Saturday 30th September 2006: Udaipur

So, I have arrived in Udaipur, which seems like as good an excuse as any to start a journal. My journey here was not entirely without difficulty. A smooth train ride from Bombay yesterday morning brought me to Ahmedabad where I spent the afternoon exploring the city's alleyways and mosques. I returned to the station in time for my night train to Udaipur and stepped into a typically Indian farce. My train will be leaving from Platform 12, the departure board informs me. So far, so trouble-free, until I spot another notice that nonchalantly challenges this advice, stating that the "Adi Udz" train will depart from Platform 9. Puzzled, I approach an official-looking character and ask him his opinion on the matter. "Platform 9," he replies curtly, scarcely looking at me.
   "But the board..."
   "Platform 9," he snaps. The conversation is evidently at an end.
As it has the popular vote, I walk to Platform 9, where a train to Amritsar sits smugly unconcerned by curt officials or notice boards. I head back to the main hall hoping to find my official, but he has conveniently disappeared without trace. I approach another official, who smiles broadly. "Platform 12, sir. Udaipur train is departing from Platform 12".
   "But the other man told me..."
   "Please sir, I am absolutely assuring you that the Udaipur train is departing Platform 12."
   The niners and twelvers neck-and-neck, I visit Platform 12, which gives me a curious impression that it has seen many things in the course of a useful life, but if there is one thing that it considers beyond the call of duty, it is having to play host to an Udaipur train. I hasten back to the main hall again and scan the assembled company wildly for any sign of either of my officials. I run again to Platform 9, time starting to run with me, and am forced to curse Amritsar and Ahmedabad and all cities that begin with an A. I dash over to the departure board, performing an intricate slalom round scurrying porters and motionless groups of voluminous, sari-clad aunties. "Don't panic!" I tell myself, feigning absolute confidence that in five minutes time I shall sink back into my seat, laughing at India's chaotic charm. The departure board story is unchanged, and I begin a final despairing assault on Platform 12. But here comes my coup de grace: a ministering angel disguised as an office worker. "You are going to Udaipur?" he asks with a smile. "Actually, your Adi Udz train is there on Platform 7."
   "But... I mean..."
   "Some complications are there, actually, but please you go now or you will be missing your train."
  I thank him from the depths of my thumping heart, and race to Platform 7. And there it is, my beautiful, elusive Adi Udz sleeper train, bound for Udaipur. I hurtle down to the correct coach, miraculously easy to find, and there on the passenger list pasted to the outside of the train is my name - how implausible! how inconceivable! - next to seat 48. I clamber in, and after a brief excursion to the wrong seat I locate 48 - mine! - and sink back into it, sweating profusely but smiling at India's charming chaos.

Udaipur

Why am I here anyway? The official explanation is that I am going to volunteer for five months in Bharti Vikas Samiti, the “Indian Development Association”, an Indian-run Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) with a strong focus on rural development. The ulterior motive is to chase a dream. My dream is what is politely referred to as a vocation, although the call has been a long time coming. When I was a child I wanted to be a geographer because I thought this consisted mainly of learning the capital cities of other countries. At thirteen I wanted to be a scientist. Come fifteen I wanted to be a doctor and by the time I was seventeen I wanted to be a scientist again. Now at 22 I have put away childish things and come to a conclusion of infantile simplicity: I want to work in far-off places. Careers Advisor convention is to diagnose this as an aspiration to work in the field of International Development, and to caution sufferers not to set their hopes too high but to be resourceful, and if possible to acquire an angle. I have not yet acquired mine, although I suspect it has something to do with villages. Neither am I under any illusion that I have been particularly resourceful so far, but tonight I feel I have achieved something: I am here!
  Luckily, I am already in love with India. This began three years ago on a visit to the deep Tamil south. There I lived with Brahmins and taught English to schoolchildren and generally had all the kinds of experiences that are becoming almost customary for a certain class of English eighteen-year old. No, not quite all - I didn't smoke ganja or grow a beard, and to my enduring shame I did not even have sex on a Goan beach, an omission so comprehensive that it extended to failing to visit Goa at all. In fact, I tended to shun the gap year crowd altogether, preferring the company of Indian friends who took me some way into their world, planting the seeds of an attraction that has grown with time into the monstrous obsession of today.
   My first day in Udaipur has unravelled with a few unexpected twists. I arrived at Bharti Vikas Samiti at nine this morning and was shown to my guesthouse within the NGO compound by a gruff security guard. Upstairs the door to the bedroom was locked so the guard knocked and rattled on it with unnecessary violence until a young man unlocked it from the inside. He was the first unexpected twist: he was white. He was white and I resented him for it. In all my mental images of Bharti Vikas Samiti's volunteer community, one underlying assumption seemed so obvious that I never thought to question it: the volunteers would be Indian. I was going to work in far-off places and I naturally expected to work with far-off people. Thinking back, this assumption was not simply naive but flew in the face of the very mechanism that brought me here in the first place - a careers fair in Cambridge! Unaware of the inner unrest he had unleashed, the young man let me in and the security guard indicated my bed. This perfectly ordinary piece of furniture prompted a new wave of silent turmoil as it dawned on me that I would be sleeping on it for five months. In the claustrophobia of the guest room, five months suddenly seemed like a very long time indeed.
   A lengthy bucket shower and a change of clothes restored my balance enough to make a foray into the poky little kitchen where I met another volunteer, Ellen. Had she gone out her way to demonstrate the world’s smallness she could not have done a better job. She was not only in my year at Cambridge but also has connections with Devon, my home county. We have already established a number of mutual friends and ascertained that I have met her boyfriend, ironically a fellow gap year volunteer in South India three years ago. Despite her distinctly firangi[1] origins, it is wonderfully reassuring to know she will be here for most of my stay. She told me that the majority of the volunteers in Vikas Samiti (the Bharti, I understand, is usually omitted) are European or North American and, on cue, in came Anna, Rachel and Melissa. About them, more anon, but I shall say nothing more of Our Young Man of the Bedroom Door as he is leaving tomorrow and, amiable though he is, I have no reason to suspect our paths will cross again.
   The girls made me some breakfast which we ate on the guesthouse roof with a glorious view of the neighborhood - a large building site surrounded by unfamiliar trees lining a dusty road. All round are concrete cubes, typical of modern Indian residential architecture, and to the east are the Aravallis, a highly angular formation of green hills that look like they are on the cusp of turning brown. Despite Anna's assurances that I would be lucky if I managed to get a project off the ground in under a week, I felt optimistic as I set off to track down Kavita, the volunteer co-ordinator. Given that I had already been corresponding with her over the summer about a potential project, and that she had put me in touch with a potential supervisor, I felt entitled to a degree of hope that things could be set into motion swiftly. Fifteen minutes of searching in the white-washed building that serves as Vikas Samiti's nerve centre revealed Kavita to be in a meeting and unavailable, and it was only two hours later that I managed to corner her as the meeting room exuded its tired-looking contents. After a perfunctory greeting she effected my introduction in brisk, almost American tones - forms to fill, a library to register with and expectations to lower. She was insistent on this last point - just because I had already been corresponding with a member of the Natural Resource Department (NRD), it didn't mean that I could simply wander off into the field. Kavita's boss, Sumita Ahuja would need to sift through my credentials to ascertain whether I could be more effectively deployed in another department. This is inviolable protocol. Since today is Saturday, and neither Sumita nor my ray of hope from NRD, Dilip Mishra, will be in until Monday, I have drawn a blank on achieving anything further until the day after tomorrow.

*

Leaving Kavita, the most logical thing to do was to indulge my desire to explore the neighbourhood. Vikas Samiti is split between two compounds, one containing the guesthouse, library and education department, the second housing all other departments and the meeting room. They straddle a long straight road, mostly lined with similar compounds - heavy, light-coloured cubes, swaddled in dusty greenery on yellow grass - and mostly devoid of human interest in the afternoon heat. This tranquil stretch runs parallel to a much busier road that seems to form the centre of Fatehpura, the north Udaipur suburb that today has become my home. On my stroll I seemed to take everything and nothing in - the rumbling, hooting, jeering, gossiping panoply of sounds that characterises urban India. Women in bright saris, men in duller whites, blues and greys. Are the faces lighter than those I saw in the south? Are blue-green eyes more prevalent? I think so, but I cannot yet distinguish my experience from my expectations.
  Beyond all expectation was this evening's entertainment. I went with the four girls to a celebration at the City Palace[2], seat of Udaipur's royal family. This was part of Navratri, the Hindu festival of nine nights which culminates in Dussehra, the commemoration of Lord Rama’s[3] slaying of the demon Ravana as related in the Ramayana epic. We sat sipping beer on a picnic table by Lake Pichola, Udaipur's trump card, gazing out to the Lake Palace, Maharana Jagat Singh's other-worldly creation, floodlit and seemingly floating in the air above the lake. Later we danced the garba, the famous North Indian stick dance, on a lawn full of beautiful ladies in jewelled saris and handsome Rajput men in traditional kurta pyjama and turbans. The setting was desperately romantic and filled me with the utter thrill of being in Rajasthan, the most unashamedly exotic state in India. The thrill still lingers as I write this in the musty guest room, on a grubby bed under a buzzing strip light and a clanking ceiling fan. I am glad to be here.

Footnotes
[1] Firangi (and variants) is used in India and Southeast Asia to denote foreigners. It is of Persian origins and is believed to have ultimately originated from an Arabic word for the Franks, the Germanic tribe who have given their name to France. The same word has become Farang in Thailand, Falang in Laos and Ferenji in Ethiopia.

[2] The palace was built by Maharana Udai Singh, at the time of Udaipur’s foundation in the 16th Century, but was extended by numerous later Maharanas (rulers) of Mewar (the region of which Udaipur became the capital). It is still the seat of the entirely symbolic current Maharana’s family.

[3] Rama is an extremely important and popular avatar (incarnation) of Vishnu, the preserver god. His story is told in the Ramayana, one of Hinduism’s best-loved epics.

Prologue

“So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked”. Mark Twain

Monsoon Palace, Udaipur

 
A casual visitor could be forgiven for coming away with a negative impression of India. It tends to come across as dirty, noisy and unremittingly, even intimidatingly, alive. Its historic monuments appear neglected and run-down and are often dwarfed by the urban chaos surrounding them. Its citizens, if the casual encounters that assault you from all sides are anything to go by, seem only interested in you as a financial prospect or in subjecting you to a quick-fire litany of questions concerning (in order of importance) your nationality, your name, your family circumstances and your salary. The food is somehow very unlike the Chicken Tikka Masalas that we have been schooled in from a tender age courtesy of numberless British Bangladeshi curry houses, and can be somewhat perturbing on first acquaintance. The sun is fiercer and more inescapably all-enveloping than it is really possible to imagine when flicking through the Lonely Planet in the temperate comfort of Basingstoke or Bristol. And hardest of all, Delhi Belly, Bombay Bum or Calcutta Gut might strike, and a particularly nasty bout is likely to colour the overall experience in an unfavourable shade.
   And yet people seem to like India. Many of them, in fact, love it with such a visceral intensity that Indophilia becomes one of their defining characteristics. Such India-lovers come in a range of styles – the travel bore, the Bollywood buff, the spiritualist, the sensualist, the volunteer, the student of culture – but all have ears that prick up at the mention of Manali or Mangalore or the Mughals, and all have that distracted look in their eyes when they detect a nearby conversation involving the magic I-word.
    It is a place that rewards the patient. Its size, and cul-de-sac position in terms of land travel mean that it has absorbed and engulfed an extraordinarily varied set of peoples from across Western Asia, and has generated a history of terrifying complexity. This presents a traveller with a tapestry of different living cultures that with time and persistence are engrossing to explore. Size, in fact, comes back and back in any analysis of what makes India quite so special. It is hard to imagine a smaller country producing three major world religions (two of which – Hinduism and Jainism – are still pretty much exclusively confined to India and its vast diaspora) or being home to the third largest Muslim population in the world, who nevertheless form little more than 10% of the country’s population. Ditto the twenty-two official languages, and the unofficial language count that stretches well into the hundreds.
    Much has been written about India’s tendency to swallow and assimilate alien cultures as they arrive. The most often-cited example of this phenomenon is the succession of Islamic empires that held sway over North India for much of the Second Millennium AD. These were mainly of Turkic or Afghan origins, although showed a tendency towards a Persianized high culture. In India this culture evolved in a unique way, sometimes reaching sublime heights that can be seen in the Taj Mahal, heard in an exquisite Urdu love song or tasted in a delectably cooked biryani. Earlier assimilations, arguably even more profound, have occurred throughout India’s history, notably the arrival of the Aryan people from present day Iran probably in the second millennium BC. With them came Sanskrit and the associated Vedic culture that forms the bedrock of today’s Hinduism. Before the Aryans came the Dravidians, a darker-skinned people, whose descendents are to be found predominantly in the south, and whose languages gave rise to the modern day south Indian languages such as Tamil and Telugu, which have themselves absorbed a vast Sanskrit lexicon. Of the more recent assimilations, one of the most obvious is the legacy left from the British colonial rule. Perhaps the most delightful manifestation of this often controversial legacy is the gloriously individual English that still serves as the language of officialdom across the subcontinent.
   This is the English of India’s major national newspapers such as The Hindu and The Times of India. Here one can follow the bewildering tragicomedy of Indian politics, a crazed dance of personality cults, hunger strikes, torpid bureaucracy and frequent corruption, which still somehow manages to sustain India’s fiercest source of pride: its status as the world’s largest democracy. In recent years, another phenomenon has swept across India – an economic boom to rival that of China, and the earlier “Asian Tiger Economies”. Dramatic reforms to economic policies in the early nineties (partly engineered by Manmohan Singh, subsequently Prime Minister) brought in the good, bad and ugly of trade liberalisation, and in the last decade, India’s extraordinary growth rates have catapulted the country into the public gaze in an entirely new light. The longer-reaching implications of this growth on the nation and on the world, and indeed the implications of the current global financial crisis on this growth, remain to be seen and understood. For now, however, the economic climate presents us with yet another reason to regard India as one of the most fascinating countries on earth.

A vegetable market, Udaipur

My own love affair with India began in the year after I finished school, when I spent a gap year teaching English in the far south of the country. I lived with a family of Tamil Brahmins who gave me my first exposure to Hindu culture, although I came to realise that theirs was a very distinctive and highly orthodox kind of Hinduism. Conforming to expected gap year procedure, I also travelled round South India. Already entirely confident that I would return, I restrained myself from venturing north of Bombay, spending time in southern states Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka. On returning to England, my obsession waxed rather than waned, and I discovered a treasure trove of India-related literature and non-fiction. Through William Dalrymple, V. S. Naipaul, Suketu Mehta and numerous others, my still limited vision of India began to broaden and diversify. 
    At the same time I was becoming increasingly interested in trying to follow a career in Sustainable Development. It was by no means clear to me what this would entail, but the consistent message I received from everybody whose advice I sought was, simply, get experience. I had no specific plans to get this experience in India and in fact I was if anything more interested trying to broaden my horizons and visit West Africa. However, from the outset I had no illusions that my motives for this career aspiration were entirely selfless or that wanderlust didn’t also play a key role, and when I came across an Non-Governmental Organisation offering volunteer placements in Udaipur, Rajasthan, I had no qualms about leaping at the opportunity. In the end, I applied to Bharti Vikas Samiti, a locally-run NGO that accepted foreign volunteers on their numerous programmes, most of which centred around the upliftment of the rural poor.
    And so it was that at around midday on the 23rd September 2006 I emerged into the hot Bombay sunshine, to be met by a driver named Raju, who drove me south from the airport to Nariman Point, a swanky southern financial district where I stayed for a week with the parents of a university friend. From there I headed up north to Udaipur, which became my home for the next four and a half months. Most of this time was spent working on two very different projects for Bharti Vikas Samiti, the first a forest management project in a tiny and isolated village called Maal, and the second a more general livelihoods-based project in Delwara, a small town with a highly heterogeneous population and an incongruous luxury hotel. Throughout this period I also had plenty of time to explore Udaipur and its environs and meet a wide variety of people, some of whom became great friends, vastly enriching my overall experience. I made a very deliberate effort to read Indian literature or India-related non-fiction most of the time, and followed Indian newspapers (in particular The Hindu). I also attended regular Hindustani classical singing classes with Madhu Khandelwal, scion of one of Udaipur’s most prominent musical families.
    I made a number of trips to nearby places of interest, sometimes alone and sometimes with other Bharti Vikas Samiti volunteers. A more extended opportunity for exploration of Rajasthan was provided at Christmas, when my family came out to see me – their first trip to India. As well as spending time in Udaipur, we also visited Jaipur, Agra and the Keolodeo Ghana National Park at Bharatpur. Finally, as if to illustrate forcibly the notion that pleasure and exploration were as much at the heart of this trip as philanthropy or work experience, I travelled for a month and a half more after leaving Bharti Vikas Samiti, concentrating mostly on the state of Gujarat, with a final week in Delhi before returning to England on March 17th 2007. Many things about this six months differed from my expectations. Perhaps most profoundly unexpected of all was the very firm conclusion that International Development work was not, after all, the field I wished to pursue a career in. The most important factor leading to this conclusion was the recognition that, without any readily transferable skill such as engineering or medicine, and without a fluent command of Hindi or detailed grasp of the minutiae of local culture, there was actually a limited amount I could offer to an NGO such as Bharti Vikas Samiti. I returned home with a strong, if vaguely formed conviction that my strengths and skills could best be harnessed in fighting climate change, based in London (which, more or less, is exactly what I do today). Aside from this, though, one thing not only conformed to, but exceeded my expectations: a passionate love of India. In the weeks leading up to my trip, I became slightly nervous that proximity might erode the rose-tinted spectacles through which I regarded the beloved, leaving me bewildered and robbed of one of my greatest obsessions. Nothing, in fact, could have been further from the case. A not insubstantial previous experience of India, followed by several years of devoted reading meant I was able to leap straight into the Indian experience with a good framework of knowledge that I was easily able to add to and build upon.
    What follows is the journal I kept throughout this period. I began it with a feeling of obligation. Keeping journals when abroad is something one must do, regardless of one’s diary-keeping habits at home. Aside from this, I was motivated by the pleasure I had already experienced reading over my own previous travel journals, including the journal I had kept during my first visit to India. Very soon, however, something happened to me for the first time: the act of writing up my life became a pleasure. In fact, the change was more profound than that: the fact of writing up my life began to impinge on the way I lived during those six months. I began deliberately looking at events in terms of their narrative qualities and looking at things and people in terms of their ability to yield themselves up to my description. Perhaps this is a dangerous way to live life, but it worked for me during those six months in India.
    Typing up these journal entries has been a great pleasure, and I have spent a lot of time tinkering with the prose – tightening up sentences, refining structures and agonising over choices of words. Very occasionally I have made slight alterations to the actual events themselves, such as allowing myself to discover a certain piece of information somewhat earlier than I really had done, or even gently perturbing the order of events to add to the reader’s clarity, but essentially what is about to follow is a faithful transcript of six extraordinary months in an extraordinary country.

People and Places

Please note: all the events, places and people described in this journal are real, but out of respect for the individuals concerned the names of all major characters and certain organisations (including Bharti Vikas Samiti) have been altered, although in certain cases photographs have been included.

Udaipur, a beguiling confection of lakes, palaces and winding lanes, is one of the principle cities in Rajasthan, the archetypally romantic state of North India. It is home to a surprising number of Non-Governmental Organisations devoted, in their various ways, to the uplift of the rural and urban poor. I joined one of these, Bharti Vikas Samiti, as a volunteer for five months, alongside characters such as:

Ellen:  interesting, intelligent and great company, Ellen became one of my best friends among the volunteers and we enjoyed fascinating conversations and debates.

Anna: whimsical, relaxed and an integral part of our volunteer social life. She spent much of her time at Bharti Vikas Samiti on a project involving buffaloes.

Rachel: a passionate environmentalist with a great sense of justice. She, Ellen and I had been contemporaries at Cambridge without ever meeting each other.

Zelda Weiss: an exceptionally charismatic and vibrant Californian who effortlessly brightened up any social gathering.

Priya: a young lady from Haryana, part career woman, part dreamy, old-fashioned romantic. I found her a little drippy at first, but we later became great friends.

Yogesh: a rural development student from Tata-dhan Academy in Madurai, originally from Orissa in the east. A fervent and very vocal lover of Bollywood songs.

Amir: another Tata-dhan student, a year below Yogesh. A somewhat tortured soul, with highly idealised notions of love and friendship.

The following were staff at Bharti Vikas Samiti:

Dilip Mishra: a tremendously enthusiastic and eloquent member of the Natural Resource Department who managed my first project.

Sumita Ahuja: the head of the People’s Management School, and nominally in charge of the volunteers. A difficult and unpopular woman, she was strikingly handsome with short hair and she always wore trousers.

Tapan: an engineer who assisted with my first project.

Chandrika: the pretty, rather highly strung lady who managed my second project.

The IRMAns were a group of ten volunteers from the Institute of Rural Management in Anand (IRMA) in Gujarat, including:

Dhanvant: the ringleader, a kindly, intelligent young man from Jammu.

Karan: a deceptively shy 22-year old from Dehra Dun. He turned out to be one of the most unusual, and in some ways most irritating human beings I have ever met.

Satish: Karan’s field partner - there was no love-lost between the two.

Arun Kumar: the self-appointed clown, fond of his tipple. Originally from Bihar, in the east.

Lalita: in her mid-twenties and enormously charismatic, she was quite unlike any Indian girl I had met before and became a good friend.

Deepak: an intelligent, handsome man of thirty with a deep love of Indian music and a fascination with the Persian and Arabic influences on Indian culture.

Outside the NGO, I made other Udaipuri friends, both in the local area and in the more touristy parts of the old town:

Hari: the young, rakish proprietor of a marble carvings boutique in the touristic heart of old Udaipur.

Jairam (Bablu): nephew of the owner of a guesthouse in old Udaipur and another of my friends in this part of town.

Shiv: acted as my interpreter for a field survey, and (almost) from the beginning became a friend and central component of my social life in Udaipur.

Prakash: initially introduced as a friend of Shiv’s, he rapidly became a good friend in his own right and we frequently had long and fascination conversations over chai.

Madhu: my singing teacher and the daughter of Dr Nirmal Khandelwal, head of the music faculty at Udaipur university.
   
Dinesh: ran a small bookshop in old Udaipur. His soft-spoken intelligence and honesty appealed to me and I used to drop in for chai and conversation.

Abbas: a delightful gem, who I met too late in my stay. He was a member of the Bohra community, a wealthy branch of Ismaili (Shiite) Islam.

My first project was a forest management study in a tiny village called Maal, where I met the following:

Amratlal: my main point of contact in the village. A shopkeeper, miller and ever-placid family man.

Suraj: a mercurial but amiable young farmer and Bachelor of Arts

Dolat Ram: a farmer and local bigwig

While working in Maal, I stayed in a little guest-room in a hospital in a nearby village called Kojawara, staffed by a colourful cast of characters including:

Dr Kishan: the gentle and intelligent old man in charge of the hospital.

Rupchand: the Doctor’s right-hand man

Aditya: the young Jain man in charge of the medicines.

The second project, working on a youth livelihood scheme, was in a small town called Delwara, where Bharti Vikas Samiti was running a number of projects, managed by the following:

Haider: my closest associate in Delwara, Haider was in charge of Bharti Vikas Samiti’s Youth Resource Centre. A gentle, somewhat naive character, he spoke quaint but limited English.

Mohan Joshi: the head of the Nagrik Vikas Manch (Bharti Vikas Samiti’s outpost in Delwara). Ambitious and business-orientated.

Kit: a well-spoken young Englishman on the fringes of hippiedom. He had already been working with Bharti Vikas Samiti for several years when I arrived.

Javed, Imtiaz and Shaheen were a trio of unofficial tour guides who would lure the millionaires staying in the local luxury hotel, Devigarh, and use their oily charm to extract monstrous tips for their services.