In the Clear Light of Day
Part XXIV
India One
My first trip to India lasted about two months. It was divided into two distinct parts. The first part consisted of the official study tour, which lasted around three weeks. The second part was my personal trip through Nepal and India for about another month.
It all started at JF Kennedy International Airport outside of New York City.
The professor arranged reduced fare tickets for us from Air India. Not many
Americans traveled to India in those days. There were few flights and Air India, the Indian national airline, provided most of the routes. Air infrastructure, like infrastructure in general, was rudimentary in India at that time. Indian airports were small and low tech. Many were left over from the British colonial period, and were shared by both civilian and military aircraft. Often there was a small civilian terminal and airstrip on one side and a military base and airstrip on the other. Airports were considered military assets and all photography was forbidden.
I was supposed to meet my group at the Air India counter at JFK to board our flight and collect my ticket from the professor. I went to the wrong terminal and the clock was ticking. I had to get across JFK to the correct terminal. I decided to panhandle a ride.
A big car stopped. The door opened and an elderly Jewish gentleman told me to step inside. He was sitting on the back seat. He had a driver. He told me he was very curious about the hippie thing and wanted to find out what it was about. He politely asked me a few questions. We drove outside the airport, through a New
York neighborhood and back into the airport. I was not scared. I knew this man was sincere and intended no harm. He impressed me as a scholar thirsting for knowledge. We could have talked at much greater length about many things. He dropped me off right in front of my terminal and I made my flight with plenty of time to spare.
I met the other folks in the group. There were six of us. We were all college students. I did not particularly bond with any of them. They seemed to have only a vague and nominal interest in India. Perhaps they came from families with lots of money and parents willing to provide them with an unusual summer experience to gain some college credit. South Asian Studies was not considered a viable career path and there were few serious study opportunities. I did not have particularly interesting conversations with them, or with the professor for that matter. He seemed detached. Although he advertised the trip as an academic experience, he did not go into much detail about much of anything. He
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was limited by the fact that the students had zero knowledge of India and were not all that interested. This may have been because there without an extensive matrix of South Asian studies in existence in the United States, there was no academic foundation for the trip. I was the only participant who planned to make South Asia my field of study.
During our weeks together, I picked the professor’s brain. He was an historian and knew a lot about Indian history. He provided me with useful background, but nothing particularly profound.
We boarded the flight. It was from JFK to Bombay (now Mumbai). It would be among the longest flights I had ever taken. As a child, I flew with my mother and brother from Japan to the United States. It was before the days of jet aircraft and we flew in a propeller plane. That flight took many hours with frequent stops for refueling. This would be a long flight as well, from America to Asia, but it would be much quicker. When I was a child, flight was rare. It was considered a unique experience. People still dressed up to ride an airplane. There was plenty of space and lots of service and good food. Although the flights were much longer than today, they were more enjoyable.
The Air India flight was my first immersion in an Indian environment, even if it was only a commercial aircraft. Air India featured a mascot called the “little maharajah.” Someone in the Indian advertising industry had dreamed him up. It seemed a bit unfortunate. To me, the little maharajah trivialized the Indian experience and patronized the Western tourists who were its principal target. It played on their preconceptions of exotic India.
Air India was part of India’s “mixed economy,” established by the Congress Party under the leadership of India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. It was uniquely Indian in that although it was a commercial venture, it was not slick and commercialized and standardized. The big American airlines at that time were
Pan Am and TWA. They stressed efficiency. I would learn quickly that Indian ventures stressed a personal homey quality over efficiency. Indians did not have the concept of purely commercial, capitalist venture that provided standardized services to customers. Even today, with globalization and all of the changes in the Indian economy, Indians expect their business transactions to be personal experiences. They prefer “mom and pop” family owned businesses, that establish personal patron client relationships. Indians are not happy with impersonal corporate conglomerates and chain stores. They are willing to spend more time shopping to receive personal attention from someone they know.
Air India was a public sector enterprise. It was not established just to make a profit. It was meant to represent India to the wider world. Air India provided me with my first glimpse of India. It was different just going to the Air India counter. To me, going to India was stepping into another world. Little or nothing would be the same as I had experienced to date. Everything would be new. This started from the moment I arrived at the Air India counter.
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Now there are five star hotels in India run by international chains. They create an international experience not tied to any country. These did not exist when I first went to India. I would not stay in such a hotel for decades. My first experience of India was close to the ground. I stayed in regular Indian hotels and guesthouses. There was nothing western about them. They were meant for
Indians not for international tourists.
My Air India experience started with food. There were few Indians in the United
States in the early 1970’s. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I grew up, I did not encounter a single Indian. I did not meet Indians until I was in Europe.
Indian restaurants may have existed in big cities in the US, but I did not see one until I arrived in Frankfurt, Germany. Even though Frankfurt was a major city and commercial center, it had only one or two Indian restaurants. It would have been unimaginable for my family and I to eat at an Indian restaurant. Families did not experiment with cooking “exotic” cuisines at home. People stuck with the food they knew. There was no concept of trying to make Indian food and no source for the ingredients. This meant that Indian food was part of the experience of something totally different.
During my stay with Air India, I ate only Indian food. I ate only Indian for the next two months. Indian food is a problem for many western people. They either cannot eat it, or cannot digest it. They find it too spicy, or too exotic, or they don’t like the look or the smell or the taste. I did not have any of these reactions. I enjoyed eating Indian food from the moment that I first tasted it. I also appreciated the fact that Indian food is usually vegetarian.
India has the largest per capita number of vegetarians of any country in the world. Indian cuisine has developed so many wonderful and delicious vegetarian dishes, that meat eating can easily be forgotten. For me, this meant it was easy to have a karma free diet. I quickly associated vegetarian eating with
Indian culture. I appreciated the fact that I could eat Indian vegetarian meals on the plane and anywhere I went in India.
I also quickly noticed that India did not have the slick packaging taken for granted in the US. The Indian meals on the plane were packaged in tin foil and paper. This is also off putting to some Americans. They mistake unsophisticated packaging with a lack of sanitation. They want their food wrapped in plastic.
Americans have heard horror stories about Indian food and have been told it will make them sick. Many are afraid to eat anything associated with India. My love of Indian food has been constant from that moment to the present. I have never complained about Indian food and have never had difficulty eating anything in
India.
The second thing I noticed was that there was Indian music on the plane. I was familiar with Indian music, but not with its many and varied genres and their significance. To me, there were two types of Indian music, classical music, which
I associated with Ravi Shankar and the sitar and the raga, and Hindu devotional music (bhajan). I had a rudimentary knowledge of Indian classical music. I was familiar with the instruments and the raga and the structure of the raga. I had no
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problems with Indian classical music. It was long and it was improvisational and required concentration. But for me, the efforts were rewarded. It was like anything in life. What you get out of it depends on what you put into it.
I did not know that Indian devotional music consisted of bhajans, devotional songs. I was familiar with mantras and I had heard both mantras and bhajans performed by Quintessence, at ISKCON temples, and on records by the Radha
Krishna Temple London, and by George Harrison. As my association with all things Indian became more intense, I acquired an intimate and affectionate relationship with bhajans.
I was not yet aware that most Indians listen primarily to film music, mostly from
Hindi movies. I had not yet seen a Hindi movie or listened to the film music that makes up Indian popular music. I still assumed that Indians listened to classical music and/or bhajans. Over time I learned that Indians, like westerners, generally do not listen or appreciate classical music. Indian classical music requires instruction and education and socialization. It is an acquired taste, for
Indians as well as westerners.
Indian devotional music is all-pervasive and an intimate part of the religious cultural environment. Unlike the West, India does not compartmentalize. India does not divide experience into religious and secular components. What we consider “religion” is just considered life in India. This means that “religious” music appears anywhere in India. Blind beggars sing bhajans on the train, on the bus, on the street. Temples and Gurdwaras (Sikh temples) broadcast religious songs from loudspeakers. The taxi driver can burst into a bhajan. Religious music contends with film music, but it is all part of the same life experience.
The third component I became acquainted with while on the plane was the Hindi language. Having only transient interaction with Indians up to that point, I was not fully aware of the linguistic subtleties of India. I was not aware of the various
Indian languages and the role of Hindi as the “national language,” and had received no instruction in Hindi. I was aware of the devanagri alphabet. It is used to write both Hindi and Sanskrit, but had no idea what the letters meant or how they are put together to form words.
Air India provided me with a Hindi phrase book. This was my introduction to the
Hindi language. The book used pictures and Hindi phrases written in the Roman alphabet. I started memorizing simple Hindi phrases from the book while still in the air. I carried the book with me everywhere during this first Indian trip and used the phrases on a regular basis.
To me, travelling and existing in another culture had always meant speaking the language of the people. This was particularly true in India. Many westerners wrongly assume that everyone in India speaks English. They are dismayed when they speak English and many people don’t understand them. I did not have this illusion. I knew that speaking the language of the people was the way to become immersed in their culture. I had already had that experience in Germany and while travelling through Europe.
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Air India provided me three essential components of Indian culture before I had even set foot in India, food, music, and language. I was also able to interact with the stewardesses. They were dressed in saris, which was another introduction to the Indian cultural matrix. I would soon be in an environment where most women wore saris. Since the 1970’s Indian dress, like many other components of Indian culture, has changed. This is particularly true of female dress. When I first came to India, the sari was the common dress for women. The “shalwar kameez” (the pant blouse combination) was still associated with its origins in
Punjab state. Indian women had yet to adopt western dress. Today, the sari is less frequent as more women wear shalwar kameez, and western clothes like jeans and skirts. Like the other cultural components, the sari was something I quickly appreciated and got used to. I thought saris were beautiful.
I also appreciated the red dots on the foreheads of the stewardesses (bindi).
Many Americans have asked me about bindi over the years. They seem incredibly conscious of the bindi and what it could mean. I tell them the bindi is purely cosmetic. It is a different culture and therefore uses a different set of cosmetics. Why should everyone in the world use the same cosmetics?
Many Americans confuse the bindi with what they call “caste marks” or religious marks. Bindis are usually round and are obviously applied with great care by women as part of their make up. When Indians go to a temple and worship
(puja) the priest applies red powder to the same spot on the forehead between the eyes. This is obviously very different from bindi. It is put on by the priest with the thumb and is obviously powder. It means the person has performed puja in a temple that day. It is common to see office workers with red kum kum powder on their forehead at work. In the Indian cultural context it is a normal part of daily life. In India, religion is not a personal thing. It is an inherent part of the personal identity and it is common for person’s to exhibit objects, behavior, dress, mannerisms, diet, and other factors that identity his/her religious affiliation.
Likewise devotees of particular religious traditions wear distinctive marks on their foreheads. For example, ISKCON devotees belong to the Vaishnava tradition. They signify this by wearing distinctive marks on their forehead
(tilak), consisting of two small parallel lines with an “arrowhead” pointed downward. Members of other traditions wear different marks. The variations are endless. These are not “caste marks,” however, but indicators of sectarian affiliation and marks of religious devotion. These marks are most often in white or grey and applied using clay. Sometimes they also include red marks. They can be simple or elaborate.
The plane touched down in Bombay. We had no program in Bombay. We were staying the night and catching a domestic flight to Delhi. I was very excited to see the lights of India. We touched down at the airport and prepared to disembark. We lined up in the aisles with our luggage to exit the plane. The plane doors opened and I felt a rush of hot wind. It was like someone had
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opened the door of a giant oven. I was not expecting this. I then realized that I was off on a great adventure.
I have heard that India can be so overwhelming that there are documented cases of western persons deciding at this moment that India is too much for them.
There are documented cases of persons who cannot make it out of the airport.
They exit the plane and board the next plane back home.
This is the intense Indian experience. It is all but impossible to be neutral about
India. Persons from other cultures either fall in love with India or hate it.
Sometimes these intense reactions are instantaneous. Sometimes they develop over time. I have known few western people who have been to India who are noncommittal about there experience. Most state that their encounter with India was life changing. They left India with it swimming in their heads and ruminated about it for months and years afterwards. They exhibited intense emotions regarding their experience, with some hating India so profoundly that they vowed never to set foot on Indian soil, while others could not get enough.
We checked into a hotel in Bombay and started wandering the streets. I had determined that I would look up ISKCON devotees while in India. In those days,
ISKCON published a list of every temple in the world in its magazine “Back to
Godhead.” I had that list and made my way to the address listed for Bombay. It was in a big apartment block in a non-descript neighborhood.
I would learn that such apartment blocks are typical middle class Indian housing in big cities. Most middle class families either rent small apartments, or own what we call condominiums. Private houses are few and far between in urban areas. This is because of enormous population pressure on available land. The price of real estate in urban areas is so high that few families can afford more than a simple apartment.
The middle class lives in multistoried apartment blocks that in many cases appear to be little more than concrete boxes devoid of ornamentation. This apartment block did not have an elevator (as is typically the case). I walked up flights of stairs on the outside of the building and knocked on the door. An
Indian woman came to the door. I asked her if this was the residence of the
ISKCON devotees. She told me that they had lived there, but had moved on. She was polite, but my mission had not borne fruit.
I then reunited with my colleagues. They appeared quite naïve and unworldly to me. My impression was soon verified. I was soaking in the ambience of a typical
Indian street scene, the sidewalks filled with people and activity, the buildings looming out of the evening haze, and the many smells and noises. India is sensory overload. It is not antiseptic and not quiet. People are everywhere.
Privacy is minimal or non-existent. A simple walk down the street can be a feast for the senses. An Indian man approached me and asked if I was interested in changing money. He asked whether I had travellers’ checks.
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Travellers’ checks were then quite common, but are not so much any more. This was before the days of ATM machines. Credit cards were practically unheard of in India. Business was conducted solely with cash. The government strictly controlled foreign exchange as part of its protectionist regimen. The government hoped to provide assured markets for Indian producers by restricting access to foreign goods. The Indian rupee was not readily convertible. There were strict limits on the amount of foreign currency Indian citizens could possess. This encouraged a huge black market in currency and smuggled foreign goods.
The man offered me an exchange rate well above the official rate. I immediately smelled a rat and stopped talking with him. The others in my party kept on talking. They found his offer attractive. The man took their traveller’s checks, told them he would be back with the rupees and disappeared.
We then flew on to Delhi. It was very hot, but I felt great. Delhi was very different in the early 70’s. The population was much less. There were few cars on the streets. Most people walked or relied on rickshaws, taxis, and various types of busses, both public and private. There were busses made from motorcycles attached to a large open-air cab with benches. Everything was quite noisy, with smoke belching from the vehicles.
There were only Indian made cars on the streets. The principal car was the
Ambassador, a version of an old British car from the 1940’s that was no longer produced in the UK. This was considered the luxury sedan. It used a choke to start. There was only a metal divider between the front seat passengers and the engine. The heat from the engine warmed the legs of the passengers. The small car was an Indian version of the Fiat. It was called the Fiat Padmini.
The most common means of transportation was the bicycle. I was on a train early in the morning. I looked out the window in the darkness and saw thousands of government workers coming to work before sunrise. The Indian government employed more people than any government on earth. There were thousands of clerks in Delhi. They sat in offices, typed on huge typewriters, and filed papers in thick files wrapped with ribbons. Oftentimes there were no file cabinets. The beribboned files were stacked on the floor and covered with dust.
Pages were stuck together with straight pins. There were no staplers. There were no photocopy machines, only “cyclostyle” machines, which produced vague copies smelling of chemicals. These machines were not in offices but in the bazaar in small stalls.
The thousands of clerks were all men. There were few women in the workforce and very few in offices. The armies of clerks rode their bicycles in great silent processions through the streets every morning and evening. They arrived in their offices, brewed up their tea, read their newspapers, and spent the day sitting at desks running India’s enormous bureaucracy. At the end of each day, they rode their bicycles back to their homes and ate dinner with their wives and children.
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In Delhi we went sightseeing. We saw all the tourist attractions, the Red Fort, the site where Mahatma Gandhi was cremated, the museum dedicated to Mahatma
Gandhi, where we saw his personal possessions, his eyeglasses, his dhoti, his gamcha (the cloth worn over the shoulders). An Indian guide did a wonderful job describing the sites to us. A student asked him to name India’s greatest contribution to civilization. Without hesitation, he answered that it was yoga.
He praised yoga for its contribution to the lives of millions of people around the world.
The Birla temple ranks among Delhi’s greatest tourist attractions. The Birlas are one of India’s premier industrialist families. They sponsored a series of modern
Hindu temples open to all, free of caste restrictions. They wanted the temples to reflect the new emerging independent India. They pledged that their temples would be clean, and the priests would never cheat the worshippers. As promised, Birla temples are clean, well lit, and clearly post–independence. They represent a conscious attempt to rediscover India’s classical heritage after two centuries of British imperial rule. They glorify India’s ancient past and religious traditions.
Birla temples are unique and are very different from the average temples. In
India temples come in all shapes and sizes. They range from the smallest neighborhood shrines to glittering marble palaces. They often reflect the particular neighborhood in which they are located and the particular group of people that frequents them. Some can be dark and dirty and forbidding. Others can be warm and welcoming. Some are ancient, and barely lit. Others are modern, and brightly lit.
In India the evening is special. It is when everything cools down. In the heat of the summer, many stay indoors, take naps and venture out only in the cool of the evening. The evenings are lively, with families doing their daily shopping and people going for walks, chatting with their neighbors and eating snacks and street food. Many people are out after being cooped up in their homes all day.
The bazaars are full of people.
The temples are also open during this period, and worshippers combine worship with their daily shopping. Hindu worship is primarily personal rather than congregational. The worshipper is self-motivated. No one keeps track of his worship. The devout get up early in the morning and worship at personal altars in “puja rooms” in their homes. They also go to temples to perform personal pujas or worship with a priest. The worshipper offers incense, flowers, or sweets, or participates in an arotik ceremony in which the priest distributes oil lamps, sprinkles water, and shares Prasad.
I went to the Birla temple on such a summer evening. Although India is generally noisy, the temple was quiet and peaceful. There was no furniture. I quickly learned to remove my shoes before entering any holy place, whether it is a tomb, temple, gurdwara or mosque. The floor was marble. It felt cool on my bare feet.
The images (deities) were of the most popular North Indian figures, Rama, Sita
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and Hanuman. I sat on the marble floor and received “darshan,” a view of the deities.
Before departing Delhi, we went on a bus to a sari emporium. In India, the tourist guides or taxi drivers earn commissions from emporium owners if they bring tourists into the shop. This was my first introduction to sari shopping. I sat at the counter while the “sari wallah” unwrapped sari after sari for my perusal.
This shop was in old Delhi, not far from the Jama Masjid (the famous mosque where the Mughul emperors worshipped). There is a Jain temple in the same neighborhood. Jains believe that every living thing has a soul. If you harm any living thing, you receive bad karma. Likewise, if you are kind to any living thing, you receive good karma. The Jains take care of animals to earn good karma.
Their temple in old Delhi is ringed with cages in which they nurse wounded birds back to health. I remember standing in front of the temple, watching the birds and thinking about people who care for animals as part of their worship.
We travelled around India on domestic flights. We switched from the international carrier (Air India) to the domestic carrier (Indian Air lines). There were no private airlines in India. The domestic flights were much more Spartan than the international flights. The service was also not nearly as good.
Stewardesses routinely distributed sweets before take off to help with ear pressurization. The flights (and later I would discover the trains as well) were almost always arrived late and rarely departed on time. Each terminal used a large chalkboard to inform passengers of delays. I spent hours in airports waiting for delayed flights.
The terminals were basic concrete affairs, usually painted a dull yellow.
Sometimes the paint was peeling. I noticed long curtains hanging beside long windows. The curtains were dirty and covered in dust. I wondered how long it had been since they had been cleaned. The windows were streaked and dirty.
The terminal smelled like disinfectant. I immediately recognized that smell from my time in Czechoslovakia and East Germany. It was the smell of Russian made disinfectant. The Soviet Union was a big trading partner of India. It allowed
India to purchase Russian made goods without spending hard currency. The two countries used a barter system, in which the USSR accepted Indian exports in exchange for Russian goods, or allowed the Indians to pay with Rupees, which the USSR could only spend in India. Much of the trade involved military hardware, as the USSR was India’s principal arms supplier. The unique smell of
Russian disinfectant was everywhere and an indicator of this trade relationship.
India is a labor-intensive country. There is little interest in labor saving devices, such as vending machines, that would put a living human being out of work.
Public buildings such as government offices, banks, railway terminals and airports had huge staffs. Employees were everywhere. Often their jobs were reduced to the continual repetition of a routine task. Cleaning staff perpetually cleaned with mops and brooms and disinfectant. This made me wonder why
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they could not take the time to remove the dirty curtains and wash them, or clean the window. Perhaps in was not in their job description.
Our next stop was Kashmir. Since I was in Kashmir, it has been all but closed to tourism because of political and religious violence. It is a complex problem.
Many Kashmiri Muslims are unhappy with their status. Some groups use violence to pursue their dream of prying Kashmir out of the Indian Union. The
Islamic groups want to become part of Pakistan. The less Islamic groups want
Kashmiri independence. Agitation was going on in Kashmir when I was there but had not yet erupted into violence.
We arrived in Srinagar and were introduced to our Kashmiri guide. He was a fun loving, talkative and personable man, with a wide smile on his face. He was handsome with the ubiquitous mustache. In India many men feel they are not truly men without a mustache. The mustache is much more common than in the
West. This is particularly true in Kashmir. I wonder what became of him and where he is today.
Our guide introduced us to Kashmiri handicrafts. This is a mainstay of the
Kashmiri economy. Handicrafts supplemented the tourist trade. Since British times, Kashmir was known as a tourist destination. It was in the mountains and cool and was home to many hotels. Under the British, the Kashmiris anchored houseboats on Lake Dal outside Srinagar. Tourists, both Indian and British spent their holidays on the boats on the lake. It was great way to get out of the heat and relax.
While in Srinagar, I stayed on a houseboat. It was a uniquely Indian experience.
It is part of India and a living reminder of British colonialism. The houseboat was comfortable and like many such places in India seemed unchanged since the days of the Raj. It featured Victorian décor with lace doilies and overstuffed furniture. Kashmiri merchants paddled to the houseboat and sold goods over the side of their boats. I told the boatmen I wanted to spend the night sleeping on the middle of the lake in a shikara. This is a small boat similar to a gondola. I slept alone with the silence of the lake for company.
Since the advent of violent conflict, the tourist industry has all but died in
Kashmir. It is too dangerous for tourists to come to Srinagar. Kashmir is suffering an enormous economic loss from this decline in tourist revenue. It has tried to make up for this loss by exporting Kashmiri handicrafts around the world. These include Kashmiri paper mache products, which are derived from folk art but are now mass-produced, and Kashmiri fabrics, embroidery, carpets, stonework and woodcarving. The pashmina shawl, for example, featuring beautiful Kashmiri embroidery, is a much sought after luxury item, both in India and around the world.
After showing us around Srinagar, our guide took us on the Hindu pilgrimage to the Amarnath cave. The cave is home to the ice lingam (a symbolic representation of Shiva, sometimes associated with a phallus). The American scholar Diana Eck says of this pilgrimage destination:
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“In the Kashmir Himalayas,…the pilgrim destination is a mountain cave at 13,500 feet, where they seek the darshan of Shiva, manifest as an ice linga. It was there, they say, that Shiva revealed the teachings of immortality to Parvati.” 1
The pilgrimage has always been popular, but at such a high elevation, the cave was difficult to reach and pilgrims few and far between. When I went on the pilgrimage, it required an extensive trek along a mountain path clinging to the sides of steep mountains. We rode mountain ponies supplied by our guide. It took several days. We spent our nights in mountain cabins. The trail was largely deserted. Even in July it was cold, with snow and ice everywhere. The cave was quiet. We did not understand the full significance of the trek and of Amarnath.
Today, modern technology has made the trek much easier. Engineers have blasted roads leading almost directly to the cave. When I went to Amarnath only thousands of pilgrims made the trek every year. The numbers have increased exponentially and now up to a million pilgrims per year go to the cave for darshan of the lingam. Like many Indian pilgrimage locations, it now faces challenges of sanitation, and pollution and overcrowding. In addition, global warming is causing the ice lingam to melt.
After Kashmir, we returned to Delhi and on to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. I approached the Taj Mahal through a passage. A courtyard surrounds the Taj.
Within the courtyard are gardens, pools and fountains, with the white building rising majestically from its garden setting.
We had been travelling frantically for days. I was at peak excitement. I was immersed in sensory overload. I walked through the passageway into the bright
July sunshine and looked with awe on the sight. I was framed in the passageway between the shade and the sunlight. I passed out. When I came to, I was lying on a bed back at the hotel. An Indian doctor was ministering to me. He had put me on a drip. He confirmed that I was completely dehydrated.
No one had warned me of India’s draining sunlight or told me to take proper precautions to avoid dehydration. There is a reason why Kipling wrote that
“only made dogs and Englishmen venture out into the noonday sun.” There was no bottled water in the 1970’s. There was no clean drinking water readily available in India. It was out of the question to drink local, untreated water. It was a ticket to “Delhi belly.” The only sure option was to drink Coke or Sprite or tea (chai). Indians sold Coke and Sprite out of bright red coolers provided by the company. They were available on practically every street corner. But they were very sweet and did little for rehydration. In India, before bottled water, I had drunk up to eight cokes per day, and still suffered from dehydration. Only water, and lots of it, keeps you from passing out.
1 India (A Sacred Geography), Harmony Books, New York, 2012, page 446. She goes on to state that the ice linga is a twelve-foot long stalagmite and that the pilgrimage takes place in the Hindu month of Shravana (early July).
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In Delhi I went to the Khadi Bhavan and bought Indian clothes. Khadi is cheap homespun cotton. Mahatma Gandhi endorsed khadi during the independence movement as a way of boycotting British made machine textiles. He supported the establishment of special stores throughout India to sell clothes made of khadi. These are the khadi bhavans. Khadi is very comfortable and adapted to the climate. I bought a pair of khadi pajama, loose cotton pants tied with a cloth drawstring, and a khadi kurta (long sleeved white shirt with long tails worn over the pajama). For footwear, I bought a pair of Indian “hawai chappal,” (rubber thongs).
When my hawai chappal got dirty, I washed them and put them out in the hotel courtyard to dry. They were promptly stolen.
After seeing the Taj Mahal, we flew to Kathmandu, Nepal. Kathmandu is the end station for the hippie trail that began in Europe wended its way from Turkey, through Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan and on to India. Most travelers on the hippie trail were headed for Kathmandu. It was one of the only countries in the world in which hashish and marijuana were completely legal.
Hundreds of hippie vans were parked in Kathmandu’s central square. They had been driven from Europe and people were living in them. Oftentimes the occupants would sell them and fly back to Europe, rather than risk the long overland route again.
We looked around the old section of Kathmandu. I saw the temple that was the home of the living Goddess. She periodically appears in a small window to wave at delighted passersby.
Kathmandu was a quiet, remote city, not very big. It was the capital of an ancient
Hindu kingdom. The central city consisted of a series of squares surrounded by old buildings. Another dominating feature was the royal palace.
There was also a large Tibetan community living in Kathmandu. The Tibetans had been driven into Nepal as refugees by the Chinese army, which occupied
Tibet. Tibetans had their own shops and restaurants and temples.
We visited the complex of Buddhist stupas at Swayambhunath outside of
Kathmandu. They were built to house relics of the Buddha, who was originally from Nepal, and are noted for their distinctive architecture, featuring the allseeing eyes on each side of the stupa central pillar.
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I wandered the streets of Kathmandu, spending time in the squares and the shops. The shops featured small brass statues of various sexual practices, and postures, some involving numerous participants. These were copied from the facades of Hindu temples in Kathmandu. The carvings were meant to spare the temples from lightning strikes. The lightening upon seeing the carvings, is too embarrassed to strike the temples.
From Kathmandu, we went to a Nepali resort called “Tiger Tops,” where we rode elephants and stayed in wooden lodges. This was the first time I rode an elephant in South Asia. The mahout (elephant driver) took us through the jungle and along the river. We were supposed to be looking for tigers. We never saw any. I have never seen a tiger in the wild in South Asia. Afterwards, I sat quietly on the bank of the river and watched the mahouts wash the elephants. There was a playful relationship between them. The mahouts and the elephants are colleagues and work and play together.
The Tiger tops expedition was the official end of the study tour. From there, the group flew to Delhi and returned to New York.
I informed the professor that I was staying in Nepal and would make my own way back to Delhi. He gave me may plane ticket and he and the group departed.
I was no on my own in the middle of Nepal.
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