Waiting for the plane from Chennai to Colombo, Sri Lanka, at the end of our 14 week journey in India. My thoughts full of memories. Conversations, voices, faces.
A father obsessed by his plans to see his daughter married “well,” the daughter wavering between resignation and disinterest. A brother’s murder in 2002 politically-incited attacks in Gujurat of Hindus against Muslim. A young woman’s story of fleeing Chinese-occupied Tibet.
The colours and sounds and touch of place. A sacred tree in a village high over Naggar town. That boisterous meeting of the gods in Kullu. Two women walking along a glacial river’s edge, backs bent under loads of green winter silage larger than their own bodies. A child playfully decorating and undecorating a Ganesh sculpture twice his size.
That new India bus station we landed in – Shimla, I believe: industrial, cavernous, barren, dark, seatless, surely the work of some “notable personality” (the media’s jargon) adept at turning mountains of sand and cement into Porsches and a “prestigious farmhouse property” in Chattapur.
A stone Jain temple floor in Jaisalmer, worn buttery smooth, so pleasingly cool on the bare feet, curvy heavy-hipped nymphs carved in warm golden sandstone dancing in the votive lights.
The relief of quiet walks in mountain forests, in the desert, in bird-filled wetlands.
Quiet. Relief. Then something like a tsunami wave of another “India” rolls over in, as it has before, like an obsession. That incessantly noisy India, so overwhelmingly congested. The constant dodging of buses, trucks, tuk-tuks, bicycles, cows, cars. Our throats burning with exhaust and dust. Those walks through waste and filth, past warm walls reeking with men’s urine ….
Worse of all, in retrospect, is how this assault of the surround, a sensory assault, biting at our nerves, had the effect of reducing the circle of our attention onto the next physical step, the body jerking away from yet another threatening honk over one’s shoulder. The sensorium living in a state of emergency.
Still – there were other times on some days when I felt the attractiveness of that same surround: the grand unfamiliar hubbub; the crazed mingling of slow-motion cattle amidst the frenetic jostling of vehicles, pedestrians and shop-keepers; the grandiosities of shop names and their curious self-descriptions in English; the fantastical world of temple iconography and worshippers; people so naturally refined, seeming to move as if oblivious to the surrounding mayhem and filth.
But even these pleasures so often succumbed to weariness, irritability, a yearning for peace and quiet. Only in the villages and country paths and places of quiet like the Gandhi ashram in Ahmedabad could I begin to look, hear, smell more in my own way, have a thought and follow it, arrive at a small shrine at the base of a great tree, then stop, linger, wonder.
My second India traveling companion, V.S. Naipaul’s “India: a Million Mutinies Now,” describes the stress of getting around, in this case Bangalore in the late 1980s. “We had to walk carefully, picking our way over broken or unmade footpaths. Level or fully made footpaths are not a general Indian need, and the Indian city road is often like a weaving, bumpy, much mended asphalt path between drifts of dust and dirt and the things that get dumped on Indian city roads and then stay there, things like sand, gravel, wet rubbish, dry rubbish; nothing ever looking finished, no kerbstone, no wall, everything in a half-and-half way, half-way to being or ceasing to be. / Deviah would have liked to talk while we walked, but it was hard. We were being kippered all the time by the gritty smoke from cars and scooters …. By the time we reached the minister’s house we had become part of the Bangalore road scene, with dust and fumy grit on the skin and clothes and shoes and hair and glasses … we had become road-stained.”
Is this feeling “road-stained” the experience of the majority of Indians? I often wondered about this, but still have no idea. Many seem to move with a noticeable sense of determined purpose, here to there, not much lingering. And many move with an adeptness that can only astonish the stranger. When asked, some seemed to dismiss or deny the chaos, but questionably because of their glancing references to national pride. Others – those frozen faces, those rare frowns, those hints of a forced-seeming smile on bus passengers as we careen terrifyingly down crowded, narrow highways or alongside cliff edges: what is one to make of those faces? Resignation? Bravado? Karmatic foresight?
And I still wonder how alive, sensing Indians somehow slip through the ear-splitting, seemingly impenetrable densities of public space that so quickly made me so tense. There they are, chatting on cellphones, yelling across the throngs, making purchases and deals, catching up with a passing acquaintance, hoot hooting without end, inching their ways through the relentless pandemonium, apparently not unnerved, not frantic.
Curious and always astonishing to me how they do somehow appear to slip through the frenzy, like they slip ever so closely past one another in crowds and, as drivers, slip a hair breath’s past oncoming vehicles or along the rim of a mountain road.
That capacity to slip through the crowds? Does it have an auditory and olfactory equivalent for Indians? Do they possess an additional capacity to somehow slip through the din, filth and stench? Sometimes I might believe this, but then I have seen Indians cover their faces with scarves, handkerchiefs, rags and saris against the dust and exhaust. I have seen them grimace at the shrieking horns. Surely they must also feel this environmental chaos attacking them, discomforting them. Some Indians living in towns and villages seem to confirm this: “So noisy and crowded in Delhi.” “I’d never live in Ahmedabad; too many people, terrible air.” “Ah old Varanasi! Impossible!”
An Indian acquaintance describes to Naipaul the difficulty of doing the simplest thing in India, the difficulty of arranging the physical details of day-to-day living. There are no rules on the Indian streets, he says. “You feel a bit like being in a jungle, and this can transfer to a large view of things. It can, and does …. A lot of energy goes into these things, those traffic jams, that chaos.”
And what about that apparently widespread northern and urban Indian habit (there are always so many exceptions to a statement like this, possibly millions of exceptions in India!) of talking over the din, so loudly, with such seeming force, assertion, as if one might never be heard otherwise? Is it an acknowledgement that the usual conversational human voice, the voice one might use in an uncrowded village or town or in the pre-industrialized world, just doesn’t work in most of India?
“This can transfer to a large view of things,” says Naipaul’s correspondent. Caught helpless in sweaty gridlock in some exhaust-filled city, I have also found myself wondering whether the daily experience of this “jungle” is some of the kindling that fuels India’s recurrent episodes of horrific violence, pitting neighbour against neighbour, so quickly moving otherwise ‘ordinary’ people to barbarism?
India leaves me wondering whether the day-to-day life of so many Indians – the effort of basic necessary movement, the effort to gain necessities, of living with filth and frenzy, of living amidst corruption and abuses from bottom to top, of living “road stained” – fund a kind of felt vulnerability and humiliation and resentment, and possibly, too, some desperately driven aspiration to ‘move up’ or ‘move out’. And whether these funds of aggravation and restlessness, borne with such apparent resignation, are like dry kindling, sitting there unremarkable until the next despot appears, sparks flying off his talk of “enemies” and honour and shame … or transmuted into the eager, impatient voices and eyes of the many engineering, software and business students one meets?
(NOTE: On the ‘dry kindling’, see Ward Berenschot’s Riot Politics: India’s Communal Violence and the Everyday Mediation of the State. Also: Pankaj Mishra, “The Gujarat massacre: New India’s blood rite.”)
Are there also qualities in Hinduism that give people a capacity to find some liveable accommodation with the frenzy that is urban India? Maybe. But then I think of the life of so many of the temples we visited where brief moments of quiet reverence collide against the surrounding pandemonium: bells, gongs, shouting, chanting, bouncy cellphone ringtones, loud voices on cellphones, rushing throngs of pilgrims, scurrying merrily between shrines like they are in some fairground.
In contrast to this, our friends Santosh and Prem have created a place of peace around their home shrine. Perhaps many other Indians do as well; many homes and yards we visited include small shrines at which quiet, meditative prayers and rituals can take place.
But many of the domestic or family or home spaces we experienced, spaces often set just off from guesthouse spaces, did not resemble the overall symmetries and spaciousness – respite from the bedlam outside – of the home of our friends Santosh and Prem. Far from it.
Instead, these domestic spaces, to which so many Indians arrive each day, seemed to mimic the crowded chaos they had just left: small rooms packed with furnishings often covered in scatterings of clothes and papers; family photos and mementos the only objects given some settled pride of place; each room a thruway for everyone; a TV on somewhere; the constant cellphone jingles. And all this is not consider the poor
Respite from the bedlam, aspirations and longings labouring amidst a maze of obstacles. Does this partly account for the abundance of gurus, priests, shamans, fortune-tellers, astrologers and palm, card, rice and sand grain readers doing a pretty good business across the India? Indians can answer whether or not the gurus deliver. I came to see them functioning more like the garlands of plastic flowers, flashing images of gods and goddesses, the stuffed lions and tigers, the crosses and miniature stupas, strings of beads, swaying fringes, bells and smoking incense seen covering bus and lorry dashboards and windscreens – a clutter intended to ward off disaster but in reality increasing its likelihood.
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