8

Arms and the World

Village Apshinge (Maharashtra)
Bounding and Extending Where

LEE I. SCHLESINGER

from
Village Matters: Relocating Villages in the
Contemporary Anthropology of India
edited by Diane P. Mines and
Nicolas Yazgi
Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2010
INTRODUCTION
In a bus or bazaar, at a government office, or during a yatra, 'Tumche
gav kuthle?' (What's your village?) is almost certainly the very first
thing a Maharashtrian would ask someone not already known.
In this ethnographic chapter, my first and primary question asks
what scholars or others might come to understand if they, like a
Maharashtrian meeting someone unknown, would also include the
village first thing when asking and thinking about people and a world
not already presumed to be well-known. I begin to explore what could
be seen, sensed, imagined, or inferred by putting villages first in con-
sidering social life, social structures, and history in Maharashtra, and
by extension in other regions or much of South Asia. What is gav,
a village, the village, which occurs in a Maharashtrian's interest in
another person, which informs identification habits, and which also
forms experience, relationships, and structure in many lives? What
difference does a village or the life in and of many of them make in
a larger world beyond? With data from a single village and some
parts of the world that its villagers traverse and somehow know, I
concentrate (and also necessarily diffuse) my attention on the place

JL
 200 Village Matters
of a village or village life, and on the kind of place either is, and on
how these might concern or affect other places. Because the world of
scholars or others who live far from this village also matters here, how
the place of the village and villagers' lives could bear on those working
and understanding differently comes into play as well.
Among rural Maharashtrians' common practices and processes are
such spoken questions as: 'Tumchegav kuthle?Kuthe nighala?Kuthun
ala? ('What's your village? For where have you set off? From where
have you come?'). Some other commonly used meeting-greeting
recognition questions include 'Nokrila nighala ka?Shalela nighala ka?
Jevayla nighala ka?.' ('Have you set off for your job, set off for school,
set off for a meal?'), and especially in the village, 'Gurakade nighala?
Ranat nighala? Parsakade nighala? Gavat nighala? Gavala nighala?
('Have you set off to take cattle to pasture, set off to the fields around
the village, set off to defecate, set off into the gav [a village or town],
set off to another gav?'). One politely and automatically asks someone
one knows where he or she is off to. One similarly asks someone not
yet known, 'Gav kuthle?', where he or she is coming from.
In Maharashtra and in Marathi speech, people are on the move,
routinely either going to or coming from, and they are recognized and
addressed as such. Experience forms and relates to heres and theres
(ithe/tithe),] and people identify themselves and ask of others accord-
ing to a world of wheres (kuthe). This also includes the hither and
thither (ikade/tikade), the where-to possibilities (already intrinsic in
the question of coming-from), which are a more deictic, circumstance-
dependent range of movements or possible moves. Altogether, there
is a where-ing of the world, a where-ing that inherently constitutes
worldliness: making the world out of, and making it into, where(s).
These where(s) and movings here and there happen, and are felt or
sensed as significantly bound up with villages or, more precisely,
with gav and the sense it imposes. This sense of gav, of (the) village,
is not merely an artha, a meaning or purpose or interest, but itself
indicates more of a feel and an orientation, even a feeling of orienta-
tion, that is, a given heading or grounding.
'Gav kuthle?' ('What's your village?') What does gav mean in
a question like this one? Depending on who is asking whom and
where the inquiry occurs, the appropriate reply could be, for example,
Apshinge, or it could be America, or almost any place in between this
one village in the western Deccan and a so-called global superpower,
perhaps a named place such as Satara District, or Maharashtra, or
Arms and the World 201
India. In reply to this question, a gav can be all sorts of places and
can be quite large. A more idiomatic, even semantically closer
English translation of 'Gav kuthle?' is simply, 'Where are you from?'2
Interpreted thus, as evoking local, regional, national, or global
phenomena or places, the question poses in itself how gav, for many
Maharashtrians, can relate to or inform such a where (and where-
from), their where. The sense of where in this frequent and ordinary
question has expanse, has a relative meaning (relative to known
places and to who is present), and may seem vague as it expands and
relates. All this is obvious, unremarkable, and probably unthought
to Marathi speakers, and yet these features of expanse, relativity, and
vagueness are noteworthy with regard to the observations of a village
and some villagers that follow.3
Now, in moving from the question that asks what is a stranger's
village to the stranger questioning of a/the village and its whereness,
another consideration is a/the village's definiteness. In a reply to the
everyday question 'Gav kuthle?', the gav place named comes with a
sense of being a definite sort of place. The next section of this chapter
considers definition and a Maharashtrian village. Borders are there,
and they give meaning to being inside or outside, to looking inward
or moving outward. The third section then presents some people who
cross these village borders, and the fourth takes a different point of
view to contextualize, generalize, and structure the kind of movement
illustrated previously, displaying how moves beyond and back, along
with the conditions within, reveal some of the significance of village
borders, as well as that of being either within or beyond or possibly
somehow both. The fifth section discusses some dimensions of village
social structure reflected in movements between a beyond and a
within, and it suggests, from what appears within a village, some ways
it extends and shapes the world, actually different worlds, for both
villagers and others. The sixth section considers what is absent or lost
from the village as another aspect of village presence, another working
of the village social structure in a larger world, and section seven
characterizes village boundaries themselves with respect to social
groupings in the village, and shows how those relating most beyond
can represent the village itself as a whole. The concluding section
speculatively offers an extension of the observations and inferences
about the villagers' and village place/space/world by approaching
some of the categories and structural and logical relations that scholars
or other outsiders seem unable to avoid. Altogether, the argument
 202 Village Matters
explores how living with, moving through, and using/sensing a world
expressed in kuthe, ithe, tithe, ikade, and tikade comes along (and
goes along) with gav, with a presumption, intuition, or expectation
of the larger world's being villaged. Or, to retreat to a somewhat less
critical and strange vocabulary, the aim is to illustrate how villages
in Maharashtra, as exemplified by one village, both inform space (as
a range of wheres) and form places there (in some wheres), and to
imagine how village life might further shape the spatial locus, realm, or
world that includes a great country, Maharashtra, and even beyond.
A VILLAGE DEFINITION, EXPANSE, AND BORDERS
As a definite kind of place, a village can be definite like a point with a
certain location. It can also be definite like an area, an expanse with a
certain boundary. And it can be definite as a population, a certain set
of villagers, people who belong to or compose the village as a social
place, as a community or society, or as parts of these.
Conventional global coordinates place Apshinge, the point, at 17°
37' N, 74° 14' E. On the ground, in terms of distances from other
points, it is a 4 km walk along a rocky path from Rahimatpur, the
neighbouring bazaar town, 11 km south and a bit east of Koregav, the
taluka town, 30 km east and a bit south of Satara, the district town,
which is on the Pune-Bangalore national highway about 110 km
south of Pune (and thus some 270 km from Mumbai).
These numbers say little about how to get there, the condition of
the roads, and how close trains, buses, trucks, motorcycles, bicycles, or
bullock carts are likely to reach at any time of the year or in different
years. Compared to other Maharashtrian towns and villages, this
point is neither extremely remote nor directly on any major transport
route. In the mid-1970s there was no paved road into the gavthan, the
main village settlement, and no bus service there at all, although a
few times a day an ST bus would ply the unpaved Rahimatpur- Vaduj
road, which traversed village lands over a kilometre south of the
centre of the gavthan. By 1986 part of the spur road into the gavthan
from this now paved Vaduz road had been paved, and two buses a
day came directly into Apshinge. While regular postal service goes
back as far as anyone remembers, up to the mid-1980s the nearest
telephone and telegraph were in Rahimatpur, and by 1995 there
were four phones in the village (including its hamlet), which then
consisted of some 400 houses and about 2,200 people. (This count was
up from about 1,850 people in 1975, some 1,600 of these in the main
Arms and the World 203
settlement area, that is, the gavthan and its adjacent expansion. The
population of the entire village in 2003 was about 2,300, when there
were nearly 100 telephones in homes and several public call shops.4
The few mobile phones then owned by villagers would not operate in
Apshinge, which was out of range of the nearest transmitter, although
by 2007 new towers in Rahimatpur had fixed this.) Of course, much
more can be said about the connectivity of this point in terms of the
relations that make location more socially relevant, whether they be
paths through fields to neighbouring villages, regional pilgrimage
routes, or the patterns of transhumant pastoralists, itinerant artisans,
merchants, politicians, and government officers. On a variety of maps
(or the maps of a variety of interests and persons), Apshinge is a point
with a known definite location.
Apshinge is also definite as an expanse on the landscape. It is a
revenue village, mauje Apshinge, a unit long recognized by the state
for the administration of revenue collection (mainly assessments on
land and houses). It has boundaries containing about 1,410 hectares,
82 per cent of which is classified as cultivable, the rest being forest,
streams, roads, the gavthan, and one small vadi (hamlet) about a mile
east of the gavthan. There are many boundaries within the village
bounds, especially as the agricultural land is separated from pasture
and some other commons and as it is divided and subdivided into
holdings owned by different families. Villagers live with, recognize,
and observe many borders.
Some of the borders of the village (shiv) are marked with boundary
stones—widely spaced but in a noticeable row. Most of the borders
appear, however, only to those who already know them, in my
experience mostly male villagers.5 Some of the boundaries are on small
ridges, often the uncultivated hard rocky rises that appear everywhere
in this part of the Deccan, and they separate cultivable land; some
parts of the boundaries are marked by known trees. Walking one day
along the short-cut footpath to Rahimatpur, a villager told me while
we crossed the border—and here it is not obviously marked at all,
except to one who already knows—that people should do namaskaar
to the gods as one leaves the village, and he did so perfunctorily,
although in my experience of walking into and out of Apshinge this
way, I rarely observed this gesture at the edge of village lands.
Ritually attending to village borders, however, was a more im-
portant part of a bullock cart journey (my longest and most unfor-
gettable), when I returned 14 km on a hot day in May 1975 over a
204 Village Matters
mostly unpaved road to Apshinge with a bride and groom after their
wedding in another village, in the taluka over the hills to the east.
En route we stopped briefly every time we passed a village border and
at each crossroads. Some people would get out, crack open a coconut
on a stone, offer copra to travellers other than those in the bride's and
groom's families, and then toss pieces over the bullock cart. Also, at
these places small lemons (limbu) were split, crushed, and then thrown
over the bullock cart. An anthropologist's view easily interprets all
this as placating the spirits who inhabit crossing places, where roads
cross either village borders or other roads, in order to protect the
newly-wed couple during their transit of a major life-course divide.
My village companions, however, seemed to understand this ritual as
something to be done because it is always done. Despite little, if any,
interest in interpreting their own behaviour, they know borders and
on important occasions attend to them in their actions.
The borders of an entire village, the political and revenue and some-
times ritual unit, are neither the only nor perhaps the most marked of
village boundaries. Revenue administration as well as socio-cultural
practices also distinguish between the fields, pastures, and forests
altogether, and the gavthan itself, the built-up main settlement area.
In gavthi bhasha (village parlance) these are ran ant than, the lands
and the real place. Revenue survey maps dating to the late nineteenth
century show the boundary of the gavthan clearly, and most villag-
ers know it.6 The enacted recognition of this distinction between
the original inhabited settlement and the surrounding lands is most
apparent in the existence of one or more ves, or gates, into the village.
These ves have no apparent physical presence today (at least not in
Apshinge or in many other villages I have visited), but they exist along
a road or path where formal entry, or possibly denial of entry, to the
village takes place.7
Although roads and paths enter Apshinge's gavthan from several
directions, there is just one main ves, which is where village entry
rituals take place. The most important of these is the arrival of a
wedding party, all of those from elsewhere who accompany either
a groom or a bride before a wedding occurring in Apshinge. The
entering party halts at the ves—in Apshinge on the main road from
the south (the direction of Vaduj road)—and a two-part entry ritual
happens. First, a delegation of Apshinge villagers lines up across the
road, as if forming a line that defines the ves, and meets the party
Arms and the World 205
of wedding guests, the pahune. Most of these Apshingekars are
men from the bhauki (or patrilineage) of the bride or groom, and
at the ves they welcome with an exchange of gifts their new in-laws
(who may also often be old affines). Coconuts, fruit, and sometimes
clothing are offered by hosts to guests, and the guests immediately
reciprocate with similar items. This ritual exchange at the ritual entry
to the gavthan makes clear that both parties are aware that a clear
division exists between inside and outside, between host and guest,
between bride's side and groom's side, and it constitutes a friendly
welcome that formally opens the inside, one space of domestic life, to
the outsider.8
Yet, immediately following this good-natured greeting and ex-
change between the new in-laws is a more adversarial demand upon
the visiting party by other Apshinge villagers. A small group of the
so-called village servants, those who do gavki kam (village work), in
the persons of several members of balutedar (also called baytadar)
castes, bars entry to the wedding party until their magni, insistent
demand, for payment is met. The balutedars, here as at certain other
occasions, express and represent the village as a whole. They watch
its boundaries and provide many services, taking care of the village
gods and of all the villagers, and they demand honour and some re-
ward when outsiders as a group want to come in. Coming together
insistently, demandingly, this delegation of lohar, gurav, chambhar,
mulani, sutar, sonar, mang, etc., configure and represent a version of
the village as a whole, showing at its formal entry at the ceremonial
portal to the village that the village is a society composed of different
parts, that it is organized, and that there is an all-village level of col-
lective action which can be mobilized.9 Such mobilization primarily
depends upon the presence and possible incursion of outsiders, and it
can involve the rest of the village, not just the balutedars. For example,
in a more everyday instance, the village will hide from the police one
of its own who may have committed a crime. As against outsiders,
villagers can organize and display village unity for various purposes,
and this happens sometimes at the ves, a limit of and passage into the
gavthan.
Villagers also recognize and mark other dividing lines between
gavthan (residential) and village lands while leaving the gavthan in a
procession to take a corpse to the village smashan bhumi (cremation
ground, which lies in the fields beyond the settlement area). The
206
Village Matters
person carrying the clay pot that contains a burning cake of cow
dung leaves the pot on the path at the edge of the gavthan as the dead
body departs the settlement for the very last time. This can happen
at different spots because, depending on the house of the deceased,
there are different routes through the gavthan to the smashan bhumi.
Other movements in outward directions, some but not all ritualized,
although often just as connected to normal life-course needs, will be
observed shortly.
The village bordering practices already noted appear consistent
with other ways in which Maharashtrians draw and observe lines,
practices worth mentioning especially when academic currents
emphasizing flows, scapes, or other ubiquitous conflations and
mixings are averse to focusing on meaningful bounds. People put
strings around poles to set off other ritual spaces, and they often
direct attention to the umbra, the threshold, the bottom piece of a
door frame, which they even use to refer to an entire house while
speaking of a village altogether. Apshinge folk would say there are
teen she (300) umbrya in the gav. There can be many defined places,
places with definite borders, like houses and the gavthan and the gav
itself, places that can on occasion enclose themselves.
The significance of such borders often comes in their isolating
and objectifying effects. Looking at and within the boundaries shows
them setting something apart from other things or surroundings.
Such a view, taking advantage of some clear bounds and limits, can
be controlled (and hence be controlling of its object), comprehending
(taking it all in), often analytic (making further cuts and divisions
with the bounded, isolated whole), and objectifying (as the observer
is set apart and safely remote from the object of inquiry, analysis, and
comprehension). It is clearly reasonable, especially for those with
knowledge interests, that is, who identify with classifying, discrimi-
nating, and ordering faculties, to view the significance of boundaries
in this way; and for studies of India, one result has been to conceive
the village as a village community or village republic, as something
with a life pretty much on its own and quite far apart from that of
literate, learned, urban worlds. A primarily agricultural economy
with an apparently well-developed division of labour and interdepen-
dence among agriculturalists, artisans, and other specialists simply
reinforces the isolationist tendency. Such conceptualizing encourages
either the romanticizing and idealizing of villages, or finding them
Arms and the World 207
backward, wanting, and in need of development or transformation
to fit in a modern society, or possibly even forgetting them on
account of their seeming unconnectedness to more vital contempo-
rary currents.
But such an isolating and hence objectifying significance of
boundaries is not all there is in villagers' lives, because borders are
also significant as they are crossed. Having thus viewed Apshinge's
location and extent as a clearly defined, quite definite place, and having
noted how villagers observe and live with borders, I can now report
some commonplace crossings of these clear and well-known village
boundaries and some movements beyond its commonly recognized
and specified extent.
SOME VILLAGERS CROSSING BORDERS AND COMING BACK
Once a year villagers celebrate a festival about crossing their village
border and leaving the village on the way to larger contests or conquests.
This is simollanghan, literally border-crossing (from sima, boundary or
limit, and ullanghan, crossing or traversing). Urban Maharashtrians
and people throughout India know the same date as Dassera, as do
villagers now. But in 1975 I heard more talk of simollanghan, which
was then interpreted to me as a village Dassera. In Apshinge this
was not just the day on which most Hindus throughout the country
commemorate Ram's defeat of Ravana, which followed the Navratra
worship and celebration of Mahishasura Mardini (one form of Devi,
the Goddess), and which involved puja (worship) for one's weapons,
tools, books, and vehicles. In this and other Maharashtra villages this
is the day gold is looted and distributed, the gold appearing as the
leaves of the apta tree; and people commemorate the crossing of the
village border by the warrior-farmers, who would set off for battle
after the end of the rains, and whose victories and new wealth would
replenish the village. The book that Apshinge's only brahmin would
consult in 1975 for definitive information whenever necessary puts it
as simply as possible:
After the monsoon break, the maratha soldiers on this day do border
crossing in order to vanquish the enemy (shatrucha parabhav karnyasathi
simollanghana karitasat).10
And here is another bit of text an Apshinge villager also showed me
in 1975:
 208 Village Matters
Indian News Review, Cairo Saturday 30 December 1944
V.C.O.'s Bag Seven Nazis
German Surprised by Mahrattas Guerrilla Tactics
If guns were notched each time an enemy was killed, in accor-
dance with the tradition of the wild west, Jamadar Balkrishna Mane
of Satara would be the owner of one of the most seared weapons in
Italy. In the course of one short affray over the Montone River this
V.C.O. recently accounted for seven Germans. The occasion was the
surprise raid on the hamlet of La Zorda by men of the 5th Mahratta
Regiment.
Thrown completely off balance by the stealth and speed of the
attack, the German Spandau outposts were bayonetted before they
had time to trigger.
Across farmyards, dodging in and out of buildings, around hay-
stacks and manure-heaps, Jamadar Balkrishna Mane led the chase,
revolver in hand, shooting up the first five Germans he encountered
in quick succession.
Expending his last live cartridge, the Jamadar holstered his
weapon, and picking up the rifle of a dead sepoy, went on to bayonet
two more of the enemy.
In the course of that day the tactics of the Mahratta guerillas
paid high dividends. In La Zorda and the nearby hamlet of Podesta
Albareto more than forty German dead were counted after a thirty
minute fight.
The Balkrishna Govind Mane whom I met early in my fieldwork in
Apshinge was a quiet, soft-spoken, gentle, reflective village farmer. He
had seen hard times and then good times after returning to Apshinge,
and he felt he was having hard times again. For months he wanted
to talk to me primarily about adhyatmika jnyan, spiritual knowledge,
and he could not understand why an educated person like myself
would come to live in a village and mostly want to record genealogies,
map houses, and list who worked for, spoke to, and ate with whom.
Only in the context of discussing life and death in different parts of
the world did he pause to search for his newspaper clipping, and then
he provided more details about his time in the army. In brief, he had
served from 1939-45 and had been stationed in Abyssinia, Egypt,
Arms and the World 209
Iran, Iraq, Italy, and Cyprus. Not too long after his heroic encounter
late in 1944, he was shot in the right leg and hospitalized, as he said, in
Roma. He looked at me, opened his eyes wide, with an extra sparkle,
and asked if I had ever had vino rosso. It seemed he could still taste
this, thirty years later. He recalled a few more Italian phrases he had
picked up while in the hospital.
Balasaheb, as most villagers referred to him (sometimes he was
just called 'Saheb'), deserves much more attention on account of his
kindness, thoughtfulness, and deep wisdom, as well as with respect to
his having become an important village leader in the 1950s and 1960s
and to the decline of his wealth and power, but not his influence on
certain topics, especially spiritual ones, as he confronted difficult mis-
fortunes in his family. Immediately relevant to my present discussion
are only three short observations:
First, his father Govind Sakharam Mane was a colonel in the army,
with service in World War I (or in the early twentieth century); his
father's brother, Yashvant Sakharam Mane, was a subhedar, and his
grandfather, Sakharam Bhavanji Mane, was also in the army. Military
service goes back even further, and other ancestors had been in the
court of the Shindes (Scindias) in Gwalior. Balasaheb once showed
me a ceremonial Gwalior sword and a turban that have become
heirlooms.
Second, Balasaheb, like his father, returned to the village to work
as a farmer on the family land after being far away for a long time.
Balasaheb became involved in village betterment activities, serving
on the gram panchayat (village council), helping to found the village
development cooperative society, and introducing new crops (such
as banana trees in 1975). When I first knew Balasaheb, his house
had partly collapsed after a huge storm, and he had withdrawn from
most public or community activities and was absorbed in reading
philosophical commentaries and thinking about the Bhagavad Gita,
and yet he remained generally progressive as well as devout in his
outlook. He insisted that one of his daughters continue her education
through high school, making her the first girl in Apshinge with an
S.S.C. certificate. One of his sons went to college, did well, studied
for an accounting degree and got a job with an insurance company
in a fancy office in Mumbai across from Churchgate. After a few years
of this nokri (service), which involved commuting on the Mumbai
local trains from his single room hut in a Ghatkopar slum, the
son also returned to Apshinge to work as a farmer, which is where
210 Village Matters
he was in 1996, the year his father died after a protracted debilitating
illness.
Third, while Balkrishna Mane impressed me tremendously as an
extraordinary person, a worldly and spiritual soldier-activist-farmer-
philosopher, his story in general is not all that unusual. There are
many more soldiers and stories. From the population that composed
about 275 households in this village in the mid-1970s, Apshinge has
had over 100 soldiers in the two preceding generations. Many left the
village, saw some remote part of the world, and returned, and some,
of course, never returned. Among the many stories that illustrate how
military matters connect Apshinge and a much larger world, one tale
of a different sort of village hero from World War II merits brief
mention here since it documents a more complicated historical and
personal experience.
Shaikh Gulab Jangu Mulani, one of three brothers who in 1975
formed one of the two extended families of Muslims in Apshinge
(a total population of forty-five out of about 1,605 in the main
settlement), had joined the British Indian Army near the beginning
of World War II. He told me he was trained as a wireless operator,
using just these English words. He also learned how to drive a truck.
Sent to Malaya, he was captured by the Japanese on 15 February
1942, and held as a prisoner of war. He told me he was one of 60,000
Indians being held along with 32,000 British and Australian POWs.
He was not a POW for long, though. He joined the Indian National
Army, the INA, when the Japanese told him that after Netaji Bose had
addressed the Japanese Parliament, the Japanese agreed to let Indians
and Netaji control Burma and Malaya if they would help defeat the
British. Gulab-bhai joined the INA and for a short while fought
against the British. He recalled that the Japanese did not support the
INA as much as expected, and they were forced to retreat from Allied
counter-attacks. On the retreat towards Singapore he was injured and
captured once again, this time to be held as a POW by the British.
He was jailed first in Singapore and then in Calcutta and released at
the end of the war to return to Apshinge. His fate and fortune in the
village during the thirty years after the war were hardly better than
while a soldier and a prisoner on both sides of the war. He had lost his
small bit of family land to his youngest brother, who despite a good
income, gained partly from selling tamarind, would not support him.
Gulab-bhai also tried to take care of an older brother who was an
alcoholic. He did rojgar (daily wage labour), sometimes even splitting
Arms and the World 2 11
wood. Occasionally he would butcher a goat for someone and receive
a little meat in return. In a torn, worn-through dhoti and a loose,
lopsided turban, he looked like a poor and sickly wreck of a man, and
yet he had married and somehow managed to keep his wife and six
children, three boys and three girls, alive.
Gulab-bhai's village life was much different from Balasaheb Mane's,
who had been one of the wealthiest marathas and a village leader.
Gulab-bhai is one of the poorest and a Muslim butcher by caste, and
yet he was no less reflective, articulate, indeed poetic, on spiritual
matters, which is most of what he too wanted to discuss with the
village's supposedly learned foreign resident. The story of his time as
a soldier in two opposing armies in the same war arose first in the
context of learning about a newspaper announcement on the avail-
ability of pensions for those who had served in the INA. He had
applied before but was refused, and he thought this was because he
had no contacts and couldn't afford the vashila (bribes or under the
table fees). Gulab-bhai narrated his entire story to me so I could
translate this in English and submit a neatly typed letter to a local of-
fice and to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
He told me of the two other Apshinge villagers who were receiving
pensions as svatantra sainiks (freedom fighters), one who had also
been in the INA and was in Germany and had met and worked for
Netaji. Dattatray Ganpati Kadam (Dattu Anna to the villagers) had
received long ago a grant of Rs 2,000 for this service, and despite
being one of the wealthiest villagers, he also had a Rs 200/month
pension in the mid-1970s. (Conversations some years later with
Dattu Anna, who had spent most of the war in Germany and Austria
before returning at the end to work his lands and raise his family in
Apshinge, indicated that Gulab-bhai had exaggerated his closeness to
Netaji.) The other recognized svatantra sainik in the village had been
active as an underground terrorist in the 1942 patri-sarkar movement
in Satara District11 and then imprisoned by the British. Although
Vishvanath Govind Dixit is an orthodox, strictly vegetarian sonar
by caste and later had a career as an elementary teacher rather than
a soldier, he too left the village, fought, suffered, and returned with
many stories, embodying in his rebelliousness another aspect of the
Maharashtrian/maratha warrior tradition.
In Apshinge the connection of the village to warfare goes beyond
what the villagers themselves know in terms of military pensions,
certificates, news clippings, swords, and other memorabilia and
 -»***»
212 Village Matters
memories. And it extends beyond the commemorations in the
simollanghan celebration and other holidays in which military motifs
also arise (for example, the model forts and toy soldiers for Divali).
The particular significance of the five hero-stones (thadge, viragal)
arranged near the oldest of Apshinge's temples, while not recognized
by current inhabitants, suggests that the village, villagers, and war
have been closely entwined for a long time.12
In any case, the twentieth century saw at least several Apshinge
villagers sent abroad in World War I, and probably quite a few more
in World War II. Since 1947, Apshingekars have served in UN forces
in Korea and Lebanon as well as in the Indian Army in Bangladesh,
Sri Lanka, Kashmir, Nagaland, and other places. Many of these
soldiers (although I do not know the proportion) return to the village,
some after a few years at war, some after twenty years in a military
career. With them come stories and experience as well as skills and
understandings of military discipline and leadership. Their service
also brings cash remittances, and eventually pension payments into
the village economy. Moreover, the soldiering past of the place, as
seen in celebrations or carved in stone, demonstrates that this kind of
worldly venture is neither recent nor modern. Like many villages in
its vicinity, the Apshinge at hand for my study reaches past its borders
and extends far into a larger world, as if some arms of the village are
its armed men.13
VILLAGE/WORLD IMPORT-EXPORT CONDITIONS AND FORCES
Other aspects of this village's relations to a larger world appear by
looking into or down upon the village, rather than only out from and
back to it. Shifting attention from illustrative individuals towards
more general, generalizing, and structural phenomena helps set
instances of particular crossings of village borders into a broader
environment and can expose some deeper, world-making processes
at work. A view focused within Apshinge on the imports of money,
social contacts, skills, discipline, and other new habits that the sol-
diers and ex-soldiers bring back to the village would reveal numerous
impacts; and a more detailed account of individual circumstances
and social structural features of the village (the following section
introduces some of the latter) would distinguish the reception and
opportunities of the Balasahebs from the Gulab-bhais and other sol-
diers who return. Yet looking from the other direction and regarding
the soldiers and then others as village exports exhibits more general
Arms and the World 213
and more worldly patterns and discloses conditions and forces that
bind the bounded village to a world beyond.
Because for many generations poor soil, scanty rain, and javar
(millet) and sheng-dhana (groundnut) agriculture have not sufficed
to sustain the village population, Apshinge has had to send some
villagers away for varying periods. Warriors leave Apshinge for a
while, but wives and children remain, and the families and village
benefit from remittances or loot. In recent generations when men
have been away in such service, their families are likely to be joint
families where one or two men remain to manage the land, and all
the wives, children, and elderly parents share the combined yield
from village farming and service elsewhere. This juxtaposition of a
practice commonly but too quickly categorized as modern, such as
leaving the village for cash employment, with a practice considered
traditional, such as the joint family, is hardly unusual. Indeed, setting
aside the problematic traditional/modern dichotomy and its often
implied division between an inside (or something stable, unto itself,
and unchanging) and an outside (which intervenes to change some
internal essence), it is plausible simply to relate the joint-family form
to greater wealth, whether in land or cash (especially since cash can
be used to obtain more land), and thus to see military employment as
a means to income which could also be a means to sustaining a joint
family. What appears here is an ordinary example of how practices
such as villagers' military careers, which spread far beyond the village
borders, affect practices that shape ways of living within them.14
Recognizing this one kind of simollanghan, that of crossing the
village border by villagers who leave, maintain ties, and return, suggests
some similar general effects of other employment opportunities, even
as it obscures much of the particular significance of soldiering in
Maharashtra. Producing inadequate food or trade goods, Apshinge
exports some of the labour it produces as hands that can work
elsewhere, extend themselves, and spread something of the village. In
turn, and sometimes in the men's eventual return, both the money
and experiences that the village cannot in itself provide become, and
can continue to be, a part of the village itself. Besides the military,
three other occupations elsewhere have attracted and supported
Apshinge men and their families through most of the twentieth
century. Most similar to the military career is service in the police, and
during my initial period of research in 1975 at least twenty Apshinge
villagers were policemen, nearly all of them stationed in Mumbai. The
214 Village Matters
other type of government service in which a significant number of
Apshinge villagers participate is school teaching. In the mid-1970s,
this village had more than fifty school teachers working mainly in
elementary schools throughout Satara District, and there were several
high school teachers from the village, including some posted in Pune
and Kolhapur Districts. Like the soldiers, those serving as police and
teachers earn government salaries and receive pensions. The last large
category of villagers working outside the village are industrial workers,
and thirty years ago, as in the decades before that, most of these were
textile-mill workers in Mumbai. Since the massive closure of these
mills, villagers continue to work in other manufacturing industries in
Mumbai, Pune-Hadapsar, Pimpri-Chinchvad, and elsewhere.
Altogether, a snapshot of the village population according to
my 1975 census shows that among the 1,600 or so who belong to
Apshinge's main settlement, less than half of these were over twenty
years old, and close to half of these adults, perhaps some 375, were
men. I know that at that time there were about 100-25 Apshinge
men with regular employment outside the village, which comprises
a significant portion of the whole. Nearly all of these men's immedi-
ate families stay in the village; the men regularly send money and
take back grain and other village produce to where they work. Many
return to the village during planting and harvest periods and help
manage the most important agricultural operations. Nearly all of the
soldiers, police, teachers, and mill-workers return to Apshinge upon
retirement. Their remittances, which help sustain families back home,
and their broader experiences and more extensive social relations
help insure that there is a village home to which to return.
Thus the clear and definite village borders neither hold in all villag-
ers nor keep them from sending or bringing back products of living
beyond. Villagers get around in so many ways, and the experience,
skills, and money earned elsewhere come back to the village in steady
and sizeable amounts. While there are many ways and many reasons
to recognize that this village is contained—because so much that
most matters does happen within it, because its borders do mean
something—it is certainly not self-contained or isolated, and just as
certainly it never was.
Apshinge, that is, a set of conditions and ways of living there, sends
people out into the world while holding onto and often bringing
people back. In this dynamic sense (both propelling and keeping, as if
maintaining an orbital balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces),
Arms and the World 215
the village persistently and regularly reaches beyond, spreads beyond,
and lives beyond its borders. Or, from a perspective highlighting
other conditions, some of what is beyond appears and draws villagers
and the village elsewhere, although the elsewhere does not remain
simply somewhere else, since the village is there too, and some of
that there then comes to pervade somewhere here within the village.
Or, in other words, considering both the sending and the drawing
as working together, as dynamics of pushing and pulling, here/there
are the forms of the place(s), space(s), or world(s) where living and
lives come about and go about, possibly as differently formed forms
somewhere apart from the insistent necessary effect of logical or
categorical divisions between in and out (inside/outside, inwards/
outwards). A view or vision in and out, even movement in and out,
can blur, avoid, perhaps void the divisions that people may conceive,
perceive, somehow receive, or otherwise believe as given. The wheres,
heres, and theres that make sense in and of the village Apshinge
(along with the senses of direction, motion, location, and extent for
its villagers) form beyond or somehow partly besides the in/out pair.
The village world involves and extends a field of sending and drawing
forces necessary to sustain village life and lives within.
VILLAGE SOCIAL STRUCTURES VILLAGING THE WORLD
THROUGH LASTING TIES
Having sensed a field of forces at play in the conditions and moves
reflected in some villagers' work, my attention turns now to a few of
the differentiating patterns structuring social life in order to suggest
where and how a village seems to end or not end or not quite end,
which itself affects who is and who is not or not quite a villager. A
more complete account of the most important structural features
that shape the dynamics of Apshinge (as this village produces,
dispatches, takes in, and holds onto different people, and as it thereby
constitutes and delimits itself by relating socially beyond its bounds
and by structuring interrelations within) would discuss gender,
kinship and marriage, clan-related neighbourhood factioning, and
caste/class status. Of these four dimensions of differentiation, the
first two receive only a cursory glance here, while the last two are
summarized in slightly greater detail for the sake of one concluding
speculation: an image of the village as a force with structural as well
as structuring ramifications, and thus world-shaping efficacy. Here a
single, many-faceted, although never fixedly framed, view develops
216
Village Matters
where/when a Maharashtrian village or village life, an association
of social differences and relationships, presents itself as a socially
constituted structuring force that helps constitute what appears to
be a spatial (and hence social) world. A more penetrating analytic
or even more sympathetically imaginative gaze can regard this as a
villaged world, one where first asking Tumche gav kuthle?' makes
sense everywhere.
Different kinds of villagers are likely to relate to, use, and experience
space and places, whether within or beyond the village, in different
ways. The worldly involvements and extensions of the village noted
so far, those of soldiers, police, teachers, and mill-workers, are nearly
all the work of men (although there are a couple of female school
teachers from Apshinge). As males, they are born in the village, leave
it for other opportunities (education, service, income), and may or
may not return to the village of origin. Yet their movement, signifi-
cant as it is (and even essential for much of the village), counts as a
demographic feature much less than does the movement of women.
Some men may take extended leave of the village of their parents
and childhood, and some even leave for good, but many never do. In
contrast, the life of nearly every village woman includes a permanent
change of village residence, which comes with marriage. A woman's
two homes, maker and sasar (or sasur, that is, her mother's house
and her father-in-law's house), are almost always in two different
villages. The life which connects these two, however, is not just the
woman's, because her marriage brings together, through continuing
visits and exchanges, a woman's brothers and her husband, sometimes
her father and his sister's husband, and perhaps at some later time
her children and her brother's children. In some families, a married
woman retains ties with her sisters after their marriages and depar-
ture from the maher, which thus further establishes relations among
the villages of a set of their possibly otherwise unrelated husbands'
patrilineages.
The networks of inter-village ties composed of the pahune (affines)
of several Apshinge families, lineages, or even of a particular Apshinge
caste or multi-caste grouping (such as balutedars) thus set the village
in a larger region (perhaps several distinct regions for different pahune
networks) of dispersed relatives, established by communication,
hospitality, ritual obligations, gifts, and sometimes more marriages.
Nearly all of the pahune ties are with families from other villages
rather than towns or cities, and almost all these other villages belong
Arms and the World 217
to some, but not all, the talukas in just two districts, Satara (where
Apshinge is) and Sangli, the district to the south (which used to be
named South Satara). Apshinge villagers visit and become familiar
with the villages of their pahune, attending weddings, funerals, and
even village festivals in these places. My 1975 village census revealed
that Apshingekars can name their own ajol (or ajul, one's mother's
maher) and that almost everyone knows their mother's ajol (that
is, their mother's mother's father's village) too. The pahune ties
that marriages generate and sustain make village affiliation obvious
because referring to one's pahune often involves naming their village.
Pahune relations also constitute another kind of necessary village
extension through export and exchange, usually but not always of
women, but in all cases one that differs from the departure of village
men as labour to enhance village income.
Most, but not all, pahune of Apshinge's villagers live in other vil-
lages. Consequently, pahune, as a term and category, does not observe
or respect the village border in any simple sense and thus represents
what is outside or beyond (or other than) the village in a less definite
manner.15 The resident pahune belong to Apshinge, but not quite as
centrally, somewhat more marginally (to use these convenient and
misleading spatial metaphors) than the lineages or clans with certain
traditional village rights and obligations (gavki hakk, gavki kam).
Moreover, in Apshinge the pahune who are marathas compose an
implicit category (and on some occasions one that is explicitly rec-
ognized) that relates to both sides of the major division that bisects
the non-pahune marathas of the village (namely the Kadams and
Bhosles, whose kin have traditional village headman rights) and that
divides the village more generally.16 A feature of many villages in
western Maharashtra is the division into two alis (sections or factions,
although the word literally means lane, alley, or row) called varchi all
and khalchi all (upper and lower ali; some villages have more than two,
in which case one of the others will usually be called madhli, or middle,
ali).17 Although the Kadams of Apshinge and Bhosles of Apshinge
do not intermarry (Kadams and Bhosles from different villages can,
however, normally intermarry), any of the Apshinge maratha pahune
(such as the Manes, Mores, Gaikvads, Pavars, Savants, and Nikams,
who have arrived and become established in Apshinge as ghar-javai
by marrying a daughter from either the varchi, Kadam, or khalchi,
Bhosle, sides) can and do subsequently marry some of their sons and
daughters to children of both of this village's Kadam and Bhosle clans.
218 Village Matters
That is, although the Apshinge Kadams and Bhosles cannot intermarry
each other, they can both intermarry with the same pahune groups
in the village. In this manner, being both apart from and relating
to the major bipartite division of Apshinge into varchi and khalchi
ali, the pahune are a mediating component that helps hold the sides
together with a network of kinship and marriage ties. In other ways,
too, marathas from the pahune group, such as Balasaheb Mane, can
seem more able and appropriate to represent, or even lead, the village
as a whole; because the pahune belong to the dominant maratha caste
group and yet to neither of the dominant but opposing maratha clan
groupings, they are often more easily chosen or accepted as an expres-
sion of a consensus or compromise between the main (and the largest,
usually dominant) Kadam and Bhosle sides.
That is, these Apshinge pahune appear relatively outside because
they are pahune, and yet relatively inside because they belong to
Apshinge and are marathas; and thus by constituting a relatively
outside inside and just as much a relatively inside outside for the
otherwise two-sided village (in its dominant maratha aspect), they
present the village, Apshinge, as a distinct and distinguishable social
world (a place or space) in which inside and outside are, in yet another
manner, not quite distinguished. Even as this category blurs an inside/
outside distinction with regard to the composition of the village, the
village pahune themselves help to sustain and compose the village
itself as a structured, interrelated, and identified community, and not
just either a point or an expanse on the landscape. While most of
the villagers' pahune are clearly outsiders in that they belong to and
usually reside in other villages, some do live in Apshinge and belong
to it, and these matter for the structuring of village social life. In
particular, as references in this and the preceding paragraph to clans,
alis, and caste already suggest, how they structurally matter involves
two other differentiations in Apshinge (and also other villages), viz.,
varchi/khalchi ali and maratha/non-maratha caste affiliation.
In contrast to the extent of the Apshinge village world and social
relations composed by its pahune networks and the movement
of women as they marry, the expanse embraced as soldiers, mill-
workers, and other men cross village borders reaches much further and
touches upon more kinds of social life. It extends past other villages
in the adjacent rural talukas and districts and brings to Apshinge
some knowledge, resources, and experience of big cities and even
foreign countries. But the space(s) or measures of distance joining,
Arms and the World 219
for example, Apshinge and Mumbai are not solely an effect of large-
scale and more general supra-village forces or structures. Relations
between the village and this apparently greater beyond neither
depend only on the far-off state or industrial economy that recruits
soldiers and workers nor even just on these pulls in combination with
the pushes from an agricultural environment that cannot sustain
the village population. Instead, certain extensions and effects of the
structure of the village community itself are found in seemingly
distant places like Mumbai, and consequently how or even whether
these places are or even seem to be that far away for the villagers and
village ways becomes much less apparent. By staying close to a village
and regarding its social life with respect to differentiations of sides or
status, that is, partly expressions of clan and caste, I somehow find the
village presenting some of itself somewhere else, beyond where many
usually presume it matters.
The Apshinge varchi/khalchi division into two alis (lanes or
sections), corresponding to the two clans of marathas most closely
associated with Apshinge, actually splits much more of the village
as a social (and spatial) setting. As most narrowly construed, varchi
ali and khalchi ali are unmarked imprecise sections of the gavthan
where the oldest houses of Kadams and Bhosles stand. Each section
includes buildings along some small lanes with the Kadams as varchi
settled to the west and the Bhosles, khalchi, to the east, although in
each area there are houses of some pahune, too (as an estate passed
to an in-marrying son-in-law). But generally the varchi/khalchi
division goes beyond the simple and vague directional and sectional
organization of the settlement core and these two clans. It appears
in accord with many pairs of places and practices that imply village
symmetry, ranging from the gavthan's two talims (wrestling pits, one
varchi, one khalchi), its two main temples (Injai is varchi and Maruti
is khalchi), the responsibilities of village officers and balutedars (in
some cases with one balutedar family serving one ali, that is, half
the village, and another the other ali), and many more aspects of
everyday life. Villagers verbally and in ritual practices emphasize that
they consider varchi/khalchi as a symmetrically balanced division
and not hierarchical in any way, as might otherwise be inferred from
the literal meaning of the terms as upper/lower. They account for the
terms used in this way as primarily directional and natural, since they
can refer to the overall slope of the Deccan, which goes down to the
east from its western heights (and the wind blows, as the rivers flow, in
220 Village Matters
this direction too). Altogether, the varchi/khalchi division organizes
many facets of village life, and as much as any other distinction
among people in Apshinge, including those of gender, caste, or class,
it distinctively constitutes this particular village society.
At least from the 1930s, and probably a decade or two before that,
Apshinge men were working in Bombay (now Mumbai), many in the
textile mills. On a side street, just off what is now Ambedkar Marg in
the heart of Dadar, close to the train station and textile mills, Apshinge
men have rented, for as long as anyone can remember, two rooms in
chawls across the street from each other. In each of these two small
rooms, about 15 feet square, resided between fifteen to twenty-five
men, sleeping and working in shifts. By the mid-1970s these rooms
were almost village property, a focus where Mumbai Apshingekars
meet whether or not they live there. (Other villagers then lived in
the vicinity, in the Worli Police Camp, in Dadar Police Chawls,
etc.) Both varchi and khalchi ali villagers occupy each room, based
on friendships and convenience or on where there was space when
someone happened to move to Mumbai. For many from the village
in Mumbai this space is felt to be part of Apshinge. Conversations
among Mumbai-wallas closely follow everyday events and gossip
from Apshinge. In the mid-1980s a feud simmered between some
of the Mumbai villagers which they could not settle, and a group of
senior men from Apshinge came to listen and resolve it. On another
occasion, the Apshinge sarpanch (village council chairperson) and
another village leader used these Mumbai rooms as their base to raise
funds from Mumbai Apshingekars for a new village high school. But
besides this general concentrated presence of village people, concerns,
and authority in Dadar, some of the structuring of Apshinge as
a village also reaches Mumbai. The routine references, both in the
village and in Mumbai, to the two rooms, name them varchi kholi
and khalchi kholi (room), corresponding, as if naturally, to one of
them being on the first floor and one on the ground floor. Yet what
is most natural here is that this distinctive opposition/combination
of varchi/khalchi is the socially given form of the village society from
which these people originate. It structures how Apshinge villagers
tacitly comprehend their village as given to them as theirs. It thus
sets the two Mumbai village rooms into this village form and indicates
the extent of this image and sense of the village itself as a structured
whole, as if the village is in Mumbai, because as a society with a
particular identity and shape, as composed of varchi/khalchi, it is.
Arms and the World 221
Other aspects of village and rural regional social patterns inform
Mumbai life, and some are especially evident everyday in where, with
whom, and what the villagers working there eat. Men from neigh-
bouring villages usually arrange for meals like the ones they would
get at home by contracting with a woman who is usually the wife or
mother of another worker from their own or a close-by village, or a
woman who is or knows one of their pahune. As men eat together
in these khanavals (common dining arrangements), small regions of
the rural landscape appear in everyday Mumbai activities, and they
are identified as such. Some Apshinge Mumbai workers even carry
from the village large sacks of grain (javar, millet) harvested from
their own fields for their Mumbai meals. Not just village events and
gossip, but village food, village organization, and rural regional social-
izing extend into the dense urban core of industrial Mumbai, as men
with vital and lasting ties to their village populate and animate the
city's factories, transport services, police, and other government jobs.
Much that seems in and of the city, at least for Mumbai and other
industrial centres (for example Pune, Thane, Kolhapur, Sholapur), is
hardly remote to people from villages, no matter how extremely dif-
ferent these things may appear at first.
VILLAGE SOCIAL STRUCTURES VILLAGING THE WORLD
THROUGH LOST TIES
As observed so far, a village world consists of the sustained and sus-
taining ties to life in a village, and it includes parts of the world where
soldiers train, fight, and hope to return to their families in the village,
where village pahune live elsewhere and in the village too, and where
Apshinge's javar, sarpanch, and varchi/khalchi pattern all matter in
Dadar. Yet in addition to the extensive extending embrace of such
village presences, another large part of the world Apshinge joins con-
sists of places full of people whose village ties were short-lived, cut off,
and lost. Having disappeared, such now absent connections present
(or in their disappearance can appear only as if to represent) another
way through which village life affects, indeed produces and so effects,
the composition of its larger world beyond. Consequently, before
concluding, one more significant working of village life beyond the
village borders should be noted despite the difficulty, especially for
an ethnographer, of seeing it.
Obviously, those villagers who have crossed its border and yet re-
appear in the village have some remaining connection there. Likewise,
222 Village Matters
those from Apshinge or any village who have left and never returned,
having broken all ties to their village, are not there to be seen and
are discovered rarely and with much effort. Because social forces and
not only random or personal peculiarities have a part in maintain-
ing or dissolving social relationships, the difference between most of
the relationships that appear and those that have disappeared can be
traced to other differences within village life. Among these, differ-
ences in caste (especially as linked to population size and occupation),
in wealth, and in social resources (these latter two, as aspects of social
class, are also linked to status, group size, and occupation) combine
in effect as another component of village social structure that is at
work in shaping a world beyond. While caste on its own forms much
too elaborate a set of phenomena to review at this point, largely be-
cause in a village it hardly ever matters on its own, a few illustrations
from Apshinge of disadvantages tending to result in detachments and
disappearances, as these contrast with the advantages affecting who
continues to be attached and to appear, depict a more tacit dimen-
sion of village dynamics.18 This is a socially structured and commu-
nity-specific sort of push, unlike more general agrarian or climatic
environmental pressures, which thus also works to village the world
beyond a village.
Caste affiliation itself, at least as displaying an aspect of village
demography and some partial division of labour, indicates many who
are more detachable and more detached from a village. In Apshinge,
the kumbhars, nhavis, parits, sonars, lohars, sutars, vadars, guravs
(potters, barbers, washermen, goldsmiths, iron-workers, carpenters,
masons, even temple priests) are small artisan or service castes from
whom the village today, almost regardless of its local population size,
requires very few specialists to meet its needs. Many in these groups
are unlikely to have enough land resources or a strong enough social
network to hold them in the village. Dalit groups, especially the
smaller ones like the mangs and chambhars (rope-makers and leather
workers) and even some among the larger population of mahars, find
little reason to remain in villages when their working conditions and
social respect are both tough and demeaning. Yet, at the other end of
the caste-status ladder (although rank or hierarchy is not a significant
distinguishing factor among many of the village castes), brahmins in
the districts around Apshinge also rarely feel secure or welcome in
many villages on account of historical and cultural understandings
or prejudices regarding their political and economic roles. In many
Arms and the World 223
villages near Apshinge brahmins suffered attacks and their homes
were burnt in 1948 (in the immediate aftermath of Mahatma Gandhi's
assassination, committed by a Maharashtrian brahmin), and during
the following decade or two many fled the villages for new lives in cities
(such as Satara, Pune, Mumbai, or even abroad). Apshinge still has its
single brahmin family, although as a resident in the village this one
is a relative newcomer, having moved from an adjacent village after
being burned out there in 1948. This family, however, had possessed
the traditional kulkarni (revenue record-keeping) rights in Apshinge
along with a large tract of land there (which was originally the inam
land granted by the state in compensation for kulkarni service); and
the family head strengthened ties to Apshinge in the 1950s and 1960s
as a successful headmaster of the village primary school (and as
benefactor of the land upon which it was built) while he performed
the conventional brahminical duties of reading the year's almanac
and conducting wedding and funeral rites. Among other relatively
wealthy and higher-status castes, there are no longer any vani or teli
(merchant or oil-presser) families in Apshinge, although these castes
were present two generations ago. But each had only one or two
families, and despite their roles in the village agrarian economy, they
were not essential to its agricultural practices and could find better
opportunities in a town.
Part of what must have made such opportunities appear promising
enough to risk leaving a home and native village is the nature of certain
caste-related differences within the village and Maharashtrian society
more generally. That is, brahmins and vanis appear quite different
from those who are marathas, even when this term conveys a broad
multi-caste sense inclusive of the maratha caste, village balutedars,
perhaps even mahars, and some others like ramoshis. The teli caste,
which as a small group associated with a specialized service closely
resembles some of the other balutedar castes (especially the sonar and
sutar), seems distinct from them too, usually categorized instead as an
alutedar, a less crucial set of so-called village servants, with this term
itself phonetically marking both the similarity and the difference in
relation to balutedar.19 For the balutedar castes and some others, such
as ramoshis or vadars, none of whom are maratha in its exclusive
sense, their village status is generally respectable enough not to be
a major factor encouraging permanent departure from Apshinge;
and yet with regard to occupation, landholding, other wealth, and
social resources (that is, class factors themselves affected by caste
224 Village Matters
status and size), it has been difficult for a village like Apshinge to
accommodate the entire increase in the population of these groups.
Especially among the smaller balutedar castes in Apshinge (those
with no more than two households in the village, which are all but the
mali, mang, mulani, and chambhar castes), both family size and caste
solidarity or conflict, as these relate to property holding and to social
privileges and debts within the web of village relationships, weaken
village ties, thus affecting the destiny of individuals, the composition
of the village as a whole, the population of towns and cities beyond,
and the interconnections among all these. In contrast, although many
village men in the larger castes may leave the village for long periods,
many of them retain enduring village ties, probably due to a broader
range of existing or potential village relationships with lineage and
caste fellows and to their castes' larger presence in Apshinge life more
generally.
In sum, village life itself affects advantage and disadvantage, and
thus qualifies and structures attachments to the village. Productive
land, a good house, social connections (friends as well as kin), hon-
our, and the wherewithal to survive adversity and possibly prosper
(which thus includes an option to obtain career employment for cash
outside the village) are some factors that can sustain village roots and
identity as an enduring village attachment. Village social structure is
both a cause and an effect of how these are distributed, and as these
lessen for some villagers, they may leave and not return. That is, who
makes up the cities and towns near and far from Apshinge results sig-
nificantly from what makes the village society what it is. With respect
to what the village loses, Maharashtra, and probably much of India
too, is thus villaged, even though many in Mumbai, Pune, and other
centres that dominate popular image-making, self-understandings,
or scholarship forget, lose, or deny village ties (probably on account
of other structuring factors affecting urban concerns and values).20
The village is a place, if not a world, of productive social forces, a
field of particular constraints and currents, pulls and pushes, vari-
ous manners of inclusion and exclusion, variably aggregating and
differentiating people. It is a space where inclusion and exclusion
themselves are not mutually exclusive, where either may include the
other, where in and out play differently in the whereing of move-
ments from and to, and of practices, processes, and structures that
extend beyond.
Arms and the World 225
THE WORKING, AND THINKING, OF BOUNDS FOR AND
ABOUT THE VILIAGE
For a researcher to miss the lost ties is understandable (although
neither responsible nor excusable), because, unlike the ties that bind,
they are ties that have untied, unbounding the village and disbanding
or abandoning a home and its hold. Less tolerable, however, is
missing the chance to look into and think about village society before
binding the village to and bounding the village within fixed and fixing
categories and logic. Dominant discourses (sophisticated, civilized,
urbane, cosmopolitan voices) too often seem satisfied with limiting or
isolating terms and simplifying or stabilizing oppositions which, even
as they recognize village borders, nonetheless misconstrue what the
borders are and what they do, how they are crossed, and the complex
challenging dynamics that form and maintain them. Other factors
encourage unremembering, even unmembering, villages.
In the account above, I have tried to outline why the borders and
other seemingly defining, delimiting, locating features of a village do
not operate like or effect an outline, a line that marks outer limits
and thereby separates an inside from an outside. If my argument,
necessarily surrendering to the bounds of academic reason, seems
messy and confused, or even in places aggressive and expansionist,
this is because my analysis of village goings-on and a village's
world tries to trace a border that is not an outline. Attending to the
workings of armed forces and social forces should attack and breach
more settled views and concepts. In Apshinge, village lives and village
life move through and interpenetrate a much larger extent than the
confines of any ordinary village map, and they mess up or confuse
other ordinary notions. Yet the point at the end is not some messy
or confusing disorder, but rather the critical challenge of differently
formed and complicating structures, both societal and cognitive or
epistemological, which all give shape to (as they take shape within)
possibly different ways of living.
The Apshinge village borders, as ritually, practically, and also
conceptually marked and crossed, continue to matter and thus con-
firm that the village as a village matters too, as a subject with some
bounds. Yet these bounds appear and work a bit strangely, since the
subject is not quite simply one within bounds and certainly not one
whose identity or character is more evident or more easily identified
with what is most inner to it, that is, with what appears farthest from
226 Village Matters
those bounds that connect or lead to something or somewhere
else. In particular, the bounds here reconfigure how marginality
and centrality may relate to denning, composing, even recognizing
what appears or is identified somewhere (in space or as a place). That
is, for example, what the position and effect of both the maratha
pahune and the balutedars (by caste, all non-maratha) suggest about
Apshinge is that the village itself, or as such, as villagers and others
recognize and reveal it, presents itself and can appear more clearly
at and in respect to its blurry or moving social margins than at or
in its dominant, numerically predominant, historically foundational,
and geographically central, divided core.
This core is the opposition and relation of varchi/khalchi, which
arranges and animates many of the differences, tensions, and connec-
tions that make Apshinge village life what it is. Moreover, as noted, this
division can extend itself to absorb and even present the entire village
in the same oppositional/relational terms and then reach beyond to
inform Apshinge life in Dadar and Mumbai. In contrast, the maratha
pahune and balutedars present no basic opposition, and in collective
effect they often practically overcome, or at least overshadow and
cover, everyday village divisions. As each of these village groupings
appears, that is, when the social difference distinguishing maratha
pahune or balutedar (viz., affine/non-amne or non-maratha/maratha,
respectively) seems salient, a complementary sense of village unity
or wholeness arises at the margin (that is, not at Apshinge's core, not
where the non-affines or marathas predominate). These groupings
express the village as a matter of some social bounds, certainly of the
village and yet not only this.
In brief, the pahune collectively are on the one hand neither
varchi nor khalchi and are on the other neither inside nor outside,
indifferent to (or overcoming) one differentiation and conflating (or
denying) the other. This double ambivalence, essential to their own
definition, disposes them to represent the village itself and some of its
world beyond altogether. Maratha pahune relate to both the Apshinge
Kadams and Bhosles, and yet they originate in other villages; and
some pahune live in and belong to Apshinge, although most whom
this label designates live elsewhere. The balutedars can also in several
ways manifest or signify the village as a whole (such as in their magni
at the ves when pahune from elsewhere try to enter before a wedding);
they do gavki kam, have gavki hakk, and (in a rare instance when an
archaic colonial formulation still fits) compose much of the village
Arms and the World 227
establishment. Yet, as just noted, the balutedars are among the most
detachable in relation to means of sustenance, of material or social
support. Moreover, not only are their ties among fellow villagers
usually weaker, but because most of the balutedar castes are so small
(mostly one or two households) and nearly all consist of just a single
lineage in the village, the Apshinge balutedars' affinal and other same-
caste relations also necessarily connect them elsewhere. This situation,
while implying a different kind of combination of all-village presence
and extra-village links than the maratha pahune exhibit, suggests
nonetheless a formally similar ambivalence regarding their village
marginality.
That is, the maratha pahune and the balutedars are structurally
both more related to what is beyond and more set apart from the core
village division, and thus both these village groupings can appear to
be somewhat less of the village while at the same time more of a whole
within the village. As Apshinge groupings they compose social bounds,
occupying the village community margins, where inside and outside
are juxtaposed and indistinct. Thus, they partly shape and also more
completely represent a where, this village world, that is composed of
those who move, who are or have been coming where-from or may
yet be going where-to, and who thereby partly compose a villaged
world. In this part of Maharashtra the mostly agricultural gav, as a
sign of settled life, and its gavthan, as the main settlement, together
settle, sustain, and even structure themselves through extensive
and embracing movements. Through such challenging forms and
dynamics, a certain gav, notwithstanding how definitely its location
and areal expanse are conceived and known, hardly sits still, or fits
comfortably, within many conventional fixed and fixing conceptual
notions, bounds, and especially oppositions, even those that focus
on such unsettling movements by concentrating them in particular
settings and periods.
THE BOUNDS OF WORKING, AND THINKING,
WITH AND WITHOUT THE VILLAGE
Much in the practices of contemporary worlds, and especially in
recent scholarship concerned with modern or postmodern or cosmo-
politan or global forces, directs attention to the pull of the cities, the
attractions of bright lights, material luxuries, and cultural spectacles,
or at least the sensation and significance of the opportunity and open-
ness of these. In what have been the politically, economically, and
228 Village Matters
culturally dominating areas of the planet over the last century or two,
cities apparently are what's happening and where it's all at, namely
sources of wealth, freedom, power, motion, motivation, and the
values and meanings that really matter; and urban life is what cultures,
concentrates, coordinates, communicates, and then distributes (and
markets) all these. But in areas where two-thirds or more of people
and social life, and probably of the production of general values and
meanings too, are not urban or suburban (especially not industrial,
commercial, or clerical), something more than the pull, the centrip-
etal weight and gravity, of the city or the supposedly non-village
world matters. Pushes from villages form extensions, expansions,
and even expulsions of different practices and people. Villages
mediate and structure these pushes, such that different people are
differently exposed and vulnerable. Indeed, for some a village-
centred push, propelling them into a nearly global orbit, coexists
with village attachments and attractions that bring them back home.
The exciting festive simollangan celebration, commemorating the
regular departure for adventures across the borders, itself manifests
the strength of the village community's desires and expectations for
the soldiers' return.
After all, the pull has made little difference to the Balasaheb Manes
who did not find it hard to keep themselves down on the farm after
sipping the vino rosso of Roma or enjoying similar pleasures in Cairo,
Baghdad, Mandalay, or Hong Kong. Villages survive, actually thrive,
on who returns and what they bring with them. Apshinge village life,
too, depends on those who leave and labour and remit what they can
of their earnings. Yet in addition, by subtraction, its way of life as
a small community consisting of castes, classes, clans, and families
persists in part on account of those who leave and are lost. Within
India and Maharashtra, village forces, centrifugal and centripetal,
help to fill and form and continuously transform non-agrarian
aggregates, ranging from a world metropolis like Mumbai through
major regional centres like Pune as well as the district towns and
local bazaars. All these comprise many who came and still come from
villages which let them go or pushed them out, while many others
living in cities remain held by, or themselves hold on to, their village
homes. In varied ways, with different kinds of people from various
places, different cities are largely villaged and belong to a villaged
world, at least as viewed by and in terms of many villagers, not all of
whom live all the time in villages.
Arms and the World 229
Thus despite the definite borders of a village, evident in relation to
its location and extent and the many social practices that acknowledge
and effectively reproduce these, what villagers and the village are
depends on, comes (and goes) with, crossing over and moving
beyond these bounds. While places are not hard to locate, name, and
focus upon, the space in which they, both places and their people,
live and the world they form appears not to be composed of, that is,
neither experienced nor known as, positions distinguished easily as
inside or outside and measures reckoned easily as near or far. Looked
at critically or imagined apart from habitual categories and logic, this
space includes conditions or potentials that exclude positions that
exclusively distinguish in and out and that exclusively separate near
and far. Despite most villagers living most of their time and most of
their concerns within village borders and with fellow villagers, the
space of villagers and village life includes people and places routinely
excluded from the most evident, apparent, village location and extent.
Beyond yet with Apshinge and its structuring forces, a world is
villaged, a lot of a world.
It is a world where asking first thing of someone not known
'Tumche gav kuthle?' makes sense. This quick, simple, habitual, un-
thought question that combines 'What's your village' with 'Where are
you from' indicates living in, and knowing about, a world that is vil-
laged, where coming from is a matter of having, or at least of having
had, a village. It reflects reasonably, as it also reproduces in practice
(and even reconstructs conceptually), the immediate association of
a who (as in 'Who are you?') with a where and also of a where with
some gav. The gav named in response might be not merely anywhere
in the world, but rather almost any where, any village, town, district,
metropolis, region, or country, with almost any degree of locational
or areal definition or vagueness. Yet the significance is more definite
than vague; it is that a village, the village, or villages somehow both
compose and comprise, make up and contain, a world; it is that any
where in this world, a world of moves where-to and where-from, is
a/the village. Moreover, the data I have assembled above argues that
the village is not just any place in general, but that what Apshingekars,
along with many Mumbaikars, know and experience as much of their
life-world is and long has been made of and by small agrarian villages
with characteristic structural features that make the world villaged in
a fairly specific manner.
 Arms and the World 231
230 Village Matters

hear and interpret in the appropriate replies to 'Tumche gav kuthle?'

For example, something besides, or at least in addition to, indexical
merely a range of relatively marked and unmarked referents or simply
semantic marking or a range of alternative contexts of relevance and
separate contexts of relevance or knowledge presupposes either a
distance (local knowledge or ignorance) is needed to account for
scale of semantic inclusiveness (joining the referents of gav), or some
how replies to 'Tumche gav kuthle?' may range from Apshinge to
amount of social exclusion (separating those who know or care about
Mumbai, or Maharashtra, or India, or even America and for how the
certain things from those who do not), or some combination of these.
significance of such different possibilities relate to each other. The
The village of the world Apshingekars inhabit and the villaging of
common interpretation of any such conversational response as either
this world beyond Apshinge, however, work somewhat differently,
indexing or following from the conversational situation (such as who
by generating, forming, and relating wheres, that is, spacing, placing,
and where the conversing people are and what they know) presupposes
and associating subjects, without everything being necessarily in or
forms of hierarchy or separation, inclusiveness or distance, which
out, included or excluded, near or far, or even known or not known.
depend upon spatial (positional) qualities or compositional logic
Presented summarily thus, my argument seems abstract, sugges-
neither of which is evident, certainly not prominent, in the way the
tively formal, metaphysical, and remote, replacing not only space
world considered above is villaged. In an official manner and obvious
but its logic (and repositioning logic and its space) and differently
on maps or a globe, the inclusive nesting through which mauje
forming a world. But on the contrary, such findings emerge from
Apshinge is in taluka Koregaon in district Satara in Maharashtra State
attempting open-minded and closer contact with villagers' and village
in India in Asia on earth, etc., hierarchically organizes increasingly
practices as well as with what can appear as some differently worlding
encompassing horizons in terms of which people and places can be
processes. Empirical inquiry brings such differences, along with the
identified and located. Proximity and distance, as technologically
movements, structures, and social and historical forces shaping them,
and socially established, also plausibly associate or separate people
into view and brings them to mind. Starting with an ordinary first
in relation to travel networks, communication media, and exchange
question posed throughout Maharashtra and then considering a
practices; and these further delimit contexts of mutual awareness
few aspects of how villagers and village life identify, border, move,
and interest as well as, conversely, some of mutual ignorance.
and extend themselves, I have tried to expose some sense of the place
Thus with respect to either a scale of inclusiveness or a measure of
of a village, what it is as a place, and how it might concern or affect
separation, greater similarity or closeness positively correlates with
other places.
more commonness of experience, concerns, and knowledge. All
As a place, it appears to be bounded, dynamic, structured, and
these relational patterns apparently account for how those who share
extended. Where it is as such a place is some where which plays a part
fewer nested horizons or who come from a greater distance will likely
(through its bounds, dynamics, structures, and the forces pushing
identify themselves in terms of larger entities, the ones more likely
and pulling beyond and back) in forming a space or world of experi-
recognizable from afar. However, all these relational patterns depend
ence and knowledge which incorporate and express different forms,
on distinctions of in/out or near/far, which the structure of a villaged
some being different from what I thought I knew about space (and
world denies or at least overcomes.
the world and even logic) before I found Apshinge and kept hearing
If some of Apshinge is in some of Mumbai, or if village soldiers
'Tumche gav kuthle?' The significant difference between opposing
return to Apshinge enriched or damaged by Rome, Malaya, Sri Lanka,
and posing differently, or the possible scope of posing itself, even
Kashmir, or Nagaland, then these connections and movements do not
forces re-posing, re-wording, re-thinking my simply put initial
merely upset official hierarchies or practical measures of distance, but
concern about how the village 'might concern or affect other places'
could replace them and reconfigure what are significant places and
(to quote both my last sentence in the preceding paragraph and the
interrelations in a different kind of space, or world. Such re-placing
penultimate sentence of the second paragraph of this chapter). These
need not completely efface nor effectively replace all that must be
places turn out to be not quite so very other, not as I had first thought
presupposed in using indexical marking or contextual relevance
of them. Structures and forces within a village and the people there,
to account for a range of good replies to a single question. Yet to
232 Village Matters
too, appear significant and effective in constructing and determin-
ing much that is beyond. But this is hardly grasped when deeply
ingrained patterns of thought and the research practices these affect
go on opposing village and city, agriculture and culture, parochial/
traditional/backward and cosmopolitan/modern/progressive, and
when they unawaredly and categorically hold to the distinctions
between inside/outside and near/far.
Village lands and village life, while bounded, are not self-contained,
much less self-sufficient or autonomous. They have led me to wonder
how their concerns and their forms could extend and apply to acade-
mic terrain and study, which too often seem more self-contained and
rigidly bounded than either the worlds of their objects or the norms
of free inquiry require. Soldiers and scholars fight different battles,
with different sorts of opponents, and often with very different reso-
lutions with regard to returning home or maintaining attachments
to a community of origins. Farmers and scholars tend different fields
and cultivate different produce, some for consuming and enjoying
on one's own or with intimates, some perhaps for other markets, and
some possibly just for show. Labourers all, notwithstanding differ-
ent means and social relations of production, they operate in and
depend upon small communities in larger worlds. The demands of
working (as forces of production, including the ends or values in and
of producing) and those of social life (including social reproduction)
necessitate taking much for granted, especially about the conditions,
habits, structures, and significance moulding the work and life. A
bit of a different endeavour, involving interruption, imagination,
possibly even a reflective and critical break, must be enlisted to
penetrate what routine work and living take for granted. Soldiers
and farmers cut into their ground, shovelling, mining, ploughing,
weeding. Were scholars to come closer to villagers and attend to the
communities and worlds they inhabit and traverse, perhaps some
different ways would have a chance to extend, dig up, and help un-
dermine and uproot much in their more ethereal grounds. Stretching
and flexing their arms, or arming themselves differently, scholars of
India could begin to feel and perhaps to embrace the differences that
relate the villagers and village life to the larger spaces they inhabit,
inform, exhibit, and express. Coming better to know 'gav kuthle' and
the nature of such spaces and their world, we could then determine
in what ways the village is a realm we can ignore as irrelevant to
Arms and the World 233
what we deem significant and in what ways it matters critically for
our scholarly concerns, with its extensive effects and embracing arms
encompassing most of India and reaching beyond.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This chapter draws from fieldwork which began with doctoral research in a
village in Satara District in 1975-6, and which continued in brief visits to the
village in 1986-8,1995-6, and 2003-4. This research was funded by Fulbright,
Social Science Research Council (NY), American Institute of Indian Studies,
and Wenner-Gren Foundation grants. The original draft of this chapter was
a talk for the Ninth International Conference on Maharashtra ('Maharashtra:
Looking Inward, Looking Outward') at Macalester College, June 2001. What
is published here is an abridged version of a much longer essay that should
be publicly accessible soon; without the extraordinarily understanding and
intelligent work of editors Mines and Yazgi, the present version would not be
here at all. I am deeply grateful to all who made this study possible, especially
those from village Apshinge. To the memory of villager Balkrishna Govind
Mane, who died in late 1995,1 dedicate these reflections.
NOTES
1. Here/there, by which I suggest something like a place, although perhaps
one not quite as definitely or clearly located, or named, or bounded as
place would often be taken to be.
2. The 'Where are you from?' sense includes a 'Who are you?' factor. Many
social categories of interest to villagers, including caste (jati) and other
status associations, interrelate nominally and practically with places,
although this is a complex matter to be dealt with elsewhere.
3. I observe near the end of this chapter that my data show something
more than and quite different from a hierarchy of contexts (or a scale
of markedness) governs the range of wheres to which the responses to
'Tumche gav kutle' correspond.
4. These population data count persons somewhere and depend on time,
actually a moment in time, to negate their movement in space. A census
of people in a village at any time does not produce the number of people
who are then that village's villagers, namely all those who regardless
of current location would in most situations answer the 'Tumche gav
kuthle?' question by naming that village.
5. I never discussed this, or wandered much in the outlying fields, with
women.
6. Plots of land outside the gavthan were numbered in the old survey and
are still referred to as sarve nambarland, and these were non-residential.
234 Village Matters
Over the past several generations, many villagers have built houses
in sarve nambar land, most of these on plots adjacent to the gavthan,
which thus expand what appears to be the central settlement area. The
old gavthan bounds, however, remain well-known. The colloquial terms
in ran ani than derive from aranya, which usually designates forest, that
is, unsettled area, and thana (or sthana), a fixed place, stand, or stance,
which is part of the word gavthan and which names it in this phrase.
7. The term ves may refer to and evoke the doorways through a village wall,
a gavkus, which no longer exists, but which people in some places still
recall, although I never heard talk of one for Apshinge.
In the past few years in villages and towns everywhere I have travelled
in Maharashtra, another kind of gate-building has become common.
Villages and neighbourhoods (or some associations or institutions in
them) are erecting archways over roads (although not always actually
arches, often just a pair of columns joined by a large horizontal beam)
in metal, brick, or concrete, sculpted and painted with figures, slogans,
and welcome messages on behalf of the place or the sponsor. In 2004
Apshinge, through an ad hoc association of past and present soldiers
from the village, erected its pravesh-dvar, entry-door (although actually
an open entryway, since there is no door to be closed), and there is
at least one of these new structures in most adjacent villages. The
phenomenon deserves more careful attention, but here I should add
that these are generally not located at a ves to the village, and except for
the ceremony that inaugurates them, they are not, at least not yet, sites
for other ritual activities. Apshinge's pravesh-dvar goes across the spur
road into the village just as it intersects the Rahimatpur-Vaduj road, and
so is at some distance from the gavthan. Also interesting to consider,
and consistent with a main theme of this chapter, is that along with
improved roads and increased ease and amount of travel, which is to
say along with seemingly much greater movement across the landscape
of concern here, collective efforts to present definite named places and
some ostentatious boundary-marking signifying their location have also
expanded. In addition, simple official welcome-signs now name places,
often along with sponsoring persons or political parties, throughout the
countryside, making local knowledge about which village is where quite
visible to any passer-by, which was not at all true in the 1970s.
8. During my visit to Apshinge in 2003-4, I saw for the first time this
bhet, meeting-greeting between the parties to a wedding, take place
somewhere other than at the ves. Several times it occurred close to
the house where the wedding mandap (canopy) had been erected, and
this may relate to the arrival of many in the wedding party in cars and
tractors as well as to the decline of the collective balutedar demand
depicted in the next paragraph.
Arms and the World 235
9. The terms listing these balutedars are caste and occupational names,
respectively, for blacksmith, temple-priest (non-brahmin), leather-
worker, Muslim butcher, carpenter, goldsmith, and ropemaker. In my
doctoral dissertation (Schlesinger 1986), I describe how balutedars can
represent the village as a whole (or in some of its contingent wholeness)
while living and appearing, even disappearing, at its margins. The section
' The Working, and Thinking, of Bounds for and about the Village' below
suggests some of the central marginality of non-marathas in Apshinge.
10. Translated from Chendavankar (1966: 46).
11. Known by two names playing on the same sounds, the prati sarkar
(parallel or counter-government) or the patri sarkar (government by
war-club or mace) was a guerrilla campaign that destroyed or seized
most imperial governmental institutions (railroad, post office, judicial
and revenue administration, etc.) in Satara District between 1942-4.
12. I follow Sontheimer's interpretation of such hero-stones (Sontheimer
1982): each of these circa fourteenth-century carved steles is for a hero
killed in battle (and not just in a cattle-raid, as indicated on stones
found in other places). Sontheimer saw my photos of the Apshinge hero-
stones and confirmed to me their likely dating, in relation to the Shiva
temple nearby, as from the Yadava period, perhaps fourteenth century
or slightly earlier.
13. The village discussed here must not be confused with another village
in Satara District also named Apshinge. This other village, in Satara
Talukua, is popularly known as 'Military Apshinge' because of the high
proportion of villagers who have served since World War I.
14. At this point I should note explicitly for those who make presumptions
about occupational specialization in rural India, based on reasonable
inferences from common (mis)understandings of caste or perhaps from
British colonial elaborations of caste and race, that nearly every caste
(jati) in Apshinge sends men into military service. Although marathas
may be considered kshatriya (in the varna classification, and hence
rulers and warriors) and have been labelled a 'martial race', Apshinge's
soldiers include people from mulani, sutar, parit, mahar, chambhar,
mali, ramoshi, and even the brahmin families, as well as marathas in
this term's narrow sense.
15. A detailed discussion of pahune in (and/or out) of Apshinge appears in
Schlesinger (1986). In brief, there are pahune who, as mentioned, come
to belong to the village as a result of an uxorilocal marriage (where the
husband moves to the home of the wife and her parents), the husband
thus becoming ghar-javai, a son-in-law to the house and a pahuna
(singular of pahune) in the village. The progeny of this marriage who
remain in Apshinge (that is, usually the male descendants) are regarded
there as fellow villagers (and they have houses and usually land in the
 Arms and the World 237
236 Village Matters

village) and identify themselves as Apshingekars (claiming it as their villages several or many generations ago rarely forget what and where
mulgav, village of origin). But neither their status as pahune nor origins their ancestral village was, although within the villages of origin, people
elsewhere are forgotten (not ever as far as I, along with the villagers, can forget rather soon, that is, even in the first generation afterwards, those
determine). The pahune of a village who are there (and not permanently who departed for good. Another difference, ironic in relation to the
resident in another village) continue to be distinguished by their clan one just noted, is that so many of those who study cities and produce
affiliation, that is, a distinguishing surname or by other distinctive what passes for scholarly knowledge about them become so absorbed
ways of referring to them. These include terms appended to personal in what appears distinctively urban (or modern or cosmopolitan) that
names which use either the name of the village from which they or they forget to attend to what many urbanites, both old and new, do
their male ancestor came, or a kin-term labelling an affine, or even not entirely forget, namely their non-urban origins and tales of their
the word pahuna itself, for example Babu Sapkar, Sripu Targavkar families' move to the city and what happened to their village relations.
(Sap and Targav are other villages), Vitthal daji (brother-in-law), and
Ganpu pahuna.
16. For some rituals a pahuna is required, and while one who is an affine
might be most proper, often any pahuna, that is, someone not of
one's own clan and with whom a marriage relationship is not pro-
hibited, will do. The notion of the pahune of the village as a whole, a
general village-based category, can appear on an occasion when either
Apshinge Kadams or Bhosles need a pahuna and any in the village
can suffice, whether or not it is a pahuna (affine) of one's own house
or lineage.
17. The most prominent account in English to my knowledge is Carter
(1974) and for another village in Satara District. A broader account is in
Marathi in Dandekar and Jagtap (1963). Additional detail on Apshinge's
varchi/khalchi alis and the fission/fusion dynamics characterizing
relations between Kadams and Bhosles is available in Schlesinger (1986:
Ch. 5) and Schlesinger (1988).
18. The valuation exhibited here by judging detachment from the village as
a disadvantage and more enduring attachment as an advantage reflects
a widespread, though not universal, village point of view that regards
village life as superior to alternatives.
19. Maratha itself is a term that names a caste in a rather exclusive sense,
and at the same time is one of the most variable and inclusive terms
as it designates several different multi-caste groupings depending on a
context of usage. Caste affiliation and status cannot be dismissed from
a consideration of differences in degrees of attachment or detachment
from the village community, but no concise summary of a caste effect
seems possible because of the complications of caste itself. Some of
the difficulty concerning the distinction of alutedars, in relation to
balutedars, can be observed in the dictionary entry for balutedar in
Molesworth( 1857: 567).
20. The forgetting or loss of such ties, like any forgetting or loss, is also socially
structured, in that different kinds of people forget and lose differently.
One difference in India is that people in cities whose ancestors left