Observations about India posted on the Class of ’57 listserv.
by Bill Fiero
Last Wednesday, I returned from a trip in northern India. Thought there might be others on the listserv who have been to India, or might contemplate a trip there, so decided to share my thoughts of the experience.
INDIA -- what a vast, total experience summed into a single word. In our travel experiences, nowhere did humans so dominate. Humans - in such overwhelming numbers. Teeming, crawling, running, walking, lying, shouting, sleeping - everywhere - humans. The things built and used by humans are themselves shrunk to nothing by the sheer volume of people.
In rural America, our landscapes dominate us -- in urban America, our structures. But in the India I saw, only humans dominate -- virtually everywhere.
Color - brilliant red saris crowned by green shawls; trucks festooned with color-bright bangles; structures pink, red, white, brown; flashing brilliant green wings of ubiquitous parakeets; a welter of shimmering red blood staining a black highway where a strong young man lies, struck dead by a truck; a golden robe on a holy man; mountains of multicolored trash on the streets, the alleys, everywhere -- eyes are overburdened and dazzled.
Noise - constant, dunning, blasting sound. Everyone shouts, even in conversation. Hawkers try to out-shout their competition, table conversations rise in flooding waves of sound, and even at night the streets resonate in shouts. Horns blare, animals bleat, Indian birds (naturally) all screech and rant, trains blow their wailing drones constantly and all night through, and not a truck in all the subcontinent has a muffler. One craves silence in vain.
Odor - stink is everywhere. The overpowering odors of humans fill the sense - excrement, urine, sweat, mold, human smell - everywhere. The smells of animals are secondary, but powerful - cows, pigs, goats, dogs - concentrated bovine smells in the cities. Everywhere patties and rivers of urine - human or animal - fill and flow in the streets.
Everything is touching and bumping - hands are tugging and begging; bodies are jarring and bumping; tires are pounding into potholed pavement, shuddering the bus; cold from stone penetrates "temple socks," numbing feet in sacred places.
And, of course, the tastes. Smell and taste merge - you are not merely flooded with the stink - you taste it as well. Your tongue is conquered by overload. Only when you eat, can the taste/smell of the human environment be temporarily overcome - by peppers, curries, coriander, cilantro, and myriad spices enflaming the mouth.
My life in America is dominated by travel in back-country byways and within natural areas - there is an overwhelming feeling of the dominance of nature. Our time in India was dominated by humanity - and our trip was designed to introduce us to rural India, with only brief times in the cities.
We did experience the natural world - birds are everywhere, and fascinating - over 2,000 species. We had the incredible treat of an intimate half hour with a tigress - we in an open jeep, she, fifty feet away, crunching the bones of a Sambur deer.
We traveled by plane, bus, train, rickshaw, camel, elephant and afoot. Our visit included vast, polluted cities and rural farmlands.
At this seasonal change time, the whole of north India was inundated by a vast, cold, mist of choking pollution. The colder it became, the more people huddled around fires of auto tires or wood, making more choking smoke, blocking the sun more effectively, making it more cold, causing more tires to go on the fire... We couldn’t land in Delhi (coming or going) due to the dense brown polluting layer, so we diverted to Mumbai (not because it was less polluted, only because they had a ground-approach radar). Our train was two hours late because of the reduced visibility. Our bus crawled through the haze, encountering traffic jams stretching twenty miles in either direction. We floated the sacred Ganges and could barely see the shore through the murk. Everywhere people coughed, hacked, and spit the brown residue out of their mouths, throats, and lungs. My throat hasn’t yet cleared out.
Religion is everywhere - sacred cows, men, statues, shrines, temples, stupas, and buildings. The next life has to be better.
The caste system is alive and well - the top class is doing very well, the vast middle-castes dominant, the servant/untouchables are in rags, living on the streets and begging or picking a living. Folks work hard to scratch out existence - especially the women. In the country villages the women do the back-breaking field work, are constantly washing, gathering sticks, and cooking. The men gather in little clusters, drink tea, play games, and talk politics - you know, the heavy stuff.
The British left a good highway and railroad system, a populace trained in the civil service, and an educated upper and middle class.
In fifty years, nothing has been added (except a few nuclear bombs). Today, the fifty-year old roads crumble, the railroads are the nation’s largest employer and function on Band-Aids and bailing wire. The populace learned the civil service well - the bureaucracy overwhelms life. Everywhere heaps of people in khaki stamp, paperclip, staple, and file mountains of paper. Long lines form while the civil "servants" sip tea and visit finally deigning to notice people - and then for a surly sneer. Say something and you spend the day being ignored. Socialism - government - is everywhere - immovable and unproductive. Nothing much works, or only barely. Everyone waits for someone else to fix it - meaning the government, and the politicians and civil service are only concerned about perpetuating themselves in non-jobs forever. Nothing much gets done. The newspapers are dominated by politics - and that means whose doing what to whom - not about whose doing what for the people.
Corruption is endemic in the system. Twenty rupees will get you to the head of the line, or anywhere or anything else for that matter. The only time anything works is when the palm is crossed with a pile of moldy notes - and then it’s done with a glacial pace, if at all. Huge sums are allocated to repair a one-mile stretch of hig
India is Homo sapiens in the raw - in the face humanity. It is all of us - as we wish we weren’t, but as we truly are. It is us - reduced to the lowest common denominator - every year! Most is gone before it gets near the road, and the residue goes to pay 50 folks (mostly women) doing hard work by hand and 250 (mostly men) who are on the payroll but never seen - "my family, cousins, friends, and folks who need a favor - in our ugliest, bare, beauty. We had been told by an Indian friend before our journey that western travelers there fall into two categories - those who love India and those who detest it. I love India.
by Jay Greene
I found Bill Fiero’s India piece thoughtful, accurate, and a perceptive reminder of the many journeys I made to that astounding place from the sixties until the eighties. I was an agent for an Indian steamship company and my dealings with my principals, and other Indian businessmen, and sojourns in Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta, and the interior, opened my eyes to a world I could not imagine had I never been there.
Bill got it right with his comments on the sights, smells, and sounds of India. Mixed with the pervasive odors of humanity and human waste, there is the inescapable, pungent "fragrance" of cheap Indian cigarettes. The merged smells of urine, cigarettes, and the steamy, humidity assault the traveler as soon as the airplane door is cracked open.
One of my closest friends (I am godfather to his second child) is an Oxford-educated Indian who is equally at home in London, New York, Washington, or Delhi, discoursing knowledgeably on the arcanae of the Indian domestic economy, and a passionate defender of Indian nationalism. An associate of his in the firm is narrow, suspicious, defensive. These opposites are only one example of the amazing diversity of the human landscape on the subcontinent. The population there is just shy of a billion (a billion!) and the financially well off members of society are well and broadly educated with a staggering range of interests, and conversation with them is brilliant, stimulating, and sometimes intimidating, so well informed are they on so many matters.
The bureaucracy is stunningly obstructive, obtuse, maddening. The combination of native wiliness overlaid with British bureaucratic organization is a wonder to behold, but only when you can observe it from a distance.
Thanks for your provocative piece, Bill.
Jay
by Bob Baehr
Classmates,
I am greatly impressed by the perceptions in Bill Fiero’s excellently written essay on his experience in India, and I have been interested in the reactions that have followed, especially Jay Greene’s.
Bill saw much more than I did in India, and clearly understood it better, but even though my experiences were mostly limited to large cities, all that he says confirms my less informed vision. If I mention a few of my enduring memories, perhaps you can tell if our evaluations coincide.
Probably picking Calcutta to emphasize is unfair, but to me it seemed like the rawest India that Bill describes. The cabs (then anyway) were as left from the British raj. As elsewhere in India, the driver gets up to speed on a highway, and then cuts the engine and coasts to save gas. I thought driving was on the left, but the chaos was so complete I wasn’t certain until we reached central city, where we stayed at the second-best hotel, another British relic now owned by the Bengali government, which is communist. There were abundant signs asking us not to tip, and at check-out seven men showed up in the room to be rewarded.
We took the one tour available then: a government-owned non-air conditioned bus (it was over 100 degrees) with wooden seats that held 40 Indians and four foreigners. The guide was excellent -- but there was nothing conventional to see. An inconsequential children’s museum, the world’s largest banyan tree (how many of those have I seen!), the river, a temple.
Of course the real tour was of the city, and that was astounding. It lives vividly for me now, reinforced greatly by Bill’s description. There are endless wooden stalls, for example, most of them set up in front of . . .storefronts? Who’s to know? All structures appear to serve several purposes. These stalls may be two or three yards wide, and a great many are divided: a bottom stall three or four or five feet high, with a stall offering unrelated wares directly above. One butcher stall offered one half of a dog’s head, divided from nose to neck. One could not help but think that if a stall owner sold everything he displayed during the day, there could hardly be enough profit to maintain life for a week.
Cashing a traveler’s check, even in Connaught Square in central New Dehli, was about all I needed to know about Indian bureaucracy. Stacks of ledgers were piled everywhere, and eventually my transaction was entered in one of them and rupees appeared. It is possible to be patient when you realize that the average Indian faces these frustrations every day, and that foreigners get treated better and faster. I was disappointed to note a whining note in all too many Indians, at least in north India, and when I compare it to the much more open and smiling character of the even poorer Nepalese, I wonder how many Indians have been driven to this by lifelong frustration.
Indian cities still probably contain cupolas shielding pedestals that support only the memory of the raj. The British statues that once anchored the central squares and circuses have been trucked off, some still to appear in a kind of Tussaud-like granite outdoor museum, which is really just a storage field where the figures are casually strewn about, much like surviving Lenin statues in Europe in the 1990’s. The concept of British superiority is hardly dead in India (though it is a subject foreigners perhaps should not touch with Indians); from time to time we get an application for the college at which I teach from an Indian who has been educated partly in England and submits as his qualification to join one of our advanced programs: "B.A, Oxford (failed)."
I still don’t know what to make out of India, and the Indians clearly do not either. On one hand I recall Indian tourists trying to prick souvenir colored stones out of the Taj Mahal and being reprimanded by foreigners: us. On the other hand, there were many kindnesses and soft smiles, and frequently a gentle toleration of our ignorance, I’m sure. Of course I’d like to go back, but I think there are only two ways to do it: live very cheaply and therefore get to know how most people live, or live expensively and do the best one can by observing. (I’ve often observed that I spend more in cheap countries than I do in expensive ones.) Before I went to Calcutta I wondered how I would react to the poverty and omnipresent hands thrust at me. My reaction was unexpected and hardly noble: I fled through the streets to the Oberoi, the city’s best hotel, and found escape in privacy, air conditioning, and a large lunch which I consumed entirely.
Next time in India for me will be a long rail journey, I think. I must be like William Dean Howells, an early realist author, who supposedly wanted to see life as it really was so he could write about it, and so he ordered his hansom carriage to drive him to the Bowery, but after a few minutes he drew the curtains over the windows.
Bill’s article did not explain to me why he loved India. My recollections his essay provokes convince me I cannot, but I like some of it, while despairing that I shall ever learn enough about it for full appreciation.
Many thanks Bill Fiero, for responding so well to Adam’s call for contributions such as this.
’Round the girdled earth,
Bob Baehr
[This page was
last updated by ATB on March 8, 1999
with assistance from class secretary Ted Jennings.]