Monday 27th November 2006: Udaipur

I submitted the draft microplan on Saturday as expected, and received it back with Dilip’s comments first thing this morning. His overall summary was a slightly inconsistent “Excellent work – the livelihood analysis was quite good” but there are a number of issues that I need to attend to. For one thing he wants me to write part of the Treatment Plan, the technical core of the report which I had previously understood to be beyond my capabilities. I suppose I should be embracing the challenge - he wants me to base it on my “vision” for Maal - but I feel this commission is placing a confidence in my abilities that is more worrying than flattering.
  We had a meeting in the middle of the morning when we were able to thrash out another issue: the prioritisation of the village‘s needs. Top of this list in my report was the urgent need for a road, followed by the need for electricity. Compared to these, everything else is small fry, but Dilip feels that I have concentrated too much on infrastructural problems that are outside Vikas Samiti’s scope, and that the focus should shift towards livelihoods and natural resources. Stall feeding for cattle, for example, or better watershed management - which reminds me I that I owe an explanation: watershed management appears to be a slightly grandiose term embracing a whole range of activities aimed at enhancing water supply, improving water quality and managing drainage. A popular Vikas Samiti example seems to be contour bunding, the placing of stones along a hill’s natural contours to impede water runoff, which both reduces erosion and improves water collection.
   What is the point of addressing these problems individually, I asked Dilip, when with a little more flexibility we could really put our weight behind Maal’s quest for a road thereby making everything easier.
  “I understand your quandary entirely, Jon, but you have to remember that the purpose of the document is to set out a programme of activities for Vikas Samiti to carry out. It is precisely to expedite such activities that we are requesting funding from the Forest Department.”
   “OK, I see that now, but is there any way, aside from the microplan that I can help Maal in its lobby for a road?”
  “Actually, I think your best solution would be to approach Rajendra ji [his boss]. It may be possible to organise some petition or other...”
   “OK I’ll do that.”
   “...but now concentrate on completing the microplan and do it quickly as people are questioning your efficiency.”
    Though not meant unkindly, this last point threw me. Until this morning it had not occurred to me that anyone in Vikas Samiti was really aware of me at all. We are volunteers, personae only just about gratae and invisible to everybody but our immediate in-charges. The thought that people might be sufficiently au fait with my work ethic to question my efficiency was all too redolent of the iron grip of authority. Although I didn’t press Dilip for details, I have a strong suspicion that the chief questioner, perhaps the only one, is Sumita. I have passed her twice around Vikas Samiti today and on both occasions her questioning expression was unmistakable.
   I probably deserve the criticism. My pace of work has hardly been frenetic, either in Maal or back in Udaipur. In my final year at university, slaving over essays about mammalian jaw structure, I daydreamed about rural development work and imagined long, wholesome, enjoyable hours. In reality these hours, while enjoyable and probably quite wholesome, have been corrupted and diluted by all the other interests that have occupied my time. Naively I thought nobody else would notice.

*

Other interests, this weekend, have featured a lot of exploring. On Saturday afternoon I went to the Gulab Bagh (Rose Garden) south of the City Palace. This is a large, pleasant public garden, also known as the Sajjan Nivas after Maharana Sajjan Singh whose most prominent legacy is the Monsoon Palace (otherwise Sajjangarh) high on a hill overlooking the city. As well as the eponymous rose garden – which boasts such varieties as “Queen Eliza Beth”, “Golden Get”, “Tittany”, “Summer Hokiday”, “Effil Tower”, “First Lone” and “First Prise” – Gulab Bagh contains a library, a zoo and plentiful tree-lined avenues. From here I walked to Dudh Talai (Milk Lake) which I recognised with some surprise as being where we entered the City Palace to get to the garba on my mystical first night. It is a pretty place and the small lake, separated only by a road from Lake Pichola, does indeed have a milky quality, the effect of which is enhanced by colonnades and pink bougainvilleas and the views of the City Palace peeping majestically through a row of palm trees.
   Best of all, I went through a gate next to an ugly little temple near the lake into some scrubby forest land, where I saw four or five wild peacocks. After a lengthy ramble through moderately dense scrub, I reached an old stone gate and a long flight of steps. These led precariously to the top of a ridge that separates old Udaipur and the lake to the west, and modern Udaipur to the east. This hill, and the fortifications on top have long intrigued me, as I pass them on the bus on the way to Kherwara. On a map of Rachel’s they are marked as Eklingjigarh, the Fort of Eklingji. Eklingji is a local version of Shiva and is also the family god of the Maharanas. I have so far been able to find out nothing about this fort, even after yesterday, when I climbed up the very overgrown steps to thetop of the hill, to a path of about twenty metres running along the ridge. The superb views on either side of the hill were starkly contrasting: on the one side Lake Pichola, with the toy-like Lake Palace floating within and the City Palace on its shore, surrounded by the crowded old city and the more diffuse modern area of Chetak, Fatehpura and Devali, flanking Fateh Sagar in the north, and the murky, confusing far shore of Lake Pichola with beautiful green-blue-grey layers of hills stretching west; on the other side Udaipur’s eastern urban sprawl: a vast, flat plain covered with busy roads, trees and concrete buildings, a second panorama as fascinating and in some ways as appealing as the first.

 The view west: lakes and palaces

The view east: urban sprawl

   The fort is not actually accessible from the stretch of wall I reached, but abuts a temple called Karni Mata Mandir, which has a more conventional approach from Dudh Talai. I plan to visit this soon. I saw four young men standing on the fort calling to me to come and join them. In the end, despite my entreaties on behalf of their necks, they jumped down to where I was, so anxious were they to talk to the extraordinary foreigner who had come up by such an adventurous route. They turned out to be students of hotel management in the institute in Udaipur. Their spokesman, Sanjay, spoke good, slightly American English and again and again expressed his admiration at my bravery of stepping off the beaten track, staring at me with disquietingly intense eyes. He also spent quite some time praising the beauty of nature here, only to compare it as nothing to the beauty of North India (north in this case meaning Himachal Pradesh, Uttaranchal and Kashmir).

Sanjay (second from left) and his friends

   After promising Sanjay over and over again that I would call him and meet them all again (and fighting off his criticism that “I don’t think you have made your mind up about Indian people yet. You are still uncomfortable” and “If you’re interested in meeting us again – but I don’t think you’re interested…”) I walked down, looking back up frequently to make sure they managed to get back to the fort safely. From the bottom I headed to the old city and briefly met Shiv, who asked me if he could describe his mother as a “positive cunning woman”, and if I knew who Warren Buffet was, before joining the girls and some volunteer friends of theirs from Indore at the Natraj for thali and jollity.
   On Sunday, after a leisurely breakfast of pomegranate and banana on toast, I headed back to the old town and explored an area around a road called Bara Bazaar, which cuts into the heart of the old city away from the tourist nexus. In the many interesting deviations I made into small gullies, I was offered tea, chapatti and chutney by various people I met. I have realised that up till now my mental image of the old city has been rather inaccurate, as it is far more extensive than I thought, and on the east side extends as far as Bapu Bazaar, the modern shopping street near the Natraj and the bus stand and the town hall. There are numerous old gates – Hathipol (Elephant Gate), Chandpol (the Moon Gate), Surajpol (Sun Gate) and Delhi Gate. In light of this afternoon’s explorations, the book I am reading, Inside the Haveli, which is set in Udaipur, makes a lot more sense.
   Before returning to Vikas Samiti I called in on Hari, who was full of vitriol about a nearby business rival whom he considers fraudulent and corrupt. The rival happens to be a Jain, and this led to a general conversation about Jains during which Hari told me an interesting story. Lakshmi, consort of Vishnu and goddess of wealth, was visiting families and distributing gifts. When she came to a Jain household, the owner ushered her in and said “Just wait one minute, I’ll be back” and left the room. He never came back, and Lakshmi, unable to break etiquette by leaving before her host returned, is still there, her presence explaining the fabulous wealth of the Jain community.
    On my way to get a tempo from Hathipol I bumped into Bablu, and was persuaded to come up to his roof terrace for a chai and chitchat. He is very likable and has an aura of innocence unlike Hari’s sleazy knowingness. I get a strong impression that they are not friends, maybe because they dislike each other, or maybe because they come from different, immiscible strands of Tourist-ville society that I am sure is as caste-ridden and hung-up in many ways as any section of Indian society. There was a middle-aged Korean man having a late lunch there today and we chatted to him for a bit. He seems to be doing a whistle-stop tour of Asia and reeled off a list of destinations visited like a particularly uninspiring shopping list. I hope he takes something away from his doubtless long-awaited travels.

*

And finally, I have a slight unpleasantness to report. Last night, on arriving back to the guesthouse after an evening walk, I found Priya in the tiny kitchen cooking supper. She had already eaten, she told me, but she was cooking for Amir (the new volunteer with strong views on aubergines) and Yogesh, who were both sprawled out in the next room in front of a film. This was by now a familiar sight but yesterday something in me suddenly boiled over.
   “Why are you acting like a slave, Priya?” I asked. “Why can’t they cook their own food?”
   “Slave?” she repeated, as if I’d just slapped her. “Slave is a disgusting word. I’m shocked that you used this word.”
   “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I just... It just seems wrong that you should always be cooking for them. They know how to cook, don’t they? Amir knows how to cook.”
   “You don’t know how to care and share. In India this we will do for our friends gladly. That is the difference.”
   She turned to give her full attention to the pot of dal she was stirring, pointedly excluding me. I left the room and avoided the three of them all evening. I was furious at the implication that we English might care any less for our friendships, that because we didn’t abase ourselves in front of each other at every opportunity it meant we were somehow deficient. As much as anything else it seemed such a facile generalisation and I would actually have preferred to have been insulted as an individual rather than as a nation.
   But I am terrible at rows. As soon as heated words are exchanged I become a little frightened of the other person, and if the fracas is left unresolved I can’t stop myself brooding, however hard I try to shake it off. Today it was obvious all morning that I should apologise for my insensitivity, and in the intervals of having my efficiency silently questioned by Sumita’s death-ray eyes I tried to find Priya, failing with a mixture of relief and frustration. It was only after I’d had lunch that, walking back to the computer room I encountered Priya and Yogesh coming in the opposite direction. My stomach lurched, my skin tightened and for a few minutes I exchanged inane remarks with Yogesh. Thankfully his project supervisor passed by and he chased after him with a question about the market value of honey. It was just the two of us and I took the plunge: “I’m sorry about yesterday, Priya.”
   “Oh Jon,” she said with a laugh, “You don’t have to worry about that. It’s OK. Really.”
   “Oh, that’s nice of you. I guess I was just in a bit of a bad mood and I wasn’t very sensitive.”
   “Really, it’s no problem. I think UK guy-Indian girl is a difficult relationship actually.”
I laughed. “You’re probably right.”
   Less than an hour ago, she and I shared a joke about Sumita’s hairstyle. Everything seems to be back to normal.


Next Post - Friday 1st December 2006: Udaipur (will be posted Thursday 1st December 2011) 

Friday 24th November 2006: Udaipur

Parts of yesterday were very good - a putative sighting of a Steppe Eagle at breakfast, a quick-fire round of questions with Dilip and a chai break with my “new friend” Prakash followed by two and a half hours of uninterrupted work on microplan writing before paneer-tomato-bread fry (a speciality of mine) for lunch.
  The afternoon was wasted as, at Dilip’s bidding, I attended a tedious Hindi meeting about JFM microplanning that was, to me, almost entirely incomprehensible. I am disappointed by my  linguistic progress so far. Although my Hindi is probably better than that of the other foreign volunteers (with the exception, perhaps, of Rachel who speaks grammatically sophisticated Hindi in an appalling, apologetic accent) it is nevertheless faltering and woefully inadequate in many situations. I am lucky to have few inhibitions about speaking a foreign language, but this tempts me into making misleadingly impressive conversational opening gambits which are usually met with an impenetrable barrage of tenses and clauses laced with unfamiliar slang. The panic on my face  betrays me, and the conversation reverts to English! In the more serious context of a development meeting, my panic soon turns to frustration, and I realise with sudden, pit-in-stomach clarity, that unless I can become nearly fluent in Hindi, there is no future for me in rural management in India. Outside, drinking chai and exchanging banter with passing acquaintances for which my command of the language is ample, the sharpness of this realisation is dulled and is at the risk of disappearing altogether. Lest I forget, here it is in writing forever: learn Hindi or go home.
   I have spent much of today continuing with the microplan, and the report is now reassuring in its  shape and size. I intend to submit the first draft to Dilip by the end of tomorrow morning. Certain points from our meeting yesterday are troubling me. He seems very happy that I should lift large chunks from existing microplans for other villages, particularly in the “Management” section, where the protocol for forest protection and resource harvesting is laid out, and the “Expected Benefits” section. He even suggests that the “Treatment Plan” – the business end of the microplan which outlines the technical steps, such as specifications of which trees to plant, what kind of enclosures to build – will be very similar to the technical plans in other villages’ microplans. To my mind this attitude defeats the whole purpose of microplanning, tailoring a plan specifically to the needs of an individual village. Otherwise you get a ludicrous “one size fits all” situation similar to one Ellen was describing where an NGO provided communities (in India? In Africa? The details escape me) with generalised “alternative livelihood schemes”, such as basket making, that may be entirely inappropriate to many regions if there is no market for them. This brings me onto another bugbear: why do all these “alternative income generation schemes” – making baskets, firing pots, quilting quilts – all seem so contrived? Everybody wants to farm and fish, but does anybody really want a basket?
  I recall a conversation with a Frenchman who was working on marine conservation with an NGO somewhere in West Africa. A whole stretch of coast had been sectioned off for protection, thereby depriving a group of fishermen of their traditional livelihood. Responding to this, the well-meaning NGO set about employing these incapacitated fishermen to make short films about the problems of over-fishing and the need for conservation. Presumably there is a limit to the number of short films one can make about over-fishing and the need for conservation, and what plans the NGO had made for the barren period after the market for such films became sluggish or dried up altogether I did not find out. When there is a clash of interest between human livelihoods and biodiversity conservation, or indeed between human livelihoods today and human livelihoods in twenty years time, there is unlikely to be a single, obvious, wholesome solution. [13]

*

We have a new volunteer called Amir - finally, a Muslim! -  from the same college as Yogesh but in the year below. He is delicate-looking and rather shy and his natural expression is rather disdainful, although I think this is misleading as he has been friendly towards me so far. He put Anna’s back up immediately, however, by criticising her method of cooking aubergines, and she has been distinctly cold to him ever since! Yogesh made a point of introducing him as “Amir, my junior”. Year groups seem to be very important in Indian colleges and if I correctly interpret the reverent-sounding tones in which the IRMAns talk about their “seniors”, it works both ways. In fact, compared to the fairly free inter-generational mixing in my college, the Indian attitude seems rather Upper Sixth-Lower Sixth, but the sample size I have experienced so far is hardly sufficient for a conclusive comparison.

*

Last night the ever-effervescent Zelda threw a Thanksgiving party at her guesthouse, known since time immemorial as the “Love Nest”. It turned out to be quite an occasion, with plenty of good food, beer and merriment. With a deliberately ambiguous dress code of “Pilgrims or Indians”, I donned my customary lunghi and put a yellow shawl with red Sanskrit prayers round my head, while Ellen, Anna and Rachel were composites of the occidental and oriental Indian – salwar kameez and war paints! Priya came but was rather quiet, and Amir remained taciturn throughout, although he assured me afterwards that his preferred approach at social gatherings is to sit back and observe. Even Dilip came, although he seemed slightly baffled by the whole thing and looked relieved as he made his early departure.
   The real stars, however, were the IRMAns. It was their last night and it felt rather like a leaving party, which I suppose it was. They were certainly on fine form: kindly Dhanwant and his bumbling friend Girish; forthright Lalita, who took one look at my lunghi and said “I bet you flicked [pinched] that, yaar?” and later berated me for being more interested in the beer than in her; her inebriated partner in crime Arun, whose supposed crush on me has become a standing joke amongst the others. After ten the evening turned unexpectedly musical when a number of people forced Zelda to sing for us. She sang something from Miss Saigon, with surprising passion. Or perhaps not surprising if one recognises the intensity underlying her sparkling personality. My own crush, the handsome Deepak, in a voice as rich and expressive as his speaking voice, responded with a ghazal, an Urdu love song, setting the precedent for an “eye for an eye” policy: a song from the firangis, countered by one from the Indians, and so on. Manon, a Parisian who shares the Love Nest with Zelda, thus gave us a Provençal melody in a deep and beautifully introspective voice, and Girish returned with a long ghazal, which some of the others joined in with. I deliberated between Bach and something lighter and opted for the latter, giving my second Indian airing of Flanders and Swann’s “Oh It’s Hard To Say ‘Hoolima Kittiluca Cheecheechee’” which went down rather more successfully than it did that candlelit night in Maal weeks ago!
   Later, the IRMA “band” –  including Girish, Deepak and Arun – treated us to a raucous rendition of something approximating to a song, my main memory of which is an entirely characteristic vision of Arun putting his head round a table leg and emitting a high-pitched “ooh”. Afterwards he explained loudly and lengthily that it was “all part of the song, actually”. The musical climax of the evening was reached after Zelda, Manon, Dhanwant and I spent 15 minutes rehearsing an American-Indian song for which Zelda happened to have the score lying around. We gave a dire, but hugely successful performance. Dhanwant, it must be added, had never read music in his life before and was consequently entirely useless, but it was very game of him to join in, especially as it meant defecting from his team. As a sort of encore Deepak sang three more beautiful Urdu songs, probably ghazals.

L-R Dhanwant, JG, Manon, Zelda - mid-performance

L-R Arun, Lalita, JG

  It was a wonderful evening and a happy last memory of the IRMAns. Lalita and I met by arrangement for lunch today and had surprisingly tasty sandwiches from the nearby Celebration Bakery, followed by ras malai, a sweet, milky liquid in shallow little foil bowls bought from the corner sweet shop. She asked me whether I thought she conformed to my idea of a typical Indian woman and I told her that no, without a shadow of a doubt, she didn’t. “Ah, but that’s because I’m an empowered Indian woman!” she replied, and it was obvious that this was something that meant a great deal to her. I was also able to say goodbye to Dhanwant and some of the others including, I am happy to say, Karan, who said “I’ll miss you” and sounded very sincere about it. I never really understood him, but I suppose I may miss his utter otherness from time to time. “Your flexibility is appreciated” were his parting words. I very much hope to visit them all in IRMA in February.

 Footnotes:

[13] In retrospect I feel I was unduly harsh on the concept of “alternative livelihoods”. Many NGOs are doing excellent work in this field and while there may well not be an elegant single solution to the problem how to empower the dispossessed or unemployed, NGOs working in this field always take market forces and supply and demand strongly into consideration.


Next Post - Monday 27th November 2006: Udaipur (will be posted Sunday 27th November 2011)

Wednesday 22nd November 2006: Kojawara and Maal

The end of a little era. I have just returned from my final visit to Kojawara and Maal. After an unusually exhausting journey back I feel washed out and unsociable so I’m eating chicken and drinking beer alone in a quiet restaurant.
  I will miss the hospital enormously: the sitting around and talking and so many little things, like the delicate floral teacups; the door to my room which squeaks an extract from a Bach Cello Suite; Rupchand’s humour and his wife’s beauty; the view from the roof above the kitchen onto drunken Ramubhai’s field. This man, in a great spirit of generosity, donated land to Vikas Samiti years ago to build their hospital after an earlier site had fallen through. His primary weakness is the bottle, and every night he comes drunkenly into the hospital roaring that he owns the land and that we are all his servants. Aditya assures me with surprising depth of feeling that Ramubhai is a kind man and will do anything for the employees of the hospital, looking upon them as his children. He always wears the same dirty white dhoti that seems to match his wrinkled old skin and short but dishevelled white hair. When I meet him in the day he clasps my hand and greets me warmly but inarticulately, with something in his manner suggesting a man stranded in the wreckage of his life, clutching at anything that moves through it.
  One incident stands out in my mind as a little summary of Kojawara life: Rupchand, Aditya and I were sitting talking one evening and it suddenly occurred to me to ask where Devji, the cook, slept. In the kitchen, they told me, and Aditya took me to have a look through the gauze window onto the kitchen door. There, sure enough, was Devji sleeping. “Shhh!”,  I said, not wanting to wake him up. But this was in vain because Rupchand now came along with a torch and shone it fully on Devji’s sleeping face, declaiming “Devji!” loudly, upon which Devji woke up, beaming delightedly at the interruption.
   My last visit to Maal today was rather ordinary. In some ways it was little more than a formality as there was no more serious research to be done - merely a few outstanding pieces of information of the i-dotting, t-crossing kind. My main motivation was sentiment - a wish to say goodbye. It was extremely sad, therefore, to miss Amratlal, who had gone to Kherwara for the day, and my adieux to the rest of his family were extra warm, bulked out by surrogate goodbyes that were really for him. Happily, all my other closest friends and acquaintances were on hand for tearful farewells, including Dolat Ram, the teachers and of course Suraj, whose unique charm and amused pathos I shall miss exceedingly.
  Saying goodbye to a special place is always difficult as it does not reciprocate, and there is a conflict between the self-applied psychological pressure to drink in the scene one last time and the accompanying feeling of self-consciousness when one does so. The result, for me at least, can be tortuous: a somewhat contrived pause on the threshold of departure, continually destabilised by the rationale inner voice urging me to get a move on and leave. Maal, in this respect, has the advantage of being on top of a hill so that very soon the sight of it is obscured by trees on a gradient, and looking back is not possible. In truth I felt no strong emotion on leaving, and as I sweated my way down the dirt track I had to keep reminding myself to think suitably poetic thoughts. When Suraj asked me whether I would come back I told him that I would see him in ten years. With luck I shall be able to surprise him and accompany Dilip, or a colleague, who will need to make a trip to the forest in order to complete some of the more technical parts of the microplan.

Between Maal and Wanibore

Next Post - Friday 24th November 2006: Udaipur (will be posted Thursday 24th November 2011)

Sunday 19th November 2006: Udaipur

Having spent much of the week in Udaipur, the weekend has provided a less marked contrast than usual. After a week of country life, the weekend signified luxury and variety; after most of the week in Udaipur, it merely signifies a certain expansiveness. Now the Maal project is coming to an end, I am starting to wonder seriously about what happens next. Dilip has hinted on several occasions that there is another village ready and waiting for a microplan and, with luck, starting this will be a relatively smooth, Sumita-free process. Whatever happens, I hope that the structure of field-based weeks and city-based weekends will continue.
  This weekend has mostly been devoted to social life. I had to pay a visit to the Old Town yesterday to change a traveller’s cheque and I took the opportunity to call on my friend Hari in his tiny sculpture shop. “Jo-o-o-nny!” he drawled, flashing a delighted smile and thrusting me a vigorous high five. We had barely had time to exchange pleasantries and dispatch one of his inexhaustible supply of friends or relations to procure chai when two middle-aged Englishwomen paused on the threshold. Immediately the full force of Hari’s charm was transferred, and cranked up into top gear. “Hello Madam! Do you want to see some marble carvings of Indian gods? Just have a look, right?”
  They gave each other an “Oh well, what the hell” look and surrendered themselves unto the Litany of Tourist-ville: they were from Leeds; it was their first time in India; they were spending a week in Udaipur; their next destination was Jaisalmer. Sensing that he had covered the preliminaries, Hari moved onto Stage Two and I braced myself for a performance.
   “This is Ganesh, the Elephant God,” he said proffering a smooth, pot-bellied basalt structure that fitted into the palm of his hand.
   “Unusual, isn’t it? Not like the ones we saw in that shop in Jaipur, is it? What’s this one?”
   “This is Lord Krishna, madam. Very special god for Indian people. Very particular.”
   “Yes, I know Krishna - with the flute normally, isn’t he? Did you make it yourself?”
   “Of course, madam... All the pieces in the shop I made.” [This was a barefaced lie].
  “Emma, he made it himself! Look at it... amazing! What’s your name? Hari? My son’s called Harry, but I guess it’s a different spelling! [we all laughed]... Is it marble?”
  “Yes, yes - very unique marble from South India.” [False again, it was made from local Udaipuri marble].
   “Gosh! Are all your pieces from South Indian marble, Hari?”
   “All are from different, actually. Some are from Kashmir marble, some are from Agra, like the Taj... [outlandish fabrication!]... you’ve been to the Taj, right?”
   “No... I’d love to one day. So romantic isn’t it? Do you travel there yourself to get the marble?”
   “Oh yes. I am travelling around India, picking up marbles and other stones” [Patently untrue!]
   “Oh wonderful - how interesting it must be! And have you travelled outside India as well?”
   Hari’s face assumed its most seraphic expression as he told them that “People come in my shop from all over the world. So I am travelling this way to London, Germany, Israel... everywhere!” [Ambiguous, to say the least, and in this case misinterpreted]. After such a smooth ride, Stage Three was disposed of in minutes. Her wings by now substantially singed, Emma’s friend was drawn into the flame with ease. She accepted Hari’s very steep price of 700 rupees without a murmur of dissent, and thus became the proud possessor of a South Indian marble Krishna made by a charming, well-travelled sculptor. Result!

Ganesh, by Hari

  We persuaded them to stay for chai and the conversation turned to my work which fascinated both of them. They asked some interesting and intelligent questions, and we slowly moved on to other, related topics. They left with an injunction to Hari to “Keep on travelling” and I lost no time in teasing him about his Kashmiri marbles and trips to Israel. He looked solemnly at me: “Jon, if I say one thing to the tourists, don’t say differently, OK?” I nodded and smiled, and he gave me a conspiratorial slap on the back, at which we both burst out laughing.
   And so, I have allowed myself to become complicit in a plot that I don’t really approve of. It is not so much the financial element - everybody knows that purchasing in a tourist hotspot is something of a game, and as long as they acknowledge the fact that they will sometimes be ripped off, the Emmas of this world are entirely capable of looking after themselves in this respect. No, it is more the intellectual dimension. If these women derived any particular happiness from the fact that their Krishna had been made from South Indian marble by the boy who sold it to them, then that happiness was unfounded, a sham. But I am probably being absurdly pedantic here and taking an over-simplistic view of truth and its relationship to happiness.

*

Back in Vikas Samiti, the biggest news is that the IRMAns  - the Indian college students volunteering here as part of their degree - are back in town. Despite their having fairly blithely flouted their college’s strict injunction to remain in the field for a month without returning to Udaipur, I have seen little of them in recent weeks and, hearing that they were back for good, I decided to seek them out this evening in their nearby hostel accommodation. It was delightful to remember what a decent, intelligent bunch they are. Dhanwant, for example, quirky, intelligent and with an oddly comforting manner; Arun, predictably a little drunk and over-eager to subject me to photo after photo of the IRMA campus and student life, but nevertheless full of hyperactive charm.  A little part of me worries that it is precisely because I haven’t seen them for weeks that their company seems so attractive now, and that after frequent exposure a la Karan, they too would grate and fuel paragraphs of unkind vitriol. Most of me simply accepts them as they are.
  Deepak, in particular, has become a bit of an idol of mine although like any good idol I’m sure the fact would be matter of lofty unconcern to him. He is the tall, handsome, intelligent Bihari who espoused such odd views on learning and unhappiness in a previous meeting. This evening he held Dhanwant and me in thrall with a brief history of Sanskrit, an account of the life of a later Mughal emperor and a story about the electrification of a small village near Patna, the state capital of Bihar. He also introduced me to the beautiful music of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, a Pakistani singer of Qawwali, a Sufi devotional style of Persian origin. Deepak seems to have an obsessive love of the Persian-influenced Islamic culture that dominated North India for most of the second millennium AD and is now utterly entwined into most strands of what we think of as “Indian Culture”. I have come to realise that this is rare, even amongst educated Hindus who surely have an inkling of the extent to which the cultural fabric of Hinduism, such as temple architecture, devotional music and the vernacular languages, has been heavily influenced by the Arab, Turkic and Persian worlds. Indian Islamophobia, however recent it may be as a phenomenon, has rooted itself deep into the Hindu psyche. A wealthy, cosmopolitan Bengali Brahmin acquaintance in Bombay told me that she had recently asked her husband to name all their close Muslim friends. The list was disturbingly short. Closer to home, I have heard casual disparagement of Islam in the conversation of a wide range of educated Hindu friends including Shiv, Yogesh, Priya and even Prakash. I feel compelled to add that through no conscious discrimination, all my Indian friends (so far at least!) are Hindus. Proof and puddings spring to mind.

Deepak

*

For my part, I have become increasingly fascinated by Rajput history, although my grasp on it is tremulous at best. Till now I have bandied the term “Rajput” around, glibly avoiding any attempt at definition. To seriously remedy this defect would require a book, hardly a practical course of action late on a Sunday evening, so I shall merely flirt with the subject here. These sons of kings (from the Sanskrit rajaputra) are a sub-group of the kshatriya, the princely caste one rung down from the brahmana or priestly caste, better known as Brahmins. Their history stretches back millennia to the murky depths of Vedic scripture, where the word rajaputra was used to cover three great princely lineages descending from the sun, moon and fire.
  It was in the period we Europeans call the Middle Ages that Rajput kingdoms were established across northwest India, particularly in the area once called Rajputana, roughly corresponding to today’s Rajasthan. The Chauhans, operating from Ajmer, were significant as it was one of their number, Prithviraj Chauhan, who became the last Hindu ruler of Delhi before it became an Islamic  Sultanate in the 12th Century. There are numerous other Rajput clans, with wonderful names redolent of past glories - Solanki, Kachchawa, Shekawat, Rathore, Sisodia.
  The Sisodias are in fact the local clan ruling Mewar, and claim descent from the Sun. Whether the current Maharana is in the habit of gazing at the sunset with a fond murmur of “there goes Grandad” I’m afraid I am unable to say, although I like to imagine he has some batty relic of a belief in his heliogenesis (the Sanskrit for the sun-lineage is suryavanshi: the vanshi, literally bamboo, refers to the lineage, while surya, sun, is related to the Greek helios and Latin sol and even the Germanic sunna). I have read two theories on the origin of the clan name - one, prosaic, after a village called Sisoda, the other, exotic, linked to the Sassanids, the last pre-Islamic dynasty to rule Persia, hinting at a far less clean-cut clan origin. I know which theory I want to believe and I know which theory I ought to believe - naturally they are not the same!
   Despite my craving for sleep, I feel it would be unfair not to explain that Rajputs are not confined to the history books, but are also to be found on the streets. The clan name is usually preceded by Singh (lion) and I often encounter people in Udaipur with names like Anil Singh Chauhan or Rajesh Singh Solanki. I always fancy I detect a certain pride when somebody tells me he is a Rajput, similar to the mild aura of piety that accompanies a Brahmin when he reveals his Brahminhood, however un-Brahmanical his lifestyle may be.

Next Post - Wednesday 22nd November 2006: Kojawara and Maal (will be posted Tuesday 22nd November 2011)

Friday 17th November 2006: Udaipur

A conversation from earlier lingers in my head and overshadows anything else I had intended to write about. The dominant speaker was Ellen, and the topic was Vikas Samiti. Reaping the benefit of Ellen’s critical intellect and enviable ability to get to the heart of things, I shall attempt a fair, if sometimes scathing sixth week analysis of Bharti Vikas Samiti.
   Whatever else, the organisation has made a name for itself. It seems that practically everybody in the six blocks it works in has heard of Vikas Samiti. I can say “Gram vikas kam kar raha hoon” (I’m doing village development work) to someone on a bus and they will, almost without exception, respond “Vikas Samiti?” or, tellingly, just “Vikas Samiti”. It is undeniable that “Samiti”, as Zelda always calls it, has made some profound differences in its area of influence - building education centres, water-harvesting structures and farm enclosures as well as more generally empowering communities, raising awareness of health problems (especially AIDS) and working with villages to ensure sustainable livelihoods.
  However, as Ellen points out, it seems to be spreading itself too thin, trying to do too many projects in too many villages meaning that work is slow, sometimes ineffectual and often left unfinished. Another gripe of Ellen’s is that Vikas Samiti employs far too many people (famously having never sacked anybody since foundation over thirty years ago) and as such, or in addition to such, is paying people to come to work late, laze around, drink tea, gossip and leave early. Of course, some people work really hard, and despite his late morning arrivals and flippant manner, I think Dilip fits this bill, but many people don’t appear to do much at all.
   Inevitably, perhaps, with such a large work force, communication within the organisation is not good. When I first arrived, different people wanted me to work on different projects and Sumita insisted on the need to observe protocol despite the fact that I had clearly communicated with Dilip and others throughout the summer. During the course of my work so far, earlier papers on Maal have appeared sporadically, haphazard miracles rising out of the dusty obscurity of some branch office. “That’s typical Vikas Samiti,” Dilip would say. “Things get forgotten and appear again when you’re not expecting them.” Similarly, it has never been entirely clear who is supposed to be in charge of me. Dilip waxes and wanes, often eclipsed in the earlier in the stages by Tapan. But Tapan himself appears to be fading, and has been all but replaced by a fat, earnest colleague of his called Tulsiram, who in fairness is far easier to warm to than Tapan, and has also been very helpful in the recent stages of the project. Answering to all three of them has been difficult as none of them seem to have much of a notion of what the others are doing.
   A different sort of lack of communication was highlighted in a volunteer meeting recently. The girls had long ago written a list of guesthouse maintenance matters, such as faulty taps and broken curtains and, according to procedure passed it on to Savitri, the sweet, pretty and useless new volunteer co-ordinator. She passed it on to Sumita, who clearly terrifies her, and the matter stopped there. When this was pointed out to Sumita at the meeting, she brushed it off saying “Oh, well, I’ve been so busy. Why didn’t you remind me? These things are trivial, they shouldn’t be problems. Just come and remind me in future.” The use of the word trivial incensed us particularly, but she made genuine overtures of resolving the matter by appointing Ellen as the guesthouse “rep” and also summoned the chowkidar (gatekeeper) to discuss some other problems. This got rather heated and he stalked off in a temper after being shouted at by Ellen and Yogesh. As if to prove that outsiders can never understand India, he greeted me cheerily later on that day for the first time since my arrival. Wonderfully, I arrived back in the guesthouse to find our geyser fixed, meaning glorious warm water in the cool mornings and evenings.
   I realise that both instances I have given relate to my own projects, and in a broader sense to the position of volunteers in the NGO’s hierarchy. This hardly seems a fair angle from which to make a balanced critique of the organisation, but so far it is the only angle I can take with any authority. All in all, I don’t wish to sound unduly negative about Vikas Samiti. The overall ethos is spot-on and there are many interesting and engaging people working here. It is also a wonderful forum for learning about development at first hand. It’s just that there are many problems of quite a serious nature that nobody seems to have the interest or energy to fix.
  Meanwhile, my own work largely revolves around the writing of the microplan, and the few remaining bits of unfinished business left in Maal will be easily disposed of in a final visit next week. When I told Shiv that I would miss Kojawara and Maal, he upbraided me for “thinking with my heart, like an Indian” when I should be “thinking with my head, like an American.” Nevertheless, miss it I shall, although I enjoy working in head office as it is very sociable - the gossip, the tea drinking and all the things I railed against earlier this evening. Nathuji, the witty chaiwallah comes round very often with a metal pot of particularly good, hot, sweet tea and a supply of amusing quips in his broken English, and if that’s not enough I can always go to the ambitiously-named canteen, or the chaiwallah down the road. The library has lots of newspapers and I always try to read The Hindu to keep up with international and domestic news.

Next Post - Sunday 19th November 2006: Udaipur (will be posted Saturday 19th November 2011)

Thursday 16th November 2006: Udaipur

Life is ambling along very pleasantly. I spent only part of the week in Kojawara and Maal, and this featured another village meeting as well as some more individual research, all aimed at filling in some of the knowledge holes I identified previously.
   I came back to Udaipur yesterday (Wednesday) in order to start putting typeface to screen in the matter of the microplan, and have spent today trying to cajole one of the antiquated Vikas Samiti computers into assisting me. No, it’s no good, I am portraying myself in a more virtuous light than I deserve. There was an ulterior motive for coming back early, and that was to join the others in a farewell meal for Melissa. As I have hardly been generous to her in the matter of bandwidth I should at least do her the courtesy of a thumbnail epitaph. Fair haired, Canadian and sharply intelligent, late twenty-something Melissa was the coolest, calmest and most collected of our volunteer community. I will miss her pleasingly dry sense of humour, and even the impression she sometimes gave of standing for no nonsense. Beyond this, however, I have no wish to write an elegy. Let me, instead, pull another North American out of a hat and introduce Zelda Weiss.
   Hailing, as Indian journalists invariably put it, from California, Zelda has been working with Vikas Samiti for several months now, and plans to continue working here until next August. She lives in a guesthouse outside but close to Vikas Samiti called “Love Nest”. I am not entirely clear what she does except that it involves clever things with databases and a good working relationship with Sumita, the difficult head of the People’s Management School. Zelda is very short and walks on crutches, but has a personality that she carries around her like a supernova. She has a tremendous amount of energy and a sense of humour that bubbles out irrepressibly, making her huge fun to be around. She, Ellen and I, in particular, have developed a brand of raucous laughter that we fall into almost automatically when the three of us are together. One evening, a group of us were comparing idiomatic expressions from either side of the Atlantic and I related a story about my cousin from Seattle. While at a conference in Europe, she had been saying good night to an English colleague who informed her that because the next day would involve an early start, she’d come and “knock her up in the morning”. To the English lady this meant knocking on her door to wake her up; to the American it meant being impregnated. Hilarity ensued (the “in the morning” must have seemed like a particularly nice touch) but I imagine this paled in comparison to the almost violent outburst of hysterics that my retelling prompted. Since then, “knock you up in the morning” has become standard currency between Zelda and me, and never fails to delight us both.
   Confronted with a joy of such vibrancy, the question that almost automatically follows is whether it is balanced by some deep private sadness. In Zelda’s case I really cannot say, and genuinely would rather not speculate. It is almost as if there is something sacred about her that I am scared to go to near to, even here in this journal. Perhaps especially here.
   One thing that puzzles us all is her friendship with Sumita. On the surface they seen about as unlikely pairing as you could imagine, and yet the two of them actually came to Vikas Samiti together after meeting as colleagues in a Californian company. It is hard to see what they could possibly have in common - Sumita cross, unsociable, never concealing her distaste for European volunteers; Zelda sharp, witty and universally popular - but they go out regularly together and give every appearance of enjoying each other’s company. Presumably whatever lies at the heart of their friendship comes from California, where Sumita was the stranger and Zelda on her own turf. It is amusing, if difficult, to imagine Sumita in such a different context. [12]

*

Meanwhile, I have more to report on the matter of reservations, the caste-based affirmative action policies that intrigued me so much a few weeks back. There have been a number of articles and letters in the newspapers on the issue of whether a reservation category should be set for Muslims. Apparently such a system is already operating in some of the southern states, Karnataka included, where about four per cent of government jobs are reserved for Muslims. Whether or not this is utterly ridiculous rather depends on whether these reservations are created because Muslims constitute a minority, or because they are considered disadvantaged. After all, Jews and Parsis constitute tiny minorities in Indian society, but it would be absurd to suggest Parsi or Jewish reservations, as both communities are, on balance, notoriously wealthy. Nevertheless, there are certainly some who argue that as Muslims have been consistently excluded from politics and the civil service jobs for so long, they deserve some kind of compensation. Detractors argue that Muslim communities require opportunities and development intervention rather than reservations. As far as I can tell, however, the most common version of the proposal is for a blanket reservation for Muslims, running blindly from poverty-ridden Bihari farmers to billionaires from South Bombay.  In my half-considered opinion, this is utterly ridiculous.

*

Finally, I am happy to announce that simplest and yet most exciting of social joys - I have made a new friend. India, in my experience, both upholds and explodes the cliches of oriental hospitality. On the one hand, I frequently encounter people who exhibit an overwhelming generosity in ordinary life that seems as instinctive to them as it is alien to us. On the other hand, this ready selfless subservience and the associated preoccupation with asking questions (without always being unduly concerned about the answers) can often serve as a barrier to the state of frankness and mutual respect that I consider friendship. In short, hospitality into the home is one thing and hospitality into the heart is quite another. A friend in South India neatly put his finger on the phenomenon: “These people...” in this case his extended family “...will treat you really well, and ask you so many questions, but really they think you’re an alien. You won’t ever get to know them.”
   It is always a relief, therefore, to meet people in whom I see a route through this barrier. So far, it has tended to be those whose situation mirrors my own - young, educated, middle class. The students from IRMA are a case in point, and to a lesser extent Yogesh and Shiv. The new friend I alluded to is called Prakash and he is part of Shiv’s circle. Shiv, in fact, is rather in his thrall and  on our trips to Maal he constantly referred to his very “minded” (i.e. intelligent) friend Prakash, who would know the answer to whatever issue we might be debating. After the dramatic shift in his opinion of my own cerebral abilities, it became his earnest wish to introduce and witness first hand the meeting of the intellectual giants.
  Our first actual encounter was in the slightly unpromising setting of the Vikas Samiti canteen, where the three of us - Shiv, Prakash and I - drank chai and exchanged a fairly pedestrian round of pleasantries. Since then, however, I have met him twice more in the same place and our discussion topics have broadened considerably. As far as I can tell, he merits Shiv’s high opinion and our conversations have been fascinating. He is pleasantly shy and speaks with an occasional stammer, but there is no mistaking the quiet confidence in his voice when he expounds an opinion. I look forward to many more such conversations.

Footnotes

[12] Months later, after I had left Vikas Samiti, I heard that the Zelda had finally terminated the friendship. Later still, Zelda and Sumita both returned separately to San Francisco, where I gather they do not meet.

Next Post - Friday 17th November 2006: Udaipur (will be posted Thursday17th November 2011)

Thursday 9th November 2006: Maal and Kojawara

With a sense of relief I can now announce that the survey is complete! Shiv and I worked hard over the last two days and managed to draw on our previous experience to maintain an efficient and amicable modus operandi with few of the flare-ups that tarnished our earlier relationship. In fact, he seems to have undergone a volte-face in his opinion of me. In the course of a conversation about families, I dropped in a reference to some Hindu text, in response to which he guffawed heartily. “Sam, your mind is very sharp, yaar! Sorry, yaar, Jon! People will be very impressed.”
   Maybe this new respect influences my opinion of him (and why shouldn’t it?) but if I was sceptical at first I am won over now. He offers a warm, uncomplicated sort of friendship and has a sunny, generous personality and is deeply loyal. He is not greatly intelligent and has a bumbling nature that I have come to find endearing. He still thirsts for new vocabulary, and takes the philosophy that one should never use one simple word when five complex words will do. “No, this word is no good,” he will say, “It is very easy. Even children will be knowing this. I want to know a really difficult meaning”. This word “meaning” has come to signify not only the definition, but the word itself. He is definitely a friend I intend to keep.
  Now the survey is finished I shall have little chance to rest on my lotus as it will be necessary to analyse the data collected and more generally think about the microplan itself, the first and perhaps only tangible outcome of my work here. Something of the old feeling of unease returns to me at this point. The survey provided a wonderful psychological balm, filling my time as it did with a very straightforward, if slightly arduous mission needing to be accomplished. Mission now accomplished, I am back in the brave new world of breadth and ambiguity and nagging worries that I am somehow on the wrong track. I am fairly confident, however, that these worries are unfounded and that my general approach will deliver the goods. This approach consists of making frequent references to existing microplans, produced by Vikas Samiti for other villages, and identifying what holes I need to fill in my knowledge of Maal to be able to complete an equivalent report. Such holes as I have identified are varied - lingering confusion over certain concepts like land ownership; ignorance of specific pieces of information such as the distance to various public services; and a number of entirely new topics that I have not yet explored. One of these is “watershed management”, a “meaning” whose acquaintance I have so far done an excellent job of avoiding. Rest assured I shall reveal all as soon as I can effect an introduction.

*

  Back in Kojawara, it is not so much a nagging as a grating that separates me from equanimity. The continued presence of Karan - loth as I am to admit it - is getting on my nerves! It is a sad fact that once you begin to find someone irritating or disagreeable, all their subsequent actions become tainted, and without meaning to, you find yourself applying increasingly stringent standards on their behaviour. Partly because their voice and mannerisms become inextricably linked with the annoyance already felt, comments and actions that from anybody else would be perfectly acceptable, from them become intolerable.
  Furthermore, in Karan’s case I realise I am not alone. Ellen, who has had her fair share of Karan-exposure, finds him similarly exasperating, and thinking back to comments made by other IRMAns, I suspect this feeling is widely shared. The ungenerous sense of relief that accompanies the discovery that others share your negative opinion only exacerbates matters, transforming your annoyance from a guilty secret to a publicly-licensed source of cruel amusement.
  Karan, it has to be said, does not appear to help his cause amongst his peers. In a rare moment of openness he told me that he had never formed close friendships at IRMA of the kind he was used to in his beloved home town of Dehra Dun. “These people aren’t very mature,” he told me earnestly, “and we have nothing much in common. They waste their time thinking stupid things and doing stupid things. Because of this I can’t respect them or bond with them.”
  I am aware, of course, that anybody with an ounce of flesh and blood will be curious to know what it is, exactly, that I find so objectionable about him, but here I have to draw the line. Despite everything I have said, I really don’t feel I know him well enough to be comfortable slating his personality on paper and in any case, pinning down his elusive, unknowable character into prose would be beyond my skills as a writer. All I can do is pick out a few traits and offer them up for inspection: the public shyness that gives way to a hard-edged cynicism in private, coupled with an intractable desire to be right at all costs; the unsettling style of conversation, didactic and defensive by turns, with a tendency towards inconsistency seemingly designed to confuse the listener.
   I suspect a lot of this comes down to fishes and ponds. In Dehra Dun he probably commanded respect amongst his peers, while at IRMA he is just one intelligent, motivated individual amongst many. That can hurt anywhere in the world, and in the pressure cooker environment of a prestigious Indian academic institution it is probably enough to make anyone a little loopy. On top of this there are my own weaknesses - I do not always handle constant proximity very well and, as already observed, can sometimes bristle in the face of criticism. Karan’s criticism, usually served on what appears to be a platter of amused pity, is the very worst kind in this respect, and there have been times when I have had to draw on every last reserve of self-control to restrain myself from doing something violent and irreversible.
   After such ripe invective, I must withdraw a little, and claim not to dislike him. That is the position I maintain with others, and it is what I tell myself. It may even be true - we certainly have a sort of friendship and can sometimes laugh together about the same thing. It is futile to speculate, but I like to think that had I met him outside the context of IRMA and Bharti Vikas Samiti, I might like him a lot more. But I didn’t meet him in another context, and the sorry fact remains that in terms of ordinary social interaction he is one of the most maddening people I know.


Next Post - Thursday 16th November 2006: Udaipur (will be posted Wednesday 16th November 2011)

Tuesday 7th November 2006: Kojawara and Kesariyaji

I am back in Kojawara now, and Shiv arrived earlier this evening prior to the second installment of our survey work which will involve spending tomorrow night in Maal. Satish and Karan are also here, making the guest room a crowded, sometimes fractious place.
   Yesterday, after a day of project-related paperwork in the hospital, I accompanied Aditya on a visit to a famous Jain temple in Kesariyaji, the little town where I change from bus to jeep en route to Kojawara. The stretch of road between Kojawara and Kesariyaji never fails to make my impressionable heart sing. It climbs vertiginously up to the rim of a water-filled quarry and descends to deliver the traveller to a modest-sized plain that stretches on one side to the Aravalli Hills. Supposedly the oldest range in the world – whatever that means – they are an odd shape, many pointed like something out of a child’s drawing. The overall impression they give is earthy and brown-red, although many are well-dotted with trees such as teak, mango, acacia, mahua and tendu. The plain is mostly cultivated with bright green paddy or maize or freshly ploughed, brown soil. A fair number of trees dot this landscape too, predominantly mango but also palms, which act as forceful reminder that we are not far north of the Tropic of Cancer.

Evening on the Kojawara-Kesariyaji road

   The villages lining the road are all interesting and attractive. Many of the houses are in the same mud and tile style as those of Maal but there are some more substantial square stone structures – new wealth? – often  painted white or pale green with a flat roof, sometimes with Rajput frivolities on top. There are the ubiquitous paan shops, recognisable by the numerous strings of foil sachets, containing a range of digestives and carcinogens, that hang from the ceiling in a row at the front of the shop, and chai stalls, tailors, STD phone booths and everywhere a gentle, agriculturally-focused bustle.
   It would have been out of character for shy Aditya to attempt anything of a discursive nature on the subject of his religion, so I shall take it upon myself to do the honours. Jainism is an ancient religion that, like Hinduism, has not spread beyond India and its diaspora. One of the most sacred Jain principles, in fact the only one that has really attracted the attention of the non-Jain world, is that of ahimsa, or non-injury. This extends to all sentient beings, so Jains are strict vegetarians or vegans and even avoid onions, garlic and potatoes in order to preserve the life of these plants.
   Jains believe that throughout history there has been a cyclical decline and resurgence in man’s knowledge of dharma, which is an endlessly difficult concept for people like me to grasp, but  is normally translated as law, truth, duty or religion. At each cycle, dharma has been re-established by a series of twenty-four thirthankaras, ford-builders, who are the key focus of Jain devotion. Thirthankaras are not gods, but rather teachers who guide humanity across life’s fast flowing river towards liberation. The final thirthankara was a sixth century prince from Bihar named Vardhamana but universally known as Mahavira, or Great Hero. Some believe that he taught the Buddha, and certainly there are family resemblances between the two religions. Buddhism, of course, has flown the Gangetic nest and flourished elsewhere, now virtually unknown in India except in some unusual re-appearances such as among some Dalit [11]  communities and in Tibetan refugee camps.
   Jainism remains firmly in the Indian world and still seems to cling somewhat to the apron-strings of Hinduism. In fact many Jains I have met initially described themselves as Hindus, either because they assumed I wouldn’t know what a Jain was, or because they consider Jainism to be a form of Hinduism. Furthermore, I was very surprised to discover that the priests in the temple at Kesariyaji were not Jains at all, but Hindu Brahmins! Aditya tells me that all government-funded Jain temples (and prosaically a large number are government-funded - eastern mysticism doesn’t come cheap) are staffed by Brahmins, although he was at a loss to explain why.
   But what of the temple itself? It is an intricately-carved marble building full of pilgrims and priests. It is called the Rishabhdeo temple, after the first thirthankara, Rishabha (the suffix -deo or -dev, incidentally, is a cousin of the Latin deus and the Greek theos, meaning god). The town Kesariyaji is also sometimes called Rishabhdeo and actually has a third name which I forget. Though the name eludes me, an interesting tale hanging thereby does not. It is the name of a farmer who found an idol of Rishabhdeo in his field five centuries ago. Who originally built the statue and why is mystery, at least to Aditya, but the story continues that the Maharana of Udaipur built the Rishabhdeo temple on this spot to commemorate the find. At any rate, there is a long tradition of Jain temple-building by the Maharanas and other Rajput rulers as a way of keeping the wealthy Jain community “on side”.
   Before returning to Kojawara we stopped for fried snacks and spicy green chutney in a roadside cafe where I was finally able to get Aditya to talk a little more freely. Initially he spoke about his faith, which is monotheism of the kind that claims all religions to be one and the same, a pleasing, inoffensive and surprisingly widely held notion in India that I suspect would not stand up to much intellectual scrutiny. Later we came to his personal life: he is getting married next February to the girl next door. This is an arranged marriage – apart from in the capacity of an occasional tutor, he had not spoken to her until his parents unexpectedly told him about the match. “But fortunately she is very beautiful” he says. Both sets of parents have given the couple the freedom to get to know each other before the ceremony. “In America,” he told me with just a hint of mockery in his eyes, “Love ends at marriage. In India, that’s where it begins.”

Aditya

  It is interesting to see how different kinds of arranged marriages work. In the most traditional marriages, the bride and groom first set eyes on each other at the wedding itself, but increasingly there is a trend towards the other extreme (within the parameters of parental arrangement) such as in the case of Tapan and his wife, where the couple are given time to meet each other and discuss things before coming to a decision. I would guess that this liberalism is sometimes a bit of a sham, and that the weight of parental expectations is too heavy for the prospective couple to decide anything but in favour of the marriage. The growing use of websites such as www.shaadi.com is presumably transforming the arranged marriage scene.
   Driving back in the dark, passing through the villages settling down to their evenings, knowing we had the hospital and a delicious meal to return to felt peculiarly cosy.

Footnotes:

[11] Dalit, meaning oppressed, is the name commonly used for the "untouchables" at the lowest end of the caste system. Gandhi had earlier called these people harijans, Children of God.



Next Post - Thursday 9th November 2006: Maal and Kojawara (will be posted Wednesday 9th November 2011)

Sunday 5th November 2006: Udaipur

All told, I’ve had a rather quiet weekend in Udaipur, spending most of it in and around Vikas Samiti. My local area has aura of calm but cheerful efficiency in contrast to the congested dreaminess of the old city. Take my nearest chaiwallah for example, a grizzled old man of few words whose establishment consists of little more than his tea-making apparatus and a few benches. A corrugated sheet supported by four poles gives the place a sense of structure and distinguishes it from the totally unsheltered chai stall further down the road.
  He draws a steady crowd of mostly male custom from the lower strata of society - barbers, tailors, peons and those at the bottom of the bureaucratic food chain. They come and pay three rupees for a chai, and such is the old man’s efficiency that if they were so minded they could complete the whole process in as few minutes. For the most part they like to linger over their tea, for it is a social ritual as much as a stimulating beverage. What could be more different to the elegant rooftop cafes overlooking Lake Pichola, where bland, tepid tea in a china cup will take twenty minutes to arrive and set you back nearly twenty times the amount?
   Further down the road, past a colourful vegetable market, is a computer-cum-xerox-cum-phone shop run by my friend Kailash. Kailash is a large, larger-than-life character in the best traditions of V. S. Naipaul or William Dalrymple. He only works in the evenings as he is a student at Vidya Bhavan, the nearby educational institution from which Vikas Samiti emerged. He sets great store by my regular visits and after a fleeting two minute drop-in recently he reprimanded me with “This was very short, Mr Jon. Next week you will come and stay for almost one hour.” His customary salutation, “Mr Jon” has an enthusiastic stress on the Jon. I enjoy dropping in for chats, as he speaks good English and has something tragicomic about him. He often bemoans the absence of his girlfriend, although I can’t remember now where she has gone, and equally often talks about beautiful girls in the broader sense. He is strongly conscious of the passing of his youth and he told me recently that “Time’s cruel hands are destroying my happiness”. It was with some surprise that I discovered yesterday that he is twenty-one, ten years younger than I would have guessed. Suitably, he is a lover of English literature, Thomas Hardy above all, and we have talked about The Mayor of Casterbridge and Far from the Madding Crowd in some depth. Ultimately, however, he dreams and plans to set up an NGO to fight HIV in villages.
   Why is that so many people want to set up their own NGOs rather than joining existing ones? Surely joining a group that is already doing good work, and which you might ultimately be able to channel in the direction you want, will in most cases allow you to make a greater contribution to the world than striking out on your own and risking a total flop? Other than this ideological reservation, I cannot help but like Kailash, and have no doubt that my regular visits will continue.

Priya in the kitchen (with Melissa)

   I have seen a lot of Priya this weekend, mostly through chance encounters in the kitchen or on the roof terrace. I am slightly at a loss when it comes to her - I like her, and we have developed a jokey, somewhat superficial friendship, but neither of us are quite comfortable in each other’s company. In a recent conversation she made it quite clear what she thought about me. I had been attempting to cook some dal, and she came into the kitchen at just the right time for a prime viewing of raw culinary ineptitude.
   “Oh Jon, you are like a child!” she exclaimed, half-disapproving, half-delighted. “How old are you?”
   “Twenty-two,” I replied, a little taken aback. “How old are you?”
   “Jon! You should never ask a girl her age!”
   “Arre, Priya! Aap ki umar kya hai?”
   “Oh my god! Your Hindi is so quaint! Actually mujhe teis [23] saal hai”
   “Achcha... So, Priya, my dear. How old did you think I was? Sach bolo!”
   “Truthfully? I thought you were maybe younger. Your behaviour is very young actually.”
   “What?” I cried in mock indignation. “You think I’m stupid?”
  “Not quite stupid. You are looking like a twenty-two year old, but in your actions you are like a  twelve year-old boy.”      
   “My actions...?”
    “By your body language I am seeing this.”
   I touched her feet in a parody of deference and as she left the room laughing and screaming I returned to my dal. The conversation made me a little uneasy, particularly after Shiv’s comments along the same lines. All this has been a stark contrast to my experience in South India as an eighteen-year-old when I was almost invariably assumed to be twenty-four!
   Moreover, I felt peeved at what I took to be the implied comparison with the other males in the guesthouse, Yogesh and Karan, neither of whom I would hold up as a model of maturity. Yogesh, in particular, is often childishly self-centred in his social interactions, an annoying trait that masks the engaging, intelligent side of him that I have liked so much on the few occasions I have witnessed it. As with Priya, I feel he and I have trouble taking each other seriously, which is a shame as it has prevented us from becoming the good friends I had hoped we might. I am still unclear as to the nature of his relationship with Priya, as they are still frequently to be found engaged in an intense, private conversation, punctuated with occasional affectionate laughter. Perhaps I am jealous of the bond they have formed - they certainly manage to make one feel a little de trop when they are together in the same room. But I am inclined to suspect that the discomfort I feel around them is more to do with the feeling of cultural exclusion, the feeling that my entire upbringing is a handicap to my being able to form such a close bond with anybody from India. And the realisation that that, above all, is why I am here.
   All this aside, Yogesh’s distinguishing feature is his voice – he sings! He sings, in fact, almost all the time. At the drop of a hat, or even without that, he will burst into a Hindi film song – while cooking, walking upstairs, getting changed, lying in bed – and this is now such a common sound that I have to remind myself, always with a modicum of surprise, that his singing voice is rather pleasing. What really characterises this habit in an endearing and sometimes infuriating way is that his singing is almost always a performance. He wanders round the room, waving his hands and rolling his expressive Tamil-film-star eyes and takes on his generally unwilling audience without a shade of self-consciousness. I am intrigued to know how big his repertoire is. Being a small-time Bollyphobe myself, I am not attuned to the milieu enough to know whether he repeats songs. Somehow, I suspect he rarely does.

Yogesh the singer

Next Post - Tuesday 7th November 2006: Maal (will be posted Monday 7th November 2011)

Friday 3rd November 2006: Maal

What a week! Having spent two nights in a row in Maal and completed over two thirds of the village survey, I can say with confidence that work has really got underway. My interpreter Shiv Tiwari arrived in Kojawara on Tuesday evening. He is Vikas Samiti standard issue, being second or third on a list of interpreters provided by Sumita in a moment of helpfulness. Tuesday, I must confess, was not actually the first time I had met him, as we had had an initial meeting over chai last Saturday. Had I not point blank refused to talk about work on Sunday, I would have doubtless mentioned him already.
   Our chai date did not leave me wholly convinced that we would get on. He struck me as rather self-centred and ebullient in a way that felt strangely humiliating and he lost no time in pointing out that I had misunderstood several fundamental aspects of Rajasthani agriculture, such as the relative water requirements of maize and wheat. I therefore made a particular effort this week to form more of a bond and have by and large been successful, although his constant company became irritating at times. Conversely, I have learnt a lot myself in the last few days about my own weaknesses - as well as being sometimes selfish and prone to jealousy, I can be irritable and immaturely resentful of criticism, or the implication that I may not have understood something or that I know less than I do. All these faults can make me difficult to work with at times, and Shiv and I had some flare-ups and patches of mutual moodiness during the course of our work. Back in Kojawara all this has been unreservedly forgiven and forgotten. 
  His English is reasonable rather than very good, although he has a terrific enthusiasm for improving it. Frequently on our trips he would ask me the meaning of a word, often pronounced wrong (such as “What is the meaning of ‘exiggerant’?” which flummoxed me until I realised he meant exaggerate) and ask me to write down new words and their meanings in a chaotic little pocket book full of words and their definitions. He asked me what my hobbies were, and after giving him an answer involving music, languages, travelling and others, I asked him his. “Collecting proverbs,” he replied without a moment’s hesitation. “I have collected so many English proverbs, nearly thirty or forty”. He delights in bringing them out in conversation, even when only tenuously appropriate to the situation in hand, and more than once has he informed me for no apparent reason that “An Englishman house in his castle” (castle rhyming with hassle). 
  And what about our work? It was finally time to initiate the formal village survey I have mentioned on several occasions. The idea was to gather data in order to substantiate or refute the hypotheses I had already drawn about land use, crop farming and livestock ownership. Since my own Hindi is several samosas short of the linguistic picnic required for any serious kind of substantiation or refutation, the need for an interpreter was obvious from the outset. 
  So far we have conducted 17 out of a total 24 surveys, leaving seven more to do next week. While this survey work could be frustrating and tedious at times, and peppered with the irritations described, the experience as a whole was fun. More than this, it enabled me for the first time to feel I was really doing some work, and after three weeks of meandering in the dusky vales of structureless inquiry, I can't overstate how reassuring this felt. Our approach was to walk up to a house on the list we had prepared - a random sample from a larger list of all the households in the village drawn up with the help of Dolat Ram - and ask for the head of the household, or next in authority if he was not available. Then Shiv or I would explain our purpose and beg to be allowed to ask them some questions for 15 minutes (this was a shameless lie on Shiv’s part, the survey generally took half an hour or more, but “These people will never agree to spend half an hour with you.”) If the first people we met were women or girls, Shiv would speak to them in what seemed to me an unnecessarily aggressive and impatient manner, although he later bristled when I told him not to shout at them. Very few women agreed to speak to us, giggling nervously at the suggestion and asking how they could possibly speak to such as us -  Shiv, clearly urban, middle class and upper caste, perhaps nearly as alien as me.
  Most of the men we surveyed seemed relatively happy to answer our questions, which were about land usage, livestock, crops, water availability and, crucially, forest use. Some seemed rather impatient, some kind, some amused and most rather bemused. Almost all of them had heard of Vikas Samiti (we were on one occasion rather delightfully referred to as “Vikas Samiti-wallahs”) and regarded the organisation positively, if sceptically. Of course, as we progressed through the survey, I thought of all sorts of ways in which it could be improved were it not already too late. And despite the sameness of the answers we received, there were occasional flashes of interest when somebody would give us a slightly unusual answer. There was some unintentional humour as well, most notably when I was urging Shiv to ask a young man about his female buffaloes and how they became pregnant (my aim being to understand whether a male buffalo was loaned out by another family and whether there was any payment involved) and he retorted: “This is a ridiculous question! I never ask sexual questions to the villagers.”
  Staying in the village has its ups and downs. Ablution, of course, is more of an effort, and entertainment after sunset can be in short supply. The food is far too spicy for me but somehow still tastes bland. Shiv, used to milder Brahmin cuisine, found the food the hardest part of the trip, although I suspect he missed home comforts in general rather sorely. But there are compensations. Being up for a stroll at seven in the morning is something I’ve always yearned for, and shitting in the open, especially on a moonlit night, has a wonderful expansiveness about it. Above all there is the continual feeling of isolation and remoteness, which is both a source pleasure and pain.

Amratlal's daughter

  Last night, I heard some singing and drumming from a nearby house and, under the impression that there was some dancing, I went along with one of Amratlal’s set and found something rather different. In a small room in the teacher’s house, a group of about twenty men and women were sitting around a makeshift altar composed of a covered idol and lots of the tacky pictures of Hindu deities one sees everywhere from food stalls to office calendars and family homes. Three or four of the men were beating rhythms on drums and little cymbals while the whole party chanted in otherworldly cacophony. I cannot think of a way to describe these chants. Although they were clearly based on a form of Hinduism, often containing the phrase ‘Hare Ram’ , they sounded almost more African than Indian, I suppose because they seemed tribal and unadulterated which is not true of either popular or classical Indian music. After a few such chants, I was noticed and invited to play the drums. I bashed around half-heartedly for a bit but I wasn’t in the mood to become a participator, because my doing so would inevitably elicit laughter, thereby disrupting the magic of the situation and reducing it to an amusing travelling incident, an already-formed anecdote. 
  It was in a subsequent chant that I became aware of a chicken in the middle of the crowd. Almost immediately, the possibility of sacrifice sprang to my mind, but at first I dismissed it, interpreting the chicken as just another animal roaming freely around a house, a ubiquitous sight in Maal. However, the sight of a large knife dispelled any doubt. An officiator, who had been passing candle-lamps back and forth in front of the idol started toying with the knife, and soon flattened the chicken under his feet with little difficulty. Within minutes the deed was done. I didn’t have a good view, but I could discern that blood was being collected and subsequently passed through a cloth filter into a small bowl.
   During all this, the group continued singing. Whenever a chant came to an end, there was a brief discussion or comment and then somebody would start a new one, shortly to be joined by the rest. Soon after the sacrifice, another man came and sat in the centre and the officiator daubed his face and arms with spots of blood. This was strange enough, but strangest of all came next when he was presented the bowl of blood and drank it! Amratlal later explained that only certain people, who had the power to transfer their souls to others’  bodies, drank the blood as a way of increasing their tagat, which translates as something like strength.  The singing continued most of the night, although I only stayed for about an hour. Deshi (liquor from the flowers of the mahua tree) was passed round and beedis were smoked, all of which reminded me more of religious occasions I have seen in Madagascar than the Tamil Brahmin culture I had previously experienced in India.
  Other than the survey and the sacrifice, there is little to report from Maal. Amratlal’s goats have given birth and the house is full of comically tiny goats scampering around. And a social observation: contrary to the impression I had previously gained of Amratlal and Suraj being sworn enemies, they seem to get on quite well. I was surprised to come back to the house on my first evening to see them both sitting outside on a string bed chatting and laughing. Both, I suspect, are unconvinced about Vikas Samiti. Suraj often asks me scathingly how the work I am doing is going to benefit Maal, and laughs when I suggest that the effects might be felt in years rather than weeks. Amratlal is not openly cynical, but his manner seems to indicate that he feels the same.
   One of Suraj’s more endearing traits is his habit of dropping English words, or cultural allusions of a sort into conversation. When I was telling him about a Diwali fair in Udaipur, he looked at me solemnly and said  “Merry-go-rhy”  and then burst out laughing, particularly after I corrected him. We were later talking about a zoo (or  “joo”  as many Indians render it, unable to pronounce the “z” sound found in words of Persian or foreign origin) and while we were listing animals in English and Hindi, he smiled and muttered ”hare and tortoise” prompting more laughter. Funny as I found this, I realised afterwards that my own approach to foreign languages and cultures is quite similar, and perhaps the Hindi words and Indian cultural references I drop casually into conversations in an attempt to sound interested and informed come across equally quaintly!

On the way back from Maal

  On the way back to Kojawara, Shiv and I discussed the events of the last few days, and he clearly felt it time to make his debriefing. “Sam,” he said (he always calls me Sam, as this was the name of the last Vikas Samiti volunteer he interpreted for). “Sorry, yaar, I mean Jon. You are a nice person, but your mind is not very much developed.”
    “?” inquired my eyebrows.
    “You are thinking like a little child, actually.”
    “Thank you,” I said, nonplussed, but the sarcasm was lost.
    “One day you will think like me.”


Next Post - Sunday 5th November 2006: Udaipur (will be posted Saturday 5th November 2011)