A few months later…
August 11, 2008 at 11:33 am (India)
Tags: Delhi, Humayan's Tomb, Jama Masjid, Red Fort
What do we Love?
August 8, 2008 at 10:27 pm (India)
Tags: India
At times it strikes me as a somewhat troublesome predicament, loving India. Specifically, being an India-loving Westerner. I cringe at the cliched implications of such a status at the same time as I rebel against it, wanting people to know that the stereotype doesn’t apply to me. Wanting, in my insecurity about unspoken condescension, very specific people, i.e. Indians who write critically about India, to know what it is I love and why. And to know that it’s not all about Me. But why this inquiet need to justify?
Perhaps, a) because there is so much not to love, to be appalled and enraged by, and b) because, inevitably, much of my response to India does stem from how it makes me feel.
It’s much easier to succinctly articulate the aspects of India that I dislike and many of which I abhor because, while each contains multiple layers of context-based difference and subtlety, the broad categories are so looming, so visible, so obvious. The poverty, the depravation, the suffering and the disturbing ignorance and neglect of those who suffer by the majority of the upwardly mobile classes; the social strictures; the corruption; the violence against, the rape of, women; the state-sponsored minority-targeting violence; the environmental disrespect and degredation; the racism; the overwhelming conservatism and sexual repression that lends a wildness to the eyes and the hands of drunken men; the denial and willful ignorance that inhibits acknowledgement and discussion of so much of the above.
And yet. These flaws, these wailing tragedies, are so easy to denounce, so unavoidably repellant. But they will never keep me away. Because they are not all.
They’re not the head-spinning, exhausting, exhilarating, inescapable, inspiring, incessant explosion of life and humanity in all its glorious, heart-swelling-heart-breaking light and noise. They are not the hospitality, the invitations to homes that follow a two-minute chat. They are not the shy smiles, the giggles, the instant sometimes transient sometimes enduring friendships. They are not the acceptance of hard work in order to achieve ambitions, or the sharing of homespun philosophies to that effect from young men and women who don’t expect life to hand them anything on a plate. They are not at worst silent resignation, at best laughter in the face of trivial daily adversity. They are not the chai-wallahs and mithai shops on every corner. They are not the unceasing life of the trains. They are not the chaos and the extraordinary sense of liberation engendered in a traveller from the West who is suddenly expected to push, to dispense with please and thank you, to let her backpack block the aisle, to share her seat with two other people but also to stand up for herself when necessary. They are not Thomas in the canteen at Varkala station insisting we share his biryani. They are not the wondrous reaction when the white girl speaks Hindi. They are not the tapping into a joyous part of myself that can perhaps only be accessed in the midst of an environment so apart from home. They are not a hundred thousand different landscapes, each with its own language, its own people, its own food, religion, music, colour. Each with its own way of being Indian, existing alongside all the other ways.
There are huge, ugly, catastrophic problems. And for many they define daily life. Surely I do those people a disservice if I don’t acknowledge that my personal experience of India is largely, luxuriously, free of such anguish and injustice. And these are many of the same people who always want to know how does the foreigner like their India? And I sometimes wish I could give a more nuanced answer, that I could discuss my feelings with them, but then wonder if that’s purely an intellectual defense mechanism against giving such a simple response to such an unsuspectingly complex question. But that doesn’t imply that my simple answer is false, because it’s not. So I tell them that I love their India, and I tell myself that it is a love in spite of – but not entailing acceptance of – its flaws, and for so much more besides.
But I Still Miss It…
August 1, 2008 at 6:31 pm (India)
Tags: India, travel
…in spite of all I said below.
It was a strange few weeks, post-India. I was in New York and immediately swept up into Abhinav’s graduation, celebrations, visits from parents and friends, the fun of being together again after so long. I expected some kind of reverse culture shock but I didn’t get any. People would often observe how strange it must have been for me to suddenly find myself in New York after three months in India. But it wasn’t really. Maybe because three months isn’t that long, even if while I was there time seemed suspended and Now became Forever.
The fact that I was in New York probably eased the transition, too; while Manhattan especially is hugely wealthy, there are areas that lend it more of a distinctly chaotic “third world” feel than any other Western city I’ve spent time in. I remember returning with Abhinav to San Francisco from my first trip to India in 2006 and wondering if we had arrived back on a public holiday, the streets seemed so quiet and deserted. That doesn’t happen in New York. You even have Indians running fruit stalls on street corners. So while it was obviously still a world away, the switch was nothing like as dramatic as it would have been had I come straight back to my gentle Wiltshire town of 12,000 people.
So I didn’t experience anything I could describe as “shock” (aside from in reaction to prices, which has only got worse – from India, to the US, to the UK – painful). But I did have two tangible and recurrent responses: one was that I temporarily lost all ability to plan ahead (both hugely liberating and mildly disconcerting as those who know me will appreciate), and the other consisted of a temporary, but crushing, sadness – replete with sob-stifling chest constriction and welling eyes – that I wasn’t in India, that such a definitive period of my life was over, coupled with an overwhelming desire to run straight back.
The inability to plan, vestiges of which I intend to hold on to for as long as I can, stemmed both from the infectious tolerance most Indians have for life’s daily struggles and from the fact that for the previous three months specific plans were few and far between. I had specific dates when I knew I had to be in a certain place, but these were always consigned to a hazy future that I trusted to arrive in its own time; day to day decisions were minimal and spontaneous and entirely up to me. And above all, I had no conception whatsoever of a future beyond India. Because everything was Here and Now. It was as if I was suddenly able to breathe with my full lung capacity – no part of me was tangled up in thoughts of What Next…I just Was. And it was wonderful.
Which is why, for at least the first month or so, I would have mornings where I woke up with a weight on my chest, knowing that I wasn’t there. Of course the ideal is to maintain such a liberated state of being wherever I am, and I feel I achieve that to a tiny degree, but as an unenlightened soul I remain heavily influenced by my environment, in every respect, and it’s this that leaves me forever pondering what it is about India.
Surely not…
May 9, 2008 at 6:06 pm (India)
It’s my last night. Which is really strange. And although this is the final India-based post, I hope to keep the blog alive – it has been such a beneficial exercise for me and I know I will have more to say (and more pictures to post) as I continue to digest the last few months. But for the time being, this is how I’m feeling about it all:
For the last three months in India I’ve been aware of sometimes possessing an Insider/Outsider status in light of my pre-existing relationship with the country through Abhinav, his family and many of our closest friends. And there have been moments when this sense has set me slightly apart from the general traveller set, particularly those here for the first time for whom India is one enormous ongoing shock to be exhaustively dissected/puzzled over/bitched about at every possible opportunity. Or those people who are here for different reasons to mine. None of whom I judge – let every visitor to India have their own experience – but the differences have gone some way, along the road, to explaining why in many situations I have found myself much more comfortable in the company of Indians that of other travellers. And why, on a number of occasions, I have been asked if, or where, I live in India. Which is always funny because on so many levels I am so obviously foreign to this environment, and yet I do feel a significant degree of comfort here, which is perhaps what people pick up on, and which I can’t attribute to anything specific (unless you believe in reincarnation), aside from the fact that so many important people in my life are from India.
But this pre-existing relationship with India – as I have written before – was largely second-hand; reflected and refracted through the experience of others, through literature and through received imagery. And as I reflect on the last three months I realise, gratefully, that this journey has bequeathed to me what I had hoped for – my own India; a wealth of thought, opinion, emotion, founded on intensely personal and hugely varied experience in this massive land. The confirmation of a long-held intuition that India will play a significant role in my life.
And describing this sense of affirmation that I have gained here is the best way I can find of explaining why, the night before I leave India after such an incredible journey, when my adventure is ending, it feels above all else, so very honestly, like the most exhilarating beginning from which the rest of my life will stem.
Irritants
May 9, 2008 at 5:14 pm (India)
There are three things which have threatened my sanity throughout this trip and about which I have intended to write but have never found the moment to. And now, given that it’s my last night, the energy and inclination are not there (plus, it will be more fun to shout about it all in person with the people who will understand). But they at least deserve a mention:
1) The absymal quality of English-language “journalism” in India. I don’t have enough breath in my body to fully vent my frustration/disbelief. A few months ago I felt perhaps it wasn’t my place to criticise, but now I feel that attitude is condescending and that I have every right to criticise publications that are so arrogant in their self-promotion and yet fill their pages with articles that have barely scraped through a computerised grammar check, never mind seen an editor’s desk. Do copyeditors exist here? What do they do exactly, aside from reward professional journalists for their ignorance of how to employ articles in English? The overwhelmingly juvenile nature of the press is summed up, for me, by the fact that the Indian Express awards a prize for Letter of the Week. I can’t go on, choked as I am by vitriol.
2) Rubbish, and the Indian proclivity to dropping/throwing it wherever they happen to be. Particularly when it’s middle class Indians paying to travel to some mountainous beauty spot who then proceed to throw their ice-cream wrappers/water bottles/anything and everything, down the side of said mountain, apparently oblivious to the paradox of the situation. And then today the Times of India prints an article crowing about how environmentally aware India is and how concerned the population is about effective waste disposal and recycling. Hah.
3) The particular specie of older-middle aged middle class Indian male who considers himself a conversationalist when he is actually an orator whose mindset is so miniscule there is no room for any other point of view. And who especially relishes encounters with foreign women which he uses as an opportunity to show off his dazzling command of Victorian English and to reassure himself that the world is without doubt in awe of his intellect and powers of perception, particularly when he is talking utter rubbish. In response to any foolhardy attempt I may make to converse, the response will invariably begin with, “No, but..” or “It’s not that…” An extreme case in point: Kaushal and I were having a conversation class in Mussoorie, going for our usual amble around to Lal Tibba, when aforementioned male with wife and daughter in tow comes striding around the corner. He sees me and interrupts Kaushal by stating that he had seen me that morning in the same spot, meditating. I told him that it wasn’t me, that I did sometimes meditate but not in that place and besides, at the time he mentioned, I was in a class. He proceeded unperturbed, modified the time by half an hour, when I was still in the class, and assured us that it had been me. His wife dared to suggest that since I was in a class at the time perhaps he had seen another girl. I agreed with this idea, seeing as it wasn’t me. He dismissed such a ridiculous notion, announced to the world that it had been me and marched off, declaring that he “appreciated my meditation”.
“Hari Om, Madam, Hari Om”: Rishikesh
May 8, 2008 at 3:15 pm (India)
Tags: Ganga, India, Rishikesh
It’s so hot tonight – there’s no hawa (wind) like on the last few nights. The air is so still that the sounds of puja a couple of miles away shimmer across the river to reach me…
‘I’ve enjoyed Rishikesh. Spending time resting up in the trees on High Bank, then venturing out in the late afternoon. Joining the throng jostling across Laxman Jhula; negotiating tourists, hawkers, jeeps, sadhus, cows, dogs, bikes and then the brief respite of leafy green peace on the way to Ram Jhula. And Ganga Aarti – the nightly puja at Parmath Niketan which is reached through a shopping arcade – a juxtaposition that characterises Rishikesh quite succintly.
It would be easy to be repelled by the extent of the commercialism here, but rather than take offense (and who are we to do so, when it is us off whom it feeds? We’re more than happy to enjoy the rare luxury of muesli and fruit salad for breakfast, yet reserve the right to be repulsed by all the shops [selling the clothes that only we, as foreign travellers, wear in India]), it’s more rewarding to view the commerce as a phenomenon in itself. And even more so to discover that in amongst the fisherman trousers and tulsi necklaces overwhelmingly peaceful religious practices are taking place in a manner unchanged for centuries. Which I find hopeful, in a certain way.
And here, as you are no doubt expecting given my recent burst of Delhi-based productivity, are some pictures!
Pictures! What a Treat!
May 7, 2008 at 12:22 pm (India)
I give you Varkala!
AND Madurai, Trichy and Tanjore! (Which actually comprise the only section of this trip I have omitted to write about. And it’s a bit late now. I hope you enjoy the pictures though!)
Ganga Days and Nights
May 7, 2008 at 12:18 pm (India)
Tags: Ganga, Ganges, Gangotri, Gaumukh, Himalayas, India
I wrote the following catch-up on the balcony outside my room in Rishikesh (I miss it!):
It’s really hot. In a languid, luxuriant way if you’re privileged enough to have nothing specific to do, and utterly exhausting if you’re not. It’s been a lovely few days with friends on the banks of the Ganga, hidden away up in the trees, eating salad and fruit, feeling happy and rested and nurtured. It’s that perfect evening light-time, a rose-peach warmth cast across the hills, the river, the multi-coloured buildings and the single white mandir on the opposite bank that I can see from here…
The last few days in Mussoorie were hectic – finishing classes and hiking up and down to the bazaar for various things. Most notably to send a parcel home, a process that demands a significant portion of time as you hunt for a tailor willing to accept the menial (but impressive, to me) task of encasing the box in cotton as is required by the post office. But the busyness was a good thing – both Martina and I were ready to move on and staying so occupied made the time fly.
On our last evening we took supplies round to a friend’s flat and spent the evening with Kaushal, learning to cook – chole, baingan ka bharta, bhindi and chapati, to be specific. If I can recreate them to taste as good as they did that night I will rightly consider myself an Indian masterchef. With a small but select repertoire. Although actually, having said that, I shouldn’t lay claim to such a title until I have also mastered pista and nariyal barfi (even though every Indian woman I say that to finds it hilarious that I can be bothered to even try given the apparent tedium of the task. But they fail to register that, unlike virtually every town in India, Bradford-on-Avon suffers from a noticeable dearth of good mithai shops). Then the menu will be complete.
So early on Saturday morning Martina and I bade a gleeful farewell to Dev Dar Woods and its white toast breakfasts, and a more affectionate sort to Mussoorie itself, as we set out in search of the Ganga in its Himalayan home.
We spent the first night in Uttarkashi which at first post-bus sight strikes as a dusty frontier-feeling town, but on further exploration turns out to be a gentle place, nestled in a valley amongst the foothills, with colourful single storey homes and ashrams straddling the Ganga which quietly bubbles its way over rocks, gathering strength for its journey south. Curiosity about the river’s spiritual significance is swiftly satisfied by the orange-robed sadhus ambling along its banks, or taking the obligatory freezing dip in the late afternoon. The scene was a gratifying change from the Christian missionary legacy that remains disspiritingly palpable in much of Mussoorie.
The next morning we opted for a bit of (very relative) luxury and hired our own jeep and driver for the four hour climb/scramble/bounce to Gangotri, 3600m up in the Himalayas. The route follows the Ganga the whole way and is breathtakingly beautiful. Literally. There were moments when looking down into the valley and seeing the water snaking through sand-coloured rocks like a jade green ribbon felt like a glimpse into Eden – or Paradise, Nirvana, the Garden of Enlightenment, whichever imagery you find most accessible or appropriate.
There is, I think, a point at which description of beauty becomes an almost pointless exercise. It can be self-defeating for the writer, who is well aware that she has no hope of doing the particular scene justice, and unfulfilling for the reader especially if the description, through want of alternatives (or sufficient talent), falls victim to cliche and generalisation. Given this (and the fact that I have photos), perhaps it suffices to say that I think, in many ways, Gangotri is the most beautiful place I have ever been (though I don’t want to mislead by omitting to mention that the journey there alse negotiates some kind of engineering project on a gargantuan, mountain-scarring scale).
It is also, between about 3pm and 8am, bone-achingly cold. We set out beneath ridiculously blue sky and bright sunshine on our trek towards Gaumukh – the glacier from which the Ganga begins to drip. After much deliberation we had decided to walk towards Bhojbasa, 14km from Gangotri, and stay the night there, possibly going to Gaumukh early the next morning or possibly just walking back to Gangotri, depending how we felt. When we reached the official entrance to the park we were told to sit down by the ageing civil servant (having his aloo paratha and chai for breakfast) and the standard army of unnecessary staff as they explained (in Hindi! Because our linguistic genius knows no bounds) that the path to Bhojbasa had become obstructed by landslides and that they would advise us not to go. Whipping out the newly acquired (and amazingly useful, my friends) future tense from my extensive grammatical armoury, I explained that we would go anyway and if it proved too difficult we would come back. This assurance that we wouldn’t take any risks was met with predictable approval, and off we went.
Four and a half hours, twelve kilometres and two negotiated minor rockfalls later the path disappeared and I gained a degree of clarity as to the etymology of the term “landslide”. The surface of the mountain had slid so as to incorporate the path, which was now subsumed beneath a shifting mixture of sand and rocks with nothing to catch them save the river itself, hundreds of metres below.
So we decided to turn around. Because in spite of the holy significance of submersion in the Ganga, we just didn’t fancy it at that exact moment. Which meant that we ended up walking 24km in a day, a distance that we hadn’t anticipated. And on the way back the clouds gathered and darkened and began to send us snow! Which was fun. But what a day. What beauty, what air, what shanti. What an amazing privilege to experience an environment so deeply touched by the truest form of natural magic.
Narnia during the thaw.
It’s all about anthropology
April 20, 2008 at 10:06 am (Health, India)
Tags: Anthropology, Ayurveda, Health, Hindi, Mussoorie
Even just being here for a few weeks affords such a privileged insight into people’s lives and their ways of being. Particularly in terms of health, as that’s what I tend to be most attuned to.
There’s a huge reliance on “medicine” here and a really interesting synergy between indigenous explanatory models for disease and an overwhelming faith in allopathic treatment, usually in the form of a pill. The ayurvedic basis of explanations for illness is very perceptible – lots of people are ill at the moment and they attribute it to Mussoorie’s erratic climate and the constant fluctuation between heat and cold, wet and dry.
According to Tasleem, his sore throat was likely caused by the sour mango he ate the night before his symptoms began. People rarely stress a single symptom, though, but rather the interconnection of several. “Bukhar” (fever) and “body ache/pain” are high profile symptoms that get mentioned a lot. Although Habib said that if you go to the doctor with a fever and other symptoms, the doctor will explain that the accompanying aches and pains are as a result of the fever which is the main illness to be treated. He also took some almonds from me one breaktime because they help his body to generate heat.
Kaushal and Aasha have both been unwell with colds and fevers. Finances will only stretch to a very short term cause of allopathic drugs, so Kaushal supplements them with “ghar ke dawai (I think)” (home remedies). For Aasha, Kaushal heated finely chopped garlic in some oil and massaged it into Aasha’s chest and back. She also warmed a paan leaf in the oil and placed it against Aasha’s ribs under her clothes before she slept as a means of drawing out the fever. I wonder if Kaushal would still employ these methods were she financially secure enough to afford allopathic medicine whenever deemed necessary. I’ll try and muster the Hindi to ask her.
The most intriguing thing for me though was Kaushal describing a year-long period of serious illness she suffered when her kids were small. She told me about the huge amount of pressure she was put under by her husband’s family – particularly by her mother-in-law, a situation which persists years later. She had a toddler and a baby yet was expected to prepare food for the entire extended family on a daily basis, as well as undertaking whatever paid work she could find outside the home. After several months of this routine, she explained, she became weaker and weaker until eventually “[her] blood finished” (which I can’t remember how to reproduce in Hindi, but it involves “khoon” and “khatam” – “mera khoon khatam ho gaya” ?)
She didn’t elaborate much on the symptoms, but she did say that her brother had to give her a bottle of blood and that she slowly recovered. Amazing. Her blood finished. I’m so curious to know what that means for Kaushal. And I’m so inspired to witness first hand examples of culturally influenced experiences of health and disease. Three years of anthropology readings brought to life.
And the role of language in the framing, understanding and expression of subjective experience couldn’t be more clear. In English, “my blood finished” is grammatically nonsensical and conceptually alien. But in Hindi, in Mussoorie, in the life of my friend Kaushal, it is a very real and traumatic phenomenon that deprived her of her health for months on end.
We’re endlessly fascinating, we humans.
