We arrived yesterday at Varanasi (old name Benares), the terminus of our tour, and have just witnessed a perfect sunrise from a boat on the Ganges (Ganga). Watching the ghats (steps down to the river) fill with bathers, holy men and peddlers - the tourists were mainly, like us, in boats at that hour - as the sky slowly then brilliantly lit up behind us and the great emptiness of the sandbar at the center of the Ganges in non-monsoon it was hard not to feel one was in one of the world's great cities, a city like Venice. However our first impression of the city, coming into the bus station yesterday afternoon, was of a nightmare city of chaotic traffic and crazed rickshaw drivers, messier than usual for the rain of the past few days which left many of the roadside peddlers in the mud. All of that hides or lurks or simmers behind the pastel facades of the buildings along the river. Tempting to let it be a metaphor for India, but I'll resist the temptation, at least for a few paragraphs more.
Since last I checked in it's been a week, I think. That was in Orchha a tiny town only just growing as tourists come to see its ruined palaces, temples, cenotaphs and the famous Bundela frescoes, some of which I was delighted to find in a palatial temple a few minutes walk out of town but deserted. Since then we've been to the thousand-year-old temples at Khajuraho, famous for the erotic among their many lovely carvings, to the edge of Panna National Park (which was closed because of the rain - you don't really want your jeep stuck in the mud in a tiger reserve - so instead we went boating on the river Ken and watched birds), then through the barren country where the film "Bandit Queen" took place to a pilgrimage center called Chitrakut, named in the Ramayana, where we made a barefoot pilgrimage around the base of a mountain lined with shrines and hopping with monkeys (macaque mostly, but also langurs), and to Allahabad, where the Yamuna and Ganges rivers meet a third, mythical river, and where modern India was born - the crowds at Nehru's house were from every corner of India, a wonderful ambience.
I haven't time to go into much detail - everything's been fascinating, nothing's really been digested - but I'll say this:
The biggest disappointment was the Mela, the great festival at the Allahabad Sangam (coming together of rivers), most of whose predicted 30 million pilgrims must already have come for their dip. There were still several tent cities, put up for the pilgrims, who arrived in various vehicles including carts behind tractors. But the crowd at the actual bathing point wasn't more than a few hundred, where we had hoped (feared) we'd be jostled by hundreds of thousands. I guess we came too late, and too late in the day.
The place I'm most glad to have seen which I would never have gone to without a tour was Khajuraho, whose reputation as a center of erotica would have kept me miles away. And yet, in situ, the erotic carvings (only 10% of the total carvings) make a kind of sense and even have a kind of beauty and power. Since we've been off the tourist track we've been a lot closer to nature than I usually am - not just the animals who live alongside people in cities as well as villages, but nightscapes without electric light - sexuality seems an entirely appropriate object of religious celebration, and something available to everyone, unlike the places and tombs of the very rich and powerful in Agra, Orchha, etc. Of course you only get to do it with your appointed spouse, so, like much of religion, it rather loses its luster when you move beyond theory to practice! Unless, of course, you think that in some sense the practice comes first and the religious halo makes it easier to bear.
I'll be glad to see the end of our group - they're nice folks but just holidayers, and for them India is just a more exotic version of Ibiza or Bali or Blackpool, and for many just one of a string of Asian countries they're seeing, Thailand being everyone's favorite. (In fact, I've found myself unwitting at the midpoint of the migrations of Brits and Aussies to each other's countries: four of our six Brits are ending up in Australasia, two for good, and two of our four Aussies are on their way to spend a few years in London.) Our guide has lots of experience taking groups throughout South and Southeast and even North Asia but seems pretty vague about India (she has a tin ear for religion!); she tells us little about where we are and my tourmates seem to think they're learning enough. We've met various people along the way and they've made all the difference, but when there's no guide or the guide speaks only the most broken of English (as in Chitrakut) it's hard to know what's going on. And yet I'm glad to have done this tour, since it's taken me places I'd never have seen, given me an insight into group tourism, but mainly because - as hoped - I've arrived at a kind of comfort level with north India. Comfortable enough, that is, to be able to contemplate coming back on my own, indeed, to feel that India deserves another, more personal visit. (Of course I'm here another week after our tour ends on Saturday, so I'll have a chance to put my money where my mouth is!)
Did I say comfort level? Discomfort level might be closer to the mark. I was more "comfortable" a week ago in Orchha. The sights and the scenery we've been seeing are all different from each other - I remarked on the great sense for dramatic contrast of whoever planned our itinerary - but the poverty of the villages through which we travel has shown itself to be a constant. At first, it too was a sight, and for a while I was diverted by noticing that we'd passed from villages with stone roofs to villages with thatched roofs and then to villages with tiled roofs, but beneath those roofs the same hardship, brought into greater profile by the occasional wedding celebration. When I remarked in my last post that India seemed to me (by "India" I don't, of course mean India, but what little I've seen) a tremendous waste of human potential, it was the breadth of the base of the social pyramid to which I was referring. I don't doubt that full lives are lived there, and that one could learn a lot if one spent some real time here. But I'm enough of a postmodern bourgeois liberal to think there's much these people deserve a chance to experience (education, social mobility and even perhaps travel), and enough of a Marxist to think it's hypocrisy for me to praise the true richness and humanity of their lives, even (especially) where I think I sense it.
Religion, as you might have gathered, is something I study for more complicated reasons than that I love it or even particularly admire it. I study religion because it's there, because it's so important to so many people. That it's occasionally the source of beauty, compassion or cruelty only makes it more important to understand. Like, perhaps, some of the Hindu deities who have gentle as well as violent faces. (Not just Hindu deities are like this of course.) The more actively religious a place is (the unjust neoliberalism-devastated places where evangelicalism and Pentecostalism lives, the corrupt and hopeless societies where religious suicide seems attractive, and the poverty and social stasis here and so many other places), the more Marxist I become. Isn't it "the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions?" If it's ethnocentric of me to use words like unjust, corrupt, stasis, it's an ethnocentrism of which I don't repent. If religion keeps these societies unjust, corrupt, static - let there be less of it.
Enough for today! We're in Varanasi tomorrow, too, so I'll have another chance to blog, and may recant much of what I've just said. For dinner I'm meeting a student from Lang - a religious studies concentrator - who's spending the year here, and he might turn me around. Varanasi has that power.
