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Capital: New Delhi
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My previous four visits here, business trips comfortably spent in first class hotels, had been very different from this ground level backpacking jaunt which plunged me brutally into the hard reality of India's social injustice. To see misery through a taxi window is tough but it's nothing compared to rubbing elbows with it daily in the poorer areas of India's big cities. This careful second look confirmed my suspicions that India is a revolution that did not occur when it should have after WW II. The noble ideals of meaningful social reform promoted by Gandhi, Nehru and Ambedkar (who wrote the constitution), and adopted by the Indian Congress Party were systematically subverted by politicians pursuing the narrow interests of their caste while paying lip service to democracy. India is said to be the world's largest democracy. There is no dispute about its size, one billion is large, but I don't think that a country whose major priorities in the last 50 years have favoured a small minority at the expense of the majority can be called "a democracy". The preference for the development of heavy industries over agricultural infrastructures (roads, irrigation, training), is eloquent in a country where 80 percent of the population live off the land. In my opinion, the priority that has been given in the last 50 years to higher education in universities and research institutes over primary school education is a crime in a country where 52 percent of the population have not yet been shown how to read and write. People accustomed to the reasonably imperfect operation of the democratic process cannot understand how the representatives of the majority could have possibly taken these and many other decisions so evidently contrary to the interests of their constituents. Obviously, the evolution of social values hoped for by the reformers in 1947 did not materialise and the traditional Hindu mind-rape and manipulation has gone on unabated. The revolution of minds that accompanied the reconstruction of Europe in the 50's and the world wide decolonisation movement in the 60's did not occur in India. The cutoff between the "haves" and the "have-nots" is as sharp here as it was between white colonial masters and illiterate black natives in Africa in the 18th century. In India, "masters" and "natives" are of the same race but of different castes. Understanding India is not possible without some grasp of the overwhelming influence of caste even today and that requires some notions about Hinduism. I hope my Impressions of India will help explain how the word democracy can have a different meaning in India than anywhere else, Europe or North America for example. See article by Pankaj Mishra published: on July 6, 2006 in the New York Times. |
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I flew in from Yangon on a bright Monday morning after an overnight stopover in Dacca . Calcutta had not changed much since I was here last in 1973, people were still camped out on the sidewalks like these three or four families on Sudder street next to the Indian Museum.
I first stayed at the Calcutta Guesthouse in an alley off Hartford Lane but moved after one night to the cleaner Capital Guesthouse on Chowinghee Lane.
Calcutta still had these hand pulled rickshaw which have been replaced by pedal powered rickshaws everywhere else in India. A sign of modern times...
This is the real India. Three quarters of the population still live in small villages like this one glimpsed from the train on the way from Calcutta to Varanasi. Caste discipline has not slackened at all in such places for centuries.
The high caste Brahmin priests, Kshatrya landowners and Baniya merchants live in their own areas close to where the the Sudra or Dalitbahujan (Dalit = suppressed and exploited people, bahujan = majority) castes live but there is less social interaction between them than there was between white Rhodesian farmers and their black laborers a century ago.
Here, one of those pedal powered rickshaws, that I mentioned earlier, is turning from Bansphatak Road into Dasasvamedha Ghat Road in the heart of the holy city that also called Benaras and Kashiji (city of light).
Below on the left, the Sunshine Hotel where I had a fine room for only 4.70$US and on the right one of the many temporary shrines built to honour the goddess of learning Sarasvati on the occasion of her yearly festival.
Of course cows have the right of way on Madanpur Road as everywhere else in India. The bull Nandi was respected as Shiva's mount since early vedic times but cattle were nonetheless killed for the Yajna sacrifice ritual and their meat was eaten by the Brahmin priests until sometime around the 4th century during the Gupta Empire when the Brahmins became vegetarian to set themselves off as supremely respectful of life and thus holier than the competing Buddhists and Jain. Around this period, the Brahmin caste gained absolute supremacy over the other castes and Buddhism practically disappeared from India.
Nandi the bull.
When the Brahmins became vegetarians, the Gupta Kings made killing cows a crime against Ahimsa (respect of all life), and the priests made eating beef a sacrilege for non-Brahmin members of the Hindu community.
It was then customary to employ mercenaries who had lost caste, so called broken men, to guard villages and to do unclean jobs. These out-castes had no land. They lived outside the village limits and were paid in kind, having exclusive rights to any animal that had suffered a natural death.
According to some sources, when these people, and others such as nomadic tribes outside the Hindu system, continued eating beef, the Brahmins retaliated by making them "untouchable" by members of the Hindu community.
India's huge cattle population provide traction, milk and fuel for cooking (dried dung). All but a few prize dairy cows are minimally fed (waste and straw). They produce little more than one liter of milk a day. Buffalo are are appreciated for the high fat content of their milk.
Below on the left, a narrow lane or "gali" next to the Bhaironath Temple and on the right, a residential gali.
Benaras city draws millions of Hindu pilgrims who flock to the more than 100 ghats to bathe in the holy waters but also a lot of tourists. Here is a boatfull of them on the Ganges looking south towards Jalasen Ghat.
Jalasen Ghat is a burning ghat with no customers when I went by.
Business was also slow at the Manikarnika Ghat which is normally the city's principal burning place.
The stairway on Lalita Ghat leads to a Nepalese temple above. The Nepalese religion is a distinctive blend of Hinduism and Buddhist Lamaism.
I didn't find anything special to say about this one called Bairavi Ghat .
The Man Mandir Ghat is one of the oldest, it was built by Maharaja Man Singh of Amber in 1600 and converted into an observatory by the Maharaja Jai Singh of Jaipur in 1710.
Looking South from Man Mandir Ghat.
Dasasvamedha Ghat (10 horse sacrifice ghat) is centrally located and easy to reach by a wide street while the others lead to a labyrinth of lanes. Many tourist boats leave from here.
Looking south from Dasasvamedha Ghat
There were four or five cremations going on when I visited the Harishchandra Ghat. Most were smouldering piles of ashes tended by untouchable "Dom" attendants.
This one was disposing of a quite large man whose white fat could be seen melting and dripping onto the sandalwood logs. Some of the onlookers were tourists like me but most were probably relatives and friends many of whom crowded around the funeral pyre to be photographed with the departed's remains swathed in red and gold silks.
A proper Benaras cremation like this one can cost a fortune for sandalwood is expensive and the Dom charge a bundle for the impure job of handling the dead. Electric crematoriums are available for ordinary people but the cheaper rituals provide less merit!
The Karnataka Ghat just south of Harishchandra Ghat is also a burning ghat.
I arrived here just a few days after the film maker Deepa Metha and her crew had been forced to leave by 10 days of violent protests by Hindutva (fundamentalist Hindu), elements opposed to the theme of the film titled "Water" she had planed to shoot in Varanasi.
The film planned to expose the plight of Brahmin widows, who are no longer forced to commit sutee since it was outlawed by the British in the 19th century, but who are forbidden to remarry and who are often forced to retreat into "widows homes" for which Benares is famous. Deepa Metha had duly obtained the required government autorisations for the script to be shot but the protesters, led by the "Kashi Sanskriti Raksha Sangharsh Samiti" (KSRSS), an emanation of the fascist "Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh" (RSS), circulated modified versions containing incendiary passages designed to inflame passions of religious intolerance.
The Central Government of India, that is bound by the constitution to remain secular and to abstain from religious bias, did not defend the rights of the film producer but gave in to the pre-censorship violently imposed by a small number of extreme Hindu fanatics. That inaction is only one of many indications of the loss of the secular character of the Indian government and of the growth of Hindu fundamentalism in India.
Below on the left, a street shrine in the old city and on the right, the new Vishvanath Temple built by the Birlas on the grounds of the Benaras Hindu University. The Birlas are an immensely rich family of industrialists who have built Birla temples in many cities. The Birlas occupy the stratosphere with the Tatas, Bajajs, Mahindras and a couple more privileged families that are probably a lot richer than upstart Bill Gates. They are undoubtedly much more holy for they have deserved their high position by the accumulation of positive karma during past existences. Their small group practically owns the Indian government notwithstanding the rituals of the "democratic" elections that the political class indulge in from time to time.
Duly impressed with the piety and devotion shown by the Hindu pilgrims to Holy Mother Ganges but also by the growth of religious intolerance in India, I took a cyclo rickshaw to the Train Station to catch the night train to Satna on my way to Khajuraho.
I had a couple of hours to observe the people in the waiting rooms and to try to imagine what could be the meaning of life for this old man or for that prosperous looking fellow or for that young girl... I like to do that sometimes when I have some time to pass away in a public place. It's fun, I let my imagination wander and it comes up with the wildest scenarios as I try to pin a character to a face.
This time, it was a complete failure for I just could not bridge the gap between what I had learned of the Hindu belief system and the values that I can imagine and stick on European or North American Christians, on Arab or Malayo-indonesian Muslims or on Therevada or Mahayana Buddhists. I came to the realisation that the major difference betwenn Hinduism and these three other schools of thought was hope. Or rather, the absence of it because the rigid cause and effect operation of the karma principle explains everything irrevocably leaving no room for hope in god's forgiveness or charity.
Even fatalist Muslims can hope that god might allow them to improve their lot. Low caste Hindus and the still more cruelly underprivileged Dalitbahujans have been made to believe that they are deep in shit because they have earned it by bad karma in past lives. There is no hope for them; the gods have wished them to be there.
