Birds of Summer

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

[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.

Biker Chick

That’s me! Six weeks ago I got a motorbike, my first to drive or own, and time to report in on how it’s going. I did agonize over it.

To get a bike is to enrich some reasonably well fixed guy with the capital to run a dealership. To stay with rickshaws, bike and auto, means to contribute to the income of far more modestly fixed folks.

To get a motorbike is to add to carbon emissions, which are appalling already in Varanasi not to mention the rest of the planet. The bike is at least reasonably efficient. It goes 100 km on a litre of petrol—it’s about a 5 litre tank.

I’m occasionally out as late as 10 or 11. (Dinner starts between 8.30 and 9.30), though not as much since I started getting up at 5 to see early morning rituals. It’s hard to find rickshaws on the street at that hour, which accounts for the price, but it’s a safety issue as well. You can’t phone one because drivers most don’t have cellphones. Some folks have regular drivers of rickshaws or even cars. A car is not the message I need to be sending, my schedule is too variable, and my flat too far from the city where the drivers live to come out at odd hours.

Most critically, I’m too far out (this is why I didn't get a bicycle) to get transport from campus early in the morning to the riverbank where folks are bathing, or the temples. There’s also a flexibility issue. I don’t always want to go a particular place. Sometimes I just want to roam about looking at roadside shrines and temples as they appear, and this is hard to do with rickshaws for various reasons. As it turns out, I still need rickshaws for occasional trips, but the motorcycle vastly enhances the flexibility and the efficiency of my time.

It’s routine for drivers to see how much they can charge westerners. I know roughly what the price should be in the areas I travel (I gladly pay a generous premium as a westerner, but we’re talking absurd), I laugh and we discuss something realistic.

Occasionally I’ve settled on a price with a driver and had him stop halfway and demand an exorbitant price to continue. Getting out and walking off generally solves the problem since the agreed fare is comfortably above what he’d normally get, but it’s a pain when you’re trying to get somewhere. Sometimes it doesn’t work. If you leave one driver to go find another, (if you’re in a crowded place there’ll be a several drivers shouting a cheaper fare at you—-which of course may change once you’re inside) a shoving match between drivers may ensue and even escalate, since you’re supposed to be the first one’s fare. Then the police come (or don’t) and whack somebody with a stick, not exactly a productive development. The usual case is there are protracted, angry negotiations before a second rickshaw driver can drive me away.

Once a driver was playing cat and mouse with me. I’d get out, he’d relent, I’d get back in, he’d drive a little ways and jack up the price, I’d get out. I finally got out with the intention of staying out, against my better judgment allowed myself to get back in after walking a ways without seeing another rickshaw. He dumped me in a completely unknown place, doubtless to frighten me into cooperating. I walked and walked till I found another rickshaw driver, got in. The first one shows up indignant. I’m his fare. The second rickshaw driver pleads with me to get in the first rickshaw but I’ve had it with him. Energetic consultation among the males on the street. Again I’m pleaded with to get out and go with the first guy. I had virtually no language at this point though I had managed to get across the price hike to the second driver whose eyes got wide, but still he didn’t want to mess with the first guy.

Time for don't-mess-with-me theatrics. Furious head shake, exaggerated folding of arms. Translation: I WILL NOT LEAVE THIS RICKSHAW. YOU WILL HAVE TO DRAG ME OUT. (They wouldn’t dare.) That one ended up costing me a lot and took an hour, but it was worth it to get away from that guy.

I’ve also had lovely encounters with drivers. There was the one who drove me all one night during Navarati (Nine Nights of the Goddess) to look at pandals (specially mounted life size idols of Durga and her divine associates). Early on I got out of the rickshaw before it had fully stopped and fell flat on my butt in the gutter. He was horrified but I had the presence of mind to laugh (it was totally my fault). Bingo, we were fast friends.

I got a real motorcycle jacket too (and yes, a helmet). It’s quite cold early in the morning. The women’s winter jackets at a nearby department store are heavy cotton. No good at all. I went to the men’s floor to get a real jacket Mine has sheep’s wool lining, an exterior of fake leather that totally cuts the wind, and five fabulous pockets (un-findable in women’s clothing), one that zips, two that button. It’s too big, so I wear a poncho over it so as not to look like a strange half male creature sitting among the women at the riverbank in the morning. My shoulders look a little broad but it works.

But How Does the Cow Get Itself Sideways?

So I was at a fancy wedding (it’s the season now that the weather’s cool). Right in the middle of the sacred space marked out on the floor where a series of important rituals takes place (all night long and into the morning), amidst all the ritual artifacts there’s a big glob of cow dung. I wasn’t surprised. Cow dung is purifying and auspicious. Everything that comes from a cow, who expresses the fertility of the earth goddess and is associated with Gauri, the nourishing mother goddess, is holy. Milk is poured over the shiva linga. Some pregnant (!) associations there, but let’s take one thing at a time.

I keep reading (haven’t seen) that when somebody dies, the floor and walls of the house are smeared with cow dung.

I see little girls playing in the road with cow dung like it was modeling clay.

In town there are rows of flattened dung cakes drying on the walls.

And poor women gathering up cow dung from the road.

Near where I take my Hindi lesson is an area five or six football fields large of mostly packed earth where women squat on the ground and knead, slap and shape the dung cakes they’ll use for cooking and winter fuel for their families when they’re dry and, just as critically, sell in the meantime for income. At night you see small dung fires glowing in the doorways of the one room dwellings of lots of modestly fixed families, cooking dinner and keeping folks warm.

So I asked about that cow dung on the floor (my only model the departing renters of the rowhouse next door in Philly who smeared their own excrement on the walls as an unholy parting gift to the landlord).

Isn’t it kind of.....MESSY? Especially walking on it barefoot inside the house? It turns out cow dung is a binding agent so you mix it with a little water into a thin paste to smear on the floor in a sacred area near the family shrine. It’s smooth when it dries, and you can walk on it. If you have a dirt floor—lots of rural folks do—you might smear dung paste over all of it. When it dries, that’s your floor. When it’s dirty you sweep it clean and apply another paste layer. They make a sturdy floor over time.

Today I went to the riverbank in Nagwa in the southern part of the city to that large open bare-dirt space with scraggly patches of grass cover overlooking the river. There are several activities here that use a lot of space: First, rickshaw repair. Great numbers of rickshaws are parked together by a shed awaiting repair. (If there’s such a thing as a new bicycle rickshaw in Banaras, I haven’t seen it.) Second, lots of bulls and cows are standing, grazing and lying on a dirt meadow of urban detritus. Here the cows don’t bother much with the grass. They’re munching the city trash. During the day other cows roam the city doing just that. Late in the day, lines of cows following the leader are herded through the streets back home to be muzzled and tied to stakes for the night.

Third, in the middle of this big open space, huge piles of cow dung (gobah) maybe six feet high have been dumped by tractor. From early in the morning till dark, women stake out work areas around these piles to make dung cakes (gohari). Each one takes a roughly woven bamboo basket (30 inches or so in diameter) over to a central pile. She might moisten the pile a bit with water from a bucket to make it more pliable as a crust forms on the surface in the hot sun. Using, if necessary, a short, crude hoe to chop out a load of loose manure, she scoops it into the basket and carries it to her work area.

Sitting on one of the bricks lying around, she retrieves about a pound and a half of dung from the basket, slams it on the ground with both hands, pats and kneads and shapes it with movements that are very like kneading bread dough. The result is a thin, flattish rectangle-like shape about eight inches wide and a foot long that she slams on the ground a few more times and bends into a patty that looks like a boomerang with no sharp angles at the center. You could say it looks a lot like Richard Serra’s curving sheets of iron in miniature. There’s bound to be a word for that shape, but I don’t know it, so Richard Serra will have to do.

She sets the patty on its side (like Richard Serra would) to dry next to the hundreds of others she’s made and other women are making. When she uses up all the dung in her basket, she goes to get more. Gradually she makes a semicircle of patties around her, moving her brick and, therefore, her work area backwards as each curved row is finished.

Ranged across the field, these worked cakes form a great prairie with brown wavelets of cow cakes instead of waving grass. Maybe 10 or 12 semicircular parallel rows form a single arching swath, this repeated all across the field, except that each arching swath catches the light differently from the patterned swathes next to it because those swathes are set down at a different angle. It’s quite beautiful.

There is also more than one patty shape, though the one I’ve described is predominant. Some cakes are round and flattened in different sizes. Every so often the women pick up some of the drier cakes and throw them helter skelter into still another space, also next to their own swath of drying patties. In this way they turn the original patties over to expose the bottoms that previously touched the dirt to the sun. These upended dry patties look like roiling waves all tossed together. Still others dry patties are stacked up neatly in roughly the shape of English haystacks or beehives.

Or try this. The field of cow cakes looks like the wave patterns in sand dunes after the wind has blown every which way over them. But it’s more interesting looking because the size and texture of the patties contrasts so sharply with the ground beneath and each other. A kind of earth quilt of undulating light, rhythm, symmetry.

Sometimes the women get up to tend kids (boys are flying kites nearby, and the occasional woman totes an infant), go home and cook lunch for their families, whatever. There’s the stray water pot for drinking from or short straw broom to sweep the detritus from the work area, but most women bring only a bucket of water to rinse their hands when they leave and their baskets. Not capital intensive.

Straw is mixed all throughout the dung which gives it additional burning capacity and a bit of structure for molding. As a city girl, it took me a while to figure out whether the straw was mixed by the cow, so to speak, or added later. Verdict: The cow did it. Nagwa field isn’t the only cake-making site in Varanasi, but it does have a great river view. Since dung is plentiful in the street, especially on the smaller roads, anybody can make them, but you can obviously make more where the cows collect. Typical are a number of small grassy plots in the village behind the university where households keep a few cows and goats, and there are often curving rows of patties there.

I’m sitting on my own brick in the middle of all this, happy as a pig in…..uh, feeling quite pleasant from the warm sun and manure smell, and not a bit dirty partly because the orderly procession of the worked patties adds to the sense that it’s all quite clean, and asking various women if I can take pictures of them working. Some say no, some yes. If anyone had offered, I would have tried to form a patty myself. I was half surprised there were no vermilion tilaks or other religious symbols around since cow dung is auspicious. There is a roadside shrine nearby that, as far as I can tell, has nothing to do with patty making. On the other hand, like the doms that stoke the cremation pyres, these women are very low caste or casteless dalits. (The doms are rumored to be rich, the patty-makers obviously aren’t.)

From time to time a woman will gather up the driest patties and stuff them into a great white rectangular sack made of some kind of woven cloth, load them on her head and walk off to sell them. Others stack great pyramids of patties in their baskets and balance those on their heads. These are seriously heavy loads. To anchor the basket bottoms, which have the shape of an inverted coolie hat, the women fashion a kind of cow dung doughnut for top of their heads into which they settle the basket.

I am reminded of the class of students, boys, cleaning up the ghats as a form of community service, that I recently talked to. Asking about (the lack of) women in public space, I was assured that women have equal rights under the Indian constitution but are simply shy: “It’s her ornament,” as one put it. He added that women aren’t strong enough to work outside the home—of the many claims that were made about women, this was the one point I gently challenged (my purpose being to learn their thoughts rather than advance my own) from the plainly visible evidence of women daily carrying heavy loads of all kinds. (Let it be said that a number of these guys had more progressive views.)

Traveling through town, one sees additional aesthetically pleasing, orderly rows of round, flattened cakes adhering to the sides of concrete walls. Here are family tores of winter fuel. Each cakes has four parallel ridges in the middle that I thought might be symbolic but, no, they’re just the trace of the fingers that made the patty stick to the wall.

I wondered if, sitting outside like that, somebody might steal all that fuel. I got three answers. One, you don’t realize it but people are watching that wall and keeping track. Two, there are better things to steal since each cake is only a quarter of a rupee. Unless you went to the considerable effort (and risk) of denuding the whole wall, there’s no value. If you’re too poor to buy dung and don’t have a cow, you can scrape it off the road. Three, somebody might take something in an emergency, and that would be ok.

Middle class-affluent folks have gas stoves or stoveplates (that’s what I have, two burners) and space heaters. No houses have central heating even though Varanasi nights can get down to freezing in January; people build for summer heat and monsoon. Winter is the good weather.

It’s always a relief to be included in humor about the stupid questions that videshis ask and know there are stupider questions even than mine. I shared in the general hilarity about the videshi who, having learned that was cow dung on the wall, looked at it quizzically and asked, but how does the cow shit sideways like that?

Road to Damascus (or could be Stockholm Syndrome)!

Here’s my moment of conversion in the matter of Indian clothes. I was coming home after spending Diwali, the height of the Kartik (lunar month from mid October to mid-November) holiday season, with the family of a lovely student who lives way at the other end of Banaras. To get me home, my rickshaw wallah had to take me through some of the densest traffic I’ve ever been in in my life, and it was virtually all male, guys walking, guys motorbiking, guys driving, and me sitting all by myself in my rickshaw. I wasn’t uneasy (though the atmosphere was as loud as any I’ve ever been in and as crowded), but still pulled up my dupatta to cover my hair and shoulders, and this feeling came over me of being safe and regal. It was a gesture of differentiation and even respect for me and for the men that felt exactly right in the situation. It wasn’t a constricting feeling, it wasn’t a puritanical feeling. It acknowledged the men while making me safe, decent, and of the place in the nicest way. As close as I’ll come, perhaps, to understanding the veil.

But I can’t entirely leave it there since the deeper point of covering the hair is to signal sexual unavailability (I’m talking about how gestures work, not me in particular). It’s both a display and denial of sexuality, differentiating the one whose head is covered from the bareheaded men and acknowledging that in public women have a responsibility to behave respectably that somehow ennobles the men. What’s non-western, or at least a different feel than at home, is respect for the men. Of course there are other ways to read it, but in the spirit of multiple readings and the place itself as I experience it, this is the one I choose to emphasize.

I’ve done that since, sometimes because the air is thick with petrol fumes in a traffic jam (common) or, lately, in clouds of whatever anti-dengue fever insecticide they put out to control mosquitoes (thankfully, not much malaria here). With a dupatta over my light hair, I get stared at less and it just fits in somehow.

My conversion to Indian dress was actually more gradual, requiring the discovery of a good tailor (it takes persistence, like finding a good shrink). My friend Megan brought me a lovely hand-printed dupatta from the Himalayas where she took a break from high-stimulus Varanasi . I wore it every day with my Western shirts and pants, because it made me look and feel more like somebody who lives here. And that’s been the motivation. It goes along with learning Hindi. No one forgets I’m videshi. The answer to the most frequent query I get is, “Mai(n) America se hoo(ng).” I’m from America.

But I can look more like western tourists in their Adidas, socks, cameras, travel pouches, North Face jackets and Patagonia pants (for younger folks there’s a grunge hippie version with dreds), or I can wear sandals, loose fitting ankle-length pants, ankle bracelets, wrist bangles, a kurta (shirt) or salwar kameez and a dupatta and feel right at home around Banaras. There’s no question I’m treated differently. I didn’t believe it would happen but it’s true.

So now I don’t care to wear western clothes and feel funny if I start to go out without a dupatta. A good fitting salwar kameez is the most comfortable thing in the world, it turns out. Funny how that carapace of resistance clings and then it’s gone.

Whose Sari Now?

The reason (to continue) western women tend to avoid saris has little to do with their being midriff-baring—westerners need few excuses to bare anything—and everything to do with knowing how to keep them on. Every region has a distinctive way of draping and folding saris and none folds them simply.

A sari is held together by safety pins (discreetly placed at the shoulder to keep that part from sliding off) and by tucking it into the (tightly tied, I’m told—observation suggests maybe not) waist of a drawstring petticoat underneath. No buttons, hooks or zippers in the saris of the women bathing in the Ganga, though the blouses (the tight-fitting separate bodice) do front-button.

Seeing this, a western woman is convinced the whole thing will quickly end up around her ankles. A sari is also heavy, at least the silk ones are (testimony from a colleague who took the plunge, though she couldn’t pin herself into or get hers folded without expert help; I’ve also watched women donning sari finery for rituals busily fold and pin each other, and special helpers may even be employed to pin and fold women into lavish wedding or other special event saris). Five meters of fabric hoisted up every stair you climb. The more expensive blouses (as I was recently able to observe at a wedding) do have hooks and eyes and an occasional zipper in back. Their wearers also have bras on, which the bathers mostly don’t. (It’s worth noting that Indian bras are kinder, gentler--and saggier. Highly structured Western bras and pushup bras are nonexistent.) Whether this speaks to the convenience of Ganga bathing or socioeconomic distinction I can’t say.

Saris come in every fabric from cheapest nylon (not heavy) worn by those who toil in the fields cutting grass and sweeping paths and streets to the most expensive silk. The latter saris almost glow with the richness of the fabric which the structure of the sari grandly shows off. Many glow in another way as well. Saris often are dripping with sequins and gold or silver banding, everyday ones often enough but especially dress ones. Their wearers sparkle and shimmer from every angle. It’s very sexy and feminine, this come hither illusion of jeweled light. Saris fit perfectly, wrapped and folded around the body you actually have. With its tight fit down to the bottom of the rib cage and short sleeves, the blouse must be tailored, but the flaws of even a not so well tailored blouse and any not so well tailored figure are easily concealed in the draping of the sari. It’s true that love handles are plainly visible when sitting and sometime moving with no apparent embarrassment or concern. Even bare bellies pooched out from age, kids and calories are common and no big deal, not the affront to modesty or aesthetics they would be in the West.

Indian women are rather less focused than Western women on body image, at least the mature ones (in the sense of age, though it could be otherwise!). The self-conscious sexy selections chosen by younger women show that awareness and interest in the sexuality of their bodies is very much present. I read something the other day that said the Indian female form is rather short and squat compared to the western one. Shorter, yes. Squatter? Not the young women here. Middle-aged women can be a bit squat like middle-aged women everywhere, but the young ones range from sylphs to voluptuous, just like young western women. And they do float around like butterflies. It’s the most graceful, various, beautiful spectacle.

Plenty of professional women wear saris to work, contrary to my previous implication, though salwar kameezes are unquestionably a sign of middle class modernity for adult women. Saris are more often worn for special occasions like weddings, and donned as a self-conscious tribute to tradition. But saris are worn by everyone—traditional women, modern women, older women and younger, humble and affluent.

What differs by economic position and occasion is the type and quality of the fabric. A woman’s first sari was traditionally worn at marriage, around puberty. Today plenty of unmarried women wear saris. Schoolgoing teenagers mostly wear salwar kameezes (with tight rather than loose leggings; a more fashionable, sexy choice for young women). Younger girls wear short pleated or gathered skirts over narrow ankle-length leggings. First saris today are worn around “18 or 20,” the age given me by some bright little girls, 12 and 16, I recently met.

For poor women it may be a different story. Some of the women who sweep the paths and cut grass with hand scythes in the fields of BHU to sell as feed and straw for cattle, or make cow dung and straw patties for fuel seem younger than 18, and all wear saris.

By tradition, especially fine saris may be ritual gifts from male relatives—especially brothers and husbands--for holidays and the breaking of ritual fasts. Men are permitted to fast ritually, but the practice is generally undertaken by women, who do it for the protection and health of brothers, sons, and husbands.

Banarasi silk saris are generally made from Chinese silk by Muslim weavers. The distinctive patterns associated with the city lean towards heavily embroidered, repetitively figured brocade with larger rather than smaller figures. Weavers’ wages are distressingly low. After the global downturn put many out of work this fall, the paper was full of sad stories of local weavers committing suicide—sometimes killing their families in the process, though this seems to have tapered off. One afternoon in Shivala, a nearby area, I saw a small shop where 18 and 19 year old males, skilled embroiderers, were hand-embellishing the handsome wedding coats that grooms wear. Someone whose family has been generations in the wholesale sari business says they make maybe 100 rs. or roughly $2.50 a day. And those are skilled workers.

Watching women early in the morning at Ganga-ji (ji, an honorific iterm of respect for Ganga, gods, and people) changing from wet saris to dry ones after ritual bathing is quite something. Wading out in full sari mode, they rhythmically splash the water with hands folded together in prayer, turn and pray in the four directions, dunk themselves a couple of times (all this begins before 6 a.m. and continues for half an hour or more past sunrise!), and then remove the sari (or not) and rinse it in the spiritually purifying waters of Mother Ganga. When they’re ready to come in, they gather the sari around them under their arms and wade to shore and webbed plastic carryalls sitting on the bank with clean dry saris. Holding the heavy, wet sari in place to preserve modesty, out of the carryall comes a dry blouse that goes on over the wet sari covering the front of their bodies. The wet sari is pulled down to just below the dry blouse. Next a dry petticoat goes over their heads and is pulled down to the waist.

Now the wet sari drops to the feet. (Some put on the dry petticoat first and then the dry blouse over the dry petticoat and then drop the wet sari.) All this is a feat of skill, and several women have told me they themselves can’t pull it off. The wet sari is heavy and unwieldy, and the mud they’re standing and walking on both in the water and on the bank is slippery, viscous and uneven.

Now, standing in petticoat and blouse, they grab the dry sari out of the carryall and twirl it counterclockwise, bullfight style, back, hips, shoulders and hair. They make complicated folds from each side of their bodies to the center and tuck them at the waist of the petticoat.

At this point an observer thinks, THAT’s the foundation that keeps the thing on, tucking one pleated end into the waist of a thin petticoat???? Then they pick up the wet, cold sari at their feet, scrunch it up and stuff it in the carryall. All without sacrificing any modesty. It’s an amazing performance. The final visual effect of the draped and pleated sari is very Hellenistic. I wonder about that lineage.

As in matters of dress the world over, apparently, bathing’s much simpler for the guys. They switch back and forth between shorts and a towel wrap or dhoti.

And me? I’m happily wearing salwar kameezes since I found a good tailor (Swastik Tailors, after the Sanskrit symbol for good fortune). Occasionally I wear pyjama pants and long kurtas. And always ankle bracelets, standard for women, one on each ankle, though the jingling takes some getting used to. I reflect on it in a conspiratorial way. Does jingling allow men to keep track? Or mothers in law (Wives traditionally the interloper into the husband’s family, where the new householdis set up, though this is changing as middle class newlyweds strike out on their own)?

She's Baaaaack......with Five Stages of Learning Hindi!

bAnd in this corner, the woman clinging by her fingernails when last heard from more than a month ago, to her western dress (a topic for the next post)……but I digress.

The reason I’ve been absent is……Hindi lessons! Which have to be added on to fieldwork, conferences and lectures at the Malavyia Centre for Peace Research, my incredibly helpful and interesting hosts, and the bumblingly (given my tori tori Hindi) inefficient conduct of my everyday life. This takes huge chunks of time away from, among other things, faithful blog maintenance. Which occasions today's reflection on

the FIVE STAGES OF LEARNING HINDI (slightly altered from the five stages of grief, a not unrelated psychological condition):

1. DENIAL:

I don’t have to learn this language. It’s not related to any Romance language language I know anything about (forget that Sanskrit is a remote ancestor of them all) or German; A whole new language in nine months? With my ageing memory? You’re kidding; Besides, you can only speak it in India, and only certain parts of India; Anyway, enough people speak English; Plus the locals don’t even speak shddh (pure)Hindi, but a local dialect called Bhojpuri; I can survive fine with a phrasebook and a self-teaching text.

2. DEPRESSION:

(Bargaining comes next in the stages of grief, but like so much in India, here it’s reversed.) On the ‘enough people speak English’ part, totally wrong (only 5% of Indians are fluent in English according to the Times of India this morning). Or at least some of the people I most want to talk to don’t. Yuck. (This does not include, of course, my colleagues at BHU.) Here I am, a big pale cow of a foreigner wandering around grinning like an idiot at people, with money the only reliable lingua franca between us. This is terrible. If I were going to come to a city where I couldn’t talk to people, couldn't I have picked one with traffic lights and solid deodorant?

On the self-teaching text, hah. (It has this title for suckers: "Teach Yourself Hindi"--and another: "Learn Hindi in 30 Days"; I bought both.) You can’t ask it questions; it doesn’t tell you when you’ve made a mistake in pronunciation, word order, nothing. Phrasebooks are clumsy and about what tourists need, not on living day to day or actually learning a language. Plus all the Hindi-English dictionaries write the Hindi in Devanagari script (Sanskrit-based) rather than Roman script, so I’m out of luck there too.

3. BARGAINING:

OK, OK, I’ll take Hindi lessons. With the best teacher I can find. Even a few weeks will make me a more socially available and acceptable guest of the country. But I can’t learn Devanagari script too. Totally alien, much more complex and extensive than Roman letters, and I’ll have my hands full learning even a little spoken Hindi.

Wrong again! Devnagari tells you how to pronounce the words. Very well too, once you adjust to the completely unfamiliar syllabary and the dreaded conjuncts (signs—apparently infinite in number--IN ADDITION TO the vowels and consonants--they show how to combine consonants and vowels with consonants and vowels; then there's all those little abbreviated vowel and consonant signs). For example, there are four different 'd' sounds, and some ‘r’s sound like still other versions of ‘d’, the phonetics of which I can’t describe without writing a novel in Romanized equivalents. It's complex because of its origin in written Sanskrit, which made sure mantras got said exactly correctly so they would be effective; thus each character specifies the place in your mouth where the sound originates, throat, mid-mouth, or front--what to do with your lips, soft palate, teeth, and tongue and whether or not to aspirate the sound. Part of my everyday routine is to write sentences in Devanagari, which really helps in learning to read and speak.

4. ANGER:

Above observation repeated with increasing incredulity: There are four different 'd' sounds (with four different characters, none of which look anything like each other) in Hindi?? Not counting the weird ‘r’s (for which there are still more characters!)? Actually, every Devanagari character is a dipthong; Well, no, not a diphthong exactly, in fact, English speakers have to guard against making every character a dipthong—-see what I mean?—-but a very different arrangement of phonemes than in English). These sounds are impossible for a Western tongue! One common ‘t’ phoneme requires folding your tongue backwards in your mouth and touching the roof of your mouth with the underside of your folded back tongue, then shooting the tongue forward while voicing ‘t’ to make a sound that, as my teacher describes it, sounds like a champagne cork popping! Unfortunately, this is the sound for thik, which is used all the time to mean, good, fine, ok. You try doing it! There IS no sound like that in English! I’ll just say it like I would an English ‘t’ even if my teacher has me do it again and again. I CAN’T HELP IT IF THIS CRAZY LANGUAGE HAS SOUNDS NO NORMAL LANGUAGE (!) HAS. I CANNOT DO IMPOSSIBLE CALISTHENICS OF THE MOUTH!

The stupidity (and humor) of this is immediately evident. I remind myself that Indians can’t hear the difference between our 'v' and 'w', and their ‘v’ is this weird halfway cross between them where you don’t actually bring your lips all the way together. Indians have a terrible time hearing my name, which is reassuring, since I have a terrible time hearing theirs.

And then I master the champagne cork ‘t’. Smart girl. (Though not being able to hear the differences among a number of sounds doesn't go away. I’m getting better at it, since when I can’t reproduce them, folks can’t understand me.) The hardest challenge is understanding what gets said back to me. At a speed of 90 miles an hour even if I could hear the sounds in the first place. My look of panic is cross-culturally transparent.

5. ACCEPTANCE:

A friend told me she couldn’t get anywhere with Hindi til she started studying it 5 hours a day. I recoiled in horror. I don’t have 5 hours a day for Hindi with everything else that has to get done. It turns out she wasn’t exaggerating. (The same friend told me Devanagari was far better for understanding the Indian pronunciation since Romanized characters aren’t precise enough; I dismissed that-—bargaining—-but it’s true. Hardly a surprise that Devanagari renders Hindi sounds better than the Roman alphabet. Moreover, differences I can’t easily hear, I can see on the page and start to hear. I have lessons every other day or every three days, one on one, with the best Hindi teacher by reputation in Varanasi (he deserves it), the patient, kind and relentless (!) Virendra Singh. If I can’t study 5 hours a day, I usually manage 3, occasionally more. My progress over several weeks has been immediately visible in talking to the rickshaw boys, shopkeepers and vegetable sellers, and folks in general. You finally live in a place when you can navigate socially. What’s hard is talking to folks at temples and on the ghats. At the moment what I can do is extremely limited but it still makes a huge difference in social exchange and my sense of comfort. (Not to mention that I can read signs like No Pissing Here!)

It’s true I’m not learning Bhojpuri (O thank you), but pretty much everyone here understands Hindi, and Bhojpuri is close enough most of the time to get as much as I’d get in Hindi if folks speak dire, dire (slowly, slowly).

Just now it's the beginning of the wedding season, and I am the delighted possessor of an invitation from a BHU professor, whose daughter is getting married in December, that I can almost translate on my own!

Revised comments on female dress in India coming up, but now I have to go copy sentences....

Sex and (Indian) Suits

I wore the first salwar kameez made for me to a conference on Indian higher education, where I was one of (many) speakers and needed to be professionally presentable. Monday I selected material for four more “suits,” two dressy and two everyday. They’ll be finished in 10 days.

What's a salwar kameez, you ask?

It’s the modern Indian woman’s compromise with the traditional sari (could kameez be related etymologically to chemise? ) It consists of a sheath with short sleeves and a scooped or vertically slit neckline, fitted close to the body around the arms and upper chest and following the lines of body to the hem, just above or below knee length with side seam slits. Worn beneath are bloomers to the ankle called the salwar that vary in billowingness. Draped over the shoulders is a long scarf or dupatta. It’s most likely to be worn by the young. The sari is a more traditional garment with a very tight top that ends midway down the rib cage to create a bared midriff. It has a longer dupatta than the kameez because it has to do more work. Instead of bloomers, a long rectangle of fabric ties around the hips and waist.

In Sex and Suits, Nancy Hollander says that the history of women’s fashion in the West is the story of copying male dress. This may also apply to salwar kameezes which I’ve heard it described as a feminine version of the kurta pyjama worn by men, a three-quarter length, sometimes shorter, loose shirt, slitted a bit on each side, with three-quarter sleeves and a small Chinese sort of collar.

Secular men of the world wear British-descended slacks, belted with a tucked in shirt along with the wear the kurta pyjama. Most common still is an untucked-in shirt over loose pants. Sadhus, of course, look quite different. Bare-chested, with markings on their face, long, loose hair and beards, they wear dhotis, a huge piece of white cloth wrapped back to front and somehow pulled through the legs to tuck in at the waist in back. I don’t quite get the mechanics but it never betrays modesty.

Gender-differentiated dress lands the maintenance of tradition on women, a traditional female task. In Varanasi, which is quite a conservative city, some young women wear tight jeans with their kameezes in place of the salwar, but female Western dress appears almost exclusively on Western females.

We wear it well because we know how to. It’s interesting to see Western women struggle self-consciously with newly acquired salwar kameezes (few attempt the midriff-baring sari). Wearing it is meant to signal some knowledge of and appreciation for the culture— that we’re not wholly outsiders. What it shows is exactly that we’re outsiders. The dupatta falls off, our haircuts don’t go with the drapey femininity of traditional shapes, our complexions are pastily inadequate for the rich and dramatic tapestries of color and pattern. We’re afraid to sit on the ground or the steps. It’s a lot of fabric for Western women to manage. We stand awkwardly amidst it while Indian women glide by with ease.

Westerners sometimes wear the dupattalike a Western scarf, draped around the neck with its two ends descending down the front of the kameez. This is exactly wrong. The point of the kameez is to cover the front upper chest area. Indian women put the ends of the chunri down the back and use the rest of it to cover more or less of that front area. In a sari women may show flashes of bare midriff, especially in the back, without causing alarm, but no clothing is cut to show or suggest cleavage. Same with legs. I’m the only woman whose calves I’ve seen since I arrived in Banaras. (I should add that Westerners who have been here a while live quite comfortably with their salwar kameezes.)

Indian female dress is an erotic (to my mind) dialogue of tight and loose, display and concealment to be manipulated at any moment by the wearer.

Fabric is sold in department stores and special sari shops in five yards that include the kameez and the already matched salwar, usually in contrasting color, and a silk or chiffon or cotton chunri. This is what goes to the tailor after you’ve been measured. The best (but more ordinary ones as well) establishments have tailors on site and a mind-bogglingly huge inventory of fabric colors and patterns in swatches that will be taken out and displayed to you for as long as you can stand it. Milk tea is served in small glasses to revive your spirits if you flag. If the structure of these garments is unvarying, colors and patterns bloom riotously. These are not Western patterns. They tend to be highly elaborate with lots of variety and detail. Never drab.

Where I went to get four more, the salesman said, “You are fair; you can wear any dark color,” which to my mind, of course, Is funny. Noorie, my comrade in arms for this shopping trip—it’s a bit overwhelming to do by yourself—was told that because of her fair skin she could wear any color when she was buying hers. Of course, we look at the brown skins that so dramatically set off these fabrics and imagine that any color looks gorgeous with Indian complexion.

Saris may be cotton or synthetic (big debate about which is better—synthetic has no-wrinkling to recommend it, but it looks a little differently (I haven’t decided about this) or, expensively, silk which unlike cotton is thought to be more resistant to ritual pollution. Vegetable-dyed cotton is both printed and embroidered. Hand-sewn sparkles and gold are considered very feminine. My one (so far) handmade is a fine avocado cotton with small embroidered polka dots of peach and and, about eight inches from the hem down, rows of different hues of peach, avocado, and chartreuse flowers embroidered geometrically to just below the knee. Delicate, feminine, set off with a peach and avocado chiffon dupatta.

My salwar, on the other hand, seems like a pair of trousers for M.C. Hammer. The waist is enormous. Peach, in my case. It drops in a yoke to just below hip level, then falls in small pleats at the top of the front legs but straight in the back. All this fabric is gathered up by a drawstring in a pocket at the waist.

Only it doesn’t COME threaded. You have to pull that drawstring through with a safety pin to wear it the first time. I did not know this, and opened up my newly tailored suit about half an hour before I had to get in a rickshaw to go to the conference. No safety pins anywhere! After pathetic attempts with a fork, I simply had to get them on. I ended up drawing the pants up above my waist and circling the fabric with the drawstring, something like the munchkin mayor in the Wizard of Oz, a human sized sack from ankles to rib cage and full of possibilities for disaster. This jerry-rigging definitely spoiled the sleek line of the kameez. I was more worried the trousers get loose from the drawstring and collapse around my ankles. I borrowed a safety pin from Pratima, who runs the computers at the Centre, and who sensibly pins on her chunri. I retreated to the bathroom and properly finished my ensemble.

Indian women do everything in a sari. They give papers, they go out with their famiies, worship, cook, cut grass with a scythe and gather it into great bundles tied up with a rectangular cloth to sell to farmers for their cows. They carry piles of cow dung on their heads (and the grass as well, and vegetables and lots of other things). They sweep the road in their saris. They manage their saris gracefully and effortlessly, or at least that’s how it looks to me.

When it doesn’t seem effortless is bathing in Gangaji. The men wear short bathing trunks or a kind of tight cotton jock strap rendered in different colors. The women step down from the ghats into the Ganga with sari intact. Here it tends to swirl around so they clutch it to keep their legs concealed. They don’t swim, like the men and boys do. Not surprisingly, there aren’t as many women bathing. Often theydo the washing, beating the laundry against the stone steps of the ghats. Both men and women work as dhobis, doing other peoples’ washing for money.

I will acquire a wardrobe of salwar kameezes but didn’t start out thinking that. Ordinary folks, rickshaw drivers, shop owners, vegetable peddlers, folks at temples, priests don’t seem to mind Western dress (providing shoulders and knees are covered). A high university administrator obliquely suggested I’m not quite kosher, to mix metaphors, commenting pointedly on the well dressed students at BHU (girls have dorm curfews, too: 9.00), implying a care for proper dress that isn’t reflected in my cargo pants and cotton shirts, meant for dusty hot journeys and sitting on the stone steps of ghats and temples. The wife of a colleague was dispatched off with graduate students to shop for proper dress three days after her arrival. In terms of what’s expected from peer adults for a person of my station, this one seems high on the list.