Chance brought together Deepti and Anjana, two researchers from different universities and backgrounds conducting fieldwork in Kozhikode. In a two-part reflective piece, they write about how their shadowing each other during fieldwork resulted in friendship, but also the intellectual quest of reading their field sites in a new light.
Deepti Sreeram and Anjana S
Read part 2 by Anjana here.
For doctoral students in universities, collaborations linger as acknowledgements in books or monographs where students remember to thank contributions, sometimes in the order of grants and residencies, or in the nature of an array of near and dear people. These necessary mentions of the community of people, texts, places and objects that made the thesis or the book possible indicate how collaborations often function in the background when the single-authored project emerges. In this essay, our reflections on collaborating depart from such descriptions to place acknowledgements at the forefront of our projects. While we are still making sense of the field and miles away from writing up the field, we document how we, as two Malayali women, made sense of our relationships within our field sites in Kerala. We show how an acknowledgement of how we saw each other in the field and how navigating two affective registers – being “pavam” and showing “ego” (explained later in this essay)- made us reflect on the selves we revealed and concealed in Kozhikode.
We are students from two different disciplines and universities. While Anjana is a second-year graduate student of Habitat Studies interested in looking at how the city of Kozhikode grows, Deepti is a fourth-year doctoral student of Anthropology who is ethnographically studying a college in Kozhikode. By age and caste, neither of us are proximal to each other. Our methods too, within the field, have been markedly different. Deepti identified collaboration as a helpful opportunity for fieldwork networking, Anjana imagined collaboration as a different pair of eyes that can offer a distinct perspective of the field. While neither of us was wrong in our preliminary assumptions, this essay shows how working together helped us navigate two affective registers (pavam/ ego) that we encountered in our field. These registers appeared to us in our field encounters and were also mapped onto our bodies by our interlocutors in our fieldsite. They were also expressions that we both had frequently encountered in our growing-up years at home in Kozhikode as well as outside.
Deepti’s notes:
Field site: A college in Kozhikode, Kerala.1
In fieldwork, the ethnographer is expected to interact with their interlocutors, while building a relationship that allows them immersion into the fieldsite. Though I was averse to the feelings of excitement that ethnographers often shared about doing fieldwork, I was aware that my resistance to interacting with the outside was also not helpful in the long run. It is in this context that I began to think about fieldwork through the lens of what it could do for me. Beyond the needs of data collection, could fieldwork help me get out and interact more?
It is with this goal in mind that I started doing the painful exercise of getting out in Kozhikode. As someone who had lived in the Gulf for a significant portion of my life, I had known Kozhikode as an outsider. Arriving in Kozhikode at the age of 13 for my higher studies had made the city become home to my angst over losing a life elsewhere. Apart from seeing the city as “mosquito-prone” and “inferior”, I was also repelled by the people I encountered in the city. The taunts over not knowing enough Malayalam, the repeated reference to my “jaada” (arrogance) and the marking of my identity as a “non-mallu” had made the relationship with the place fraught. Given this history, I was struggling to get my foot out of the door even after reminding myself that this was the objective of my fieldwork. One day, when an interlocutor had been kind enough to direct me to a potential interviewee, he told me rather playfully that I might have to do the balancing act of “ego massage”. “Nalla ego aanu”, they said in reference to the person. While I had laughed in response, the expectation to manage an “ego”–a term that is very commonplace in Kerala–had brought memories of the battles I had fought as a teenager. What if I did bring the ego of the person out? How am I supposed to engage with that?
Between “ego” and “pavam”: A reading
Much of my childhood in Kerala had been profoundly associated with the word “ego”. My mother, who grew up and graduated in Kerala, would often evoke it in arguments as something that was visible to her eyes and absent from her own life. In my field site, ego was often circulated in the everyday in reference to other Malayalis who were arrogant or close to power or who would not assimilate well into the system. In offices, ego was recalled as central to how one managed actors who occupied hierarchical positions within the space. A counterforce to ego was a reference to how pavam someone was. For example, in a conversation with someone, they revealed how they conducted fieldwork as a pavam who did not know more. This practice of letting the ego recede to the extent that the field and the interlocutors would open up and gladly share information was a stance that ethnographers took especially in the first few days of the fieldwork. It seemed to me then that to survive fieldwork I would have to, in some ways, navigate between being a pavam in the field while encountering ego outside.
Though ethnographic research methods do not recommend such ossified stances where one imagines passivity and people-pleasing behaviour within the ethnographer and ego outside, I was not in an emotional state (given my history with the city) to imagine a different possibility in Kozhikode. Perhaps the nearness of the place, along with the memories I carried within had also created such absolute ideas. It was when I was grappling with the difficulty of engaging with these affective registers that I met Anjana at the archives. Unlike my hesitation with walking aimlessly in the field, Anjana seemed like someone who did the job of field-loitering quite well. In addition to moving between unfamiliar people and spaces, Anjana would take the bus or train and travel to the city from Vadakara–47 km away from the city–for her fieldwork. She would then go from the railway station to Velimadukunnu, take the bus to Calicut University (situated in the outskirts of Kozhikode) and even stand and talk to people at the beach or Mananchira for hours. By venturing to every possible public space in Kozhikode, Anjana had hung out and loitered in her field like an experienced fieldworker. Her commitment to work where distance or alone-ness did not seem daunting blew me away on the first conversation. It also immediately made me ask Anjana if she would be open to letting me shadow her as she went about fieldwork in Kozhikode.
I was introduced to shadowing as a method in my classroom. While there was no practical demonstration of what it would mean to shadow someone else, my peers and I were eager to execute some of it during fieldwork in Kerala. A friend and I, for example, planned how we could visit each other’s sites–his site in Thrissur and mine in Kozhikode–to enliven our fieldwork experience. With another more experienced peer who worked in Kochi, I proposed shadowing to learn from her. In these plans, shadowing appeared as a practice that one could adopt with a Malayali batchmate, peer or friend who one already knows. I did not imagine then how such an approach could also be equally, if not more, nourishing with a colleague like Anjana with whom I had no previous relationship.
Although our initial attempts at a shadowing exercise did not materialise immediately, we managed to successfully arrange a meeting in May 2024, three months after our meeting at the archives. After arranging to meet at the GST Bhavan, Mananchira, the two of us decided that we could undertake a mapping exercise of the city by foot. While I had to map the educational sites in Kerala, Anjana wanted to survey the distribution of hospitals and malls in the city.
In retrospect, our meeting point, the GST Bhavan, Mananchira in Kozhikode was somewhat symbolic of how our different vantage points and eventual meeting at a common point could help us make sense of our field. While I arrived at the side entrance of the building, Anjana had been waiting for me at the main gate. The two of us then took the circular journey of meeting at a common point. A committee member had once explained to me how walking narratives in my field site might be useful in capturing space as well as conversations that emanated through such tours. With Anjana, the narrative emerged as soon as we made our way through Mananchira Square, the city’s prominent heritage spot as well as shopping hub. As we zigzagged through the crowds occasionally pausing to cross a road, Anjana would explain how she was an expert at calculating the distance at which a vehicle came while she crossed the road. I would in response explain how I was absolutely incapable of gauging and had often stood paralysed at the zebra crossing. Between such conversations on our fears related to movement, we also confessed our collective academic anxieties and even shared our thoughts on caste and our respective locations. Anjana’s upper-caste location along with my lower-caste one were evoked as we walked under the overbridge amidst the fragrance of biriyani emanating from the famous Paragon restaurant nearby. The turn towards the beach and our subsequent rest on a bench made us also reveal bits and parts of our home contexts. At the end of this tour from Mananchira to Kozhikode beach, we had walked nearly six kilometres and been sufficiently sunburnt.
Towards Shadowing and Multiple authorship
The success of the mapping by walking and the ease of navigating the city with someone else opened certain possibilities that I could not have fathomed earlier. The first instance of it became visible when we walked into the office at Mananchira during our walking tour. While I had seen the dilapidated building before and had chosen to ignore it in the past when I walked along Mananchira Park, Anjana’s description of the office and its history made me wonder how such buildings had failed to catch my interest when I had navigated the city on our own.
Since the office’s future development was tied to city planning, Anjana was looking forward to speaking with an official in the office. As we made our way in with much confidence, the office staff inside asked what we wanted and if we had spoken to “Sir”. Initially, the official inside was a bit defensive upon seeing us. But listening to Anjana’s soft and naive tone and her explanation of her project, the official was eager if not extraordinarily generous to share and make her understand what was happening concerning the office’s future. Looking consistently at Anjana’s face while describing the protests that characterised the office’s future, it appeared to me that the official was more warm towards her than me. I also felt that the motivation to open up to her stance was also a result of how Anjana seemed like a tired and eager young student.
Anjana expressed a similar observation about me when she saw my swift authoritarian response to a guard standing at a college gate. To his enquiry on where we were going, I had dropped “Principaline kaanan povva” (to meet the principal) as a terse response to close any further interrogations on permissions. This was, indeed, not true. I had arrived at the college without prior permission to visit the premises. Noting my tone, Anjana explained how she might have been “stuck” in such situations and not had the wherewithal to respond with such immediacy. In both these circumstances, I noticed how I had read Anjana’s softness and youth as being pavam and how despite my best intentions to avoid “ego”, Anjana could read into my response to the security guard. In my subsequent conversations with Anjana on how we navigated the field, she mentioned how being a pavam often made her feel infantilised. Like others, I had also immediately identified her age, her young and thin self along with her soft voice, as an indicator of her being less difficult. I had not considered how this reading of mine could be similar to the way the field perceives her. Between cups of tea and snacks, when Anjana spoke of her home and the battles she had waged home and around, I realised how she had been vigilant and protective of her freedom.
The readings I studied in class have spoken of how the field disrupts you just as you disrupt the field. However, these readings speak from the perspective of imagining fieldwork as a relation between the lone ethnographer and their interlocutors. In such descriptions of the method, the ethnographer is expected to be aware of what the field sees through their limited engagements with their interlocutors. In contrast to this method of being reflexive, our collaboration and engagement with each other’s field allowed us to mirror each other. By shadowing each other and seeing our doctoral projects through the eyes of “the Other”, we were also foregrounding the potential of writing PhDs together.
In the next part of this essay, Anjana will reflect on her experience of fielding in Kozhikode.
I got really excited while reading this article. Really good!! Hope to see more from you.