ABSTRACT
The municipality of Jahazpur is the administrative seat of a sub-district (tehsil) in provincial Rajasthan. With numerous government offices, and a hospital, Jahazpur is a regional hub for services unavailable in villages. Jahazpur's bus stand and streets are crammed with shopping opportunities of every kind. Rural and town lives have long intersected commercially in these lively markets. Twenty-first-century Jahazpur culture exists in perpetual engagement with national and transnational flows of goods, images, jobs, news, money, and much more. It is networked both literally and figuratively. Yet Jahazpur is undeniably and self-consciously a ‘provincial’ place: mofussil, or — as local people are much more likely to say, using the English words — a ‘backward area’.
