a legacy reshaping the landscape to harvest rainfall to recharge the aquifer for lift irrigation. Successful in this arid zone, they want to be heard. A celebratory meal culminates our decade-long endeavor to persuade government administrators, engineers, and hydrologists to listen. In this pluralistic world of multiple castes, classes, and ethnicities, we, prove through our history of dining to be the perfect guests suited for this occasion. The feast is spontaneously arranged, an epiphany arising from our success that day, uniting administrator, researchers, and farmers. So gathered, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and Jew, we discover how auspicious (shubh) is this moment, occurring on a high holiday according to the calendars of four separate religions. Everything has fallen into place. To quote a saying I heard in my fieldwork: “Shubh āve hae. 11 Words and sentences spoken in Marwari of northwestern Rajasthan are written in italics, with a dash over long vowels, a diacritical dot under retroflex consonants, and aspirations shown by adding “h,” while nasalization are left unrecorded. When “-ji” is added to a personal name it is an honorific often used in conversation. The auspicious happens.” The trajectories of our separate pathways in life have joined, making this the most serendipitous of occasions. By turning the gaze from subjects to our joined intimacy of encounters, I have chosen narrative, rather than a conversation among scholars, to emphasize the primary conceptions underlying everyday concerns and aspirations in South Asian society.