IN THE BEGINNING
They walked out of Africa, our human ancestors, along the bottom of Arabia to India, where they settled along the fertile river valleys of the Indus. When it got overcrowded, some wanted to leave. But as the Himalayas to the North were too steep to climb over, some went West and then turned North to populate Europe. Some went East, and then turned South to Australia, or North and slowly clockwise, across the Bering Strait, all the way round the Pacific, eventually straggling down as far as Patagonia. But let us rewind to India, where some of those who went West are returning to India, driven back by climate change and land scarcity. They were now called Aryans, successive tribes fighting over territory and pushing East into the Ganges plain. They brought with them humanity’s first written language, Sanskrit. The poems of the Rig Veda contain clues suggesting these Aryan tribes came from Iran and Turkmenistan, back through the Hindu Kush and Afghanistan, then moving across Northern India looking for scarce land. And their immense battles over this land are commemorated in the Mahabharata, the epic story of India. Meanwhile, far down south in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, life had been so unchanged since the Dravidians arrived that whole villages still have the same gene markers as their African ancestors.
Then for thousands of years we find the same dynastic squabbles over real estate, and the same emergence of class systems, that we found in the history of Europe. The dynasties here were the local empires of Ashoka, the Guptas and the Marathas, and the foreign empires of the Persians, the Greeks, the Mughals, and finally the British. In Europe the class system was called Feudalism, in India it was called Caste. It is difficult to rise above caste, but someone called Shivaji once did. Born a Shudra in Mararashtra, he became a great Kshatria warrior fighting against the Mughal invaders, a hero to this day.
IN THE END
The British, who had ruled India through a network of absentee landlords collecting British as well as their own taxes, then divided the country into separate Hindu and Muslim territories and left abruptly. Today, after all these cultural upheavals, the Hindu wife still walks submissively three paces behind the husband, he still worrying how to pay his landlord and moneylender, and the dowries to offload his daughters. “The father of daughters waters another man’s tree.” But, wherever we have travelled in India, we have met a people who are poor, yet gentle, innocent and peaceful, always friendly, always helpful.
Caste. In Europe the feudal system has now re-invented itself as the Common Agricultural Policy whereby taxpayers pay European land-owners to over-produce, the export surplus bankrupting farmers in India. But in India those at the top of the caste system are also adapting to new profit opportunities, as illustrated here by Lappe and Collins, in Food First.
“The buyers are a motley group, some connected with land through family ties, some altogether new to agriculture. A few have unemployed rupees acquired through undeclared earnings, and most of them look upon farming as a tax haven, which it is, and as a source of earning tax-free supplementary income. The medical doctor from Jullundar who turned part time farmer is sitting pretty. The 15 acres he purchased four years ago have tripled in value. To listen to him, he is farming ‘for the good of the country’ … His only vexation is whether or not he will succeed in buying another 10 acres he has his eyes on – and what a disappointed man he will be if they escape him. As we watched him supervise the threshing, he was anything but a gentleman farmer.”
let us now RETRACE my two travel paths through India.
TRAVELS IN 1993
AT HONG KONG AIRPORT the occupants of our seats on Air France do not speak French or English, and they refuse to move. So the air hostesses tell us go and sit anywhere! I carefully explain the domino theory to them and, eventually we are given seats next to two little Punjabi children, busy eating biscuits and drinking coke. The Indian businessman puffs and pants up the aisle, having held up our takeoff for an hour while he waited at the wrong gate. He has now lost his business class seat. He is not pleased. So the hostesses then evict the little Punjabis, goodness knows where to. The businessman lowers his ample backside, squelching into a coca cola-soaked cushion, and curses Air France and all Punjabis for the next twenty minutes.
DRUG RAIDS AND BANKS. This inauspicious start to our India adventure is not improved when we read the Lonely Planet. “You either love India or you hate it but you cannot ignore it” and extreme caution is then advised concerning taxis, hotels, banks, trains, food, and bazaars. But this covers pretty much everything we have come for. So, in Delhi, we start with the taxi, chugging like an old threshing machine and driven on the assumption that all traffic lights are unreliable, and red and green offer even chances. The taxi rasps along in an asphyxiated manner to the hotel we have booked. Here, the driver explains that it has been closed in a drug raid. But he knows a much better one, run by his brother-in-law. And next morning, stung badly by that brother-in- law, we have to replenish our cash from the bank. My money pouch, designed to hang inside a trouser leg, turns out to be a most inappropriate investment as, back on the street, we try to conceal a ten centimetre thick wad of filthy notes held together with giant staples.
TOURISM. Emerging from the bank, we pass a cobra also emerging, from a basket. They have no ears so they can’t hear music; they just look around curiously when the lid is lifted off the basket. We cram into an auto rickshaw, circumnavigate the rough and tumble of rampant commercialism, then a huge elephant coming the other way, and we land up at a travel agent in the bazaar, a low grade crook. From there we go to the Government Tourist Officer, a high grade crook. We decide to go North by train and prepare ourselves with the Lonely Planet. “A tip to a station porter will ensure you a seat even when the train is packed out to the very limit…Judicious baksheesh will open closed doors, find missing letters and perform other small miracles”. And “Toilets are often unusable and in any case there will be someone asleep in it. Trains stop for no apparent reason. Often it is because someone has pulled the emergency stop cable because they are close to home.”
THE HIMALAYA QUEEN leaves New Delhi for Kalka at 6 a.m. Ticketing involves three stages before we finally get to the ticket window, which is partially blocked by someone sleeping across it. Across the plains the clatter is regular and monotonous. For some reason they are called Bogies, those pairs of wheels dangling below the rail carriages, and the bogies of the Himalaya Queen emit a syncopation suggesting somewhat irregular maintenance. Beyond the dusty glass window, regiments of stately eucalypts march past, projecting a glittering pattern of light and shade on the borders of the paddi fields.
FROM KALKA both terrain and transport options change abruptly as the Himalayas rear up in front of us. The Toy Train to Shimla has already left so we negotiate with a taxi driver who believes his Morris Oxford is a formula one racing car. And so it seems that on mountain roads it is OK to overtake at high speed on blind bends if you blow your horn loud enough. As the tyres shriek on the edges of precipices I notice that the glove box is labelled ‘First Aid Box and Complaint Book’ and I reflect on the uselessness of both if we go over the edge. In the back of the taxi I can sense right feet pressed hard against rusty floorboards as we slither round the bends. In the middle of uninhabited forests we pass a rusty tin hut optimistically called ‘Property Consultant’ then, at the top of a mountain pass, we park behind some fuming, creaking TATA trucks and pay less than a dollar for a superb roti and curry at a transport café. Then, while Stirling Moss slithers us round the last few hairpins approaching Shimla, he tells us the Hotel White is closed but, of course, he knows a much better one. At Shimla there are more surprises, mock-English provincial architecture and a small Anglican cathedral where someone is tuning a church organ. But this is India, and anything can happen.
SHIMLA. After a steamy night in another overpriced hovel we splash through the rain to find Hotel White, open and welcoming. Apparently the manager refuses to bribe taxi drivers so the hotel is always pleasantly empty. Since the departure of the British Raj, Shimla has grown to 72,000, but still retains an Early Perpendicular English church and half-timbered Tudor houses along a Mall. It rains each day, the road to Manali is blocked, there are riots in the Punjab and 500 tourists are stranded in Kashmir, but here at Hotel White we are very comfortable. Each morning our little immersion coil boils glasses of water for tea, brushing teeth, gargling, salt inhalation, and mixing with powdered milk for the muesli which we take it in turns to eat out of a lunch box. On wet evenings Joan’s hair drier inflates the sleeves and legs of damp garments. Hotel White is run by an elderly Sikh couple, regretting the passing of the British Raj, the decaying reminders of which are visible in the old rest houses, bandstands, never-completed stained glass church windows, and in a mysterious place on the map labelled Scandal Point. Today, well-dressed Indian tourists fill the hotels while Tibetan porters in rain-soaked sackcloth carry enormous loads up from the Toy Train. Monkeys carrying babies scamper across the Mall and abseil down electric power cables. The road to Manali is still blocked so we go shopping. “I don’t think I will buy a jumper…Oh look, there are jumpers in that shop” so we buy one.
On a walk around Shimla we are joined by some young backpackers. The tanned English girl, after a crash course in paramedics and bush survival, had worked for a charitable organisation as a health officer up the Essequibo and Berbice rivers in Guyana, far up to the Brazilian border, inoculating Amerindians. The Canadian girl, hiking through Tamil disputed parts of Sri Lanka, found herself the only tourist there. The two girls from Melbourne had to circumvent the blocked roads out of Dharamsala to reach Shimla. They all said you were OK if you kept fit and listened to other backpackers, as they are the only ones who really know what is going on. That night I felt quite ashamed of the tiny blister on my toe resulting from our short stroll.
Breakfast is interrupted by a monkey who has leaped in through the window. Joan shakes a fist, the monkey shakes a fist back, collects three bananas and a pear (see photo), eats them and absails down the nearest electricity cable to the street. We are told a heavy monkey can pull down a cable, causing a blackout. The road to Narkanda is now clear, so we go to the bus station. Walking towards our bus, a window slides open and a woman is sick down the rusted side panel. But there are no alternatives so we set off, laying down a smokescreen of diesel and, from now on, sights are near vertical and sounds are unexpected and erratic. Horns blaring around the corner tell our driver to get back on his side of the road. We stop often, on account of recent landslides. Suddenly a dozen men come sprinting round the bend followed by six explosions as dynamite clears our path and the road is now good for a few more miles. Our bus passes many gangs still repairing landslides. Minimum wage is six rupees, $3 a day. Most work seven days, 52 weeks, but government employees get a month plus 25 miscellaneous days holiday. Farmers here grow potatoes, cabbage, cauliflower and peas, on terraces stacked high up the walls of each mountain.
NARKANDAR has been described as “a nondescript truck-stop town”, and the Him View
Hotel, at ten dollars a night is the cheapest, at 2500 metres the highest, and certainly contains the dirtiest bed sheets of our trip so far. Being a government rest house, the room, the bedding and the bed are rough, but there is a lawn and we have a verandah from which the rows of mountains, topped with mists, seem to go on for ever and ever. Beyond these photos of Joan and Rebecca, a hundred terraces step down past huts roofed with massive slates to green valleys and flashes of running water.
We find some locals and their real estate
The single sheet is several guests old, the eiderdown much, much older, the pillow the texture of a sack of potatoes and, at night, someone is quietly turning the handle of our door against which we have jammed a massive chair. Then, at two a.m., with a grinding and clashing of gears, the German mountaineers arrive, in a vehicle piled high with camping gear and ice picks. They are a cheery lot and we exchange travel plans at breakfast. I say “We have a daughter in Hong Kong, one in India and one in England…so we go to Italy”. They laugh a lot and respond appropriately, in perfect English: “A Catholic, a Protestant and a Jew were asked when life begins. For the Catholic it was at conception, for the Protestant it was at birth, and for the Jew it was when the children have left home and the dog has died.” We follow a goat track thousands of feet above the farms from which children climb each day to school for the nine months of the year when they are not snowed in. The photos below show the town centre and some secret men’s business in the market place.
One of the staff has offered to share a taxi back to Simla, so we cram into a tiny asthmatic Suzuki van which requires frequent R and R, that is to say Rest for its overheated little engine and Repairs to its bronchial tubes. The staff at Hotel White welcome us back with beaming smiles, retrieve the luggage they were looking after for us, and even traced us later to a restaurant to bring us the umbrellas we had forgotten to take. Next day we stay in bed with sore throats. We are lucky, floods in these parts claimed 220 lives last week. Last night the hotel was blacked out when a monkey pulled down a power cable in the street. No news of the monkey.
Heavy rain next night and I wake trying to formulate a simultaneous equation to resolve the slowness of the Toy Train, the velocity of a taxi, the probabilities of missing tomorrow’ plane, and hence the cost of waiting another week for the next Air France flight out of India. The solution materialises in the form of a mini-taxi, free-wheeling dangerously most of the 2000 metres drop to Kalka. About 1000 kilometres for 22 dollars – but no, not quite! There is a by-election in Kalka, therefore a curfew and therefore police road blocks. The taxi driver ejects us onto the street just as heavy rain starts. But in India there are always free-market entrepreneurs round each corner and, miraculously, two tricycles with wooden platforms appear from nowhere and we career downhill to the station, with the electorate of Kalka laughing, waving and giving the thumbs up to what must look to them like sodden remnants of the British Raj.
Ticketing in India, if nothing else, is now computerised and, stuck outside each carriage of the Himalaya Queen, is a list of travellers’ full names, destination, age and sex. As heavily armed soldiers join us on the train I feel like offering to reprogram the computer to include a column for next-of-kin. There is new tension between India and Pakistan, batteries detonate bombs, and we have batteries in watches, clocks, cameras, flashes and calculators. So we say farewell to India standing amongst our soiled laundry, spread out across the airport lounge, in our search for our declared inventory of dangerous batteries. Our Indian doctor in Sydney, preparing us for cholera, typhoid and malaria, had looked dubiously at us over the tops of his glasses: “It will be an experience for you” he had warned.
TRAVELS IN 1994
ON THE ROAD TO PUNE. A year later and back in India, I pass a scrap metal yard labelled “College of Engineering” and further on some men are assembling a truck’s gearbox on the footpath. Every truck has a totally superfluous “Sound Horn” message printed on the back. Occasionally I pass old women squatting in the middle of the road sweeping dust and pebbles into holes and waiting for tar barrels to boil at the side of the road. Last week a truck hit a tar barrel and sent a whole road gang into intensive care. A new rail bridge is being constructed with the help of women in fluttering saris swinging sledge hammers in colourful arcs over their heads. Each village has its surprises, like the one with a tin hut labelled “Film Training Institute”, or the man carrying eight empty tea chests on his head, four on four, steadied occasionally at two diagonal corners by outstretched hands.
Above is Rebecca at the Shanwar Palace in Pune and I think Dr. Lele took the other photo. The huge wooden door of the Shanwar Wadi palace in Pune is studded with 15 inch spikes, to discourage the elephants of hostile armies from breaking the door in. At the Shiva temple one of our tour party has his shoes stolen. Pune, a city of two million, is reputedly the fastest developing city in the world, and the fields on the outskirts are filling up with three storey concrete structures. The neat rows of tents alongside each structure house the construction workers and their families. The untidy hovels nearby belong to Rajastani gipsies, one of which is leading a camel towards us. I take a photo, give him some rupees and immediately some twelve children appear as if out of the ground and follow us like a cloud of mosquitos as we walk faster and faster back to the road. Outside the shop at the bottom of our building are open sacks of rice, nuts, etc. and when Mr. Kulkani is serving someone he often puts his small child, bare-bottom, to sit on the rice, nuts, etc.
Women carry everything on their heads, vegetables to market, washing to the creek and, in large woks, rubble to mend the road. The men ride the sort of staid upright bicycle I rode 50 years ago and it looks like these will last another 50 years. Calcutta still has rickshaws but everywhere else is the auto rickshaw. With a motorbike front and a two-wheeler cabin behind it can take three adults or, as I counted, twelve school children. Going up a long steep hill our auto was flagged down by another, out of petrol. In bottom gear, and using his spare sandalled foot, our driver pushed the other auto in front of him up to the top of the hill. The Rajastani gipsies have their own form of transport, and I watched them fold their tents and head north in search of work with eight camels pulling carts, the children following on donkeys.
With rough roads and loads well over any legal limits tyres take terrible punishment. The worn out ones go onto the roofs of hutments to keep the tin and plastic from blowing away. We are on the road again, on the Mumbai bus, and the sound track of the Hindi movie seems overlaid with a staccato Morse code. On a fast section there is a notice “Caution: you are entering accidental zone”, we pass an “accidental” truck on its side in the middle of the road and, later, a bus just like ours teetering over in the ditch. We get a taxi and join the slow crawl into Mumbai. Stopped in traffic women with babies beg for money – most of it goes to their managers. Our taxi windows are always open, the winder ratchets having lost their teeth sometime in the middle ages. My hair, normally white, is dust grey on one side, dirty black on the side facing the taxi window.
WEST BENGAL is a communist state and today there is a strike. I have it all explained to me: “In capitalism man exploits man, in communism it is the other way round”. Waiting for takeoff at Calcutta airport the airbus pilot, with drooping handlebar moustaches, announces “we are having a slight technical problem” and, ten minutes later “Cabin crew to disarm and open doors”. My neighbour grumbles: “This means we walk back to the terminal and wait six hours.” But we are comparatively lucky: “Due to unforseen circumstances Aeroflot flights 231, 232 and 235 are cancelled”. Did they simply disappear in mid-flight? Now back in the plane and there is a sudden commotion in the seat in front of us. An Italian couple, looking out the window, has seen their luggage still sitting on the tarmac. Further delay. Apparently the first flight in India using automatic pilot didn’t end well. As our flight lines up on the runway a fellow passenger gleefully recalls the newspaper headline next day: “Fly by wire; die by fire”. But the weather is clear, the handlebar moustache is in control and soon we are getting a glimpse of a cake with crinkled icing that must be Everest or Kanchenjunga.
THE THREE WISE BABUS a fat one, a thin one and a short one, sit in the hut called Immigration. Darjeeling is in India. We have Indian visas. But for some reason we need visas to go to Darjeeling. Problem number one is Australia which is not in their filing system, and a great chasm of misunderstanding opens up. But a helpful Swiss tourist who, arising from problems of his own, has gained entry to the hut, and he helps the short babu to find Australia. Problem number two: my visa stamped with the wrong year, fortunately this goes unnoticed, as it did in Bombay and will do in Calcutta. Problem number three is Rebecca’s visa which is complicated, very complicated, in fact a centimetre-thick folder of correspondence. But the Lonely Planet guide book is helpful in unexpected ways. “At the post office” it says, “you will be given a handful of change. Wait long enough, and you will be given another, and so on.” So we now apply this technique in reverse, releasing only one document at a time, so as to avoid information overload. Eventually Rebecca, who can speak some Hindi, overhears the fat babu say to the thin babu “It is too difficult, let her through”, and Swiss, Australian and Bengali smile happily at the pragmatic solution to yet another problem of international relations.
By now, both the toy train and the bus to Darjeeling have left hours ago. We share a Maruti van with one man, agreeing to pay two-thirds. But, the minute the driver starts his engine, the man becomes a family of three, A Maruti is designed with the miraculous ability to squeeze through traffic gaps apparently narrower than itself. Our Maruti has two horns, allowing it to travel twice as fast as anything with only one horn. With aching cramp in my right brake foot we reach Darjeeling around midnight. The hotel manager sees we are tired and hungry and knows the street lights are now off, so the room price expands accordingly. But it turns out to be full board and in no time six waiters, who seem to sleep on the restaurant floor, are serving us a delicious curry. At four a.m. the hot water system shatters the silence of the night with all the environmental friendliness of a Bessemer blast furnace, and the hotel staff wake and call to each other as if across a mountain valley. In the room next door someone is doing something with a hacksaw, so at 4:30 I get up and sit in the bathroom to write these notes, but at 4:35 there is a power failure. By 5:00 a game of soccer has started in the street below and, by 6:00, bleary daylight reveals a notice on a small door above the bed-head that says “GIZER – PLEASE OPEN”. So, being an obedient sort of fellow, I open the door and see the hot water contraption and its writhing pipes that woke us at 4:00.
KANCHENJUNGA, nearly as high as Everest, is best seen at sunrise from Tiger hill. Accommodation at hotel X at Ghoom near Tiger hill can only be booked through the government tourist office. But this is closed often on Saturday and always on Sunday. Miraculously, we hear of a private company that opens often on Saturday and always on Sunday, coincidentally located in the government tourist office, coincidentally staffed with the same cheery faces. We learn from them that hotel X burned down three years ago and hotel Y is much better (because it is more expensive). We pack our backpacks and check out our trekking gear by following Tenzing Norgay road along a spectacular ridge until we reach Ghoom. There we find that hotel Y has been under renovation for years but hotel Z is much better (and more expensive). Next morning we leave at 4:30 a.m. and the guide book’s “short half hour stroll” turns out to be a 90 minute 1000 foot climb, and jeep loads of tourists are on their way back to breakfast by the time we reach the top of Tiger Hill. But we have majestic Kanchenjunga all to ourselves, shimmering above a sea of cloud.
THE TOY TRAIN turns out to be the down train, the up train back to Darjeeling is next day. So we eat a banana on the platform and read the guide book. Maneybhanjiang sounds interesting. We ask the way to the bus, take the average of various instructions and soon we are bouncing along a narrow mountain road above a precipice in a TATA bus loaded well over the legal limit with the stench of an overheated engine. But at Sukiapokha the bus stops and everyone gets out. “Bus to Maneybhanjiang?” “Sorry, no bus.” “Taxi?” “Sorry, no taxi, you walk.” Rebecca, exhausted after 14 kms before breakfast, is suddenly filled with the spirit of adventure. “Come on Dad, it’s only 8 kms.” The road is marked on the map as “jeepable” and two jeeps did pass us, but otherwise the only people we see are the tiny specks near tiny wisps of smoke coming from tiny fires at the bottom of an immense ravine. We are now so hungry that we eat the bag of nuts, gathered from the sacks that had been guarded by the bare bottoms of Mr. Kulkani’s children.
TREKKING. For some reason, possibly because we are now near the Nepal border, our visa numbers have to be recorded at the police checkpoint at Maneybhanjiang. Rebecca’s correspondence file freaks out the policeman, so we help him out, point to the first six digit number we can find, and he copies it happily. He says the trekkers hut is closed (it wasn’t) but he recommends his mother-in-law’s establishment. We enter a dark, smoke-filled kitchen with cubicles in which some Tibetan refugees are drinking something from bamboo mugs. They watch us curiously while we hoe into a lunch of huge platters of chow mein. The photo shows the small bedroom at the back which is completely filled with four trestles covered with lumpy bedding. Do we want two beds or pay for four? We eagerly pay for four. Mrs. “Tibet” cooks in front of us with a huge saucepan I’d be proud to own. Mr. Tibet and his customers morph into English and ask us about Australia. They cannot believe it is twice as large as India. We ask about Tibet and they point to a political poster on the wall entitled “A Stranger in my own land”. An astonished peasant in rags is looking up at a row of Chinese generals taking the salute at a parade in Lhasa. “China is elephant putting foot on mouse” says Mr Tibet as he grinds his foot into the dirt floor. The toilet is indescribable and we have to brush our teeth in a little stream trickling past the hut, but this is adventure and today we have climbed Tiger hill, gazed on that “Great Abode of Snow” called Kanchenjunga, trekked high up above the Little Rimbik River as it roars down out of Nepal and, with huge appetites, eaten very well.
Next day the bill is eight dollars for full board for two including six bottles of Limca. They are good people and we promise to visit them again. Tonglu turns out to be too far, too high and too politically risky, so Mrs Tibet finds us a taxi for Darjeeling. We walk through a labyrinth of tiny streets overflowing with stalls, the air thick with an aromatic mixture of incense and rotting vegetables. We agree a price then the driver doubles it for exclusive use of the back seat. Then three more passengers cram into the front squashing the driver into the door panel from which he steers crabwise. We pass signs which say “Dead slow”, “Very weak bridge” and “Be late than never”. Exhaust smoke billowing, we drive very fast in case the bridge is very weak and we get to Darjeeling early rather than late or never.
WITH OR WITHOUT COUGH. By now I am quite good at swinging a loaded backpack onto my back without scattering several pedestrians, but a timid procession nevertheless gives me a wide berth, chanting and tinkling little bells. Again taking an average of conflicting directions we arrive at the bus terminal. The two young Austrians have worked out how to respond to the advances of small children. “Where do you come from?” “We come from Mars” “What money do you have in Mars?” “Invisible money, here is some”. If a bus meets another bus or truck on a narrow mountain road, one may have to reverse. This is what the navigator is for. He goes to the back and bangs on the side of the bus signalling the number of inches clearance, with an extra loud bang for no inches. The young Germans are worried about the pneumonic plague they left behind in Gujarat. I tell them the risk is statistically insignificant compared to that of travelling in a TATA bus, and now they have two worries. They will already be a week late for the next term at their German university, and I haven’t the heart to tell them that Germany has just imposed six days quarantine on all travellers from India. In a land of seemingly permanent confusion it is easy to see things from the local point of view. In India, according to the Lonely Planet, “If you ask if this is the right way, and someone says ‘yes’, it probably means you are miles out of your way and going in completely the wrong direction, but they would hate to be the first person to tell you that.” And in Ireland you may be told “If I was going to Dublin I would never be starting from here in the first place.”
On the mountain roads there are exhortations to good driving everywhere: “Keep your nerve at a sharp curve”, “Take care, make accident a rare”, “If you want to donate blood, don’t do it on the road.” “Expect the unexpected”. But the Austrian boy is not good at expecting, and each time we lurch round a bend into the path of an oncoming truck, he gasps loudly, grabs the handrail, and stamps his hiking boot into the seat in front, causing the two little Japanese girls to self-levitate two inches. At Bagdogra airport I see him still quivering like a jelly as he braces himself for another uncertain mode of transport. As we strap our seat belts there is a sound like an old battery teasing a Holden EJ starter motor for a long time. But the delay comes later at Calcutta where the Durga Puja has drained all the taxis away from the airport’s catchment area. As we queue patiently for two hours Rebecca tells me that India has matured me a lot. Finally, a volcano of screaming horns announces the arrival of the taxis.
Like the young Germans, we have been followed by the plague across India and now, high over Bangla Desh, I have to fill in a medical (plague) declaration. At Bangkok airport I fully expect to be given a bell to ring or at least be clad in sackcloth when I hand in my form. But no; all forms are thrown into a cardboard box on the floor, without any scrutiny whatsoever, as we all surge through the barrier with, who knows, “high fever, general feeling of weakness, chest tightness, with or without cough and shortness of breath.”
But there are many others beyond the reach of medical statistics: “We think two million sleep on the streets. Birth and death rates are unknown but certainly high” (Calcutta street clinic doctor interviewed by me). To these homeless must be added dwellers in hutments built of recycled materials: “If these hutments grow at the same speed, very soon more than 60 to 65 percent of the population will be slums…” (Mahratta Chamber of Commerce, Pune).
JOURNEYS OF THE MIND
The Caste System. Hindus are born into one of four castes: Brahmin priests and teachers, Kshatria warriors, Vaishya merchants, and Shudra labourers. Shudra women were accessible to higher-caste men, but their progeny were not allowed to jump caste. Fulfilling your dharma (moral duty) increases your chance of being re-born into a higher caste. Samsara is the doctrine of the cycle of rebirths. All of this is not only an oversimplification (it ignores thousands of Jatis) but it leaves out some lower casts: the Dalits or untouchables, scheduled, criminal, and de-notified castes, and the Hijras (transvestites, eunuchs, gays, hermaphrodites, and the castrated). More unfortunately, the whole system leaves out a most important category: landlords and moneylenders. With the help of Santonu Basu, a lecturer at Macquarie, I have put together a picture of this class of person.
Consider a peasant in a country which, like nearly all countries, can produce more than enough food for all of its inhabitants. But, since he may be paying 50 percent of his produce as rent to an idle or absentee landlord, he may have little reserves for problems like fire, flood or simply a bad harvest. For whatever reason, let us say he runs out of food and must borrow from a money-lender or his landlord, often the same person. If he has any land or assets he may forfeit them. Now, without collateral he is a risk to the moneylender, attracting an interest rate between 50 and 200 percent (Todaro, Economic Development in the Third World). This high rate may reflect many factors, monopoly power, risk, or the fact that he borrows, say, 1000 rupees-worth of grain at high, pre-harvest prices and has to return back a much larger quantity at low, post-harvest prices. He uses this loan to feed his family and, if he is still a tenant or sharecropper, to continue paying rent. Eventually he defaults. Then, or if he is lucky next time, he or his wife or his children become debt bonded.
Next, he migrates, with or without his family, to a city in search of work. Most likely he remains embedded within the informal sector of the city depending on income from ambulatory services, begging or crime. He, and perhaps eventually his family, camp on whatever sidewalks and footpaths they can find. But apparently rent-free vacant and public spaces turn out to be managed by illegal “slumlord” rent collectors. Eventually, their shacks made of scrap and rubbish are bulldozed and the occupants moved on. Alternative accommodation, if not dried up by rent control, is available at rents which always rise with population. Even if they have escaped their rural debt-collectors, new urban debts now arise. Loans for medical treatment, weddings or funerals, or simply to offset lack of employment, create new debt bondage. Investible public savings that might otherwise create jobs are diverted to meet rising costs of welfare, congestion, crime, pollution and infrastructure decay, and into unproductive, untaxed speculative investment in the rising land values created by migration and population growth.
Finally, he or his family may pay what they have left to people-smugglers or “employment agents” in order to emigrate. Those in boats, if they arrive, may no longer be debt bonded. Not so the men crossing borders illegally in trucks, or their wives or daughters, working as domestic servants, with their passports held in “safe keeping” by their employers.
Hindu legends underpin not only this caste system but some 7,000 Indian religions and the many derivative Western New Religious Movements (NRMs). Because they are profoundly important I propose to discuss them here as journeys of the mind, journeys of the soul and, in the final chapter, alongside other faiths.
The Mahabharata as history. Since it was written by a Brahman, the stories are, naturally, of the power and the glory of the Brahman caste. The Indian calendar dates it at 3102 BC, the beginning of the “Age of Misfortune”, but probably around 1400 BC. From legends and folk tales the story was written down, in 5800 pages, over some 400 years, 200 BC to 200 AD. The Mahabharata .is, essentially, an epic story of a dynastic struggle over real estate, escalating from cattle raids and disputes between kings into a titanic battle between two kingdoms, the Kurus and the Pandus.
The story starts with a gambling contest in a debauched, warlike aristocracy. In the gamble the Pandus lost their entire kingdom (land), fled to the forest disguised as Brahmins (this is clever, Brahmins don’t have to work, as holy men they are supported by the plebs), and promised not to bother the Kurus for 12 years.
In the middle of the story, in the 13th year the Pandus got their massive revenge. Neighbouring kings entered the quarrel until the whole of India was involved. The battle for the ownership of India, fought on what is now a sacred place of pilgrimage, lasted 18 days.
In the end the Mahabharata becomes the story of India. Thousands of years later we try to explain conflict as a response to scarcity, famine, drought, and population pressure. Unfortunately, each nation writes its own historical interpretation of all this as battles between good and evil and uses this interpretation to justify its stance in the next conflict, and its call to arms of the next generation of cannon-fodder. But back then it was seen as a cosmic moral confrontation. Epics of great dramatic power leak into and help define law, religion and morality, as in that part of the Mahabharata called the Bhagavad-Gita. And so, epics continue to be celebrated as battles between good and evil, as journeys of the soul.
JOURNEYS OF THE SOUL
The cosmology. The Indian pantheon of deities is overwhelming in its diversity and vagueness; the gods, the devas, in continual conflict with the asuras, the demonic forces.
The Mahabharata as the soul of India begins quite beautifully “Long ago when the sea was milk…” The players include Indra lord of heaven, Krisna reincarnated as Vishnu, Siva, sprites, dryads, naiads and Raksas, the malevolent demons.
In the middle the story takes the form of a re-enactment of a cosmic moral confrontation. In India the dharma of the Kshatriyas caste, kings, princes and warriors, was to protect their dependants, rule justly, speak the truth, and fight wars. Arjuna is a Kshatria torn between this duty and the fact that some of his kin are on the wrong side.
A central part of the Mahabharata is the Bhagavad-Gita in which this dilemma is worked out. Today it is part of a debate about something called The Just War. The Gita starts with the gods goading the princes into battle. In the Gita war is neither good nor bad, it depends on your circumstances. So Krishna uses two sets of values, relative and absolute, in persuading Arjuna to fight. Krishna is not Jesus on the Mount nor is he a Ghandi. Arjuna regrets the killing of kin but not the killing of peasants (we now call it collateral damage, or friendly fire). He regrets the defiling of Shudra women in war, but mostly because corruption comes from the mixing of castes. The Gita presents the caste system as a natural order within which spiritual growth is possible, but to try and jump caste puts you in great spiritual danger.
The main part of the Gita is a dialogue in poems between four speakers, the King, Arjuna, the Lord Krishna and Sanjaya. These develop seven Yogas. Yoga, in Hindu religious philosophy, attempts to join the soul with the Universal Spirit by turning inwards from the environment. Yoga appears to Westerners to sit somewhere between meditation (reflection and contemplation) and trance (hypnotic, dazed or drugged state. Evidence from the origins of Sanskrit suggests parts of the Rig Veda may have been written under the influence of Soma). The Gita presents a system of cosmology centred on the Brahman, also called the Reality, the total Godhead, and the Atman. Brahman is defined by negation, Brahman is not this, not that, until the entire universe is eliminated, and Brahman alone remains. But when Brahman is regarded as a personal God then he has attributes of love, mercy, purity, justice, knowledge and truth. Interestingly, the universe is never destroyed but cycles between dissolution and creation, as in recent big bang theories.
“There will never be enduring peace unless and until human beings come to accept a philosophy of life more adequate to the cosmic and psychological facts than the insane idolatries of nationalism and the advertising man’s apocalyptic faith in Progress towards a mechanised New Jerusalem…The Bhagavad-Gita is perhaps the most systematic scriptural statement of the Perennial Philosophy.” (Aldous Huxley’s introduction to Prabhavanada and Isherwood’s book on the Bhagavad-Gita).
At the dreamy end of the Mahabharata “they walked away into the evening. They stepped into the Ganga and were gone underwater, to the Naga kingdoms far below…then….the players met under the coloured shadows and asked ‘what shall we play next?’ “. Whimsical and beautiful.
The Ramayana, like the Mahabharata, describes huge wars fought over land, disguised as battles over right and wrong. But the Ramayana, like the Mahabharata, is a rich and exciting legend that says much about human nature. Incidentally, how did the poet Valmiki know of the existence of Sri Lanka, and how did the monkeys get there? Maybe there was a land bridge in those days or, more likely, they just flew there.