Reduction, Third Attempt: Playing Fortune-teller, Pt. 2

The trend of farming supplemented by migratory wage labor seems a rough compromise between the desire of the Indian farmer to remain on the land and the desire of the Indian government to see him off it, and yet it is not a compromise that is acceptable from either an economic or social standpoint: under such an unregulated, ad hoc arrangement, too much arable land lies fallow, labor flows and productivity for those industries dependent on the migrant force are unpredictable, and the costs to families imposed by the ruptures of migration, though difficult to measure, are no doubt considerable. The National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) is, in some sense, an attempt to address this issue, and yet it is plagued by its own serious problems of graft and poor administration. Thus the question must again be posed: How to shift one-sixth of a labor force as large as India’s from the countryside, its ancestral homelands, the plow and the scythe, into the city, the SEZ, and onto the assembly line? Twenty-first century India is not Stalinist Russia; as Nandigram shows, the government can’t simply force people from their farms at riflepoint. Can it?

Meanwhile the pressures of the "agrarian crisis" continue to mount: Indian farmers must contend with the falling prices of many agricultural commodities, including rice; diminished state support for farm livelihoods; a dearth of credit; and, perhaps most ominously, the increasing adversity of meteorological events. Broad scientific consensus suggests that global warming will serve to intensify existing patterns of precipitation: wet areas will receive even more rain, thereby becoming flood-prone; dry areas will receive even less, becoming drought-prone. Semi-arid regions such as southern Rajasthan may tip toward desert and become largely, if not entirely, uncultivable; regions most buffeted by the monsoon in the South and Northeast of India, already menaced by floods on a nearly annual basis, may very well spend every June, July, and August under water. Thus Mother Nature, with an invaluable assist from human negligence, could, at least in part, do what the Indian government cannot: if the science of climate change is sound, many farm families may have little choice but to give up their land. They will migrate to the cities, downtrodden, aggrieved, and ill prepared for life outside of the village.

And global warming will make its presence felt in India in other, more insidious (though perhaps no less catastrophic) ways. Last year scientists were shocked to discover that ice cores taken from Himalayan glaciers revealed no evidence of the radioactive fall-out generated by atmospheric nuclear tests in the 1950s and '60s, thus suggesting that the glaciers have been shrinking for at least the past half-century. Given that the ice fields of the Himalayas provide drinking water for half of the Indian population, their diminishment is serious cause for alarm. A concerted national water conservation effort seems warranted, and the most logical first step would be to impose strict limits on the amount of water made available for irrigation, since the practice consumes far more of the resource than any other activity. From the Indian government's perspective, such an imposition would be doubly advantageous: not only would it conserve water, but it would further hasten the flight of the Indian farmer to the city.

Despite myriad hardships, most of the 16% of the workforce to be absorbed by the manufacturing sector will cling to the land. Farming for many Indians isn’t a way of life; it is life itself, all some families have known for millennia. Dozens of daily suicides attest to the fact that faced with economic ruin, many Indian farmers would rather die than forfeit their land. But if the Indian government is determined to thoroughly modernize its economy, to ensure that everyone shares in the rewards of the Asian Century—if it feels, as that old absolving saw goes, it must act for the good of the nation—by hook or by crook, it will have its way. Further blood will be shed, and the only matter in question will be whether more farmers perish by their own hands or via the clammy appendages of state sanctioned violence.

But for the loss of life likely to accompany a new, modernized, rationalized Indian economy, odds are that a rousting of the countryside wouldn’t threaten the legitimacy of the state. Repression would be decentralized and local, resistance fierce but fragmented, and the central government would be reluctant to intervene, both out of deference for state sovereignty and out of self interest. Those who remained on the land—after all, the overwhelming majority of rural Indians—would be grateful for their good fortune and inclined to remain silent, lest they also find themselves compelled to vacate. Nandigram, whose atrocities were well documented in the press, inspired the outrage of the intelligentsia and politicos in Kolkata and Delhi and a large demonstration or two, but little in the way of widespread condemnation from the masses—I have not once heard it mentioned in conversation in Udaipur. City dwellers might see little evidence of the enormities of their government’s policy and care still less; that is, until the displaced and destitute begin swarming into the cities.

Here, finally, is the event with the power to ignite the nation and all of its latent and not so latent prejudices. A migration of more than 100 million embittered and resentful village dwellers—one driven by resource scarcity, natural and man-made calamity, and government coercion, whether overt or not—into India’s already bursting cities over the course of, say, fifteen years, if not properly planned for and managed, could have disastrous consequences. Not only would such a migration strain already woeful infrastructure, thicken already clotted streets, swell the ranks of the unemployed, heighten competition for resources, and boost crime rates, it would also provide a ready supply of scapegoats for a political class whose strategy of first and last resort has long been one of divide and conquer. India is already a society of the aggrieved, and for the shrewd Indian politician, every grievance represents an opportunity. The opportunities proffered by a massive and rapid urbanization of the rural population (or at least a part of it) would be bountiful blessings indeed.

Put another way, the disaffection engendered by a Great Indian Migration—that belonging to both the dispossessed farmer and the put upon urbanite—would be a vein so deep and so rich that politicians would fall over themselves in their haste to exploit it. Disaffection, the fountainhead of Indian political power, is also malleable, particularly when felt generally, for general disaffection can be most easily twisted to desired political ends. Blame can then be assigned where most convenient: today to migrants, tomorrow to Muslims, the next day to upper caste oppressors. In the event of a face-off, both dispossessed farmers and put upon urbanites would have their cheerleaders, strategists, and co-opters among the political class—harboring excess stores of anger and resentment, the two factions would function as ideal instruments of political ambition. And it's not as if either side will require much goading in order to take up the lathi, cudgel, and torch, or much convincing to divert their wrath, as necessary, to other objects—those which best serve their political sponsors and their own preexisting prejudices—as, notwithstanding the Gandhian legacy, the impulse to violence is still strong in Indian society, as it is in most of the world.

It takes little imagination to conceive of a scenario in which the violence borne of such a conflict swiftly widens its clutches, spreads from city to city, escalates in ferocity, turning into something its political abetters can no longer summon, direct, and dismiss when convenient; the malignant feeling feeding such violence cannot be neatly allayed, being so deeply rooted and diverse in aspect that timelines for reconciliation must be understood not in weeks or months but in years. Of course such a scenario first depends upon a lengthy and improbable concatenation of neglect, misfortune, malfeasance, and treachery in order to come to life...but even that slight probability must be carefully considered. The Indian state is not nearly so stable, nor so assured of prosperity as is widely believed.

Reduction, Third Attempt: Playing Fortune-teller, Pt. 1

The answer does not much stretch the imagination; it’s an old story really, with a few contemporary twists. Too many people, not enough land—that’s how the most ancient strand goes. The trope about the government pushing to modernize its economy and getting pushed back has been around for a couple of centuries as well; a parallel tale is that of the agrarian nation urbanizing too rapidly. But too many people, not enough water? That’s more contemporary. And stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Climate change will make everything a whole lot worse.

The thesis isn’t terribly original, and the equation even simpler: Scarce resources that grow ever scarcer; an enormous, burgeoning, and largely uneducated rural population being herded against its will into cities; massive generalized resentment; a society divided against itself in more ways than can be counted; and a nation with a bloody history, a long memory, and politicians eager to exploit differences within the population for a soupcon of power. I’m not suggesting that large-scale civil strife in India is inevitable, or even that it’s likely; but I am suggesting that the Indian government—and the rest of the world, for that matter—ignores the elements in this equation at its peril. The future character and composition of the Indian state, and by extension that of South Asia, may very well depend upon the Indian government’s ability to relieve or sublimate the strain of those forces that have already begun to tug at the margins of society.

As has already been noted, 56% of the Indian workforce is employed in the agricultural sector; furthermore, seven of every ten Indians live in rural areas. For many reasons the status quo will not endure; for starters, agriculture is the least productive and least dynamic sector of the economy—if India is serious about achieving broad-based, pro-poor growth, it cannot permit the majority of its workforce to scrabble away in the fields at hardly better than subsistence levels. The problem is one perhaps inherent to the sector (no major modern world economy rests on a foundation of agriculture), but it is undoubtedly one driven by scarcity: ninety-six percent of Indian farmers work plots of two hectares (five acres) or less. It is the rural population that continues to drive population growth in India, and with each successive generation of farmers coming of age, family holdings are further subdivided, shares of land become smaller, and it becomes increasingly difficult to make a living from the earth.

It is already commonplace for farmers in India’s arid and semi-arid zones to migrate seasonally to towns and cities seeking work as wage laborers in construction and other unskilled trades (in fact, within Seva Mandir’s purview, families garner the majority of their income from wage labor, not from farming). Due to water scarcity and the absence of irrigation infrastructure, most are able to only grow a single crop annually, or two at best—farmers in those regions blessed by liberal rainfall are capable of raising three. However, given the inexorable carving of the fields, perhaps it will soon become common, if it hasn’t already, for even those farmers in high precipitation areas to spend at least part of the year as wage laborers in order to make ends meet. Yet in spite of the momentum of this trend, the hoped for demographic transition is no nearer as consequence; given the option, few Indian farmers will abandon their farms in favor of the better (though still miserably) compensated life of a full-time wage laborer. They will only turn from the land grudgingly, with rancor and bitterness, if they turn from it at all.

But given national economic imperatives and the exigencies of land and water scarcity, the pressure on the Indian farmer to leave his land is daily ratcheting in intensity. In 2006, current Prime Minister Manmohan Singh—the former Minister of Finance who oversaw India’s economic liberalization in the early ‘90s—said, "Manufacturing has to be the sponge which absorbs people who need to move out of agriculture in pursuit of higher incomes." The government has predicted that the percentage of the nation’s workforce in the agricultural sector will fall from 56% to 40% by 2026--this perhaps reveals more an implicit goal than any expectation of organic economic reshuffling. And if India is to have any hope of addressing the astonishing poverty of the bottom third of its population, this is perhaps a low-end target. Even at that, is it a realistic one? How to induce more than 100 million people to move off of the land if they simply don't want to?

Some clues have already emerged: in several states the government, citing powers of eminent domain, has seized farmland for the establishment of Special Economic Zones (SEZs)—manufacturing and industrial centers often gifted to foreign consortiums and bundled with tax holiday bows and ribbons of relaxed labor and environmental standards. Farmers and their political allies have opposed such seizures on principle and claim that owners of expropriated land have not been fairly compensated. Last week in Punjab farmers blockaded railroads in protest of one such land grab; last March, in Nandigram, West Bengal, recalcitrant villagers refused to abandon 10,000 acres destined to become a chemical hub and at least fourteen were killed in the subsequent face-off with police. Violence flared again in November when Communist Party of India (CPI) cadres attempted to retake the land on behalf of the government; dozens more were killed and the cadres burned homes and corpses in a clumsy attempt to conceal their crimes.

Reduction, Second Attempt: Playing Doctor

Begin with history, which is perhaps the greatest predictor of such things. Though it’s tempting to view India through the gloss of that famous epithet “World’s Biggest Democracy”, its sixty years of nationhood have been more notable for their tumult than stability: three wars with Pakistan, and the conflict over Kashmir still simmering; war with China; the assassinations of two prime ministers; two years of emergency rule; battles with Punjabi separatists; and throughout, periodic flarings of civil unrest. Given such a history, it’s remarkable that democracy should have endured at all—many post-colonial nations have collapsed into authoritarianism or calcified as one-party states beneath far less wrenching pressures. Despite thirty years of relative political stability, however, India remains a nation wracked by forces that try the mettle of its democracy: Naxalite (Maoist) rebels in the South and Northeast; wrangling with Pakistan over borders and territory and the concomitant threat of terrorism on Indian soil (although it should be noted that terrorism in India has many faces and many objects); agitation over political and other reservations by Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs), and Other Backward Classes (OBCs); and the omnipresent specter of “communalism”—euphemism in polite society—the press, political circles—for Hindu-Muslim violence.

With Pakistan absorbed in a struggle for the preservation of its historically (more or less) secular and democratic state, it is communalism that is perhaps the clearest present threat to Indian peace and prosperity (although some would argue, and not without merit, that in its instability Pakistan represents an even graver threat to India than it does when at peace). The danger of communal violence seems especially keen now that the Hindu nationalist BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) is resurgent following important victories in state elections in December (including a volatile contest in the key state of Gujarat). Historically, BJP leaders have had little compunction about exploiting and even instigating Hindu-Muslim tensions for political gain. Indian politicians are, if anything, even more prone than their American counterparts to foist blame on their enemies for any national misfortune or disgrace—accusation and recrimination being a sort of double reflex in politics here—and the BJP is almost as fond of blaming Muslims and other non-Hindus for the country’s ills as it is the nationally ruling Congress Party. It’s no coincidence that the BJP played an incendiary role in India’s two most recent large-scale incidents of communal violence, each of which resulted in thousands of deaths, primarily of Muslims.

And yet, given the overwhelmingly Hindu character of the nation—82% of the populace, as opposed to only 13% Muslim—it seems unlikely that communalism itself poses an existential threat to India (unless, that is, it should manage to precipitate nuclear war on the subcontinent)—although not insignificant, the Muslim minority could not endure a protracted skirmish with Hindu nationalists. Though perhaps the most profound schism in Indian society, the Hindu-Muslim divide is not one so wide as to cause permanent rupture. In fact, no single divide in India is broad enough to threaten a lasting division of the nation; it is the aggregate fracturing of hundreds of minute divisions among its people that, given a single seismic event, one shaking the entire country, could cause the entire edifice of the state to crumble.

It is a terrible irony that some of the nation’s greatest strengths—its diversity, its commitment to political, educational, and economic inclusion of traditionally marginalized populations, and its strongly federal system of governance, among others—are also fundamental sources of division. In the U.S. we tend to think of diversity as an unalloyed good, a desideratum, something to be striven for as a just end in itself rather than as a means to some other goal, forgetting that diversity, however desirable and beneficial, is also very often a catalyst for conflict (which isn’t to say that it should ever be forsworn as a social goal or otherwise). India is a state comprised of thousands of ethnic groups, castes, sub-castes, jatis, and other distinct populations. It is the birthplace of three major world religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikhism), and with the exception of Indonesia and Pakistan, it is home to more Muslims than any other nation on the planet. The last census found that more than 1,600 languages are spoken within its borders. Indians joke that India is not a single large country, but thousands of tiny ones: travel only fifty kilometers from wherever you are, they say, and you will encounter a new language, a new culture. This is said with pride and a bit of astonishment; even Indians can’t believe how disparate the nation’s population is.

This grand diversity, so different from our conception of the term, one which defines diversity most readily in racial and national terms—diversity is the New York melting pot—isn’t inherently dangerous, especially so long as all of its constituents share some common identity or sustaining narrative of unity. This isn’t necessarily true of India, where, despite a visible patriotism among its people, significant segments of the population tend not to identify with their country of birth and residence (one old man in a village I visited in September didn’t even understand that he was a citizen of a broader political entity called India). The nation’s extensive system of political, educational, and employment reservations for SCs, STs, and OBCs—an impressive and commendable program of affirmative action—has often exacerbated this disassociation from nation in favor of narrower allegiances to caste or tribe.

The reservation system, conceived of to speed the integration of all segments of the population—specifically those historically repressed—into broader Indian society and to redress past injustice, has, in some cases, resulted in the hardening of traditional distinctions. Ethnic identity often becomes more important than national identity, because it affords advancement; resentment builds among the non-SC, ST, or OBC population, particularly its impoverished elements; unrecognized marginalized groups agitate, often violently, for legal recognition of SC, ST, or OBC status; and recognized SC, ST, and OBC groups stridently oppose the efforts of these groups because their recognition will result in a reduction in the reservations of the already recognized groups. In Rajasthan, the Gujjar people currently seek ST status and are employing large-scale demonstrations and blocking roads in pursuit of that end; their fiercest opponent hasn’t been the police but the Meenas, one of Rajasthan’s ST groups.

Given India’s history, diversity, and vastness, both of area and population, the nation’s federalism is both strategic and concessionary—it seems the best way to govern an enormous, far-flung, and multifarious population as well as a necessary acknowledgement of the country’s heritage of fragmentary administration—even the British failed to bring the nation under a single, central government. India is nearly as much colonial fabrication as any African state, and perhaps the only thing in which Indians have ever been united was their detestation of colonial rule; thus the reliance on a system of governance in which Indians states have been given an autonomy of which the American Federalist Society would heartily approve. Yet federalism has also perpetuated the historical geographic and cultural divisions of the subcontinent and highlighted the inequalities between populations—the development of southern states such as Kerala and Tamil Nadu is several generations advanced beyond that of others like Bihar, Orissa, and Assam, where the quality of life of inhabitants is more typical of sub-Saharan Africa and the world’s least developed countries than what one would expect of an emerging economic power like India.

In the minds of Indians, state lines are too often more than imaginary boundaries; they are tangible demarcations of different peoples. In a nation where everyone is an “other” to everyone else, state affiliation is just another way of defining the “otherhood” of another person. And the fracturing of state identity is not yet complete: three new states were born in 2000 out of old ones—Uttaranchal from Uttar Pradesh, Jharkand from Bihar, and Chhattisgarh from Madhya Pradesh—and it seems likely that another state, to be called Bundelkhand, will emerge from Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh by the end of the decade. Tribal regions in several other states, following the lead of Jharkand and Chhattisgarh, are also working toward independence. The further atomization of the Indian state, with all of its ramifying social implications, seems inevitable.

On January 27, Raj Thackeray, the leader of the Maharashtra Navnirman Shena (a Hindu nationalist party and affiliate of the BJP), publicly denounced the presence of North Indians in Mumbai, specifically citing emigrants from the states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh (incidentally two of the poorest states in the country), claiming that they were taking South Indian jobs and insulting South Indian culture with their adherence to native practices. Mumbai is India’s most cosmopolitan city; Thackeray’s outburst was roughly equivalent to Al Sharpton telling all of the Mississippians and Alabamans in New York City to get the hell out. Thackeray’s xenophobia (if it can even be called that) seems absurd, and yet it inspired a wave of violence that left at least one man dead; on Saturday Thackeray warned against public celebrations of Uttar Pradesh Day in Maharashstra, suggesting that Shiv Sena members would put down by force all who disobeyed his extralegal proscription. The hullabaloo surrounding Thackeray is a morbid outgrowth of an endemic prejudice: in private conversation I have been told by educated South Indians that North Indians are generally unfriendly, arrogant, and disdainful toward those who don’t speak Hindi, and many North Indians' opinions of Southerners are equally derogatory.

Hindu vs. Muslim (and other non-Hindus), caste vs. caste, tribe vs. tribe, state vs. state, tribal vs. non-tribal, North vs. South: all are divisions daily in evidence in India’s newspapers. The largely invisible divisions and resentments of class, education, and rural vs. urban populations are no less profound for their latency. In a nation of a billion ruptures--some tiny cracks, others daunting crevasses, but none so large as to alone be capable of collapsing the idea of the Indian state--what sort of force is then capable of convulsing the entire nation at once, thereby acting on multiple ruptures concurrently?

Reduction, First Attempt: Like V.S.

I have quixotically hoped, during my time in India, to arrive at some confident assaying of the Indian character—the spirit of the nation, the psyche of its people, that sort of thing—knowing full well that it was, by its very nature, an impossible undertaking, and probably an undesirable one as well. I have wanted, in some sense, to do as V.S. Naipaul has so often done—to enfold an entire country, a people, in a single well-crafted sentence, to encapsulate them in a terse declaration, to reduce them to a single idea. Naipaul really has reduced entire peoples—that is the proper word—for he rarely has had much but scorn for the inhabitants of what people used to call the Third World. He has found them ignorant and superstitious and wanting for industry and originality; after having traveled much of the post-colonial world in the last half century, his assessment of the progress of its inhabitants is starkly uncharitable. They have grown and achieved little, he feels, since the lifting of the colonial yoke—the implication being that if a people clamor for independence, they should not then squander its dispensation.

It is likely that Naipaul has only escaped lasting opprobrium because, as a native of Trinidad, he was once one of the liberated peoples that he savages; just as only a black person can utter “nigger” and not be castigated, so can only a post-colonial describe his own country as a “picaroon society with its taste for corruption and violence and its lack of respect for the person” without serious censure (it also doesn’t hurt that his writing bursts with a rare intelligence and percipience). That’s not to say that Naipaul doesn’t acknowledge and tacitly condemn the deleterious colonial legacy, in particular its psychological effects; his position on the issue is not an extreme one, and yet his thinking does represent one particular polar strain—that the problems of the post-colonial world can largely be imputed to its people and culture—in the interpretation of its history. But in examining his work, one must accept, with the requisite grain of salt, Naipaul’s fundamental conservatism, his arrogance, his chauvinism, and the fact that these tendencies have only deepened with age (he has even gone so far as to recently deprecate the work of his erstwhile friend and fellow Caribbean native and Nobel laureate Derek Walcott).

An opposing strain of interpretation suggests that colonialism arrested and blighted the efflorescence of established and well-ordered societies the world over, where people lived largely peaceful and mutually reinforcing existences free from the taint of the unfettered pursuit of profit, the impulse to exploit the natural world, and the desire to master one’s fellow man. This romanticization possesses more than the whiff of the Noble Savage myth in it, and notwithstanding the slivers to be found in each of these strains of interpretation, it should be evident that the whole truth, as it invariably does, lies somewhere in between the two.

Naipaul has been especially critical of his ancestral homeland, and perhaps no nation has so embodied the frustrated promise of the pre- and post-colonial periods as has India. India’s value as a trading hub to the Portuguese, British, and French was enormous—it may very well have been the most precious jewel in the diadem of Empire—and few if any post-colonial nations have contributed more (both through its native population and its diaspora), in real terms, to the world economically and culturally since independence. Everyone is by now familiar with the presumptive narrative of Indian ascent: the still fecund IT industry, the febrile financial sector, the burgeoning professional class, the prodigious entertainment biz, the enlightened government (“the world’s biggest democracy”!)—we have entered the Asian century, even if it’s not yet evident.

And yet: the agricultural sector’s share of the economy is shrinking, even as it employs the majority (56%) of the Indian workforce. The epidemic of farmer suicides seems intractable, as does the scourge of female feticide. Primary school enrollment is abysmally low and the child mortality rate disturbingly high, particularly for a nation aspiring toward a position of global prominence--India was ranked only 128th out of 177 countries in the UN's most recent Human Development Report. The entire country has a mere 5,000 miles of four-lane highway; in comparison, China has constructed more than 15,000 miles of 4-6 lane access-controlled expressways in the last ten years alone. And while a staggering number of Chinese, 180 million, live on the equivalent of less than US$1 per day (the World Bank measure of extreme poverty), 370 million Indians contend with such destitution. That’s almost one-quarter again the entire population of the U.S. and considerably more than the 300 million living in extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa—and people speak of this impoverished mass as the “other” India, as if it represented some aberrancy.

Sir Vidia, the Grand Belittler, would undoubtedly seize upon the recalcitrant residue of brutality clinging to Indian culture as evidence of its prevailing backwardness: the feticide of course, but also the preponderance of lynchings, the acid attacks of spurned suitors, the culture of scholastic bullying (known as “ragging”; it seems to inspire at least one prominent murder case each month), the temple stampedes, the so-called “communal” violence (to which we shall return). Such appeals are a double-edged sword, however, as most cultures harbor an atavistic bloodlust, even Naipaul’s beloved British; an accounting of the signifiers of contemporary American brutality would likely consume the better part of an entire post.

What is most distressing about India, then, is not its brutality, which is quite commonplace even among so-called “advanced” societies, or its dismal social indicators, or even the boggling number of poor; it is the very real fracturing of its populace along hundreds, if not thousands of fault lines, both visible and invisible—cracks delineating religion, caste, class, wealth, politics, geography, culture, and language, among other things—which, when coupled with a tendency toward brutality among certain segments of its population, is the greatest cause for alarm. Though perhaps I am alone in suggesting such a possibility, it seems that India possesses more than the necessary ingredients for fierce and protracted civil strife—though one not imminent or even near enough to be easily discernible, it might arrive twenty or thirty years in the future, when the forces of cleavage have had time to widen small fissures into unbridgeable chasms of discontent and alienation.

Touring as Something Other than Hell, Part 2: Himalayan Vistas, River Worship, and a Thrilling Roar

Following the trauma of Delhi and Agra, the hills and fields and rivers of Uttaranchal, a state carved from Uttar Pradesh in 2000, seemed a proper antidote to the sclerotic and suffocating city. With our base in the comparatively drowsy and diminutive capital of Dehra Dun (which we explored on our first day in the state), my mom, dad, brother, and I made day trips to Mussoorie and Haridwar, before departing for our final stop outside of Ramnagar and Corbett Tiger Reserve.


Mussoorie: Located approximately two kilometers above sea level (6561 feet), Mussoorie, the “Queen of Hill Stations,” is a flock of buildings—including an inordinate number of hotels—flung across a heavily wooded ridge in the Himalayan foothills. The only road to Mussoorie from Dehra Dun (Elev: 2296 feet) is tortuous and steep, and though only about 30 kilometers separate the cities, it takes well over an hour to traverse the distance between the two. Although it aspires to offer a great deal to tourists, Mussoorie is little more than a grand view—two views, in fact, each dramatic in its own fashion. To the south, in the direction of Dehra Dun, a panorama of the Doon Valley unfolds, green and riven by the fingers of the foothills, which point towards Delhi. To the north, peeking just above a muscular ridge, are the distant snow-packed heads of the Himalaya. Too bad, then, that the day was swimming in haze; the southern exposure in particular was blurred and indistinct. It hardly mattered, though: the city had postcard poise (see above) and even from afar the Himalaya announced themselves with a fluent grandiosity.

Haridwar: Wiith my dad was sidelined by intestinal distress, the next day my mom, brother, and I departed for Haridwar alone—alone, that is, save for our driver Samuel and his four-year-old munchkin son, Lucky. As a result of its propinquity to the source of the Ganges River (Ganga in Hindi), Haridwar is one of the four holiest cities in all of Hindu; it’s also believed that Lord Vishnu spilled nectar here and in doing so left his footprint behind. The city stretches for several kilometers along the river and occupies a narrow swath of land between the Ganga and a steep, scrubby ridge. No doubt owing to the nearness of its source, the Ganga was a pale and milky green (shades of the non-St. Paddy's Day Chicago River) and looked nearly clean enough to drink from.


Haridwar has two famous hill-top temples, Mansa Devi and Chandi Devi, both most enjoyably accessed by cable car—or ropeline, as it’s known in India; in fact, the ropeline to Chandi Devi is the second longest in the country. The views from the temples, Chandi Devi in particular, were commanding, or rather would have been if not for the unshakable haze. The temples themselves are uninspiring—dispiriting is a better word, given that their primary function seems to be the extraction of rupees from visitors’ pocketbooks (a subject which certainly merits its own post, although it’s likely I’ll never get around to writing it)—and the temple monkeys (above with pilfered ice cream cone) are even better shake-down artists than the pandits. In accordance with the American way, the Gaffs tried to take more than they gave, and we made out handsomely: tikkas for our foreheads, bracelets for our wrists, consecrated money for our wallets, consecrated sweets for our bellies, and marigold garlands for all! My mom’s garland was the heaviest and gaudiest, hanging below her waist, while my brother’s was small and understated. Mine was just right.

After looting Mansa Devi, we secured a spot along the Ganga at the Har-Ki-Pairi (The Footstep of God) ghat, where the daily Ganga aarti ceremony is held, and spent the ninety minutes before sunset watching inspired bathers and waders shiver in the current and monkeys scramble across roofs, trees, and walls on the opposite bank. As there is not a single square inch of India where the pursuit of money is thought profane and properly barred, we were also forced to fend off a steady and miscellaneous stream of vendors, beggars, and children demanding ten rupees for a tikka. One fellow with broken eyeglass lenses and ragged clothes importuned me to convey his plaints to the President of the United States and the U.N.—the tribals and lower castes of Uttaranchal were being brutally suppressed, he told me. He spoke fluent, stilted English and didn’t ask for money.


At dusk the Ganga aarti began. I don’t know much of the ceremony’s history or the significance of its forms and rituals; it is simple veneration of the river—the Great Mother—and aarti is a particular variety of worship involving the lighting of lamps. At 5:45, bells began to clang in that joyful, rhythmless temple style and five men came to the river’s edge bearing large lamps. As ponderous music piped over loudspeakers, the lamps were ignited and held aloft. Some of the assembled (and there were likely a few thousand) sang along to the music in call-and-response style; the calling was done by a shrill and nasal soprano voice whose style typified what, until relatively recently, was considered the truest, most beautiful expression of the female singing voice in India (it used to grate on me terribly; now it’s as much a part of the unregistered ambient tapestry of this country as the honking of car horns). At indecipherable intervals, the men slowly and gently swooped the lamps in an arc below their knees. The lamps burned with some high-octane fuel—their shivering flames rose several feet into the gloom (see above), projecting solid stripes of orange light onto the river’s surface. Darkness settled, and glowing offerings—sturdy vessels constructed of large tree leaves and brimming with the blossoms and petals of flowers arrayed around a central candle—were released into the current. I had hoped that the entire river might be choked and glittering with their light; alas, the scintillating armada of my imagination was, in reality, no more than a twinkling flotilla.

Corbett Tiger Reserve: It all comes back to tigers. For the trip’s grand finale, we entered the forests of the night in search of that singular, ferocious, and most fearsome of predators in a nation overflowing with hot-blooded hunters (not the least of which are the omnipresent vendors, hawkers, and beggars--it all comes back to them too). We arrived at the entrance of the Reserve shortly after 6, the first jeep of many to roll up in the pre-dawn gloom, waiting for the gates to admit us at 6:30. It would be nearly 5 when we departed, dusty, dead-eyed, and deprived of a tiger sighting—that is not to say, however, that we left disappointed.

Corbett National Park is enormous, more than 1300 square kilometers, and its Tiger Reserve, though smaller (around 500 square km), is nonetheless significant. And while only 15% of the total area of Ranthambore Park is accessible to tourists, it would seem that nearly all of Corbett can be reached by jeep—in the afternoon we spent hours traversing muddy tracks deep in the forest, combing the remote bowels of the Reserve for the striped menace of legend. Corbett is even more beautiful than Ranthambore, greener and more thickly forested, full of rills and broad, stony riverbeds, deep ravines, bluffs, gently sloping hills, and stands of tall, yellowing grass perfect for concealing tigers. It abounds in deer (three species) and monkeys (two species), and we also observed a wild boar, several varieties of birds, and a sizable herd of pillaging elephants.


On our second venture past the elephants, in the course of making our way back to the Reserve’s “campus” for lunch, we stopped so that our guide, who moonlighted as a wildlife photographer and seemed dismayed by our frugal snapping, could amuse himself with my camera. After several minutes of shooting, one of the elephants took exception to our presence and made an abortive charge toward our jeep, stopping perhaps thirty yards short and releasing a minatory trumpet. We were suitably shaken and urged our driver to get moving; however, shortly thereafter, a guttural bark somewhere in the forest off to our left caused him to throw the jeep into reverse and rapidly retrace our tracks. The bark, we quickly learned, was the distress call of the langur monkey; it suggested that a tiger was in the vicinity.

We waited attentively for perhaps ten minutes while the barks continued intermittently, occasionally drifting back in the direction of the elephants (who continued their pillaging unperturbed in the distance), occasionally backtracking further in the opposite direction. It had been several minutes since the last bark when two elephants behind us suddenly made a right turn toward the road; we heard a brief bellow from close by. “Tiger roar!” our guide whispered excitedly (it wasn’t a proper roar—tigers are capable of dozens of vocalizations), but instead of backing up in the direction of the sound, we remained rooted in place and waited, every fiber of our being focused on the forest behind us. And waited.

We never saw the tiger; it never emerged from the thick undergrowth, at least within eyeshot. Nevertheless, the experience was thrilling—in many ways more thrilling than spotting the Lady of the Lake in Ranthambore. It was the thrill of pursuit and the thrill of fear that quickened the pulse—the fear that the thing you were pursuing, a beast so terrible it turned aside creatures more than ten times its own size, might decide, on a whim, to turn on you. And the thrill didn’t soon subside.

Touring as Something Other than Hell, Part 1: Tombs, Forts, and The Lady of the Lake

It is probable that the pleasure one can have strolling through a virgin forest or hunting tigers is marred by the idea that one must later make an artful description to please as many bourgeois people as possible—Gustave Flaubert


The time has now come for backtracking—not retraction precisely, just a bit of backtracking. Much has been made in this blog of the wretchedness of the tourist experience in India; it’s possible, even, that someone, perhaps rather theatrically—let us say in the spirit of showmanship—ventured to place side by side, in a rather incautious manner, two dissimilar things—for example, that peculiar, aforementioned experience and a certain nether-realm of the Christian imagination—and in so doing implied, or even suggested outright the overlapping nature of the two. And now, in the spirit of fair and evenhanded reporting, I’d like to say that the trip wasn’t all, or even mostly agitation and torment; it offered a good bit of wonder, pleasure, and appreciation, too—appreciation of the creations of both man and nature.

Tyger, Tyger: When I was seven, my best friend Michael Pecina and I whiled away many an hour imagining ourselves into tigers and the human masters at whose bidding they worked (not always to moral ends, as I recall); had I been able to undertake a trip to Rajasthan’s Ranthambore National Park then, my life may very well have turned out differently—what happens to a child who is granted the most fervent desire of his heart at such a young age? Alas, it would be twenty-one long years before I would have a chance to see a tiger in its natural setting, and even the most passionate of romantic loves rarely have sufficient reserves of ardor to burn for such a span. That’s not to say that I wasn’t pumped about the prospect of encountering the biggest of the Big Cats in the wild, only that I wouldn’t be descending into the hysterics that, had we traded places, my seven-year-old self undoubtedly would have.

Ranthambore possesses the desiccated loveliness typical of Rajasthan, with towering massifs above which, on the day of our visit, the sky crimsoned prettily in the minutes before sunrise. Due to the vagaries of booking, my sister and brother-in-law were seated in a jeep other than mine, theirs being bound for Zone 3 of the Park; my jeep, which I shared with a Mumbai investment banker and his mother, wife, and two children, sped off for Zone 5. After two hours of fruitless searching (I say fruitless though we saw two species of deer, a large antelope, crocodiles, peacocks, langur monkeys, and other sundry creatures), we turned back for the park’s entrance. “I want to see a puppy!” the little girl from Mumbai exclaimed.

Not far beyond Zone 5 we came across a cantor—a large open vehicle seating about twenty—stopped in the road, and after some feverish whispering between the guides of the two vehicles, our driver backed up a safe distance and killed the engine. Following a few breathless moments, a tiger emerged in the undergrowth of the forest perhaps fifty yards from the jeep. It strode languidly on a line parallel to the road, occasionally glancing over in our direction. We followed its path as best we could, but after less than two minutes, it was lost irrecoverably in the forest. The tiger was a three-and-half-year-old female nicknamed The Lady of the Lake; I didn’t catch her measurements or turn-offs. Alas, the zoom of my little camera proved insufficient to capture The Lady; I did, however, manage to take thirty-four seconds of video footage that make the Bigfoot tape seem, in comparison, definitive evidence of the Sasquatch’s existence.

Humayun’s Tomb: (Scene from the Bollywood film, Fanaa)

Guide: This is Humayun’s Tomb. It was constructed for him by his wife Hamida.

Husband (to his wife): Take a look at what a wife made for her husband. And you can’t even make me breakfast.

Wife: Don’t worry, I’ll start building your tomb right away.


On Christmas Day, the entire Gaff family (at right, arrayed just inside the Tomb’s walled gate), reunited for the holiday in Delhi and made its way to Humayun’s Tomb, which, though a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is little known outside of India. Humayun was the second Mughal emperor, and the elegance of his final resting place clearly influenced the design of the Mughal-built Taj Mahal. H.T. is an impressive structure to be sure, all domes and minarets and filigree, and most distinct from the Taj in its builders’ employment of red sandstone, rather than white marble, as the primary material of construction. In my most objective reckoning, ignoring the shadow cast by what was yet to come, it ranks as one of the more remarkable buildings I’ve ever seen; the Lincoln Memorial, in comparison, is a prosaic monument, pale and stunted.

The Taj Mahal and Agra Fort: In June of 2005, I made my first trip to Yankee Stadium, one of the most storied venues in all of American athletics. Site of an unprecedented number of World Series contests (and victories), the only perfect game in Series history, Reggie’s three home runs in three pitches, Maris’s 61st, and the showground for some of the game’s all-time greats, the House that Ruth Built is hollowed turf for any true baseball fan, Yankee-lover or not (I am not). It also turned out to be a huge disappointment—blandly featureless, largely devoid of charm, and—it would seem—determined to ignore its incandescent history. Forgive me for fearing that the Taj Mahal might likewise disappoint; how could it fail but to collapse beneath the weight of the stacks of purplish encomiums penned on its behalf?


And yet one glimpse was enough to dispel such fears; if nothing else, the Taj delivers on its promise of being the most visually sublime structure humankind has yet had the sensibility to erect (go ahead, try to prove me wrong). The Taj is a bit smaller than I had anticipated, but this is a cavil and in any event one quickly subsumed by the inexorable gushing of the Taj’s deathless charms: the unmatched and impeccable harmony of design; the epically suggestive (and satisfying) arches and domes; the shocking marmoreal brilliance, at once cool and white-hot; and, upon close study, the astounding flourishes of detail adorning its iconic face. It is difficult to reconcile this face of Islam, which could create something so senselessly beautiful that it approaches unearthliness, with the one which finds beauty so threatening that it must be concealed beneath chador, jilbab, and burqa.

Immediately following our visit to the Taj, we headed to the Agra Fort, our third UNESCO World Heritage Site in two days. It was certain to be a letdown—what wouldn’t be after the Taj?—but, after all, Sgt. Pepper’s had The White Album and Star Wars had The Empire Strikes Back and Joe Dimaggio had Mickey Mantle so maybe it wouldn’t be all bad. And so it proved to be; in fact, though it is no doubt blasphemy to suggest, the Agra Fort, in many ways, is the Taj’s superior. The Taj is a bit of a one-trick pony, if you’ll excuse the awful cliché; it’s absolutely stunning to look at, but in the end it’s only a tomb (how many times has someone said, “Calling X a Y is like saying the Taj Mahal is only a tomb”?). It provides little stimulation beyond that frisson of wonder one receives at first glance—although as far as frissons go, they don’t get any better.

If it were a contemporary actress, the Taj Mahal would be Penelope Cruz, who is so ridiculously, unfathomably attractive that she tends to obliterate the very consciousness of the viewer (perhaps only male viewers, and perhaps only this male viewer) to the fact that there is a story, a film, going on around her; one is also likely to fail to notice or, for that matter, even care that, after all, she can act a little too. But sit Cruz down on a talk show couch, and you quickly realize that, after a week, you’d have nothing to say to the woman. Agra Fort, then, is Cate Blanchett—beautiful too, though in an entirely differently way than Cruz, and yes, not as beautiful—but my God, she knows a bit about everything and has a crackling mind that would keep you hopping well into your dotage. Given a choice between the two for a day, or even a week, you would choose the Taj; anything longer and you would be sure to run into the arms of the Fort.


Agra Fort is a rambling conglomeration of buildings, courtyards, and gardens encircled by high sandstone walls 2.5 kilometers in circumference. Initially (as the name implies) only a fort in function, it would gradually evolve, over the course of its first 100 or so years, into a palace complex, small city, and administrative capital of the Mughal Empire, until, under British control, it was reduced to a mere fort again. Made to enclose the dreams of generations of Mughal rulers, the structure is grandiose and inscrutable. Though it doesn’t possess much or any aesthetic continuity, it is nonetheless a fantastic hashing of halls (see above) and mosques, marble and sandstone, turrets and arcades. We wandered about its grounds, stumbling dazedly in appreciation among the muddle of exquisite forms. At closing we were reluctantly shooed out of the Fort by security; as we left, the paterfamilias of an Italian clan paused before us for one last look. "Magnifico!" he exclaimed, and we snickered, but he was right—it was magnificent.

Touring as Hell, Part 3: The Dysfunction of Life and the Road Through Perdition

It was New Year’s Day, somewhere in Uttaranchal on National Highway 74--progressing between Haridwar and Ramnagar in the desultory, nauseating fashion that is the rhythm of the Indian road--when I felt something that I can only think of as vocational despair descend upon me. How, I thought, how could I look out of the car window on this day, and how could I have looked out of it the day before this, and the day before that too, and imagine a world in which poverty might one day be banished, like polio, to the loneliest margins of human experience, and what’s more believe that such a banishment might be possible in my lifetime? I couldn’t any longer, could I? Because here, here before me, was unassailable, irrefutable, inescapable evidence to the contrary, evidence that I might live one thousand lifetimes and devote each and every second of each and every one of them to improving the lives of only these very people that were this very day clustered on and along this very stretch of NH 74, and yet I would never so much as bring one kernel more of corn to the lips of a single hungry babe! The feeling, as most do, would pass within hours, but I couldn’t soon forget it.

It wasn’t any glimpse of destitution or abjection that provoked this gloominess; in fact, the countryside along the highway between cities, that is, most of what was outside of my window, approached pastoral idyll: fields of delicate yellow mustard blossoms, sugarcane, and green, seedling wheat; a colonnade of eucalyptus trees lining either side of the road; and in the distance, the foothills of the Himalayas rising above the earth like stoic deities. And the cities held no more impoverished masses than I am accustomed to encountering in Udaipur—there were no visible slums, shantytowns, or tent cities to lay low the spirit. My soul foundered on something else, something beyond a shocking image or even the accreting horror of a series of them; I was demoralized by the very process and performance of life around me, the functioning of the world that I had entered. It was dysfunction that flung my spirit to the depths, then: I had seen the dysfunction of Life, Life for the billions, and it unsettled me deeply.

I saw dysfunction in the senseless jostling of traffic, which had no one to oversee it, and in the enormous, omnipresent freight trucks built without taillights. I saw it in the man who smiled smugly as he pushed a laden handcart against traffic, and in the souls clinging to the sides and perched atop speeding buses. I saw it in the young boys awkwardly straddling motorbikes that hurtled heedlessly in the shifting interstices, and in the beggars and hawkers at car windows caught unawares by the sudden resumption of traffic, wavering in the torrent like bulrushes in a swift river. I saw a terribly dysfunctional world outside my window, and though I knew it might possibly be different because I knew a world that functioned well, despair accompanied the feeling that, after all, this particular world would never change.

Predictability is the armature upon which any economy is constructed, and conversely, unpredictability is economic poison (which is why, for example, hyperinflation (a dysfunctional currency) is the gravest ill that can befall any economy—in its throes, one can’t predict what a kilo of rice will cost in the next hour, let alone the next day). Dysfunction and unpredictability are mother and daughter: a dysfunctional world is an unpredictable one. When will the Goods Carrier arrive with produce for market? Will the investment banker make it to a vital appointment with his client? Will the city have power when that time sensitive e-mail attachment arrives? In India, it is best not to depend too deeply upon anything. Mandarins of the international economic system suggest that this country, along with China, will challenge the economic supremacy of the U.S. in the next half century; a nation with a growing middle class of a quarter billion, with an educational system that is producing millions of highly skilled workers annually, and with, by developing world standards, a stable, democratic, and upright government, possesses the necessary ingredients for sustained and prodigious economic growth, the thinking goes. This may very well be true; however, five minutes along NH 74 reveals how truly slight the possibility is that the mass of Indians will be involved in or affected by such growth.

For mired in such dysfunction, dysfunction that runs to the very core of things, how could this world change, how could the world’s billions hope to escape? When the dysfunction was so much bigger than one city, or two cities, or one thousand cities, how would they ever know respite from the onerous toil and hardship of their lives (for dysfunction makes a mockery of hard work without ever delivering one from its clutches)? I didn’t have any answers for such questions, and yet I succeeded in dispelling them with surprising speed—in my defense, I was going on safari the next day, and preoccupation was unimaginable when a tiger might dash into view and out again in a mere split second. I owed myself the forgetting, didn’t I?

Two days later, my family and I were in a car again, en route from Corbett National Park to Delhi, where I would be dropped at Nizamuddin Railway Station and they at Indira Gandhi International Airport. In late afternoon, around four o’clock, after six hours on the road, we drew near to the city—and to the conclusion of what had been, in my case, two weeks of hospital visits, car rides, harassment, and clamoring chaos without cease. There on the Hapur Bypass, between Ghaziabad and Noida, somewhere within the vast conurbation east of the city, a stunningly apt (if rather obvious) metaphor for the tourist experience appeared to me, as if by the conjuring of some supernatural power of macabre poetics. William Blake was frequently visited by ecstatic, hallucinatory vision of angels; in contrast, on January 3, I believe I saw Hell.

The suburbs outside of Delhi were engulfed in a spectral haze of dust and pollution that had settled over everything, rendering buildings in the middle distance vaporous columns of smoke and the city beyond an indeterminate jutting on the horizon. The sun was low in the sky (it sets around 5:30 this time of year) and, as if having gained in heat, glowed flash bulb white; only a faint tinge of yellow at its margins degraded the purity of its fervor. Its rays, so close to the solstice, were foreshortened and struck the earth obliquely. The haze and the sun had conspired to leech away the color of the world; all was white and that which outlined the whiteness, like a badly overexposed photograph. The people, however, were black and small and gathered thickly in places, as a dry canal bed where a cricket game raged (at this point any Indian would interject: “But it couldn’t have been hell if there was cricket!”); the strides of the bowler sent puffs of dust into the lowering haze.

From my car window, the world seemed baked by an intense and blanching heat; its dust was the steam rising from smoldering earth, its haze the sulfurous emanations of a noxious atmosphere; its inhabitants were souls charred to insignificant flecks by an implacable furnace. Then flecks, too, began to appear in the sky. First only a handful dotted its miasmic face, but then the handful of flecks became dozens, and the dozens became hundreds. The black birds wheeled in an enormous, bristling half-circle above the earth, settling over a banquet of eternal carrion. I thought I heard the chorus of their ravening cries mingling with the shrieks of the damned.

What sign was this, what omen, what augury (certainly not one of innocence, as in Blake's poem)? What, precisely, did this vision reveal? Only this: an addled and grasping mind, a strange world more sinister for its strangeness, and a city suffocating in the noisome exhalations of its machines. And one convenient metaphor.