In my brief time in India, I’ve already come to a sincere appreciation for the value that this culture attaches to celebration. Celebration inhabits body, mind, and soul here; it is the animating spirit of the people. Indians are blithely serious about the enjoyment (as opposed strictly to the observance) of their holidays and festivals. Holidays here are legion (perhaps owing to the antiquity of the culture) and lengthy, diverse in their celebration, and this diversity exists both between holidays (Dussehra vs. Dewali) and within their observance (burning effigies of Ravana vs. submerging idols of Durga on Dussehra), according to place and custom. In comparison to this surfeit of celebratory riches, Americans are destitute. The disparity leads me to ponder the possibility of an Indian foreign aid program for merrymaking—-when it comes to celebration, we are the developing world (perhaps the UN’s next World Development Report will feature an Index of Merriment to reflect this overlooked variable in the calculation of quality of life). Technical assistance would come pretty cheaply—-any man on the street here has internalized the relevant lessons from childhood.
Let’s quickly examine the American problem. To wit: our holidays, religious and secular alike, are, taken as a whole, largely deficient in spirit and vitality. They are usually but a day in duration, and, I think, not really celebrated, except perhaps for New Year’s, which, it is worth noting, is a universal occasion, even if its observance varies depending on the calendar. Christmas is a single day (although we have the Christmas “season,” or the “holidays,” which is probably the closest we come to an extended observance), likewise Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Easter. The case of Easter, I think, is particularly instructive. Here we have the culmination of the Lenten season (An entire season! And how is it celebrated? Mass abstention from pleasurable activities!), a day that commemorates the single most important event, the upshot of all of Christianity: Christ rose from the dead! Eternal life is the true and tangible reward of the faithful! Our sins can be forgiven! If there is any day that should cause Christians to become utterly deranged with rejoicing, it is Easter. And yet, if not for the Easter bunny and Easter baskets and Easter egg hunts, it would be nothing but donning one’s best clothes and bustling off to church for ponderous reflection on the meaning of resurrection (or so I’m told—-I’ve never actually been to church on Easter. My family knows how to celebrate: massive chocolate intake). In other words, we had to invent a giant candy-dispensing leporid to make bearable the most momentous of Christian holidays.
Christmas is much the same. Christ is born! But where’s the outpouring of exaltation? Oh, there’s rejoicing on Christmas to be sure, but it’s too much “Silent Night” and not enough “Joy to the World.” We rely upon Santa Claus, flying reindeer, eggnog, external illumination, and the bejeweled Christmas tree (I love the whimsy of this tradition, the strangeness—-Indians would heartily approve, I think) to instill the occasion with a sense of wonder, mystery, and awe. This isn’t some “Remember the reason for the season” rant; the reason isn’t as important to me as the spirit, for it’s the spirit of the season that has been lost. It seems today Christians of the Western world value solemnity and contemplation above joy and merriment and look to the secular world to recapture that spirit of celebration that once accompanied the observance of their holidays—-without first attempting to reignite the smoldering fires of enthusiasm within the faith. I can’t help feeling that this is unfortunate, if only for the fact that, at its essence, few things in the world are better at inspiring feelings of ecstasy and zeal and exuberance than religion (ignoring, for the moment, other things it may inspire, or to what ends these feelings may be put), and these feelings make for stupendous celebrations--just ask the Indians. And one need not be Christian, or Hindu, or Jew, or Muslim to benefit from the spirit of celebration—-it’s an infectious disease that everyone is welcome to catch.
The point is not that Christians are a joyless lot, or that American holidays are dreary, lifeless events--truth be told, I genuinely enjoy them. Perhaps my favorite thing in the world is to celebrate Christmas with my family, and despite its curious, church-driven tendency towards solemnity and temperance in observance, Christmas is sacrosanct to me--I wouldn't see it changed in any fundamental way. But the celebration of most of our holidays lacks a certain quality, a rapture, or zeal, or passion--however it is named--that resides at the very center of Indian celebrations. It is this quality that inspires singing and dancing into the small hours, that demands fireworks be ignited for every occasion, that sustains a festive spirit for nights on end. Americans go shopping the day after Thanksgiving and back to work the day after Easter. We'd rather experience the tumult of New Year's Eve in Time's Square on our couches than create or join mass festivities in our own communities. We understand sacrifice as the point of Lent, and believe Advent to be for candles and calendars. We have forgotten Annunciation, Ascension, Pentecost, and any number of other minor Christian holidays. We haven't embraced the traditions of our minority communities, like Cinco de Mayo, Eid al-Fitr, or Chinese New Year. In short, we rarely celebrate deeply, passionately, or purely, and we simply don't celebrate enough. How truly unfortunate...
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Monday, October 29, 2007
The Many Paths, Part 3 of 4: The Spectacle of Dandiya Raas
In Gujarat, the celebration of Navratri is famous for two unique forms of folk dance—-nightly garbas and dandiya raas in Amdavad, Gujarat's largest city, may include hundreds, if not thousands of participants and spectators. The dances are circular and repetitive and try endurance—-they wheel on for hours, often into the early morning hours. Garbas feature only women, are devotional in nature, and are performed before Aarti, a nightly worshipping ritual. Dandiyas follow Aarti, are celebratory, and feature both men and women and sticks (dandiyas)--the essence of the dance is an endlessly repeated reenactment of the battle between the goddess Durga and the demon Mahishasura, with the sticks standing in for swords. Udaipur, less than 100 kilometers north of Gujarat, has also adopted these folk forms in celebration of Navratri, and on each of the last two nights of the festival, I return to the base of Nirach Mata to watch dandiya performed in its modern, Udaipurian incarnation. It isn’t difficult to find: the music blares at such a volume that it can be heard plainly from my guest house a quarter-mile away. I only have to follow my ears.
In a schoolyard, an iron-framed canopy has been strung with tinseled silver and gold garlands and fringed with translucent pink bunting. Youth (broadly speaking—-I would say that participants range in age from 4 to 35 years, although most seem to fall between the ages of 12 and 17) form two circles around its perimeter—-girls inner, boys outer—-and while (in the case of this dandiya) dated Indian pop music thunders, the circles slowly grind in opposing directions, like the gears of a clock. Each of the youth clutch two dandiyas; they’re about the length of drumsticks, although perhaps twice as thick. Face to face, male and female counterparts strike their dandiyas together in unison, keeping the beat in a uniform pattern which, once traced, is repeated endlessly as partnerships shift with the turning of the circle. The tempo of the song drives that of the dance, which itself is simple and obeys an unwavering structure—-hit, hit, off-beat, hit, off-beat, and a final off-beat in which all dancers step to their right and the next partner. However, within its rigid structure, the dance admits individuality and improvisation: during off-beats, dancers move as they like, and each develops his or her own style, partially contingent, as well, on the character of the song being played. Within this circumscribed freedom lies much of the charm of the dandiya raas.
Variation in skill among dancers is pronounced, though this is hardly of consequence. Some are stiff and unsure in their movements, but many dance well, fluidly and joyfully; the girls are masters of a controlled suggestiveness and the boys are loose-limbed and confident. Although some do little more than step in place during off-beats, the most accomplished twirl their dandiyas in an elaborate, almost figurative style (my roommate Arun was particularly captivated by a girl who twirled herself, along with the dandiyas, between hits). Faces are also telling in their differences: many of the youngest dancers bear timid, nervous expressions, seemingly mortified by their inexperience, while other faces plainly reveal the delight, concentration, or boredom of their bearers.
The striking of the dandiyas, too, allows for variation. Within some pairings, the hits are integrated nearly seamlessly into the off-beat movement of the dancers; they become, if not incidental to the dance, a mere complement. For most, however, the striking is the dandiya's distinguishing feature, and part of the intrigue to the observer is the inevitable pairing of dancers of different styles, ages, and abilities. It is through this multiplicity of pairings that diversity is revealed to be at the heart of dandiya raas, despite the dance's formal limitations. Because the two circles move in contradiction, every boy must dance with every girl, and each partnership gives different expression to the dance. This is likely what allows dandiyas to press on for hour after hour, to midnight and beyond, for nine consecutive nights. For the dancers, the anticipation and satisfaction of pairing with a favored partner (or partners) is motivation and sustenance enough to continue spinning; for spectators, enjoyment derives from appreciation of the myriad varieties of expression born from the intersection of the dancers’ individual styles and the dance’s egalitarian structure, all realized within the constraints of a simple folk tradition. It’s just a bunch of kids dancing, and yet so much more: religious observance, cultural celebration, social adhesive, romantic catalyst (according to Arun, condom manufacturers do big business in Gujarat during Navratri), and entrancing spectacle.
In a schoolyard, an iron-framed canopy has been strung with tinseled silver and gold garlands and fringed with translucent pink bunting. Youth (broadly speaking—-I would say that participants range in age from 4 to 35 years, although most seem to fall between the ages of 12 and 17) form two circles around its perimeter—-girls inner, boys outer—-and while (in the case of this dandiya) dated Indian pop music thunders, the circles slowly grind in opposing directions, like the gears of a clock. Each of the youth clutch two dandiyas; they’re about the length of drumsticks, although perhaps twice as thick. Face to face, male and female counterparts strike their dandiyas together in unison, keeping the beat in a uniform pattern which, once traced, is repeated endlessly as partnerships shift with the turning of the circle. The tempo of the song drives that of the dance, which itself is simple and obeys an unwavering structure—-hit, hit, off-beat, hit, off-beat, and a final off-beat in which all dancers step to their right and the next partner. However, within its rigid structure, the dance admits individuality and improvisation: during off-beats, dancers move as they like, and each develops his or her own style, partially contingent, as well, on the character of the song being played. Within this circumscribed freedom lies much of the charm of the dandiya raas.
Variation in skill among dancers is pronounced, though this is hardly of consequence. Some are stiff and unsure in their movements, but many dance well, fluidly and joyfully; the girls are masters of a controlled suggestiveness and the boys are loose-limbed and confident. Although some do little more than step in place during off-beats, the most accomplished twirl their dandiyas in an elaborate, almost figurative style (my roommate Arun was particularly captivated by a girl who twirled herself, along with the dandiyas, between hits). Faces are also telling in their differences: many of the youngest dancers bear timid, nervous expressions, seemingly mortified by their inexperience, while other faces plainly reveal the delight, concentration, or boredom of their bearers.
The striking of the dandiyas, too, allows for variation. Within some pairings, the hits are integrated nearly seamlessly into the off-beat movement of the dancers; they become, if not incidental to the dance, a mere complement. For most, however, the striking is the dandiya's distinguishing feature, and part of the intrigue to the observer is the inevitable pairing of dancers of different styles, ages, and abilities. It is through this multiplicity of pairings that diversity is revealed to be at the heart of dandiya raas, despite the dance's formal limitations. Because the two circles move in contradiction, every boy must dance with every girl, and each partnership gives different expression to the dance. This is likely what allows dandiyas to press on for hour after hour, to midnight and beyond, for nine consecutive nights. For the dancers, the anticipation and satisfaction of pairing with a favored partner (or partners) is motivation and sustenance enough to continue spinning; for spectators, enjoyment derives from appreciation of the myriad varieties of expression born from the intersection of the dancers’ individual styles and the dance’s egalitarian structure, all realized within the constraints of a simple folk tradition. It’s just a bunch of kids dancing, and yet so much more: religious observance, cultural celebration, social adhesive, romantic catalyst (according to Arun, condom manufacturers do big business in Gujarat during Navratri), and entrancing spectacle.
Saturday, October 27, 2007
The Many Paths, Part 2 of 4: The Dreadful Thrill of Nirach Mata
A week ago Sunday, I ventured forth from the guest house to the base of a large hill that looms impressively over my neighborhood--it's but a five minute walk from home and has beckoned irresistibly since the day I arrived. A Hindu temple crowns the hill, and both hill and temple are locally famous. The temple is called Nirach Mata. Last Sunday was the third night of Navratri, a nine-night Hindu festival (Navratri literally means "nine nights" in Sanskrit) in celebration of the goddess Durga and eight of her avatars (incarnations), each with her own designated night of worship. The day after Navratri is called Dussehra, and it is especially festive--it commemorates Durga's slaying of the demon Mahishasura. In West Bengal Dussehra is called Durga Puja, and Bengalis submerge idols of Durga in celebration; in Udaipur, as in many other places in India, Dussehra revelers burn effigies of Ravana, the demon king. Dussehra, like Navratri and most other Hindu holidays it seems, is celebrated differently depending on place (and in the case of Navratri, the avatar most venerated), but ultimately the universal thème du fête is the conquest of good over evil. Nirach Mata is home to a Durga idol, ten arms and all, and thus the faithful scale its hill to receive darshan (sight of the goddess/idol) and prasad (food consecrated by the goddess and subsequently consumed) in greatest numbers during Navratri. It is pure coincidence that, on this day, I should join the throngs.
At the base of the hill, I am immediately besieged by shills bearing prasad-ready bundles of incense and a single coconut. Here, in a plastic bag, is a prepackaged bit of obeisance. Pocket calendar salvation it isn't, and for pure entertainment value, the idea of commingling worship, fragrant smoke, and eating seems promising. Furthermore, incense sticks and coconuts whip the censers and Eucharist of the Catholics any day of the week. (Marge Simpson makes a good point: "I went to a Catholic wedding once, and the incense ruined my new pantsuit!") Nevertheless, I blow off the shills.
The way to Nirach Mata is steep. A carved archway announces the entrance to the temple path, and already many devout remove their sandals and shoes, intending to make the entire climb barefoot. Some whisper a quick prayer, stopping momentarily to touch the ground and mutter. In reality, there are two paths to the temple, although they intersect and overlap with regularity. One is a steep stairway, direct and strenuous, the other a switchbacking cement walkway with railings and benches, less steep but still taxing. Along with my companions, Arun and Anuj, I take both paths at varying points of the ascent. I am in a hurry--I want to reach the top before the sun sets. The view promises to be spectacular, and I am not disappointed: the entire city of Udaipur lies stretched out before me, encircled by hills that have turned a hazy brownish-gray in the evening's dying light. The white buildings of the city--stained with dust, flaking paint, shabby and decaying in ground-level daylight--seem a network of immaculately calciferous nodules from this height, like barnacles on the back of a surfacing gray whale. The waters of Fateh Sagar and Lake Pichola are a limpid looking glass, reflecting the failing light of a darkening sky.
We're forced to halt at the bottom of the temple's ultimate stairway--it is overrun with patient supplicants (see photo at right). We remove our sandals and tread through shallow puddles of filthy water to join the queue. For now the day lives on, but by the time we reach the temple, full night has fallen. Indians are notorious queue-jumpers, but with few exceptions, everyone is patient. Some cheers ring out to puncture the monotony. The temple's exterior is lit with small white lights, not unlike those strewn across town and country at Christmas. A man is splayed across the temple's surface, checking connections with a hand-held device and replacing burnt-out bulbs. Two policemen run the show at the top, operating like bouncers at a popular club. Finally we're admitted.
The air at the temple's edge is thick and sweet with the smoke of burning incense; a solitary drum is beaten slowly, methodically. The faithful ring bells that dangle in a row before a mass of burning incense, their sound more clang than ring, more discord than harmony. I pass and strike their clappers in turn, as I have seen others before me do. It is sensuous ritual: a fiery yellow light throws shadows amid the clanging of the bells and the slow, stentorian whump of the drum, the incense, the smoke. I have the unshakeable sensation of being in the midst of something pagan, something elemental and atavistic. I admit I am utterly ashamed by the idea, ashamed that I might equate strangeness in some inchoate and unarticulated way with primitivism, and yet I can't deny the feeling. I was brought up in one of the more staid and uncharismatic traditions of a largely staid and uncharismatic religion. The Mennonites, "the plain people," cousins to the Amish, kissing cousins to the silent Quakers--this is what I know of worship. Worship is silent, solemn, unadorned, like the people of God. Can I be blamed for the momentary ignorance and ugliness of my gut?
My mind keeps returning to the end of Apocalypse Now, when Martin Sheen slowly rises from the primordial river, his face luridly smeared with black, eyes wild and steely, while lightning snakes and flashes in the sky all about him. Coppola overlays Sheen's creeping to and murder of Kurtz (Marlon Brando), with an image of the ritualistic slaughter of a water buffalo by Kurtz's worshippers, a primitive tribe of the remote Cambodian jungle. Earlier, Brando reads parts of Eliot's "The Hollow Men" in voice-over: "This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper." The murder scene is cryptic, eerie, powerful, unsettling, and however incongruous it might be with what I encounter at Nirach Mata, it is nonetheless lodges in my mind, unbidden.
Existing within this feeling of uneasiness and, yes, even dread, perhaps even at the core of it, is thrill. Thrill, too, because of the strangeness, the sensuality, the sense of trespass--both into this world to which I don't belong, and more fundamentally, trespass as an admittedly non-spiritual person into a spiritual realm. I feel I'm getting away with something, bearing witness to something secret and sacred, and it excites me. In reality, no one cares that I am here--as Anuj points out, "We can go to church, can't we?" And yet, as I sidle up to the idol (ha!, but I really did sidle) to receive darshan, I am anxious, self-conscious: I don't know how to act. I watch those worshippers ahead of me, but no two behave alike. Most surrender their coconuts for prasad, bow, and mouth some words, but some touch their foreheads to the table before Durga, and some bring their fingers to their lips and pray, and some touch their lips and chests and bow in rapid succession. It is all done so quickly, I hardly have time to formulate a plan of attack; no one tarries before the idol. (Because I've endured many a church service bloated to ninety minute with sop, filler, and grandiloquence, on some level I can appreciate the radical condensation of this practice. One only has time for the essence of the prayer. And practically speaking, if everyone is to get personal facetime with Durga, it needs be brief, or else Hindus would lament the one-third of their life they spent sleeping, and the two-thirds they spent waiting to receive darshan. And yet, what is gained by that four second prayer? I suppose Woody Allen was right: 95% of life is showing up.)
Now I am front and center, and so I press my palms together, hold my hands to my chest, make several small, quick bows and hurry off. I am not conscious of having looked at the idol; I remember only a fierce yellow light and the face of one of the men (priests?) handling prasad. He is smiling indulgently. I catch up to Arun and Anuj. The rear wall of the temple is inlaid with swastikas (an auspicious Hindu symbol), and some worshippers reach out to it and pause for a split-second prayer. I touch it. We take some time to appreciate the temple's western exposure, munch coconut that has been consecrated by the goddess (Durgalicious!), and enjoy the relative cool and quiet of this side of Nirach Mata.
Within ten minutes, we depart. The stairway down from the temple (seen at the right in the photograph) had been relatively clear during our wait--the descent of worshippers was no more than a trickle then, and could be no more, as the temple can hold only a fraction of those waiting to be admitted. But now, as we descend, impatience and fervor have surmounted propriety, and a wave of the zealous has swept nearly to the top to meet us. There is jostling and shouting. "This can't end well," I think. The crowd seethes and churns; it is an independent organism, obeying its own logic. There is a terrible strength in this mass, and that strength is heaving about, trying to find articulation in its dumb gesturing (More of "The Hollow Men": "Between the motion/And the act/Falls the Shadow"). Caught in the middle are an elderly couple, gray and shriveled and stooped, buffeted by the crowd. I fear for their safety. I fear for my safety. I can think only of the headline that I've glimpsed online that very afternoon: "15 Killed in Gujarat Temple Stampede". "This is how it happens!" I think. Someone lifts the rope separating the two stairways, and the old couple, harried to the last, manages to duck under. Arun and Anuj and I push downward and to the left, where a second staircase branches from the first. We slip away.
After we retrieve our sandals and continue our descent, I exclaim, "Indians are crazy!"
"What?" Anuj asks.
"All those people pushing," I say. "It was crazy."
"Oh, that happens all over India," he says matter-of-factly. He and Arun are unperturbed by what has taken place. The subject dies there.
At the base of the hill, I am immediately besieged by shills bearing prasad-ready bundles of incense and a single coconut. Here, in a plastic bag, is a prepackaged bit of obeisance. Pocket calendar salvation it isn't, and for pure entertainment value, the idea of commingling worship, fragrant smoke, and eating seems promising. Furthermore, incense sticks and coconuts whip the censers and Eucharist of the Catholics any day of the week. (Marge Simpson makes a good point: "I went to a Catholic wedding once, and the incense ruined my new pantsuit!") Nevertheless, I blow off the shills.
The way to Nirach Mata is steep. A carved archway announces the entrance to the temple path, and already many devout remove their sandals and shoes, intending to make the entire climb barefoot. Some whisper a quick prayer, stopping momentarily to touch the ground and mutter. In reality, there are two paths to the temple, although they intersect and overlap with regularity. One is a steep stairway, direct and strenuous, the other a switchbacking cement walkway with railings and benches, less steep but still taxing. Along with my companions, Arun and Anuj, I take both paths at varying points of the ascent. I am in a hurry--I want to reach the top before the sun sets. The view promises to be spectacular, and I am not disappointed: the entire city of Udaipur lies stretched out before me, encircled by hills that have turned a hazy brownish-gray in the evening's dying light. The white buildings of the city--stained with dust, flaking paint, shabby and decaying in ground-level daylight--seem a network of immaculately calciferous nodules from this height, like barnacles on the back of a surfacing gray whale. The waters of Fateh Sagar and Lake Pichola are a limpid looking glass, reflecting the failing light of a darkening sky.
We're forced to halt at the bottom of the temple's ultimate stairway--it is overrun with patient supplicants (see photo at right). We remove our sandals and tread through shallow puddles of filthy water to join the queue. For now the day lives on, but by the time we reach the temple, full night has fallen. Indians are notorious queue-jumpers, but with few exceptions, everyone is patient. Some cheers ring out to puncture the monotony. The temple's exterior is lit with small white lights, not unlike those strewn across town and country at Christmas. A man is splayed across the temple's surface, checking connections with a hand-held device and replacing burnt-out bulbs. Two policemen run the show at the top, operating like bouncers at a popular club. Finally we're admitted.
The air at the temple's edge is thick and sweet with the smoke of burning incense; a solitary drum is beaten slowly, methodically. The faithful ring bells that dangle in a row before a mass of burning incense, their sound more clang than ring, more discord than harmony. I pass and strike their clappers in turn, as I have seen others before me do. It is sensuous ritual: a fiery yellow light throws shadows amid the clanging of the bells and the slow, stentorian whump of the drum, the incense, the smoke. I have the unshakeable sensation of being in the midst of something pagan, something elemental and atavistic. I admit I am utterly ashamed by the idea, ashamed that I might equate strangeness in some inchoate and unarticulated way with primitivism, and yet I can't deny the feeling. I was brought up in one of the more staid and uncharismatic traditions of a largely staid and uncharismatic religion. The Mennonites, "the plain people," cousins to the Amish, kissing cousins to the silent Quakers--this is what I know of worship. Worship is silent, solemn, unadorned, like the people of God. Can I be blamed for the momentary ignorance and ugliness of my gut?
My mind keeps returning to the end of Apocalypse Now, when Martin Sheen slowly rises from the primordial river, his face luridly smeared with black, eyes wild and steely, while lightning snakes and flashes in the sky all about him. Coppola overlays Sheen's creeping to and murder of Kurtz (Marlon Brando), with an image of the ritualistic slaughter of a water buffalo by Kurtz's worshippers, a primitive tribe of the remote Cambodian jungle. Earlier, Brando reads parts of Eliot's "The Hollow Men" in voice-over: "This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper." The murder scene is cryptic, eerie, powerful, unsettling, and however incongruous it might be with what I encounter at Nirach Mata, it is nonetheless lodges in my mind, unbidden.
Existing within this feeling of uneasiness and, yes, even dread, perhaps even at the core of it, is thrill. Thrill, too, because of the strangeness, the sensuality, the sense of trespass--both into this world to which I don't belong, and more fundamentally, trespass as an admittedly non-spiritual person into a spiritual realm. I feel I'm getting away with something, bearing witness to something secret and sacred, and it excites me. In reality, no one cares that I am here--as Anuj points out, "We can go to church, can't we?" And yet, as I sidle up to the idol (ha!, but I really did sidle) to receive darshan, I am anxious, self-conscious: I don't know how to act. I watch those worshippers ahead of me, but no two behave alike. Most surrender their coconuts for prasad, bow, and mouth some words, but some touch their foreheads to the table before Durga, and some bring their fingers to their lips and pray, and some touch their lips and chests and bow in rapid succession. It is all done so quickly, I hardly have time to formulate a plan of attack; no one tarries before the idol. (Because I've endured many a church service bloated to ninety minute with sop, filler, and grandiloquence, on some level I can appreciate the radical condensation of this practice. One only has time for the essence of the prayer. And practically speaking, if everyone is to get personal facetime with Durga, it needs be brief, or else Hindus would lament the one-third of their life they spent sleeping, and the two-thirds they spent waiting to receive darshan. And yet, what is gained by that four second prayer? I suppose Woody Allen was right: 95% of life is showing up.)
Now I am front and center, and so I press my palms together, hold my hands to my chest, make several small, quick bows and hurry off. I am not conscious of having looked at the idol; I remember only a fierce yellow light and the face of one of the men (priests?) handling prasad. He is smiling indulgently. I catch up to Arun and Anuj. The rear wall of the temple is inlaid with swastikas (an auspicious Hindu symbol), and some worshippers reach out to it and pause for a split-second prayer. I touch it. We take some time to appreciate the temple's western exposure, munch coconut that has been consecrated by the goddess (Durgalicious!), and enjoy the relative cool and quiet of this side of Nirach Mata.
Within ten minutes, we depart. The stairway down from the temple (seen at the right in the photograph) had been relatively clear during our wait--the descent of worshippers was no more than a trickle then, and could be no more, as the temple can hold only a fraction of those waiting to be admitted. But now, as we descend, impatience and fervor have surmounted propriety, and a wave of the zealous has swept nearly to the top to meet us. There is jostling and shouting. "This can't end well," I think. The crowd seethes and churns; it is an independent organism, obeying its own logic. There is a terrible strength in this mass, and that strength is heaving about, trying to find articulation in its dumb gesturing (More of "The Hollow Men": "Between the motion/And the act/Falls the Shadow"). Caught in the middle are an elderly couple, gray and shriveled and stooped, buffeted by the crowd. I fear for their safety. I fear for my safety. I can think only of the headline that I've glimpsed online that very afternoon: "15 Killed in Gujarat Temple Stampede". "This is how it happens!" I think. Someone lifts the rope separating the two stairways, and the old couple, harried to the last, manages to duck under. Arun and Anuj and I push downward and to the left, where a second staircase branches from the first. We slip away.
After we retrieve our sandals and continue our descent, I exclaim, "Indians are crazy!"
"What?" Anuj asks.
"All those people pushing," I say. "It was crazy."
"Oh, that happens all over India," he says matter-of-factly. He and Arun are unperturbed by what has taken place. The subject dies there.
The Many Paths, Part 1 of 4: Pocket Calendar Salvation
On the flight from Newark to Delhi, I sat on the aisle in a partial row of three seats near the back of the aircraft. The middle would remain mercifully empty throughout the trip, but when I sat down the window seat had already been occupied by a middle-aged man. His hair was graying, if not gray, and he wore glasses and a mild, benignly blank expression. He was a large man, and although not fat, his full cheeks and jowls bespoke a comfortable life. As I am not of the temperament to begin conversation with strangers, even those whose company I will share for the next thirteen hours, he addressed me first; he had the sort of smooth, drawling southern accent that I associate with televangelists and football coaches. He was going to India to visit his wife, he told me. She was finishing her second and final ("she told them she's not coming back") three-month stint conducting training for Indian employees of United Health Care in Delhi. The visit, his first to the country, would last a week, and then he would fly home, his wife following the next day. They wouldn't fly together, he told me, in the event some tragedy should befall the flight: "We couldn't do that to our kids." The kids, as it turned out, were in their thirties with lives of their own; he and his wife had recently celebrated their 38th wedding anniversary. I congratulated him and commented, out of politeness and possibly for the lack of anything better to say, that it was rare in this day and age for a marriage to last so long. "We got married real young," he said. "In South Carolina. She was sixteen, and I was eighteen, so we kind of grew up together."
There are two things I can't tolerate in strange travel mates: incessant talk (or general noisiness) and overly familiar talk. Fortunately, this man, whose name I've forgotten, indulged in neither. When he spoke it was to comment generally about his life and interests or to inquire after mine, or, less frequently, to make a passing observation regarding Indian culture (usually prefaced with the caveat or commendation--I wasn't sure which--"my wife says"). However, at one point he managed to steer the conversation to religion, and I immediately felt that this transition had a hint of the non sequitur in it--I suspected that he had intended to steer there all along. "We're Baptist," he told me strangely, almost sheepishly. He plunged on: he had accepted Christ a few years before. I braced myself, certain the conversation could go only one of two places from here: a personal recounting of his journey to faith in God, or else the dread question, Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior?
But my panic proved unfounded. He took a third tack, asking merely whether I had any background in "the church." My attempt to describe the unique character of the Mennonites, I think, thoroughly flummoxed him. "So they're Christians?" he asked at the end of my spiel, which, despite its regular and longstanding employment, has never achieved coherency, even to my own ears. Later in the flight he wrestled an impressive Bible from the overhead compartment and took to studying intently by the overhead light. Every other page of the Bible was blank, permitting the reader space for liberal note-taking and reflection, a feature he was evidently proud of: "I really like it," he drawled, in typically understated fashion. Meanwhile he scribbled away in pencil.
On our descent into Delhi, we wished each other good luck, and he hurriedly reached into his breast pocket and pressed a small white rectangle, inscribed with red script, into my hand. It was a pocket calendar from the Monnett Road Baptist Church of Julian, North Carolina. "We started handing these out a few years ago," he said, by way of explanation. He cited a figure, which I've forgotten--the number of pocket calendars his church had distributed, some several thousands. I wondered if he equated this figure with a lesser, but still quantifieable number of souls saved as direct consequence. Perhaps his church had some formula for pocket calendar salvation (for every 100 calendars distributed, seven souls come to God), as fundraising organizations do for calculating the success of direct mail campaigns or phone banks.
The reverse of the calendar featured red letters, bold and underlined, in all caps: GOD'S SIMPLE PLAN OF SALVATION. Five steps to salvation followed: 1. Realize that you are a sinner; 2. Realize that sin brings forth death; 3. Realize that God still loves you; 4. Realize that salvation is a free gift. Finally, unnumbered, but having the additional emphasis of italics: Call upon God and receive His free gift! Which sounded to me as if salvation were the sweatshirt one receives along with his Sports Illustrated subscription. (Calleth our operators and they will sayeth unto you: Behold, I send to you my only sweatshirt, and it shall be called Warmer of Arms, Concealer of Guts, Absorber of Beer Spills, Cradler of Remote Controls, Proclaimer of Everlasting Love for Thee, Sports Illustrated.) And at the bottom in eye-straining script: (Please let us know of your decision for Christ). In order to refine the formula no doubt.
There are two things I can't tolerate in strange travel mates: incessant talk (or general noisiness) and overly familiar talk. Fortunately, this man, whose name I've forgotten, indulged in neither. When he spoke it was to comment generally about his life and interests or to inquire after mine, or, less frequently, to make a passing observation regarding Indian culture (usually prefaced with the caveat or commendation--I wasn't sure which--"my wife says"). However, at one point he managed to steer the conversation to religion, and I immediately felt that this transition had a hint of the non sequitur in it--I suspected that he had intended to steer there all along. "We're Baptist," he told me strangely, almost sheepishly. He plunged on: he had accepted Christ a few years before. I braced myself, certain the conversation could go only one of two places from here: a personal recounting of his journey to faith in God, or else the dread question, Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior?
But my panic proved unfounded. He took a third tack, asking merely whether I had any background in "the church." My attempt to describe the unique character of the Mennonites, I think, thoroughly flummoxed him. "So they're Christians?" he asked at the end of my spiel, which, despite its regular and longstanding employment, has never achieved coherency, even to my own ears. Later in the flight he wrestled an impressive Bible from the overhead compartment and took to studying intently by the overhead light. Every other page of the Bible was blank, permitting the reader space for liberal note-taking and reflection, a feature he was evidently proud of: "I really like it," he drawled, in typically understated fashion. Meanwhile he scribbled away in pencil.
On our descent into Delhi, we wished each other good luck, and he hurriedly reached into his breast pocket and pressed a small white rectangle, inscribed with red script, into my hand. It was a pocket calendar from the Monnett Road Baptist Church of Julian, North Carolina. "We started handing these out a few years ago," he said, by way of explanation. He cited a figure, which I've forgotten--the number of pocket calendars his church had distributed, some several thousands. I wondered if he equated this figure with a lesser, but still quantifieable number of souls saved as direct consequence. Perhaps his church had some formula for pocket calendar salvation (for every 100 calendars distributed, seven souls come to God), as fundraising organizations do for calculating the success of direct mail campaigns or phone banks.
The reverse of the calendar featured red letters, bold and underlined, in all caps: GOD'S SIMPLE PLAN OF SALVATION. Five steps to salvation followed: 1. Realize that you are a sinner; 2. Realize that sin brings forth death; 3. Realize that God still loves you; 4. Realize that salvation is a free gift. Finally, unnumbered, but having the additional emphasis of italics: Call upon God and receive His free gift! Which sounded to me as if salvation were the sweatshirt one receives along with his Sports Illustrated subscription. (Calleth our operators and they will sayeth unto you: Behold, I send to you my only sweatshirt, and it shall be called Warmer of Arms, Concealer of Guts, Absorber of Beer Spills, Cradler of Remote Controls, Proclaimer of Everlasting Love for Thee, Sports Illustrated.) And at the bottom in eye-straining script: (Please let us know of your decision for Christ). In order to refine the formula no doubt.
Sunday, October 21, 2007
The Cutting Board Napoleon and Other Tales from the Scary Guest House
My Indian abode (pictured at left) has been variously identified as a guest house, a hostel, or, employing the definite article, the “Scary Guest House” (this epithet courtesy of another volunteer). Scary because dirty, and, I suspect, because of the absence, from a Western perspective, of some basic comforts and conveniences. The guest house, owned by Seva Mandir, is located on the campus of a teacher’s college and training center operated by Vidya Bhawan, another prominent local NGO; it is an eight minute walk from Seva Mandir. The campus comprises five main structures: two academic buildings, a boys' dorm, a girls' dorm, and a hostel for visiting training participants (currently sixty-seven teachers from seventeen states in India have gathered for three-and-a-half weeks of instruction in classical Indian culture and art—they’ve taken a bit of interest in me). The Scary Guest House abuts the rear of the girl’s dorm and was once a part of it. In fact, we share a padlocked interior door; I can hear the chattering of college girls just about any time of day.
I have but one roommate for the present, Arun, a south Indian from the state of Karnataka who works with Seva Mandir’s Natural Resource Development Unit. He’s young (twenty-five) and recently completed a Master’s degree in Development Management. He’s a tiny man, perpetually smiling, and he has a pleasant, wheezing, hiccupping laugh, although I never inspire it, even with my liberal bungling. We each have our own room with a single bed, but there are two other bedrooms with two beds apiece, and no doubt they will be occupied, at least partially, at some point.
My room is moderately sized and modest in every sense. There are two pieces of furniture: the bed (at right) and a large and flimsy metal cabinet of four shelves where I store my clothing (I also stack my books and other sundry personal belongings on top). The room is painted a washed out yellow, almost ochre, but judging from the spots where the paint has chipped away, it was once green. Four large windows have also been painted over, to cave-like effect. Two things adorn the otherwise bare space: a page torn from an Indian entertainment rag featuring a couple of suggestively posed actors, which has been hastily taped over a rear window, and hanging beside the door, a lithographed image of three freedom fighters from the Indian Uprising of 1857.
As perhaps befits a scary guest house, cobwebs are epidemic: the guest house is large, the ceilings high, and they inhabit every corner, crease, nook, and cranny. No matter how thorough the eradication effort, the cobwebs return, as though they are sustained by the very walls. I hesitate to kill the webmakers for several reasons. First, their sheer number would render any piecemeal extermination futile; secondly, I think that they’re good luck and perform a vital service: pest control. The Scary Guest House harbors ants great and small, a symphony of crickets, and when Arun inexplicably leaves the door open some nights, a swarm of mosquitoes too—plus the odd beetles, cockroaches, and flies. The occasional trespassing of a lizard is suffered for the same reason the spiders are spared their existence.
From time to time we host larger visitors too. Much of the front wall of the guest house, including the front door, is screened mesh (the swath of blue in the first photograph), and one of the innumerable stray dogs that loll about everywhere in this country has pushed in the mesh at the bottom of the door and can be found sleeping peacefully on the stone floor of our entryway some mornings.
The Scary Guest House contains not a single chair, let alone a table. When we eat, we sit on the floor of Arun’s bedroom. Arun has more space than me, including a real closet, a small anteroom of sorts (it has a door that leads outside) that houses a low dresser mounted with the guest house’s only mirror, and access to the only interior bathroom. I use this bathroom. The other bathroom is beyond the screen door and adjoins the patio (you can see its brown door at the far left in the first photo). Its door doesn’t latch properly, and the less said about its condition the better. I saw a (different) stray dog depart its confines one morning, and Lord knows what else has taken up residence there.
The interior bathroom isn’t exactly a paragon of cleanliness either. The sink is caked with the residue of thousands of hand-washings and the backwash of thousands of teethbrushings. The toilet is Indian-style, meaning it is set in the floor with raised footpads. It no longer flushes, so waste is banished by a pitcher of water refilled as many times as necessary. It’s likely not the most sanitary method of removal, but it seems effective. Although the toilet isn’t up to snuff, in a literal sense, by Western standards, in the reckoning of India, the smell is modest: a blind man can locate a public restroom here just as well, if not better than the fully sighted.
Which brings us finally to the kitchen, in many ways the most modernly outfitted of the Scary Guest House's rooms. Since I’ve arrived, Seva Mandir has acquired, on our behalf, a countertop gas range with two burners (no more single burner glorified camp stove for us!) and, most splendid of all, a refrigerator. Arun cooks. I do not, except when he is away in the field, usually one or two nights a week. I offer my assistance with vegetable chopping or other preparatory tasks, and I wash the dishes. Arun is particular about food preparation and cooking matters. Well, to be honest, this is an understatement. The proper method for achieving some culinary aim—let’s say chopping a tomato—exists, and this is Arun’s method. Then there is everything else. Frequently—by which I mean every time—when he asks me to lend a hand in some way with the cooking, my strivings are interrupted with a lecture and a demonstration that culminates in him finishing the task for me. He hasn't any faith in me. He is a kitchen dictator, a cutting board Napoleon.
In Arun's estimation, I peel the potatoes wrong (I want to tell him: “In the U.S. we have an implement called a vegetable peeler, and if I had one right now I would peel this potato three times faster than your sorry butt.”). I cut the potatoes wrong. I chop the onions wrong. I add too much tea and not enough sugar to the chai (Arun’s version of this quintessential Indian beverage is essentially heavily sweetened milk, which is perfectly fine with me). I’m not attentive enough to the chapati (a circular, unleavened bread also called roti). I wash the rice wrong. This last quibble inspired me to tell him, “You know, there’s more than one way to do something, Arun.” It's the most I could muster. On the one night that he asks me to cook, when he has returned late from a day trip to Kotra (nine hours of miserable bus travel), he predictably hijacks the process mid-way. After we sit down to eat, he notes that I haven’t fried the mustard seed properly. “I am thinking you added the onions immediately after the mustard seed,” he says. He’s right about that. Imagine my delight one night when, in the interest of saving time, he attempts to cook the rice in a pot instead of the pressure cooker, where dhal (a watery lentil-based mixture that is a staple of Indian cuisine) is being prepared instead. He does everything wrong: he boils an indiscriminate amount of water, leaves the pot half-covered, then uncovers it and stirs several times, then pours off some of the water and returns it to the burner. “What are you doing?” I ask him at one point, but don’t belabor it. The result of his efforts, by his own admission, is “paste.” The schadenfreude, however, is delicious.
You may imagine, given the foregoing, that I am anxious to relocate. Quite to the contrary, I am perfectly content to remain in the Scary Guest House at Vidya Bhawan. I am comfortable here, and at heart a creature who appreciates consistency and familiarity. Also, despite his authoritarian leanings, his lax mosquito admission policy, and other minor annoyances magnified by our proximity, I am fond of Arun. Plus, he’s a good cook, and he’s got range in the kitchen—it’s not just curry and dhal and rice. He’s the rare South Indian who can make chapati, and he’s prepared omelets, the occasional upma for breakfast or a snack, and is a savant with vermicelli. I’ve already been offered the opportunity to move into another Seva Mandir “guest house,” which is really a modern two bedroom flat in the middle of the city. It has furniture, flush toilets, and is implausibly clean (it’s small enough that hiring a cleaning woman is economically feasible). In almost every way, it is more appealing than my former apartment in Washington D.C. But I decided against the move, and not for any misguided notion of living a more authentically Indian existence (in any event, I think most Indians keep their living spaces far neater than ours). The Scary Guest House, for all its defects, has become my Indian home. It’s like that first high school girlfriend, who, though you may have dated smarter, prettier girls later on, you remember with an outsized fondness and think, “Maybe I should have stuck with her after all. She was solid, and things were simple, and she never gave me too much grief.” I guess what I’m trying to say without laughing is: A man can get used to the Scary Guest House.
Monday, October 15, 2007
Pt. 2 of 2: A New Way to See Them
Last Sunday night my roommate Arun tracked me down in an internet café. “I’ve come to tell you that we can eat in a restaurant tonight,” he said, really meaning, “I don’t want to cook tonight, and I’ve just gotten my monthly stipend from Seva Mandir.” We located a nearby restaurant with an Urdu name, Ku war Kalewa, and took a seat at a table on the darkened lawn, which fronted an open, canopied structure housing a bar and several tables. No candles were lighted, no external illumination switched on. I had to hold the menu inches from my face to read it. It was my first time eating out since arriving in Udaipur.
In the gloom, stars returned to my brain, and I craned my neck to gaze at the sky. It was no less underwhelming for our murky surroundings. “Do you know anything about astronomy?” I asked Arun.
“Yes?” (“Please repeat yourself,” in Arun’s idiom.)
“Astronomy. Do you know anything about the stars, the constellations?”
“No.” He half-laughed, and I couldn’t decide whether the question seemed ridiculous to him, or whether he hasn’t really understood me after all. I let it drop.
The next morning a FedEx parcel awaited me at work. It had arrived courtesy of some former co-workers and softball teammates who, still basking in the glow of a second-place finish in the Congressional Softball League tournament, had, to my great delight, thought it necessary to ship to India my “29th Annual U.S. Congressional Softball Tournament 2007 Final Four Team” t-shirt, a card, a photo of the runner-up trophy, and several books (the library expands!), no doubt all at the company’s expense. Among the books was a thin and oversized paperback volume with an attractive bluish cover. It was called The Stars: A New Way to See Them by H.A. Rey. The name and the script on the cover were instantly familiar, if not immediately identifiable. Wasn’t H.A. Rey the author of the Curious George books? (I had an intense Curious George phase as a child.) What was the meaning of this book and by what uncanny power had it landed in my lap?
A blank inner page, opposite the Table of Contents, contained an inscription hand-written in blue ink. It began:
Peter,
My hope is that while in India you will have numerous opportunities to lie under a vast, dark sky and marvel at the cosmos. After several years of living in the city, I forget about the beautiful and infinite night sky I loved so much as a child. I forgot about wishing on stars and watching comets glide across the horizon. With so much light pollution the night sky of yesteryear has all but disappeared.
I was stunned. Although impossible, I felt as if a private fancy had been found out. Life’s small serendipities…
I owed this felicity to Barbi Broadus, a co-worker and close friend who had been leveraging delivery of some mysterious gift against future e-mails and correspondence—as in, you’d better stay in touch, or I won’t send you the package. She had served in Peace Corps in a village in the Malian Sahel, where the book had found its way into her hands just as she was confronting the seeming infinity of the African sky (and perhaps the seemingly infinite loneliness of the outsider). The book, first published in 1952, is, as its title implies, a deft and unpretentious introduction to the heavens. Rey reconnected the dots of the constellations in a manner he labeled “Graphic”; this in contrast to the two antecedent schools of representation, Allegorical and Geometric. In essence, he created a new figuration for the constellations, one that rendered them more representational, recognizable, and therefore memorable, all in a quest for greater accessibility and enrichment of our experience of the cosmos. Reading the first few pages, I felt a redoubled enthusiasm. But would I ever have the chance to use it?
The following day I was off to Kotra, seat of the most distant block in which Seva Mandir works, in the isolated, northernmost reaches of Udaipur District, where I was to document the impact of Seva Mandir’s first gravity-flow irrigation project, in a village called Thep. Among my fellow travelers, estimates of Kotra’s distance from Udaipur varied, ranging from 120 kilometers to 185, but the bus ride took more than four hours, and any way you figure it, that’s slow going. And cramped going. And bumpy going. The ride there and back deserves a post of its own (flat tires, an aging woman struck down by a carelessly flung spare, a doddering goat herdsman flogged in passing by our driver, numerous opportunities to calculate precisely how much of one’s butt must remain in contact with a seat to sustain one’s verticality), but I’m afraid it won’t happen, not least because I had an even more interesting jeep ride to Jhadol the morning after returning from Kotra. But I digress.
Seva Mandir’s Kotra office is situated perhaps a half-mile north of town, on a plain that slopes gently to a rocky, brush-lined stream running behind its guest house. Beyond the stream are rolling fields of stony scrub; the fields give way to modest foothills, and the foothills to the lovely forested ridges of an undulating spine of Aravallis. The two-story guest house was constructed in 2005 and seemed resortish in comparison to my accommodations in Udaipur: flush toilets, copious natural light, and a balcony! The guest house was L-shaped, and at the intersection of the L, a spiral staircase led up to the roof, where during the summer months steaming boarders take refuge from the heat and find sleep. It offered a grand view of the surrounding landscape (the second photo in a previous post, “Self-Indulgence and Self-Correction,” was taken from the roof while looking out over the stream) and, I sensed, of an effulgent night sky.
In the evening I sat on the balcony and watched darkness creep into the world. In the last hours of daylight, the stream quickened with activity. People washed clothes and washed themselves; children drove cattle to drink, then stripped down and swam gleefully among their charges; a man waded back and forth, checking his fishing nets. Birds came (a kingfisher, a pair of bee-eaters, and the inevitable crows, pigeons, and sparrows), cackled noisily, and went. As I stared off into the east, the hills grew blue, then gray, and finally black. All the while I ignored the sky, waiting for the true dark of night, when I would steal away to the roof and confront the cosmos on better terms.
After dinner I could wait no longer. It was impossible to avert my gaze from the radiance of the stars; they were immediate and importuning. Among this series of serendipities—the reawakening inspired by “The Dark Side”; the arrival of The Stars: A New Way to See Them; a rooftop perch in dark and desolate Kotra—was a final, tiny one: the night of October 9 welcomed a new moon. Thus it offered ideal stargazing conditions: a cloudless sky unsullied by the fulsome glow of its brightest celestial body. I saw the Milky Way for the first time in memory: it splashed across the center of the sky like a wide and spectral river, rending the empyrean in two. I saw more stars and saw them more clearly than I have at any time since Kilimanjaro. They twinkled and shone and all but spoke, projecting their innate brilliance and vitality across distances greater than the human mind can fathom. The sky wasn’t perfect—the lights of Kotra infringed from the southwest, and the aggregate artificial light of other dispersed human habitations roundabout dimmed the heavens by degrees—but it was more than enough to awe, to inspire “plain old jaw-dropping wonder.” I hadn’t had the foresight to bring the book, but it didn’t matter. It wasn’t a night to identify individual constellations, but one to revel in the ecstasy of the glorious totality. I lay on a ledge, arms behind head, staring upward until the cool breeze brought a chill and sent me reluctantly to bed.
In the gloom, stars returned to my brain, and I craned my neck to gaze at the sky. It was no less underwhelming for our murky surroundings. “Do you know anything about astronomy?” I asked Arun.
“Yes?” (“Please repeat yourself,” in Arun’s idiom.)
“Astronomy. Do you know anything about the stars, the constellations?”
“No.” He half-laughed, and I couldn’t decide whether the question seemed ridiculous to him, or whether he hasn’t really understood me after all. I let it drop.
The next morning a FedEx parcel awaited me at work. It had arrived courtesy of some former co-workers and softball teammates who, still basking in the glow of a second-place finish in the Congressional Softball League tournament, had, to my great delight, thought it necessary to ship to India my “29th Annual U.S. Congressional Softball Tournament 2007 Final Four Team” t-shirt, a card, a photo of the runner-up trophy, and several books (the library expands!), no doubt all at the company’s expense. Among the books was a thin and oversized paperback volume with an attractive bluish cover. It was called The Stars: A New Way to See Them by H.A. Rey. The name and the script on the cover were instantly familiar, if not immediately identifiable. Wasn’t H.A. Rey the author of the Curious George books? (I had an intense Curious George phase as a child.) What was the meaning of this book and by what uncanny power had it landed in my lap?
A blank inner page, opposite the Table of Contents, contained an inscription hand-written in blue ink. It began:
Peter,
My hope is that while in India you will have numerous opportunities to lie under a vast, dark sky and marvel at the cosmos. After several years of living in the city, I forget about the beautiful and infinite night sky I loved so much as a child. I forgot about wishing on stars and watching comets glide across the horizon. With so much light pollution the night sky of yesteryear has all but disappeared.
I was stunned. Although impossible, I felt as if a private fancy had been found out. Life’s small serendipities…
I owed this felicity to Barbi Broadus, a co-worker and close friend who had been leveraging delivery of some mysterious gift against future e-mails and correspondence—as in, you’d better stay in touch, or I won’t send you the package. She had served in Peace Corps in a village in the Malian Sahel, where the book had found its way into her hands just as she was confronting the seeming infinity of the African sky (and perhaps the seemingly infinite loneliness of the outsider). The book, first published in 1952, is, as its title implies, a deft and unpretentious introduction to the heavens. Rey reconnected the dots of the constellations in a manner he labeled “Graphic”; this in contrast to the two antecedent schools of representation, Allegorical and Geometric. In essence, he created a new figuration for the constellations, one that rendered them more representational, recognizable, and therefore memorable, all in a quest for greater accessibility and enrichment of our experience of the cosmos. Reading the first few pages, I felt a redoubled enthusiasm. But would I ever have the chance to use it?
The following day I was off to Kotra, seat of the most distant block in which Seva Mandir works, in the isolated, northernmost reaches of Udaipur District, where I was to document the impact of Seva Mandir’s first gravity-flow irrigation project, in a village called Thep. Among my fellow travelers, estimates of Kotra’s distance from Udaipur varied, ranging from 120 kilometers to 185, but the bus ride took more than four hours, and any way you figure it, that’s slow going. And cramped going. And bumpy going. The ride there and back deserves a post of its own (flat tires, an aging woman struck down by a carelessly flung spare, a doddering goat herdsman flogged in passing by our driver, numerous opportunities to calculate precisely how much of one’s butt must remain in contact with a seat to sustain one’s verticality), but I’m afraid it won’t happen, not least because I had an even more interesting jeep ride to Jhadol the morning after returning from Kotra. But I digress.
Seva Mandir’s Kotra office is situated perhaps a half-mile north of town, on a plain that slopes gently to a rocky, brush-lined stream running behind its guest house. Beyond the stream are rolling fields of stony scrub; the fields give way to modest foothills, and the foothills to the lovely forested ridges of an undulating spine of Aravallis. The two-story guest house was constructed in 2005 and seemed resortish in comparison to my accommodations in Udaipur: flush toilets, copious natural light, and a balcony! The guest house was L-shaped, and at the intersection of the L, a spiral staircase led up to the roof, where during the summer months steaming boarders take refuge from the heat and find sleep. It offered a grand view of the surrounding landscape (the second photo in a previous post, “Self-Indulgence and Self-Correction,” was taken from the roof while looking out over the stream) and, I sensed, of an effulgent night sky.
In the evening I sat on the balcony and watched darkness creep into the world. In the last hours of daylight, the stream quickened with activity. People washed clothes and washed themselves; children drove cattle to drink, then stripped down and swam gleefully among their charges; a man waded back and forth, checking his fishing nets. Birds came (a kingfisher, a pair of bee-eaters, and the inevitable crows, pigeons, and sparrows), cackled noisily, and went. As I stared off into the east, the hills grew blue, then gray, and finally black. All the while I ignored the sky, waiting for the true dark of night, when I would steal away to the roof and confront the cosmos on better terms.
After dinner I could wait no longer. It was impossible to avert my gaze from the radiance of the stars; they were immediate and importuning. Among this series of serendipities—the reawakening inspired by “The Dark Side”; the arrival of The Stars: A New Way to See Them; a rooftop perch in dark and desolate Kotra—was a final, tiny one: the night of October 9 welcomed a new moon. Thus it offered ideal stargazing conditions: a cloudless sky unsullied by the fulsome glow of its brightest celestial body. I saw the Milky Way for the first time in memory: it splashed across the center of the sky like a wide and spectral river, rending the empyrean in two. I saw more stars and saw them more clearly than I have at any time since Kilimanjaro. They twinkled and shone and all but spoke, projecting their innate brilliance and vitality across distances greater than the human mind can fathom. The sky wasn’t perfect—the lights of Kotra infringed from the southwest, and the aggregate artificial light of other dispersed human habitations roundabout dimmed the heavens by degrees—but it was more than enough to awe, to inspire “plain old jaw-dropping wonder.” I hadn’t had the foresight to bring the book, but it didn’t matter. It wasn’t a night to identify individual constellations, but one to revel in the ecstasy of the glorious totality. I lay on a ledge, arms behind head, staring upward until the cool breeze brought a chill and sent me reluctantly to bed.
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Pt. 1 of 2: The Discovery of The Dark Side
Sometimes life’s small serendipities assume outsized significance, whether as result of circumstance, or timing, or other factors not as easily reduced to a word or idea. Part of my cargo for India included a fair amount of reading material, as drawing from my previous experiences in Africa, I anticipated having an excess of free time that couldn’t be filled by television, DVDs, chatting on the phone, or any of the other more or less mindless activities in which we fritter away large portions of our lives. I looked forward to the prospect of devoting more time to reading; like most people, I do far less of it than I would like. My portable library is dominated by books, but I did jam several back issues of magazines into my backpack before departing. Owing largely to my habit of reading issues cover to cover, I tend to develop backlogs in my subscriptions, and so leaving the country afforded an excellent opportunity to get caught up: I would have ample time to read the old issues without new ones arriving by mail to bear witness to the futility of my effort. Given that the New Yorker is a weekly publication, it has proven particularly difficult to stay current with (I used to pray for double issues). Hence, four issues of the magazine accompanied me to India.
During perhaps my second week in Udaipur, I encountered an article in the August 20 issue called “The Dark Side,” written by a man named David Owen (you can access it here: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/20/070820fa_fact_owen). I am in the habit of clipping and filing away articles—whether newspaper or magazine—that strike me as especially fascinating, profound, or well-written, and upon finishing the issue, I tore “The Dark Side” out immediately. As with some of the best New Yorker feature writing, it took a relatively mundane or marginal subject—in this case, light pollution—and made it seem startlingly immediate, substantial, and, in a word, vital, all the while maintaining that elegant but understated, equable New Yorker style to which all reportage should aspire. It shocked with simple facts, not with alarmist tone or fiery rhetoric or by conjuring dystopian imagery. Just facts: the brightest feature in the nighttime sky visible from the Grand Canyon is the lights of Las Vegas, 175 miles away; in a sky absent of light pollution, Venus, Jupiter, and the Milky Way are all bright enough to cast shadows; “in a truly dark sky, shooting stars are too numerous to bother wishing on.” My connection with the last was immediate, almost visceral: during my most profound experience of the heavens, while making final ascent of Mt. Kilimanjaro, I marveled at the frequency of shooting stars, which seemed to tracer the sky every time I had occasion to gaze upward.
Owens’ thesis: “Excessive, poorly designed outdoor lighting wastes electricity, imperils human health and safety, disturbs natural habitats, and, increasingly, deprives many of us of a direct relationship with the nighttime sky, which throughout human history has been a powerful source of reflection, inspiration, discovery, and plain old jaw-dropping wonder,” is powerfully argued, and not merely for the marshalling of dismal facts: his evocation of the experience of a truly dark sky, glimpsed at Bryce Canyon National Park in the desert of southern Utah, had a transporting and stirring effect on me. I put down the magazine and stepped out into the Indian night, which would surely reveal a sky that shamed the dim American firmament. But Udaipur is a city after all, and a fairly sizable one by American standards—nearly 600,000 people live here. The sky hardly revealed more than I might expect to see in a middling American city, and a good deal less than I might observe from my parent’s yard in rural northern Indiana. I was disappointed, though not crushed.
After coming to India, I formed both the idea and hope that I might establish an acute, fundamental, and enduring appreciation for the simplest of things: the taste of a chocolate bar, for example, rendered novel and especially delectable for its relative scarcity, or the physical experience of a city hemmed in by hills. India lay before me, I thought, its charms, its horizons, its forms and features and cultural incarnations inevitably less debased, purer than those of America. India promised to be a wilder, simpler world. And so it is, I think, in many ways. But it also has a population three-and-a-half times greater than that of the U.S. dispersed over an area less than one-half of that of the forty-eight contiguous states. All manner of pollution has taken tenacious hold here and will likely worsen with time: the sky, like the rivers, the forests, and the city streets alike, is compromised by human activity in many places.
The night sky—what could be a pleasure more basic than that? I had practically forgotten about the existence of stars after four years of city dwelling. Only, as should have been obvious before I rushed out-of-doors in a dumb swoon, Indian cities are heavily illuminated, just as American cities are, just as most cities in the world are, for that matter. Perhaps this fundamental human pleasure, reawakened with such fervor by David Owens’ writing, would be scuttled before it could become a regular source of joy and comfort and wonder. I still held out hope that Udaipur harbored some brilliant stargazing redoubt, perhaps on a hillside facing away from the city. But how would I ever find it?
During perhaps my second week in Udaipur, I encountered an article in the August 20 issue called “The Dark Side,” written by a man named David Owen (you can access it here: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/20/070820fa_fact_owen). I am in the habit of clipping and filing away articles—whether newspaper or magazine—that strike me as especially fascinating, profound, or well-written, and upon finishing the issue, I tore “The Dark Side” out immediately. As with some of the best New Yorker feature writing, it took a relatively mundane or marginal subject—in this case, light pollution—and made it seem startlingly immediate, substantial, and, in a word, vital, all the while maintaining that elegant but understated, equable New Yorker style to which all reportage should aspire. It shocked with simple facts, not with alarmist tone or fiery rhetoric or by conjuring dystopian imagery. Just facts: the brightest feature in the nighttime sky visible from the Grand Canyon is the lights of Las Vegas, 175 miles away; in a sky absent of light pollution, Venus, Jupiter, and the Milky Way are all bright enough to cast shadows; “in a truly dark sky, shooting stars are too numerous to bother wishing on.” My connection with the last was immediate, almost visceral: during my most profound experience of the heavens, while making final ascent of Mt. Kilimanjaro, I marveled at the frequency of shooting stars, which seemed to tracer the sky every time I had occasion to gaze upward.
Owens’ thesis: “Excessive, poorly designed outdoor lighting wastes electricity, imperils human health and safety, disturbs natural habitats, and, increasingly, deprives many of us of a direct relationship with the nighttime sky, which throughout human history has been a powerful source of reflection, inspiration, discovery, and plain old jaw-dropping wonder,” is powerfully argued, and not merely for the marshalling of dismal facts: his evocation of the experience of a truly dark sky, glimpsed at Bryce Canyon National Park in the desert of southern Utah, had a transporting and stirring effect on me. I put down the magazine and stepped out into the Indian night, which would surely reveal a sky that shamed the dim American firmament. But Udaipur is a city after all, and a fairly sizable one by American standards—nearly 600,000 people live here. The sky hardly revealed more than I might expect to see in a middling American city, and a good deal less than I might observe from my parent’s yard in rural northern Indiana. I was disappointed, though not crushed.
After coming to India, I formed both the idea and hope that I might establish an acute, fundamental, and enduring appreciation for the simplest of things: the taste of a chocolate bar, for example, rendered novel and especially delectable for its relative scarcity, or the physical experience of a city hemmed in by hills. India lay before me, I thought, its charms, its horizons, its forms and features and cultural incarnations inevitably less debased, purer than those of America. India promised to be a wilder, simpler world. And so it is, I think, in many ways. But it also has a population three-and-a-half times greater than that of the U.S. dispersed over an area less than one-half of that of the forty-eight contiguous states. All manner of pollution has taken tenacious hold here and will likely worsen with time: the sky, like the rivers, the forests, and the city streets alike, is compromised by human activity in many places.
The night sky—what could be a pleasure more basic than that? I had practically forgotten about the existence of stars after four years of city dwelling. Only, as should have been obvious before I rushed out-of-doors in a dumb swoon, Indian cities are heavily illuminated, just as American cities are, just as most cities in the world are, for that matter. Perhaps this fundamental human pleasure, reawakened with such fervor by David Owens’ writing, would be scuttled before it could become a regular source of joy and comfort and wonder. I still held out hope that Udaipur harbored some brilliant stargazing redoubt, perhaps on a hillside facing away from the city. But how would I ever find it?
Friday, October 12, 2007
Self-Indulgence and Self-Correction
Adrift in alien and, at times, inhospitable waters, one may naturally seek the familiar to restore his orientation—the star, common to all skies, that may guide him. Or, conversely, he may abandon his craft and plunge into the sea roiling around him and hope that he will learn the quality of this strange water quickly enough to establish a new orientation. Or, perhaps, if he is the timid sort, he will cling to the mast, shut his eyes, and set his will against the sea, waiting for the tide to bring him to shore. In India, I have attempted, at one time or another, all three courses. The first, I should say, has been the most common; the last has been employed more than I care to admit, however (it seems a default response to inevitable misunderstanding and frustration). For example, Sunday night I played solitaire and pinball on my laptop, a mindlessness I never plumb at home. The second course is the least natural for me, and perhaps the most rewarding, as well as the most dangerous. Some seek to find themselves in foreign places; others expect to lose themselves there. I, for my part, hope to retain myself. Should I return wearing a dhoti and singing Bollywood treacle, I expect a good boxing of the ears.
I don’t mean to suggest that I hope to remain unaltered by my time here—far from it, in fact—only that I hope to conserve what I find at my center, that it will not be overthrown by this experience. This may be presumptuous (that there be something worth retaining), and it is certainly a conservative attitude (I have even used the world “conserve” above). Some would say: “But you must open yourself to the fullness of this new world! Allow everything you know to be challenged! Allow yourself to be transformed!” Forgive me for rolling my eyes at this (proof twenty-eight has found me already a grumpy old man!). This is what I felt at twenty-two. I believe I now know a little of what, at its essence, I love, a little of what, at its essence, I value, and I expect that will change with age, but I don’t think I should throw it off so easily. In India, I would hope to learn to love and value more widely, perhaps even more deeply, but that it not be at the expense of what my heart already cherishes.
In one of life’s many ironies, I face, perhaps, the same challenge that Indians and so many other peoples of the developing world have confronted for years. To wit: the true challenge of the post-colonial peoples was not something so nebulous as realizing democracy, or something so narrow as achieving economic prosperity, but rather it was taking the good (of which there was some) and throwing out the bad (of which there was more) of the colonial experience, while retaining what was best and unique and abandoning what was mean and limiting about their own cultures. This dialectic lives on in the age of globalization, and even as the post-colonial battles continue to be waged, they intermingle with the skirmishes of globalization—the two are often indistinguishable. So too must I confront difference and decide what is good and bad in it, and also to hold it alongside myself, to see, in the comparison, what of myself may be sloughed off.
Granted the crucible of a year in India or any foreign culture does not approximate that of centuries of forced cultural interchange, but I still think that the analogy may be made. Much is confronted here that one cannot be neutral about. We are always adding to and subtracting from ourselves, and the experience of a foreign culture is less solving a single abstruse mathematical problem than a rapid and constant calculation of simple sums and differences. Only the grading of our efforts is never so simple.
I’d like to pause here a moment and confess that I never intended this blog to assume the character it has of late, by which I mean the gratuitous theorizing and philosophizing dressed up as fact with declarative sentences; when I originally consented to do this, it was to obviate the need for mass e-mails. I was reluctant to take on a blog because of my fundamental dislike of the medium. I fear it gives voice to the dilettante, the armchair philosopher, the shrill contrarian, the fatuous blowhard (so close to home!); in other words, voice to those who don’t deserve a forum. And now have I not become what I’ve despised?
As many before me have pointed out, ours is an age of, among other things, the democratization of art and commentary. This has occurred primarily as a result of technological advance (digital film, desktop publishing, music production software), although shifting aesthetics (the visual arts now favoring big ideas at the expense of technical virtuosity), and expanding markets (art and criticism being information in an information-ravenous age) have certainly played their part. In general, I view this as an auspicious development, but it harbors a grave danger for the masses: deluged with all manner of expression, we are even less able than normal to distinguish the worthy from the unworthy. This is not so dangerous, though lamentable, where art is concerned, but it is positively perilous in regards to commentary: where art may have long ago lost its power to shape the values of nations (which is really a subject for another post and another blog), cultural and political commentary has entered a Golden Age of influence. No longer can journalists, the clergy, or statesmen claim to be supreme arbiters of national opinion, as they might have at one point in the history of the United States: this mantle is now reserved for the talking head and its invisible brethren on the radio airwaves and, yes, in the so-called blogosphere. Sound and fury is perhaps even less restrained in the blogosphere; therefore, were it possible to signify less than nothing, bloggers might very well do it. I’ve lain down with dogs.
I’m afraid I’ve been carried away—by the power that an audience confers, I mean. Forgive me: I’ve never had one before. Also, I assumed that only a few true souls would bother to regularly read the blog, while some number more would check in when it happened to be a slow day at work and the Times online was uncharacteristically slight. But this is a half-excuse if it is any excuse at all. One must always write with the audience in mind, and you are not reading this blog because you crave my half-baked wisdom. I apologize for betraying your trust…and of course I beg your pardon only so that I may continue in the same vein (didn’t the preceding paragraph prepare you for that double-cross?). It is all for the sake of courtesy. The truth: I enjoy the pontificating too much to stop entirely. And yet, there hasn’t been a single bit of retelling in this post, a standard all others have adhered to. Although it may be rooted in my emotional and mental experience of India, it is removed from my physical experience, and this cannot stand. I promise that not only will all future posts be inspired by my Indian odyssey, but they will also include some actual accounting of my experience here. I obey you letter, though the spirit be weak. I hope a couple of photos of the Aravallis will tide you over until the next post, which should be soon.
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Jhadol Block, Pt. 2
We range far from Jhadol on my second day in the field, into the most distant reaches of the block. The motorbike plies a steep road of swiftly alternating elevation—the hills are bunched tightly here. The road is also heavily eroded, as is often the case after monsoon. At occasional intervals we are forced to dodge villagers repairing its most washed out stretches. Today’s village is absent many adults—mostly men—of working age: they have gone to prepare for a ceremony in celebration of Gawari, a Hindu holiday of minor significance in most of India, but one which is stringently observed here. Try as I might, I never receive a satisfactory explanation of its origin; however, I can tell you that it involves the veneration of Lord Rama, who is the seventh incarnation of Vishnu, and his consort Sita, goddess of agriculture. I also learn that it is believed that its observation here forestalls natural disaster and pestilence.
After conducting a couple of interviews, Anuj and I speed off into the countryside, soon turning from the main road so that our path parallels a stream. We travel for a short distance, until a fence of thorny branches bars further progress—we’ve reached a homestead. We dismount and begin to walk along the bank of the stream, which doubles back close to the house (the house sits at the tip of a sort of peninsula). We cross the stream on foot (it is shallow and will be dry within months) and after following its rightward bend, we pass some boys splashing happily alongside a wallowing buffalo and cross again. Here, in a clearing above the stream, the ceremony/celebration/intrigue will initiate.
Existing alongside the caste-bound Hindus (82%), the remaining Muslims (12%), the Christians of the south (2.3%), the Sikhs of Punjab (1.9%), and a smattering of Buddhists and Jains (both constituting less than 1% of the population), are the indigenous tribal peoples of India, whose presence here predates the Dravidians, who came from the south, and the arriviste Aryans, who swept in from the north. Overall, tribal peoples represent about 6% of the Indian population; in Seva Mandir’s purview, they constitute 68%. Until 1952, they were officially known as the Criminal Tribes; now they are designated the Scheduled Tribes—along with the Scheduled Castes (the Dalits, or Untouchables), the Other Scheduled Castes (OSCs),and the unfortunately named Other Backwards Classes (OBCs), they are part of an extensive government quota system that puts American affirmative action to shame. Tribals exist outside of the caste system, but their native religions were long ago swallowed up by Hinduism and other major Indian faiths. I am in a tribal village, although to my eyes it is indistinguishable from a village of poor Hindus of muddled and indeterminate ethnic heritage.
I have never taken an anthropology class. I have never consciously compared distinct cultures within an anthropological framework or examined them on an anthropological basis. I am a stranger to the methods, jargon, theories, presuppositions, and hermeneutics of anthropologists. This is all a caveat for what comes next: On some fundamental level, my experience of this Indian tribal people’s observance of the Hindu holiday Gawari bears an uncanny resemblance to my experience of some tribal rituals in Africa. As embarrassing as I find the idea, it strikes me almost immediately. Though the similarities must be superficial, I cannot ignore them.
Music here is supplied by a single, two-sided drum and a metal pan clanged with a small and crude hammer. Is the beat the same? I cannot say; I can only say that it sounds similar, and that it drives the same sort of skipping, stopping-starting dance. The singing has a monotonous, chanting quality, an incantatory power that transports me to Cote d’Ivoire, where I would shake a rattling percussion piece and mimic a droning indigenous song for the amusement of my peers. There is a mask! Faces are painted. Bunches of weeds are shaken and twirled about. Perhaps it doesn’t add up to much, particularly in the retelling, but the sense of commonality impresses itself upon me. On Sunday, I will serendipitously stumble into a performance of Gujarati tribal dances, none of which will ever be confused for African.
Here in the village, differences are also illuminating. As in Shakespeare’s time, even the female roles in this ritual are played by men, and even the men not in drag wear enough jewelry—necklaces, bracelets, and dangling earrings—to rival Mr. T. Some have painted their fingernails. There are swordsmen and peacock feathers, umbrellas and spears. Much of the drama seems to revolve around spanking, pretend and otherwise. Anuj, a Hindu, is at a loss to interpret the proceedings. There is a bride and a groom, each of whom sings and dances in turn. “It is done,” Anuj tells me finally. “They are singing movie songs now.” We leave.
Development, like most forms of change, is incremental, although not unassailable, at least in the short-term. Gains can be lost; progress can be subverted by any number of variables. In the long-term, however, the world seems to be pushing toward well-being for all of its inhabitants (although the case of Africa makes me stare hard at this sentence). “The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice,” Martin Luther King Jr. said. The arc of development may very well parallel the arc of history and bend towards health and safety and dignity and fulfillment for all peoples—and what is justice if not that? It is best to measure progress in generations, for this is the most realistic timeframe for change and the surest way to avoid frustration. It may take a generation to convince people to value the education of their children above narrow economic considerations, and another generation for them to realize the insufficiency of their children’s education, to mobilize, and to press the government for redress. And how long for the government to provide a quality education to all of its far-flung peoples, to provide redress? When was Brown vs. Board of Education? 1954? Patience may be both virtue and excuse. After all, King, in his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” also rebuked those who asked him to wait for justice: "There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience."
On my first day in Jhadol Block, I inspect an anicut that stands at the mouth of a small, stream-fed lake. It is a high and impressive structure, with a slightly sunken and crenellated center that allows water easy passage should monsoon overflow the artificial lake. The excess water rolls over a nearly sheer stone wall six meters high (about twenty feet) into two cement retaining pools at the dam’s base, which in turn spill into a rocky streambed. At this remove from monsoon, water trickles solidly over only a couple of narrow swaths of the wall.
In the retaining pools, hundreds of fingerlings swim. I watch as a few fling themselves onto the ledge which surrounds the pools, then further to the base of the wall, where the water runs. They move in frantic hops spaced around long intervals of rest. Not one is as big as my thumb. After crossing the ledge, they begin to surmount the wall. By some miracle of physiology these fish are not only able to cling to the face of the wall—which must be inclined at eighty degrees, at least—but to fling themselves up it (for it really is flinging) in fits and starts, all the while drawing enough oxygen from the meager current of water that opposes them to perform this incredible feat (a rough calculation suggests that I would have to scale the side of an eighty-story building, without using hands or feet mind you, to approximate their journey). Bit by bit, fling by fling, they make it to the lake above. It must take an entire day, at least. Some fall, but I suspect that this doesn’t deter future climbing, because the lake affords space for growth, and offers the promise of freedom and abundance that the retaining ponds cannot. Somehow the fish understand this, and however long and difficult the journey, they make their way up.
After conducting a couple of interviews, Anuj and I speed off into the countryside, soon turning from the main road so that our path parallels a stream. We travel for a short distance, until a fence of thorny branches bars further progress—we’ve reached a homestead. We dismount and begin to walk along the bank of the stream, which doubles back close to the house (the house sits at the tip of a sort of peninsula). We cross the stream on foot (it is shallow and will be dry within months) and after following its rightward bend, we pass some boys splashing happily alongside a wallowing buffalo and cross again. Here, in a clearing above the stream, the ceremony/celebration/intrigue will initiate.
Existing alongside the caste-bound Hindus (82%), the remaining Muslims (12%), the Christians of the south (2.3%), the Sikhs of Punjab (1.9%), and a smattering of Buddhists and Jains (both constituting less than 1% of the population), are the indigenous tribal peoples of India, whose presence here predates the Dravidians, who came from the south, and the arriviste Aryans, who swept in from the north. Overall, tribal peoples represent about 6% of the Indian population; in Seva Mandir’s purview, they constitute 68%. Until 1952, they were officially known as the Criminal Tribes; now they are designated the Scheduled Tribes—along with the Scheduled Castes (the Dalits, or Untouchables), the Other Scheduled Castes (OSCs),and the unfortunately named Other Backwards Classes (OBCs), they are part of an extensive government quota system that puts American affirmative action to shame. Tribals exist outside of the caste system, but their native religions were long ago swallowed up by Hinduism and other major Indian faiths. I am in a tribal village, although to my eyes it is indistinguishable from a village of poor Hindus of muddled and indeterminate ethnic heritage.
I have never taken an anthropology class. I have never consciously compared distinct cultures within an anthropological framework or examined them on an anthropological basis. I am a stranger to the methods, jargon, theories, presuppositions, and hermeneutics of anthropologists. This is all a caveat for what comes next: On some fundamental level, my experience of this Indian tribal people’s observance of the Hindu holiday Gawari bears an uncanny resemblance to my experience of some tribal rituals in Africa. As embarrassing as I find the idea, it strikes me almost immediately. Though the similarities must be superficial, I cannot ignore them.
Music here is supplied by a single, two-sided drum and a metal pan clanged with a small and crude hammer. Is the beat the same? I cannot say; I can only say that it sounds similar, and that it drives the same sort of skipping, stopping-starting dance. The singing has a monotonous, chanting quality, an incantatory power that transports me to Cote d’Ivoire, where I would shake a rattling percussion piece and mimic a droning indigenous song for the amusement of my peers. There is a mask! Faces are painted. Bunches of weeds are shaken and twirled about. Perhaps it doesn’t add up to much, particularly in the retelling, but the sense of commonality impresses itself upon me. On Sunday, I will serendipitously stumble into a performance of Gujarati tribal dances, none of which will ever be confused for African.
Here in the village, differences are also illuminating. As in Shakespeare’s time, even the female roles in this ritual are played by men, and even the men not in drag wear enough jewelry—necklaces, bracelets, and dangling earrings—to rival Mr. T. Some have painted their fingernails. There are swordsmen and peacock feathers, umbrellas and spears. Much of the drama seems to revolve around spanking, pretend and otherwise. Anuj, a Hindu, is at a loss to interpret the proceedings. There is a bride and a groom, each of whom sings and dances in turn. “It is done,” Anuj tells me finally. “They are singing movie songs now.” We leave.
Development, like most forms of change, is incremental, although not unassailable, at least in the short-term. Gains can be lost; progress can be subverted by any number of variables. In the long-term, however, the world seems to be pushing toward well-being for all of its inhabitants (although the case of Africa makes me stare hard at this sentence). “The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice,” Martin Luther King Jr. said. The arc of development may very well parallel the arc of history and bend towards health and safety and dignity and fulfillment for all peoples—and what is justice if not that? It is best to measure progress in generations, for this is the most realistic timeframe for change and the surest way to avoid frustration. It may take a generation to convince people to value the education of their children above narrow economic considerations, and another generation for them to realize the insufficiency of their children’s education, to mobilize, and to press the government for redress. And how long for the government to provide a quality education to all of its far-flung peoples, to provide redress? When was Brown vs. Board of Education? 1954? Patience may be both virtue and excuse. After all, King, in his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” also rebuked those who asked him to wait for justice: "There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience."
On my first day in Jhadol Block, I inspect an anicut that stands at the mouth of a small, stream-fed lake. It is a high and impressive structure, with a slightly sunken and crenellated center that allows water easy passage should monsoon overflow the artificial lake. The excess water rolls over a nearly sheer stone wall six meters high (about twenty feet) into two cement retaining pools at the dam’s base, which in turn spill into a rocky streambed. At this remove from monsoon, water trickles solidly over only a couple of narrow swaths of the wall.
In the retaining pools, hundreds of fingerlings swim. I watch as a few fling themselves onto the ledge which surrounds the pools, then further to the base of the wall, where the water runs. They move in frantic hops spaced around long intervals of rest. Not one is as big as my thumb. After crossing the ledge, they begin to surmount the wall. By some miracle of physiology these fish are not only able to cling to the face of the wall—which must be inclined at eighty degrees, at least—but to fling themselves up it (for it really is flinging) in fits and starts, all the while drawing enough oxygen from the meager current of water that opposes them to perform this incredible feat (a rough calculation suggests that I would have to scale the side of an eighty-story building, without using hands or feet mind you, to approximate their journey). Bit by bit, fling by fling, they make it to the lake above. It must take an entire day, at least. Some fall, but I suspect that this doesn’t deter future climbing, because the lake affords space for growth, and offers the promise of freedom and abundance that the retaining ponds cannot. Somehow the fish understand this, and however long and difficult the journey, they make their way up.
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Jhadol Block, Pt. 1
Last Wednesday I was back amongst the Aravallis on my way to Jhadol, the seat of the largest of six blocks in which Seva Mandir works—blocks being administrative sub-units of the larger district. The Hills reveal more than the antic scattering of bumps and rises of my previous sojourn beyond the city: Evidence of their former splendor appears in the form of high and far-ranging ridges, fingers of which produce a landscape of haphazard valleys and bottomlands, some transected by streams, others guttering out in rock and dust. But all is green. The land folds like an accordion, producing neat ridges; it opens onto vast expanses heaped all around with regular hillocks, like gooseflesh rising from the pores of the earth; its hill huddle together as if to whisper, their sides so steep as to admit only the intrepid. Most often these features intermingle, to striking, if curious effect. What shaped this landscape? I wonder. I would commend its insouciance, its rejection of orderliness and symmetry and expectation. Does it operate in algorithms for which we cannot yet bring account? I assume that science can mold such chaos as the Aravallis into a comprehensible tale of birth and growth and inevitable decline. Science is good for nothing if not undercutting superstition and myth, for creating the rational counter-narrative. Still, the Aravallis must lay down a challenge. I know that the proper hills were created in a Precambrian geologic event; this accounts for the high ridges that bound the valleys all around. But what of the rest? How are they to be explained? I’m not rushing for answers.
By the time I arrive at Seva Mandir’s Jhadol office, I am sick. This owes as much to the driver’s rapid two-step of brake-and-accelerator as to the jarring, twisting roads. Suitably recovered within an hour, I hop onto the back of Anuj’s motorbike (Anuj, though he works in Jhadol, stays at my guesthouse on frequent visits to Udaipur), and we’re off to a village. I visit only two over the course of my time in Jhadol Block, but this is no matter. I am only seeking a glimpse of the world in which Seva Mandir works, a glint of understanding. I visit anicuts (small dams built by communities with Seva Mandir’s support), observe existing water sources, conduct informal interviews with a few scattered households. Where do you get your water for household use? I ask. Are your children often sick? Do you take any precautions to ensure the water is safe for consumption? Would you be willing to pay 10 Rs a month to finance a supply of clean water for your family? (This may prove the rub.)
Superficially, these villages are similar to ones in which I’ve spent time in Kenya. In both places rain arrives but once a year, in a furious gushing torrent of two or three or (in a good year) four weeks. Perhaps two feet will fall. The land, for the time being, is flush. But that is temporary; for the better part of the next eleven months, no appreciable precipitation will find its way to earth. The sun is brutal and direct (particularly in Kenya, which straddles the equator); water evaporates at several times the normal rate. With no outside source of water, no piping from a distant reservoir or siphoning off of some mighty river with its provenance in the mountains, every drop is precious. What monsoon brings, what the rainy season brings, must last. Subsistence is tenuous for most. Poverty signifies readily: small children are without pants, shirts; older children wear tattered and filthy school uniforms; bellies distend. It is all very familiar. India seems more blessed for the moment—greener, more water, more forest, more fodder—but perhaps this is a trick of the recent rains. In any event, the sheen of similarity does mask some fundamental differences in the social, cultural, and economic make-up of the two places—differences in land distribution, primary income sources, valuation of education, and the reach of government, among others.
One of the first, self-evident rules of development is that one size does not fit all. I have come to the field to receive what hints of identity might be offered up by this particular subset of “all,” this peculiar people nestled away from the world in the Aravalli Hills. What size will fit them? My superiors at Seva Mandir hope I can begin to answer this sort of question, one which, over many years, they have come to answer, if not entirely satisfactorily, at least to a degree to which they are peacefully resigned. It’s not that the people here are especially enigmatic; it is only that in development, one can never be assured of continuity and replication, of understanding and success. What works in one village does not work in the next, and this conundrum presents itself throughout the world—whether in the hills of western India, the slums of Mexico City, the jungles of the Congo, the mountains of Afghanistan, or inner-city Baltimore, rural Harlan County, Kentucky, and the banlieues of Paris. It hinges on questions of behavior, practice, custom, habit, belief, and values. This is the crux of development, or the implementation side of it at least: What will work in this place and why? Science fails here, or succeeds incompletely; it may tell us what should work, but it has less to say when its prescriptions falter, which is often. Its explanatory power shrinks in the face of multifarious humanity and its multifarious behavior.
The other side of development, what may be called the policy and management side for lack of a better term, involves mustering sufficient resources for a particular intervention (or more likely interventions) and then allocating them efficiently and effectively. It is a different sort of challenge, and one which I hope might be less intractable than the first. I will be dealing with both problems, but first things first: Given the world in which Seva Mandir works--its values, its beliefs, its culture, its economic and geophysical reality--how can a safe supply of drinking water be ensured? For the time being, this is my charge.
By the time I arrive at Seva Mandir’s Jhadol office, I am sick. This owes as much to the driver’s rapid two-step of brake-and-accelerator as to the jarring, twisting roads. Suitably recovered within an hour, I hop onto the back of Anuj’s motorbike (Anuj, though he works in Jhadol, stays at my guesthouse on frequent visits to Udaipur), and we’re off to a village. I visit only two over the course of my time in Jhadol Block, but this is no matter. I am only seeking a glimpse of the world in which Seva Mandir works, a glint of understanding. I visit anicuts (small dams built by communities with Seva Mandir’s support), observe existing water sources, conduct informal interviews with a few scattered households. Where do you get your water for household use? I ask. Are your children often sick? Do you take any precautions to ensure the water is safe for consumption? Would you be willing to pay 10 Rs a month to finance a supply of clean water for your family? (This may prove the rub.)
Superficially, these villages are similar to ones in which I’ve spent time in Kenya. In both places rain arrives but once a year, in a furious gushing torrent of two or three or (in a good year) four weeks. Perhaps two feet will fall. The land, for the time being, is flush. But that is temporary; for the better part of the next eleven months, no appreciable precipitation will find its way to earth. The sun is brutal and direct (particularly in Kenya, which straddles the equator); water evaporates at several times the normal rate. With no outside source of water, no piping from a distant reservoir or siphoning off of some mighty river with its provenance in the mountains, every drop is precious. What monsoon brings, what the rainy season brings, must last. Subsistence is tenuous for most. Poverty signifies readily: small children are without pants, shirts; older children wear tattered and filthy school uniforms; bellies distend. It is all very familiar. India seems more blessed for the moment—greener, more water, more forest, more fodder—but perhaps this is a trick of the recent rains. In any event, the sheen of similarity does mask some fundamental differences in the social, cultural, and economic make-up of the two places—differences in land distribution, primary income sources, valuation of education, and the reach of government, among others.
One of the first, self-evident rules of development is that one size does not fit all. I have come to the field to receive what hints of identity might be offered up by this particular subset of “all,” this peculiar people nestled away from the world in the Aravalli Hills. What size will fit them? My superiors at Seva Mandir hope I can begin to answer this sort of question, one which, over many years, they have come to answer, if not entirely satisfactorily, at least to a degree to which they are peacefully resigned. It’s not that the people here are especially enigmatic; it is only that in development, one can never be assured of continuity and replication, of understanding and success. What works in one village does not work in the next, and this conundrum presents itself throughout the world—whether in the hills of western India, the slums of Mexico City, the jungles of the Congo, the mountains of Afghanistan, or inner-city Baltimore, rural Harlan County, Kentucky, and the banlieues of Paris. It hinges on questions of behavior, practice, custom, habit, belief, and values. This is the crux of development, or the implementation side of it at least: What will work in this place and why? Science fails here, or succeeds incompletely; it may tell us what should work, but it has less to say when its prescriptions falter, which is often. Its explanatory power shrinks in the face of multifarious humanity and its multifarious behavior.
The other side of development, what may be called the policy and management side for lack of a better term, involves mustering sufficient resources for a particular intervention (or more likely interventions) and then allocating them efficiently and effectively. It is a different sort of challenge, and one which I hope might be less intractable than the first. I will be dealing with both problems, but first things first: Given the world in which Seva Mandir works--its values, its beliefs, its culture, its economic and geophysical reality--how can a safe supply of drinking water be ensured? For the time being, this is my charge.
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