Chaube of Mathura || Part 7 of 8

Reality

Masti is an emotion that adds significance to Chaube experience; experience in practices—drinking marijuana, eating good food, singing hymns, and doing physical exercises—engenders masti. Each practice, when fore-grounded as a mastexperience, resonates with the background experience and meanings of the others. All are part of a complex emotion,masti, that culturally constitutes for the Chaubes an ideal of personhood, the mastram. Because masti is produced and reproduced in cultural practices and because these practices are embedded in a historically contingent political economy, the experience of masti varies with changes in those practices and in political economy.

There are realities of daily life that for many, if not most, make the ideal difficult to achieve and dilute the feelings of masti they may experience. First, being mast—despite pretensions that the ideal mastram is totally unconcerned about his source of food, clothing, and shelter—requires a certain style of life. Few Chaubes today, and probably few in the past, are truly satisfied with what they have, and money is a constant worry and desire. As one Chaube said to me, "There is little mast in being poor. If one is hit on the hand he can publicly cry; but if one is hit by poverty, he hides alone in shame." There are, moreover, constant pressures to spend one's wealth on dowries for daughters; on feasts at sacred thread ceremonies, marriages, and deaths; and on the many onerous gifts required for relatives at various times of the year. Reciprocity is as often a burden as a boon.

Not all clients are wealthy, and lucky, pampered pilgrim priests are few. In recent years, with bus travel and modern guest houses and hotels, the link between client and pilgrim priest is wearing thin, and, it is said, clients are becoming less generous. More than this, the ambiguity of donations (danadaksina^[*]), the traditional source of Chaube livelihood, is becoming more apparent, more real, and more deeply felt. Gifts to Brahmans bring merit to the giver, and, although the Chaubes have the right to receive them, they also carry negative connotations of dependence on the whim and fancy of others and of beggary (bhikh mangna^[*]). Indeed, some very few Chaubes will admit that their occupation is begging, a demeaning occupation, especially when begging turns into dunning for donations. Chaubes categorize themselves as vrttisvar^[*](those who have enough hereditary clients to support them without begging) and rojgari (those who daily hunt for pilgrims and new clients). Rojgari have a lower status than vrttisvar; this distinction makes explicit the implicit contradiction between receiving religious donations as a right and begging for them as a need.

Chaubes also categorize themselves as kulin (refined, noble, educated) and panda^[*] (pilgrimage priest). As more and more young men become educated and take up other occupations (many interestingly enough in commerce, banking, and accounting) this distinction gains in significance with the kulins having more respect in society at large. The distinction is actually, as well as symbolically, present in the spatial separation of bazaar from bathing ghat. Pandascongregate in and around Vishram Ghat, but kulins sit in the shops of Chhata Bazaar where Chaubes dominate in the seconds and cut-piece cloth market.

A young educated Chaube now in another occupation said to me, "In the Arthashastra does it say there is any place for mendicant holy men? They get food by begging, but there is need for more things than that, such as medicine. If you have money, then you will always have food." In the context of the conversation the implication was clear: beggary was demeaning and insecure; only with a secure occupation could one live with the essentials of life. Another educated young man, echoing many like him, said, "I don't like this work of begging. Even now, if there is a family register (bahi) of clients, then on the death of its owner it is divided among his sons. Thus, over the generations almost nothing is left. Who can live from that?" His pessimism was in marked contrast to the optimism of young, educated, and well-employed white-collar and professional Chaubes whom I met in a modern hotel in Mathura and on a commuter train in Bombay; all were truly mast as they shared marijuana in the evening after work. The new generation is not foresaking masti; rather, it is transforming its meaning and actualization in the context of new practices and a new political economy.

Those who are poor or who beg lack the means to be truly mast, and, more important, they have little honor (izzat) before peers and others. Just as there is little masti without money, so too there is little masti without honor. Much pressure to spend lavishly on life-cycle ceremonies comes from the desire not to show a poor face and suffer dishonor before others. Both the display of, wealth and the ability to engage in competitive reciprocity mean that a man can preserve his honor and name before others. Without honor masti is diluted, even destroyed, by feelings of shame, insecurity, jealousy, and inferiority. Such social pressures and values, as well as such consequent negative emotions, only add to the poignancy of the mastram ideal itself. It is known as much by absence as by presence.