Tuesday 20 October 2009

Puja puja!


The last month or so here in West Bengal has been one long holiday, occasioned by a series of three "pujas" or religious festivals each dedicated to the worship of a goddess. First comes the martial but fundamentally benevolent Durga, invoked by Rama in his battle against the demon king of Sri Lanka, Ravana - the climax of the Ramayana epic, and the main focus of the Dussehra festival held on the same days throughout the rest of India. Then comes Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, who is celebrated slightly earlier here than elsewhere. Finally the fierce and terrible Kali arrives to demand her sacrifices, the black goddess appearing ironically on the very day of Divali, the festival of light. (Divali is celebrated simultaneously with Kali Puja by Bengalis in the manner traditional across India, by the lighting of "rows of lamps" - the Sanskrit meaning of the word di[pa]vali. This is supposed to be in imitation of the citizens of Rama's city Ayodhya, who did the same to welcome their king back after his victory against Ravana.) Bengalis decide to link the three up as a single puja season, giving one the chance to get properly into the festival spirit - although also ensuring that little or no official work gets done for four weeks. In England we have bank holidays; in India they have holi-months.

Durga Puja in Calcutta focuses on what is colloquially known as "pandal-hopping": visiting pandals, temporary pavilions built to house an image of Durga. During the puja period one finds them virtually at every street corner, most no more than a sort of tinselled tent - although the statue inside is always magnificently adorned - but some enormous, and/or enormously expensive. Visiting College Street a few weeks before the puja, I caught sight of this structure in scaffolding (the figures at the top give you an idea of the scale!):


Returning in the late afternoon of Saptami (the seventh day of the festival, but the beginning of the actual festivities), it had been transformed into a life-size replica of the Hava Mahal, or Palace of the Winds, the famous free-standing facade in the "pink city" of Jaipur, Rajasthan:


Without a contact in Calcutta at the time to guide me round, I couldn't quite get into the spirit of pandal-hopping on my own. Festival time here is very family- and community-oriented, and one wants to feel included, rather than hovering about in the background taking photos all the time. So I left the city and returned to Santiniketan, thinking to accept the kind offer my friend Partha Gupta had made to me that I visit his village, Daronda, 8km away, for the last couple of days of the festival. Here the urbane touring of pavilions gave way to a more dramatic spectacle: the mass slaughter of goats. First the dhak drummers summon the villagers to the temple. The dhak is a heavy drum, worn slung over the shoulder so that the attached plumes curl up over the drummer's head, and played with two sticks from underneath. The sound is loud without being deafening, and according to Partha can travel long distances.


In the centre of the cleared space in front of every temple, a small area is earthed up and a heavy six-foot fork driven hard into the ground, leaving only its two prongs visible.


A decorative pattern made of red earth and white rice flour links it symbolically to the temple entrance, which stands open so that Durga can witness the sacrifice. The fork's distinctive shape both reminds one of other symbols in Indian mythology (such as Shiva's trident), and also serves a practical purpose. Its narrow neck, bolted across with a bamboo stick, prevents the victim from wriggling its head out of the block.


On hand to sprinkle the victim's neck with water is a Brahmin priest:

The goat's neck is then severed with a single blow from a heavy sacrificial sword. It is of course considered inauspicious if the executioner fails to achieve this cleanly - something that happened once out of 15 times during the main village sacrifice. Having never witnessed the killing of a large animal before I was a bit alarmed that, even with a true blow, the goat does not appear to die immediately. Both head and body writhe bleeding on the ground for a period of up to half a minute. I was advised against photographing any of this, and I'm not sure I wanted to anyway. Once it is over, the bodies are placed at the temple door:


More goats get the chop when Kali Puja comes round a month later. (By the end of all this I'm surprised there are any of the poor animals left in Bengal.) Since on this occasion the slaughter took place after midnight I had an easy excuse to miss it out. Kali is in fact particularly associated with goat sacrifice on account of the famous Kalighat temple to her in Calcutta, where the goddess's bloodlust is satisfied on a daily basis. Her image there is black, as her name suggests (black is kalo in Bengali); but the version more often found is blue, like a number of other Hindu deities.

In all versions she has her tongue poking out. I've read that this is a reaction of surprise (although when do you ever express surprise by sticking your tongue out?! Usually we do it to surprise someone else!). The occasion for this is depicted in the image above. Under Kali's feet is her consort Shiva, who has unexpectedly thrown himself under her feet to halt her spree of destruction.

Despite the pretty dark connotations of the deity being worshipped - incidentally, Kali was also the main goddess of the murderous dacoits, described in another post on this site - Kali Puja seemed mainly to be an excuse for a full-blown, let-your-hair-down party. Or maybe it was just where I was - the area just south of Sriniketan, Santiniketan's partner village, at the house of my Sri Lankan dancer friend's guru, Bosanta. In consequence there was a good deal of dancing, both before and during the procession of the deity around the village, which lasted around three hours.

Under the influence of a quantity of surreptitiously consumed rum, it can't be said that the family exhibited their dance training to best effect... Other intoxicants were on hand: I assisted with the preparation of a very thick, sweet beverage called siddhi. The ingredients include bananas, milk, sweets, jaggery (palm sugar), and the ground siddhi leaves, which I was assured were not the same as bhang, even though they looked pretty similar.



There was also country liquor, a curious local rice-wine, greyish white and quite pleasantly sour. Asking the name I was told they called it bachui here - not a word I was able to find in the dictionary or online, but to judge from the preparation method it may have been similar to hadia. To sustain all the dancing, plenty of food was provided too - enough for about five hundred people, served in the courtyard on banana leaves in a series of consecutive sittings:



Everyone is included in the festival spirit - even the cows are painted with pink polka-dots!



While waiting for things to get under way, the charmingly irrepressible Titi, Bosanta's niece, conducted me on a little tour of the area's notable buildings, including a terracotta temple, similar in design to the famous ones of Bishnupur. We also walked around the "boro bari", literally "big house": the mansion of the erstwhile local zamindar, perhaps 200 years old. Predating the invention of the "Indo-Saracenic" style, it seems to have no native architectural elements at all - apart from maybe the colour scheme:


Yet this building, its central, partially enclosed courtyard strangely ecclesiastical in design, has been taken over by the locals for their own ceremonies. Behind an iron grille framed by a decidedly Gothic arch, rather like a side-chapel entrance in a Catholic cathedral, the image of Durga is installed during her puja, and in front of it lights were burning that evening for Divali.


That this did not look at all out of place prompted me to think how universal a religious symbol the lighting of candles is. Only Islam makes little use of it, as far as I know. The candle-flame seems like an emblem of human consciousness - finite, vulnerable, insubstantial, but steadily shedding illumination, rescuing a certain area of space from the larger, encompassing dark. To worship that darkness itself still seems to me counter-intuitive, not to say perverse, and for that reason I still cannot sympathize with the devotion to Kali and Durga that is so central to the religious calendar here in Bengal. The Tantric tradition in which it is rooted is undeniably fascinating - originally not traditional or Vedic Hindu, but Mahayana Buddhist in its emphasis on the female, and doubtless very rich in psychological insights. And the festival atmosphere sweeps one with it anyway, without too many scruples about the meaning of what is being celebrated! But I would be curious to have a Bengali explain their relationship to or conception of Kali, and what it is they find inspiring about such an image. I could have asked then, of course, but found neither the timing nor the phrasing of the question easy to judge. To interrogate any religious tradition like that is fraught with the danger of immediate offence; even though such questions may be necessary if outsiders - or even insiders - are to understand the meaning of religious practices and symbols.


Monday 19 October 2009

Raibeshe

Though it might be a mundane sentiment, I often feel the best side of travelling is in the discovery of things that you had no idea even existed before you set out. It's always satisfying to know that the world is larger than a guide book. This is an example - a local tradition I'm not even sure how to classify.
A few weeks after I arrived here, a good friend and Sri Lankan dancer piqued my interest by mentioning the existence of a particular folk tradition called "raibeshe", native to the Birbhum district of West Bengal in which Santiniketan is located. Although usually described as a folk dance, listed here (in the last paragraph) among others of northern India, its appearance was more that of a martial art. Even though neither dance nor martial arts are subjects I know much about, I was intrigued, possessed by the vague idea of some kind of undiscovered Bengali capoeira (the Afro-Brazilian fighting style thought to have been "disguised" as a dance in order to protect its slave practitioners from punishment).
According to the people I've asked here, the origin of raibeshe is almost as peculiar. The dacoits of West Bengal, bandits feared and romanticised in equal measure, were traditionally regarded as constituting a "profession", known as dacoity, having elevated house-breaking and highwaymanship to fine arts. Raibeshe is thought to have originated as a kind of dacoits' training programme, a method both to maintain fitness during the idle periods between their criminal deeds and to cultivate the physical skills - many of them co-operative and almost resembling military tactics - that were necessary to ensure success in consummating their crimes. Another source locates the art's origin among the "lathiyals" or members of the zamindars' (Indian feudal landowners') private armies; but the two may not contradict each other anyway. According to this fascinating period account, translated from the Bengali, zamindars under the Mughals were unable to stop their militia from criminal activity, and with the arrival of the Raj, soldiers discharged by zamindars turned en masse to dacoity. In the opening section of his great novel Pather Panchali (1929), the Bengali writer Bibhutibhushan makes an even closer and more scandalous connection: of the zamindars of early-19th century Bengal he alleges, "Many a wealthy family of those days built up its fortune by dacoity; indeed every student of ancient history knows that the wealth of most of the Bengali zamindars today is derived from the gold and jewels that their ancestors looted."
As a latter-day zamindar, Rabindranath Tagore is said to have been interested in the remnants of dacoit culture persisting in the area around Santiniketan (the village lying directly west of the Santiniketan-Bolpur road, Bhubandanga ("Bhubon's land"), takes its name from a famous bandit). He even encouraged, as part of the physical side of his education programmes, the cultivation of the dacoits' stilt-walking technique - the bamboo ron-pa or "battle legs", designed for the flat plains of Bengal as they were independently for certain regions of Europe, that allowed fleeing dacoits to cover ground at tremendous speeds. It was however Gurusaday Dutt, a contemporary of Tagore's, even more deeply engaged than the poet in village social projects and the preservation of traditional Bengali culture, who counts as the "discoverer" in 1930 of raibeshe, on which he published a considerable quantity of material in Bengali and some in English (which I haven't yet been able to consult here - update pending, I hope). Weirdly, the year after this he travelled to England and met Cecil Sharp, the discoverer of morris dancing, which seems to have spurred on his own folk revivalist efforts.
The "dance" itself couldn't be less like morris - apart from the fact that both use wooden sticks. A day or so after Durga Puja I had the chance to see a performance in the nearby village of Raipur by a local group, "Binuria Raibeshe", run by a friend of the above-mentioned Sri Lankan dancer. How "authentic" the performance I saw really was, I'm not qualified to judge. In this variant, it was certainly less of a dance and more of an acrobatic display. What was clear was that this was a home-grown, amateur cultural form, still practised for the sake of exercise, alertness and a kind of team spirit by villagers in the hours they could spare from the day's work. Though the group leader was a driver for of one of the university faculty, many of the others were apparently day-labourers. The only concession to slick presentation was the red and yellow sports kit. In performance the result was impressively athletic and ingenious by turns, as these photos hopefully show. (Apologies for the dimness of some of the images - the performance went on into the evening and my camera flash could only achieve so much!) Some stunts did look rather as if they had been borrowed from a circus, for instance twirling a flaming brand -


- or diving headfirst through a ring of fire -



None of this is especially unusual, although impressive considering the performers were not professionals. The pyramid-building exercises seemed to me at first to belong to this category, until it occurred to me that they might well have had a criminal use too: standing on the shoulders, or in one case, head, of his accomplice(s) would allow a dacoit to gain quick access to an upper storey.


Other poses demonstrated sheer strength -



or incorporated aesthetic compositions based on religious imagery (Vishnu seated on a lotus):




The most interesting displays, since most obviously related to the art's origin, were those involving squeezing through confined spaces (originally in order to break into a house). Here Baban the group leader - well-built and not at all the slenderest of the group - crawls under a bamboo lathi on whose ends two of his colleagues are standing. The only space available is whatever Baban can create for himself by forcing the stick to flex:


Another vertical variant involves a hoop, with one person standing upright inside it and the other wriggling head down through the remaining space, as if crawling through a pipe or a hole in a roof:




Finally there was stick-fighting, the core martial element, which apparently went off less well at this performance than in others:




An impartial observer might have thought this not much as a purely physical display, compared to something like the Shaolin monks, but I was quite caught up in the atmosphere of village excitement generated by the performance - and at the same time fascinated to imagine its distant origins in India's feudal past.

Friday 16 October 2009

Whose "development"?

Readers well-versed in development issues may have to forgive (if they can) some economic naiveties in the following, where this blog goes determinedly "off-topic"...

Kathmandu's Thamel district, a rooftop restaurant in the tourist ghetto. The third lassi of the afternoon, staving off the waiters circling questioningly with the bill. As dusk draws on, the crazy medley of sounds that crowd in from outside sums up the distracted confusion of the place, and my situation, trapped in visa limbo now for two weeks, and still too preoccupied to plunge into the "real" Nepal. Rickshaw drivers emit bird-like peeps, quack their home-made shampoo-bottle hooters; the tourist-protecting policewomen give intermittent blasts on their whistles; the sarangi (Nepali fiddle) sellers wander up and down all playing the same desultory scale, competing perhaps with a flute salesman or one of the melancholy, note-perfect imitations of American rock that begin to echo down from the bar across the narrow, rainy street. Everything meant to alert or attract the foreign traveller, everything instead merging together into a repetitive, overlayered backdrop, like the jungle of signs and banners that jut and unfurl across the claustrophobic gully separating one pizza parlour from its rival opposite - they read: Laundry, Internet, ATM, Massage, Treks and Tours, Continental/Indian/Tibetan/Chinese Food...

I become lulled into a familiar urban-American doze - a mall-terrace, airport-lounge, TV ad-break state of mind. It even seems to have penetrated the book I have just abandoned, bought out of a vague sense of duty to read at least something Nepali, Samrat Upadhyay's Arresting God in Kathmandu - nothing very arresting or divine about it to my mind, a succession of adultery- and alcoholism-filled tales in jaded, detached American short-story prose; Nepal through the eyes of a cosmopolitan Raymond Carver-wannabe. I read other books here too, mostly for "timepass" as Indian English quaintly expresses it. One genuinely attracts my full interest, and begins to connect with what I am learning here and there about the situation of Nepal, and of India. It is Helena Norberg-Hodge's book Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh, a brilliant and deeply questioning text, part anthropology, part political-environmental manifesto. (There is also a film of the same title.) Her thesis is as radical as her perspective is unique: as the first Westerner to master Ladakhi, the dialect of Tibetan spoken in the highest region of Himalayan India, she was also the first outsider to penetrate fully one of the most stable, ancient and secluded societies still to be found on the globe in the second half of the twentieth century. And at the same time, arriving just as Ladakh began to be "opened up", she saw the region both prior to and during its ongoing "modernization", its exposure to Western commerce, development and tourism.

Her conclusion was, quite simply, that this process was an unmitigated catastrophe for the Ladakhi people. And that conclusion was the more convincing for being reached gradually, over 16 years, and from an originally non-political vantage point; for Norberg-Hodge had entered Ladakh as a professional linguist, merely with the intention of compiling a dictionary of the Ladakhi language. But the political passion that finally speaks from the book's pages is white-hot, quite as fierce as the more recent investigative journalism of Naomi Klein or Arundhati Roy. It is a brave and fascinatingly argued challenge to our commonplace image of development - that it is something like growing up, an inevitable "mixed blessing", dispelling one's innocence but giving one new capacities to engage with the big wide world.

That makes it sound as if "globalization" is what is at stake here; but in 1991 Helena Norberg-Hodge made little use of the term, and in a way one is rather grateful for it. To talk instead of "progress" and "development", while questioning the values those words have acquired, puts things in a different perspective. One sees Ladakh's changes temporally, rather than spatially; as part of a historical transformation that has happened, is happening, or (in a few far-flung cases) is still about to happen in each individual human culture, rather than a seductively fatal, all-embracing process of interconnection between them. As the author writes, this latter picture falsely implies a "concept of unity [that] has tremendous symbolic appeal... 'One market' implies community and co-operation and the 'Global Village' sounds like a place of tolerance and mutual exchange" (p.155). Not only does this leave on one side the imbalances and injustices that affect individual communities; it also implies that the interconnection and exchange taking place now is something absolutely new, rescuing the "native" societies of the world from their age-old isolation. One of the most telling points this book makes - there is almost one a paragraph - is that such isolation is wrongly imagined. Even such remote societies as Ladakh's reach out and accept foreign goods and influences. Leh, the capital, was an Asian trade hub, and Ladakhis themselves travelled as merchants and pilgrims. The point was that cultural contact with foreigners did not disturb the structures underpinning Ladakhi society - it was sought only as and when the Ladakhis needed it.

And it must be said, that was relatively seldom: for the Ladakhi way of life seems to have been so internally well-adjusted as to rely little on outside resources. The society was small and tightly-knit, using a few natural assets - a short barley-growing season, carefully channeled mountain streams, sturdy yaks providing labour, milk and fuel - to maximum effect. By harvesting and storing food and fodder when it was available in summer, the Ladakhis could spend the winter months celebrating, drinking and telling stories. "Economic" relations were centred on the household (the meaning, it pays to remember, of the Greek root of our word "economics": oikos); and particularly on the sustaining knowledge and industry of the women at its core. Work thus solidified familial relationships, diffusing a spirit of co-operation throughout the community which is neatly summed up in a traditional proverb: "Even a man with a hundred horses may need to ask another for a whip". Such co-operation largely replaced any need for a money economy, as well as ensuring a crime rate of virtually nil and an absence even of the concept of "unemployment". As the expressive English phrase goes about the "good old days" (sometimes even taken to include the Second World War) - back then people "pulled together". And having done so in traditional fashion for hundreds of years, the Ladakhis continued still in 1975 to live their lives with grace, consideration, humour and an extraordinary level of contentment.

The picture seems exaggerated, too rosy perhaps - some reviewers of the book and film suggest as much. But it may equally be, as Norberg Hodge reports of her own initial distrust at the Ladakhis' joie de vivre, that we would rather not believe a society so different from our own could take such good care of its members. We would prefer to think of it as "poor" and "backward", in urgent need of development on the Western pattern. And the tragedy, which in this book stands revealed as one of the main motors of such development, is the success we have had in convincing the Ladakhis and others like them of our way of seeing things. A sadly revealing chapter epigraph sets two quotes from the same Ladakhi source alongside each other, one from 1975 when Norberg-Hodge arrived, the other from 1983. The first time of asking, Tsewang Paljor opined, "We don't have any poverty here [in Ladakh]"; eight years later, he was complaining, "If only you could help us Ladakhis, we're so poor".

What is poverty, according to these two definitions? On the first, it seems to indicate a poorer quality of life, the lack of an enjoyable modicum of the things one needs - "enough to drink, enough to eat" as a Ladakhi phrase went. On the second, it has been reduced to lack of money, and the things - of Western origin - that money can buy. The innumerable economic paradoxes this sets up in practice, some of them familiar from the free trade and globalization debate, are well explained here, in more detail than I have space to reproduce: how villagers begin selling traditional brass and wooden jars for a pittance and replacing them with tins or plastic buckets; how construction work with imported concrete becomes "cheaper" than building traditional houses from local mud bricks; how the Ladakhis' environment becomes urbanised and aesthetically degraded at the same time that individuals count themselves richer. But of equally great importance, for the psychological or rhetorical reason just mentioned, is the paradox in theory. In Ladakh and the similarly placed independent kingdom of Bhutan, the standard of living is "actually quite high... People provide their own basic needs, and still have beautiful art and music, and significantly more time for leisure activities than people in the West" (p. 143). Yet going by GNP, Bhutan's subsistence economy ranks it as one of the poorest countries in the world. In effect no distinction is made "between the homeless on the streets of New York and Bhutanese or Ladakhi farmers". Equally absurdly, because work performed in one's own home or on one's own land is not "productive", only 10% of Ladakhis were, at the time of writing, officially classified as being "in work" at all.

I'm not competent to start a debate about statistics here, but this really made me stop and think. What does a slogan like "Make Poverty History" - which is the kind of sentiment that no-one would normally dream of questioning - actually mean in practice? Perhaps the agitatory tactics and short-term objectives selected by the 2005 campaign were in fact less problematic than its long-term aim - removing "absolute poverty". For when one looks with Norberg-Hodge's caveats in mind at the ways in which this state, or its upper limit, the "poverty threshold", are defined, one starts to wonder whether it really always equates to the classic cliche of destitution - as real as that undoubtedly is for those living in a Mumbai bustee. The World Bank sets the poverty line at $1 a day. First of all, that figure must be adjusted according to national economic conditions. Many students here at Santiniketan, for instance, spend less than that in a day, and are by no means absolutely poor: it is simply that, going by current exchange rates, a vegetarian lunch in a restaurant here will cost only 30 cents (and home cooking is of course cheaper). Secondly, even when adjusted, this measurement will always rest on the assumption that purchasing power or the lack of it must be the defining factor in quality of life - something that may not hold true in traditional economies. And some of the conventional lifestyle-based alternatives, such as the UN paper quoted on the above Wikipedia link, are so loaded with cultural bias they would astonish anyone who had spent any length of time in a Third World country: if you live in a house with a mud floor and do not get your information from the media then you are already defined as living in absolute poverty. (That would have categorized Tagore in his later years as poverty-stricken, living isolated in his mud house "Syamali" here in Santiniketan!)

Although that was not a happy example, alternatives to financial measures of poverty are needed - as Bengal's most famous Nobel laureate since Tagore, Amartya Sen (also a denizen of Santiniketan) has pointed out. The now-deposed King of Bhutan famously stated the objective of his deliberately isolationist policies as the maintenance of "Gross National Happiness". Maybe that sounds whimsical, but in fact economists have recently been taking happiness seriously as a factor in their theories. And as the Bhutanese meditations on this concept reveal, this is surely one way in which such wider topics as morality and religion must enter economics, upsetting the modern dogma that "development" and progress should be defined in purely material terms.

Tagore was of a similar mind. In a few paragraphs on the idea of "civilization" in his book The Religion of Man, he tells a story about travelling down by car with friends to Calcutta. Since there was a problem with the engine, the party had to stop numerous times in order to ask for water to help service it. In village after village people were happy to help, without thinking of charging any money for their often considerable trouble in finding water for the visitors. "The only place where a price was expected for the water given to us", he reports, "was a suburb of Calcutta, where life was richer, the water supply easier and more abundant and where progress flowed in numerous channels in all directions." It is a rather ambiguous anecdote, one must admit: as indeed much in Tagore's effort to engage with rural society was. The party of motoring urbanites already embody to the full the transformation in lifestyle that Tagore regretfully witnesses occurring in the countryside; and it is easier for the aristocrat to operate with assumptions of mutual generosity than it perhaps was for those whose lives were being swallowed by the growing metropolis. But for all that, he has a point when he contrasts the moral culture needed to offer a simple gift of water with the material civilization which has lost such an instinct: "In a few years time it might be possible for me to learn how to make holes in thousands of needles simultaneously by turning a wheel, but to be absolutely simple in one's hospitality...requires generations of training."

It is easy to forget the role that human virtues have had to play even in establishing what "material" civilization we do enjoy. We are too prone to forget that money itself is not a material but an ideal entity, its power resting entirely on trust and confidence. Businesses too need to choose morally reliable associates and employees, hence the provision of job references; where corruption rules and everyone has their hand in the till, even the maximization of profit will prove difficult. And once we are prepared to acknowledge how important the virtues of human character are within our present economic system, perhaps then we may see what virtues also lie outside it. When money does not change hands, then other concepts than trust come to the fore. Doing things for oneself builds independence and self-reliance, as Thoreau discovered in his cabin in Walden; conversely, the gift can stand at the centre of a whole network of social bonds and associated values, as sociologists from Marcel Mauss to Pierre Bourdieu have observed. To give a local example: for one of the prominent Brahmin families in rural Bengal, feeding the other villagers at festival time is a way to maintain one's social position; not to do so would be considered both mean and dishonourable. Analysing similar practices in Algeria, Bourdieu terms this "social capital": by distributing one's wealth one cultivates good social relations, which are always considered more basic and valuable. All across the Middle East and India, such attitudes permeate even what might appear to be normal market economies. When market traders assiduously cultivate your friendship, they are, perhaps, not just being "slimy" (as Western travellers are prone to think); they are attempting to convert a brief and empty monetary transaction into a more continuous social relationship. We may not think it worth the time; but is that not in the end our loss? For if we persistently refuse such overtures - and I admit, out of my lack of social adeptness I tend to do so, most of the time - then we ourselves will gradually transform a large part of our public world into what must be a worse alternative: into Thamel, a pure consumer zone, where the isolated, rootless individual wanders through a mall of luxury goods and impersonally administered services, gazing constantly, but from ever-varying angles, at the mirror of his own impatient desires.

I am, then, still persuaded by the argument of Ancient Futures: Ladakh may be an exaggerated case of postponed development, but its situation is far from unique. The tragedies of the Native American and Australian aborigine populations were not the result of "colonial" attitudes: they are another, more radical outcome of much the same process - the insistence that only Western definitions of land ownership, money, education, wealth and leisure are binding. Is it worse to have to travel miles on foot to fetch water, when this is an expected part of one's way of life - or to have that way of life and its skills laid waste, and to sit alone and unemployed at home with plentiful clean water on tap? I put that not just as a rhetorical question: it is genuinely difficult to answer, because we in the West have in fact got used to the latter kind of alternative and the values it creates. And when others want access to that sort of living, it seems like condescension, or jealousy, to suddenly begin questioning it.

In the end, I think the best thing one can do is to acquaint oneself as well as one can with the alternatives to our "developed" state, and with the dilemmas of those still "developing". Those dilemmas are real, but in their complexities they can also be very local. A subsistence economy, after all, means farming: and what one can farm and how easy it is (with or without some use of machinery) vary massively from place to place. It thus seems right to me that the most popular practical approach to "development issues" is currently not through central government, but small-scale charitable enterprise, better known as the NGO. In this part of the world one comes across NGOs everywhere. A Swiss woman I met at the Indian embassy in Kathmandu, acquainted for some 25 years with Nepal and its affairs, explained to me how - with the government still in transition and the constitution suspended - the country was virtually being run by NGOs. In the mountainous area of Jharkhand, roughly between West Bengal and the Nepalese border, numerous local initiatives were being run for the adivasis (tribal people) and poor local peasants. Here NGOs are the peaceful alternative to a more revolutionary approach: Maoist guerilla fighters, establishing enclaves independent of central government, and in the last few months constantly in the news for their attacks on local police stations. I met one NGO worker from there on the train between Santiniketan and Kolkata; in Nepal I made friends with an American girl volunteering on a project in Hazaribagh, the Nav Bharat Jagriti Kendra. And in Kathmandu itself I was given a tour of the Kumbeshwar Technical School, a completely self-sustaining, 25-year old project integrating traditional handicraft production, an orphanage and a primary school, all for the local low-caste population. In Hindu India and Nepal, these organisations are not only battling economic imbalances but also the ingrained social prejudice of the caste system. Not everything in traditional societies is organised for the "greatest happiness of the greatest number", and not everything there deserves to be endorsed just because it has perpetuated itself for generations. (I want to put on record that I do not agree with social conservatism a la Edmund Burke!) But in some cases, and Ladakh may have been one, stability corresponds to slowly-evolved contentment, not oppressive conservatism; and here we must have something to learn in building a sustainable future for our own society.

Sunday 11 October 2009

The Indian Circumlocution Office

A post born primarily of sheer frustration - but I hope with some anthropological apercus thrown in.

"My Bengal of red tape, I love you! Forever your majestic piles of ancient application forms and the intoxicating smell of musty paper will play upon my heart like the rusty keys of a thrice-repaired office typewriter..."

...as Tagore might also have written! I hope any Bengalis reading this will forgive my sacrilegious parody of the opening lines of Tagore's "Amar Sonar Bangla" (now the Bangladeshi national anthem); but a foreigner coming to live here does not only feel the magic of the open air and sky penetrating his breast like the sound of a far-off flute (though he surely does feel that too), he also sees a great deal of the inside of administrative offices and their pen-pushing inhabitants.

For here, bureaucracy is a way of life, and as with the slow pace of rustic existence, one must attune himself gradually to its gentle rhythms. There are no appointments; there are, it often seems, no "office hours" that anyone cares to observe with regularity; but there are very, very many holidays. Kalke ashun, "come tomorrow", is the eternal refrain. It does not mean that anything will be done tomorrow; it is not even a guarantee that anyone at all will be in the office tomorrow; it is usually no more an admonition to patience (but as such very salutary, since nothing is needed more than patience). Computers and electronic mail exist here, but officials avoid using them: they infinitely prefer transactions involving the inscrutable West Bengal post service, who have never successfully delivered a single document relating to me, or telephone lines which run through overloaded and intermittent exchanges and are answered, if at all, by people who speak no word of English. If they have an official email address they will not make any advertisement of the fact: why, that would mean answering so many enquiries! and from the General Public! And this would disturb them in their eternal circumlocutory task of establishing - to adapt Dickens' immortal description of nineteenth-century British bureaucracy from Little Dorrit - "How to Do It as Slowly as Possible"; an aim recently quoted in a Calcutta Telegraph editorial as the fourth "inbuilt Indian principle" of officialdom. A cartoon by the great R. K. Laxman analyses how delays can be introduced into the simplest office communication:an irate administrator turns from a virtually empty desk, decorated with a single memo, to berate his secretary - "You mean to say that you placed this note here a month ago? And yet you never bothered to draw my attention to it?!"

Now, inefficiency alone is not a necessary ground for complaint, as long as the administrative machine in question does not also set terribly exacting standards for the completeness of its own procedures. I have been told that in Spain and South America one is often unable to get anything done, but that at the last minute some official will summarily ignore the proprieties, stamp all your forms, and give you a free pass to whatever it was you were after. A certain amount of palm-greasing would have the same function. Conversely, the German or Swiss approach - as the complaint runs, "Von der Wiege bis zur Baare/ Formulare, Formulare" ("From the cradle to the grave/Forms and still more forms they wave") - is at least smoothed by famously ruthless efficiency and precise timekeeping. Stony-faced, the handsomely paunched official comes back with your notarized documents and bids you go free, out into the sunshine to enjoy your lunchtime Bier and Wurst. There, bureaucracy may not be fun, but it is dispatched as quickly and clinically as it can be, freeing the rest of your time for leisure. And the Germans have some very good ideas of what to do with that.

In contrast to both of these approaches, the Indian system seems to have been born from a truly perilous desire to make bureaucracy itself enjoyable - without however making it either any more efficient or any less demanding in its procedures. There you stand, apprised of some new setback to your application, and the official who has just dealt you this blow will try a little joke in English, or draw your kind attention to the interesting similarities of certain root words in Sanskrit and Latin, or enquire how you are liking India? or invite you to take a seat and have tea and sweets brought in. And really, the only polite and practical thing to do is to accommodate yourself to this. Make sure you have no subsequent appointment, but bring a book, accept any tea and conversation overtures that are proffered, and make yourself comfortable. At least the office ceilings in India contain an unusually high density of fans. For you will probably be back again in the same place another half-dozen times, and it pays to make yourself amenable to those you are dealing with.

In fact, it pays to make trips to the office even when you know there is little hope of seeing any progress - just in order to say hello and "pay your respects", as it were. In this, dealing with Indian administrators rather resembles the ceremonies of the ancient Roman system of patronage, the morning levy at which clients assembled at their patron's door to see if there was any service they could render him. Your service is required since, when the time is right for the next stage in the process, it is you who will be required to expedite the documents for the necessary counter-signatures - and a good thing too, since the official peon (internal postman) would probably lose them if they were ever entrusted to his care. Moreover, form-filling is done on the pre-Xerox principle that multiple copies must be handwritten by the applicant. Since a submission in triplicate is the bare minimum - quadruplicate more common - this is a task in itself. (One can be thankful that a classical education in India signifies Sanskrit; for it can only be ignorance of the higher Greek ordinal numbers that prevents the stipulation of "dodecatuplicate" submissions, or some other such monstrosity.) Also not to be underestimated is the provision of the necessary number of passport photos. Rather than containing photo booths, district administrative offices are surrounded by freelancers, each with a digital camera, printer and a stained patch of wall or background curtain. They would scoff at providing photos in the UK standard four copies - that would be used up on a single form! Here you are best advised to order forty at once: it will save you trouble, and they will all be used up within the year.

On occasion you may be required to perform other, more altruistic tasks, such as burrowing on hands and knees through piles of old forms in the backs of cupboards - filing cabinets are a rare item here - catching the occasional glimpse of a disappearing rat's tail or some small adventurous frog that hopped in with the last monsoon shower, in order to locate a misplaced application. (This is a perfectly bona fide anecdote, relayed to me by a seasoned foreign applicant for Indian university courses.) If you have been through it all before, and there is some newcomer unfamiliar with the system, then it is best to make a formal introduction; if returning to the place after a long absence, you will enter the office door and greet the clerk like an old friend. You will have his mobile phone number and know his home address, so that you can call out of hours to get a form signed, or have a cup of tea, in case of need. If he has taken a liking to you he will turn to your case promptly, make suggestions, and ensure things run smoother; if you have got on the wrong side of him, then documents will be lost or buried, signatures delayed, memos left unsent. Your responsibilities to him are never entirely discharged: he has become a semi-permanent figure in your Indian existence.

As I said, here bureaucracy is truly a way of life.

Sunday 30 August 2009

Tagore worship


So this blog's title finally gets a chance to justify itself - by giving some aesthetic impressions of India, the land of the rasikas. Who are to be found in sufficient number here in Santiniketan, incidentally - most of them also devotees of Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet, composer, artist, and founder of the university.

The atmosphere surrounding the Tagore inheritance is peculiar, perhaps unique, being both very Indian and bearing curious parallels with the personality cults of European artistic figures. One could put it more bluntly, and say that to the average educated Bengali, Tagore is God. His creative output was indeed staggering, in quantity, quality and variety: he produced poems, songs, novels, plays, criticism, dance-dramas, Bengali primers, tracts on education, religion and philosophy, and in his last few years, paintings. He also came to occupy a virtually unique position as representative of Indian culture to the outside world during the early decades of the twentieth century: he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, a fact Bengalis are inordinately proud of, although it is now regularly awarded to writers whose names are not exactly household knowledge; he undertook extensive lecture tours, cultivated friendships with Gandhi and Einstein, and saw it as his mission to bring East and West together. To confess to a Bengali that you do not know of him is like telling an Englishman you've never heard of Shakespeare, or worse; it would leave him shaking with horror and disbelief. And yet many Europeans, even the better-read ones, do know nothing about him - a fact that indicates not so much their reprehensible ignorance as how, despite boasting grandly of universal human values, many of the world's high cultural traditions continue to remain resolutely local in their appeal. To overcome that state of affairs takes work. And without wanting to make grand boasts myself, that's one reason I would give for being here.

The week of my arrival happened to be Rabindra Saptaha - "Rabindranath Week" - and featured daily events in the town's two major auditoria, the aircraft-hangar-sized Nataghar and the smaller Lipika (about the size of the Wigmore Hall, with a gently raked floor). In both, the majority of the audience sit on thin cloth or sacking spread on the ground, with VIPs sequestered in a section with plastic chairs. The Lipika event began with two Tagore songs for solo male and female voice, the accompaniment discreet and traditional; but most of the evening was taken up with lectures from two dignified speakers sitting garlanded at the edge of the stage. Almost as severe and white-bearded as Rabindranath himself, the appearance of the first seemed in my mind comically appropriate to the cries of "sadhu, sadhu" that echoed the end of his speech, and which are the traditional form of applause in Santiniketan. (The European equivalent would I suppose be "bravo", "bravo" - but coincidentally the same Bengali word also means "holy man".)

My Bengali was certainly not up to the task of comprehending the lectures, but I got a certain impression of their range and tone: general rather than specialist, but very serious, and filled with largely reverential oratory. The one sentence whose drift I could catch ran through a long, pause-laden anaphora, enumerating all Tagore's many individual talents before denying them all for the sake of his universal but unique personality: "Rabindranath was not A, Rabindranath was not B...not X, Y, Z -no, Rabindranath was Rabindranath." Said to mark a higher virtue and the highest truth of nineteenth-century humanist philosophy - as Goethe put it, "Personlichkeit ist hochstes Gut", personality is the greatest treasure of all - but also somewhat platitudinous, unless one is prepared to say how it does not hold true of everybody. And this combination, of unquestionably high ideals, high achievement, high culture, but also a lack of willingness to criticize and distinguish, or to leaven the tone where it might be necessary - this surely explains some of the negative reactions I have already read to Tagore and Santiniketan. They range from the scoffing of Vikram Seth in A Suitable Boy ("Robi Tagore/He's such a bore!" chants a Bengali teenager, to her pious mother's horror) to V. S. Naipaul's more nuanced perceptions of Santiniketan culture as "something Arcadian and very fragile, depending on a suspension of disbelief and criticism".

As Naipaul goes on to point out, it must have sustained itself partly through a simple beatification of its founding figure: the "simple Indian tourists" visit the town "not because they knew the poetry or the work of Rabindranath Tagore, but because they had heard of him as a holy man, and it was good to visit the shrines of such people". The Tagore statues one sees in the gardens here, tastefully monochrome and elongated to occasionally Giacomettian proportions, but in size and situation reminding one involuntarily of garden gnomes, hardly help to suppress the picture of an incongruous twentieth-century folk religion. One thinks - only in India! But on a deeper level this may not be true. Culturally, my suspicions - which will need careful and unprejudiced testing over the next few months - are that Santiniketan is in many respects a kind of Indian Bayreuth, preserving the memory of the Master and the forms of an artistic canon with a fierce, necessary, but ultimately self-restrictive loyalty. Even if this is so, and however far it is driven, mockery should not be the only response. Tagore and Wagner on different continents both produced some of the highest achievements of nineteenth-century Romantic culture in word and tone, something anyone ought to try and appreciate. Importantly, I think both also knew exactly how they had done it, with the help of which common traditions and values (both esoteric and popular). Perhaps that inner understanding is what one should strive to recreate today, for the sake of contemporary art as much as theirs. And meanwhile, a bit of humour might not go amiss: one only needs to read the memoirs of either figure to see they did not lack it themselves.

The real value of Tagore's legacy probably lies, not so much in the self-conscious cultural pride that he has given the Bengali middle classes, as in the extent to which his poetry and songs have been naturally reabsorbed, like rain, by the land on whose creative waters he drew. The second concert in the vast hall of the Nataghar, more populous and less reverential, gave me more of a taste of that: not soloists but school children singing en masse, their families encamped around the cavernous but bustling auditorium, chatting, hailing each other, trying to rein in their toddlers, singing along and taking photos of the folk dancers swarming on and off stage.



It had almost the atmosphere of a festival, being centred on enjoyment rather than reverence; and festival culture here is both a reflection of Tagore's wishes and the natural inclinations of the Bengalis. There will be plenty of it to enjoy and describe in the next few months.