When you step out of Delhi Airport -- even at 3 o'clock in the morning -- India is ready and waiting for you. A heaving mob of taxi drivers pounce out of the shadows; one grabs your arm, another grabs your bags, and all of them are shouting at once: "Come with me!" . . . "I have very good car !" . . . "This way!" . . . "Come with me, come with me!" And when you get to a hotel, the night porter comes out wrapped up in a dirty sheet, rubbing his eyes. You ask him how much for a room and he tells you. You laugh and start to get back in the taxi, but the porter grabs your arm. In the end you get the room for about half the price and go in. It's hot. The electric fan on the ceiling doesn't work, nor do the lights. The electricity has broken down again. You lie there in the dark and it's too hot to sleep and you think, "Well . . . here I am, back in India. Nothing has changed."
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India in some of its aspects is a highly developed and "up-to-date" country, but to the casual eye it appears chaotic and backward -- and fearfully noisy. As first impressions are replaced by second and third impressions the country seems, a bit bewilderingly, to belong to many different centuries all at the same time. India is one of the oldest continuous civilizations in the world -- there were cities on the Indus River nearly five thousand years ago -- yet it is also a "new" country, since it finally gained its independence from Britain as late as 1947. History can help us to understand the way the Indian people think and live today as long as we don't try to interpret this history in the determinist sense of progression through time, or of one type of political and sociological environment being superceded and entirely replaced by another. There are at least three major and quite separate historical traditions at work in this country, each one of which can be traced to its own period of ascendancy, and each one of which continues to exert influence. These traditions have often been at odds with one another, and at other times have overlapped or even coalesced to form something new and different among certain sections of Indian society. The process continues to this day, and for the casual observer it is often difficult to understand the social and psychological strains that are still at work. Indeed, to speak of only three traditions is in itself an oversimplification, but it will serve as a useful beginning: these three traditions, in the order of their appearance, are the religious and social philosophies of the Aryan Hindus; those of the Muslims who invaded from the northwest, culminating with the empire of the Mughals; and, most recently, the predominantly secular but nonetheless philosophically challenging influence of the British Raj.
About 1500 BC the Aryans, a warlike nomadic folk , invaded India from the west. In the course of the next thousand years or so they subdued the people who had been living there before them and established control over the vast and fertile North Indian plain. Their religion was one of ritualistic sacrifice to many gods and their society was divided, rigidly, according to various functions and privileges (there are a number of remarkable linguistic and ritual similarities to the European Celts and the early tribes of Latium that went on to form the Roman Republic). These social divisions gave rise to the caste system which persists to the present day. The four original castes were those of priests, warriors, tradesmen, and farmers. Non-Aryans had no social standing at all and became "outcastes". These castes sub-divided among themselves and sub-divided again so that today there are more than three thousand of them, called "jatis". A jati determines the social standing of its members in relation to all other Hindus in terms of worship, dietary practices, and acceptable partners in marriage. The system is flexible enough to allow for upward and downward movement of the various jatis on a limited scale, but the overall effect of such compartmentalization of society has been profound in that it makes any lasting sense of national or political solidarity (except in relation to non-Hindus) almost impossible to achieve. Even in times of relative peace and prosperity, preoccupation with the pecking order is responsible for a great deal of tension and irritability, exploding at times into the sudden outbursts of violence that are a constant feature of Indian life.
The Aryans ruled over small independent kingdoms for the most part, although two great empires arose and lasted for a few centuries each. Before this time, and for long periods afterwards, there were the invasions -- always the invasions: Persians, Greeks, Huns, Kushans, Turks, Mongols, Afghans . . . the list is long and formidable. But among all these foreign invaders it was the Muslims -- especially the "Mughals" from Afghanistan -- and then the British, who came from far across the sea, who were to have the most lasting and noticeable effect upon Hindu civilization.
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At Laxman Jhula , after an overnight bus trip up from Delhi we arrive finally at the foothills of the Himalayas. The sun shines down on the Ganges, green and turbulent, fast-flowing, not as dirty and foul-smelling as it will become by the time it reaches the holy city of Benares. The passengers on the bus wash and brush their teeth at a public well and then pass over a narrow bridge. The roadway is lined with beggars. It's very hot. The beggars are spaced very close to one another, some of them squatting in the shade of umbrellas and it's impossible to give money to all of them. There are many temples along the river and people bathe, fully-dressed, believing that these sacred waters will wash away their sins. As we walk along I spot a European among the beggars and go over to ask him what he's doing there. He shrugs and says, " What else can I do now ? "
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Hardwar. In the bazaar an elderly man takes me by the arm and speaks in careful, cultured English . He takes me to his house. His wife bows, joins her hands to her forehead, and then brings us cups of tea. The room is small but cool, and the walls are lined with books. He asks me what my religion might be and begins to speak slowly and hypnotically about God. Before I leave he shows me letters from America, from England and from France and Holland and Germany. "These are my friends, " he says, "they have stayed with me here." I look through some of the letters to be polite and think how hard it must be at times to be an Indian trapped in India. I thank him for the tea and step back into the noise and the sunlight. There are cows lying in the narrow street and the pedestrians and cyclists make their way around them .
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On the train. A day and a night on the train and the evening of the second day is approaching. We pull into a station, another station just like all the others: the platform, the station master's hut, the waiting room. People are asleep on the platform, others are sitting in groups, smoking, chatting, drinking tea . . . farmers in ragged turbans, women in cotton saris with bracelets up to their elbows, porters in torn red tunics, and all the people with nowhere else to go and nothing else to do. Everywhere one goes in India, at any time of the day or night, one finds people sleeping: sleeping curled up on the pavements, sleeping in the corridors of public buildings, sleeping in the shade of trees or in the cool arcades of the mosques and temples, and sleeping on station platforms like this one. Here, as soon as the train stops the beggars are crowding the windows, thrusting in their arms, holding up deformed children, pleading, begging for money. There are so many, too many. And everywhere you go it is the same. And there are so many people selling things, so many people selling the same things, and each fighting with the other to be the one you buy from. And over all this noise and confusion you can always hear the drawn-out mournful cry of the tea-sellers as they move up and down the length of the train, chanting " Chaaa . . . aay , chaaa . . . aay !" Then the train pulls out. We leave the station behind. Soon it will be another station, a place just like this one but with a different name. There will be the same sights, the beggars, the porters, the people asleep and the people awake, and the same cry of the tea-sellers approaching and receding along the platform . . . " Chaaa . . . aay . . ."
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The Mughals established their rule over India in 1526. Their leader, Babur, had already made six unsuccessful attempts to conquer the Afghan dynasty then in control of Delhi. He was hiding in a cave after his last defeat, so the story goes, when he noticed a spider trying to climb up a thread. Six times the spider climbed and six times the spider fell, but on the seventh attempt it was successful. Babur took this for a sign and decided to invade India one more time. He too was successful on his seventh attempt and his descendants were to rule over India for the next two hundred years and more. Each one of the emperors over six generations -- from father to son to grandson -- reigned in an atmosphere of splendour and magnificence that the world had rarely seen before and will likely never see again. Babur, Humayun, Akbar (especially Akbar!), Jahangir, Shah Jehan, Aurangzeb: their lives have become the source of legends in India. It was a time of palaces and gardens, of fountains and poetry and coins flung into the arms of the crowd; it was a time of great battles and heroes and intrigues, of queens and dancing girls, of treachery and gallantry and peacocks strutting on emerald lawns. "If there is a Paradise on Earth," reads the carved inscription on one of the marble walls within the Red Fort at Delhi , "If there is a Paradise on Earth , it is here . . . it is here . . . it is here." Now all this pride and dazzling brilliance is a thing of the past. Nothing remains of the Mughal Empire apart from its religion, Islam, and its public buildings. But what buildings! The Mughals blended traditional Hindu and Persian styles to create a unique, almost floating style of architecture, the most famous example of which is, of course, the Taj Mahal .
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In Agra for a week, staying at the same place as four years ago. The old man says he remembers me, but I wonder. He sits all day in the shade of the courtyard with his eyes closed, immovable as a lizard. The Taj Mahal is about a two-minute walk from here, past the shops, through the arch, and across the square. But there's something wrong with me. I'm sick. Everybody who comes to India gets sick, gets well after a while and then gets sick again. It's something you have to get used to. This time it seems to be worse than usual and I'm beginning to get worried. In the afternoon Ganesh, the rickshaw driver, comes by and gives me two bananas and a small lump of brown stuff. "Eat this, " he says, "and don't drink any tea." I do as he says and sleep until the evening. I awake feeling much better and stroll down to the bazaar where I run into Ganesh outside one of the tea shops. "What was it you gave me ?" I ask, "I'm feeling much better now". "Opium," he says, and in the next breath invites me to his cousin's wedding.
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The Taj Mahal. Shah Jehan dearly loved his wife who was known as the "Jewel of the Palace". When she died in childbirth he could not overcome his grief and, vowing to build a tomb for her that would last throughout the ages, gathered artisans and workmen from all over India. When the building was nearing completion the Emperor decided to build an exact copy as his own tomb, only this time in black marble and across the river which runs behind the present Taj. His idea was to increase the proportions slightly so that when one looked through the archway that serves as an entrance to the White Taj, the Black Taj behind it would serve as a perfect outline of its graceful domes and slim minarets. His son, Aurangzeb, deposed Shah Jehan before this dream could be realized, and the dying Emperor spent his last years as a prisoner in the Fort of Agra, a sick man, with a mirror on the ceiling of his room so that he could see the Taj without rising from his bed .
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On the nights when there is a moon, the gardens of the Taj are open until midnight. There you can sit on one of the marble benches surrounded by an almost perfect stillness while the Taj rises up, pure, white, and gleaming before you. The semi- precious stones inlaid in the marble glisten in the moonlight. Never have I seen anything like this. Several nights in a row I went down there and sat alone for hours, silently watching. If I could understand the source of those feelings, I think it would change my life.
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The wedding was magnificent. First there was a procession through the crowded streets as the bridegroom arrived on a white horse. His bride-to-be was wearing the traditional red sari with borders of spun gold and he was resplendent in a turban and spotless robes. The room where the wedding was held was so dense with people that I could hardly squeeze in, but I managed to catch glimpses of what was going on from time to time over the heads of the crowd. The central part of the ceremony is when the bridegroom leads the bride five times around a sacred fire, symbolizing the five elements (earth, air, fire, wind and water) from which all life arises, has its being, and returns. It is no coincidence that the ceremony of cremation of the dead is similar. The eldest son or closest male relative (women are not allowed to attend cremations) leads a procession of family members five times around the funeral pyre before he sets it alight with a torch. There is a consistency of thought here: birth is a manifestation, marriage a regeneration, and death only a comma in the progress of the human soul, a temporary end to be followed by another birth, another marriage, and so on forever. The individual person is just a passing phase in the eternal life of his soul. Beliefs such as these are used to explain why Hindu India seems so alien and incomprehensible to outsiders, and so careless of human suffering. How, we are asked to consider, can the Hindus possibly live any other way when they believe the world to be a mere illusion? Well, the simple answer is that most of the Hindus I met never seemed to bother with the philosophy of their religion at all, but simply observed familiar customs and rituals without giving them another thought. There is something almost southern Italian in the popularity of garish, multi-coloured religious images and the love of bright and gaudy and above all, noisy, processions. These people are just as passionately involved with their own personal successes and failures and with the ups and downs of fortune as any other people, certainly so in their youth and middle age. With advancing years comes a growing interest in religion and religious philosophy. This is a phenomenon not particularly restricted to India or the Hindus, by any means, since the elderly in any society have to make their peace with Death.
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Benares. We met by the river before dawn and climbing into the boat moved silently into the middle of the stream. The sun began to rise quickly in the east and within minutes turned the surface of the river into sliding, dazzling sheets of gold. Slowly we passed the strange-shaped temples on the shore and the people who had come down to bathe, some of them standing waist-deep in the water, all facing towards the sun, their hands joined together in prayer. So strange the feeling. . . as though this were not the twentieth century at all, as though one were in a world of many hundreds of years before . . . From a circle of brahmins on the shore came a drone of chanting, but there was no other sound to be heard but the drip of water from suspended oars as we moved along. The sun climbed higher in the sky. Dukhi stopped rowing, said something, everybody laughed. Somebody passed me a cigarette and the spell was broken. Soon after the corpse of a baby floated by, bloated and horrible. We all held handkerchiefs to our noses .
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The British first came to India as traders during the declining years of the Mughals. When the Empire began to disintegrate during the 18th Century, the East India Company began to assume more and more military and political power under the guise of "protecting trade". By the mid-19th Century most of India was under British control -- the exceptions were the Princely States, each with a British Resident and with fluctuating degrees of sovereignty. With British rule came many innovations: they introduced a law system and a civil service which extended to the district and village level; their medicine reduced the appalling mortality rate and the population increased enormously as a result; the railway and telegraph linked all parts of India for the first time; their language became the lingua franca of India and remains so today in a country of 14 major languages and more than 250 separate dialects. But the English language, studied originally as a means to securing government employment, became in time a window for the educated elite into a world of new ideas, ideas such as parliamentary democracy, civil liberties, and the principles of social justice -- and such ideas led, inevitably, to a political campaign for independence.
Independence came in the end not through the ideas learned from English books but through a popular (and shrewdly political) campaign based upon an idealization of the Hindu past. This was led by an English-educated lawyer, Mohandas Gandhi, revered throughout India to this day as the "Mahatma", or Great Soul. Gandhi disrupted the British power structure in India through the use of non-violent civil disobedience on a mass scale. His ascetic way of life and his sincere belief in the teachings of ancient Hindu scriptures gained him the fervent and devotional support of illiterate village India. But it was his imaginative use of symbolic protest -- notably his leisurely walk across India to the sea with his thousands of followers in order to collect salt and so defy the government monopoly -- that attracted the attention of the international press. The relentless pressure which came to bear on the British, from within the country in the form of mass demonstrations and from without in the form of world opinion, led to their decision to pull out of India in 1947.
Since Gandhi's assassination in 1948 -- at the hands of a Hindu nationalist who didn't like the concessions being made to Muslims -- India has been struggling to find its direction as a nation under a new dynasty -- that of the Nehru family. Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi's friend and political ally, held the reins of power in the first crucial decade and a half of independence and it was his daughter Indira who kept the nation together, invoking emergency decrees in the mid-70s, until her assassination at the hands of Sikh extremists. Her son Rajiv was also assassinated, this time by Tamil separatists from Sri Lanka. After a prolonged interregnum by the Hindu nationalists of the BJP, Rajiv's wife Sonia, an Italian by birth, has recently led the Congress Party to another sweeping election victory but has wisely declined to assume the post of Prime Minister. The country still faces enormous problems, chiefly those brought about by overpopulation and widespread, mind-numbing poverty, and is furthermore riven with an alarming array of internal divisions, political, regional, religious, linguistic. Despite the many strains, the fabric still holds together .
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One of the bitter legacies of the colonial past is the queer mixture of arrogance and envy that one encounters in conversations with English-speaking Indians. On the one hand they criticize everything they possibly can about the West in the most provocative terms: it's materialistic, morally corrupt, and full of terrorists, pornographers and drug addicts. What a horrible, disgusting place! But it is also a place with a high standard of living and with opportunities that do not exist in India, where ordinary people take cars and televisions and washing machines for granted and where the electricity works all day. These conversations all seemed to follow a familiar pattern no matter where they took place -- whether in restaurants or railway carriages or in the tea shops of the bazaar. First came the criticism, torrents of outlandish nonsense for the most part, since nobody seemed to have a clear picture of what life was really like in Europe and North America. I never argued, I simply listened. Then when the denunciations had ceased came the urgent, whispered questions: how could one get a visa to work in such-and-such a country? Could I help? I felt sorry for some, especially the young and energetic, but not all that sorry. They were at least well-fed. All around us were beggars and people starving in the streets.
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Udaipur. Sick again. Sitting in a tea stall in the gardens of a dead maharaja while the monsoon rains beat down on the tin roof. Across from me a wrinkled old man in a blue turban sits huddled in his rags, staring at me. Everything is quiet apart from the rain and a kettle that hisses on the coals of an open fire. I haven't shaved for three days and feel rotten. I catch the old man's eye and hold the stare. What the hell are you looking at? "God is good," he says in English, and smiles.
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Bombay. The view from the hilltops above the city is impressive. The buildings, from a distance, are tall, modern, and white and the Arabian Sea is a deep tropical blue. This is the commercial hub of India. Seen from a distance it looks a bit like Honolulu. Closer up it's more like Hong Kong -- only more so. The streets are jammed with people and a fair number of them spread out burlap sacks on the pavement at night and sleep on them. The big hotels seemed to be full of Arabs in flowing robes. But there were no Arabs in my hotel. Where I stayed (with an Australian fellow I had met on the train) was a dingy walk-up near the railroad station. We fastened our own padlock to the door of the room -- a traveller's custom in this part of the world -- and went out, wandering through the crowded streets, looking for a place to eat. The British influence was very noticeable downtown, with many rather hideous-looking Victorian-Gothic buildings and red double-decker buses. This was once their " Gateway to India " where all the liners and troopships from Britain arrived. We found a place, finally, that served beer as well as food. Beer in India can be pretty awful stuff but it's usually safer than the water. We had a large bottle each, ate, and ordered a couple more. In the course of time the beer made its presence felt and I asked the owner where I could wash my hands. He looked at me as though I had taken leave of my senses. "OK," I said, "never mind the hands. Where's your toilet?" "Outside," he said. I went outside and found myself staring at the street. " Listen," I said, going back in, "I couldn't find it. Where is it?" "Outside! "he yelled, with a wave that took in all of Bombay .
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Back in Delhi where it all began. I'm leaving tomorrow. Outside the Great Mosque in the Old City a European in a blue satin waistcoat and loose yellow trousers walks up to me. His face is all hair and beard and glittering eyes. "Hey man," he says, "can you give me a couple of rupees? I want to get something to eat." I reach into my pocket for some change and ask him how long he's been in India. "Too long, man," he says, his eyes on the money, "way too long. I gotta get out of here."
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The very next day I was back in Japan. It was a shock to the system. Everything became clean and orderly and expensive all of a sudden. Friends asked me what India had been like and I didn't know what to say. Even what I have written here is nothing more than a collection of fragments -- a number of random incidents with a little historical background. I could write a great deal more because there are so many more memories to draw upon. The selection is incomplete. But no matter how much I write I don't think I can carry the feeling of what it's like to be over there. It's a chaotic, colourful, noisy, round-the-clock circus sort of a country which I can't claim to understand very well -- but then neither do the Indians themselves. The poverty is truly frightening: in spite of this, in spite of the crowded cities, in spite of the noise and the flies and everything else that visitors complain of, there is something magical and timeless about this place. There are moments when the face of our own century seems to slip away entirely -- as though a mask had suddenly been removed -- and something eternal and never-changing is briefly revealed But which is the reality and which is the illusion?
Every morning you wake up over there and you wonder what is going to happen. And every day, without fail, something does happen, usually without warning. India never, never leaves you alone. It is always tugging at your sleeve, pulling you, pushing you -- just like the taxi drivers at the airport -- forcing you into a world of your senses and imagination. It's too much to take in all at once: there is so much beauty to be seen and so much horror which cannot be avoided. You always feel that you need more time to understand, to reconcile the differences; that if you only had more time you could make sense of all the incidents and impressions of each passing day as if they were so many pieces that fit together to make a design. But perhaps there is no design. I don't know. India fascinates and appalls me. I reveled in the excitement and colour while I was there but I was happy enough to leave when the time came. Now I'm wondering when I'll manage to go back.
(Check here for an excellent collection of photos from India)
