ABSTRACT
I caught a taxi on a cold February morning from Jammu to Srinagar where I had planned to conduct an ethnography of a craft practice. It was a ride I shared with six other passengers, some of whom struck up a conversation with me as soon as our vehicle began to move. This was more out of curiosity of seeing a woman travelling alone on an eight hour long journey. I carried a copy of Orhan Pamuk’s novel My Name Is Red, a murder mystery set around Turkey’s miniature artists during the Ottoman Empire. Even though nothing in the fiction of the painters could reveal the lifeworld of the craftsmen that I was going to enter, the similarity in the areas of apprenticeship and the sly manners of favouritism and secrecy did not go unnoticed. Carefully folded inside the book was a piece of paper on which I had scribbled ‘my methodology’ – a step by step chart of how I planned to enter the field, find key people, find a host, meet the bureaucrats, traders in the market etc. Once in a while, I took a break from the novel to scribble a new thought to improve my plan. It was only when the taxi stopped at the mid-way that an octogenarian co-passenger enquired about the purpose of my visit and was surprised to know that a woman had charted a plan to study walnut wood carving. Little did I know that over the course of my ethnographic fieldwork on walnut wood carving craft, I would be dealing with many such surprise encounters, some pleasant and many vociferous. Aligning to the anthropological requirement of spending a long time in the field, I had planned to conduct the fieldwork in a walnut wood carving karkhana (workshop) in 2014. This chapter is the methodological retrospection of socialities that I encountered and diversions that took shape. It describes the trajectory that my ethnographic fieldwork took.
