Arbitrary

Recently my staff had to survey in a village called Gahmar, which according to locals has the distinction of being "the largest village in Asia." I was surprised to find that this claim was corroborated by Wikipedia. I'd highly suggest reading through this very informative and "off course" well-articulated article. But I'm not sure that I find the claim very meaningful. It looks like the locals decided to clump 23 villages together and call it one name, or replace the word "town" with "village", in order to earn the distinction of being the largest village in Asia. I also don't know if I believe Wikipedia's estimate of 2 lakh residents, since the Census data that I am using for sampling cites a number 90% lower for the village's population. (Off course, the Census data is 10 years old, but this would imply a birth rate that is high even for rural India). Finally, I went down to the area and found that no one was saying the "very famous saying" that is quoted in the article.

But the area, known as Z(J)amania, is surprisingly different than the rest of Ghazipur. It is the only part of the district south of the Ganga. There are vast fertile plains where crops grow on big farms, and so the villages are a lot more spread out than north of the Ganga, which I think contributes to them being larger and more difficult to find survey respondents in. Right now, before the rainy season, these plains are pretty dry, and we were sweating a lot since it is now "summer" in north India (I completely reject the local definition of summer, since in my opinion - no - since according to meteorological fact, the dates of summer are fixed between the equinox and the solstice. But everyone here, even Virginia, is going along with this arbitrary and painfully subjective notion that summer is whenever it is "warm"). I saw a dust devil the other day just as we were leaving a village - a sand tornado speeding across the wheat fields. Thankfully it is cool enough at nights that the ceiling fans are enough. Plus I'm a Florida boy, sun in my veins and all that, so I can stand whatever heat this country can throw at me.

By the way, if anyone has noticed in the last few posts, the most common transliteration of Ghazipur is inaccurate - a more accurate transliteration would be "Gajipur" (or typing using our favorite Hindi font, "gaajeepur"). Same with Behea, the field location of Virginia's project; a better transliteration would be Bihiyan. Anyone doing field research in rural India will find that trying to match village names, whether written in English or even in Hindi, is an incredibly frustrating and time-consuming process. Especially when half of the villages are Rampur or Salempur, and the other half are (name) "urf" (name).