Research woes and wonder

''It is only after you have come to know the surface of things, that you can venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface of things is inexhaustible.'' Italo Calvino, speaking of the pigeons and their view of the city in Mr. Palomar.

I remind myself again and again that I am not on the Great Nomad Hunt, running around the desert looking for some mythical, sufficiently exotic peoples. I am thirty years too late for that. Its not possible with my comfortable,relativist, post-colonial, post-modern, subaltern, anti-authoritarian leanings and my own little Edward Said whispering sweet nothings in my ear.

So, yes, I am trying to learn about nomadic people, about their way of life, about that intransient nomadic ethos in a place where the nomads have all but disappeared. But I am also grateful just to talk about ideas of nomadism, to understand how modern Indians think and talk about Jogis and ghummakers; how communities write stories about each other, write and sing each other´s histories for better or worse, fact or fiction. There certainly is a lot of fiction.

History may be in the details, but it is the stories which move us. Again, I find myself a collector of stories. There is no fact checking in storytelling. Merely listening, filtering, contextualizing. All of these words are loaded. There is no truth, only references. Each comment contains its own truth. Even the most complete lie serves a purpose, fulfills an intent, betrays a motivation to conceal, to mislead, to sway. I am exhausting myself with an inexpressible number of whys and hows. So, I content myself for a while not with order or meaning, but with narrative.

I grow fat with chai and discourse.

I spend my dazs doing interviews, driving around the desert visiting villages with Jathu Singh on his motorbike, and my evenings with Fulli and my bhopa friends, making roti and subzee and playing with the kids. I wonder if I still expect any great insight and I wonder how this ´project` will come together. I struggle to find coherence in these great leaps in space, time and culture. The more time I spend in India, the more I learn and the less I understand. I feel like I have nothing but fractured knowlege, made almost entirely of exceptions, particularities and contradictions.

How can I make generalizations out of all these faces and stories and lives when I feel that it is impossible and pointless to do so? How to convey these teachings, the wisdom these people have so generously shared with me?

I hold in my hands a mess of notes, sketches and poorly composed snapshots - portraits with blurred backgrounds and captions written in scripts I can hardly pronounce.