As the mercury rises (it's hot!), there’s a new outdoor species. Never seen at night, it flutters and clusters around motorbikes in daylight, riding on them, driving them. There are unusual and distinctive head markings: a burka-like wrap, usually white, around the scalp area, low over the forehead, swooping around the lower half of the head to neck and shoulders, a narrow slit for the eyes. Is the Taliban on vacation in Banaras?
In many examples of the species, these mummy-like markings are accompanied by long white gloves from fingertip to bicep. Are they burn victims?
It's a little like that.
Huge round sunglasses projecting from the eye slit are the giveaway. These are young girls, teenagers and young women in their 20s. This is how they keep the unrelenting, sizzling sun from darkening their arms and faces as they move around the city!! Pollution and dust are the reason some folks tie a scarf over nose and mouth on most days, and the heat definitely brings out head wraps out on the road, but these are special birds of summer.
These beswaddled young women frankly admit what they're up to. Who’s surprised? If you looked only at television ads and news anchors over here, you’d think Indians had only the lightest of complexions. They are, of course, a rainbow of shades from dark to light. Ads for skin creams—even for guys!--all promise to "whiten" the skin in 2 weeks, 30 days, 6 weeks, to peel off the bad outside dark skin that is not you to the good fair you underneath.
Where does this come from? Not the British, though they might have made it worse by preferring fair skinned servants and functionaries. This goes back at least to the Puranas, ancient tales of the gods compiled from the 5th to 17th centuries CE.
Two I know about seem to reflect a cultural preference for fair skin (though hindu myths never have one meaning or version).
The mythological origin of Holi, the riotous celebration of spring when everyone paints each other with colors, wet and dry, is not well known in Banaras. In one version Holi is a holiday of Krishna, the dark god of the common people, a cowherd who challenged the supremacy of the Vedic gods and made cows an object of protection instead of sacrifice. It seems Krishna was jealous of the fair skin of Radha, his childhood playmate and later his erotic soulmate. Krishna’s mother told him to paint Radha with colors, and this is what Holi commemorates, at least in this version.
Parvati, Shiva’s wife, “gleamed with skin like the petal of a blue lotus at night.” Ond day Shiva fought with her, saying, “Your slender body, shinking darkly upon my white body looks like a black female serpent coiled around a white sandalwood tree. You look like a dark night touched by the light of the moon, like the night during the dark half of the lunar month; indeed, you offend my sight.” (This from a guy with a blue throat.) Eyes red with anger, Parvati had a few choice words for Shiva, but stormed off to become golden anyway by doing austerities in the mountains.
It took a more than face cream. Parvati put off her cothes, put on the bark of trees, heated herself with the five fires in the summer, lived in the water during the monsoon, slept in the winter on bare ground and went without food. Even then it took Brahma to grant her a boon so she could divide herself into black Kali and fair Gauri. In the Puranas, Shiva was pleased with this transformation.
In the matrimonials (marriage ads online and in the classifieds; traditional Indians don’t date!) fairness, expressed also as ‘gori’ (for the golden goddess) and ‘wheatish’ is a highly prized nuptial trait. These two ads are not untypicalin their fairness claims (though I also chose them because they lack other typical requirements that i'll deal with in another post):
For a bride:
Match for Punjabi Khatri [Punjabi word for Kshatriya, the warrior caste] boy 29/5’10” working MNC [multinational] GGN [city of Gurgaon] 9.6 LPA [9.6 lakhs per annum, means Rs. 90,600] seeks Prof Qlfd Tall, Fair BE [bachelor of engineering or]/MBA working girl. Send BHP [biodata, horoscope, personal profile] to [gives contact info].
For a groom:
Suitable match is required for beautiful, slim, gori, cultured MBA girl (28/162—[height in cm] from a high status upper caste hindu family of educationists. Caste no bar. Please correspond on email [which address is given].
This hierarchy is utterly wrongheaded. The god-given glowing complexions of Indian women are stunning against the rich and colorful fabrics they wear of shimmering silk and cloud-like cotton, often with mirror pieces sewn into them, shimmering and sparkling with silver and gold embroidery and glittering stones and beads. At dressup time, their expressive eyes and smooth dark hair are set off by exquisite gold jewelry pieces for head, forehead, nose, ear, eyebrow and neck, not to mention forget the shining rainbow stack of bangles on their wrists, and with extravagantly drawn eye makeup and the reddest of lipsticks, which only they can get away with because of the already dramatic contrast of their skin with their eyes and hair. They look exactly like goddesses should look. They emit light.
To my eyes, fair-skinned Westerners look exceedingly uninteresting clothed in the fantastic colors of Indian textiles. Our skin appears flat. We are ghostly and pale. Our eyes, hair and skin simply disappear. Indian women in their finery, their jewelry and clothing sparkling and glittering against their skins with every move and gesture, are transfixing.
I read that Pres. Sarkozy means to ban head veils for French drivers on the spurious grounds that they limit the field of vision. If he tried to do that here, young women would run him down with their cycles, and not because they couldn't see him.
Ugh, a lizard just fell on me. Rahu and Ketu went on vacation for the winter, but once the warm weather returned they got busy. Now my flat is a lizard village. You can hear their sticky toes pattering out reptile tabla as they hunt on the killing fields of the walls. I also have a wasp's nest in the shower room, ants, and an ancient (to be that large) cockroach in the bathroom sink with whom I've reached an accommodation (ahimsa and all that). One should not imagine that respectable Indians would put up with this menagerie for a minute, though pretty much everyone shares space with lizards. Mosquitoes, one of the lowest creatures in the reincarnation food chain, have thankfully died off on their own. It's too HOT for them.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Girls Gone Wild
Ok, listen up. The possession ritual took place in a temple known for this sort of thing on the sixth day of Navratra (spring worship of the Great Goddess) in Chainpur, a small village in Kaimur district, Bihar, in the Gangetic plain about 90 km southeast of Varanasi. Arriving at the temple early in the afternoon, we entered the courtyard to see lots of folks, mostly family groups of adults and children--two or three folks at the smaller end of the spectrum, and eight or ten at the larger, sitting cross-legged on the concrete facing the shrine (established beyond the porch surrounding the courtyard) of Harsu Brahm, a ghost with great power, a former royal priest who was seen standing on the burning ghat during his cremation at Varanasi. All that is left of his “seat” is a small stump of black rock around which his shrine is built.
Murmuring and chanting created a kind of soothing hum, along with the rather more staccato and excited vocalizations of the possessed. It went like this: Somebody seated would after a while start swaying back and forth, then more and more and more. Some folks were extremely active, crying out, slapping the ground rhythmically, rolling their eyes up and back into their sockets, their clothes getting disarranged. As far as I could tell, no one lost consciousness, though that isn’t to say it may not have happened when I wasn’t there.
Priestly shamans came and went from these groups, sitting a while, leaving for a while and coming back to talk to the spirit speaking through the possessed. Sometimes the shaman laid on hands, sometimes he fashioned an amulet for the possessed person to wear, or struck the possessed devotee gently on the back or shoulder with a stick, or gently slapped them. A trance might continue for hours in an individual case (some possessions had started before we arrived, all those were completed when we left three hours or so later, new ones having started in the meantime), often calming down for a while and then starting up again.
Most of these devotees were women, though we realized after a while there were men too. Maybe 10 or so possessions were visibly in process at any one time. The temple priests are of course men, descendants of Harsu Brahm himself. The decision to bring somone to the temple for the purpose of releasing a troubling spirit is a family affair, though we spoke with at least one woman who spoke of feeling peace and relief from her terrible headaches which no doctor has been able to cure, every time she comes there.
How do you know you’re possessed? Folks feel “heavy headed,” lose their appetites and experience general malaise. Possession may be tantrically induced by another family member where ill will exists toward the vicrim. During possession, ”anything” may happen. Women may beat a family member or start to remove their clothes (family sitting nearby will prevent this: to protect female modesty, we were asked not to photograph). I saw no one doing either. Whatever happens, the spirit is responsible, not the woman, and the women are said to (and say they) remember nothing of what transpired while the spirit was manifest.
In the most agitated possession I saw a woman sat on the ground cross-legged (this is everyone’s posture), rhythmically leaning forward low to the ground from the hips, slapping the floor with both hands and clapping them together before lifting up to sitting level and starting the same rapid sequence again. Her upper body described a fast, wild circle, her unbound hair was flying, her head swung around on her neck. Each time her hands slapped the earth, her head came dangerously close to the floor but never actually hit it. From time to time her eyes receded in their sockets. Much of the time they seemed to perceive objects in the environment. Her breathing and speaking patterns were hoarse and rhythmic. Her excitement would build and decline, and then she would sit listening to the priest. Towards the end of the possession she was able to smile at us. At intervals the priest questioned the spirit.
A possession can end only when the spirit speaks a ritual formula, “Harsu Brahm ki jai” (All praise to Harsu Brhahm), the sign that it agrees to leave the possessed person. In one case we saw a woman struggling in a weak voice to say, “Harsu….. Harsu…,” who could get no farther. The spirit also states an amount of payment for the priest must be made as among the requirements for what must be done for the spirit to leave the person. We did not learn what it was, since the priest we questioned happened to be a family member of the possessed devotee.
Local folks are impressed by the fact that people identify similar symptoms as possession. Another way to think about it is that cultures teach folks how to be ill, how to talk about it, and what ways it ought to be addressed. The people my friend spoke with told of going to lots of doctors, none of whom could cure whatever ailed them until they came here. One wonders if there can really be the funds or ability for such a lot of people to go to such a lot of doctors, though this temple is a famous one to which people come from far away, including, according to one priest, the son of a certain high official in Varanasi. Perhaps (only perhaps) this formulation is a way of comparing traditional to modern ways more than an empirical statement about alternatives. One also wonders why, if the shaman is known to be effective, people don’t come here first. In any case, everyone seems to know a story of someone in their own extended family (a very large group of people) who had some definite symptom—blood in the urine in one case I was told about—being treated by respectable doctors, such as at BHU—and then later being cured by a shaman. Probing discovered that the treatment at BHU was frequent and expensive. What the BHU diagnosis was, and what was the correlation between the cure and stopping the BHU visits was vague.
I take at face value the reality and intensity of this experience of auspicious possession for devotees. Per the above notion that cultures teach people about sickness, the open character of the courtyard made the attributes of possession widely available to public inspection by members of the community who crowd in. I even found myself moving my own head (faintly!) in time with some of the possessed and with the songs piped in over the loudspeaker. It wasn’t hard to imagine gradually build up the aerobic quotient.
Why mostly women? Women are generally considered more religiously sensitive than men, at least as devotees. To the extent that the disturbance is manifest in the family, the family is where the women always are. They can’t easily go out and blow off steam like men do (not to say the guys don’t bring it home, but at least they have that outlet). Since women have little status and identity within the patriarchal family (especially daughters-in-law—-most of the women we saw were fairly young, i.e., not yet likely to be matriarchs in their own households), this is a setting in which a huge amount of family and public attention is paid.
But what impressed most is this. Here is a public space where women can go safely out of control in a society where women are obliged to exhibit both subservience and rigid self-possession in public. Here female uncontrol is divinely sanctioned and occurs within the safe confines of the temple where women cannot be molested for their infractions--in fact, the infractions are not theirs, but the spirit’s.
The comparison that immediately comes to mind is Holi, the Hindu spring Festival of Colors celebrated this year on March 1. On Holi, men roam the streets in gangs. In talk about Holi in Varanasi (celebrated by Hindus all over the country, though not necessariliy in the same way—in Mathura, women are said to beat the men on Holi, for example), sooner or later women and men alike make the point that WOMEN DON’T GO OUT. On the eve of Holi, there are large public bonfires, the materials for which are gradually accumulated over the preceding month. Vandalism and petty theft is rampant, folks crash about stoned on bhang shouting rude and obscene remarks and drenching one another’s faces and clothes with hard core dyes—green, yellow, red, pink, blue--paintball style, and nobody can say boo. The small boys command the small neighborhoods and gallis (the narrow alleyways of older Varanasi), the big boys command the major thoroughfares. On Holi the fundamental male lessons of alliance, conquest and defeat are given visible and dramatic form.
During Holi might makes right, and men must band together to project might and defend themselves from the might of other men, and women hole up in the house since nothing,including molesting women, is disallowed.
Pause here to clear throat and signify that Holi INSIDE is no piece of cake. Did I mention that playing Holi INSIDE with the womenfolk of the family I was visiting and their brother, one delighted 14-year-old moving back and forth between inside and outside the house, himself dyed a muddy combination of many different colors, the women of the house poured buckets of blue and yellow dye on me and turned my hair and skin glowing blue-green? It washed off my skin, but the next day I slunk out to get my hair dyed a color you have not previously seen: shocking brown with, when i stand in the sun, arresting green highlights. Objectively speaking, the blue-green was more flattering to my complexion, but a Western woman with green hair who needs to talk to local people is a culturally impossible category.
So in possession rituals the women go wild where the community assembles, their families safely in attendance. Anything they do is not their responsibility. What mostly happens is their clothes are disarranged, an otherwise unthinkable condition for women in public. That and they are totally spent and calm by the time it’s done.
Lastly. At the center of the courtyard is an old gnarled neem tree with sacred strings encircling its trunk (wrapping trees is a practice that appears over and over in southern and southeastern Asia—sometimes the wraps are scarves), encased in four stone walls at its base, with sacred pennants thrust in the packed earth around its trunk to signal the apirit-power of the tree. At its foot are many many hardened blobs of concrete, somewhat randomly placed against each other. Each contains a spirit successfully exorcised and obedient to Harsu Brahm. (Other spirits have entered rice brought from the home of the possessed at the time of the exorcism' once the spirit agrees to leave, that rice is burnt in the fire pit of the temple.) A win-win for the spirits and the formerly possessed. The former are honored but confined, the latter are released.
Murmuring and chanting created a kind of soothing hum, along with the rather more staccato and excited vocalizations of the possessed. It went like this: Somebody seated would after a while start swaying back and forth, then more and more and more. Some folks were extremely active, crying out, slapping the ground rhythmically, rolling their eyes up and back into their sockets, their clothes getting disarranged. As far as I could tell, no one lost consciousness, though that isn’t to say it may not have happened when I wasn’t there.
Priestly shamans came and went from these groups, sitting a while, leaving for a while and coming back to talk to the spirit speaking through the possessed. Sometimes the shaman laid on hands, sometimes he fashioned an amulet for the possessed person to wear, or struck the possessed devotee gently on the back or shoulder with a stick, or gently slapped them. A trance might continue for hours in an individual case (some possessions had started before we arrived, all those were completed when we left three hours or so later, new ones having started in the meantime), often calming down for a while and then starting up again.
Most of these devotees were women, though we realized after a while there were men too. Maybe 10 or so possessions were visibly in process at any one time. The temple priests are of course men, descendants of Harsu Brahm himself. The decision to bring somone to the temple for the purpose of releasing a troubling spirit is a family affair, though we spoke with at least one woman who spoke of feeling peace and relief from her terrible headaches which no doctor has been able to cure, every time she comes there.
How do you know you’re possessed? Folks feel “heavy headed,” lose their appetites and experience general malaise. Possession may be tantrically induced by another family member where ill will exists toward the vicrim. During possession, ”anything” may happen. Women may beat a family member or start to remove their clothes (family sitting nearby will prevent this: to protect female modesty, we were asked not to photograph). I saw no one doing either. Whatever happens, the spirit is responsible, not the woman, and the women are said to (and say they) remember nothing of what transpired while the spirit was manifest.
In the most agitated possession I saw a woman sat on the ground cross-legged (this is everyone’s posture), rhythmically leaning forward low to the ground from the hips, slapping the floor with both hands and clapping them together before lifting up to sitting level and starting the same rapid sequence again. Her upper body described a fast, wild circle, her unbound hair was flying, her head swung around on her neck. Each time her hands slapped the earth, her head came dangerously close to the floor but never actually hit it. From time to time her eyes receded in their sockets. Much of the time they seemed to perceive objects in the environment. Her breathing and speaking patterns were hoarse and rhythmic. Her excitement would build and decline, and then she would sit listening to the priest. Towards the end of the possession she was able to smile at us. At intervals the priest questioned the spirit.
A possession can end only when the spirit speaks a ritual formula, “Harsu Brahm ki jai” (All praise to Harsu Brhahm), the sign that it agrees to leave the possessed person. In one case we saw a woman struggling in a weak voice to say, “Harsu….. Harsu…,” who could get no farther. The spirit also states an amount of payment for the priest must be made as among the requirements for what must be done for the spirit to leave the person. We did not learn what it was, since the priest we questioned happened to be a family member of the possessed devotee.
Local folks are impressed by the fact that people identify similar symptoms as possession. Another way to think about it is that cultures teach folks how to be ill, how to talk about it, and what ways it ought to be addressed. The people my friend spoke with told of going to lots of doctors, none of whom could cure whatever ailed them until they came here. One wonders if there can really be the funds or ability for such a lot of people to go to such a lot of doctors, though this temple is a famous one to which people come from far away, including, according to one priest, the son of a certain high official in Varanasi. Perhaps (only perhaps) this formulation is a way of comparing traditional to modern ways more than an empirical statement about alternatives. One also wonders why, if the shaman is known to be effective, people don’t come here first. In any case, everyone seems to know a story of someone in their own extended family (a very large group of people) who had some definite symptom—blood in the urine in one case I was told about—being treated by respectable doctors, such as at BHU—and then later being cured by a shaman. Probing discovered that the treatment at BHU was frequent and expensive. What the BHU diagnosis was, and what was the correlation between the cure and stopping the BHU visits was vague.
I take at face value the reality and intensity of this experience of auspicious possession for devotees. Per the above notion that cultures teach people about sickness, the open character of the courtyard made the attributes of possession widely available to public inspection by members of the community who crowd in. I even found myself moving my own head (faintly!) in time with some of the possessed and with the songs piped in over the loudspeaker. It wasn’t hard to imagine gradually build up the aerobic quotient.
Why mostly women? Women are generally considered more religiously sensitive than men, at least as devotees. To the extent that the disturbance is manifest in the family, the family is where the women always are. They can’t easily go out and blow off steam like men do (not to say the guys don’t bring it home, but at least they have that outlet). Since women have little status and identity within the patriarchal family (especially daughters-in-law—-most of the women we saw were fairly young, i.e., not yet likely to be matriarchs in their own households), this is a setting in which a huge amount of family and public attention is paid.
But what impressed most is this. Here is a public space where women can go safely out of control in a society where women are obliged to exhibit both subservience and rigid self-possession in public. Here female uncontrol is divinely sanctioned and occurs within the safe confines of the temple where women cannot be molested for their infractions--in fact, the infractions are not theirs, but the spirit’s.
The comparison that immediately comes to mind is Holi, the Hindu spring Festival of Colors celebrated this year on March 1. On Holi, men roam the streets in gangs. In talk about Holi in Varanasi (celebrated by Hindus all over the country, though not necessariliy in the same way—in Mathura, women are said to beat the men on Holi, for example), sooner or later women and men alike make the point that WOMEN DON’T GO OUT. On the eve of Holi, there are large public bonfires, the materials for which are gradually accumulated over the preceding month. Vandalism and petty theft is rampant, folks crash about stoned on bhang shouting rude and obscene remarks and drenching one another’s faces and clothes with hard core dyes—green, yellow, red, pink, blue--paintball style, and nobody can say boo. The small boys command the small neighborhoods and gallis (the narrow alleyways of older Varanasi), the big boys command the major thoroughfares. On Holi the fundamental male lessons of alliance, conquest and defeat are given visible and dramatic form.
During Holi might makes right, and men must band together to project might and defend themselves from the might of other men, and women hole up in the house since nothing,including molesting women, is disallowed.
Pause here to clear throat and signify that Holi INSIDE is no piece of cake. Did I mention that playing Holi INSIDE with the womenfolk of the family I was visiting and their brother, one delighted 14-year-old moving back and forth between inside and outside the house, himself dyed a muddy combination of many different colors, the women of the house poured buckets of blue and yellow dye on me and turned my hair and skin glowing blue-green? It washed off my skin, but the next day I slunk out to get my hair dyed a color you have not previously seen: shocking brown with, when i stand in the sun, arresting green highlights. Objectively speaking, the blue-green was more flattering to my complexion, but a Western woman with green hair who needs to talk to local people is a culturally impossible category.
So in possession rituals the women go wild where the community assembles, their families safely in attendance. Anything they do is not their responsibility. What mostly happens is their clothes are disarranged, an otherwise unthinkable condition for women in public. That and they are totally spent and calm by the time it’s done.
Lastly. At the center of the courtyard is an old gnarled neem tree with sacred strings encircling its trunk (wrapping trees is a practice that appears over and over in southern and southeastern Asia—sometimes the wraps are scarves), encased in four stone walls at its base, with sacred pennants thrust in the packed earth around its trunk to signal the apirit-power of the tree. At its foot are many many hardened blobs of concrete, somewhat randomly placed against each other. Each contains a spirit successfully exorcised and obedient to Harsu Brahm. (Other spirits have entered rice brought from the home of the possessed at the time of the exorcism' once the spirit agrees to leave, that rice is burnt in the fire pit of the temple.) A win-win for the spirits and the formerly possessed. The former are honored but confined, the latter are released.
Monday, March 29, 2010
I and the Village
I spent the last 3 days of Navratra, the spring cycle of worshiping Maha Dev, the Great Goddess, about 90 km south of Banaras in the Kaimur village district of the stateof Bihar. Seema, my hostess studies village rituals in this area by comparing Kurmi rituals in the plains to those of the Kharwar tribe in the highlands, which is considered a Naxalite area. She and her husband are landlords in the village and owners of a farm that produces cereal crops and vegetables for market.
I attended a shamanistic exorcism ritual, a community blood sacrifice of goats (251altogther—folks were assigned a number, just like at Baskin-Robbins), and a non-violent sacrifice in which thrashing goats offered to the Goddess were made through her powers to lie inexpliably still while the priests offered prayers. I also trooped up a mountaintop at night to a 2000 year old living temple, the oldest in all Bihar and perhaps India itself, with only the garbha griyha standing following a large earthquake, or several, that leveled what was likely a large temple complex whose ancient pieces are strewn around the site.
This was all fascinating and exhausting, as the hot, dusty summer winds, the loo, are beginning to blow in from the western deserts of Rajasthan. The temperature in Varanasi today is about 108 F. (the heat, everyone says, is several weeks early) and will rise until the monsoon comes in June to punctuate it with violent rainstorms, the roads a running flood, as temperatures begin to abate in a process that takes until Otober to be truly comfortable. The dry heat is on the prowl to grab moisture away from puny little water-based beings. I drank 3 liters a day and wanted more. In this area the first gesture to a guest is a drink of well water, which I gratefully accepted while moving from house to house in Seema’s extended kin network.
One out of 10 people in the world live in the Gangetic plain, participants in an ancient cycle based on monsoon replenishment of the land and Himalayan meltwater replenishment of Ganga-ji. Most of the population in the area I was in are Dalits, and though caste discrimination is illegal, traditional hierarchies persist. The income of the poor is small, irregular and unreliable. In these parts many do not eat, in government parlance, one square meal a day, two squares being the government standard for poverty.
Land redistribution is the Naxalite solution (its goal unachieved, its means spectacular--of late blowing up railway tracks and road bridges). Friends argue that redistribution would create holdings too small to support large Indian families. Small plots also tie families to the land—even a single cow has to be fed and managed every day. For some members of the family to go to school or travel at all, a holding must support either a family large family to provide workers or be profitable enough for the hire of auxiliary workers. And whatever land a household acquires will be subdivided among the surviving sons when the father dies, making them less profitable still.
Add water table stress from irrigation of rice and wheat, water intensive crops to which much of this area is devoted, as opposed to gram and lentils whch drink much less water, against a background of reduced Gangetic flooding. For the past two years late and scanty monsoons and early heat have disrupted planting and harvesting, with significant crop loss. Food prices have risen alarmingly (18% since September), though not especially as returns for the farmer. Though the government pledges to buy crops at a guaranteed support price, it doesn’t always, which forces the sale of perishable crop at unfavorable prices for the farmers, who are not organized. My friends report near famine in the villages here during the last two years.
What happens if the crops fail? The state has reserve stocks—maybe enough, maybe not. A significant percentage is said to have been lost to mice, insects and water. Non-literate peasants forced off the land and migrating to the cities increases the surplus of uneducated urban labor and leaves the land to industrial interests that want to mechanize it on a large scale with destructive indifference to generations of social fabric for those who remain.
The political parties—the presumed alternative to Naxalism—have responded with high dramas swirling around claimed cultural and religious threats to distract from the unaddressed problems at issue. My friends think literacy is the best hope to counter the isolation and poverty of agricultural communities. Illiteracy is high even among the landed classes, who imagine that mere possession of land will see them through all futures. What education is available to boy is less available to girls, in whom families invest less resources because they will live most of their lives as wives in other families. There are programs that target girls for education and nutrition, and programs for food subsidy and distribution and microfinancing. How they work at bedrock is hard to know.
It’s not clear what would immediately change with literacy alone. Folks could farm smarter, perhaps the main point, might be cheated less often (or not), or make better choices for their children. But it’s not as though there are jobs in the village crying out for literate workers, and in Varanasi the unemployment rate is above 70 per cent, affecting both the college educated and the underclass. Perhaps the point is to set literacy in generational motion, both for its immediate pleasures (I saw newspapers and at the mela around the temple were displays on small paperbacks that looked like romance novels—also-----bicycles carrying folk-art decorated coolers of ice cream with cones strapped to the basket!) and long term gains.
Three days did away with whatever romantic views of village life I might have entertained. Settlements are dusty, hot and far apart, organized as clusters of small dwellings. Life expectancy in this area is about 60 years. Roads are narrow, mostly unpaved and difficult to traverse, not wide enough for two approaching vehicles to pass without backing up and going forward again, carefully. (The roads are built up from the fields to resist washing out. We rode in a well-traveled jeep (luxury mode both for the four wheel drive and the roof against the sun) piloted by an unbelievably skilled driver and accompanied by relatives and a young goat for the bloodless sacrifice—the fulfillment by my friend of a promise, a menotti, made on her behalf by a maternal aunt in the event my friend had a son, which she did five years ago. We had to leave the road and light out across the fields when roads were closed for repair or accident.
Most villagers move on bicycles (neither road nor bicycle lit at night except by moonlight) in wagons drawn by human and animal power, and the occasional motorcycle. Though settlements are scattered, everyone is connected to everyone else by one or two, not six degrees of separation. Against the sun, small dwellings of rammed earth with roofs of curved ceramic tile are constructed as much like dark, cool caves (no windows) as this dry hot climate permits. For the more prosperous who live in concrete and brick family compounds, electricity is simply unavailable most of the day, and expensive so that families with it live without it as much as possible (no light for curling up with a paperback or textbook). Prosperous landholders have hand pumps; wells near crossroads serve others.
Tradition—the whole fabric of festival, ritual, kin relations and the daily round of community life--is the major source of cultural cohesiveness and sociability and knowledge of the skills of survival here, though said to be weakening. How it will survive television and eduction, those powerful bringers of desire for what is beyond—both spottily availalble, one perhaps too powerful, the other perhaps not powerful enough--is a question for which there are no easy answers and much suffering to come in one form or another. Indian television has many channels devoted to puja (worship) and darshan (a ritual practice of gazing on the god). One ‘effect’ of television is to show village tribals and lowlanders that their distinctive rituals differ from those in the ‘next country’ (the term for the world beyond the villages, includin adjacent villages). They believe those rituals must be better or truer than their own and are constantly asking Seema hto show them these rituals they imagine to be so much better than their own.
There is a well known claim by Amartya Sen that democracies have avoided famine because the press is able to inform citizens of approaching food crises that generate political pressure to address the situation and get resources to those in danger. I’d say the increasing threat of famine in India, where Parliament has failed to address the substantive needs of the people for infrastructure and a sustainable agricultural policy, will be a strong test of that hypothesis.
I know; you wanted to hear about the possession ritual. Stay tuned.
I attended a shamanistic exorcism ritual, a community blood sacrifice of goats (251altogther—folks were assigned a number, just like at Baskin-Robbins), and a non-violent sacrifice in which thrashing goats offered to the Goddess were made through her powers to lie inexpliably still while the priests offered prayers. I also trooped up a mountaintop at night to a 2000 year old living temple, the oldest in all Bihar and perhaps India itself, with only the garbha griyha standing following a large earthquake, or several, that leveled what was likely a large temple complex whose ancient pieces are strewn around the site.
This was all fascinating and exhausting, as the hot, dusty summer winds, the loo, are beginning to blow in from the western deserts of Rajasthan. The temperature in Varanasi today is about 108 F. (the heat, everyone says, is several weeks early) and will rise until the monsoon comes in June to punctuate it with violent rainstorms, the roads a running flood, as temperatures begin to abate in a process that takes until Otober to be truly comfortable. The dry heat is on the prowl to grab moisture away from puny little water-based beings. I drank 3 liters a day and wanted more. In this area the first gesture to a guest is a drink of well water, which I gratefully accepted while moving from house to house in Seema’s extended kin network.
One out of 10 people in the world live in the Gangetic plain, participants in an ancient cycle based on monsoon replenishment of the land and Himalayan meltwater replenishment of Ganga-ji. Most of the population in the area I was in are Dalits, and though caste discrimination is illegal, traditional hierarchies persist. The income of the poor is small, irregular and unreliable. In these parts many do not eat, in government parlance, one square meal a day, two squares being the government standard for poverty.
Land redistribution is the Naxalite solution (its goal unachieved, its means spectacular--of late blowing up railway tracks and road bridges). Friends argue that redistribution would create holdings too small to support large Indian families. Small plots also tie families to the land—even a single cow has to be fed and managed every day. For some members of the family to go to school or travel at all, a holding must support either a family large family to provide workers or be profitable enough for the hire of auxiliary workers. And whatever land a household acquires will be subdivided among the surviving sons when the father dies, making them less profitable still.
Add water table stress from irrigation of rice and wheat, water intensive crops to which much of this area is devoted, as opposed to gram and lentils whch drink much less water, against a background of reduced Gangetic flooding. For the past two years late and scanty monsoons and early heat have disrupted planting and harvesting, with significant crop loss. Food prices have risen alarmingly (18% since September), though not especially as returns for the farmer. Though the government pledges to buy crops at a guaranteed support price, it doesn’t always, which forces the sale of perishable crop at unfavorable prices for the farmers, who are not organized. My friends report near famine in the villages here during the last two years.
What happens if the crops fail? The state has reserve stocks—maybe enough, maybe not. A significant percentage is said to have been lost to mice, insects and water. Non-literate peasants forced off the land and migrating to the cities increases the surplus of uneducated urban labor and leaves the land to industrial interests that want to mechanize it on a large scale with destructive indifference to generations of social fabric for those who remain.
The political parties—the presumed alternative to Naxalism—have responded with high dramas swirling around claimed cultural and religious threats to distract from the unaddressed problems at issue. My friends think literacy is the best hope to counter the isolation and poverty of agricultural communities. Illiteracy is high even among the landed classes, who imagine that mere possession of land will see them through all futures. What education is available to boy is less available to girls, in whom families invest less resources because they will live most of their lives as wives in other families. There are programs that target girls for education and nutrition, and programs for food subsidy and distribution and microfinancing. How they work at bedrock is hard to know.
It’s not clear what would immediately change with literacy alone. Folks could farm smarter, perhaps the main point, might be cheated less often (or not), or make better choices for their children. But it’s not as though there are jobs in the village crying out for literate workers, and in Varanasi the unemployment rate is above 70 per cent, affecting both the college educated and the underclass. Perhaps the point is to set literacy in generational motion, both for its immediate pleasures (I saw newspapers and at the mela around the temple were displays on small paperbacks that looked like romance novels—also-----bicycles carrying folk-art decorated coolers of ice cream with cones strapped to the basket!) and long term gains.
Three days did away with whatever romantic views of village life I might have entertained. Settlements are dusty, hot and far apart, organized as clusters of small dwellings. Life expectancy in this area is about 60 years. Roads are narrow, mostly unpaved and difficult to traverse, not wide enough for two approaching vehicles to pass without backing up and going forward again, carefully. (The roads are built up from the fields to resist washing out. We rode in a well-traveled jeep (luxury mode both for the four wheel drive and the roof against the sun) piloted by an unbelievably skilled driver and accompanied by relatives and a young goat for the bloodless sacrifice—the fulfillment by my friend of a promise, a menotti, made on her behalf by a maternal aunt in the event my friend had a son, which she did five years ago. We had to leave the road and light out across the fields when roads were closed for repair or accident.
Most villagers move on bicycles (neither road nor bicycle lit at night except by moonlight) in wagons drawn by human and animal power, and the occasional motorcycle. Though settlements are scattered, everyone is connected to everyone else by one or two, not six degrees of separation. Against the sun, small dwellings of rammed earth with roofs of curved ceramic tile are constructed as much like dark, cool caves (no windows) as this dry hot climate permits. For the more prosperous who live in concrete and brick family compounds, electricity is simply unavailable most of the day, and expensive so that families with it live without it as much as possible (no light for curling up with a paperback or textbook). Prosperous landholders have hand pumps; wells near crossroads serve others.
Tradition—the whole fabric of festival, ritual, kin relations and the daily round of community life--is the major source of cultural cohesiveness and sociability and knowledge of the skills of survival here, though said to be weakening. How it will survive television and eduction, those powerful bringers of desire for what is beyond—both spottily availalble, one perhaps too powerful, the other perhaps not powerful enough--is a question for which there are no easy answers and much suffering to come in one form or another. Indian television has many channels devoted to puja (worship) and darshan (a ritual practice of gazing on the god). One ‘effect’ of television is to show village tribals and lowlanders that their distinctive rituals differ from those in the ‘next country’ (the term for the world beyond the villages, includin adjacent villages). They believe those rituals must be better or truer than their own and are constantly asking Seema hto show them these rituals they imagine to be so much better than their own.
There is a well known claim by Amartya Sen that democracies have avoided famine because the press is able to inform citizens of approaching food crises that generate political pressure to address the situation and get resources to those in danger. I’d say the increasing threat of famine in India, where Parliament has failed to address the substantive needs of the people for infrastructure and a sustainable agricultural policy, will be a strong test of that hypothesis.
I know; you wanted to hear about the possession ritual. Stay tuned.
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Memsaabs Bounced!
Only the special few have been tossed out of the 5-star Amarvilas Oberoi near the Taj Mahal.
What was I doing at the Oberoi, where Bill Clinton hung out when he visited the Taj? (HE was not thrown out. Fulbright’s India director, who also did not get thrown out of the Oberoi but was given a tour that included the Koh-inoor suite where Bill stayed, told me that one showers there in transparent glass and marble surroundings with a grand and unimpeded view across the treetops of the magnificent Taj.)
Around New Year’s my friend Megan, 28, invited me to come to Rajasthan with an intermediate stop at Agra with her mother and her aunt, both roughly my age. I readily accepted. We took train, plane, and car, the latter from Delhi to Agra with the garrulous driver, who honked at every living thing on the road, of a small white Maruti, our trip luggage lashed on top.
This is not about the Taj, but it is as breathtaking as one expects, a grand shimmering bubble floating on the horizon when we visited at dawn. Like good tourists we also inspected every other grand pile in the vicinity over the course of the day, all built by one or another of a long and fractious line of ruling Mughals with exceptionally testy intra-familial relationships. It will here be recorded that in front of Akbar’s tomb my salwar (the string-tied bloomers beneath the kameez), in the stuff of nightmares, suddenly gave way and descended to my ankles. I was lightning fast in swooping to retrieve them, and so shocked and awed only the immediate crowd (exposing only white calves and a failure to properly inhabit the culture).
After a day of taking in much weapons-grade sandstone and marble, we were ready for a drink. Alcohol is hard to come by in India, especially for women. According to Megan’s Lonely Planet, we could have a cocktail in the high class, air conditioned ambience of the Taj Oberoi—drinking Westerners of all genders among their best clientele—so off we went. This was a challenge for our driver, who couldn’t at first find any among the humble class of local rickshaw wallahs and taxi-ists who knew what or where it was.
But finally we drew up to a coach carriage roundabout in front of a faux Mughal palace with beautiful, non-randomly fair-skinned doormen outfitted in eunuch drag--elegant red kurtahs with gold detailing over full length ivory dhotis, pewterish gold turbans--gliding over the marble to greet our band of four, tootling up in our dusty compact with its canopy of mismatched luggage. We gathered up all the dignity our rumpled clothes and windblown hair permitted and climbed out to faultless manners and gracious greetings. Not a bad way, we thought, to spend time before dinner on New Year’s Eve.
We sent off our driver and got down to business. This meant submitting our bags to screening on a side conveyer belt in an unadorned niche off a side entrance. Something I’ve never done before in any hotel. This is 26/11 land, but the whole thing felt awkward as we hoisted our stuff on the belt. One could not picture Bill doing that. We were followed the whole way by staff standing attentively about, but not helping. As we crossed a courtyard to the lobby, one eunuch directed us to the pink orb of the late afternoon sun hovering over the carefully manicured terrace garden. Very aesthetically sensitive, us and the costumed help pausing to enjoy nature’s gifts together. And so, with Megan’s aunt briskly in the lead, we went to find the bar.
Oh, so sorry, said one of the slaves, effectively and expertly cutting us off like a border collie herding stampeding sheep. We must call and see if the bar has any room to spare: It’s New Year’s Eve. Right. At 4.30 in the afternoon with an entirely empty lobby. He smiled apologetically.
Everyone smiled, pityingly as I think of it now, at us. We sat in pleasantly cooperative anticipation, like it is perfectly normal for folks at swanky hotels to check in daylight to see if the bar’s full. By now us older broads had pretty much figured out the score, but Megan was still sure all was going according to plan, and dispensing regal receptivity as the benevolent mistress of the situation among servants attuned to her every wish.
The verdict came. Oh, so sorry, no room at all! Such a pity! Had I thought of it, I would have asked just to look at the bar to see what they would come up with to keep early drinking patrons from glimpsing Another Kind. But this was a “light boot” as somebody later described it, and all the players were perfectly behaved.
Where are you staying, one of the eunuchs asked as we walked out, so pleasantly only a cynic could be suspect. Megan named our cheesy mid-grade hotel. He took it in and with barely a pause and a well bred lift of the eyebrow—And how do you like it there? In this context a negative answer would have been pathetic over-sharing; an enthusiastic one totally confirming of our yokel status. We said we liked [the cut rate stuff] fine, and with a final display of gracious smiles all around, trooped out to the terrace to call our driver.
Across the roundabout, sleek rich people in sleek rich cars pulled up at the entrance to the main lobby. No one was rumpled. We waited in the cold, as it were, for our driver. When he came the doorman glinted engagingly one last time and waved us off, four more Lonely Planet parvenus dispatched without blood.
There was still dinner to be had before boarding an overnight bus to Haridwar. Our driver promised to query the locals for a good place to eat.
He must have had difficulty pegging us. Camped at a standard tourist hotel, we had nonetheless gone for cocktails at the Oberoi. And twice he had taken us to the bus station, the strongest possible contrast with the Oberoi. So where did we belong?
With great fanfare he picked us up from our hotel and drove to a kind of thatch-roofed wooden shed with a Polynesian decor filtered through an Indian aesthetic, bad lighting, a semi-karaoke floor show, and food about which it is better not to comment. As we alighted, he happily waved his hand and told us: All the people from the Oberoi go here.
What was I doing at the Oberoi, where Bill Clinton hung out when he visited the Taj? (HE was not thrown out. Fulbright’s India director, who also did not get thrown out of the Oberoi but was given a tour that included the Koh-inoor suite where Bill stayed, told me that one showers there in transparent glass and marble surroundings with a grand and unimpeded view across the treetops of the magnificent Taj.)
Around New Year’s my friend Megan, 28, invited me to come to Rajasthan with an intermediate stop at Agra with her mother and her aunt, both roughly my age. I readily accepted. We took train, plane, and car, the latter from Delhi to Agra with the garrulous driver, who honked at every living thing on the road, of a small white Maruti, our trip luggage lashed on top.
This is not about the Taj, but it is as breathtaking as one expects, a grand shimmering bubble floating on the horizon when we visited at dawn. Like good tourists we also inspected every other grand pile in the vicinity over the course of the day, all built by one or another of a long and fractious line of ruling Mughals with exceptionally testy intra-familial relationships. It will here be recorded that in front of Akbar’s tomb my salwar (the string-tied bloomers beneath the kameez), in the stuff of nightmares, suddenly gave way and descended to my ankles. I was lightning fast in swooping to retrieve them, and so shocked and awed only the immediate crowd (exposing only white calves and a failure to properly inhabit the culture).
After a day of taking in much weapons-grade sandstone and marble, we were ready for a drink. Alcohol is hard to come by in India, especially for women. According to Megan’s Lonely Planet, we could have a cocktail in the high class, air conditioned ambience of the Taj Oberoi—drinking Westerners of all genders among their best clientele—so off we went. This was a challenge for our driver, who couldn’t at first find any among the humble class of local rickshaw wallahs and taxi-ists who knew what or where it was.
But finally we drew up to a coach carriage roundabout in front of a faux Mughal palace with beautiful, non-randomly fair-skinned doormen outfitted in eunuch drag--elegant red kurtahs with gold detailing over full length ivory dhotis, pewterish gold turbans--gliding over the marble to greet our band of four, tootling up in our dusty compact with its canopy of mismatched luggage. We gathered up all the dignity our rumpled clothes and windblown hair permitted and climbed out to faultless manners and gracious greetings. Not a bad way, we thought, to spend time before dinner on New Year’s Eve.
We sent off our driver and got down to business. This meant submitting our bags to screening on a side conveyer belt in an unadorned niche off a side entrance. Something I’ve never done before in any hotel. This is 26/11 land, but the whole thing felt awkward as we hoisted our stuff on the belt. One could not picture Bill doing that. We were followed the whole way by staff standing attentively about, but not helping. As we crossed a courtyard to the lobby, one eunuch directed us to the pink orb of the late afternoon sun hovering over the carefully manicured terrace garden. Very aesthetically sensitive, us and the costumed help pausing to enjoy nature’s gifts together. And so, with Megan’s aunt briskly in the lead, we went to find the bar.
Oh, so sorry, said one of the slaves, effectively and expertly cutting us off like a border collie herding stampeding sheep. We must call and see if the bar has any room to spare: It’s New Year’s Eve. Right. At 4.30 in the afternoon with an entirely empty lobby. He smiled apologetically.
Everyone smiled, pityingly as I think of it now, at us. We sat in pleasantly cooperative anticipation, like it is perfectly normal for folks at swanky hotels to check in daylight to see if the bar’s full. By now us older broads had pretty much figured out the score, but Megan was still sure all was going according to plan, and dispensing regal receptivity as the benevolent mistress of the situation among servants attuned to her every wish.
The verdict came. Oh, so sorry, no room at all! Such a pity! Had I thought of it, I would have asked just to look at the bar to see what they would come up with to keep early drinking patrons from glimpsing Another Kind. But this was a “light boot” as somebody later described it, and all the players were perfectly behaved.
Where are you staying, one of the eunuchs asked as we walked out, so pleasantly only a cynic could be suspect. Megan named our cheesy mid-grade hotel. He took it in and with barely a pause and a well bred lift of the eyebrow—And how do you like it there? In this context a negative answer would have been pathetic over-sharing; an enthusiastic one totally confirming of our yokel status. We said we liked [the cut rate stuff] fine, and with a final display of gracious smiles all around, trooped out to the terrace to call our driver.
Across the roundabout, sleek rich people in sleek rich cars pulled up at the entrance to the main lobby. No one was rumpled. We waited in the cold, as it were, for our driver. When he came the doorman glinted engagingly one last time and waved us off, four more Lonely Planet parvenus dispatched without blood.
There was still dinner to be had before boarding an overnight bus to Haridwar. Our driver promised to query the locals for a good place to eat.
He must have had difficulty pegging us. Camped at a standard tourist hotel, we had nonetheless gone for cocktails at the Oberoi. And twice he had taken us to the bus station, the strongest possible contrast with the Oberoi. So where did we belong?
With great fanfare he picked us up from our hotel and drove to a kind of thatch-roofed wooden shed with a Polynesian decor filtered through an Indian aesthetic, bad lighting, a semi-karaoke floor show, and food about which it is better not to comment. As we alighted, he happily waved his hand and told us: All the people from the Oberoi go here.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Attachment Disorders
Warning: Generalizations Ahead.
Last Sunday I was at Dashashvamedha, the public space hub of the city, a large open bathing ghat minutes from one of the city’s major intersections. A ghat is a boat landing. Banaras’s are distinctive terraces of stone piers and descending steps going back in some cases to the 18th century. The crowd at Dashshvamedha is fed by equal streams of religious, commercial and sightseeing traffic to and from Ganga, to and from nearby Vishvanath, the most important temple in the city, and to and from a lively shopping avenue from the intersection to the ghat. Sacred and secular life flow effortlessly together. Dashashvamedha is urban Banaras’s Sunday park.
It was the day after the biggest religious holiday in Banaras, Mahashivaratri, when Parvati, a manifestation of the Great Goddess, makes a householder out of the wild ascetic Shiva, the deity whose residence in Kashi is central to its identity as a tirtha (sacred crossing-place), by marrying him. Lots of human couples also get married on Mahashivaratri, and the ceremony which may last till dawn. Many come the next day to get the blessing of Shitala, the cool goddess who guards against the evils of the warm season, which has just begun. Her pitha or seat is above the Dashashvamedha promenade where folks walk from ghat to ghat, and gather on weekends to look, eat, fly kites, get massages and haircuts, do yoga and generally chill.
A number of couples sat on the weathered, wooden platforms where ghattias sit in the early morning attending to the ritual needs of bathers and pilgrims, and where at night local devotees and visitors sit and watch the religious theater of aarati puja, an evening worship ritual for which Dashashvamedha is especially known.
At Sunday midday they were still in their wedding costumes. The slender young brides in their gem-encrusted, gold-embroidered red wedding saris were stunning. They sat on the wooden platforms and looked shyly, or perhaps shell-shockedly down, their pallus (the portion of a sari that drapes the head) pulled way down over their faces so no one, not even their husbands, could see them. (Other brides, perhaps older and seemingly better acquainted with their grooms, showed their faces and basked in the attention of onlookers). The husbands were wearing cream or white wedding suits embroidered with rhinestones and red or maroon accents, and elaborate wedding turbans. They looked like princes of Rajput, which is the idea.
Consider: These couples had been up all night performing their wedding vows and maintaining the sober, dignified demeanor that is the obligation of the wedding pair amidst the merrymaking and congratulations from people in both extended families and the guests around them. The brides would have fasted for much of the day of the ceremony. They are leaving, usually at a very young age, their birth families to be thrust abruptly into a new family where they must will be expected to submit to the unfamiliar authority of their mothers-in-law as well as their husbands. Some have left their villages for the first time.
This is a lot to do in 24 hours as well as days of ritual that lead up to the wedding. So, faces covered, they weren’t saying much, conspicuously tied by a yellow sash to their husbands, who were tied right back (and yes, she walks behind him when they move). Yellow is the renunciant color: marriage, the sash eloquently says, is both renunciation and attachment.
Many of these newlyweds sat as far apart as their new umbilical cord would allow, their bodies turned in opposite directions, the covered bride looking down, the husband often bored, absolutely nothing to say to each other. Many had first met this person to whom they were now so visibly joined only in the last 24 hours (or, if they had previously met, it was briefly and decorously in the presence of relatives). Their marriages have been arranged by their families as (usually) a caste match and often an astrological one for those who can afford to have their charts cast. Hindus take wedding and death rites extremely seriously even if they are otherwise more casually observant.
Here are effective strangers often with scant sexual experience, about to establish a permanent sexual relationship (fourth day--more ceremonial, lots of flowers, the yellow sash comes off) before they’ve developed any sort of emotional connection. Americans have sex without any emotional connection often enough. That they don't have to stay together afterward seems pretty reckless to Indians. Nor is emotional intimacy particularly the goal of Hindu marriage, the tenderness of wedding vows notwithstanding.
New couples may not even have their own sleeping quarters. If there are separate bedrooms to be had (this is largely an economic issue), the family may sort out sleeping arrangements by gender rather than marital pair. When the young couple wants to sleep together (there are only so many ritually possible days, not when the wife has her menses, for example, an impure that also precludes her from cooking or entering a temple—-sensible time off from domestic responsibilities), they take over the kitchen for the night. The point being that household arrangements for the new couple do not facilitate emotional intimacy, though many couples must achieve it.
(Reality check on the generalizations: A college-educated dual-career couple that lives in Delhi may have dated, may be setting up their own independent household, and may still have a traditional ceremony. There are plenty of variations in courtship and marriage in a society as big as this one—-I'm talking about traditional marriage, alive and well at every level of society.)
There’s a lot of writing about the consequences. Mothers (wives deprived of close emotional connections to their husbands) focus on the kids. The mother-son bond is especially strong, not least because the presentation of a son finally makes the new wife really part of her husband’s family by ensuring its male lineage. (So what son needs an emotional connection to a wife?) Preceding the sociologists and psychologists are the mithya—Sati, whose husband Shiva really doesn’t care about her till she’s dead (from throwing herself on her father’s sacrificial fire), Radha who pines eternally for Krishna, who never stays with her and flirts with other women. The Krishna-Radhu story is often interpreted by devotees as a story about the soul’s pining for the divine, a reading I whole-heartedly embrace while noticing other interesting things about it.
In Haridwar, one of the great pilgrim tirthas, I saw a family tree mounted next to family portraits in the corridor of a lovely hotel overlooking Ganga (cold and fast-moving near the foothills of the Himalayas), the family business. Hand-inked on parchment were the names of the patriarch and the matriarch and all the sons and their wives and all the sons they had produced and their wives and sons for several generations—-no daughters anywhere. In the chronology of ancestral lineage they don’t exist.
Indians believe that such arrangements create strong families and generational stability. Sudhir Kakar, a psychoanalyst who writes about Indian sexuality and considers the Oedipal conflict largely a Western trauma, argues that the traditional arrangements of the Hindu family create anger and disappointment in women and fear and dread in men.
By a very different cultural route, this sounds like a whole lot like diagnoses of heterosexual romantic life in the U.S.
Last Sunday I was at Dashashvamedha, the public space hub of the city, a large open bathing ghat minutes from one of the city’s major intersections. A ghat is a boat landing. Banaras’s are distinctive terraces of stone piers and descending steps going back in some cases to the 18th century. The crowd at Dashshvamedha is fed by equal streams of religious, commercial and sightseeing traffic to and from Ganga, to and from nearby Vishvanath, the most important temple in the city, and to and from a lively shopping avenue from the intersection to the ghat. Sacred and secular life flow effortlessly together. Dashashvamedha is urban Banaras’s Sunday park.
It was the day after the biggest religious holiday in Banaras, Mahashivaratri, when Parvati, a manifestation of the Great Goddess, makes a householder out of the wild ascetic Shiva, the deity whose residence in Kashi is central to its identity as a tirtha (sacred crossing-place), by marrying him. Lots of human couples also get married on Mahashivaratri, and the ceremony which may last till dawn. Many come the next day to get the blessing of Shitala, the cool goddess who guards against the evils of the warm season, which has just begun. Her pitha or seat is above the Dashashvamedha promenade where folks walk from ghat to ghat, and gather on weekends to look, eat, fly kites, get massages and haircuts, do yoga and generally chill.
A number of couples sat on the weathered, wooden platforms where ghattias sit in the early morning attending to the ritual needs of bathers and pilgrims, and where at night local devotees and visitors sit and watch the religious theater of aarati puja, an evening worship ritual for which Dashashvamedha is especially known.
At Sunday midday they were still in their wedding costumes. The slender young brides in their gem-encrusted, gold-embroidered red wedding saris were stunning. They sat on the wooden platforms and looked shyly, or perhaps shell-shockedly down, their pallus (the portion of a sari that drapes the head) pulled way down over their faces so no one, not even their husbands, could see them. (Other brides, perhaps older and seemingly better acquainted with their grooms, showed their faces and basked in the attention of onlookers). The husbands were wearing cream or white wedding suits embroidered with rhinestones and red or maroon accents, and elaborate wedding turbans. They looked like princes of Rajput, which is the idea.
Consider: These couples had been up all night performing their wedding vows and maintaining the sober, dignified demeanor that is the obligation of the wedding pair amidst the merrymaking and congratulations from people in both extended families and the guests around them. The brides would have fasted for much of the day of the ceremony. They are leaving, usually at a very young age, their birth families to be thrust abruptly into a new family where they must will be expected to submit to the unfamiliar authority of their mothers-in-law as well as their husbands. Some have left their villages for the first time.
This is a lot to do in 24 hours as well as days of ritual that lead up to the wedding. So, faces covered, they weren’t saying much, conspicuously tied by a yellow sash to their husbands, who were tied right back (and yes, she walks behind him when they move). Yellow is the renunciant color: marriage, the sash eloquently says, is both renunciation and attachment.
Many of these newlyweds sat as far apart as their new umbilical cord would allow, their bodies turned in opposite directions, the covered bride looking down, the husband often bored, absolutely nothing to say to each other. Many had first met this person to whom they were now so visibly joined only in the last 24 hours (or, if they had previously met, it was briefly and decorously in the presence of relatives). Their marriages have been arranged by their families as (usually) a caste match and often an astrological one for those who can afford to have their charts cast. Hindus take wedding and death rites extremely seriously even if they are otherwise more casually observant.
Here are effective strangers often with scant sexual experience, about to establish a permanent sexual relationship (fourth day--more ceremonial, lots of flowers, the yellow sash comes off) before they’ve developed any sort of emotional connection. Americans have sex without any emotional connection often enough. That they don't have to stay together afterward seems pretty reckless to Indians. Nor is emotional intimacy particularly the goal of Hindu marriage, the tenderness of wedding vows notwithstanding.
New couples may not even have their own sleeping quarters. If there are separate bedrooms to be had (this is largely an economic issue), the family may sort out sleeping arrangements by gender rather than marital pair. When the young couple wants to sleep together (there are only so many ritually possible days, not when the wife has her menses, for example, an impure that also precludes her from cooking or entering a temple—-sensible time off from domestic responsibilities), they take over the kitchen for the night. The point being that household arrangements for the new couple do not facilitate emotional intimacy, though many couples must achieve it.
(Reality check on the generalizations: A college-educated dual-career couple that lives in Delhi may have dated, may be setting up their own independent household, and may still have a traditional ceremony. There are plenty of variations in courtship and marriage in a society as big as this one—-I'm talking about traditional marriage, alive and well at every level of society.)
There’s a lot of writing about the consequences. Mothers (wives deprived of close emotional connections to their husbands) focus on the kids. The mother-son bond is especially strong, not least because the presentation of a son finally makes the new wife really part of her husband’s family by ensuring its male lineage. (So what son needs an emotional connection to a wife?) Preceding the sociologists and psychologists are the mithya—Sati, whose husband Shiva really doesn’t care about her till she’s dead (from throwing herself on her father’s sacrificial fire), Radha who pines eternally for Krishna, who never stays with her and flirts with other women. The Krishna-Radhu story is often interpreted by devotees as a story about the soul’s pining for the divine, a reading I whole-heartedly embrace while noticing other interesting things about it.
In Haridwar, one of the great pilgrim tirthas, I saw a family tree mounted next to family portraits in the corridor of a lovely hotel overlooking Ganga (cold and fast-moving near the foothills of the Himalayas), the family business. Hand-inked on parchment were the names of the patriarch and the matriarch and all the sons and their wives and all the sons they had produced and their wives and sons for several generations—-no daughters anywhere. In the chronology of ancestral lineage they don’t exist.
Indians believe that such arrangements create strong families and generational stability. Sudhir Kakar, a psychoanalyst who writes about Indian sexuality and considers the Oedipal conflict largely a Western trauma, argues that the traditional arrangements of the Hindu family create anger and disappointment in women and fear and dread in men.
By a very different cultural route, this sounds like a whole lot like diagnoses of heterosexual romantic life in the U.S.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
The Fog Comes on Little Cat Feet
(I wrote this several weeks ago but never got it up. I'm posting it now because winter is definitely on the minds of folks in the Northeast. Spring has now come to Banaras, a temperate interval before the furnace of summer.)
It’s cold in Uttar Pradesh, the state I’m in. Cold means 2 to 4 degrees Celsius which is 39 F or so. Hardly enough to yawn at in the States, here it closes the schools. That’s because no buildings have central heating, and space heaters are a luxury. With their concrete walls and stone floors, the schools can’t keep children warm so they’ve closed during this cold snap. There’s also thick white fog, a palpable, ghostly substance that makes everything outdoors mysterious and isolated from all intelligible context, seasonal but thicker and more tenacious than usual, I’m told. Caused by the southern-sweeping Arctic jetstream, it sits stubbornly on the ground day after day, fanning out in a way that keeps rail passegers stoically huddling with their baggage in unheated waiting rooms while it plays havoc with transportation in this part of India (I get no morning paper for days at a time), and creates connectivity chaos for phone and internet users.
Cold brings out the shawls and head wraps. Instead of coats many Banarasis wear woolen shawls, a light, portable toasty shield against the chill. The best are from Kashmir, especially prized for their silky nap and delicate tracings of floral embroidery, not only beautiful but astonishingly warm for their weight as I can personally attest. Also in demand are soft, thick Tibetan-made unbleached wool scarves from the Himalayas. Trash fires punctuate the thick, white fog that settles on the road like vaporous snowdrifts that make it difficult to see in front of traveling vehicles, indeed, to see traveling vehicles, and making the line drying of laundry a two, even three-day affair. Men squat around them in their unbleached tan or ivory shawls drinking tea, conversing, reading the newspaper, from early in the morning till about noon when the sun warms things up for a couple of hours.
There is something that fixes in memory the drape of shawls over the heads and shoulders and upper body of men, long kurtas beneath a silhouette like snow on mountains and seemingly as ancient. It’s the look of a way of life, a solution that has long served the needs and history of a culture. Women are draped in every season. Wrapped now in wool they scurry along before dawn to the river to perform morning bathing rituals. Standing in Ganga-ji they show little sign of the cold, though close up you see them shivering when they emerge to put on fresh saris, sweaters, and shawls. Of course there are Western style warm jackets but mostly for men. Shopping in a small local department store whose clientele is not-fancy middle class, I could hardly find anything warmer than corduroy for women.
Tradition, of course, could not anticipate the windstream of motorcycle-driving, though plenty of men driving wear only shawls. As the possessor of a largeish jacket bought precisely to defend me against the cold and wind of driving, I still wear a shawl over it to fit in better since women just don’t wear motorcycle jackets. Mostly they mostly ride side saddle behind the men, whose shoulders form at least a little barrier. (Draped in a shawl, salwar suit, warm socks over my sandaled feet and a bonnet sort of a little hat that is sold here, you can’t tell I’m a Westerner til you see my face, which can be useful for moving unmarked through crowds.)
Lacking heat in my flat, I’ve learned to cover up. My feet are always cold even with rugs bought to put a barrier between me and the chilly stone floor. Inside I wear long underwear, Indian salwar pants, the long housedress that is considered appropriate wear for women at home, a sweater or two, a blanket shawl tucked under one arm and thrown over the opposite shoulder to free a hand for doing things, and occasionally a stocking cap. My attire resembles that of Banarasi women generally, though more layers means more money. Bucket baths in the concrete unheated shower room are another matter, sort of thrilling in their extreme-adventure way. At night I tuck a hot water bottle under the covers, a lovely hand made cotton batting quilt of Indian pattern stuffed with black cotton, which is considered especially warm, that I bought for about 10 dollars from one of the large wooden wagons on which they are stacked for sale on the main street. Quilts are both for bedding and socializing since lots of folks sit on them instead of using couches.
In workplaces the space heaters tend to be trained on the highest status person around (that has sometimes been me) rather than the largest number of those present, one of the less than subtle ways that status is continually marked.
A definite cultural divide surrounds the use of curtains. For Westerners curtains are devices that permit us to go less than decently clothed inside our own houses by shielding any outside view. As far as I can tell, Banarasis with their extended families never go less than decently clothed inside. The point of curtains, therefore, is to hang on doors to keep out the cold in winter; in summer, the bugs (screens are a rarity), heat and dust. Hung inside at floor length they separate functions in the house, especially guest and family areas. A friend of mine rents rooms from an Indian family whose matriarch could not understand why she wanted window curtains, just as my friend could not fathom the aesthetic or functional merit of door curtains. “But WHY??” they expostulated in mutual incomprehension.
It’s cold in Uttar Pradesh, the state I’m in. Cold means 2 to 4 degrees Celsius which is 39 F or so. Hardly enough to yawn at in the States, here it closes the schools. That’s because no buildings have central heating, and space heaters are a luxury. With their concrete walls and stone floors, the schools can’t keep children warm so they’ve closed during this cold snap. There’s also thick white fog, a palpable, ghostly substance that makes everything outdoors mysterious and isolated from all intelligible context, seasonal but thicker and more tenacious than usual, I’m told. Caused by the southern-sweeping Arctic jetstream, it sits stubbornly on the ground day after day, fanning out in a way that keeps rail passegers stoically huddling with their baggage in unheated waiting rooms while it plays havoc with transportation in this part of India (I get no morning paper for days at a time), and creates connectivity chaos for phone and internet users.
Cold brings out the shawls and head wraps. Instead of coats many Banarasis wear woolen shawls, a light, portable toasty shield against the chill. The best are from Kashmir, especially prized for their silky nap and delicate tracings of floral embroidery, not only beautiful but astonishingly warm for their weight as I can personally attest. Also in demand are soft, thick Tibetan-made unbleached wool scarves from the Himalayas. Trash fires punctuate the thick, white fog that settles on the road like vaporous snowdrifts that make it difficult to see in front of traveling vehicles, indeed, to see traveling vehicles, and making the line drying of laundry a two, even three-day affair. Men squat around them in their unbleached tan or ivory shawls drinking tea, conversing, reading the newspaper, from early in the morning till about noon when the sun warms things up for a couple of hours.
There is something that fixes in memory the drape of shawls over the heads and shoulders and upper body of men, long kurtas beneath a silhouette like snow on mountains and seemingly as ancient. It’s the look of a way of life, a solution that has long served the needs and history of a culture. Women are draped in every season. Wrapped now in wool they scurry along before dawn to the river to perform morning bathing rituals. Standing in Ganga-ji they show little sign of the cold, though close up you see them shivering when they emerge to put on fresh saris, sweaters, and shawls. Of course there are Western style warm jackets but mostly for men. Shopping in a small local department store whose clientele is not-fancy middle class, I could hardly find anything warmer than corduroy for women.
Tradition, of course, could not anticipate the windstream of motorcycle-driving, though plenty of men driving wear only shawls. As the possessor of a largeish jacket bought precisely to defend me against the cold and wind of driving, I still wear a shawl over it to fit in better since women just don’t wear motorcycle jackets. Mostly they mostly ride side saddle behind the men, whose shoulders form at least a little barrier. (Draped in a shawl, salwar suit, warm socks over my sandaled feet and a bonnet sort of a little hat that is sold here, you can’t tell I’m a Westerner til you see my face, which can be useful for moving unmarked through crowds.)
Lacking heat in my flat, I’ve learned to cover up. My feet are always cold even with rugs bought to put a barrier between me and the chilly stone floor. Inside I wear long underwear, Indian salwar pants, the long housedress that is considered appropriate wear for women at home, a sweater or two, a blanket shawl tucked under one arm and thrown over the opposite shoulder to free a hand for doing things, and occasionally a stocking cap. My attire resembles that of Banarasi women generally, though more layers means more money. Bucket baths in the concrete unheated shower room are another matter, sort of thrilling in their extreme-adventure way. At night I tuck a hot water bottle under the covers, a lovely hand made cotton batting quilt of Indian pattern stuffed with black cotton, which is considered especially warm, that I bought for about 10 dollars from one of the large wooden wagons on which they are stacked for sale on the main street. Quilts are both for bedding and socializing since lots of folks sit on them instead of using couches.
In workplaces the space heaters tend to be trained on the highest status person around (that has sometimes been me) rather than the largest number of those present, one of the less than subtle ways that status is continually marked.
A definite cultural divide surrounds the use of curtains. For Westerners curtains are devices that permit us to go less than decently clothed inside our own houses by shielding any outside view. As far as I can tell, Banarasis with their extended families never go less than decently clothed inside. The point of curtains, therefore, is to hang on doors to keep out the cold in winter; in summer, the bugs (screens are a rarity), heat and dust. Hung inside at floor length they separate functions in the house, especially guest and family areas. A friend of mine rents rooms from an Indian family whose matriarch could not understand why she wanted window curtains, just as my friend could not fathom the aesthetic or functional merit of door curtains. “But WHY??” they expostulated in mutual incomprehension.
Friday, February 12, 2010
Their Game is Con....
I wondered when the New York Times would get around to the Shah Rukh Khan vs. Bal Thackeray dustup here, and I see it finally has. The details are accurate so far as I know them, but bloodless.
The basic facts: Shiv Shena, a regional nativist party in India whose constituency is the left-behind-in-India's-economic-miracle population of the western state of Maharashta, of which Mumbai is the capital. Mumbai is also the capital of Bollywood. Sena's one-issue platform is Maharashtra for the Maharashatrians (self-rule and preference for Marathis in Maharashtra and exclusion of Muslims) and its program is intimidation, public and physical. It's led by the past-his-prime bully Bal Thackeray. The party took a beating from Congress in recent state elections much to Congress's relief. Other spin-off and complicatedly allied and squabbling chauvinist parties (BJP, RSS, MNS, like everything in India, these groupings are labyrinthine), are engaged in an internecine struggle in anticipation of the upcoming elections.
Sena’s latest target is the huge film star Shah Rukh Khan who publicly regretted in a recent television interview that Pakistani cricket players had been passed over by Indian team owners in the recent player’s auction, presumably because of 26/11. (SRK, himself a cricket team co-owner, also didn't bid for any Pakistanis, worth keeping in mind.)
For that, Shiv Sena threatened to shut down SRK's newest film, a tear-jerker called My Name is Khan, about anti-Muslim prejudice in post-911 America. (In the film SRK is not only the lead character whose name--like Shah Rukh's own--is Khan, but also has Asperger's and goes on a journey across America--sounding more and more like Forrest Gump--see next graph.)
Shah Rukh is the biggest Bollywood star around, a Muslim, and a Mumbaiker. If there was a Bollywood Forrest Gump, he would be the star. SRK has more star power than Tom Hanks and more sex appeal—-I can’t even think of a Hollywood equivalent right now. Besides his films, he’s constantly in small-drama television commercials and gives frequent aw shucks interviews. Overexposure apparently holds few risks for him. Over 40, with a wife and two kids that he frequently mentions as the people whose good opinion matters most to him, he has a large-boned, boyishly mischievous face, a good big open smile, and just a hint of mature cragginess. He’s smooth and smart with a gift for coming across as affably honest and humorously self-deprecating.
For example, though he’s lived in Mumbai for years he doesn’t know Marathi, the regional language. Linguistic purity is an evergreen issue with Sena, which recently tried and failed to get a bill passed requiring Mumbai taxi drivers, mostly immigrants, to know Marathi. SRK smiles fetchingly and says it’s a point of embarrassment to him that he only knows a few Marathi phrases (which he displays), and he’s terrible with languages, but his kids know it! A domesticated, urbane, safe householder kind of sexy.
Not like Sachin Tendulkar, India’s (and the world's) enduring cricket great who stands for a kind of purity and innocence and self-discipline. There’s a guy who stays away from the limelight off the field but lacks Tiger Wood's arrogant aloofness. Tendulkar was Sena's first target in this latest campaign which started several months ago. Most recent Sena target was Rahul Gandhi, heir apparent to the fabled Nehru dynasty, about a week before the SRK brouhaha erupted.
SRK, Rahul and Tendalkur are all too big for Sena to make a dent in, and most of the country has sided with them against Sena. But the controversies keep SS in the headlines and aapparently prevents supporters form noticing the party isn’t doing squat to help the fervent base of folks to whom it markets its tediously predictable but fiery brand of identity politics.
SS threatened to use its shock troops to block the release of My Name is Khan--with violence. The cops took no chances and pre-emptively arrested Sena protesters with, one would not be rash to assume, little regard for their civil rights. On this very blog in August, I mentioned a controversy in which My Name is Khan was embroiled in a dispute over whether SRK had been profiled and detained by U.S. customs on a trip there. It was a badly managed publicity stunt, and he backed down quickly when INS categorically denied the allegations.
As the Times article says, the Shiv Sena name goes back to the army of General Shivaji. Shivaji was the iconic resistance fighter against the Mughal empire as it began to fall apart in the 17th century. He particularly went up against Aurangzeb, the last of the great Mughal emperors, the legendary villain of the Mughal piece for Hindus. Aurangzeb was a strict Muslim who made a career of persecuting Hindus and razing temples, among them Vishwanath, the holiest site in Banaras for the entire last millennium, because, it is said, its citizens had given shelter to Shivaji. Vishvanath had been razed and rebuilt before, but Aurangzeb erected a mosque on the ruins, and the cosmopolitan and artistic glory that was Hindu Banaras never recovered its 17th century grandeur. Today’s Vishvanath, the Golden Temple built by the fabled Marathi Queen Ahalya Bai Holkar of Indore (this time in appreciation for the connection between Shivaji and Banaras), stands near by. It is smaller than the original temple but gorgeous, and the object of fervent devotion by locals and pilgrims.
Today’s cynical, bullying Sena does not practice the religious tolerance that the historical Shivaji was supposedly known for. Their major talent is generating chauvinist controversy, especially against Muslims. They are linguistic thought police who punish the famous for any reference to Bombay, Mumbai's colonial name, or for mild, obviously true statements to the effect that Mumbai belongs to every Indian as every place in India does.
The famous have been remarkably acqueiscent, rarely criticizing them publicly and groveling to their demands for apology for alleged insults to Maharashtrians. One of the more thoughtful views of all this is voiced in this long quote (I'm taking the liberty) from a Feb. 13 column by Dileep Padgaonkar, who writes thusly for the Times of India about what is specific to India, but an old, old story:
Taking on Sachinn Tendulkar, the national pride of India, was a tactical goof (his sin was saying he fights for all India on the cricket field), but perhaps not a strategic one. Same for Rahul Gandhi, who’s positioning himself to run for prime minister one of these days as a populist sort of moderate. He called their bluff (his sin was saying ‘Bombay’ in some speech or other that Sena was apoplectic about, and voicing, as everyone attacked by Sena does, the civic unassailability of multicultural multi-religious India) by going deep into Maharashti voting territory on a local train and pumping the flesh with crowds who received him with obvious and enthusiastic affection.
Tendulkar has an almost innocent virtue going for him, Rahul the rock star legacy of his name. What SRK has is his giant stardom. As an idealized family man, I don't think he's been associated with any sex scandals, but there’s a little streak of something there. Today’s paper has a story that after SRK passed through the imaging security at Heathrow recently, a couple of young women, presumably security workers handling the images, accosted him with prints from the machine showing the details of his anatomy, THAT part, under his clothes. He breezily autographed the prints and was quoted as saying that only somebody “not well endowed” had anything to fear from the machine.
This is interesting not only because of the rooster strut that makes an astounding invasion of privacy a concern for wimps, but because it's nekkid pictures (which we are titillatingly encouraged to imagine) without it's being your fault, just what a domesticated older male sexpot requires. You can't imagine Tom Hanks doing that.
With each of these incidents, the respectable papers crow that Sena is shooting itself in the foot. But in Sena politics, even if you lose you win, because each controversy grabs headlines that feed the sense of aggrievedness its followers feel. After Sena threatened to shut down the film, there were a flurry of television interviews with the director and SRK—-WOULD THEY WITHDRAW THE FILM AND DISAPPOINT SRK FANS???--which was released after all (are you surprised?). The tv reviews of this two hour and 40 minute monster are gushing. Based on the trailer snippets, I’m betting on the one negative review I heard that SRK toggles back and forth between between hyper and cute, and the plot is mawkish. The release day was yesterday, Shivratri, a major religious holiday on which Shiva gets married to his consort Parvati. Schools and shops are closed, followed by a long--Valentine's (big here)-- weekend. A lot of folks will be going to the movies.
The story has been all over local and national Indian television all the time (CNN and BBC have run small stories but are mostly not very interested) in both editorial content and ads. Not only Sena spends too much time on the non-substantive. The English language channels (a large number) have been chewing the whole thing and spitting it out for several days and make no pretense of objectivity. When interviewing Sena leaders, they loudly denounce them to their faces for their political divisiveness. But they interview them. The audience for the English language channels is a comparatively educated one that views Sena as corrupt, opportunistic thugs (as do most Indians who are paying any attention). But Sena has little to lose from the liberal enmity of television commentators.
SRK has tweeted about it (as we know from its constant broadcast on tv) taking an I'm-hurt-but-I’m-only-being-reasonable-and-a-patriot tone and lamenting that Shiv Sena is dividing the country (it isn’t, actually), and asserting in a high minded tone that his stardom is transient, his integrity non-negotiable, and his Indian identity unassailable. Thus he refuses to apologize (and the media is happy to side with one of their own and keep the story going.)
A few Mumbai theaters scheduled to release My Name is Khan closed down for a day to take the public temperature. No surprise, the 21 Mumbai theaters that stayed open to screen it were packed, and there was only token protest and a bit of scuffling here and there.
A resounding win-win for My Name is Khan AND Shiv Sena.
Popular culture is a good place for such issues to be raised and followed through, and Bollywood frolics are an arena of civil society where the public feels it has a stake in the fight and can participate in the discussion. More so, unfortunately, than in the official political arena, since Lok Sabha (Parliament) is widely thought to be corrupt and useless. Several of these incidents in a row probably help consolidate and reinforce the conviction all Indians are equal citizens. Given the considerable anti-Muslim sentiment currently washing around, that's to the good. And why not have the biggest film star, the biggest sports star, and the biggest political star on the side of the angels? A long overdue development that will make it safer for others to travel in their wake.
The basic facts: Shiv Shena, a regional nativist party in India whose constituency is the left-behind-in-India's-economic-miracle population of the western state of Maharashta, of which Mumbai is the capital. Mumbai is also the capital of Bollywood. Sena's one-issue platform is Maharashtra for the Maharashatrians (self-rule and preference for Marathis in Maharashtra and exclusion of Muslims) and its program is intimidation, public and physical. It's led by the past-his-prime bully Bal Thackeray. The party took a beating from Congress in recent state elections much to Congress's relief. Other spin-off and complicatedly allied and squabbling chauvinist parties (BJP, RSS, MNS, like everything in India, these groupings are labyrinthine), are engaged in an internecine struggle in anticipation of the upcoming elections.
Sena’s latest target is the huge film star Shah Rukh Khan who publicly regretted in a recent television interview that Pakistani cricket players had been passed over by Indian team owners in the recent player’s auction, presumably because of 26/11. (SRK, himself a cricket team co-owner, also didn't bid for any Pakistanis, worth keeping in mind.)
For that, Shiv Sena threatened to shut down SRK's newest film, a tear-jerker called My Name is Khan, about anti-Muslim prejudice in post-911 America. (In the film SRK is not only the lead character whose name--like Shah Rukh's own--is Khan, but also has Asperger's and goes on a journey across America--sounding more and more like Forrest Gump--see next graph.)
Shah Rukh is the biggest Bollywood star around, a Muslim, and a Mumbaiker. If there was a Bollywood Forrest Gump, he would be the star. SRK has more star power than Tom Hanks and more sex appeal—-I can’t even think of a Hollywood equivalent right now. Besides his films, he’s constantly in small-drama television commercials and gives frequent aw shucks interviews. Overexposure apparently holds few risks for him. Over 40, with a wife and two kids that he frequently mentions as the people whose good opinion matters most to him, he has a large-boned, boyishly mischievous face, a good big open smile, and just a hint of mature cragginess. He’s smooth and smart with a gift for coming across as affably honest and humorously self-deprecating.
For example, though he’s lived in Mumbai for years he doesn’t know Marathi, the regional language. Linguistic purity is an evergreen issue with Sena, which recently tried and failed to get a bill passed requiring Mumbai taxi drivers, mostly immigrants, to know Marathi. SRK smiles fetchingly and says it’s a point of embarrassment to him that he only knows a few Marathi phrases (which he displays), and he’s terrible with languages, but his kids know it! A domesticated, urbane, safe householder kind of sexy.
Not like Sachin Tendulkar, India’s (and the world's) enduring cricket great who stands for a kind of purity and innocence and self-discipline. There’s a guy who stays away from the limelight off the field but lacks Tiger Wood's arrogant aloofness. Tendulkar was Sena's first target in this latest campaign which started several months ago. Most recent Sena target was Rahul Gandhi, heir apparent to the fabled Nehru dynasty, about a week before the SRK brouhaha erupted.
SRK, Rahul and Tendalkur are all too big for Sena to make a dent in, and most of the country has sided with them against Sena. But the controversies keep SS in the headlines and aapparently prevents supporters form noticing the party isn’t doing squat to help the fervent base of folks to whom it markets its tediously predictable but fiery brand of identity politics.
SS threatened to use its shock troops to block the release of My Name is Khan--with violence. The cops took no chances and pre-emptively arrested Sena protesters with, one would not be rash to assume, little regard for their civil rights. On this very blog in August, I mentioned a controversy in which My Name is Khan was embroiled in a dispute over whether SRK had been profiled and detained by U.S. customs on a trip there. It was a badly managed publicity stunt, and he backed down quickly when INS categorically denied the allegations.
As the Times article says, the Shiv Sena name goes back to the army of General Shivaji. Shivaji was the iconic resistance fighter against the Mughal empire as it began to fall apart in the 17th century. He particularly went up against Aurangzeb, the last of the great Mughal emperors, the legendary villain of the Mughal piece for Hindus. Aurangzeb was a strict Muslim who made a career of persecuting Hindus and razing temples, among them Vishwanath, the holiest site in Banaras for the entire last millennium, because, it is said, its citizens had given shelter to Shivaji. Vishvanath had been razed and rebuilt before, but Aurangzeb erected a mosque on the ruins, and the cosmopolitan and artistic glory that was Hindu Banaras never recovered its 17th century grandeur. Today’s Vishvanath, the Golden Temple built by the fabled Marathi Queen Ahalya Bai Holkar of Indore (this time in appreciation for the connection between Shivaji and Banaras), stands near by. It is smaller than the original temple but gorgeous, and the object of fervent devotion by locals and pilgrims.
Today’s cynical, bullying Sena does not practice the religious tolerance that the historical Shivaji was supposedly known for. Their major talent is generating chauvinist controversy, especially against Muslims. They are linguistic thought police who punish the famous for any reference to Bombay, Mumbai's colonial name, or for mild, obviously true statements to the effect that Mumbai belongs to every Indian as every place in India does.
The famous have been remarkably acqueiscent, rarely criticizing them publicly and groveling to their demands for apology for alleged insults to Maharashtrians. One of the more thoughtful views of all this is voiced in this long quote (I'm taking the liberty) from a Feb. 13 column by Dileep Padgaonkar, who writes thusly for the Times of India about what is specific to India, but an old, old story:
[SS has] been able to exploit to their advantage the anger, fear, frustration, resentment and pent-up aggression of middle-class and lower-middle class Maharashtrians who have failed to cope with the swift and sweeping changes in the polity and economy of the state.
Modernity has indeed evaded large sections of Maharashtrians especially as economic reforms opened up more opportunities hwich other communities, endowed with more pluck, drive and energy, were able to seize with greater felicity. They cornered jobs, started businesses, occupied urban spaces that were once the exclusive preserve of the locals and, not least, emerged as force to be reckoned with in politics. It is in this soil of insecurities that the Sena sowed its poisonous seeds.
In the outfit's reckoning, when people canot compete in the open market the only choice left to them iseither to sulk or to seek refuge in the politics of parochial identity. Such politics needs targets. Some 'other' has to be found who can be demonised, intimidated, terrorised and, should the need arise, also massacred. But this alone would not have been enough to succeed the way itdid. Another key element was needed to finess the strategy. The Thackerays systematically cultivated friends with money and muscle power: builders and corporate groups, film stars, the underworld and, not least, rival political parties. When the friends refused to fall in line, they resorted to their tactics of intimidation. The patriarch reckoned, correctly, that those engaged in making big money had the spine of an eel. And those busy playing seedy power games jettisoned their ideological claims if breaking bread with Sena furthered their ambitions.
This tells you why no harm has ever visited the Thackerays though they have flouted the law at will and mocked at the Constitution time and again. You cannot write them off unless the Indian state puts them on a tight leash. The political class ensures their electoral defeat and the government of the day addresses the real or contrived insecurities of Maharashtrians without the trappings of identity politics. This calls for courage. Rahul Gandhi and Shah Rukh Khan have demonstrated it.
Taking on Sachinn Tendulkar, the national pride of India, was a tactical goof (his sin was saying he fights for all India on the cricket field), but perhaps not a strategic one. Same for Rahul Gandhi, who’s positioning himself to run for prime minister one of these days as a populist sort of moderate. He called their bluff (his sin was saying ‘Bombay’ in some speech or other that Sena was apoplectic about, and voicing, as everyone attacked by Sena does, the civic unassailability of multicultural multi-religious India) by going deep into Maharashti voting territory on a local train and pumping the flesh with crowds who received him with obvious and enthusiastic affection.
Tendulkar has an almost innocent virtue going for him, Rahul the rock star legacy of his name. What SRK has is his giant stardom. As an idealized family man, I don't think he's been associated with any sex scandals, but there’s a little streak of something there. Today’s paper has a story that after SRK passed through the imaging security at Heathrow recently, a couple of young women, presumably security workers handling the images, accosted him with prints from the machine showing the details of his anatomy, THAT part, under his clothes. He breezily autographed the prints and was quoted as saying that only somebody “not well endowed” had anything to fear from the machine.
This is interesting not only because of the rooster strut that makes an astounding invasion of privacy a concern for wimps, but because it's nekkid pictures (which we are titillatingly encouraged to imagine) without it's being your fault, just what a domesticated older male sexpot requires. You can't imagine Tom Hanks doing that.
With each of these incidents, the respectable papers crow that Sena is shooting itself in the foot. But in Sena politics, even if you lose you win, because each controversy grabs headlines that feed the sense of aggrievedness its followers feel. After Sena threatened to shut down the film, there were a flurry of television interviews with the director and SRK—-WOULD THEY WITHDRAW THE FILM AND DISAPPOINT SRK FANS???--which was released after all (are you surprised?). The tv reviews of this two hour and 40 minute monster are gushing. Based on the trailer snippets, I’m betting on the one negative review I heard that SRK toggles back and forth between between hyper and cute, and the plot is mawkish. The release day was yesterday, Shivratri, a major religious holiday on which Shiva gets married to his consort Parvati. Schools and shops are closed, followed by a long--Valentine's (big here)-- weekend. A lot of folks will be going to the movies.
The story has been all over local and national Indian television all the time (CNN and BBC have run small stories but are mostly not very interested) in both editorial content and ads. Not only Sena spends too much time on the non-substantive. The English language channels (a large number) have been chewing the whole thing and spitting it out for several days and make no pretense of objectivity. When interviewing Sena leaders, they loudly denounce them to their faces for their political divisiveness. But they interview them. The audience for the English language channels is a comparatively educated one that views Sena as corrupt, opportunistic thugs (as do most Indians who are paying any attention). But Sena has little to lose from the liberal enmity of television commentators.
SRK has tweeted about it (as we know from its constant broadcast on tv) taking an I'm-hurt-but-I’m-only-being-reasonable-and-a-patriot tone and lamenting that Shiv Sena is dividing the country (it isn’t, actually), and asserting in a high minded tone that his stardom is transient, his integrity non-negotiable, and his Indian identity unassailable. Thus he refuses to apologize (and the media is happy to side with one of their own and keep the story going.)
A few Mumbai theaters scheduled to release My Name is Khan closed down for a day to take the public temperature. No surprise, the 21 Mumbai theaters that stayed open to screen it were packed, and there was only token protest and a bit of scuffling here and there.
A resounding win-win for My Name is Khan AND Shiv Sena.
Popular culture is a good place for such issues to be raised and followed through, and Bollywood frolics are an arena of civil society where the public feels it has a stake in the fight and can participate in the discussion. More so, unfortunately, than in the official political arena, since Lok Sabha (Parliament) is widely thought to be corrupt and useless. Several of these incidents in a row probably help consolidate and reinforce the conviction all Indians are equal citizens. Given the considerable anti-Muslim sentiment currently washing around, that's to the good. And why not have the biggest film star, the biggest sports star, and the biggest political star on the side of the angels? A long overdue development that will make it safer for others to travel in their wake.
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