Never travel to India for the First Time!

“Never travel to India for the first time,” is a saying that Sidsel Millerstrom, anthropologist on board, shared around before we arrived in India. She doesn't remember where she got it, but does remember the resonance. First, I will tell the overpowering to the senses and emotions bad news. There will be good news and I will again save most of it for dessert.

India is full of edgy energy and stark contrasts, reminding me in these respects of home in the USA, except that the extremes are so much more so. (I notice that I want to end each sentence about India with !!!) In the cities, there is a quality of awakening into ever greater possibilities of materialistic decadence that reminds me very much of California in the 1980's, including the use of every possible space for advertising. This, I am told, is one of the effects of globalization, the transnational glories of unrestricted 'market driven' economies and Western consumption styles and habits. It has interesting repercussions here in India: for example, the 15-fold increase in dowry murders between the 1980's and now. Since wealth is gendered by way of marriage, the bride who cannot provide must die, and often horribly. This is not a problem for the Brahmins, of course, as they (men and women) have what they need and the power to do what they want to do without marrying up. And the Dalits live hopeless lives, rich only in every kind of abuse. It is the majority of people who are not at the extremes of society who are most affected by the intersections of globalization and traditional social structures, and especially those on the poor but able-to-aspire end. There is nothing that can't be bought in India, except, I suppose the quality of consciousness that allows one to live surrounded by largely unquestioned and unchallenged large-scale distress of every kind.

(Caste has been outlawed, and so has dowry for that matter--and, when a wife of seven years or less dies, the husband is automatically legally suspect, but rarely prosecuted for one of the ghastly 'accidents.' Yet these customs live on and even grow in the light of “return to our own culture and traditions,” a theme that is being exploited globally in order to keep the powerful powerful and to make of the meek easy-pickings. Interestingly, it works by way of liberal post-colonial guilt--it is not our place to interfere; and those who want to exploit are quick to remind us to mind our own business. But the poor and powerless need assistance and advocacy as ever they have, so we have to find new and more respectful ways to care and to interfere with wrong-doing.)

The general level of pollution in India is stunning. I recall walking home from school in the 70's in Los Angeles with yellow-gray skies, burning lungs, watering eyes. Then we passed the Clean Air Act. India has no such thing and it gave me a sense of where LA might have gone; people cough constantly, the Taj Mahal from a short distance away is a hazy apparition in the murky sky, yellow gray air is the norm. There is no drinkable water for those who cannot afford to buy it; those who can afford to buy water on the streets must be careful that it is clean water they are buying and not bottled waste that has had a cap glued back onto it. The population density is amazing--one billion people in a place that is largely without infrastructure--so that the filth density mirrors the population density. There are no sewage systems in many, many places (yes, people just squat at the roadside or in the field, or in the alley). The air is dirty, the water is dirty, the majority of the people are dirty--clothes I bought in middle class stores had to be laundered intensely to get the smell of soot out of them--and with all the dirt comes illness.

The sheer number of hungry, maimed, infected, angry, and hopeless people is stunning. Add to this that staring is the norm; you are stared at and sized up from any number of angles constantly; the assault of people trying to sell, beg, grope, or steal is non-stop (picture hands reaching for breasts while riding in a taxi with the window down in a sweltering street, crowded with cows, sari-clad women in brilliantly colored silk carrying burdens on their heads, donkey-drawn carts piled with rolled carpets, cars and scooters with blaring horns (and bearing signs that say “please use horn”), barefoot children darting in and out. Beauty is always there, like so many jewels sparkling in a garbage dump, in the artistry and design of fabrics, in jewelry, in religious monuments, in human faces, and gestures, and humor. And danger is always there, not only the small danger of theft, but the pulse of rage that wants blood and sparks into flame every day.

The India Times carried a story about University of Delhi students on a public train who resisted 'eve-teasing,' blatant and public verbal and physical sexual harassment of a woman or women by groups of men, a common occurrence accepted in the mode of 'boys will be boys,' with an added flavor of punishment for women who are out and about. When the students and professors resisted, the locals stopped the train, decoupled the car, beat the students, pummeled the car with stones and bricks and set it on fire to force the students out into their midst. There were many stories more violent and gory every day, with a special fascination for fire. Rescue by helpful strangers is frequent and necessary.

I began to see the deep relationship of the core concepts of Hinduism (an emphasis on spiritual liberation through consciousness and identifying with consciousness while disavowing the physical body) and the physical horrors on every street corner. On the more understandable side, it creates a vicious cycle of suffering and the need to transcend suffering and the worsening of suffering by way of inattention to it. On the abhorrent side, it justifies any kind of physical condition or behavior on the basis of its karmic justification (not all that different, by the way, from the puritans of South Africa who preached that the saved elect were white Europeans and the damned were black Africans). I began to feel almost hatred for this disavowal of the body in the name of the spirit, seeing clearly the way that the spirits and consciousness of the poor and suffering are crushed by the lack of care for their bodies.

Tomorrow's theme, though, is that anything you can say about India is true--and so is its opposite...