Zameen-asman ka farak

Zameen-asman ka farak – the difference between earth and sky. The Hindi idiom seems to describe perfectly the world of difference that divides Delhi from the villages that cover the vast Indian countryside. It’s not that I didn’t know this before last weekend, when I traveled with my economics class to villages a few hours outside of the capital. But sometimes the intensity of talking to the people of a place, breathing their air and swatting away their flies, is an electric shock of some sort, a visceral kind of awakening. In Tibetan there are different words for “to know by word of mouth” and “to know from experience.” Weekends like this one enlighten the need for this distinction.

It is a common feature of the developing world – massive, modern and wired cities juxtaposed against impoverished villages. Something about this juxtaposition felt especially startling though this time. Traveling from the inner districts of Delhi to the countryside of Uttar Pradesh is a fascinating journey. The colonies of central and south Delhi (the city’s different residential districts are called “colonies”) like Niti Bagh, Hauz Khaus, or Greater Kailash feel comfortably modern, the kinds of places where the educated and globally-connected have been living for decades. The harmonies between tradition and modernity feel well-established. As one travels from interior Delhi into its suburban areas, and the vastness of the city becomes all the more apparent, these battles between new and old seem more recent and raw. Billboards ostentatiously display the new most exclusive high rise in Ghaziabad, a *suburb* of almost four million people. The rhythms of a “modern” city feel more kitsch – new malls are springing up like weeds, and yet it isn’t strange to find a family on the tenth story of an apartment building raising a cow out back.

But not very far past Delhi’s mega-suburbs, the battles of modernity and tradition – of a country struggling to devise itself as a global power – dissipate, even disappear. Villages like Somaspur, or Taina Goaspur, in western Uttar Pradesh, a two hour drive from Delhi, are stagnant in the struggles for food, for a school that can hold all of its pupils, for the opportunity to think and breathe outside the constraints of caste. At first, these places seem peaceful and idyllic in all the ways that city-dwellers tend to imagine the agrarian life, but it only takes a few conversations to see the fuller truth underneath. A conversation where a very wealthy “farmer” (really landlord) complains about how his day laborers demand to be paid in wheat rather than cash, and how 100 rupees a day (about $2) no longer suits them. He is wealthy enough to send his sons to the United States but not wealthy enough to pay his workers a livable wage. Or a conversation where a Scheduled Caste woman (the government term for Dalit, or “untouchable”) explains how the government scheme for people below the poverty line (BPL) gets corrupted by a greedy village head. Or a conversation with a Dalit self-help group that elucidates why their self-help group is the village’s only one: the leader of the last Dalit group was tied onto the railway tracks before an oncoming train, for his political power had become too great.

The middle classes in Delhi are concerned with the traffic caused by construction for the coming Commonwealth Games, which seek to put Delhi on the map for a future Olympic bid. Villages like Somaspur don’t show up on any map. Urban Indians are known to obsess over which schools their children attend, often complaining about the reservation system (affirmative action), which sets quotas in higher education for students of disadvantaged backgrounds. The disadvantaged in villages like Somaspur can’t even dream of profiting from the reservation system, when simply making it to secondary school is as impractical as walking 10 km a day. The feminists of Delhi University accuse the most liberal institutions of society of patriarchy. While the veiled women in Somaspur aren’t allowed to speak without ten men monitoring them.

The government in Delhi is increasing expenditure on space exploration. While villagers in Somaspur are concerned about a dropping water table, a result of too many private wells and not enough government-funded canals. Zameen-asman ka farak.

The Human Tributary

As you journey to the Kumbh Mela, the Hindu festival which attracts the most impressive crush of humanity – indeed, the global event which gathers more humans together than any other – the mystery and hysteria around the experience increases. Some tell you to expect 30 million people gathered in the space of the UNC campus on just one day. Some excitedly explain that this Kumbh is really the most important of the last twelve or 62 or 700 years, and give varying cosmological reasons why. Bhim Yogi, the hefty, limping but infinitely wise caretaker of the ashram where we stayed that weekend, continually reminded me and my friends that we would lose each other, so to make sure that our cell phones were on at all times (I wonder what people did 700 years ago?).

It took hours just to spot the place along the Ganges where devotees venture to bathe (security persons and barricades, as in many places in India, were ubiquitous, and with good reason, for stampedes aren’t unheard of). The line to bathe at this spot is as wide as a road, thick with bearded sadhus (renunciants) who come organized in their hierarchy of sects, some from thousands of kilometers away. The line, though it moves constantly, appears endless as it curves for miles out of the river, through the city of Haridwar and beyond. For that day, it is as though humanity has created an extra tributary in the great network that becomes the Ganga, one that flows from all over South Asia. In the moments of seeing that mass, I was overwhelmed. Not by the number of people or the fear that I would easily lose my cohort. But by a sense of comfort, to find so many people who still live according to non-materialist rhythms, who still inhabit a world where the Ganga – rather than the market – determines their movements and migrations, who challenge the opinion, held widely among educated Americans of my generation, that “religion is one of the world’s greatest problems.”

The festival was filled with spectacles. The phenomenal line. The entire city of tents that goes up for kilometers around Haridwar to host the pilgrims. The image of the train heading out of the city that evening was extraordinary, for not a crevice between people existed, and limbs extended out of every corner of every window and door. But none of these spectacles was surprising, for one is told over and over to expect them. And indeed, the human scale of India can only shock one so many times. The most unpredictable moment of the trip to Haridwar came in finding a quiet part of the Ganga, somehow magically removed from the miles-long line and the tent city and the millions of people. The public health warnings about the Ganges instantly faded away. To neglect that chance to bathe in its waters would have been reckless. So I didn't neglect it; I immersed myself in the river for which millions make arduous pilgrimages. For a moment I felt like one of the droplets of water that comprised the human tributary that day, and the river seemed to wash away more than simple sweat and grime.

Friendly Fatigue

We were in the midst of the slow but dramatic transition from morning to afternoon in the rich, Green Revolution plains of northwest India. Sleeper class, bucking the trend, was remarkably uninhabited. So I was sprawled, reveling in the joy of a barefoot train ride. The beauty of sleeper class is its open windows. As the day blossomed, as deep mist sharpened into a pilgrim’s midmorning sun, I found solace on my stomach, head rested on bunched up scarves, squinty eyes gazing out into the Punjabi fields of wheat and mustard. The onset of a friendly fatigue.

Friendly not only because it was sewn out of eternal-feeling threads of interconnectedness, basking in the sun and admiring its partner the soil at the same time. Friendly also because of intense familiarity. I’d known that sprawled out contentment before. On pre-teen summer days after hours of swimming and eating grilled cheeses at the neighborhood pool, when the bonus room’s couch felt like a cloud and Boy Meets World like the Gospel. Or on eight-hour July road trips to Pennsylvania to visit my grandparents, when the rolling Virginia countryside used to rock me into a brooding sleep. Or during a post-cross country meet endorphin high, when, upon removing sweaty socks and rediscovering the space between my pruny toes, October breeze was ticklish.

Travel is alluring because of the chance for exoticism. Nothing is sexier than to imagine sights and sounds and smells, even emotions, different than any we’ve ever seen. But I find that the most magical moments of traveling are those of crystalline familiarity, a kind of soothing déjà vu. They are transcendental moments, above exoticism and allure, and beyond homesickness. They not only connect disparate places of the world, but also disparate places of the heart.

The Varanasi-Kolkata Sleeper

I was dreading the sleeper class from Varanasi to Kolkata. A quick education on the Indian Railway System: There are eight different classes. On overnight trains, four are generally available for passengers that hope to lie horizontal: First Class A/C, Second Class A/C, Third Class A/C, and Sleeper. The first three classes were completely booked by the time I scheduled my brother’s and my itinerary.

My last trip in sleeper was a not so restful, dizzying fog of snores at every octave, discordant interruptions of raspy Hindi and Marwari on the hour, and struggles to retain at least half of the seat I’d paid for. And that five hour trip was a quick jaunt compared to the fifteen hour one my brother, Danny, and I were soon to embark on, through some of the most underserved rural areas of India.

The train station in Varanasi hosted a teeming number of people, anxiously anticipating the arrival of overdue trains. They were sprawled out on the dirty floor – even those who, judging by appearance, would not normally find the corner of a train station a suitable resting place. Our train too was delayed, the platform undetermined, but a friendly security guard directed us to Train 3006’s normal point of arrival. Still a bit confused, I turned to a guy waiting at the platform, “Aapka train teen hazaar chhe?” (Your train is 3006?) He smiled and nodded, pleased to hear Hindi emerge from a foreign mouth, and asked me which train car I was in. “S7? Mai bhi!” he proclaimed, glancing at my ticket. We were in the same car.

About ten minutes into the train ride, my new friend Vikash showed up at my seat, motioning me to come with him. I followed him to the grimy, thunderous section between rail cars and he flung open the train door, exposing clear and increasingly crisp night air. His face lit up to tell me that the Ganges was coming. Devout Hindus honor the river as a goddess, Ganga, and offer to it coins for luck. As the train crossed over the river and the city of Kashi (Varanasi) lit up under us in beautiful shades of honey-colored light, Vikash turned to me and in eloquent English declared: “There is nothing rational about this. It is something of the spirit.” His two-rupee coin clanged against the bridge before dropping into the water as he performed the motions of a mini-puja.

When we slipped back into the people-packed rail car, Vikash’s father was signaling the two of us to join him. He wanted to introduce us to the woman sitting next to him, a new acquaintance. Her heart-shaped face was wrapped with a subtle pink shawl to break the infant chill of the open air sleeper car, and she was sitting cross-legged inside worn pajama pants. Her smile was intelligent, and infectious. This was Nilanjana Deb, a head lecturer of the English Literature department at the prestigious Javadpur University of Calcutta – riding sleeper class with rats running below her carefully tucked feet. For nearly an hour we all sat squeezed into one two-person seat, conversation drifting naturally from Hindi into English and back again; philosophies of literature and politics and religion rooted themselves in stories of sadhus and saints, poets and mystics. I mostly listened, reveling in their rich streams of thought, seamless but broad-reaching. By the time I returned to my seat with research project ideas, book recommendations, email addresses and two new friends, I’d also acquired a new respect for sleeper class, and a love for the people who don’t mind riding with rats.

Western Sadhus and San Franscisco Hindus

To describe a place as “really touristy” is slander in the backpacking world. Translation: Pack up your Lonely Planet and escape to a different “undiscovered” retreat. Varanasi – the most famous city along the Ganges, the center of Hindu sacred geography, and the oldest continually inhabited community in the world (existing since the time of Babylon) – is definitely “really touristy.” Its ancient ghats (riverbanks) that rise up in a flurry of color from the river are flooded with white and East Asian faces. And yet this place is far too amazing, far too unique, for anyone to pack up his Lonely Planet and move on (perhaps visitors feel the same pull that has kept people inhabiting Varanasi for so many millennia). So the white faces cringe at the other white faces, praying for the ability to ignore their continual, awkward presence.

The hypocrisy of this attitude I find in myself is all too apparent. How can anyone be annoyed by the people who are foreign to a place if he himself is a foreigner? Varanasi enlivens this identity crisis, since the line between foreigner and local is blurred. Europeans and Americans with sun-stained skin live among the sadhus (holy renunciants) of the riverbanks, donning yoga pajama pants and orange, Om-printed dhotis. Heavy, careless beards, chalky dreadlocks, and their lack of hovering hawkers demarcate members the washed-up hippie community, along with their new mentees, those from my generation who similarly find solace in Hinduism’s holiest city. We found another kind of spectacle at the Dashashwamedh Ghat’s sunset aarti. A group of at least twenty white American Hindu converts were the jajman (sponsors) of the ceremony, and took center stage in front of the hundreds of pilgrims who came for the puja. It was their pilgrimage to India, but it felt more like a religion hijacked. My reaction against this “takeover” was visceral, but why?

I think, on one level, tourists don’t like seeing tourists because it is a reminder: that no matter how much you pride yourself on either “going local” or understanding the local, that you can’t ever be local, nor fully understand the local. And this actually goes beyond superficial appearance; there is the kind of knowing that begins in books and photographs and quarter-life crisis journeys around the world, and then there is the kind of knowing that begins in the first few days of life, even at birth. Surely, there is a difference between feeling the Ganges with a twenty year old hand running alongside a hired boat, and feeling the Ganges with baby feet – smooth and flexible and new. And surely there is a difference between knowing the chants of the Ganga Puja as those you read in your “A Very Short Introduction to Hinduism” and knowing the chants of the Ganga Puja as what your grandmother sang while she dreamt of Kashi’s ghats. The kind of knowledge which the San Franscisco pilgrims can never have is a child’s knowledge, an ignorant knowledge, a knowledge of uninterrupted gaze. This is why their imbibing the culture feels strange – because on some level it cannot be true.

But I am then left with a question: What does one do with a passion, a powerful and motivating interest, in another society? Adopting its culture completely seems to cheapen it. To do nothing but observe it feels futile. Where is the middle way?

Stream-of-Consciousness Seminars

The first day of class was not what I expected. From those whose authority I trusted, I had been told to expect a harsh, hierarchical rigidity in Indian higher education. Show your professor the highest respect. Expect only the lecture format. Don’t ask challenging or probing questions in class. Wait until you meet the professor in his – and yes it will likely be “his” – office. These were the pieces of advice I received.

Upon arriving in Delhi, I quickly learned that the mother of the family I’d be staying with was indeed a professor of economics at the University of Delhi. When I walked into my first class – Sociology of Education in India – the professor immediately asked a musically inclined student to come to the front of the class and lead everyone in John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Afterward, he asked the class to engage in introspection on their own childhood experiences with education. A dialogue quickly began, with Professor Pathak only moderating. Dr. Pathak is a philosopher by nature, breezing into class five to ten minutes late, a thin woolen scarf around his neck. He offers lectures that sound more like well-structured philosophical treatises. There is never an “um,” or even a pause. He has no notes in front of him. Yet every word is carefully chosen. His lectures follow a progression that is neither completely logical nor in the least bit chaotic. If we walk away having not heard a story about two debating mystics on the Ganges, or not witnessing the quotation of a dozen lines from a T.S. Eliot poem, it has been an unusual class.

One thing is certain: Most of the students in my class have never had the opportunity to question their education system the way they are encouraged to at Jawaharlal Nehru University – a graduate institution frequently called “the Harvard of the East.” This is why theoretical discussions of “what education means,” where Pathak expects engagement with the likes of Durkheim and Parsons, often devolve into tired diatribes about how “education has come to just mean rote learning,” or non-generalizable anecdotes about some textbook in Gujarat. But the open format of Professor Pathak’s class has also shown me a new kind of seminar. What happens in the seminar classrooms of the United States often resembles debate. Students construct a “point” to make, formulate a logical progression of ideas that will “prove” that point, and then proudly perform their articulation. Here, the shape of classroom discussion takes a stream-of-consciousness shape. If a student says that he doesn’t have anything concrete to say, Pathak will reply, “sometimes there is beauty in chaos.” And often the “points” made in classroom discussion are more like journal entries, or even a Romantic period poem. At first the incoherency of these moments irritated me, but I’m now beginning to see the way that Professor Pathak, in his infinite wisdom and intense ability to listen, garners genuine knowledge of his students through their soliloquies. Perhaps I will make it one of my goals to hear people in this way.

PS: Pictures coming soon. Thanks for your patience!

Morning in Munirka

I woke up in Munirka Village this morning, a neighborhood in Delhi where it isn’t one sound or smell or thought that wakes you, but rather an entire amassed collection of them. Munirka bustles with as much energy as other Delhi districts, but it has a distinctly more rustic feel. The whole neighborhood is, in fact, built illegally on government land. Landlords pay their regular baksheesh, and Delhiites give it the distinction of being a “village” in a strangely subconscious association of rural with backward and unofficial. Munirka Village is not a slum. My friend lives on the top floor of a beautiful new six story building, complete with wrought iron railings and flashy purple paint. The village simply belongs in the great collection of Indian treasures that remain outside of officialdom. Like the cloth vendors of Sarojini Market and the electronics salesmen of Palika Bazaar and all the thousands of auto wallahs who refuse to switch on the meter and the aloo tikki chefs that roll their kitchens alongside the roads of Safdarjung Enclave. The aromas and tastes and moods of these unofficial (but perhaps more mainstream) spheres are intense – pungent and sweet, racing and slow, everlasting but mortal.

As I walked onto the rooftop terrace of my friend’s flat, six stories above the low-lying Munirka Village (even this construction is illegal – residential buildings should not exceed four stories in Delhi), I could see the varying levels of activity on all the rooftops below. Each level had a different story to tell on a descending ladder that led to street level. I felt like jumping from one to the other, meeting the woman who was hanging her nicest sari to dry, the boys playing a game of carom, the old men enjoying their first cup of morning chai. I think one of the reasons I remain attached to India is that it always offers another unexplored perspective. The Delhi overlooking Munirka Village – a dirt-smeared, cow-traversed rustic Delhi – is a world unlike the lush green Delhi of Lodhi Gardens, or the raucous old world Delhi in the winding street markets near Jama Masjid. Delhi – and India – gives the impression that one could spend a lifetime turning over new rocks, discovering new lenses, even encountering new religions. All of a sudden the seven months I plan to spend in South Asia seem far too short to see it all.