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.
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Sunday, December 6, 2009
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?
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?
Thursday, December 3, 2009
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.
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)?
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)?
Sunday, November 22, 2009
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....
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....
Friday, October 16, 2009
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.
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.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Osmagogic Varanasi
Turning onto the road that leads from Hyderabad colony (where my flat is) to the rest of the campus I am each morning enveloped by the sweet smell of jasmine. A few yards down and the air is entirely filled with cardamom. Someone has an ilaachi tree in the yard. Sundar (beautiful) and bura (bad) smells are densely, almost archeologically layered here and come on you unexpedtedly, by turns overwhelming and subsiding. Connected to the breath, they have an immediacy that cannot be ignored. I smell the body of the rickshaw wallah exerting himself on my behalf, the aromas of fried dough and spicy potatoes in the street stalls. Saffron in heavenly milk desserts. In crowds there is a more noticeable presence of soap, perspiration and breath than in the States—not unpleasant, more reminders of our humanity as emitters of odors and the trouble to which we go to laminate others on top of them. The reek of rotting food rises from the side of the road, weaker on campus than in the town gutters where trash and dirt collect. The flanks of ambling water buffalo and Brahma bulls radiate a warm, musky aura. Near them is the heavy aroma of dung. In the temple there are the lighter, softer smells of flowers and incense punctuated by the hard, sharp odors of burning and smoke.
The other night I was at a lovely three story hotel above a steep flight of stairs near Assi Ghat. Overlooking Gangaji , it is elegantly remodeled from the ancestral home it once was. Fifteen warmly intimate and warm rooms, all distinct, lovingly fitted out with beautiful Indian furniture and art, collected and commissioned by its owner for whom the making of this wonderful interior is a life project. Here guests are made comfortable amidst artists who gather to perform and work here. While I was there I saw a mural being painted by Suresh Nair, visiting as a professor of painting at BHU, and two of his students. The mural depicts Bharata Puzha, the goddess that inhabits Nila Nadi, a river in Kerala, where Suresh spent his childhood. It fills the upper half of a walll of what will soon be another bedrooml. From her lotus the goddess gazes at us with a slight knowing smile. Great whorls fill out the background around her. These look for all the world like breaking waves, almost Chinese style, but Suresh would only go so far as to say they were energy. From a spacious roofed veranda, one of the common areas a few steps away, one sees the lights of Gangaji, which seems as big as the sea in the dark. Musical performances are often held on this spot.
Several of us were dinner guests of Adam Grotsky, director of the Fulbright program in India (and a graduate of Penn!) who was in town, and his wife Olga, an artist in her own right, who is learning immersion Hindi in a school here. Also on hand were Surej and Ramuji, a musician and singer. Ramuji is a man who appreciates sensuality and pleasure. On this night he was wearing an especially fine embroidered silk salwar kameez of a peach color. When dinner was done and we were standing around talking, we complimented him on the lovely fragrance surrounding him. He pulled out a tiny flask of this magical scent, which he said was saffron and musk, and put it on the wrists of Megan, my Fulbright comrade in arms (with whom I had quite another sort of olfactory adventure recently), and me. Then he then scented our chunris, the scarves of our own far less rich salwar kameezes. He puts on this scent after his morning bath, he said, to keep him fresh in the hot weather. It was transporting, I’m not kidding. Every day since I have indulged my nose in my chunri where it lies folded in the closet bureau. Next time I see him I will ask him if a humble Westerner can acquire that lovely perfume.
It always made me a little sick to smell incense In America, like the reaction I have to the artificial-air smell of a closed up airplane that suddenly opens to admit passengers. The first time I smelled incense in India, it was rich and inviting, like it was in exactly the right place. It seemed to oxygenate the air instead of eating it. American incense must often be of an inferior make, like peanut butter adulterated with sugar, or artificially flavored teas.
Food is relatively cheap here (in Indian terms the prices are alarmingly up after more than a year of drought and worse is anticipated as a result of this year’s late and severe monsoon flooding); spices are relatively expensive. On my kitchen shelf there is a jar filled with fresh whole cumin seeds. Sitting on top in the same jar are pods of bara (big) ilaachi and chottah (small) ilaachi—masala for the vegetable dishes and lentil-mung stew and rice I eat almost every day. Next to it is jar of garam masala, a powder of spices including black pepper, cumin, cinnamon, cloves, cardomom, coriander, bay leaves, nutmeg and mace that flavor food in very small quantities. I use ginger and ilaachi and sugar to make chai or flavored milk tea in a small two-handled rounded basin, the standard form of an Indian saucepan, into which I throw all the ingredients after I’ve smashed them with my heavy mortar and pestle. On the wall hangs a net bag of shallots (piyaz) and garlic (lehsun). Next time I go to the spice shop I’ll get cloves and bay. I have found a good spice shop but have to learn how to make use of it—how much one gets, what the names are. This is fun.
Culturally distinctive smells need no language to be received, but the layers of refinement that go into the combination and presentation of smells are another thing altogether, complex and with their own rules. Like saffron and musk. To return to the breath idea, of all the parts of the sensory apparatus, olfaction seems to best foster the meditative imperative to exist in the present moment.
The other night I was at a lovely three story hotel above a steep flight of stairs near Assi Ghat. Overlooking Gangaji , it is elegantly remodeled from the ancestral home it once was. Fifteen warmly intimate and warm rooms, all distinct, lovingly fitted out with beautiful Indian furniture and art, collected and commissioned by its owner for whom the making of this wonderful interior is a life project. Here guests are made comfortable amidst artists who gather to perform and work here. While I was there I saw a mural being painted by Suresh Nair, visiting as a professor of painting at BHU, and two of his students. The mural depicts Bharata Puzha, the goddess that inhabits Nila Nadi, a river in Kerala, where Suresh spent his childhood. It fills the upper half of a walll of what will soon be another bedrooml. From her lotus the goddess gazes at us with a slight knowing smile. Great whorls fill out the background around her. These look for all the world like breaking waves, almost Chinese style, but Suresh would only go so far as to say they were energy. From a spacious roofed veranda, one of the common areas a few steps away, one sees the lights of Gangaji, which seems as big as the sea in the dark. Musical performances are often held on this spot.
Several of us were dinner guests of Adam Grotsky, director of the Fulbright program in India (and a graduate of Penn!) who was in town, and his wife Olga, an artist in her own right, who is learning immersion Hindi in a school here. Also on hand were Surej and Ramuji, a musician and singer. Ramuji is a man who appreciates sensuality and pleasure. On this night he was wearing an especially fine embroidered silk salwar kameez of a peach color. When dinner was done and we were standing around talking, we complimented him on the lovely fragrance surrounding him. He pulled out a tiny flask of this magical scent, which he said was saffron and musk, and put it on the wrists of Megan, my Fulbright comrade in arms (with whom I had quite another sort of olfactory adventure recently), and me. Then he then scented our chunris, the scarves of our own far less rich salwar kameezes. He puts on this scent after his morning bath, he said, to keep him fresh in the hot weather. It was transporting, I’m not kidding. Every day since I have indulged my nose in my chunri where it lies folded in the closet bureau. Next time I see him I will ask him if a humble Westerner can acquire that lovely perfume.
It always made me a little sick to smell incense In America, like the reaction I have to the artificial-air smell of a closed up airplane that suddenly opens to admit passengers. The first time I smelled incense in India, it was rich and inviting, like it was in exactly the right place. It seemed to oxygenate the air instead of eating it. American incense must often be of an inferior make, like peanut butter adulterated with sugar, or artificially flavored teas.
Food is relatively cheap here (in Indian terms the prices are alarmingly up after more than a year of drought and worse is anticipated as a result of this year’s late and severe monsoon flooding); spices are relatively expensive. On my kitchen shelf there is a jar filled with fresh whole cumin seeds. Sitting on top in the same jar are pods of bara (big) ilaachi and chottah (small) ilaachi—masala for the vegetable dishes and lentil-mung stew and rice I eat almost every day. Next to it is jar of garam masala, a powder of spices including black pepper, cumin, cinnamon, cloves, cardomom, coriander, bay leaves, nutmeg and mace that flavor food in very small quantities. I use ginger and ilaachi and sugar to make chai or flavored milk tea in a small two-handled rounded basin, the standard form of an Indian saucepan, into which I throw all the ingredients after I’ve smashed them with my heavy mortar and pestle. On the wall hangs a net bag of shallots (piyaz) and garlic (lehsun). Next time I go to the spice shop I’ll get cloves and bay. I have found a good spice shop but have to learn how to make use of it—how much one gets, what the names are. This is fun.
Culturally distinctive smells need no language to be received, but the layers of refinement that go into the combination and presentation of smells are another thing altogether, complex and with their own rules. Like saffron and musk. To return to the breath idea, of all the parts of the sensory apparatus, olfaction seems to best foster the meditative imperative to exist in the present moment.
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