Friday 26th January 2007: Delwara and Udaipur

This week has probably been the most interesting in Delwara so far, in that I have been able to take all the strands of my work into my own hands and respond to genuinely perceived needs. I realised that unless somebody did something, we wouldn’t be able to send many people on the Dalit Shakti Kendra courses in Ahmedabad, simply because nobody was coming to the Nagrik Vikas Manch. So, Haider being away on a family visit to Lucknow, I decided to go on a “tour of the school dropouts”, identifying young people without education or employment and explaining to them the nature of the DSK courses and how they could get involved. For those who expressed an interest, I took down some personal details and I now have several pages full of mini-profiles of youths. This means that when Haider comes back, it will be much easier to go round and confirm prospective attendance. It was also an interesting way of meeting people and seeing other parts of Delwara. One snapshot remains with me vividly: Akram Khan Pathan, a personable young garbage collector, standing in his tiny house in the Muslim mohalla, surrounded by rooms filled with five-star trash from Devigarh, ready to sell in Udaipur.
  On Tuesday I spent an interesting morning meeting the Principals of the Institute of Hotel Management (IHM) and the Food Craft Institute in Udaipur. I have quite a number of friends who study in the IHM, including crazy Sanjay and his cronies, as well as some of the extras in the Hollywood film. The Principal, Mr Sehgal, was very friendly and charming and interested in my idea of getting Devigarh to sponsor some Delwaran youths to study hotel management. He gave me lots of information about the courses on offer which I shall incorporate into a report I am going to prepare for Chandrika on all my work here. His deputy, Mayank, was in his mid-to-late twenties and had just returned from working in the Thistles Hotel in Brighton, speaking with ease about pints and Fatboy Slim beach parties. His English was trendy and sophisticated and he had the characteristically upper class Indian trait of suave, uninterested restraint. He gave me a lift some of the way to the Food Craft Institute, right out east in Sector 14, where I met the Principal, Mrs Sehgal. The Sehgals apparently met at the IHM in Dehra Dun in the 1980s and have presumably been going strong professionally and personally ever since. Mr Seghal worked for a long time in Taj Group hotels, meaning he is right in the upper echelons of India’s vast service industry. Before I came to India I would not have imagined in my wildest dreams that I might end up campaigning to help people join this industry.
   Back in Delwara I am focusing on organising the careers event, for February 9th, next Friday. It seems to be shaping up well – I have the blessings of Mohan and Chandrika, I have squared everything with the school Principal and have secured a Devigarh worker and a policeman to come and talk about their professions. Haider, I hope, will do a talk about social work, currently all the rage in Delwara, and I will run a workshop in Hindi (or at least Hinglish) on writing CVs and job applications.
   I enjoy the networking aspect of my work here. There is a chai stall in the square just outside the team entrance to Devigarh, which I visit every day as I can be guaranteed to meet most of the people I need to talk to, plus a few interesting extras, such as the lighting engineer from Bombay, working on a sari advert being shot in Devigarh, or the student of hotel management from Meerut, on a placement in Devigarh.

*

Fearing that that time is slipping past and I may never get round to it otherwise, I feel the need for  a brief description of the route I take to Delwara every day. The bus leaves from Fatehpura Circle and travels east, away from Vikas Samiti, past Kailash’s phone shop, through some unremarkable town outskirts before hitting Sukher, the land of marble. Seen from the bus, Sukher is a two-mile stretch of road flanked by endless shops selling marble in bulk – Taleswar Marbles, Arjun Marbles, Laxmi Marbles, Siddarth Marbles, Mishra Marbles… I make up the names, but the pattern is clear. I like to imagine all sorts of scurrilous but glamorous business deals being conducted behind these shop fronts by agents from across India, but I think the real evil of this place is that of exploitation and poor health. Migrant workers come in from all round Udaipur and Rajsamand districts, pushed by desperation and lured by the prospect of money, and most are overworked and underpaid. This is one of the reasons why Vikas Samiti is working to try and find alternatives to migration, and promoting training courses that enable migrants to choose work that leaves them less vulnerable to exploitation.
   Moving on from Sukher, I call the next winding stretch of road the “Amalfi Drive” of Udaipur, even though there is no sea in sight. Over a hill the road slopes down, eventually passing a lake on the left. On the far side of the lake are the temples of Nagda, the ancient Mewari capital, that I visited with my parents at Christmas. Then on to Kailashpuri (which for a fleeting second could be Positano, before one moves into the busy temple street) and with it Eklingji, the family temple of the Maharanas. For me, the area around Kailashpuri is the Holy Land, as many of the hills have little temples on them. These hills are the Aravallis, at their most triangular and child-like, especially round Delwara, which is only ten minutes of green fields, trees and chai stalls beyond Kailashpuri.

Between Udaipur and Delwara

   I got another chance to explore some of this area on Tuesday evening when I visited a village called Jhalla ka Gudha, just before Kailashpuri as you come from Udaipur, for a wedding. This came about in a typically haphazard Delwaran fashion. On one of my first forays near Devigarh, when I approached some of the security guards, I met a boy called Ajay Singh Jhalla, who was thinking of applying for a job in the hotel. I chatted to him over some chai, with a view to finding out more about hotel jobs, and later that day bumped into him again as I was about to go home. He gave me a lift on his motorbike as far as his village, Jhalla ka Gudha, showed me his family’s house and invited me to his cousin’s wedding – a fast pace of friendship by Exeter standards, but pretty normal for Rajasthan!
   A few weeks on, Ajay now having landed a job at one of the five star hotels in the City Palace, I came back to Jhalla ka Gudha for the wedding. The Jhallas are a Rajput clan, so the wedding was an all-Rajput affair, full of turbans, veiled ladies and swords. I arrived far too early and so spent some time exploring the area, climbing up a hill to the local Mataji temple, a mellow building with fantastic views of the Aravallis and Delwara in the distance. I also saw four impressive Egyptian vultures, sitting on rocks close by before taking flight.
   Dancing and singing started in the late afternoon, and the women were dazzling in their colourful saris. Food had to wait until the bridegroom’s party arrived from Rajsamand at 8.30. Etiquette demanded they eat first, and I pleaded to be allowed to help serve them, but this was vetoed after much discussion on the grounds that I was a guest, and it would therefore not be appropriate – oh, the simultaneously elevating and isolating effect of a culture that holds that “Guest is like God”. Once they had finished we were allowed to sit down and stuff ourselves with tasty puris, rice, vegetables, dal and sweets. Rajputs are fond of their bottle, so there was plenty of beer, whisky and home-brewed liquor on offer. I drank too much and too quickly and felt alarmingly drunk for some time afterwards.

In their dazzling saris

   Very little then happened until 1.30am, when the bridegroom’s party arrived all over again, this time with the bridegroom himself on a horse. He looked awkward and nervous, understandable given that he had only seen his imminent life partner in a photograph before. The wedding band gave a sketchy rendition of “Dum Maro Dum”, a famous film song about disaffected pot smokers. At the time this struck me as a strange equivalent to Mendelsohnn’s Wedding March, until it was explained to me that bridegroom’s party is supposed to be having constant maasti (fun) right up to the ceremony. A number of curious customs had to be gone through before the bridegroom was allowed in. To begin with, he had to sit on a throne outside, while his forehead was anointed with a red tikka mark. He then mounted his horse, only to dismount again to allow his future mother-in-law to wash his feet. Before coming into the wedding precinct he had to pay the bride’s party a nominal entrance fee. Embarrassingly he seemed to have come out without cash, and members of both parties had to help him out.
   While this was happening, a minor fight broke out. I couldn’t work out whether it was an inter-party or intra-party dispute, but it started because one of the very drunk, over-excited young men insisted on spraying foam over everybody, and after the umpteenth go a number of people, feeling no doubt that, while they liked a joke as much as the next Singh Jhalla, enough was enough, started expressing their feelings physically.
   Inside the courtyard, the actual wedding ceremony took place at the auspicious time decided on by the astrologers (about 2.30am). I was exhausted by this stage, and watching became quite an effort. The pandit, in dhoti, jumper and woolly hat, recited endless Sanksrit slokas at breakneck speed, pausing only to check details about the name of the village and the protagonists (he clearly hadn’t done his homework!) while overseeing all sorts of intricate rituals involving ghee, rice, turmeric and other appropriate ingredients set out in the Vedas. Finally, a fire was lit and, slowly, the bride and groom, who had their hands tied together, were led round three times. This was the bit I had read about in countless Indian novels and, thus satisfied, I took myself off to bed.

  

*

Away from the ritual and invocations, I’m still far from understanding the complexities of love and marriage in India. In 2003, I arrived in South India with a simplistic vision of a chaste society where love and sex were confined to marriage, and marriage was always arranged by the parents. I was therefore surprised, even disconcerted, by the breadth of pre-marital intimacies proudly recounted by the friends I met, and over five months built up a general impression that arranged marriage was slowly on its way out. Here in Rajasthan I have been struck the other way - there seems to be a surprising lack of appetite for love marriages after all. Maybe this contrast is a symptom of Rajasthani conservatism (compared to the more liberal-thinking south) or of my selective memory (bolstered by my 18-year old eagerness to draw conclusions on my previous visit) but nonetheless a majority of the people I have spoken to - old and young - have insisted that, outside the cosmopolitan elite of the big cities, Indian marriages ares exclusively arranged. “Love marriages don’t work in India” is a common refrain.
   I probed Dinesh on the subject of his own marriage on a recent visit to his shop. He told me that the marriage was arranged by his parents, but he was given the final say in whom to accept. After the engagement he was allowed to meet his bride-to-be every few weeks so that they could get to know each other better and discuss their future married life.
   “Did you ever feel nervous before meeting her?” I asked. He blushed, but said no, he was not nervous.
   “And while you were talking was there ever any... physical contact?” I smiled in apology for my bluntness and mimed a kissing action with my hand next to my mouth. Poor Dinesh blushed even deeper and, smiling, hinted that something of the kind may have taken place.
   “Arranged marriages are really better in India,” he argued. “Lovers promise so much to each other and after the marriage they can’t act on all their promises. So, they become dissatisfied with each other and end up unhappy. In an arranged marriage there is less to promise, so happiness can really grow after the marriage.”
  Of course, many Udaipuri boys have girlfriends, but there is something of the love that dare not speak its name in all this. Usually the relationships are rather secretive, and form a separate strand in the couple’s lives, isolated from their social and family lives. Shiv has a girlfriend, for example, but none of his friends (let alone his family) have met her, and he is under no illusion that the two of them would be allowed to marry. On the other hand, some of my friends have very clearly expressed their intentions to find lifelong love of their own choosing. It is probably no coincidence that these people tend to come from middle-class, urban backgrounds - Amir, Yogesh, Deepak and probably other IRMAns. Many members of this love-match camp seem to scorn the the European practice of having a series of relationships before (or instead of) marriage. Priya, indeed, has indicated that she finds this idea immoral.
   Sometimes the liberal approach can actually hinder young people’s prospects. Girish, the slightly bumbling 30-year old IRMAn complained to me that his parents will not arrange a marriage for him and he does not know what to do. “How can I find a girl myself?” he said rather pathetically, with a gesture that took in the entirety of his kindly but unremarkable figure. Priya’s friend Mithun, Ellen informs me, complains of the same problem. This seems a rather poignant contrast to the more familiar story of a young couple desperately in love but unable marry due to parental opposition, and perhaps the Girishes and Mithuns are the unsung tragic heroes of modern romantic India.
   Yet another phenomenon is the transient Indian boy-European girl fling that seems to spring up constantly in Lal Ghat and tourist areas all over India. Normally the boys in question, however superficially “Westernised”, come from poor, conservative families and would not contemplate anything outside an arranged marriage. Even Hari’s family, according to his brother, are apparently considering his prospects with some nice girl of the same caste, although he flatly denies this and currently seems to be attached to a charismatic Irish girl with striking ginger hair. I am sure one could unearth hundreds of tales of heartbreak and star-crossed, trans-continental despair in Udaipur alone.