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!