Monday 30th October 2006: Maal

Today, by the skin of its teeth, has lived up to its expectations, although it looked distinctly unpromising until the early afternoon. After the customary rooftop jeep-ride and mountain slog, I reached Maal full of vim and enthusiasm for the meeting ahead. I had arranged to meet Tapan at ten in order to discuss our battle plans for the meeting and for the household survey, which I aim to start on Wednesday.
   I had no particular expectation of him being on time - this is rural India after all - so I decided to while away the time with a book. I am currently reading Maharanis by Lucy Moore, an account of the lives of four princesses from the Princely States. These states were officially independent from British India, ruled by their own monarchs who had earned this privilege in return for supporting the British in the 1857 mutiny. These states included Mewar, ruled by the Maharanas of Udaipur, Marwar, ruled by the Maharajas of nearby Jodhpur, and numerous others such as Hyderabad, Kashmir and Gwalior. Despite leading lavish lifestyles, characterised as much by debauched excess as by overblown pomp and circumstance, the real extent of these rulers' power was extremely limited.
  After an hour I began to experience a niggling feeling that I was not quite displaying the resourcefulness that had been drummed into me by the Careers Advisors of Cambridge as a prerequisite for international development work. Surely I should be using this unexpected spare time to interrogate Dolat Ram or some other local worthy on the finer details of buffalo ownership or mustard planting? The prospect, however, of actually extricating myself from 1920's Jaipur and relinquishing my comfortable spot in the shade filled me with little enthusiasm. In the end, apathy proved more potent than guilt and I spent the next three hours lost in my book, only the occasional exchange of pleasantries with passers-by connecting me to Maal. The niggling feeling prevented me from ever feeling entirely at peace, and furthermore, as the appointed meeting time approached, fear was added to the crucible of emotions as it dawned on me that Tapan might not arrive at all, leaving me to chair the meeting single-handed. While I might have been socially equal to this task, my linguistic shortcomings would have rendered the experience frustratingly unproductive.
   Luckily he arrived in the nick of time, puffing and panting and looking every inch the harassed minor official as he launched into protracted apologies and excuses for his delay. The explanation, while rather too tedious to replicate here, exonerated Tapan from blame and while I was a little annoyed at the way things had turned out, I did not let it show. We had a hasty pep talk as Maal's top brass arrived, looking ready to move and shake, at the village school where we had arranged to hold the meeting. Scanning the assembling company revealed a wide disparity between the notional guest list and the reality, with many turning up uninvited and some key players, such as Suraj, nowhere to be seen.

Village meeting

Tapan kicked off with what appeared to be a rambling introduction, outlining our aims in the village and running through the key points of the impending survey. He then put some questions to the Forest Protection Committee (FPC) about the forest land and existing conservation measures. They seem to be doing a good job, fencing off parts of the forest with Vikas Samiti’s assistance as well as instigating a patrol scheme they designed themselves which has apparently reduced encroachments. In fact this scheme has been largely discontinued as the change in general attitude has made it unnecessary. Furthermore, everybody present vehemently denied that any previous forest encroachments could be blamed on the people of Maal. At this point I wished Suraj had come, as I would have been interested to see whether he would have dared to put forward his own unorthodox version of events. While what we got today was probably something of an official line, I must admit to becoming less and less convinced that what Suraj told us about Amratlal’s family’s encroachments and the ineffectiveness of the FPC was anything but his own rather warped perspective, that of a marginalized and very diffident man who has had more education than most of his contemporaries but is unable to use it.
   As we moved onto the next item on the agenda - a group discussion aimed at drawing up a list of key priorities for development in Maal - it became clear that without some kind of stage management the conversation would remain entirely male-dominated and the three very embarrassed women would not get a chance to put their views across.
   "Tapan," I said. "Could you ask the men not to answer the next question, and let the women speak?"
   "Actually, this is a not good question. Maybe you will be offending these fellows."
  "Well I'm sure you could ask them tactfully. But I'd really like to try, because none of the women have said anything yet!"
   "Actually, these ladies are feeling some embarrassment at this time, so they are remaining quiet."
  "Exactly! That's what I mean! So let's try asking the men to remain quiet for a change, and maybe the women will speak."
  "Actually [if I depended on getting a rupee every time Tapan didn't start a sentence with "actually", I would be forced to look for alternative sources of income] these are shy type ladies."
  He spoke with such an air of finality that I hesitated to press the issue. But, breathing deeply and suppressing my rising frustration, I did continue to press and he reluctantly agreed, launching into a lengthy proposition in Hindi, no doubt along the lines of: "Actually, this very strange foreigner type has a highly improper request..."
  His spiel was met with a puzzled silence, broken by a few soft chuckles and murmur of bemused assent. The women’s embarrassment initially deepened and they retreated further into their veils, until one of them slowly started talking. She gradually encouraged the others and eventually two of them became at least as vociferous as the most opinionated of the men. The practice of wearing veils, common in the Rajasthani countryside, is presumably a hangover from the not too distant days of purdah where all Muslim women and high caste Hindus (including the Maharanis I have been reading about) would have been forced to wear veils in public. [10]  Presumably this extended to the Meena tribe at some stage in its history. In any case, all this is entirely alien to what I saw in the south, where mostly only Muslim women covered their heads, and in the few villages I visited, women seemed astonishingly forward and voluptuous.
  In terms of Maal’s needs, the men and women were in broad agreement that everything boils down to a road. A metalled (i.e. tarmac) road running all the way from Suveri to Maal with a regular jeep service would enable faster delivery of supplies, easier access for future development interventions, vastly more efficient transport of the sick to medical help or vice versa and a less time-consuming and exhausting school run for kids studying beyond 5th standard. It seems that a faction from Maal is already lobbying local government officials for a road and also electricity. Progress, however you define it, looms not too distantly, and even in ten years time Maal will be unimaginably different, and I am not too caught up in the “all change is beneficial” mindset to deny that some things, maybe many, will be lost.

Footnotes:

[10] Although purdah is generally thought of as an exclusively Islamic phenomenon, it is now believed that there was a form of female seclusion in Hindu society before the earliest arrival of Muslims in India. With Islamic conquest came Islamic-style veiling of women, which persisted in Indian Muslims and certain strata of Hindu society (notably Rajput clans) well into the 20th Century.


Next Post - Friday 3rd November 2006:Maal (will be posted Thursday 3rd November 2011)

Sunday 29th October 2006: Udaipur

Yesterday, Saturday, was divided between work and pleasure. Work consisted mainly of... But wait, it's a Sunday and everything in me is rebelling at the thought of having to think about work. In a few hours I will have to set off back to Kojawara in any case, so let me think about pleasure a little longer. Yesterday it involved a rewarding roam around the old city, discovering a labyrinthine Muslim quarter full of playing kids, sitting old folk and gorgeous, crumbling havelis (Rajasthani merchant houses, replete with scalloped arches, latticed windows and the odd cupola); drinking tea and eating roti with an elderly Jain couple who were full of warmth, especially given the fact that our acquaintance had begun by me asking if I could pee in their overgrown, rubbish-filled courtyard; chatting to Bablu in his rooftop restaurant, mostly about his complex but curiously innocent-sounding amorous life, while admiring the wonderful views of many of the major Udaipur landmarks; falling freshly in love with Lake Pichola and the mesmerising Lake Palace, beauty enhanced by the evening light; venturing out onto the other side of the lake and being greeted joyously by most of the people I met; accepting a lift on a stranger’s motorbike and whizzing along the shore of Fateh Sagar (another lake), perfectly lit up in the sunset and bounded by receding layers of blue-grey hills to the west… confronted by Udaipur how is a hopeless romantic like me supposed not to write reams of overripe and unoriginal bilge that probably best resembles the disgusting, polluted shore of much of Lake Pichola, which must look truly hideous when the monsoon fails! [9]

Evening light, Fateh Sagar

   We had a jolly volunteer party in the evening giving the girls, masterminded by Ellen who turns out to be quite something in the culinary department, an opportunity to try out some of the recipes they had learnt on a cookery lesson in the old town. The triumph was a delicious hybrid between a naan and a pizza. The party was the first chance I'd had in quite some time to catch up with Yogesh, with whom I discussed reservations a few weeks back. He is now in the thick of a research project about honey production, and talks at length about methods of farming bees. I am beginning to suspect that he has a crush on Priya, the pretty volunteer from Harayana, as they seem to spend a great deal of time together, often in earnest conversation. This theory took a slight knock yesterday when he told me that he is in love with a girl in Orissa, to whom he is all but engaged. Karan, likewise, seems to be in Priya's thrall, an observation that makes me question an earlier speculation that he was gay. Whatever the truth of either of these possibilities, I am no closer to working him out, and I am beginning to find him a little irritating although I would be very hard pressed to pinpoint exactly which facet of his unfathomable personality is responsible for this.


Footnotes:

[9] On a return visit to Udaipur in March 2009 I saw this very phenomenon and realised that I had in fact been extremely lucky to see the lakes so full on my 2006-7.

Next Post - Monday 30th October 2006: Maal (will be posted Sunday 30th October 2011)

Friday 27th October 2006: Udaipur

Friday: a day of meets and mellow fruitfulness (will you ever forgive me?). At Tapan's bidding, I came back to Udaipur first thing so I could meet him and discuss the project in more depth. This in itself would have been cause for significant celebration, but any Tapan-derived joy I might have felt was immediately eclipsed by the far greater joy of discovering that Dilip is once more among us! It turns out that his family visit to Indore was less protracted than feared, and he has already been back for several days. I was able to corner him in his office and give him a potted summary of the project so far. He seemed reasonably impressed - enough, at least, to entitle me to a feeling of satisfaction that it hasn't been all that bad a start. He also explained something that has been troubling me recently: why does a Joint Forest Management microplanning project seem to have so little to do with forests, and so much to do with everything else? The former issue is largely a question of experience - my lack thereof. Much of the technical part of the report concerning actual forest management will have to be completed by others more qualified than me. My focus has therefore quite correctly been more on areas outside the forest which brings me on the latter point. The Forest Department in fact sets aside a certain budget for "non-forestry activities" in villages such as Maal, and it is hence necessary to focus part of the research onto the potential beneficiaries of such activities.
  Dilip seemed on typically dynamic form, and managed to insert the words "bifurcate" and "inculcate" into our conversation with every appearance of ease. He also complimented me on my "mind-blowing" Hindi, in response to an off-the-cuff comment I made about buffaloes. These gems aside, however, I can't help but detecting a slight coolness in his manner. Perhaps despite his apparently favorable response to my initial efforts he is actually a little disappointed. Who knows what great things he had imagined me capable of? Interestingly, and in all honesty a little annoyingly, he seems to be enormously impressed with Ellen. Given the high esteem in which I hold her myself, I can hardly blame Dilip for reacting likewise.

Dilip

   Later on I managed to track down Tapan, who seemed to be spending his day scurrying from one interminable meeting to the next. Despite traces of the petty bureaucrat about him that irritate me, I am slowly beginning to warm to him. Today I even managed to draw him out briefly on the subject his personal life - a blamelessly blissful arranged marriage with a brood of beautiful babies. On the more mundane matter of the microplan he was predictably efficient in helping me to draft the formal survey that I am to carry out next week.

*

This evening I went to a Rajasthani dance performance in the upper courtyard of the Bagore-ki-Haveli. This is a nightly occurrence and totally geared towards tourists which, if I cast my prejudices forcefully aside, does tend to mean things will be fairly professional, even if less genuine. This certainly was professional, albeit with some amusing blips, such as when the unseen and not very fluent compère announced one dance and then, after a confused pause, apologised that his dancers weren’t perfect and so would be performing a different dance. This they did, following which the compère announced the earlier dance again, absolutely verbatim, and the dancers, apparently now perfect, danced it without evident difficulty.
   All the dances were very good: the first was a solo by an exotic young woman with a pot of fire on her head, the second a trio of women striking thirteen little cymbals attached to their costumes in various places. The last, however, was truly remarkable. From the desert in western Rajasthan, it was a reflection on the practice of taking huge numbers of pots to the well in order to have a good supply in case of later shortage. To the ongoing background of extraordinary folk music – plaintive singing accompanied by jumbles of notes played on the harmonium bolstered by complicated rhythms on a drum that looked like a South Indian mridangam but sounded quite like a tabla - the oldest, and presumably most experienced, of the dancers came on and danced gracefully for a bit before a man offstage placed a large pot on her head. With an almost imperceptible increase in tension, she carried on dancing, until the man came on and placed an object covered by a cloth in front of her. Very slowly and elaborately she lowered herself until she was in a reclining position next to the mystery object, gesturing around it with her hand seemingly forever before (pot balanced perfectly on her head throughout) she grasped the cloth with her teeth, gingerly lifting it up to reveal… a flower! (Some symbolism here, surely? The flower in the desert).
   Buoyed by this, she carried on dancing, ever graceful, ever accompanied by the part-mournful, part-joyful Rajasthani music, which reminded me that gypsy origins have been traced according to some theories back to Rajasthan by studies of gypsy culture, including music. After a while she moved off to the sidelines, where the man placed a second, slightly smaller pot on top of the first. Totally unperturbed now, she carried on dancing while the singer sang of “paani… pichola paani” (water from Lake Pichola) and the man appeared again with a small bronze plate which he placed on the floor in front of her. In due course she put one foot, then the other on the plate, although it was too small, and jerked around for a bit before deeming this second labour over. Not long after taking away the plate, the man placed a third pot onto the growing pile, so that the height of pottage now must have been a good two thirds of the dancer’s own height. It did not seem to interfere with her graceful steps -  what amazing control of posture these women must have, especially considering in the “wild” these pots would be full of water and carried long distances back to the home.
   The third task consisted of walking over shards of blunted glass, followed by the addition of three more smallish pots, the effect of the overall six being now not unlike a gigantic tower shell. Almost unbelievably, the taskmaster waiting in the wings added three final pots to the monstrous pile, making a total of nine, more than doubling the dancer’s height for a few minutes while she whirled round faster and faster to the fascination of the visibly tense audience. Finally, her assistant removed all the pots, and there was palpable sigh of relief while the dancer, smiling broadly, did a few final twists and turns before finishing the dance looking happy and unburdened. And I must say, the whole thing does reek of the oppression of women in village life, making it something more than a bit of uncomplicated fun. This is strongly reflected in the rich emotional ambivalence of the music, which cleverly mirrored the drama of dance.
   Later on, for a total contrast, I joined the girls for thali in the Hotel Natraj. Meaning plate, a thali has virtually limitless possibilities as a meal, and varies widely throughout India. So far as I have seen in Rajasthan, it generally involves chapatti, dal, various vegetable dishes and rice, and may also include papad, fried delicacies, buttermilk and sweets. In South India, rice is more prominent, and the vegetable dishes are rather different from in the north. In Tamil Nadu, it is known as “meals” and eaten off a banana leaf, in contrast to the metal plates and dishes of north and central India. Tonight's has been definitely one of the best thalis I’ve ever had, with excellent rotis, dal, tasty vegetable dishes, a rich potato mush, kedgeree of a sort, papad and rice, all washed down with delightful buttermilk flavoured with salt and cinnamon.

Next Post - Sunday 29th October 2006: Udaipur (will be posted Saturday 29th October 2011)

Thursday 26th October 2006: Kojawara

Nearly a week on, I am writing from Kojawara, full of a renewed love for the village and its muddy mediaevalism. The hospital itself I love for its curious architectural design, already described, its beautiful setting amongst fields and gentle mountains and its quaint cast of characters. Firstly, Dr Kishan, who gives the impression of moving placidly but intelligently through life, always questioning and trying to understand what he sees. He has some delightful turns of phrase, such as his claim that he only goes into central Udaipur for “purchasing purposes” or that if people in Kojawara don’t want to come to the hospital, “they can always visit quacks.”

 

"Muddy mediaevalism"

   Rupchand, whose role seems to be that of Dr Kishan's right-hand layman, is head-to-toe an unintentional comic with a serious approach to life. Everything he says to me, in Hindi, is spoken with emphasis and loud repetition of the “I’m talking to a foreigner” type, and accompanied by exaggerated gestures and mimes. His facial expressions are wonderful: frequent extreme surprise or shock, desperate incomprehension, an “oh, isn’t that adorable” face – reserved for occasions such as when I told him that there were lots of domestic cats in England – and a general beaming expression. All are outrageously magnified to cross the chasm of potential misunderstanding between us, but apparently without a hint of conscious self-parody. He is tremendous fun, but I don’t think I’ll ever get to know him well. His wife is surprisingly beautiful and, contrary to what I had earlier supposed, not at all shy. Their child, who I am sure is a girl, but strongly remember being introduced to as a boy and now feel to embarrassed to ask, is pretty, strong-willed and very engaging[8].

 

Rupchand and Hitanshu 

Aditya, in charge of the medicines, is quite interesting and sweet but absolutely uncurious, in stark contrast to Rupchand, for whom no detail of the habits and customs in my country is too small to be of the utmost fascination. I made a howler when talking to the two of them earlier about English marriages, referring to them not as pyaar ki shaadi (love marriages) but pyaaz ki shaadi (onion marriages).

*

En route from Udaipur on Monday, Satish and I made a trip to the Forest Department in Kherwara in order to clear up some of the mysteries of land ownership. I only partially understood the Hindi conversation and so far have only discussed the skeleton of it with Satish, but he assures me that the meeting was a triumph and has helped him hugely with his own field project. It appears that all land – which I suppose means all rural land – belongs to the Revenue Department, who lease it out to the Forest Department, to panchayats or to individuals.
  I spent Tuesday and Wednesday in Maal trying to find out about labour migration patterns. Satish and Karan were working back in their assigned village, and Ellen is now doing some research for Dilip in Udaipur, so amateur dramatics and frantic scrambles through the dictionary were the only tools at my disposal. As usual, Amratlal and Suraj had to bear the brunt of this, alongside Bhagwanlal, who is one of the village teachers. It appears that two Maalians are based in two different Gujarati towns acting as contractors for various cotton and wool factories. They come back to Maal at times, and return to Gujarat with as many new workers as are required. They recruit people not only from Maal, but also from other neighbouring villages. Similarly, other villages have their own contractors working for various industries in Gujarat (or elsewhere) who get work for Maalians as well as their own villagers. Unfortunately, neither of these thekadars, as they are known, are in Maal at the moment, so I had to content myself with talking to a couple of the migrants themselves, young guys who were about to go and work in Gujarat. 
   Minor theatrical research triumphs aside, week three hasn't been as productive as I had hoped. Tapan, whose status as saviour seems to grow with his continued inaccessibility, has been ill all week, making it very difficult to really move anything forward. I was luckily able to coax the hospital telephone into making a call to Kherwara, and had a brief conversation with him in his office. Poor thing, he sounded really unwell and I masked my frustration as well as I possibly could. He assures me, however, that he will be going to "Head Office" in Udaipur tomorrow, and that I should come back a day early to meet him.
  He also outlined the next steps of the project which will inevitably form a process of formalising my Maalian inquisition, specifically through setting up a village meeting and implementing a survey. The aim of the latter will be to gain a fuller understanding of the context - that wonderfully all-encompassing term that embraces wells, pumps, goats, encroachments and migration patterns - and fill some of the gaping holes as yet untouched by my hand-waving, chai-swilling research methods. The former will partly be an exercise in PR - explaining what we are doing in Maal, and why we are doing it - and partly another medium through which to clarify some of the confusion that is the legacy of my first few weeks. There will be a strong focus on prioritising the village's main needs, an exercise which I understand forms a core part of the microplanning exercise. Since talking to Tapan, I have managed to convene a meeting at 2pm next Monday with the Forest Protection Committee and a number of others (such as Dolat Ram and Suraj) that I have invited personally.

Footnotes

[8] He was definitely a boy!

Next Post - Friday 27th October 2006: Udaipur (will be posted Thursday 27th October 2011)

Saturday 21st October 2006: Udaipur

Today is Diwali, perhaps the most famous of all Hindu festivals, which celebrates light and the internal triumph of good over evil. It varies in significance across India, but for most Hindus it also commemorates the return of Lord Rama, one of Vishnu’s greatest incarnations, to his birthplace Ayodhya after defeating the demon Ravana in Sri Lanka.
   Back for another weekend of urban indulgence, I spent this morning visiting the Bagore-ki-Haveli, a mansion or haveli built by an early Prime Minister of Mewar. Some of it has been converted into a restaurant with exquisite views of Lake Pichola and the two main islands therein (the Lake Palace and more distant Jagmandir). Another part has been turned into a museum, whose biggest draw is an extensive collection of turbans. Those of us brought up West of Wiltshire tend to develop a rather narrow view of turbans, regarding them as the diagnostic feature of one specific group: the Sikhs. A brief acquaintance with India reveals a hitherto unsuspected breadth to the turban's style and function but it takes a visit to a museum like this one to illuminate the complex subtleties of the language of turbandom. All the usual suspects - Brahmins, Jains, Patels, Rajputs - have their own turban, but India’s rigid millinery etiquette runs far finer than this. Back in the glory days, every caste had its own peculiar brand of headgear. There were turbans for different professions, most of which in any case corresponded at least approximately to a certain caste - landowner, government inspector, postman. There was even a “Family History Record Keeper’s" turban. In a different room was the “biggest turban in the world”, an unprepossessing whopper unfit for any normal head.
  I strolled out into the congested capillaries of the old city, in particular the area near the City Palace and Lake Pichola, which I have come to think of as “Tourist-ville”. I dropped in on Hari, who was with a younger cousin he introduced as Love. He seems like a Hari-in-training - oily hair, pan-continental accent and a charm that grates as much as it seduces. I also visited the beauteous Bablu, although forbore to initiate the first French lesson. I realise now that his shop is merely the ground floor of a three story haveli that hosts his family's hotel and restaurant and happens to be the premier venue for Korean weddings in Udaipur. This is not as absurdly niche a market as it sounds, as Korean tourists are a familiar sight in Udaipur, and Bablu's uncle has capitalised on this by serving Korean dishes, detailed in Korean menus. For those who wish to take the Udaipur experience to extremes, he offers a paired down version of the Hindu wedding ceremony!
   Later on, I met the girls for an unconventional Diwali lunch of tuna salad and cheesecake at Cafe Edelweiss, a particularly tasteful example of the German Bakery that grows like a parasite on the face of India's serener tourist spots. The ingredients are pretty much the same wherever you go: wicker chairs and rich-textured tablecloths; pancakes and apple pie on the menu, sometimes translated into French, German or Hebrew, and a disconcertingly confident-looking girl in baggy orange trousers reading One Hundred Years of Solitude in the corner.
   Ellen and I visited Dr Kishan (of Kojawara) in the early evening in his Udaipur house where we gorged modestly on snacks and tooth-rotting milk sweets. We presented him with our own box of sweets which he received with a delighted whoop. We briefly met his shy wife and his younger son who was later forced to drive us back into the main part of town. Or rather, we were forced to accept the lift.[7]

Ellen with Dr Kishan and his family

By now, Udaipur was magically lit up with tacky lights that would be considered borderline bad taste in England at Christmas, but seem to fit here. The mood was genial, if slightly fraught, with people out on the streets buying sweets and other goodies and letting off crackers alarmingly close by. Unlike Christmas Day in England, which is above all a private family affair, Diwali seems to be both a family occasion and a very public celebration where lots of the fun is had on the streets and in the bazaars. Diwali decorations resemble Christmas decorations – fairy lights and strings of tinsel – but the way that they are used is not the same: tinsel is often strung above head level from one side of the street to another, forming a festive tunnel.
   The girls and I dined luxuriously at the Jagat Nivas hotel, supposedly one of Udaipur’s romantic hotspots, from where we have just returned. It is graceful, with big scalloped arches opening out onto the lake, and live sitar and tabla music. The lighting does seem a bit bright to be romantic, however, and the restaurant is entirely frequented by tourists – I didn’t see a single Indian face – which seems very unromantic to me. But, far more importantly, the tandoori chicken I had was truly sublime, and well washed down by two expensive Kingfishers. We all had a good time, and it seemed the most appropriate way for us outsiders to celebrate Diwali. Most of the IRMAns have gone to celebrate with their families, but Karan is around and had arranged to join us this evening. Somehow the arrangement fell through and he didn't turn up. Now, back in the guesthouse he has barely said a word about it and shows no signs of being bothered either way. I find him difficult to make out, as he comes across as simultaneously apathetic and deeply caring. He is clearly very intelligent but altogether doesn't strike me as a very wholesome kind of person. I imagine I will see a good deal more of him in Kojawara, so I must try harder to crack his unusual shell.

Musicians at Jagat Nivas Hotel

Footnotes:

[7] The next thing I heard about this son was the devastating news some weeks later that he had died in a motorbike accident.

Next Post -Thursday 26th October 2006: Kojawara (will be posted Wednesday 26th October 2011)

Wednesday 18th October 2006: Maal

I am back in rural parts now, but I have brought a souvenir from the city with me. Three in fact, in the form of Ellen, Satish and Karan. The latter two are IRMAns, working on a project in a nearby village but, owing to certain complications with eating arrangements, currently camping out in the Kojawara hospital. Ellen has come with me as she has joined an interesting-sounding project with Dilip ("The campest man I've ever met!" as she describes him) and needs to get some field experience. My first impressions of her had been of a sensible, but slightly ordinary person and it hasn’t taken me long to realise that they were wide off the mark: she is fascinating, hilarious and ferociously intelligent. She has spent time volunteering in Ghana and Kenya and is full of my kind of interest in foreign cultures and development. Luckily, she has also turned out to be just the impetus I needed in what could have otherwise been a rudderless second week.
   Unable to bask any more in the comforting luxury of a first week with absolutely no expectations, I felt strangely ill-equipped to leap into an achievement-studded second week. Part of the problem is the lack of one vital ingredient: supervision. Throughout last week I consoled myself with the knowledge that back in Udaipur I would be able to run through everything with Dilip, and work with him in shaping up a plan for this week. He had even half-promised that he would come to Maal with me. Imagine my shock when I discovered that he left last week for a lengthy family visit to Indore, 400 miles away! Dilipless, I was at least hoping to reconvene with Tapan, the curiously hard-to-like engineer who accompanied me on my first day. Frustratingly, he has not reappeared, and the antiquated excuse for a telephone in the hospital has not quite been equal to the task of connecting me with him in the Kherwara Office.
  The single topic on which I was most desperate for clarification from Dilip was that of land ownership. So much of a Joint Forest Management microplan seems to revolve around land - land quantity, land quality, land use, land misuse - that a basic understanding of how land ownership works is a pre-requisite for any burgeoning microplanner. My sorry attempts at background reading have left me far from enlightenment, and on my Monday morning mountain commute I was feeling particularly nonplussed. Left to my own devices I would have probably floundered, but the dynamic presence of Ellen inspired a research-it-yourself attitude in me. An hour's elaborate charade with Amratlal enabled us to glean some interesting insight, but it was only with the unexpected arrival of Satish and Karan (who clearly sensed that Maal was where it was all at) yesterday that we were really able to make inroads into the matter. Even then, the main issue that the presence of these interpreters served to highlight was that everyone is telling a different story.

Mango, teak, charnot and private land

  In essence, public land appears to be owned by either the Revenue Department or the Forest Department, but nobody seems to agree about how private land ownership relates to this, or whether the charnot (pasture land) is owned by the panchayats (village councils) or Revenue Department, or both. Amratlal told me at length about the theka, a tax paid by small landholders, like him and everybody else in Maal, in return for ownership of “revenue land”. Dolat Ram, a farmer who lives near the school and has been very friendly and helpful so far, seemed to agree with this. However, the family of Laxmanlal, a very bluff and hearty shop keeper, laughed out loud at the idea of a theka, saying it was “purane zamane mein” (in the olden days), while Bhagwanlal, a teacher who has become a friend and ally, claimed never to have heard of it!
   Of particular interest is the issue of encroachments, which in this context refers to any illicit activity on the 50 hectares of forest land that Vikas Samiti has already set aside for Joint Forest Management. Amratlal, who evidently likes to have a finger in every pie and is a leading light on the Forest Protection Committee (FPC), claims there has never been a problem with encroachments. Others claim low levels of encroachment, such as illicit logging, on the part of outsiders. Suraj, of History, Politics and Hindi Literature fame, goes even further, and suggests in a performance of stage whispers and glinting eyes that Amratlal’s brother and others have built houses on the JFM land, the very worst kind of encroachment! He even says the FPC are doing a valueless job in protecting the forest, and after an initial few months of reduced encroachments, forest conditions post-FPC formation are no better than they were before. Ellen suspects that Suraj is bitter that he, a Bachelor of Arts, has so little say in village politics and is therefore ultra-critical of anything the FPC does, maybe even to the extent of telling lies. I am inclined to agree, reluctantly, as I have a soft spot for Suraj, although Laxmanlal’s wife also hinted that Amratlal’s family were involved in encroachments. Amratlal, naturally, has said nothing about this and I have not brought up the subject as it would hardly constitute good etiquette to cast aspersions at his family’s integrity. He is kind and amiable and, as with Suraj, I am reluctant to entertain suspicions of his duplicity.

Next Post - Saturday 21st October 2006: Udaipur (will be posted Friday 21st October 2011)

Sunday 15th October 2006: Udaipur

My initial feeling on returning to Vikas Samiti on Friday evening was one of loneliness. After a week of Vagadi and Hinglish I was looking forward to some highly Anglo-Saxon banter in the guesthouse on my return. Instead, as if in punishment for the hypocrisy of craving what I had initially resented, I was greeted by a sepulchral calm. An unhealthy sounding cough alerted to me to the presence of poor Rachel, in bed with a high fever. I sat and talked to her for a little while and then, feeling grotty myself, went to lie down and listen to music. A late afternoon stroll, incorporating chai and a chance encounter with Lalita, my garrulous IRMAn friend, restored my interest in life immeasurably.
   "I've been clicking pictures all week!" she informed me when I enquired about her field project. The IRMAns, as I predicted, have received their first exposure to life in rural Rajasthan with mixed feelings. Profound shock at the poverty in their own back yard, on the one hand, seems to have been matched by an intense appreciation of the beauty of its setting and the wholesomeness of country living.
   For my own part, I have certainly relished a thoroughly urban couple of days. I spent yesterday back in the old town and renewed my acquaintance with the sleazy Hari, who waylaid me outside his shop for a lengthy chat over a glass of chai. Surprisingly he has actually heard from Intrepid Travel, the company whose application form I helped him fill in. They have so far merely informed him that they have received his application and have taken the opportunity to quiz him as to its authorship, for which he has of course claimed full responsibility! A stone's throw from Hari's shop I passed a breathtakingly beautiful young man sitting outside a tiny open-fronted shop selling decorated notebooks. He greeted me cheerily and subjected me to the usual litany of questions concerning my nationality, name, travel plans and marital status. In this case it developed into an entertaining conversation about foreign tourists, during which I found myself promising to teach him French in return for Hindi. His name is Jairam, but everyone calls him Bablu, so I shall do likewise.

Bablu (Jairam)

   Yesterday evening was spent, strangely enough, at a roundabout. I imagine there can’t be many cities in the world where a trip to a roundabout could pass for a good night out, but Sukhadia Circle, with pleasure gardens, snack vendors and a boating lake is something a little out of the ordinary. Collective curiosity drove a large party of us - English volunteers and IRMAns included - down to investigate. In a fit of generosity, partly inspired by the memory that I owed the IRMAns for having treated me to a meal the week before, I hired pedaloes for the group. I accompanied Lalita on a two-seater shaped like a swan. She is hilarious and a Bombay girl to the core, speaking near-fluent but idiosyncratic English with that typical educated Indian accent that sounds so upper class to British ears. En route to the roundabout she asked me whether I knew why so many walls were painted with images of Hindu gods, and explained that this was a very successful method of preventing people from spitting and pissing against them. “You must find India so amusing,” she said. “Even I find it quite amusing!”  Later on she delighted us all by saying “Oh no, I don’t really want an ice-cream, I’d prefer a fully-fledged meal”. After this, everything we talked about became “fully-fledged” to her disgust, and accordingly those of us with "fully-fledged appetites" went to eat in a surprisingly upmarket hotel close to Vikas Samiti.

 Lalita

   Here I made the acquaintance of another of the IRMAns, Deepak. He is a handsome 30-year old who, like Arun, is originally from Bihar. After the cheery banality of my conversations in old Udaipur earlier in the day, Deepak's words rained down like manna from an intelligent heaven as we discussed politics and poverty. The conversation became general, and everybody seemed to agree that the Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, is little more than a stooge for Sonia Gandhi, the Italian widow of Rajiv Gandhi, former PM and scion of the indefatigable Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. Lalita, characteristically, was particularly virulent on this point, deriding Singh as a "nonsense man".
   Deepak surprised me later on in the evening by espousing the odd view that learning is a source of unhappiness. "Throughout childhood we're forced to learn so many things that we don't want to learn. I really believe that adulthood should involve a process of unlearning. That is the secret to happiness." Accordingly, he has progressively given up meat, alcohol and smoking, and has tried to shed himself of considerations of caste and arranged marriage.
   It turned out to be quite a night for discussion, and walking back to the guesthouse I became engrossed in conversation with another volunteer called Yogesh, newly arrived from a college in Madurai in the south. He is a Brahmin from Orissa, another state in East India, and has yellowish skin and a face that reminds me of the bumbling heroes of the interminable Tamil films I saw on my previous trip to India. We began by talking about religion, but soon became absorbed by another topic: reservations.
   The reservation system is a practice of setting aside a quota of jobs in various sectors for certain underprivileged caste groups. These sectors are primarily government and civil service, but also include some businesses and some educational institutions. The three main caste groupings with quotas reserved for them are the Scheduled Castes (SC), corresponding approximately to the Dalits, the lowest castes, traditionally considered untouchable; the Scheduled Tribes (ST), often called adivasi (literally “orginal inhabitants”) such as the Meena of Maal and the more famous Gonds and Bhils; and the unflatteringly-named Other Backward Castes (OBC), a mishmash of lower status castes, presumably correlating roughly to the Shudra, the lowest of the traditional four-tier classification (Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaisya, Shudra) of Brahmanic Hinduism called varna.
  The quotas involved are actually quite high, and vary from state to state, although usually something like 7.5% of government jobs are reserved for STs, 15% for SCs and a whopping 27% or so for the OBCs. The SC/ST reservations date back to independence, while the OBC reservation were only introduced around two decades ago.
   I suppose the main motivations behind this system are increasing the representation of these disadvantaged groups, fostering their development and providing compensation for centuries of oppression and neglect. I am personally ambivalent on this issue – yes, it could be a tremendously useful tool in development as Yogesh suggested, but it is massively open to abuse. People talk about the “creamy layer” phenomenon, which means that in whichever group you set aside a quota for, it is always the richest and most socially advantaged members of that group (the creamy layer) who are going to benefit. They will be the ones who can afford the training and education needed to apply for and succeed in a high powered civil service job. A tribal farmer living in deepest Madhya Pradesh, on the other hand, can reap no conceivable benefit from the fact that nearly a tenth of government jobs are set aside for members of his caste group. Yogesh suggested that restricting reservations to one generation per family would help combat this phenomenon. Thus if your father got into the Ministry of Fertilisers on a Scheduled Caste quota then you should not be allowed to benefit likewise, meaning in practice that you would have to apply as “General Caste” rather than SC.
  While decrying the creamy layer, and ridiculing the idea of reservations for educational institutions, Yogesh defended the general concept of reservations by citing what he called a “Darwinian” theory that, viewed as a division of physical labour, the caste system results in social groups using some body parts a lot, but not others, which will have the eventual effect of rendering these unused body parts vestigial. The reservation system, therefore, by shaking up the caste system will ensure anatomical normality for generations of Indians to come! This bunkum aside, I suppose that a small proportion (maybe 20-30%) of single generation-only reservations that are accompanied by all sorts of development measures could be a useful way of making a deeply hierarchical society more fair. On the other hand, a system like the one in Tamil Nadu, where over 50% of government jobs are reserved for various lower castes, must do as much damage as good. I remember the Tamil Brahmin family I used to live with in Kovilpatti complaining that it would very difficult for their son to find a job in Tamil Nadu, so he would probably have to go to Bombay.

Next Post - Wednesday 18th October 2006:Maal (will be posted Tuesday 18th October 2011)

Thursday 12th October: Maal

After nearly a week of no writing, it is finally time for me tackle Maal. Leaving the hospital in the morning (and taking care this time not to stray onto the path that leads to Kojawara) I hang around outside the little roadside hut that serves as a bus stop. This place seems so untarnished by the ravages of modernity that it is always a small miracle when, after twenty minutes of chai and gossip, a jeep pulls up. I travel by jeep as far as Suveri, a village some 10 km off. I invariably travel on the roof, always a thrill and usually crowded - men, gunny sacks, jerry cans and once even a goat - so that I am pushed right up to the edge, clinging on for what seems like dear life. Two days back, however, I had the roof to myself and, feeling like a Maharaja atop his elephant, made a point of doffing my cap to passers-by. From Suveri I walk along a tarred road as far as Wanibore, a hamlet lying in a fertile plain of paddies and mango trees. Another half hour on a dirt track takes me to my destination.

Wanibore

Maal

   Maal has no real centre, although the tiny primary school serves this purpose. Houses –  brown mud walls with red-tiled roofs supported by great wooden beams and smaller bamboo frames – are connected by paths wending between rice paddies, maize fields and clusters of trees. The 570-strong community belongs entirely to the Meena tribe, once branded by the British as criminals but now formally located within the fabric of Indian society under the heading of "Scheduled Tribe". They hardly fit my textbook image of a tribe - nobody wears a headdress or war-paints and as yet I have not heard a single distant drumbeat or eerie ululation.  Rather, they are a soberly dressed lot with tatty shirts and trousers customary for men and brightly-coloured saris for the women. They are mostly dark-skinned with soft, intense eyes and a strange but beguiling manner that to my city eyes looks like living in slow motion. Men greet each other with a gentle touch of the hands rather than a shake, and out in public they seem to ignore other women altogether.
   On the first day Tapan, a friendly but strangely hard-to-like engineer from Vikas Samiti’s office in nearby Kherwara came as my chaperone, and introduced me to Amratlal, the owner of one Maal's few shops that sells soap, biscuits and little cigarettes called beedis. Amratlal is probably in his late thirties as he has a 15-year old son, but, like Rupchand back in the hospital, is curiously ageless. It was arranged that he would act as my main point of contact in the village and would provide a bed if and when I needed to stay over. It was with some relief that on the second day, halfway up the mountain, I heard a call of "Jon ji" (Jon, sir) from further up and had the strange sensation that even here, in the tribal heartlands of south Rajasthan, there was someone to watch over me. He and his family have been very helpful, although I've been careful to spend as much time as possible alone, so that I am not simply seeing the village from his or anyone else's sole perspective. My Hindi is sufficient to hold a reasonable, if tortuous, conversation with him, and we both pull out all the stops as far as general cross-cultural bonhomie is concerned. That aside, I am constantly aware of the great gulf between us - while travel makes us aware of the fundamental similarities of all humans at core, it also reveals the extent to which "superficial" differences can act as a barrier between them. Conversely, however, it has always taught me that astonishingly little is required to strike up a friendship, and for the time being Amratlal and I are as close as brothers.

Amratlal and his daughter

   My work so far has mainly consisted of what I like to think of as informal research -  long chats over tiny cups of over-sweet, weak, unspiced tea - all with a view to building up a basic framework of knowledge prior to any attempt at formal research. I’ve learnt about all sorts of things in this way – about Maal's amenities, such as shops, wells, hand-pumps, and about agricultural practices, livestock, trees, forest uses and village priorities. I've often felt out of my depth and struggled with Hindi, which in any case is a lingua franca, as the language spoken in the village is called Vagadi and is closer to Gujarati. Very few people speak English, although they are sometimes able to dredge up an English word to save the day, while I dredge up my small but trusty dictionary. One scrawny little fellow, after an almost excruciating period of brain-racking, managed to serenade me with a “How are?”, each word a painfully earned triumph of rhetoric.
  Other than Amratlal, the closest I have come to anything resembling a friendship is with a pleasantly eccentric character called Suraj. I met him on one of the paths leading to the forest, where he greeted me with a lengthy, mumbling sentence that concluded with the words "History, Politics and Hindi Literature". I repeated this back to him questioningly, and he nodded solemnly before bursting out laughing, leaving me no option but to join in, baffled. I managed to persuade him to sit with me in the shade of a large rock and talk about trees and asked him a number of questions which he answered in a whimsical drawl that I found hard to follow. The raucous laughter that punctuated his conversation indicated that he found both my questions and my difficulty in interpreting his answers extremely entertaining. And yet somehow, across the barriers of continents, cultures, experiences and lifestyles, I recognised razor-sharp intelligence. It shocks and embarrasses me to admit that this came as a surprise, and yet I now realise I needed a Suraj to warn me not to underestimate the Meena.

Suraj

   He told me about mango trees; trees called sagwan with plate-like leaves, the wood of which is used in house-building [6]; mahua trees, from whose flowers a “country liquor” called deshi is made; a tree with finger-like leaves called neem, with twigs that are ideal for brushing teeth; and the tendu, whose leaves are used to roll the little cigarettes that everybody seems to smoke called beedis. In a tortuous pantomime I managed to work out that these tendu leaves are sold to government contractors who then sell them on to companies that manufacture the beedis and sell them to retail outlets such as Amratlal's shop. This discovery of elaborate order in apparent chaos somewhat shook the lazy, judgmental paradigms of the life indigenous that I had brought with me. But Suraj had still more unintentional tricks up his sleeve to shake at the foundations of my naivety, for the full meaning of "History, Politics and Hindi Literature" became apparent towards the end of our conversation - it was his BA degree! Admittedly, it was from a college in the local town of Kherwara, rather than St Xavier's, Bombay or Trinity College, Cambridge, but nonetheless it came as a strange and almost unwelcome surprise. Why unwelcome? Why would I possibly wish these people to remain uneducated? Simply that I had built up an indulgent private fantasy of a truly remote village, disconnected from the mainstay of my reality, and the presence of Bachelors of Arts lolling on the grassy hillsides rather jarred on this. Likewise Suraj's trump card, the information that four of Maal's sons are working out in Kuwait! Kojawara had prepared me for this, but somehow the whole thing seemed ten times more ridiculous in Maal than in Kojawara. I sometimes wonder whether we Western Europeans think that we have a monopoly over immigration - it is certainly always a refreshing surprise to discover immigration patterns that defy this - Rajasthani villagers in the Gulf, Lebanese in Brazil, Chinese in Madagascar.
   I spent one night in Maal at Amratlal’s house, which enabled me to work into the early evening and start earlier the following morning. I had a good chance to explore and drew up an initial map of the village. Amratlal’s wife cooked a tasty but extremely spicy meal of chapatti and dal, which I ate outside by candlelight, sitting on a string bed and using an empty oil can as a table.  Later on, various friends and relations came and hung about in the area outside the house. We had a fun evening of cultural exchange, which featured my performing Once in Royal David’s City and Flanders and Swann’s Oh It’s Hard To Say ‘Hoolima Kittiluca Cheecheechee’. I tried to explain their meanings in Hindi, but they didn’t translate very well, as nobody had heard of Jesus Christ, and in my attempt to convey the meaning of the amusing innuendo at the end of the Flanders and Swann I used the word sambhog (sexual intercourse) at which Amratlal was visibly a little shocked. Still, on balance, it was a moderately successful set, and far outshone the 15-second Hindi song that I finally managed to persuade one of the boys present to sing in return.
   So far I cannot make any pronouncement on how the project is going. It has been a fascinating first week, and I think I have used my time relatively wisely. I certainly feel better placed to enter the next stage of the microplanning which will involve a village meeting and a formal household survey. For now I am glad of the prospect of a weekend in Udaipur.

Footnotes:

[6] It was a long time before I learnt, to my great surprise, that the Sagwan was none other than the teak tree (Tectona grandis)

Sunday 8th October 2006: Kojawara

Today I am reporting from hospital. Nothing, I hasten to add, is wrong. On the contrary, I feel more than usually healthy and alive, although were I to fall ill I can think of few more delightfully bucolic spots to do so. Five whitewashed wings radiate out from an open air corridor, all with roof terraces affording picturesque views of the Aravalli hills. The grounds while not extensive, feature a small patch of lovingly manicured lawn that could have been lifted straight out the Home Counties. If, in a radical departure from form, P. G. Wodehouse were to have set one of his novels in a North Indian country hospital, this is undoubtedly the sort of place he would have chosen.

 "Lovingly manicured lawn"

But some explanation is in order. The hospital is in fact a Vikas Samiti endeavour, and is located in a village called Kojawara. Dilip has arranged that while I carry out my Joint Forest Microplan research in the nearby village of Maal, I shall stay in the hospital guesthouse. Compared to the remote mountain-top setting of tribal Maal, this hospital definitely qualifies as "civilisation" and Kojawara is a thriving metropolis. By most other yardsticks, however, it is a rural idyll. We are several hours from Udaipur, electricity is intermittent and the one car I have seen looked almost as out of place as a bullock cart would do in Central London. My journey here, two days back, was made in a crowded Vikas Samiti jeep, for by a lucky coincidence a general meeting had been called in the hospital and a number of officers from Udaipur were attending it. From now on I shall make my journeys by local buses and jeeps, a prospect that does not daunt me anything like as much as would that of trying to navigate rural England by Stagecoach. I suppose this is mostly because India has always filled me, like Hari, with a feeling that things will work out in the end, and being a foreigner gives you a carte blanche to make a prat of yourself whenever necessary.
   By rights I should now launch into an edifying description of the work I have done to date in Maal, but I am going to indulge myself for a bit longer in Kojawara and the hospital. Currently there are no patients staying in the tiny ward, although there are apparently lots of outpatients who come in the day to visit the old and gently unassuming Dr Kishan. He has been working here for two years, despite technically having retired, while his wife and family remain in Udaipur. He visits them every weekend. I’ve noticed that in India there seems to be a high tolerance, presumably born out of necessity, of living and working away from your spouse. He speaks good English so we’ve talked about various things, ranging from the obvious swapping of family details to more abstruse topics such as “What happens in your country if an unmarried girl gets pregnant?”
   Another unmissable feature of the hospital is a peculiarity called Rupchand, who must be in his thirties. He seems extremely anxious for my well-being and always turns a simple Hindi conversation into an elaborate and often entertaining charade. His wife is virtually non-evident, although his baby son Ramesh, who has long hair like a girl, is often with him. An elegant young man called Aditya Jain is in charge of the medicines and his good English makes him a useful interpreter, giving me the feeling that he may end up becoming my best friend of the lot. Most important of all are the brothers Devji and Dalji, one small and wiry, the other beefy and strong, who produce wonderful dishes in the tiny hospital kitchen: roti and sabji (vegetables) and dal (lentils) or dal bati, wondrously filling flourballs crumbled up with ghee, onions, dal and a squeeze of lemon.
   Kojawara itself is enchanting in the late afternoons when I have strolled through the rice paddies and maize fields, watching the men plough the fields with pairs of bullocks. Their wives and sons herd groups of hefty buffalo home, occasionally beating them or uttering monosyllables of encouragement, or perhaps admonishment. Many people carry large bundles of grass on their head, for animal fodder, turning them into spooky creatures from science fiction. Others sit outside their houses or shops, which have walls of brown clay and generally large open spaces at the front, sometimes covered with a roof supported by wooden pillars. All kinds of birds, such as house crows, cattle egrets, bee-eaters and rose-ringed parakeets, flit overhead. Trees include mango, neem and the inevitable acacia, as well as cactus-like plants [4] that are often used for fencing. Many of the families in the village belong the Patel community and some have members working in Kuwait, which in a naïve way I find hard to imagine – what should these simple folk do in an Arab oil economy? [5]

Kojawara

   In moonlight, Kojawara becomes a paradise. Last night, while staring across the valley at the extraordinary spectrum of different greys – far-off hills, nearby fields, midrange tree silhouettes and close outlines of cactus-like fencing – I was struck by two things: one, that this was surely one of those special moments in life that should be treasured long after the event; and two, that the whole scene, expansive moonlit panorama with an orchestra of crickets and cicadas in the background, had something oddly familiar about it. It reminded me of a film. Not a particular film, but the sort of scene you might see in a film set in the tropics, or southern USA or even the Mediterranean!
  Well, I have lingered longer than planned in Kojawara and I cannot quite summon the energy to do  justice to Maal and my work there. I promise to remedy the defect as soon as I can!


Next Post - Thursday 12th October 2006: Maal (will be posted Wednesday 12th October 2011) 

Footnotes:
[4] My father later pointed out that these were probably not cactuses at all, but members of the Euphorbia family.

[5] I subsequently learnt that local links had been established with Kuwait back in the seventies, initially by local members of the Bohra community, a sect of Shiite Muslims (specifically Ismaili) with a huge population in India.

Thursday 5th October 2006: Udaipur

Things are moving on apace and tomorrow I shall go to the village of Maal, where I am to work for a month or two preparing a Joint Forest Management microplan. Joint Forest Management (JFM) is the term given in India to partnerships formed between a State Forest Department and a local community in order to protect and regenerate forest land. NGOs are often present in these arrangements, acting as mediators and preparing reports with detailed analyses and strategies for individual areas. These are microplans, and the production and subsequent implementation of microplans is one of the major roles of Vikas Samiti's Natural Resource Department (NRD). What writing a microplan entails in practice is something I am less certain about, but it will mean spending time in the forest and the village gathering information about how people use and abuse the forest and assessing what can be done to improve matters. If I sound vague it is because I am vague.
   How did I reach this state of incipient activity? The first glimmer of hope came two days ago on Tuesday morning when I finally met Dilip Mishra, my summer correspondent from NRD. I had built up an image of an intensely earnest and inaccessible character of indeterminate age. It was a revelation, therefore, to meet a young man, enthusiastic and stylish, who smiled broadly and asked about my journey from Bombay. He spoke rapid and eloquent English in a high-pitched voice that always seemed on the verge of getting even higher. He told me that he was very keen to get me on board in NRD as he had a village requiring a microplan and he apologised for the bureaucratic hurdles presented by Sumita. In the meantime, there would be plenty of reading to get on with. "When you see the reading material you will heave a sigh of relief that I am not expecting you to have completed it within the week," he gabbled breathlessly. "These documents are extremely voluminous!"
   During our conversation Sumita herself sailed in. She is head of the People's Management School (PMS) which controls Vikas Samiti's human resources, including the volunteers. She is altogether different from the army of benevolent-looking women I have seen around Vikas Samiti, mostly middle-aged and slightly frumpy, dressed in salwar kameez and perpetually looking a little harassed. Sumita, in contrast, wears trousers and has short hair. Her glacially beautiful face is set in a near-permanent frown and she speaks the cultivated English of the Indian upper classes, although her tone is deadpan. She reminded us that there was a procedure to follow and that she couldn't sanction my joining the NRD project until she had spoken to other departments. "But you are lucky to have an enthusiastic champion in Dilip," she said, almost smiling.
   I was impatient at this stalemate, but reasonably confident of the full force of Dilip's enthusiasm behind me, and spent much of the rest of Tuesday lost in a book about the history of Indian forest policy. I am one of those people who feels uncomfortable jumping into something half-way through, and no matter where I tried to start browsing I kept realising I should have started further back and ended up rather lost and confused somewhere in the 1950s. I passed Sumita a few times during the day and on each occasion she pointedly ignored me. As I headed over the next morning to see Dilip, however, I capitalised on her faint smile of recognition with a pouncing "Any news?"
   "About what?" she said, coolly bemused.
   "About the project!"
   "As we have already discussed, there is a procedure and I cannot contravene it."
  She glided off, and I continued despondently to Dilip's office to discuss forest management issues. Half an hour later Sumita joined us, her brow furrowed as if she was about to deliver an unwelcome message. "It will be possible, of course, for you to work on a JFM project with Dilip, but I am not sure if this is what you are interested in."
   "But that's what I've been trying to explain since I arrived!" I cried, exasperated.
   "Oh," she said, genuinely amused. "You'd better take it then."
   "Great! Is this settled then? You won't change your mind?"
   "No, no," she laughed sneeringly. "It is settled".
I have no idea whether the delay in sanctioning the project served any purpose other than an assertion of rank.

*

Meanwhile, our volunteer community has swollen with the arrival of ten Indian students from the Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA) a college in Gujarat. They have come here for the first of three fieldwork components that make up a significant part of their degree. Their self-appointed leader appears to be Dhanwant, a highly intelligent 23-year old from Jammu, with whom I have already had long conversations with on a variety of topics. Karan, a 22-year old from Dehra Dun, is by contrast quiet and enigmatic and doesn't seem to blend in much with the rest of the group. My favourites so far are Lalita, one of the only two girls, and Arun Kumar a 26-year old joker from Bihar, a notoriously poor and corrupt state in the east of the country. Lalita is very bubbly and surprisingly forthright for a 24-year old Indian girl and lost no time in calling me an idiot, while later conceding that I was a "fun person to party with". This accolade was awarded to me when I accompanied the group to the Ambrai, an elegant outdoor restaurant on the shores of Lake Pichola, where Arun got drunk and insisted on treating me to dinner. His gesture was slightly undermined by the fact that, in his confusion, he only ordered one dish between the two of us and we had to share a Chicken Mughlai that was already on the slender side of substantial. Another IRMAn, Girish, a slightly bumbling 30-year old performed a lengthy Urdu ghazal (love song) for my benefit which, according to his running translation, contained phrases such as "Half close your eyes and drink in the unchanging scene".
   They all left for their various field projects today, and I can't help wondering how they will fare. As far as I can gather, none of them have spent much time, if any, outside the urban middle class milieu in which they have evidently been brought up. I asked Karan whether he was feeling at all nervous about his spell in the back of beyond. "No," he replied with quiet confidence. "India truly lives in her villages. Why should I be afraid?" Commendably Gandhian, of course, but not entirely convincing!

*

My own feelings certainly allow some room for some apprehension. This has less to do with living in a village than a growing bafflement as to what I am expected to do once I reach Maal. I have made some slight inroads into Dilip's "voluminous" reading list and have browsed through a few JFM microplans, so I have a sketchy mental outline of my overall aim. This seems to be to produce a report, divided into various sections with names like  “Management Plan” and “Technical Plan” that gives a detailed picture of the village and its relationship with the forest and identifies the area’s key development priorities with recommendations on how to address these. The mechanism by which I am to achieve this aim, on the other hand, is currently a near-total enigma. I have probed Dilip gently on this point, but perhaps not as much as I ought to have done. I can't rid myself of a niggling embarrassment that I may have missed some vital point somewhere along the line - in my reading, in our discussions or, worst of all, during our e-mail exchanges over the summer. Fortunately I appear to have a week's grace with which to sharpen my ideas, as Dilip has indicated that my first week should be used to make general observations about the village and get a feel for my new metier. All in all, therefore, I am rather excited and the unimpressive specimens in my stomach that pass for butterflies are only putting up a half-hearted show.

Next Post - Sunday 8th October 2006: Kojawara (will be posted Saturday 8th October 2011)

Sunday 1st October: Udaipur

Yes, I am most certainly glad to be here. I have had today to myself and have continued my explorations. The old town - the Udaipur of the tourist guides - is not quite close enough to Fatehpura to be walked easily, so this morning I took a tempo, a super-size rickshaw with a distended abdomen that can carry eight people or more. Ellen had instructed me to get off at Hathipol, a good-naturedly seething roundabout on the edge of the old town. From Hathipol, a busy little lane leads you past jewellers and sari shops, incense stalls and chai canteens. Little by little, you spot the tell-tale signs of Asian tourism: dreadlocked Nordic females draped in outlandish fabrics; bearded Israeli boys, fresh out of the army on a voyage of exploration within and without; Americans, often upmarket and sometimes overweight, drawn by some gravitational force into the handicraft emporia run by supercilious Kashmiris; pretty European girls hurrying past shops in an attempt to avoid the lure of the omnipresent chirrups of "Where are you fraaarm? Hi! You want pashmina? Special price just for you. Which country?" mainly emanating from slim, trendily-clad youths with disconcertingly Americanised accents and unimaginable amounts of hair oil. This is old Udaipur, a lively and intensely colourful maze of winding streets that leads down to the serenity-little-dented-by-tourism of Lake Pichola.

Lake Pichola

 
The first overtly touristy act I committed was to visit the City Palace. As far as I can tell, the main entrance is nowhere near the entrance we used last night, and of yesterday's lawns and lakeside picnic tables I saw nothing. In the cool light of day the palace is still beautiful, if a little garish in places, and an excellent introduction to the Maharanas of Mewar who have ruled the area around Udaipur since the 8th Century. The great hero seems to be Maharana Pratap Singh, who fought the Mughal Emperor Akbar in the Battle of Haldi Ghati in the 16th Century, the subject of much heroic rhetoric on the part of the Rajasthan Tourist Board. It was only after this event that the seat of power fully transferred from the fort of Chittorgarh to the planned city of Udaipur, the creation of Pratap’s father Maharana Udai Singh. Since then, the Maharanas have ruled Mewar from Udaipur ever since - first literally, now only symbolically. I am intrigued to find out more about the current Maharana who seems to be rather unpopular, according to a friend of mine called Hari, as he is only interested in the rich. He has founded a chain of luxury hotels called HRH and from what I can tell is keen on heritage rather than social development or environmental conservation.
   Said Hari is one of the slim, oily-haired youths in trendy clothes. He swaggers more than most and his salutations have an extra confidence as he runs his own shop, a little marble-carving boutique. He seems to have a network of uncles and cousins all over the town. I entered his radar a few metres from his shop and he drew me easily into conversation, interrupted by frequent greetings to passing blondes of "Hi! How's it going? Do you want to see some marble carvings?" in a strange drawl that he evidently regards as the height of sexual allure. He asked me if I could help him with a form he was trying to fill in. I had no objections, although felt a slight sinking feeling on realising that this was an online form, to be completed at an internet cafe some distance away. This feeling was compounded when I saw the form itself - an application form for a tour guide job with Intrepid Travel - and understood the magnitude of the task in hand. However, we soldiered away at it, and after an hour and a half it was in reasonable shape. Hari's own contributions were odd, if understandable. One inevitable question asked what the applicant would do if a series of ghastly events befell the tour party miles and miles from civilisation. "Can I put that everything works out in India?" he asked, only half-joking.
   Perhaps as a way of saying thank you he invited me to another garba in the evening, from which I have just returned. Less sartorially exotic than last night's, it was still enormous fun. The five hundred or more who attended formed two concentric circles divided by gender, and we slowly made our way round in opposite directions performing the standard five beat stick-bashing routine with girl after girl. I was one of the very few Europeans in the circle and at points attracted a certain amount of attention, although more often than not I was accepted without question and felt strangely like I was being ignored.
  I had some difficulty in getting back to the guesthouse, and after an exciting journey of frantic running and two hitched motorbike rides, I made it just in time for the 11pm curfew. At the gate I met Priya, who is currently the only Indian volunteer staying in our guesthouse. She is a year or two older than me and comes from Haryana, the little-known state adjacent to the more famous Punjab. She is small and quite pretty and, while she tends to wear a sulky expression, in the few conversations I have had with her she has struck me as being fairly cheerful.