Musings from India
Christmas morning, Jaipur, India, 2004:
There were no presents under our tree this morning—nor, indeed, a tree—but we ordered a bucket of hot water each from the irrepressible proprietress of our guesthouse, Mrs. Singh, after a very cold edge of the desert night. For breakfast, we had masala dosa—a flat, thin crispy pancake stuffed with curried vegetables—and hot coffees in the appropriately named Indian Coffee House. It’s a delightfully grubby place set back off of the main M.I. Road in a haveli courtyard with dirty, lime green walls, chipped concrete and portraits of the Indian political triumvirate: Indira, Nehru and the Mahatma. Waiters here wear soiled white outfits complete with cummerbunds and those funny, Raj/ice cream cone hats. The urinal in the courtyard is just that with a sign that reads: “urinal only; we regret the inconvenience due to legal litigation.” I wanted to ask, but didn’t… For Christmas Eve, we watched a Hindi film (not as much singing and dancing as we would have liked) at the most opulently grotesque theater imaginable—the Raj Mandir—a cross between retro art deco and bad 80’s furnishings.
Our flight to India from Kathmandu was delayed by a day due to the ubiquitous fog/haze that blankets northern India/southern Nepal this time of year, and rather than wait around another day for a flight to Varanasi, we opted for Delhi. After a bit of wrangling in the Delhi Airport, Indian Airlines put us up for the night (it took us 26 hours to finally get to India…). We stored our bags in the Old Delhi railway station—cloak rooms as they are affectionately known—and wandered around the back alleys and amazing bazaars of OD for almost 10 hours: spice markets, used car parts, cricket bats and paraphernalia, street vendors offering all sorts of curried things, mosques, Sikh temples and even a Jain bird hospital. We took the night train out of Delhi and arrived in Jaipur the next morning at 6:00 AM. There, in the darkness, we were met by a gaggle of touts immediately upon stepping foot on the platform—that much of India has not changed. We did half of Jaipur on foot—much to the chagrin of the thousands of bicycle rickshaw wallahs—and the other half the following day. Jaipur is appropriately called the pink city (although it is more accurately a sort of rust color) and is loaded with palaces (the famous one being the lovely named Palace of the Winds) and Maharaja sightseeing stops, yet the other half of Jaipur has grown into a rather bustling city. Like most things in India, the best of times and places are found just wandering around.
And other days & nights:
We boarded the night train for Bikaner (375 kms to the northwest)—a fairly grubby version of the Indian train on this not so popular route, but we had upper berth, 2nd class sleepers reserved despite the antiquity of the train. Crossing this part of the desert at night with nothing more than a few shawls was foolish on our part—temps dropped down to freezing as we shivered through a few hours of sleep. I finally gave up on it around 5:00 AM, had a cigarette in the carriage entrance/exit next to the smelly toilets (or hole in the floor) and was lucky enough to see the full moon rising (or was it setting) simultaneously with the break of dawn over the Thar Desert—stunningly beautiful. Once in Bikaner, we beat back a group of rickshaw wallahs long enough to have a cup of chai and share a bidi and a chat with Corporeal Singh (every other person has the surname Singh it seems) around a crudely lit fire of rubbish in a dirt lot next to the station.
Bikaner is a fairly large, dusty city but its walled old city with Mughal influenced architecture and narrow lanes were a pleasure to meander through. We witnessed several wedding processions with the groom on horseback being led by blaring Hindi music and large groups of men dancing wildly in front. Somehow we found our way to the 550 yr old Jain temple—a 3-tiered with each progressively smaller from bottom to top. Bikaner’s fort was quite a surprise: more beautiful and better preserved in our estimation than the much ballyhooed city palace of Jaipur. Bikaner sees fewer tourists/travelers than other Rajasthan cities and so has a rather unspoilt feel about it. People are generally quite friendly and outgoing if not a little over the top. I use a lot of Nepali here, which is usually understood once I attempt to change around the verb endings, but, alas, sometimes not at all.
India is a dichotomy: it has grown up tremendously yet remains much the same. The burgeoning middle class is all around at tourist haunts with their mobile phones and digital cameras, but so too is the ubiquitous poverty. It is hard to say which is the poorer of the two, India or Nepal, although by appearances poverty seems to be more prevalent in India, I tend to think this is a matter of India’s population dwarfing that of Nepal. Beggars and street children seem more rife here, and although visible in Kathmandu, because we tend to be in more “residential” areas we don’t encounter people on the streets as frequently in Nepal. Certainly, Mahottari, where we lived in southern Nepal, is as poor as any area in India, but because no foreigners ever stopped there, we never encountered anyone asking for anything. The appearance of westerners/travelers no doubt prompts, perhaps enables, this process the world over.
We made the 7-hour journey across the desert (once again—Rajasthani cities are very spread out with wide swathes of empty desert between) by bus from Bikaner to Jaisalmer with what seemed to be mostly turbaned and handlebar mustached men. India’s bus service has also grown up, or at least it has in Rajasthan. A decade ago, you through something through the open window of the bus (and hope it landed in a seat) and that was how “reservations” were made… Now there are printed tickets and even seat numbers! We arrived in Jaisalmer just before sunset—the penultimate time in this desert outpost—and were met, of course, by a horde of touts (mostly boarding the bus before we even had an opportunity to disembark). Jaisalmer is dominated by its old fort—a tangle of houses, narrow alleyways (and frequent cow jams), Jain temples and former Maharaj palaces—but when I stayed here over 15 years ago, there were only two guesthouses in the fort. Now there must be between 20-30 and the charm and quaintness of the area has no doubt been spoiled somewhat. With popularity comes kitsch and pushiness, but luckily for Jaisalmer, the town has remained small. This pushiness and constant hawking of something or other, meant that we changed guesthouses 3 times before settling into a place that left us alone (at least from the pressure to buy or do something through them) with steaming buckets of hot water for bathing and unbeatable rooftop views. We did the almost obligatory camel trek through the desert for 2 days and one night (years ago, I did a 3 or 4 night trek) and camped out under the stars on New Year’s eve—the first time since childhood I have been to bed before midnight). Our first day on the camel (one for Migyoung and one for myself) was a difficult and cold trek through a blustery sandstorm, which, thankfully, finally settled down by sunset. The second day was a beautiful, cloudless day through desert nothingness and small Muslim and dalit villages. The children in these villages are well rehearsed with their mantras of one rupee, one pen, almost unbearably so. I preferred the slow, rhythmic and surprisingly meditative rocking of the camel ride itself, despite a very sore bum at the end of the second day. Chapatis and curries never tasted better than when prepared over an open fire in the middle of the desert.
Post-camel trek back in Jaisalmer, we opted to spend a few lazy days in town (and the difficulty of getting train tickets back to Delhi during this popular time of the year to visit the desert) doing many things on foot and just taking in the general ambiance. Back in Delhi on the 6th and then on to Kathmandu on the 8th. Delhi, and I imagine Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai, is almost unrecognizable to me a decade later. Middle class development is everywhere within the heart of the city (despite the slum areas still being thrown up all along the rail lines as you make your way into the city) and there is a new, fashion and status conscious breed of Indian on the rise. Despite more automobiles on the roads and the smattering of newer homes here and there, Kathmandu has remained more in a time warp as compared to Indian cities it seems. High tech development in India is the most ubiquitous (it seems that having a mobile phone is more important than the evening thali) and has led to the whole remaking of cities such as Bangalore in the south (the Indian silicon valley). Still, with only a cursory view of village life on this trip and based on the recent elections in India that kicked out the government which oversaw all of this development in favor of the old-guard Congress party, much of this development has not trickled down to the masses, and that much is the same in Nepal as well. Social and economic indicators as a whole are higher in India than in Nepal (a civil war, new King and totally inept government has hampered any development in Nepal) and that much is quite visible. And on the whole, for whatever reasons, Nepal remains the more “relaxed” of the two countries. At times, India seems a country totally on the make.
I have also reached an age in my life where I can say that I have been there and done that before things changed. I remember India (and Nepal for that matter) as a place where only the most hardy of backpacker ventured due to the difficulty of travel and the sheer overwhelming nature of the country. The place still generally smells of cow dung and sandalwood, but infrastructure developments have led to a new breed of traveler (even an army of newly wealthy Indian tourists) making the rounds to places once considered outposts. This has been both good and bad for India, I imagine…
There is both good news and bad news upon returning to Kathmandu: the good news is that our house now has solar panels for a bit of hot water (there is no real storage system, so it is “make bath while the sun shines”), but the bad news is that our bicycles were stolen while we were away despite being locked in addition to being inside a locked and gated compound. The locals say the most likely culprits are the glue sniffing street kids in the neighborhood. I’ll give them credit for scaling a wall, passing the bicycles over the wall and then having to break the bicycle locks. A bit of thievery (one digital camera, two bicycles) has sullied our Nepal experience a bit, but not enough to hold a grudge against the country as a whole. Other good news is that my grant proposal to the European Commission was accepted and the contract has been signed. You may remember that this was something I put together for my previous organization—a two-year Dalit Rights and Inclusion project, which includes the formation of inter-caste community-based associations, allied women’s groups, human rights and activist training and advocacy, income generation skills training and seed money, community generated/activist newsletters and forums, and even working with local government officials on appropriately allocating funding for dalit-focused projects. I am elated with these developments, and will be lobbying hard to return to the south to help set this project up and engage in periodic monitoring and evaluation.
Posted by david at January 9, 2005 02:24 PM