Nepal

hi everyone-- yes, i succumbed to the usual curse of the blogger. ie i started strong and then fizzled out and never wrote again. actually i wrote a lot about my winter break but then never posted it because i kept wanting to check my information and not tell lies. this is related to the other curse of the blogger which is wanting to put up something that is of worthy interest and not just completely self-centered, and yet also just keep my friends and family posted...for which purpose, in part two of our academic year, there was not much that was qualitatively different to report then what was new in the first half, only now it felt as if everything starting coming together and bearing fruit. so lots happening but nothing that i was able to really tell about. plus, ironically the more there is to write about, the less time there is to write. and here i go succumbing to the third curse of the blogger, plain old self-reflexivity for this whole last paragraph.

anyway, my time in India is almost over for now; i’ll be back in the US in just a few days. although i hope to come back lengthily and often. so i suppose i should try to give some sort of overview or wrap-up of this phase of things.

of course it’s too late to go into detail about various anecdotes i could have talked about if i’d been on the ball-- like the time i saved the honor of the Indian Army by rescuing the olive beret of a hapless soldier perched in his little guard post above the road where it had fallen and, gallantly asking, "aapki topi?" i threw it up to him with some brilliant fluke of wind that made it sail up perfectly through the alcove as if i was a person with professional ballplayer aim [which you all know i am definitely NOT!]... or the time school was closed due to Sunni-Shia altercations which led to what most people thought was ridiculously disproportionate security crackdown and everyone said was because it was routine stirring up of trouble before the big elections, in which parts of the city were placed under full curfew for a week, including the part where a lot of our teachers live.

overall...

oh bother. i’m just going to slap this up without reflection. why the hell not.

i just got back from a quick trip to Nepal to celebrate the end of the Lucknow Urdu program. it was a grueling train plus 2 buses, a full day and 2 nights of travel, each way. the weather in the mountains was a big relief from the sweaty Gangetic plain [and thrilling nightly thunder and lightning displays with refreshing showers] but unfortunately i couldn’t see much of the landscape we were driving through since it was dark for much of the way through the hills. beautiful starts when we took pit stops though.

once in Kathmandu, we tried to balance admitting we were tourists with trying to educate ourselves about the political situation...which was a constant shadowy presence just off stage you might say.

first of all i should mention that Kathmandu and the rest of Nepal are two completely different worlds, and on this trip i only had time to experience the former. this is where the vast majority of the country’s wealth, media, power, infrastructure etc are concentrated whereas 90% of the population is in poor peasant communities throughout the central valley, the mountains, and the lowland part [aka the terai] along the Indian border.

you can see lots of Indian and lots of Tibetan cultural influence; the clothes and faces of the people i saw too tend to look either Indian, Tibetan, or anything in between. there are tons of Hindi words recognizable in Nepali, and many Nepalis also know Hindi; but there are also many Nepalis whose native tongue is other than Nepali. i saw women wearing saris with long-sleeved shirts, or salwar-kameez, and men wearing sort of a different variation of a skinny-legged kurta-pajama with a [soft pillbox sort of topi] but i also saw a lot of young people wearing hipsterishly western clothes. the popular music sounds really different than in India though; maybe more Tibetan-inflected, and also maybe more ethereal and less poppy.

actually it’s possible to say thatNepal would probably have been incorporated into postcolonial India except for the fact that the kingdom was never conquered by the British, [thanks to the mountains and the proverbial valor of the Gurkhas who of course were then recruited into the British Indian army in large numbers, to this day] so it remained independent when the British left; nevertheless there’s also a lot of longstanding resentment toward Indian cultural and economic domination. all the cars are Maruti and all the trucks say Tata. the industry and world commerce all go through India and large numbers of Nepali laborers go from their villages down to India to work and back. in India the newspapers and politicians often talk about the fear of destabilizing radicalism across the border, but i’ve read in other sources that the completion of this labor circuit and the contact the migrant workers thereby found with the Indian radical left while working here contributed in large part to the radicalization of the Nepali militants, at least the peasant segment as opposed to the urban intellectual segment.

as you probably know, there’s been a Maoist guerrilla-led People’s War going on in Nepal since 1996, but in April 2006, a historic popular uprising united the Maoists and the 7 major moderate/mainstream political parties for the first time along with civil society groups to abolish the monarchy and demand a constitutional republic. ever since then there have been non-stop deliberations and debates over how to convene the constituent assembly, over the Maoists’ retention of their weapons, over the way to achieve equitable representatio for Nepal’s many languistic and ethnic groups, etc etc, along with sporadic violence ongoing.

here are the signs and echoes and shadows that we saw, without ever confronting the reality head-on.

on sat, our bus through the terai was stopped for awhile because there have been alot of bandhs [ie closures and strikes] called by the ethno-nationalist/separatist organizations representing the Madhesis who feel marginalized by the Kathmandu government and also tend to be anti-Maoist. they are encouraged in this tendency by a lot of moral and financial support by the Indian Hindu right wing. so more often than not these days all the traffic on the highways through the lowlands stops.

on sun, we saw a play at the famous Gurukul theater by the Aarohan national theater company. it’s their 25th anniversary festival-- they formed in the early 1980s with a group of 5 or 6 actors who were determined to make theater socially relevant and get people to engage with critical issues; initially they were very influenced by Ibsen. they alternated between English-language works and adaptations or original works in Nepali, now moving toward more Nepali. so we couldn’t understand the language of this play but we figured what the heck, we’d at least get the feel of things and learn what we could before and after. it had some nicevisual imagery and like i said there are many many Hindi words recognizable in Nepali-- from namaste-kripaya-dhanyavad to inqilab zindabad. from what we could make out it was about this guy who’s all depressed and fatalistic about the state of society and perhaps disillusioned with revolutionary politics as well. he also had a pregnant wife, a flirtation with a prostitute, and a missing important paper of some sort that was causing him to freak out. unfortnately the female characters didn’t get to do much but serve as accouterments to our sensitive heroe’s misery.

[by the way i also got to see some excellent Hindi and/or Urdu-phone theater in Bombay and Delhi and even Lucknow. Bollywood Shmollywood. there’s great stuff with political, social and literary depth and fine technical acting. much of it has some connection to the Prithvi theater in Bombay. and also, as it happens, to the Urdu Progressive Writers tradition. i saw Essay Communications’ Kharaashein making a statement against communalism as part of the Prithvi festival in Delhi, and Naseeruddin Shah’s Manto Ismat Hazir Hain in Bombay, and Kaifi aur Main from Kaifi Azmi’s personal papers read by Shabana Azmi and Javed Akhtar in Lucknow. check out these links.
www.prithvitheatre.org
www.ipta.org [Indian People’s Theater Assoc.]
www.aarohantheatre.org

and also read this book: Anthems of Resistance by Raza Mir and Ali Husain Mir.
and see the old Guru Dutt/Sahir Ludhianvi movie Pyaasa.

on mon, we visited the social science baha where they have various talks and research facilities and share a building with the Himal magazine office, in the neighborhood of the university. too quick a trip to do much that was worth while, but good to discover for futrue reference. we also continued with our informal study group...in which each day of our travels we tried to continue our Urdu work [whether over many momos in a succession of cafes, or on a carpet of pine needles in the ex-Royal Nagarjuna forest reserve-- to do which we had to leave our passports with some soldiers and answer questions] by reading part of Sardar Jafri’s Lucknow ki Panch Raaten and also by reading and discussing a couple of books on the Maoist movement and the People’s War that i bought there.

in the same neighborhood we also happened to arrive in time for a big festival in which 2 carts drag swaying, towering cones 3-4 stories tall, which are covered in pine branches and topped with flags and red bunting, which i believe represent images of spiritual beings who in practice from what i can see kind of fuse aspects of Buddha with Hindu deities. don’t quote me on this though. again, we’re deducing from scraps of Q&A with friendly people, and a mention in our borrowed guide book. the interesting part, we thought, was that the crowd in the wake of this tug of war was completely quiet-- no music, no chanting, no drums, no slogans, no shouting or cheering. but it wasn’t grim, just focused.

on tues, it was the first anniversary of Democracy Day, or apr 23 2006, when the uprising i mentioned was consolidated last year. so there were big celebratory rallies and lots of news coverage along the lines of “how far have we come so far, what problems are we still dealing with” etc. i wanted to attend the big thousands-strong demonstration but due to a misunderstanding we didn’t discover the correct location until the next day. but maybe this was for the best as it gave us the opportunity for a lot of discussion about what it means to be a foreign traveler who has the means to just show up to such things without longterm local engagement in the struggle...even if we are people who are committed longterm to other points of struggle linked to this one in the global sense, to which the activists here too are quick to assert the links. still, to the naked eye, what makes the difference between a genuine gesture of solidarity, and opportunistic adventure-travel voyeurism? would we have been welcomed or resented? and of course, the old favorite, should one feel guilty to be a temporary visitor spending recreational money in a place where tourism is the primary industry? if so, how guilty? are we contributing in a small way to some economic redistribution, or just being exploitative? should we just embrace our role as tourists for a few days, quit thinking so much, enjoy the yummy food and buy some pashminas?

on weds, i was thus sitting touristically in our hotel drinking a cold coffee when i noticed that the staffers were all standing raptly around a speaker unit from which sounds were coming that had first registered on my consciousness only vaguely, as if someone were watching an action movie in the next room: spurts of rapid gunfire, explosions, shouting, excited voiceover. then i realized it was the radio. so to confirm, i asked them, is that the radio?yes. is this happening right now? yes. what exactly is happening? the Maoists are fighting the government. where? west of city.

i wasn’t sure if they meant the western part of the city, or if they meant somewhere outside of the city to the west. i also wasn’t sure who exactly they meant by the government, since these days that’s precisely the question: who is the government and how is it constituted, and what role in it the supposed-to-be-disarming Maoists themselves now play in it, as fuller participants than they have been at any previous time. but before i could get more answers the manager came and made the staffers turn it off. i’m not sure if it was more that he wanted them to get back to work and not stand around, or if he didn’t want them to upset the guests [marring our touristic experience in this idyllic mountain shangri-la].

either way, as soon as the sound was switched off, it was eerily easy to forget. i’m just here sipping cold coffee in a lovely mountain garden amongst the spiritual pilgrims and action trekkers and new age hippies. for the city is also dotted with many unobtrusive and a few flamboyantly magnificent Hindu and Buddhist shrines and stupas and temples. if you go out early in the morning before the tourist commerce starts, the air is full of bells ringing as people do their daily prayers and offerings all over the place. on our last day we walked up to the iconic Shahbhunath stupa where we weren’t allowed all the way in without paying, but we still got a great view of the valley and got to enjoy lots of statues and prayer flags and sacred monkeys.

on the way back the bus ride was pretty scary because the bus broke down with a diesel leak before we’d even left the outskirts of Kathmandu, and then from the sound of things as we squealed our way downhill through the night, the brakes were none too reliable either. then there was the drunk guy who had to get kicked off around midnight. and the high-strung high-maintenance hippie couple chopping raw ginger on bread and spilling their herbs and veggies in the aisle and then chewing out rickshaw drivers who the rest of us thought had charged a perfectly reasonable price to carry their mountains of boxes and backpacks to the border. and the full of himself white-boy adventurer wanna-be who kept bragging about the 30 exciting countries he’d been to of which out of all of them “South Asia’s the craziest...in South Asia you just never know..anything can happen in South Asia, know what i mean?....you don’t? you mean you DON’T think South Asia’s a crazy place? and you’ve been LIVING here?...well, i’ve been to a lot of parts of South Asia. how many parts have you been to?” [of course we knew what he meant. but there was no way we were going to give him the satisfaction of agreeing with his orientalist pseudo-cosmopolitan cracker ass who thinks knowledge of the world is measured purely in coverage and never in depth and points to the dhaba by the side of the road where the driver has elected to take a several-hours’ midnight nap while we kill time looking at the stars from the top of the bus, with a knowing “well THAT’s sure a dose of culture, right?”.]

i’m now in Delhi hanging around for a day or two before my plane back to the US. another post coming [really!] when i return.

WRAPPING UP

15 december 2006

i realize i should have told you more about some of the other historically and/or culturally significant things we’ve seen in the last couple of months...like the British Residency, the site of many tales of death and mayhem where major battles of the 1857 mutiny occurred and where there are now picturesquely semi-ruined buildings, a museum, lovely grounds to wander around in, a Sufi shrine with adjacent mosque where people seem to do namaz in a rather puja-like fashion [wall-niches painted green with incense sticks still smoking ghostlike fragrance after someone’s gone] and they’re always friendly to strange ferenghi peering in...

and Deva Sharif, yet another Sufi shrine northeast of Lucknow. actually i can think of at least 4 little shrines within the course of my daily travels where some Sufi met his or her maker. in fact it seems like in these parts the entire soil must be seeded with the bones of Sufis memorialized where they fell. that’s got to be good for us, right? actually there was another urs in the cemetery just around the corner in our own neighborhood, this one rather small and modest and i’d heard more accomplished qawwals, but just as passionate and welcoming when we payed it a visit late one full moon night. Deva Sharif though is quite big and famous, with a school attached. when we arrived the bigwigs ushered us into a reception room, gave us tea and sweets, answered questions about the place and its saint, and draped us in vari-colored rose-scented chadors [mine is very tasteful, green textured with gold starry spangles and silver tinsel fringe]. however due to stupid planning we weren’t able to go inside the sanctuary because those were their closed hours.

so instead we were forced against our own free choice to pass the rest of the afternoon at a trippy and disturbing place called Kalagaon, ie art-village, which is basically a Rural India theme park cum craft-workshop center, to get to which we drove through miles of actual rural India where actual villagers were living their actual lives [postmodern hyperreality anyone?]. although it was crammed with hordes of Indian school groups and promenading Indian families, i noticed that only the foreigners received fawning adulation and namastes at the entrance and got their foreheads anointed with red paste and sparkles and rose petals. what’s up with that?

nevertheless inside the fake village there were some enjoyable features, such as the mannequins depicting happy villagers climbing palm trees or sowing crops or doing night-watchman duty with a lantern, and a set of mannequin legs sitting on a cottage step without a torso, a live bullock cart giving fast and bumpy rides, some Rajasthani puppeteers [how’d they end up in a village in eastern UP?] some bizarre statuary such as a giant watermelon with a wedge cut out, its weirdly sexual resulting gap the perfect size for artistically posing in to take pictures of each other; the giant blue hand of a god emerging from the ground and holding a conical mountain on its finger much in the style of Magritte, i thought; and a cornucopia-like hill of sculpted vegetables we christened the Giant Sabzi-- so big that you could go inside it, look out the windows, and climb the central staircase to the top of the tunnel-slide that rocketed you out one side into a sandpit below. it was the fastest slickest slide i can ever remember riding. so the day wasn’t a total waste.

the last few days in Lucknow before break were the week designated the most auspicious for weddings in the whole year. so on practically every street at all hours you would encounter a baraat with a brass band, chains of men with blazing light-bulb-studded panels mounted on their heads, horses, elephants, revelers; or you’d pass a lawn or hall set up with tents and garlands and chandeliers and buffets and DJs and gazillions of fairy lights and a big light-up sign at the from with the names of the newlyweds and maybe some interlinked hearts or something. down the street from our house there’s an old aristocratic house with a big garden that’s rented out for such things; during this week the tents-regalia-paraphernalia stayed up for the whole time while they simply kept changing the names in front:
Lakshmi Weds Sachin.
Neerada Weds Arvind.
Navin Weds Natasha.
etc etc etc.
i was curious whether all these couples’ families had chipped in equally for the party planning or if the first and last ones got stuck with the set and strike.

on the second last day of class we had an authentic “cultural program” which featured presentations by most of the students and some of the teachers too, revealing all their hidden gifts of shairi and sangeet, including plangent songs, lambent ghazals, a rendition of Khaake Paan Benaraswala with real paan, an original courtroom drama, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s self-anointed successors the Super Secret of God Mastt Mastt Qawwali Masters, and Urdu free verse poems by me along with interpretive movement-- you know, bouncing monkeys, dying sepoys, that sort of thing. then we gorged on coffee, cake, jellabi and gulabjamun and went home.

look for poems, recipes and winter vacation report soon.

SOCRATIC METHOD

late november-early december 2006
my friend Rowena has a wonderful gift for making warm, deep, lasting connections with random people who instantly adore her. one of these is a woman she met on the train, a grandmother who teaches high school biology, writes Urdu poetry and historical pamphlets on the side, and harbors a boldly iconoclastic and exploratory mind. she is passionate about the rights of women and hates the oppressions of organized religion, but feels obliged to only allow free rein to her progressive opinions in private.

a few weeks later she invited us to her home, sat us down for tea and sweets, shared pictures of her daughter and grandchild, her poems, and back issues of magazines from Manushi [the Delhi-based social justice and women’s rights organization], and launched direct into the frank questions she wanted to ask-- in those precious spaces where which women can speak freely with one another, she said.
what do you think about premarital sex?
what do you think about homosexuality? crime, sin, choice, nature?
what do you think is the best way to deal with homosexual teenagers?
what about domestic violence?
when do you think a woman should leave her husband? if she is in an abusive relationship, what should she do?
what do you think about god?
it was a treasured experience both as language practice and as a unique human connection.

but before this, she had invited Ro to bring a couple of her friends along to speak to the students at her school and i got the opportunity to be one of them. based on the quickie tour we were given, the school itself was quite impressive. it felt happy and open rather than highly disciplinary and driven as i had perhaps unfairly expected. the student body is mostly Muslim with a few Hindus, but they were in the midst of celebrating Eid, Divali and Christmas...because they think holidays are fun plus the school is committed to counteracting communalism. in rather Hogwartian mode, there are are 4 “houses” even though it’s not a boarding school, named for Tagore, Gandhi, Mhd. Iqbal and Sir Syed Ahmad Khan; each group is photographed wearing color-coded accessories to their uniforms.

so Ro and Julie and i found ourselves seated at a table with microphones in front of a roomful of somewhere between 50 and 100 students. i’d guess the students were between 14 and 16, both boys and girls. some of the girls and some of the female teachers wore hijab, others didn’t, and it didn’t seem to be a big deal for anyone. what impressed me was that both the boys and the girls who spoke seemed extremely smart, self-possessed, confident and well-spoken...which pleasantly counteracted all stereotypical and statistical expectations about Indian Muslim girls in particular being suppressed intellectually and socially.

nevertheless i was sort of terrified, since this was much more formal and public than i’d been led to believe, and it was happening all in Hindi/Urdu! what, you want me to...speak??? first we each introduced ourselves, then students came up one by one to the mic to ask questions of our little panel, and then finally we asked them questions and they came up to answer in self-selected mode. some of their questions: [the usual.] why have you chosen to study Urdu? how did you come to be interested in India? what methods do you use in your studies? what problems have you encountered in Lucknow, and/or in your studies? what do you/Americans think about India? what do you/Americans think about Islam?

we talked about our own experiences and intentions in this language program, and were also quite honest about sexism in public spaces being a major problem for us in Lucknow. at one point we strayed toward criticism of the Bush administration and the war in Iraq but were gently diverted from this perilous path lest things get too sensitive for the school. next we returned questions like what about YOUR studies? why have YOU chosen to study Urdu as an optional elective? what do you, especially you girls, want to do when you’re done with school? what do you think about America?

they said that they liked American people but not American government policy; that studying Urdu is important to them because--shit, i can't remember that part--; and that choosing to wear hijab or not had nothing to do with whether or not a woman should work outside the home. of course she should. they wanted to be laywers, teachers, entrepreneurs. as we were leaving, some of the qirls tagged after us to shake our hands, beaming, and thank us for coming...some emotional to the point of being near tears, saying how much it meant to them for us to be there, and hoping we’d come back...i hope so too.

TOUCH THE SILVER BABY

mid-november 2006
a few of us went on a bike ride in the morning, headed out of town, just to see what we could see. it was kind of an initial foray, a reconnaisance mission-- we thought that first we’d start exploring Lucknow’s environs, and then we had high hopes of getting all the way to somewhere else, like maybe Kanpur...or Varanasi...or Nepal...on second thought, we realized that would probably be all uphill with no gear shifts...

anyway, while this particular bike ride was pleasant and refreshing, there wasn’t anything particularly exciting to report...except for this:

southeast of town we starting following this guy who was pedaling a cycle-cart loaded with plastic or plaster lawn-type statuary-- elephants, maudlin dogs, green parrots, and babies...with a gleaming SILVER BABY on top. we were enthralled. it was so delightfully surreal and really quite Southern Gothic. we followed him for a while, making this our new course-setting device, but then decided he was going too slow and who knew how long this could go on, so we passed him with the stipulation that we had to touch the baby on the way around to put some closure on the interaction. we each stretched out an arm to do this as we veered around him in the road. then later we overtook him again in a side street of villas where he seemed to be making a delivery and we were perusing pigs, ponds, and a way to turn around for lunch. i don’t think he was delighted to see us. anyway, long story short, by the time we got back to town "Touch the silver baby!" had become a catchphrase and we were determined to introduce it into frequent use except that we didn't quite know what it should mean. then we figured it out: our last stop was at an enticingly eerie-looking-despite-bright-sunlight garrison church at the edge of the military cantonment at the edge of town. as we were tiptoeing through the echoey church and feeling kind of haunted thrills and wondering where this kind of frisson comes from even of you’re not religous...and then once we were back out in the sunshine dissecting the feeling and its source-- is it the architecture, certain kinds of space, combined with other techniques that induce changes in consciousness? consensus of years upon years of agreeing that a place is special or holy? built-up psychic charge from such focused concentration from so many people? simple sense of history? mass delusion? extra-rational senses that are nevertheless valid?-- we suddenly realized that to touch the silver baby means those moments when a self-proclaimed nonbeliever can’t deny the experience or recognition of that sense of the uncanny and of unexplained "divine" presence. and i have to say, if you haven’t ever touched the silver baby you’re missing out.

HI FOLKS, HAPPY NEW YEAR..

i know i’m way behind on my updates and all of these posts should have been put up weeks ago. let’s just say i’m approximating the good old days when news from India had to travel by ship around the Cape of Good Hope. in which case i’m making great time in getting you news. so here are some belated bulletins, and next i’ll work on reporting my travels over winter break in Mumbai and Udaipur. best wishes for 2007.

LEAVING LUCKNOW

LEAVING LUCKNOW:
TRIP ONE
30 october 2006

i went to Mumbai and Delhi during our break in late october for the Eid/Divali holidays and had a great time in both places. the weirdest part was that i saw more westerners there in a few days than i’d seen in the previous 2 months. i kept marveling, look at all the white people! they're everywhere! who are they? why are they here? do they know they look goofy in their ethnic-spicy clothing? ai hai, o fo, do i look that goofy too?

Divali weekend in Bombay was one nonstop string of multicolored explosions and deafening thunder. as strings of crackers went off on busy streets i was amazed that no cars were blown up. though my cousins were all a bit jaded, i myself was entranced by the strings of lights streaming down the fronts of apartment buildings, outlining windows and balconies, turning alleys and patios into magic gardens. i lit some crackers and temporarily went deaf in one ear. i ate massive quantities of sweets and top-drawer kulfi, but little else.

it was also really good to see my family-- some of them for the first time in over ten years. it was rather heartwarming to feel embraced as part of a clan with certain recognizable characteristics which i happen to share. everyone said i look exactly like my dad. when i told him this later, he said “sorry about that.” [thanks for the self-esteem boost!]

then in Delhi i stayed in a district right next to the railway station called Paharganj, which resembles someone’s idea of a heaven or hell for globetrotting hippie backpackers, dense with sabse saste hostels and internet outlets and tiny shops. places like that remind me of those trippy kaleidoscopic pictures of fractals, in that things are always flowering out into smaller microcosms, opening out behind and above. nothing is a simple facade: chowks behind alleys off of chowks behind alleys, balconies and stairways rooftops and courtyards jammed together in layers; temples or doctors’ offices tucked away behind jellabi-fryers or news vendors.

the vast majority of said backpackers are Israeli; apparently they come to India in vast droves to recover from military service by getting stoned, tranced and partied out. in some parts of the country they’ve superceded all other tourism, and this neighbourhood definitely caters to that clientele. i saw as many menus, signs etc in Hebrew, as much or more than i saw in English or Hindi. so i’m thinking, great, my identity issues are complicated enough right now, and AS USUAL everyone will now just assume i too am Israeli. but no, as i was sitting in the top of a cafe waiting for a 25-rupee masala dosa i heard the kitchen guy call to the waiter to see to the “Yankee upar.” [hmm, i wonder what gave me away?]

in my hostel, the cook in the rooftop terrace/cafe saw me writing Divali cards in Hindi [no, folks, i still haven’t sent them! subliminal fear of the Lucknow post office perhaps?] and came over to talk. he was quite pleased to discover i could speak a little bit, since most of the international travelers there don’t know any and are also, i might add, in my humble observation, quite rude and demanding whereas i was making an effort to behave with perhaps a bit more flexibility and patience. anyway he stopped to talk with me and told me about his family who lives in Nepal, where he is also from, and which he says is extremely beautiful. i took it as a sign that i must get to the mountains before i leave.

in Delhi i wandered around a lot, tramping past the Gateway of India, the Purana Qila [Old Fort], Lodi Gardens. i figure i’ll check off a few more of the tourist sights each time i go. i sprained my hand boarding a bus [they never seem really to stop; they only kind of slow down while you flag it down and run after it and jump on or off] but it’s almost better now.

i also did some research in the archives at Jawaharlal Nehru University...which resembles someone’s idea of a heaven or hell for lefty intellectuals. actually it’s physically not unlike UCSC, with roads winding through a wild wooded area with buildings scattered unpredicatbly among them in a nonlinear fashion. also, remember how i said they had no ideology at Lucknow U, only power politics? well at JNU the ideology is so thick you could slice it with a knife and stuff it into one of those fat deli sandwiches that you can’t get into your mouth.

in the couple of days that i was on campus i was intrigued to try to decude who the different student groups are, by following the tracks of the fierce and impassioned conflicts whose record was slathered thickly over the walls and bus stops. what i deduced was that the AISA and the AVDP despise each other, and that AISA was recently appealing to a bunch of other groups saying see, see, will you admit we were right that AVDP is evil, now that they’ve attacked you too?

representative nuggets of AVDP rhetoric:
Down with naxalism.
Down with Maoist terrorism-- sideline anti-national AISA on JNU campus.
Stop Congress-Communist hypocritical and unholy alliance.
Strength is life. Weakness is death. (Vivekananda)
Bande Mataram.

and the writing on the left-hand wall:
Defend India’s sovereignty against imperialist globalization.
Resist globalization, smash capitalism.
Unite against female foeticide.
End patriarchy-- no morality-policing of women in the name of tradition.
For half the earth, half the sky, we will fight and win.
[hidden word that ends with p-- rise up?] brothers of misery, we want no frontiers! Destroy the bourgeoisie and suppress tyranny. We must have heart’s energy. (John Reed)
Strike against the injustice and insensitivity of JNU: massive dharna demanding scholarships for needy students.
Smash regressive social structures of casteism, patriarchy, communalism.
Down with fascist Modi government-- support rehabilitation for riot victims.
Hands off Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine: oppose US-Israeli imperialist designs.
IMF, WB, WTO: Diktats of imperialism.
Bush proposes, Manmohan imposes.
Unite for a radical restructuring of society.
Oppose forced relocation in the name of development.
Independence we won; democracy we established; socialism we practice.

and this isn’t even counting the long detailed policy statements, declarations, and point by point arguments and counter-arguments.

my deductions were later confirmed when i learned from friends-of-friends who are students there that these are the student front organizations of the CPI-ML and the BJP, respectively...in other words, the farthest left and farthest right of major Indian political parties. the other groups also correspond to various mostly left parties. but there are also newer forces on campus upsetting this balance by introducing a platform of “equality” against reservations [comparable to affirmative action in the US] and by a caste-based movement slicing right across the left-right axis by denouncing the entire spectrum as uniformly upper-caste-ist. very interesting.

LEAVING LUCKNOW
TRIP TWO
16november 2006

overall, i find Delhi a breath of fresh air from Lucknow, and just an easy train ride away. but you should skip this next section if you find political commentary to be more a stifling sensation than a breath of fresh air.

i went back a couple of weeks later to attend the India Social Forum, a subsidiary of the World Social Forum-- this despite the warnings of several of JNU’s far left groups that the WSF/ISF is a mere reformist puppet of the corporate world, tool of capitalist imperialism, and an ineffectual tamasha to boot. i read the handout and they do have some good points. nevertheless it was a good place to get information about a lot of the different issues, organizations and movements.

it was held in three separate big dusty areas inside a giant stadium, in which everywhere you looked there was a regional womens’ or childrens’ group performing political street theater, members of various scheduled tribes, kisan, dalit or self-determination groups marching, drumming, singing or chanting slogans; delegations of the aforementioned squatting en masse in the dust to eat dal-caval on paper plates while visitors snacked on samosas and chai in plastic cups. flocks of people plied me with flyers on every topic, from river dams to HIV/AIDS to Burmese democracy. there were also communist bookstalls, artwork, and a film screening tent. one of my favorite things was the museum of bicycle lore and art sponsored by the rickshaw-wallahs’ union.

the scale was so big that unfortunately i felt like a spent most of my time wandering around trying to find things, or to decide which of the 10 simultaneous events to check out. and in the end i didn’t really learn anything i didn’t already know [you mean...can it be true??? corporate capitalism has had adverse effects on the global south?!?!?!?!?!]

some of the things i sampled:
--anti-Coca-Cola campaign: here i learned that Coke is BAD! in Plachimada, Kerala,they drain village groundwater supplies and then pass out toxic sludge as fertilizer, harass and intimidate union organizers or anyone who protests these practices...this India-based group is in coordination with a group in Colombia, where Coke has assassinated something like 8 union organizers in its bottling plants, and another group that works on eliminating Coke from college campuses in the US and Britain. but the real issue at the heart of the matter, the speakers emphasized, beyond a single softdrink, is privatization and control of water supplies.

--panel on self-determination movements and national sovereignty: this touched on the Tamil struggle in the south AND the separatist movements in Assam, Manipur and Nagaland in the northeast. one shaggy fellow looking the part of the proper guerrilla [though the ISF doesn’t permit participation by armed resistance groups] in Che T-shirt, camouflage jacket and long moustache gave a rousing speech in what i think [but am not sure, forgive me elder Ramnaths] was Tamil, in the liquid flow of which were strewn occasional English words like “imperialism,” and “neoliberal capitalism”. another guy spoke in English about Assam; this i found a bit muddled, conceptually. he had tons of facts and information, no question about that; but he kept vacillating between saying things like “it is the obligation of the [Indian] state to provide us with X, Y and Z; where are X, Y and Z?” and things like “we just want to rule ourselves”; between sentiments like “i am an Indian too! why am i not recognized as an Indian?” and “my people must have a separate homeland!” i found myself thinking, make up your mind: are you angry because you want in and you’re left out, or because you want out and you’re forced in? i guess maybe what it comes down to is that because India had NOT provided X, Y and Z, and had withheld recognition and inclusion-- in other words, to let them fully in-- for these reasons they now want out. he also talked about Assamese activist “Iron” Sharmila who has been fasting for 6 years [kept alive by forced tube feeding] for repeal of the brutal Armed Forces Special Powers Act.

--panel on Gujarat and the aftermath of the 2002 massacre: here i learned that, believe it or not folks, 4 years on and it’s not all better; i’m shocked, shocked. actually reminded me of the way New Orleans gets talked about in the US-- ie, that despite the fact that it cast light on [and exacerbated] deep socio-economic faultlines and prejudices, it seems to be such an effort for imvolved groups to simply keep it on the popular radar screen for low attentions spans beyond the temporary drama of disaster headlines. so anyway, they ran through the litany that ripple effects of death and misery continue amongst the displaced Muslim population, people still have not all reclaimed their homes and livelihoods, there is still fear, tension, and irreparable damage to inter-community relations, the perpetrators are still not being held responsible, etc etc. it was all in Hindi and i could actually understand most of it. too bad that beyond reporting that all of this is indeed NOT all better, there doesn’t seem to be much of an answer about what anyone should DO about it.

--documentary on the Komagata Maru called Continuous Voyage. related to my Ghadar movement research so i’d been wanting to see it for awhile. don’t get me started, i’ll go on for hundreds of pages.

--documentary on the Pakistani rock band Junoon called The Mullahs and the Rock Star. it had some interesting stuff to say about South Asian Islam-- contrasting “purifying” [and Arabizing] orthodox doctrines with an indigenous Sufi tradition of ecstatic music and unmediated mysticism...and claiming that by this argument, the mullahs’ denunciation of rock music in general and Junoon in particular as a decadent, un-Islamic contamination of Pakistani culture is completely inaccurate [both historically and theologically], and that this rock group fits squarely in the latter tradition.

--children’s rights caucus: the previous day, children from all around the country who participated had come up with a list of demands to “represent the voices of our friends back home, share with you our dreams and put forward our demands for a better world.” it’s a long list, and it included: good quality affordable and accessible education [and playground equipment] for all-- education was the most emphasized issue and included quite a few individual points; nutritious food and safe drinking water; government hospitals and health facilities in every village; eliminating gender discrimination including female foeticide; equal rights and opportunities for differently abled kids; stopping child labour and child marriage, exploitation of street kids, trafficking and “bad” tourism; ending police harassment [“such police should be punished and children should be protected”]; ending family violence and corporal punishment [“children should be able to live in a neat, clean and violence free environment”]; stopping evictions [“but if it has to happen, everyone should get proper shelter”]; fair employment for parents including migrants.

i was heartened by the fact that the children themselves had generated this document, or so i was told. the part i was less optimistic about was that the school-teacherish woman who cornered me at the door of the tent kept trying to convince me how important it was to get accountability for these demands-- sure, of course-- but that this meant above all “ensuring that the State gives us what we want. this is the only way. we can’t leave it to the localities. it’s the State’s duty to provide this for us. involvement at the family and community levels is useless without the State. we must ALL be empowered...to petition the State.”

of course i thought she had it precisely backwards, that power and organization should be decentralized and flow from the bottom up and be in the hands of local communities. why can’t we all be empowered...to take our own collective action to meet our own community needs? what about panchayat councils? what about neighborhood or basti associations? of course, who am i to judge: i don’t know the nuts and bolts of all the situations. given the intense maldistribution of resources, demanding economic outflows and legal accountability from the center may be crucial to enable people to undertake such projects, so they can actually be realized. nevertheless it’s a paradigm that i fundamentally disagree with.

overall, the ISF was quite the spectacle of edu-tainment-- to claim a slogan from the world famous Ten Minute Limit. but i tend to agree with the criticisms that the Social Forum doesn’t really accomplish any concrete organizational purpose. this is not to say that the participating movements and groups aren’t doing important and effective work; they are. i just didn’t think this extravaganza added anything in pragmatic terms to the separate projects they’re already doing on their own; and so the resources used to produce this thing might have been better used elsewhere.

BACK TO LUCKNOW FOR NOW
for my round trip i took the overnight train, which i really like.

first of all, there’s something about waiting on Indian railway platforms that really appeals to me, maybe because in my sentimental mind it evokes all those movies about the independence movement where you’re waiting for Gandhi to roll into town for a whistle stop speech, or else you’re taking leave of your weeping family to go to be a civil disobedience volunteer or a communist party worker, and you’re maybe wearing khadi and/or some little round lefty intellectual glasses yourself.

in any case despite the new golden quadrilateral of prostitute-hopping long-distance truckers, Indian inter-city travel seems still to be first and foremost by train. i’ve seen plenty of movies which involve a climactic scene of departure, with someone running along the platform as the train pulls out, hands outstretched to touch each other one last time, or else for a dramatic grab to pull someone aboard at the last possible second; and i’ve seen similar things repeated in real life as well. in short it’s iconic.

once aboard i like stretching out on the fold-out triple decker berth with my backpack under my head for safekeeping. i like listening to the snatches of sleepy conversation so i can practice my comprehension skills;

[eg, “ham iski madad kaise karen?”
“thanda hoga. kya apna kambal laya aap?”
“voh NA EK paisa dega.”
“mere dil ne kitna bola...” that last one said in perfectly straightforward manner by an elderly man.]

i like the sensation of moving steadily through the darkness, then stirring to squint at the names on the dimly lit disembodied islands of small town stations where you pause for 2 minutes at the hours of the wolf; and i like waiting for the chai-garam-chai-coffee-coffee-garam-chai guy coming down the aisle for my little steaming plastic cup in the morning, as the landscape emerges from mist and shadows. i also like the odd moment of eye contact when the train passes through a town: whether i’m in the clutch of bicycles lined up at the crossing while the people go by hanging out the train doors, or whether i’m the one peering curiously out the train window at the early farmers and milkmen and bicycles at the crossing. both ways wondering what they’re doing, what they’re doing. wishing for a journey to somewhere exciting...wishing for a place to call home.

RETURN OF STREET-FIGHTER

RETURN OF STREET-FIGHTER
19 october 2006

someone’s always demonstrating in Lucknow. today there’s some sort of mass rally going on just down the road. the main sponsor is the Bahujan Samaj Party, at least judging by the blue bunting draped over the bamboo arches over the roads, and all the little blue flags and the 6-foot tall white plaster elephants. but there are also strings of the Socialist Party’s cute red and green flags with white bicycles and Indian National Congress’s orange and green with upraised hands and the Bharatiya Janata Party’s saffron lotuses. i predict the latter will try to start a fight. there have been lines of people assembling since this morning, and music and speeches and chants blaring out of loudspeakers.

“Bara Sahab ka dusra nam?”
“Kanshi Ram! Kanshi Ram!”
[what’s the Big Man’s other name? KR...]

“Jab tak suraj-chand rahega...”
“Amar Kanshi Ram rahega!”
[as long as the sun and moon remain, KR, immortal, will remain...]

“Bacche bacche bheem hai...”
“Kanshi Ram ka bheem hai!”

at least it sounded like bheem. there were more verses but i either didn’t catch or can’t remember them. i also saw the slogans later, painted in Hindi on the walls across from Ambedkar Maidan [Ambedkar was the writer of the Indian constitution and kind of the Dalit version of Martin Luther King. Kanshi Ram was the founder of the BSP.] along with more quite artistically shaded blue elephants.

some things still in use are refreshingly low-tech, whether you prefer to call it classic or obsolete: such as the loudspeakers, which are basically giant flared trumpet bells mounted on roadside poles or moving jeeps. or the railway crossing system, which consists of a guy sitting in the dingy hut next to the tracks with interior walls the color of police khakis, that looks like it hasn’t been remodeled since 1947, cranking the barrier up and down whenever a train comes, all the livelong day.

the BSP controlled Uttar Pradesh government until recently, when the SP took over. as far as i know they’re the two main ones currently jockeying for position in this area. the BSP was founded for the purpose of uplift and empowerment for lower caste people, though nowadays the leader, Mayawati, often gets accused of just being in for her own aggrandizement, having betrayed a) the people she’s supposed to be representing, and b)the legacy of Kanshi Ram, whose memory today’s tamasha is lauding. she builds lots of ostentatious public monuments, including one big Luxor-via-Vegas-esque mausoleum that’s supposed to be more or less a temple to herself when she dies. it’s near our house. [in giving directions to where we live, it’s often enough to say “Mayawati ke aaspaas.”] the ruling Samajwadi [socialist] party is also supposed to have a program geared toward the needs of the poor, economic justice and development, you know, all that socialist type stuff. in practice, people complain that neither is ideological and both are actually about patronage, competing for the same bank of votes. then there are the BJP and the Communist Party of India-Marxist who hang their red or saffron banners out just down the street from each other across from the capitol building. those who know me can guess my thoughts on both of those.

which reminds of a conversation i had the other day with a colleague, who expressed the opinion that those people who really believe in something with fervour and conviction are scary and dangerous...to which a counter-argument is, are those people who believe in nothing, who are either apathetically self-absorbed, or who are amoralistically out for wealth and power, any less scary and dangerous? why can't we all just enjoy life and be happy and be nice to each other: is it ethical to just be happy and nice and no more, in an unjust world? i’m not being rhetorical, i'm interested to hear your thoughts on this: would you rather deal with someone who believes in something and is committed to an ideal, even if you don’t like their ideal...or someone whose commitments aren’t compelling enough to intrude upon daily life? is there a happy medium between fanaticism and apathy? are flexibility and integrity inversely proportional? are tolerance of others’ ideas and commitment to one’s own?

now there are people streaming up the road, getting off busses that ferried them here from neighboring villages. the women are in bright but well-worn saris and the men are in dusty dhotis and long kurtas, or trousers and short kurtas. some carry signs, some carry children. every so often a gleaming new SUV with BJP logos and lotus flags cuts through the line. they do look poor and in need up uplift and empowerment; they’re uniformly thin and weathered. but are they here because of party conviction, or because they were bussed in to beef up the crowd? are they true believers in Kanshi Ram, betrayed by Mayawati, as the editorials suggest? i lack the confidence [mine and theirs] to ask them.

then there’s also the lively crew over at Lucknow University, where student elections have been going on recently. some dude named Rajan Nayak must have an in with the transportation department or something, because he’s managed to get “Vote for Rajan Nayak” painted on the outside of lots of the buses and tempos. the thing is, these are bigtime events since the major political parties groom candidates in the universities as their own likely future rabblerousers. recently there was an attempt to pass a reform law on the student election process, including campaign spending caps, requirements that candidates must be attending a certain percentage of classes, and that they must be under age 25. in other words, that they be legit students. this caused an uproar: how could such ridiculous demands be placed? outrageous! so students shut down a major intersection in the middle of Lucknow, smashed car windows and set fires.

listen up, proud UCSC “vanguard”: so we shut down the entrances to campus a few times in the last couple of years? here it seems to be pretty standard on most campuses. no big deal. students are routinely up in arms. literally. many of them stockpile weaponry. they march on offices and occupy them, physically encircle or attack officials, shut things down, fuck shit up. sometimes people get killed. this is not always an accident. BUT, and this is a crucial but: we’re back to the question of convictions. this is all just tactics. none of it is necessarily linked to any discernible ideological justification or political analysis other than the calculus of power. student politics is a training and recruiting ground for the big leagues, and it’s a high stakes game. government power in UP is about who knows who and who’s in whose pocket, who promises what to whom in exchange for votes or muscle. corruption and thuggery are endemic.

i feel pretty isolated from the political stuff happening in the streets, unless of course it’s right outside, like today. often i only know something’s going on because the streets are blocked up or you can’t get through the city, and then i learn the specifics in the newspaper the next day. i’m still in watching and learning mode. that’s ok, i’ve got a lifetime, and this is not the sort of politics i’d care to be involved in anyway.

NAFEEZ O NASTALIKH

NAFEEZ O NASTALIKH
10 october 2006

this is one of our institute director’s favorite phrases. it means basically delicacy and sophistication, or gentility and nobility, or something like that, and it’s supposed to sum up her goals for our Urdu. aapka khubsurat tehzib ka tasharif laie, akhlaqi tarbiyet sabse ahm hain, blah blah blah. afficionadoes of Urdu literature tend to venerate the highly refined culture of the Mughal and Nawabi era, especially the art of the ghazal-- i’ve even heard people spouting couplets at each other in daily life, drawing on their repertoires for one apropos for any occasion. “do you have a shair[couplet] for this?” at this point i’m less concerned with that than with being humanly functional.

aside from the great mystical and/or courtly poets, the other main thing that Urdu lit scholars tend to be into is the Progressive Writers Movement of the 1930s-60s, who were avid anti-imperialists and anti-capitalists, and aimed to make relevant literature For The People by exchanging couplets about the Beloved and the moth and the flame and the moon for couplets about the Dawn of Revolution and red flags and oppressed masses. actually there’s still a lot of continuity here, it’s just a newly manifest flame for the impassioned moth. the Beloved is now the People, and the ecstasy of the sacred union is to be sought within the Revolution itself. as you can probably guess, i’m kind of a sucker for the Progressive Writers.

but, back to the culture of old Lucknow:
we met the Nawab, who’s a friendly fellow with a polished-looking bald pate and a clear and melliflous voice. he gave a talk on Lucknavi history and culture at our institute and answered questions about the Life of a Nawab Today [which i’m still not quite clear on, though he he doesn’t seem like too much of a threat as a Semi-Feudal Class Enemy.] then later in the week he received us in a room of his house crammed with artifacts and mementos, chandeliers, platters, urns, ivory letter openers, antique vessels and implements, commemorative plaques, pictures of him with notables, etc. he offered us bananas, namkeen and paan rolled in little brass cones, and told a rambling anecdote involving a camel, urination, and some lost pantaloons. it was difficult to know how to react-- even if you’re sure you really understad the words, which is not 100% certain, do you laugh at the dirty jokes of such a personage or maintain respectful quiet? he also passed out his business card which bore the emblem of the two fish that symbolize the old kingdom of Avadh (they look kind of like dragonish dolphins) and his hotmail account.

we also heard an excellent qawwali performance and visited the Bara Imambara, which was built by Nawab Asif Ud-Daula back when Nawabs ruled things and had things built and played power games with the Mughals and the East India Company. it’s next to a handsome mosque which he also built to compete with the mosque across the way which was Aurangzeb's; one is Sunni and the other Shia. inside the imambara it's all cavernous mint-green halls, and outside it bears signs that say things like “This is your ancestral and cultural heritage. Kindly do not insult it by spitting.” [or in Hindi more explicitly, “Paan thuk kar, gande mat karo”] and “Spreading filth is the work of animals. We are humans.” [“Gande phailana janvari ka kam hai. Ham insaan.”] the highlight of the place for me was the labyrinth of stairs and tunnels above the main halls, that give access to little galleries and alcoves overlooking the interior from the edge of the ceiling domes, as well as onto the roof, where there are panoramic views all the important domes and spires of the city. some turns lead up, some down, some inward into pitch darkness, some outward to airy arches. wandering through it you feel like you’re inside an Escher drawing.

i’ve also experienced a couple of other aspects of Old Lucknow, directly from our very own rooftop: kibootar-bazi and patang-bazi. this means the afficionado-ship of pigeons and kites, respectively. kites are still a big thing; most days if you look up in the sky you’ll see a flock of them, dipping and spinning like birds, handkerchiefs, manta rays. i’ve seen kids standing right in the edge of the traffic flying kites, since you don’t have to run to get them aloft, just do a special kind of jerking motion with the string which seems to be much harder than it looks. these are pretty much the same type of kites that you would use for kite battles during the appropriate festival, but i hear they outlawed the fighting strings, at least in Pakistan, because they’re coated in glass for cutting other strings and too many people were getting badly hurt.

there’s a guy who hangs out on the rooftop adjacent to ours who’s really good at it. our household has not yet mastered the art of launching, despite the neighbor guy throwing one over for us to use and demonstrating his technique. he also has lovely white or white-and-gray-spotted pigeons up there, and he can control their flight patterns, their wheelings and landings, through whispery hisses and arm signals. it’s pretty amazing. in the old days they used the pigeons for fighting too, and also for sending messages.

and the final cultural activity: cricket. i hate cricket. there, i said it. and yes, i am an apostate and plainly not a real South Asian. [why doesn’t anyone here like soccer?] the Institute has been closing early during the month of Ramadan, during which there’s a hiatus on guest speakers and special field trips. so what’s been happening instead is that after lunch, the teachers and students play thrilling cricket in the driveway. since hand-eye coordination has never been one of my skills and swinging at a ball gives me too many unpleasant flashbacks to grade school gym class, i kept refusing to play; though i did offer my services as a wall-scaler, ledge-reacher and stray-ball-chaser, which are things i’m good at, until the guard at the neighboring apartment building got upset with me. so then i began to serve as half a player-- namely, the bottom half. some batters had been recently sick and didn’t want to run, whereas i love to run and didn’t want to bat, so i became their surrogate legs. this seemed to be a mutually satisfactory system. but i still don’t understand the rules, the scoring, or the general appeal. give me soccer any day.

MY COMMUTE

MY COMMUTE
2 October 2006
(happy birthday, Gandhi-ji)

dear readers:
agar aap Hindustan se parichit hue hain, ya aap yahan rahte hain, maf kijie. yeh sab aapko aata hai. i’m stating the obvious.
ye likhai un logon ke lie hain, jinhone Hindustan kabhi dekha nahin.

so, to the rest of you--
some things i see on my way to school.

cows.
goats.
dogs.
water buffalo.

the goats sound uncannily like humans imitating goats. once i passed a rickshaw carrying 7 kids [i mean the goats]-- 5 with their bellies on the seat and their hind legs trailing off the back, and 2 more lying in the footrest. all plaintively saying baaa just the way you and i would.

the dogs come in two distinct styles. you could call them class differences. the street dogs are leggy and long tailed and jackal-eared, with short coats. aside from the fact that they are so bony and mangy and fleabitten, they look clever and resourceful and they seem the kind of dogs i’d like to have. the pet dogs are the little yappy fluffball type, perhaps to more clearly differentiate them from street dogs.

the cows and bulls fulfill stereotype by being beatifically everywhere, eating garbage or wandering through the traffic with their effulgent eyes, imposing humps, curly horns and smelly bottoms. i once had to literally lean against a cow to get my bike out of the crush outside a movie theater where it was wedged between said cow and a motorcycle. watch out for droppings.

morning routines: men in loincloths vigorously soap themselves up and rinse in buckets on the side of the road. people cook breakfast in mini mobile kitchens, the same kind of cart that’s used for selling fruit and vegetables, selling shoes, ironing clothes, frying snacks, boiling chai, anything you like-- basically a wooden flat mounted on 4 bicycle wheels. also good for sleeping on once you close up shop for the day. some of the rickshaw drivers go home to families at night, but others just sleep on the curb or on the rickshaw seat. i see them at night or early morning gathered in clumps, here and there making little campfires under trees in a traffic island.

police posts: off duty cops sleep on folding cots in canvas tents or hang their towels and khakis out to dry. the ones on duty hang out in front sauntering around or leaning casually on their rifles. a recent newspaper poll determined that the majority of Indian citizens experience the police to be a “threatening and hostile presence.”

old aristocratic houses that look like they were sketched with smudged ochre pastels, framed in tangled gardens and picturesque decrepitude behind walls. domes and pointed arches and frilled balconies and intricate screens and arabesques, all crumbling. fruiting and flowering tropical trees.

construction sites: workers perch high on rickety-looking scaffolds of rope and bamboo. more workers at the bottom toss gravel against angled mesh screens until it’s winnowed into fine sand. for concrete, i guess. the dogs like to make nests in the piles of sand-- soft, warm, form-fitting-- to sleep in.
people toil in the sun along the broad new flyover road, bent over breaking up big slabs of rock into smaller chunks of rock and smaller chunks of rock into gravel. others tote the chunks of all sizes in baskets or on their heads. at night they make cooking fires and stretch out to sleep right there by the worksite under shelters of tarp or plastic sheeting slung over bamboo poles.
a woman in a parrot-green sari with necessarily perfect posture piles a castle of bricks on her head. a woman in a candy-pink sari bears a bundle of grass the size of a haystack on hers.
it never ceases to amaze me how people can do hard physical labor from dawn to dusk every day for years, on painfully substandard nutrition. like running a marathon on one cup of juice. the cost is that it ages them fast, so that someone you think is 50 or older might actually be 30 or younger.

bicycles, motorcycles, scooters:
milkmen hang a big metal cannister on each side. office workers hang tiffins on the handle bars. wives balance skilfully behind husbands, kids behind dads, moms behind daughters, any 2 guys, any 2 girls. if you ride on the back, make sure your legs are hanging off on the left. if you learned the road in North America, remember traffic flows on the left not the right, but if you forget it’s not that big a deal because half the time people are cruising unconcerned up the wrong side of the road anyway. if you’re wondering how women ride bikes without getting tangled in their dupattas, the secret is that you tie the ends behind your back. let me tell you, wearing a dupatta and a backpack at the same time can have complex results. all bikes, for you bike people, are basically fixed gear, and very upright with narrow handle bars and broad springy seats.

cycle rickshaws. auto rickshaws. more cycle rickshaws. they’re basically giant tricycles with a passenger bench on the back, and a fold-up awning for when it rains. they’re personalized with patterns of birds, fish, and flowers done with rivets and scraps of of red, yellow, blue and green metal, or with names: Deepu, Qaif, Suresh 2, Bobby.
they’ve been having student elections at Lucknow University, which is a bigger deal than it is in the states because it’s seen as a training and recruiting ground for the major political parties (and their partners in organized crime, it appears. more on this later.) this dude Rajan Nayak must have an in with the transportation department because he’s gotten “Vote for Rajan Nayak” painted on scads of city buses and tempos.

there are some cars, but they’re outnumbered by all of the above. most of the cars belong either to the police, the military or the government. these are the most obnoxious things on the road, big white Ambassadors that barge through like the original Juggernaut crushing anything in their path, honking continously at a level that would be 11 on a Spinal Tap amp. i cuss at them every time they pass, trusting that my English cussing does not raise hackles the way Hindi cussing would. though i know those words too and keep them ready just in case for when i might need them, like for Eve-teasing.

i sometimes take rickshaws if i’m going out with friends on the weekend, but usually i bike or walk. at the beginning i was doing the rickshaw thing by default, before i learned my way around, but i didn’t like it. partly just because of my native restlessness and my preference for physical activity and personal autonomy. but also because the whole situation of sitting pretty while someone pulls you around with the sweat of his skinny brow makes me feel weird. we’ve all discussed this amongst ourselves, and everyone comes up with their own rationale. for some, it goes something like this: you are not refraining from exploiting the drivers by not taking rides from them; you are merely depriving them of their income. so ride, and just pay handsomely.
but, but, but, am i supposed to just embrace a paternalistic role in an inequitable system? do i just accept that my sole obligation as an economically privileged person is to treat my peons with beneficence? i am uncomfortable with this. i prefer to simplify things by conveying myself through my own labor rather than buying someone else’s. i prefer to not use the services of anybody for anything i can do for myself, and that is very different than the way things most often work here. self-reliance is not expected, or even necessarily assumed desirable. (it makes me realize how deeply ingrained the liberal-individualist assumptions are in my cultural training.)
of course the choice to walk or bike is not going to change the economic relationships, any more than the choice to ride. but my ideal of interdependency is of mutuality among equals, and this is all one-sided.

tune in next time for the Rant of the Day and more politics in the street.

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ON THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE AND A POSSIBLE 5 SECONDS OF FAME

ON THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE AND A POSSIBLE 5 SECONDS OF FAME
28 september 2006

who knows, maybe i’ll appear on an Indian CNN broadcast. they showed up at our school today to do what i guess was feature story about Americans learning Urdu-- something which people here seem to regard with fascinated incredulity. the big question is always WHY we would want to do study this language. more on this below.

anyway. so, CNN showed up at our school. first they wanted to take footage of classes in session-- “just act natural” and all that [yeah, right]-- as we continued what we were doing, with painful self-consciousness. then they got all of us together in the main room and told us to keep going, even though we were done for the day. “that’s ok: dummy class.” [what? oh my god! but i thought all news footage was purely spontaneous, a transparent window on reality!] so our director made some announcements-- in Urdu-- of things we already knew about while the camera panned around our faces demonstrating our alert comprehension. it was all completely bizarre.

then they wanted individual interviews. they started by randomly choosing people, selecting the blondest, rosiest, bluest-eyed specimens of Typical Americans they could see. “what is your name? where are you from? why are you here? how did you come to study in this program? how do you like India? WHY are you studying Urdu?”
everyone did a good job i thought...but still, there was a lot of quoting of poetry, which the news crew liked, and a lot of statements like “well, i’m studying South Asian Islam, so...”
i felt like something was missing. so although i had not yet been picked-- lacking the necessary wholesome cornfed telegenitude perhaps-- i asked if i could speak too. i said, more or less,[prompts not included]
“My name is Maia Ramnath, and i’m a doctoral candidate in history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. My work is in modern South Asian history in a global context. also my father was an immigrant to the United States from India. for these reasons i began studying Hindi, and then expanded my study into Urdu.
“for me it is very important to counter the idea that Hindi and Urdu are two completely separate languages, or that there is one language for Hindus and another for Muslims. i want to emphasize that this is one language, with one mutual base, which has a very large, rich vocabulary of Sanskrit-, Persian- and Arabic- derived words. depending on the context, i may choose to speak in different styles. but it’s not a matter of choosing only one or the other. why not read 2 kinds of script, and have a broader range of materials you can read? why not embrace a larger vocabulary to draw from, in a wider range of contexts? why use half of the whole?”

most likely they won’t use this; they’ll probably air some cute blonde person reciting classical poetry. still i felt it needed to be said.

so, will India’s legions of TV viewers get an answer? WHY would an American choose to study Urdu?

this question is based in a set of common Indian assumptions including: Urdu is a Muslim language. Urdu is the language of Pakistan. Urdu is the language in which terrorism is conducted. Muslims are different than Hindus. Hindus hate Muslims. Americans hate Muslims. Muslims are violent. India is America’s ally in the War on Terror against the Pakistani Muslim Urdu-speaking terrorists.
this Urdu-learning American must be either CIA agent or a terrorist sympathizer, and we’re suspicious.

OR...

Urdu is inseparable from the classical culture of Avadh. Urdu is the language of aristocrats and poets. Urdu is the language of Ghalib, Iqbal and Umrao Jaan. Urdu is a beautiful but arcane language of romantic nostalgia, not of cosmpolitan modernity. To speak Urdu IS to recite shairi [poetry].
this Urdu-learning American must be some sort of orientalist afficionado, and we’re flattered.

moreover, conversations [debates, arguments, fights] about the relative merits of Hindi and Urdu are liable to be carried out in what used to be called Hindustani. If it’s happening between a self-identified Urdu speaker and a self-identified Hindi speaker, they will both be under the impression that they are speaking their own native tongue. Zabaan. Bhasha. it’s true that the most formal and classicized styles of speech at either end-- and of course the written scripts-- are mutually unintelligible. but as for what the news guy called “general baatchit”, movies, daily conversation, etc, how can people possibly be insisting in identical words that they’re speaking different languages? unless you’re putting your fingers in your ears and shouting “Lalalalalala-ican’thearyou!”

still, specifying that you study Urdu and not that you study Hindi-- though for my money i’m studying both, just by walking through the street each day-- makes a unmistakable statement in the domestic Indian context. inevitably, it implies that you have an opinion on communal politics, whether actively pro-Muslim or simply anti-Hindu Right. it automatically places you in a conscious, counterhegemonic position, rather than the default setting of the National Language.

an aside-- along the side of the street outside the post office, there’s a row of men sitting on the ground with typewriters marked either English or Hindi [i didn’t see any Urdu scribes] to write letters for illiterate people. i thought that was pretty cool, because it gave me another idea for something i could theoretically do to make myself useful in the hypothetical society After the Apocalypse.

another aside-- i don’t know much about Indian CNN. but judging from the newspapers and magazines i’ve seen, the intellectual level of at least the print media is far above that of the dumbed-down saccharine-plastic level i’m unfortunately accustomed to. while they are responsibly factual, newspapers also do not flinch from heated editorializing, making erudite allusions, putting current events into historical context, and printing commentaries by publicly-engaged intellectuals-- many of whom happen to be ones who are listed in my QE bibliography. even mainstream centrist publications engage to some degree in discourse about legacies of colonialism, ecoomics and contemporary geopolitics, and take seriously the existence of a wide range of political opinions from far right to liberal to far left. it’s just normal. imagine that.

next time [unless some crazy event happens]: In Which Maia Describes Her Daily Commute to School.

ADVENTURES IN SUFISM

19 september 2006
ADVENTURES IN SUFISM


this weekend we had an adventure that was actually two adventures: one was the Urs, and the other was getting to the Urs. after all, in Sufism, it's all about the journey.

an Urs is the anniversary of the death of a Sufi saint, celebrated by several days of devotional congregating and all-night qawwall at the place of the tomb. this one was for Hazrat Khwaja Sufi Sabir Mohammed Zakaria Shah Hasni; it's also known as the "poor people's Urs," known for distributing eyeglasses, medicine and clothing. his shrine is a place called Mausandi, outside of a village called Purwa in Unnao district not far away from Lucknow and so we decided to make the trek.

no one quite knew exactly where the place was; it wasn’t on any maps. we had only a few notes copied on a piece of notebook paper as to the vague particulars. we weren’t sure which one it was closer to. but we were willing to see how far we could get. so our intrepid band set off in the evening on the Lucknow-to-Kanpur bus. we hadn’t gone more than a few kilometers before the whole bus knew what we were doing, and quite a few of the passengers had advice. the driver thought we were being foolish, that we’d never find transportation by this time of night, that it would be dangerous, and that we should come all the way to Kanpur, spend the night there and return in the morning.

another guy, let’s call him Dipesh, was on his way home to Unnao; Dipesh suggested that we take cycle rickshaws into the town center from the Unnao bypass, and from there he had a friend with a car who could take us to the Urs.

so the bus deposited us at the bypass, which was pitchdark and very sketchy; there was literally nothing there but rickshaws clustered around a spot on the highway waiting for fares, truckdrivers stopping to rest. we were quickly surrounded as we stood conferring in a clump. after some debate we got 4 rickshaws to Unnao. thing is, there was a miscommunication: we thought they knew the spot and would stop when we got there, they thought we were going to signal them when to stop. we figured this out after going a considerable way out of the way, then backtracked to the spot Dipesh had suggested.

the driver was waiting. he was also under the influence of either some powerful ganja or some refreshment from the Deshi Sharaab shop across the street. within minutes he was passed out cold on the roof of his car. we stood around and conferred some more. it was maybe about 10 or 11 pm by this point.

Dipesh was back to check on us: it wasn’t safe for us to be standing around out here, he said; we should come into his house while everything was getting worked out. Dipesh’s house turned out to be a bachelor pad where it was plain, despite the thick camouflage of incense, that 3 other guys had been getting majorly stoned. but they were hospitable nevertheless. one of them proudly explained that their family had been here since 1942, and that his father had been the first doctor in Unnao [meaning the village or the district, i’m not sure.]

Dipesh’s contact eventually turned up with the car. he was initially suspicious: what reason could a group of videshis have for going out into the countryside, other than to make trouble? we had indeed been rather cagey about our movements, up to this point. so now we said we were going to a mela. “a mela? oh, you mean the Urs? ah! that’s all right then.” after some bargaining we agreed that for about 2000 rupees plus gas, he would take 9 people to the Urs and then back to Lucknow afterward; half now, half on arrival home. i think it was now close to midnight.

so there we were, zooming along in the pitchblack rural north Indian night while-- adding yet another layer of surreality-- a really creepy Christopher Walken movie dubbed into Hindi played on the fold-down video screen. just after a guy in the movie had a gruesome encounter with a scissors, we came to an abrupt halt: a tire was flat, punctured by a wicked-looking 6-inch curved spike. while the driver lay under the car changing the tire, we milled about in the single-lane road through fields and sprawling trees, joking about daku ambushes under a gorgeous starry sky with no other lights in sight except for what we thought were some amber airport flares on the horizon and a couple flashes we figured were UFOs. twice trucks approached, and we skulked into the shadow of the car, worried that they would stop and make trouble for us. but they both just crawled carefully around the car and continued.

spare successfully attached: chalo!
we stopped in a village, headlights [sorry, sorry] rousing sleepy residents from where they lay outdoors on charpois or on the backs of wagons. plainly nothing was happening here. we parked across from the local Banduk ki Dukan [gun shop] while the driver conferred with a helpful old guy, who directed us to another village. at least now we knew that the place did exist and that the Urs was indeed happening; the guy knew exactly what we were talking about. the next village too was dark and sleepy. But this time the driver had a brother living there, with whom he stepped out to confer, and then, triumphant, zoomed away.

up until now, we’d been on single lane country roads; from here on in it was dirt tracks through the fields. I was dozing off by this time; it was almost 2am and i’d just about decided that we weren’t going to find it, and that the driver would simply take us back to Lucknow...when a glowing orb appeared against the sky-- an impossible white dome, lit up with ultra-violet, topping a structure lit up with twinkling white and green strands of lights. “it’s a space ship!” “it’s a magic castle!” “it’s Disney world!” no: it was the Urs. in that single second the whole night’s journey was worthwhile: the sight of it was so fantastically unexpected, bright and beautiful. also quite appropriate to the point of Sufism, which is all about the journey.

the driver let us out at the edge of the encampment that had sprung up outside the site; he’d wait. i thanked him fervently and he answered with a huge and gracious grin: koi baat nahin. so in we went,trying to be respectfully lowkey as we hovered around the edges. of course we got some stares: 9 foreigners trooping in during the wee hours, to a location that was literally off the map, inacessible from any city transport, unannounced in any obvious manner. there had been no propaganda, no tourist bait. this was real. once people’s surprise wore off we were ushered [with little opportunity for refusal] into the center of the proceedings.

the shrine consisted of a raised, enclosed square platform, where the saint’s tomb was displayed, and a large, covered rectangular area with a few notables seated on the side nearest the tomb and the qawwali musicians on the far side. first we were waved up into the tomb enclosure, where they draped our shoulders with tinsel-trimmed dupattas before we sprinkled rose petals on the body. the air was thick with some powerful incense or attar, which lingered in my clothes for days. then we were called down into the big space and asked to sit in the row of people framing an open rectangle in the center. behind us, women vigorously waved what looked like either fans or banners, setting up a stiff breeze over the heads of the seated. at appointed moments, men got up to whirl around in the central space-- they whirled until they were dizzy and reeling, at which point their friends would hold them up and assist them as they staggered over to kneel in front of the notables, placing their foreheads on the ground to receive a blessing. a couple of young men seemed to be having such intense experiences that they had to lie prostrate twitching for a little while. i wondered if they were faking until i saw the face of one of them taking deep breaths, supported by a couple of older men as he recovered, and then i didn’t think so anymore.

the males among us were also asked to stand up for the dancing times; the females were not, although we were the only women present to be seated in the inner row. we were, however, handed small rupee notes to take up to the bigwigs, and touch our heads to the ground as well. as we left, a while later, the convener of the event gave us his business card and some prasad and tried [and failed] to get all of our contact info. we got home about 4am, in a fraction of the time it had taken for the outward journey. a few days later, the Times of India, Lucknow Edition, reported that “Urs of sufi saint Sabir Mohammed Zakaria ended...with distribution of clothes and medicines among destitute...a large number of foreign devotees of the sufi saint visited the urs to pay their respect.”

ARRIVAL AND IDENTITY

12 september 2006
ARRIVAL AND IDENTITY

all of it is familiar. .

i haven’t been to india for over 10 years, but everything i perceive is an echo of my earliest memories: the smells [spices, manure, incense...], the colors of the clothing [fiery orange, peacock blue, hot pink], the music, the way the light is in the morning and evening against the heat of the day, the way bathrooms work, the way kitchens work, the lizards on the wall, the voices of crows, the way people drink water without touching the cup, the endless street pageant sprinkled with serene cattle, buzzing swarms of auto- and cycle-rickshaws, carts piled with bananas and pomegranates, shouts of passing [insert item here]-wallas, barbers shaving patrons by the roadside with mirrors on trees, ambient alternation of muezzins and temple bells.... i’ve seen all this before

India is not at all strange to me. it’s me that’s strange to India.

people stare. after all i’m a woman with light skin, blue eyes, short hair, solitary ways and not-conventionally-feminine body language. i make lots of mistakes in speech and procedure. plainly i don’t know what i’m doing. plainly i’m not from around here.
then again i’m kind of strange anywhere, skirting categories habitually.
still, there’s a difference between wilfully flouting rules you know well, and floundering amid rules of which you haven’t mastered the nuances.
there’s a lot i’d like to be able to do here as a participant in society...but there’s so much i have to learn before that’s possible to contemplate.
i want to get fluent and literate in Hindi and Urdu.
i want to be able to feel like, and be regarded as, a resident and not a guest.
and yet that doesn’t mean i want to try to emulate some standardized model of “Indian-ness.” i don’t know what that means, and it would in any case be false. i’m *not* an Indian; i’m a farflung product of South Asian diasporic miscegenation.
what i want, rather is to find a spot to be spliced into the loose strands on the fringes of this uncommonly dense and complex fabric, shot through as it is with counterpoints and contraries, mirrors and embroideries, paisley and [madras] plaid, patches and tears. after all it’s more or less the same way i tend to find myself situated in the US-- slightly outside everywhere, maintaining some freedom and a critical vantage point.

GHAR MEETHI GHAR
The house where i’m staying hosts 4 students on the ground floor, with rooms around a communal courtyard area, and 4 more up above. It’s spacious and airy and there’s also an accessible rooftop, great for fresh air in the evening. [“evening in Lucknow, dawn in Varanasi,” or am i getting it all backwards?]

i’m going to call our hosts Ram and Nasreen.-- they’re kind, generous, energetic and openminded. they say they enjoy having a houseful of young scholars around.

next door is some sort of universalist religious cult center which had its grand inauguration just as we were moving in. almost 24-7 for several days it was everything from chanting mantras to bhajans to qawwali and various fusions of the above, including qawwali stylings of lyrics like Hare Krishna Hare Ram and Om Mane Padme Hum. we sat on the roof one night listening for a while, under a near-full moon and a flurry of bats, enjoying a cool breeze after a hot humid day. but while it’s entertaining to watch it all going on with a birdseye view, i think they’re driving their neighbors crazy. they painted the outside of the newly sleek high-concept design house with red and white candy stripe panels on the outside, and mosque-green on the inside, which is easily visible through the open-sided terrace rooms. they tried to come over the fence to paint on our side too, and when Nasreen complained and said “hey, what are you doing, you can’t paint my house,” they said “but you’re just like our family” to which she retorted “i’m NOT your family.” today she went over to say “the music is great, but when is it going to stop?” so, perhaps to placate her, they invited her to have an audience with the guru. i don’t know if she went.

we’re also close to the military cantonment, and an associated training facility for army and navy officers, whose sign says, “We make the imossible happen/Miracles do take sometime.” [sic] there’s an attractive path with relaxing piped-in music in the cantonment for morning constitutionals, where i go running. i walk or bike to classes at the institute through rather terrifying traffic in which anything could be coming at you at any time from any direction.

classes are intense. it’s incredibly infantilizing to feel so inarticulate and to not always understand what people are saying to me, and sometimes i am bitterly impatient. at times i resent how all-consuming this process can be, and how isolated it makes me feel from the academic and political work i ultimately want to use it for. but this is a temporary feeling. someone warned me to be careful about wishing for instantly uploadable language modules to plug into one’s brain, because they just may be available sometime soon.

[“I know kung fu!”]

ROZ KI BAAT
Lucknow is the provincial of Uttar Pradesh, which is the biggest and most populous province, the traditional “Hindi heartland.” [Delhi has its own federal district, like Mexico City or Washington DC] this means that there’s always some sort of rally or demonstration or garbar or hangama or gherao or hartal or whatnot going on. recent events have included a very military-looking parade of boy and girl scouts on a polio vaccination campaign; a shut-down of the center of town after some students beat up a transit worker and the bus drivers blocked off the roads with their busses in protest; both Sunnis and Shias objecting to the pope’s recent anti-Islamic statements; and a BJP youth wing ransacking and vandalizing an elite Christian school after the school had held a controversial assembly aka “seance” in which they had invited a rickshaw driver called Nobo Kumar Mandal who claims to be channeling the spirit of Jesus and healing people to come and manifest the divine presence for the assembled students. a couple of students had fainted-- whether the disturbing result of occult possession, or natural outcome of a hot and crowded hall, is still under discussion, as is the appropriateness of the school’s holding such a function. aside from that issue, what everybody seems to agree on is that the BJP-sanctioned thuggery was unacceptable.

Nasreen for one was disgusted: “i guess they don’t have anything better to do between now and Valentine’s day. that’s when they beat up any couple that they see out in public-- it doesn’t matter what their relationship is, whether they’re married, or engaged, or dating, or cousins, or siblings, or friends, anyone. They say Valentine’s day is a sign of the sexual decadence of the west, and of moral degradation.
“But with the school, it’s also a class issue. this is an elite instution, English-medium, selective in admissions. Say you went to a Hindi-medium school, you’re not popular and accomplished, so you’re jealous of those who have what you don’t. These were hooligans acting out of personal resentments and bitterness, and now they’ve found an excuse, a justification, to go out and make trouble and hurt people. it wasn't like this 20 years ago."
Ram and Nasreen, by the way, are a mixed Hindu/Muslim marriage. so was one of their parents’, in the years just following Partition. she thinks the communal tension is worse now than it was then.