Leaving India

After our last visit with Balaji, Devi, Swastika, Shrinidhi, et al, we left for the airport, flew to Chennai and, after several hours in the Chennai airport (including a hip fusion bar), we all left - Becky to Washington, D.C., and Raphael and I to London.

India is an assault on the senses - ALL the senses. Not for the faint of heart. Sensory overload, really.

Despite warnings to the contrary, didn't get sick at all on this trip. Unfortunately, my camera died - a casualty of sand from the Great Thar desert, I suspect. Full disclosure - photos from Agra and Madurai are not mine.

India didn't feel like a country, or rather, it felt like more than a country - a civilization - a collection of civilizations. In many ways, it feels as different from California as any place could be. In other ways, very familiar.

Of course, two weeks is a drop in the bucket for such a vast place -just a taste.

It was a great opportunity to experience this with Raphael and Becky. Thanks to Becky, I got to visit South Africa (with her) last year and now India. Fun and fascinating encounters with yogis, priests, beggars, crazy drivers, thespians, avatars, rock sculptures, elephants, camels, camel trainers, snakes, monkeys, and rodent-storytellers, among others.

When I arrived in Mumbai, my first act was to try to avoid getting bitten by mosquitoes. I got through the two weeks with no malaria, but something else got into my blood.

Love, Marriage, Tevya, and Tamil

Becky's host family is constructed traditionally. There is a husband and wife (and kids) who live with the husband's parents (usually, the oldest son and his wife live with his parents). The husband (Balaji) and his father are both plastic surgeons. Balaji's wife, Devi, 28, is primarily responsible for their two daughters - Swastika (7) and Shrinidhi (4). (The swastika is an ancient religious symbol for Hindus and also Persians - the Nazis appropriated it and reversed its direction. Swastika does NOT have negative connotations here at all. One can purchase ornamental gifts with swastikas on them - I've been itching to ask the vendors just how well those items sell to Europeans and Americans).

Though Devi's mother-in-law is Becky's official host mother, or Amma, in fact, Becky has spent most of her time and gotten closest to Devi. Devi runs a small clothing boutique and is going to business school (online) but mostly she is responsible for the household and the girls. She's college-educated and I think having Becky around has been great for her, as well as for Becky.

Devi and Balaji's marriage was arranged, as are the vast majority of marriages here. A friend of both families thought it might be appropriate so she contacted the parents. The parents met each other and compared notes about the kids, showed photos, etc. The purpose is for the parents to determine if it would be a good match - not necessarily or certainly not only if they would like each other, but, rather, if their families are compatible, by caste, professional orientation, income, etc. The girl's and boy's skills, future prospects, etc. Once the parents are satisfied that it may be a good match, they then consult the astrologer. Consulting the horoscope is critical - the stars must align for this match to succeed. If the astrologer says yes (let's imagine him or her bobbling their head in affirmation), then the boy's parents take him to meet the girl's parents. The girl is home, but she does not participate in this meeting.

(By the way - "caste" has two meanings. One refers to the broader and popular understanding of social strata - 4 broad classes, and below, "untouchables." The caste system was outlawed shortly after independence, but it continues to have a profound, though slowly waning, influence on Indian life. The 2nd meaning of caste refers to tribe or clan. It is important to parents that their children marry within their clan - a clan can be quite large. Arranged marriages of 1st cousins are not uncommon.)

The horoscope is also consulted with regard to the wedding date. Other factors come into play - there are auspicious and inauspicous times in Hinduism. For example, within a lunar month, while the moon is waxing is more auspicious, while it is waning is less auspicious. During the year, from the winter solstice to summer solstice, as daylight increases, is more auspicious, and from summer to winter, as daylight diminishes, is less auspicious. Within the week, Tuesdays and Fridays seem to be auspicious days (not sure why).

When all these are consulted, a wedding date is selected (bear in mind, until this moment, Devi had not actually met Balaji). During their engagement, they spent no time alone - not dates or such. They were alone for the first time after their wedding.

This was nine years ago.

After the wedding, not only does the couple get to know each other, but the girl moves into the home of her husband's family.

Devi, who'd gone to college, actually had some male friends - this is not traditional and is frowned upon by many in the older generation. Devi maintains these friendships, but she told me that when she was married, she broke off contact with her male friends for a while, since Balaji didn't know her, she wanted to build their relationship and establish trust and felt that the presence of male friends would be undermining.

Devi has a few friends who have done "love marriages" - an unusual, but growing phenomenon. She told me about one couple - they met and fell in love. Their parents were friends and they were from the same caste. Nonetheless, the parents were livid and refused to accept the union. The couple fled to Mumbai and hid out there, far from Tamil Nadu. After 2-3 years, and children, the parents came to accept the marriage.

Becky knows some young people who have "secret" boyfriends or girlfriends.

One of the fascinating things about India - it is going through enormous modernizing influences now - in a sense, 100 years of post-industrial modernization are being compressed within a single generation. At the same time, this is occurring in a vast society steeped in old traditional customs. Here in Tamil Nadu, one is more likely to see in public two men holding hands (not gay) than a man and a woman. At the same time, turn on the TV or go to the movies and see the latest from Bollywood, in which sexuality is celebrated or flaunted, depending on one's point of view. There are many cultural taboos here, yet I haven't observed the equivalent of ultra-orthodox haredim burning down a bus stand because of a risque photo of a scantily clad woman on it. Perhaps due to the religious diversity of India, there's a bit more of a live and let live attitude.

Becky asked Devi if she thinks her girls will marry arranged, as she did, or will choose their husbands (imagining different sexual orientation is completely off the table). Devi said she didn't know - which itself is a very progressive attitude here on this subject.

The whole subject of arranged vs. love marriages is a rich topic here. Thus, we brought a DVD of Fiddler on the Roof. Becky's host family is fascinated by Judaism. There was a Hindu holiday they celebrated that coincided with the Days of Awe, so Becky was explaining Yom Kippur, Shabbat, etc. They were very interested. Becky and two other Jewish students had a Shabbat dinner at their home. So - given their interest in Judaism and the theme of arranged marriages and modernization - Becky thought it would be interesting for us to watch Fiddler on the Roof together (in a way, Fiddler is kinda like a Bollywood production anyway). That is our afternoon activity today, before we leave.

Yoga at the Gandhi Museum

Our time in Madurai is less about site-seeing and more about experiencing Becky's life and world here. We visited her program and met the head of the program and some of the workers and her professors - all of whom told me how beloved Becky is.

Other than breakfast at the hotel, we have not eaten out at a restaurant in Madurai - every meal has been at Becky's host family. So, it's a lot of authentic South India life - at least, for a family like Becky's host family.

They are a family of doctors and reasonably well off by India standards. Like many middle class Indians, they have servants in the house who do much of the cleaning and cooking.

We eat with our hands, no utensils. The food is served on banana leaves.

Not far from our hotel is the Gandhi museum. The museum tracks Gandhi's career from his time in South Africa to his assassination. We ran into a class of girls from a teaching college. They couldn't stop giggling with us - because, in Madurai, we are so exotic - they just never saw Americans. Becky says this is a common experience for her in Tamil Nadu.

Gandhi had been to Madurai and it was here where he chose to shed his western lawyer clothes for the traditional khadi (loin cloth and shawl). This was not a huge surprise to me - when we arrived in Maddurai from our night train, I observed rail workers wearing such clothing - I had not seen this at all in North India.

I wanted to take a yoga class in India. I asked the hotel concierge, but they were useless. Fortunately, Becky's host sister Devi has a friend who takes yoga classes at the Gandhi museum. She arranged for me to take a yoga class there. When the yogi heard I was coming, he arranged for a private class for me with one of his students/teachers.

The class was great. After the class, the head yogi came over to meet me. Turns out he is the director of the Gandhi museum. When I told him I was from California, he laughed and said that California has supplanted India as the world center of yoga.

He is a student of comparative religion and, like Dr. V, he is fascinated with Judaism. As it was Saturday, he wished me a Shabbat Shalom, and had all his students say "Shabbat shalom."

He told me about an interfaith conference he'd attended in Europe and that one religious highlight for him was attending a Passover seder. He informed me that there is no book about Judaism in the Tamil language and he asked if I would work with him on a primer about Judaism that he could publish in Tamil. I told him I would send him a good book on this subject - easier for him to translate an existing good intro to Judaism than to write a new one.

I was gonna take an auto rickshaw back to the hotel, but my teacher gave me a lift on the back of his motorcycle.

Bobble-headed Communications

Spending time here in India has led me to reexamine assumptions about what is universal and what is culturally relative.

For example, if you ask an American to imagine two motorized vehicles driving straight toward one another in a busy road, as if playing a grown-up game of "chicken," only for one to swerve and miss the other at the last moment - the American would probably say that this is an unsafe driving practice and assume that this perspective is universal (if they experience this - as I have many times now - they may pass out first and then offer their opinion after being revived). And yet, it is common practice here and many Indian drivers would be perplexed or bemused by the notion that someone else finds this unsafe, not to mention unsettling. (We were in an auto-rickshaw in Jaipur one night and the driver turned the wrong way down a one way street. He realized his mistake and started to turn around - but there was a lot of traffic and he realized it would take him a long time to get to where we wanted to go. He looked back down the one-way street, thought for a moment and then, I could see it in his eyes and body language - thought to himself - "fuck it" - and turned back, gunned his little auto-rickshaw engine and drove against the traffic down the one-way street. And got us to our hotel.).

Similarly, we nod our head vertically as a non-verbal sign of assent, and shake it horizontally to signify - "no." I've traveled widely, and this has never failed me in communicating yes or no.

In India - most especially in Tamil Nadu - one expresses agreement by bobbling one's head up & down and side to side - sort of diagonally, or in an arc. Probably closest to an action an American would interpret as "not sure..." (though really, there is no corollary in the U.S. for this).

This was very confusing at first - we'd be negotiating with taxi or auto-rickshaw drivers (opening bid is doubled at site of white foreigner) - they say 60 rupees, I say 30 rupees, and so on. They would bobble their head, and I'd take it as a no, but it actually meant yes - I'd continue to argue and Becky would have to say - "Dad - he's agreeing with you. Let's get in the car."

The "bobble" is ubiquitous in South India. It is cute, endearing, and, when I've seen some women do it - kinda sexy. I've been practicing.

Meenakshi Temple

Meenakshi Temple, Madurai

Lots of fun visiting with Becky's host family, visiting her program and meeting the director of the program (who loves Becky), shopping in the bazaar, and taking a private tour of the Meenakshi Temple with Becky's professor - professor of Hindu art and anthropology - Dr. V. (it's a longer name, but everyone seems to call him Dr. V.).

The temple is among the great temples in Hinduism and is the heart of Madurai. It was first constructed in the 7th century, CE, so it is about 1300 years old.

The temple is huge and is divided into two temples - one devoted to Shiva (in the incarnation of Sunderaswarar) and one devoted to Meenakshi (Meenakshi is an incarnation of Parvati - remember, in Hinduism, every god is an incarnation of another god).


Meenakshi is replete with gazillions of statues

Dr. V is an anthropologist. We discussed the plethora of avatars of gods in Hinduism. Dr. V's take is that many years ago, you had in the vast subcontinent many different religions evolving among the different tribes - different, but related and similar. As societies developed, conquered one another, there was an attempt to "unify" all these disparate faiths under one Hindu religion. The best political way to deal with these disparate gods among these different tribes was to say that they were just different incarnations of the same gods. Thus, one tribe's Meenakshi became simply an incarnation of another tribe's Parvati, as one tribe's Durga was an incarnation of another tribe's Karni Mata, and so on.

The temple commemorates the marriage of Shiva and Meenakshi (Parvati). Every night, there is a wedding procession through the streets of Madurai, beginning and ending in the temple. Shiva rides a bull - Nandi, the bull god, is Shiva's guardian. Nandi represents sexual energy and fertility, which Shiva controls when he rides Nandi.


Shiva, riding Nandi the bull

An elephant marches in the wedding procession. They were preparing the procession when we were there - I gave the elephant a couple of rupees and the elephant blessed me (I held out a 2 rupee coin, the elephant took the coin with its trunk, and then it lifted the trunk and gently placed it upon my head).


Ganesh

The temple was really hopping when we were there. There were a bunch of pilgrims there. This group, according to Dr. V, travels around to temples once a year on a pilgrimage. They take 3 weeks off in December and spend the time making pilgrimages to temples. All men, in ages from around 20 to 70 it seemed, all bare-chested. All totally into the scene.


Pool of holy water inside Meenakshi Temple

Fascinated by Hinduism. Hinduism seems unlike organized religions I'm familiar with - more like an unorganized religion. As I mentioned above, Dr. V sees Hinduism having developed as amalgamation of multiple tribal faiths and traditions. Unlike some religions, it never developed a monolothic structure and dogma, so differences are tolerated.

Dr. V is fascinated with Judaism which he views, like Buddhism, as an "ethical religion." Ethical human behavior toward other humans is, in his view, central to Judaism, more so than Hinduism, for example.

As we walked through Meenakshi Temple, we discussed some similarities and contrasts between Judaism and Hinduism. He was most interested in the effect of the Roman occupation and destruction of the Temple - how it contributed to a new and evolved model of Rabbinic and congregational Judaism.

Heading South

Until now, we've spent our time in north India - make that North India. As an Indian friend once told me many years ago - "we have our own Mason-Dixon line."

We took the train from Agra to Delhi, then flew from Delhi to Chennai (formerly Madras), then nigh-trained from Chennai to Madurai.

We had a few hours to kill in Delhi. We were pretty tired from somewhat constant traveling - Mumbai-Jaipur-Bikaner-Agra - so rather than site-see, we found the nicest restaurant at the nicest hotel we could, had a really good meal and chilled.

Flight to Chennai, then, our last night train - from Chennai to Madurai.

Many differences between the north and south. First, there's language. In Madurai, people speak Tamil, not Hindi.

The linguistic diversity of India is staggering. About 200 languages and dialects, 15 offically recognized languages. Hindi is the officially recognized national language and the problem is - few southerners speak Hindi. Hindi is actually more closely related to English (we are both Indo-European languages) than it is to Tamil (from the Dravidian language group - indigenous to this region, while Hindi descends from Sanskrit and other languages brought by the Aryan invasion of the subcontinent thousands of years ago).

The closest thing to a lingua franca here is English, and most people don't speak that either. Nehru had wanted to make English the official language of India, but he lost that battle and the northern-dominated parliament made Hindi the national language - despite the fact that more than half the country did not speak it at all.

Becky learned Tamil, which is great down here but it was useless in the North.

Another difference - Madurai is a much more culturally conservative town than the other places we have been. One won't see a woman in modern dress here - saris, plus an additional wrap covering a woman's chest are required for going out in the street. Becky was shocked to see women wearing jeans and such in Mumbai. I even saw women in saris in a yoga class (though, that was also the only place I saw a couple of women wearing pants).

Also - nearly every man I see in Tamil Nadu has a moustache. Some have beards, but probably less than one in a hundred have an exposed upper lip. Facial hair is common in the north, but not like this.

Oh - one more thing. My camera died - I think from sand from our camel safari in the desert. So I don't expect to have any more photos - at least not from my camera.

Taj Mahal

Becky, David, and Raphael, searching for the Taj Mahal
gotta be around here somewhere...)

I'm sitting in the gardens that front the Taj Mahal.

When you see it for the first time it is breathtaking. In some respects it is not that elaborate in design - the simplicity works. Don't get me wrong, it is majestic, awesome and, yes, elaborate - I just mean there are other examples of Mogul architecture with more intricate detailed artistry. We saw one today - Itimad ud-Daulah, nicknamed the Baby Taj, a mausoleum built by Shah Jahan's father, Jahangir, for his father-in-law. More detailed art in the tile work than the Taj.


Itimad ud-Daulah (Baby Taj) - actually built earlier than the Taj Mahal.
Also in Agra, a few miles from the Taj Mahal.


Closer view of the Itimad ud-Daulah - across the river from the Taj.

Still - the Taj Mahal is magical.

The whiteness helps - the way the white marble plays with the light, and reflects - as if it has a surreal glow.

Of course, it is a tourist scene, but I can block all that out and focus on its serene beauty as hawks silently glide over and around it.

It is set on a platform - about 3 stories high - so you are always looking up at it and the backrop is only sky, it is the singular image - behind it the earth drops down to the bank of the Yamuna River.

On an aesthetic level - it is magnificent; architecturally, it is glorious.

Shah Jahan built the Taj as a mausoleum and memorial to his wife Arjumand Banu Begum - known as mumtaz mahal (chosen one or ornament of the palace).

She was his 3rd wife but his clear favorite - he took little interest in his other wives once she joined the harum. She was 19 when they wed and 38 when she died - so half her life was with him. She died giving birth to their 14th child.

It is said that his grief was so severe, he hair turned gray overnight (another story has him going into seclusion for a year and when he returned his hair was gray).

Legend has it that her dying wish was for him to build something beautiful to memorialize their love.

22 years, 20,000 workers and 5 million rupees later - he did.

The romance is countervailed by the brutality, vanity, and wastefulness its construction necessitated. Legend has it that he had the hands of the builders cut off when it was done, so they would not be able to replicate their work. Takes a bit of an edge off the romance (though some historians dispute this story).

The Taj Mahal is not just the building. It is surrounded by gardens, pools and fountains, and a mosque and a guest house - architectural beauties in their own right, along with an impressive entry gate to the gardens. Outside that gate a courtyard/public square, surrounded by walls and 3 gates.


Gate to Taj Mahal courtyard

Outside of THAT - every vendor one can imagine, hawking every possible cheap artifact or postcard, or guide service. See Slumdog Millionaire to get a sense of the scene outside the gates.

We spent most of the afternoon there. Late in the afternoon, we crossed the river and watched it from the other side of the river, as dusk fell.