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.
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