In Search of Gandhi's India

Video Clips

2008-09-15T07:47:00.000-07:00

I've now created a separate page for some of the video clips I shot while in India. You can view them here.

My Photographs from the Trip

2008-08-21T14:14:00.000-07:00

I've now finished putting together a website containing some of my favorite photographs from the trip. You can access the site here. The photographs are divided into groups -- they really kind of sorted themselves out: People, People at Work, Streets, Signs, Facades (doors and windows), Mosques, Temples, and Villages.

Exploring India’s Prosperity Through the Eyes of the Invisible Men

2008-08-15T06:34:00.001-07:00

Another article on India from The New York Times focusing on the enormous economic and class divisions there. It's written by Anand Giridharadas and also appears in The International Herald Tribune. The article discusses a new movie, “Barah Aana,” which features a servant's view of class division in India (reminiscent of Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger, which the author doesn't mention). The article quotes the director as saying India may have a problem deeper than "poverty": a "'dehumanization' problem." This is a little vague, but it seems to me it may allude to the entrenched effects of the caste system in India and how it has helped to structure the effects of modern capitalism.

Make Your Own Chapati: Part II

2008-08-14T20:18:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago I posted Mark Bittman's recipe for making chapati on the grill. I'm here to tell you it works. The first picture above is a shot of the four pieces of dough I rolled out, ready to go on the grill. The second shot is of a piece that's done and ready to come off the grill. He's right that it only takes about a minute a side--once the first side puffs up and begins to darken you just flip it over, then the second side will puff up and darken, and it's done. They were quite good, but next time I'm going to use more white and less wheat flour because I think wheat flour in the States is more grainy and "wheaty" tasting than what I had in India.

Of course in India the women I saw making chapati didn't use food processors to work their dough. They did it all by hand, and with artful dexterity and speed. Nor did they use rolling pins to shape and flatten the pieces of dough before they were cooked on a pan over an open flame (Bittman recommends using a tortilla press, which would be a heresy worse than the rolling pin). They would just work the dough in their hands for a while, then flatten it out with one hand on a stone or board with quick, rhythmic patting motions. The third picture here was taken in the small kitchen of a woman who made lunch for us in a little village outside of Pune. She let me try to make chapati with her and I failed miserably. But I remember squatting there watching her work and being taken by the rhythmic, musical sound of her patting the dough flat with one had. It was like she was playing a little drum and I began to clap along with her, and then did a little scat singing to try to indicate how musical her work was.

‘Auto rickshaw’ Gives Waukesha Man Cheap, Fun Ride

2008-08-14T06:41:00.000-07:00

Thanks go to my brother, Greg, who lives in Milwaukee, for spotting this article in today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about a guy who has bought and imported his own autorickshaw. Paulo are you out there? You can read the article here.

Make Your Own Chapati--on the Backyard Grill!

2008-08-13T06:46:00.000-07:00

Those of you who have been following this blog know I tried my hand at making chapati a few times on the trip, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Chapati is one of the traditional flat breads of India. It's usually cooked quickly in a hot pan, though at Navdanya I saw the cook throw pieces right on the burner after they came out of the pan to make them bubble up. But in today's New York Times the inimitable Mark Bittman has published a simple recipe for making chapati on the barbecue grill. Here it is:

Grilled Chapatis

2 1/4 cups whole wheat flour
1 cup all-purpose flour, more for dusting
1 teaspoon salt.
1. Mix flours in food processor; add salt and, with machine running, pour in one cup warm water. Process for about 30 seconds, then remove cover. Dough should be in a well-defined, barely sticky, easy-to-handle ball. If it is too dry, add warm water a tablespoon at a time and process for 5 to 10 seconds after each addition. If it is too wet, which is unlikely, add a tablespoon or two of flour and process briefly.
2. With floured hands, shape dough into a ball, cover with plastic and let rest for at least 30 minutes. (At this point, you may wrap dough tightly in plastic and refrigerate it for up to a day; bring to room temperature before proceeding.)
3. When ready to grill, pinch off a piece of dough and roll as thin as is practical. Dust lightly with flour to keep from sticking and cover with plastic or a damp cloth while you roll out remaining dough. (It is O.K. to overlap them a bit, but do not stack them.) Or just roll as you grill.
4. Grill chapatis until they start to blister, char and puff up a bit, about a minute or so. Turn and repeat. Serve immediately.

Yield: 8 to 12 chapatis, 4 to 6 servings.

Click here for the complete article.

Interview with Ashish Nandy

2008-08-09T17:12:00.000-07:00

Anil Lal, Vinay Lal's brother, has sent me the link to a recent interview with Ashish Nandy. You'll find it by clicking here. In the interview he is very critical of the impact of modernization and secularization on India, insists that Gujarat has become a kind of intellectual and cultural waste land, laments that the middle class do not have middle class values and lack "the modern concept of cosmopolitanism," discusses the reemergence of religion as a dominant force, and talks about how, in his disillusionment after the Emergency, he found himself re-evaluating Gandhi: "I began to look for new ways of looking at Indian politics. My discovery of Gandhi happened at that time. I had always disliked Gandhi: his allegiances had looked primordial; his style a deviation from our idea of cosmopolitanism; his politics anti-modern. But I rediscovered Gandhi. I became more sceptical of the Indian state, which was modelled on the colonial state that had ruled us. I saw that the categories that dominated Indian politics had no openness to the experiences of a majority of Indians." It's an uncompromising articulation of his position.

If you read it, feel free to comment here as a way to extend the discussions we began to have on the trip.

"A Farewell to India," by Ellen Lindeen

2008-08-09T16:21:00.000-07:00

As my fellow travelers know, Ellen Lindeen composed a wonderful poem about our trip which she read at our farewell dinner. She's sent it to me, and you can read it here. Enjoy.

Photos from Chennai/Madras

2008-08-07T07:19:00.000-07:00

I've just uploaded some of my favorite photos from our last stop, Chennai. You can view them here.

The initial group of photos were taken at Arulmigu Kapaleeswarar Temple (Hindu) in the heart of the city. The other photos were taken at the beach on the Bay of Bengal at twilight. As I explained in a previous post, Indians don't go to the beach they way we do. No bathing suits, no swimming. They treat the beach more as a park, with friends and family lounging around in groups and food vendors everywhere helping them to enjoy the evening. Paulo and I had vowed to put on our speedos and go body surfing here, but that provided culturally inappropriate. There are a couple of shots of the group frolicking in the surf. At one point a wave came in and swept everyone's sandals out to sea. Miraculously, they were all recovered.

Epilogue: The Ironing Man

2008-08-05T07:48:00.000-07:00

I wrote this on the plane last night. It's the last of my posts from India, but I want to keep the blog going, both so I can keep writing about the trip and so others can use it as a way to stay in touch. We had an amazing time, and I grew to love all of my travel mates, a great group of people!. Thanks to them for making the trip so special.

p.s. Click here to read the article about us published last week in the Express India.

The Ironing Man

Today marked the end of our five weeks in India. It was time to fly home and pick up our lives. We had a short business meeting during breakfast, packed our bags, then left the hotel for a few hours of shopping before heading to the airport. We drove for about 20 minutes through the crowded commercial districts of Chennai, but then turned off into a solidly middle class residential neighborhood filled with nice two and three story homes set in thick tropical vegetation. It was overcast and grey, but there were lots of birds whose chirps and squawking cut through the humid quiet of the morning. We pulled up in front of a handicraft store, a shop full of locally produced goods that seemed like the only commercial business in the neighborhood. It must be geared to the tourist bus trade because it’s way too far from the business district for any shoppers to just wander by. We trooped in and over the course of about 45 minutes we all made a few last minute purchases. I decided to bail out of the shopping a little early and ended up taking a walk around the neighborhood. As I set out down the steps of the store I noticed through the thick trees across the street that there was a man in a shirt and sarong, ironing clothes just inside the gate of the home across the street on an old push cart while his dog slept underneath. I looked a little closer and noticed he was using a huge old iron that was heated with hot coals. At first I thought perhaps he was ironing clothes for himself, or for someone who lived in the very large house outside of which he was working. But then I saw that some people were entering his yard, either to pick up bundles of shirts he’d ironed, or to drop some off. He appeared to be running a little business ironing the clothes of people who live in the neighborhood, and his work was being done with tools—the old hot coal iron and the push cart—that seemed to date from the 1920s.

My walk in the neighborhood was short, but it was a pleasant break from shopping. I enjoyed seeing the neighborhood, and it was nice to have a few solitary moments as my trip wound down. Many of the homes had security guards sitting just outside the front gates on plastic chairs. Most weren’t doing anything at all, just reading papers or looking quizzically at me as I passed by. The tropical vegetation surrounding the homes was beautiful, and with the exotic sounding birds singing in a kind of cacophony and the architecture of the homes just different enough from what I’m used to at home engaging my curiosity, my little stroll made for a pleasant break. When I returned from my walk in the neighborhood and strolled past the ironing man I noticed the large house in whose yard he was still working was in pretty bad shape. All the other houses I’d passed were quite well kept and dignified, with an abundance of trees, shrubs, plants and flowers that made each home a pretty colorful place. But the exterior walls of the house where the ironing man was working were darkened with dirt that had run in the rain into dark streaks that stained its peeling paint, and the stain on the wood windows had long since chipped and fallen away. The windows seemed thrown open but the house looked largely abandoned. Clearly no one had taken care of the place in years, and I wondered why all of the vegetation was dead and brown, why the house, if was abandoned, hadn’t become overgrown with plants.

This was my last image of India, the final scene of so many that made for me a special moment the power of which was a little mysterious and a bit elusive. I saw much of the India that had become familiar to me later as we drove out to the airport. Teeming streets full of autorickshaws, cars, trucks, bicyclists, the occasional old wooden cart being pulled by bullocks. The ramshackle cobbled together little commercial sheds by the side of the road that competed with more established and prosperous businesses housed in proper buildings that lined the business districts. The vendors selling roasted corn or full meals off carts or from stalls where fires burned and huge, old, darkly burned steel pans sat atop open fires while the food cooked. Men, some dressed in western wear, others, Muslims, all in white with white caps, Hindu men in traditional garb, the occasional turbaned Sikh, and women in colorful saris walking everywhere, many with pots, huge containers, or large packages on their heads (or thinner, troubled and disheveled looking women with nothing but an open hand wending their way through stilled traffic hoping to collect a few rupees, often with small children set on their hip). People in rags lying on the street or propped up against short walls, many of which supported small shelters carefully put together with cardboard, metal sheeting, wood, rags, and materials from old tarps. Some of these had morphed over the years into structures framed out of wood with thatched roofs. Many lined the river and wound down to its banks, enough of them to form little villages that looked livable but squalid to my eyes and which contributed inexorably to the pollution of Chennai’s main river, which flowed less with water than with a dark, murky, oily substance full of floating debris.

This was an urban India that had become familiar to me, a country bustling and full of paradox where grinding poverty existed along with a dizzying range of ingenious and tenacious commercial activity, people finding a way to somehow get by selling old locks or metal pots or roasted corn or used luggage or recycled bicycle tires or outdated electronic gadgets, or who made a living repairing bicycles or autorickshaws right on the street from small little enclosures and old tools. There seems to be an economy within the economy, a vast, impromptu, unregulated chaos of commercial activity among the impoverished who somehow scratch out a living amidst the more established, prosperous, glassed in formal stores that line the streets. An economy of the impoverished alongside an economy of the newly prospering middle classes, the one tied to what we usually call globalization and westernization, the other tied it seems to me to an older and more traditional set of commercial activities that service those who haven’t gotten swept up into the new prosperity. I imagine these parallel economies existed to some degree under the Mugal Empire and the British Raj, that the split world globalization has created has replaced these earlier divided empires.

And where does the ironing man fit in all this, and why did he capture my imagination now, at the end of my trip? He’s part of India’s vast service economy of course, but not the one we’re used to in the U.S., the one peopled by those who work in clean stores, nicely lit restaurants, or who handle our dry cleaning or repair our iPods. This is a service economy made up of an impoverished underclass who live in slums and who take care of the rudimentary needs of the middle class, driving their cars, cooking their food, beating the dust out of their rugs, or ironing their clothes. He’s a guy who has found a niche for himself and a way to get by, with an ancient coal powered iron (at one point I saw him walk away from the clothes he was ironing and blow into it to heat its coals, ash flying out into the air), an old wooden cart, and a steady clientele. I can’t imagine he makes much money at this. Perhaps he lives in the dilapidated, crumbling house outside of which he worked, but I doubt it. It’s just as likely the cart sits there for him to use every day in this island of prosperity and quiet tropical luxury, and that he goes back to one of the slums off the road we passed as we drove in, where he eats and sleeps and perhaps helps tend to a family. It can’t be an easy life, but as I watched him work, saw the steady careful rhythm of his ironing and how he neatly folded and stacked the shirts he had finished, as I saw his dog sleeping peacefully under his cart, as I saw people pick up or drop off their laundry and chat with him for a moment or two, observed all of this through the warm tropical foliage with the birds singing and no horns honking, no cacophony of traffic, it seemed to me he was doing alright given everything I’d seen I my 5 weeks in India. In comparison with the prosperity, even the modest opulence around him he wasn’t well off, and if I’m right about him spending the nights and mornings in a slum, then his situation borders on desperate. But even though I run the risk here of sentimentalizing the ironing man, taken as I was by the simplicity and dignity of his work, the romantic setting of the crumbling house and the humid tropical environment and the singing birds, still I think I saw something powerful and ancient and Indian in the ironing man. The house reminded me of the Jamughoda Palace, that dilapidated monument to a still crumbling colonial structure I wrote about in an earlier post, and the ironing man recalled entrepreneurial Indians like the women on the sidewalk in Pune whose business consisted of a weight scale, people who consistently impressed me with their calm, even cheerful way of scratching out a living under desperate conditions. The ironing man gave me a little gift at the end of my journey, more valuable than the handicrafts being sold just beyond the steps from which I observed him. He was for me another reminder of the tenacity and beauty I saw among everyday Indians on a continent Gandhi helped make independent, but which still struggles to be free, a nation bursting with economic development that allows many to prosper but which adds to the suffering of many others, and whose cultural traditions are threatened by the kind of homogenization that accompanies globalization. The ironing man in the yard of the crumbling old mansion seemed a steady presence amidst all of the chaos and change. I wonder how long he’ll keep ironing there, what it means that he does, what it will mean when he stops?

Our Last Day in India

2008-08-03T10:22:00.000-07:00

Today, our last full formal day in India, was devoted to a wrap-up mini-conference organized around a series of speakers, all of whom are trying to find ways to incorporate Gandhian principles into solutions for 21st century problems. Our first speaker, Ramasubramanian, Chief Consultant for Samanvaya here in Chennai, is a young activist working primarily with villages to help support their traditional governing and social structures. He explained that he is committed to the position that Gandhi did not idealize the village, that many villages here in Tamil Nadu in fact operate in just the kind of decentralized, non-hierarchical, self-sustaining ways Gandhi envisioned. Ramasubramanian is a self-described “field worker,” not an academic. Indeed, he was careful to explain that he wasn’t in the habit of speaking to academics and that academia often produces a different version of Gandhi that the one he embraces. His background is in information technologies (he was a consultant for information planning) but the more he worked with social activists the more he became attracted to the kind of work they do, which he decided had the potential to make a larger impact than the IT work he was doing. This of course fits a pattern I’ve observed throughout the trip and have already commented on, for many of our speakers started out with very traditional careers in academia, business, or information technology and left those fields to work as social activists and/or to start alternative institutions like Navdanaya or Navadarshanam.

Ramasubramanian presented a fascinating overview of how a particular village in Tamil Nadu functions, with a particular focus on the panchayat, or village council, that directs the village's affairs (civic, judicial, and commercial). He called these "caste" panchyats to distinguish them from the formal ones authorized by the national government. The caste panchayats are elected by the villagers, are part of a much older tradition, and take precedence over the government-designated ones. As he presented these panchayats and the villages they oversee, he highlighted the logic and elegance of their operation and the extent to which they function pretty smoothly and logically to take care of village affairs. When he concluded by praising these village structures as an example of how "Indian society" can function I asked him about urban India and how it fits into his larger vision of "Indian society," since as he used the phrase it seemed to only refer to village society. His answer was intriguing. He reminded us that India has a very long and rich tradition of urban centers, and that it makes sense to think of India's contemporary cities in terms of this tradition, not just as products of westernization. This suggested to me that there may be specifically Indian approaches to thinking about the city and its problems and the solutions they require. Traditional forms of "town planning," he insisted, are too western in their orientation, and Indians don't have to tackle the problems of urbanization by drawing on approaches from the west. He also had some interesting things to say about the urban slums we've seen. Many of the people who live in these slums work as servants for the burgeoning middle class and are therefore a product of the economic boom we keep reading about. They need to live near where they work, and so these slums develop adjacent to the middle class neighborhoods their population services (although many of the inhabitants of these slums have small commercial businesses they are running). According to Ramasubramanian the slums function a bit like villages, with some kind of organizational structure that helps keep them working in an orderly way.

It seems to me that both the villages and the slums in India are linked to problems that have their origins in the west as well as in India itself. The history of colonialism is partly to blame, certainly, but so too are the explosive forces of globalization which are draining the population of villages, transforming old patterns of farming in ways that ruin the land and run farmers into debt buying hybrid seeds and the pesticides they need, and at the same time are creating a boom among the expanding middle class, people who are buying into the marketing of western modernity in a big way that drives a deepening wedge between their economic status and that of the slum dwellers who service them. The Gandhians tend to focus overwhelmingly on the village because that's where Gandhi put his emphasis and because his critique of western civilization takes aim at the city specifically and at urbanization in particular as monsters created by modernity. But as I've been writing all along, it seems to me the problem of the city needs a solution, and that what these young 21st century Gandhians are struggling to work out is a particularly Indian solution for them. I'm struck by how the world I live in and enjoy is inextricably tied to the problems I've been exposed to in India. That's pretty sobering.

I've got more I'd like to write about all of this, but my online time has run out at the hotel. But check back if you're interested.

Chennai (Madras)

2008-08-02T20:37:00.000-07:00

Chennai, or Madras, is where the British Raj started. The East India company set up shop here, and in Calcutta and Bombay, and from that beginning England began inexorably to colonize India. Yesterday we saw the beach front fort the East India company first built. I don't have much time to run through the day, but we started yesterday with a really stimulating presentation by a western-trained Indian scientist who has been studying Indian ways of thinking at the history of Indian science. He doesn't reject western science, but is doing really interesting work on the differences between western and Indian science, and on the differences between modern western medicine and traditional Indian medicine. His group also keeps an organic farm outside of the city. I found his assimilation of western practices and Indian ones quite attractive. He doesn't reject modernity and the modern nation state out of hand, but feels we have to draw on Gandhian principles but adapt them to our own situation, so he doesn't find Gandhi's critique of modernity in Hind Swaraj, about which I've written a lot, very practical.

In the afternoon we visited a museum full of amazing Hindu bronzes from the 9th - 14th centuries that were excavated in the south of Tamil Nadu from temples by the British. Fabulous. Then we visited a still thriving 500 year old Hindu temple in the city itself, and ended with a visit to the beach on the Bay of Bengal. This isn't like a beach in the states. No one in bathing suits and no swimming. It's more like a giant park with food vendors. It was twilight and grey and misty, quite beautiful. We all got our feet wet and nearly had our sandals swept out to sea when the tide rushed in.

A note on photos. I'm trying to upload some but the connection here at the hotel is maddeningly slow. Please check my web gallery for whatever Navadarshanam photos made it (the link to my gallery is in the menu to the right under "General Links"). I may try again tonight.

Back Online from Chennai

2008-08-01T10:49:00.001-07:00

We just arrived at our hotel in Chennai (in Tamil Nadu, on the coast of the Bay of Bengal)after three wonderful days at a commune in the countryside outside Bangalore. Please see the two posts below for details. The second post down is the first installment, the one just below this one the second. I will post photos from our trip there tomorrow. We're all well, rested, and looking forward to coming home (with a few regrets we can't just keep going)in a couple of days.

Navadarshanam II

2008-08-01T10:47:00.000-07:00

My previous post dealt with the social vision underlying Navadarshanam since yesterday’s discussions dealt mainly with an analysis of Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj and the role his critique of modern civilization has played in the development of the community here. This morning’s discussion, on the other hand, focused on the spiritual aspects of Gandhi’s thought and on his conception of religion. As we’ve seen all along, Gandhi was a multi-faceted thinker, and so he is often treated as a political leader or as a philosopher, but not as often as a religious leader or thinker. In his presentation this morning, Ananthu stressed that in Gandhi’s introduction to his autobiography he wrote that the whole point of his existence was self-realization and seeing God, that he was less interested in India’s self-rule than he was in individual self-rule achieved through a kind of spiritual journey (although for Gandhi there seemed no division between religious and public life). His insistence on nurturing the spiritual and his commitment to a fundamentally religious life, of course, caused much division among his peers, for many of them, like Nehru, were secularists. But Ananthu insisted that Gandhi’s commitment to a spiritual life and to religion is of central importance. He explained that for Gandhi, however, “religion” was the “religion underlying all religion,” that is, it is constituted of those basic moral principles that underlie all religions and therefore intersect, so that to be religious is to rise above narrow definitions rooted in the doctrines of individual religions, especially those that claim a special or privileged status. This means that in the Gandhian sense, religion need not be divisive, since it’s constituted of the basic underlying truths of all faiths. The question I had, of course, what just what those basic underlying truths are, and who decides? We didn’t really talk about this, but I think the question sometimes gets begged. In theory this conception of religion is very appealing, but there are complexities underneath the surface.

Ananthu also took some time to discuss yoga as a spiritual practice that can help us to transcend mind and body and connect us to an ultimate or essential reality. This practice is a central aspect of life at the commune. His discussion of yoga, which as a practice is designed to “yolk” (the literal meaning of the word) the individual to a higher essential force or principle by using the body to do “inner work,” led to a spirited discussion of some of the underlying spiritual concepts Ananthu had been invoking all morning. Some of us wondered whether living a moral life required religion at all, and Ananthu quickly insisted that religion and morality are the same thing, which I think is essentially correct. Others took issue with his invocation of “essence,” the idea underlying western metaphysics that there is an unseen, higher, transcendent reality or force beyond material reality, a “higher” reality that is intrinsic and absolute. This in turn led to a discussion of the role religion has played in the history of violence and conquest, whether the quest for material plunder was at the center of things like colonialism and slavery, or whether religion also played a central role. The whole morning’s discussion was lively, intelligent, thoughtful, and engaging, and I thought it produced some really helpful give and take between the group. I like the fact that, collectively, we have a variety of points of view. We share an interest in Gandhi and how his work is being carried on at the places we have visited, but we have diverse intellectual and religious backgrounds and each of us comes at the issues we are discussing in different ways. Add to that the fact that our assumptions are continually being challenged on the trip and that we are learning an enormous amount (we’re really a kind of traveling seminar) and you’ve got the makings of a really fertile intellectual experience.

In the afternoon we met with the senior trustee at Navadarshanam, Partap Agarwal. He is in many ways the most fascinating person I’ve met in India. He’s is absolutely uncompromising in both his criticisms of the effects of modernization and his prescriptions for social change. And he’s quite preoccupied with toilets and what we put in them. He is absolutely convinced that the toilet is one of the three worst inventions of mankind (the other two being the automobile and nuclear energy). In Partap’s view the toilet has created two problems. In the first place, it wastes water, a valuable resource, and in the second flushed fecal matter pollutes the environment and is a natural resource that’s being wasted. He’s a strong advocate of shitting in the woods so that fecal matter can return to the earth and nurture the soil. For him, human beings took a fatal wrong turn when they invented agriculture, for agriculture has led inexorably to the degradation and then the pollution of land, and to the creation of increasingly large communities that have proved, especially with the invention of the city, increasingly unsustainable. His solution to the problems of modernity? Forget Gandhi’s proposal that people return to villages, for Partap insists that everyone should move to on an acre or so in the forest and live off the land. Without planting anything. He is a guru of the tree, and has a dizzying knowledge of the edible matter they produce. In his view, of course, the community of Navadarshanam is full of bad compromises. They have toilets (which he spoke against), grow their own vegetables, and create their own electrical power. In a way he strikes me as the conscience of the community, the man with the most extreme vision of what a healthy life entails. I thought Gandhi’s vision was severe until I met Partap. But while his vision is uncompromising, his life is a compromise. He lives here only part time, and his other home isn’t in the forest.

Partap’s other passion is fasting. He claims he hasn’t been to the doctor in 20 years. When he feels bad, he fasts. The science of fasting (if one can call it that) as he explained it has to do with freeing the body from its work processing the food we take in, separating off what the body needs from the foreign material it needs to expel, so that it can set to work getting rid of residual foreign material that may be causing our symptoms. When he gets sick, he fasts, letting the body purge itself of whatever is ailing it. He also fasts on a fairly regular basis as part of his over-all spiritual practice. In these fasts, he takes nothing but water, lays at rest, and does nothing but meditate, trying to get in tune with his body and lifting himself above the mind (I told him frankly that the fasting part sounded like something I could do but that doing nothing for three days sounded impossible).

What he advocates (everyone moves to the forest, no agriculture, shit in the woods, no doctors, fast regularly to cleanse the mind and body, live without everything we think of as part of our culture) of course strikes me as extreme, to say the least. There is a logic to his analyses and to what he advocates, of course, but putting all of these things into practice as a way to heal human civilization and save the planet is clearly impractical. I don’t see people deciding any time soon to move to a single acre in the forest to become gatherers who shit in the woods, fast when they are ill, and spend most of their time seeking God within themselves. But at another level I find Partap extremely compelling exactly because he takes such an uncompromising position, and because he argues it with such passion, grace, and goodwill. If we are to measure the quality of the lives people live by their presence, their devotion to the common good, their sense of well being and comfort in the world, by their sense of humor, contentment, and the solidity of their attitude, then Partap is doing something right. He’s a wise man, lovely to be with, and a great conversationalist with a wonderful sense of humor. And this isn’t to say that the others I’ve met here aren’t equally impressive in their own ways, indeed, everyone here is absolutely charming in the best sense of the word, and the range of their talents is striking. Ananthu is in many ways the intellectual leader of the group (though he’s a deeply spiritual man), Om the practical solver of problems, the engineer extraordinaire who isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty, Partap is the guru, the spiritual leader, and Shoba the master cook extraordinaire who prepares the most wonderful, tasty (and easy to digest) vegetarian food you can imagine and leads the group every night in communal hymns. All of these people have wonderful spirits. It is relaxing just to be around them, and they’ve created an impressive community here based in equal measure on devotion to sustainable, healthy living, ingenuity, and gritty tenacity.

A footnote: There is a small village just about 200 yards beyond Navadarshanam’s gate which I visited alone early on the first morning of our stay. As much as I’ve come to love my companions on this trip it was nice to take a solitary walk and to move through the village on my own. Often when we’ve visited villages we’ve arrived as a group, and it is pretty overwhelming for the villager, and a little chaotic, when 14 Anglos just appear out of nowhere in western dress, cameras in hand. As I arrived (the name of the village is Ganganahalli) people were just beginning their day, emerging from their brightly painted concrete and wood homes to fetch water, tend to the cows, wash clothes, or just mingle with one another. One little girl in a school uniform was standing in the front of her house combing her long hair. I was struck by how colorful, well-built, and nicely kept the homes were (I didn’t see a single commercial business, they seem centered in another village a few kilometers away), and by how little people seemed to be disturbed by my presence. I strolled through the village and out the other side into rolling farm land. There was a small blue temple on my right which had a little shrine in it, and the structure was covered by a small thatched roof supported by four thick branches sunk in the ground. Beyond this farmers began to work their fields, some by hand and others with tillers pulled by oxen. One boy walked by and told me he was a student on his way to school. Further on was a small, abandoned granite quarry that had filled with water. A thick row of beautiful grass was growing in the water and swayed in the morning breeze.

The quarry pool was a particularly peaceful place, but I had to double back to get to breakfast, so I headed along the road I had taken back into town. The first little home I encountered was a small farm on the edge of the village with a pen full of very young goats. As I moved back into the village I could see more people were up and at work. They didn’t seem to mind my taking pictures. Indeed, one woman with a child on her hip motioned me over to take her picture. Once I’d shown it to her she called others over, including a much older women I assume was her mother, or her mother-in-law. Children also appeared from all sides, and pretty soon there was quite a crowd. I tried to explain who I was as best I could, and they spoke back, but who knows what they thought of me, why I was there, and what I was doing?

Navadarshanam I

2008-08-01T10:45:00.000-07:00

Navadarshanam, July 29-30. On the 29th we made our way by plane, coach, and in the final leg, in the back of a truck, from Pune to Bangalore and then to the small commune run on Gandhian principles called Navadarshanam. The Pune to Bangalore flight was quick. The new airport on the outskirts of the city is another example of India’s explosive development. It’s modern, expansive, and state of the art. You could be in Paris or Madrid or New York City. The area just outside the terminal is dominated by a huge sculpture of a Luis Vuitton bag, as good an icon I can imagine for the boom in consumerism that’s helping fuel Bangalore’s rise. The city itself, where we spent about three hours is, at least in its modern center, even more prosperous and contemporary in its look than Pune. Many of the buildings are new, the shopping streets wide, and elegant hotels share the avenues with virtually every brand name store you can think of from Rebok to Levi’s to Nike (but no Chanel or Gucci, at least not yet). Bangalore is of course the home of India’s call centers, and is also a hub of activity for the IT industry, and it is booming (although this is only true of the immediate center and the IT parks, for on its outskirts the city quickly becomes shabby, then impoverished—and the pollution is nearly unbearable). The modernization and urbanization that mark India as a rising power but which seems unsustainable on a global scale is everywhere in Bangalore, and so the city in its own way represents everything many of the Gandhians we’re meeting with lament.

That’s certainly the case with our hosts at Navadarshanam, a small community started by Indians who were working both here and in the U.S. in the computer and software industries but who decided to drop out and start there own self-sustaining community in the forests of Tamil Nadu, in the south of India. But before I describe the place, a word about how we got here. After lunch in Bangalore we headed out in a convoy, two cars filled with our luggage and a couple of passengers, and the rest of us in a small coach. We had to cross the state border just before we got to Navadarshanam and at that point we had to abandon our transport for a new set of vehicles. I ended up in the back of an open truck with our luggage, our guide, Ranjith, and Ted and Wendy. It was a great ride. As we drove deeper into the forest people, animals, oxcarts, and soon, small villages would suddenly appear behind us out of nowhere. Hopefully I’ll be able to post some of the pictures I took from the back of the truck. My favorite series was shot when we drove by a large school just as the kids were getting out. It seemed like a hundred of them, and when they saw us they started waving and laughing and chasing after us. We waved back, the truck sped along, I shot away with my camera, and they ran, smiling, as fast as they could. Later we made our way through a small village, and then met the road to Navadarshanam, which turned out to be under construction and blocked by a tractor. We had to wait awhile, and mingled with a local couple and some kids until the road opened and we were able to make our way into the compound. Groves of banana palm trees covered the land that wasn’t being farmed, and the far horizon gave way to green, rolling hills.

The Navadarshanam compound itself is quite a beautiful place, nestled on land that slightly inclines down to a little valley and has beautiful views of the surrounding forest and a small lake. The vegetation verges on tropical. Here and there in the fields are small, simple Hindu temples. The buildings in the compound itself are made of simple, sun-dried bricks with tile roofs, but they’re pleasant, even elegant, and decorated in places with painted designs or murals. There is a single communal kitchen and dining area, small homes for the full-time residents, and a couple of large nicely furnished dorm rooms where we are staying. The grounds are beautiful, and animals graze nearby on a landscape that spills off into farmland. Navadarshanam (which means “new light”), a marvel of ingenuity, is completely “off the grid,” in other words, it produces all of its power from the wind and the sun and draws its water from wells and rain water harvesting. Gas, as at Navdanya, comes from a mix of cow dung and water which produces methane gas used to heat cooking stoves. Solar panels produce warm water for showers most afternoons. There’s also a windmill that generates the power that runs their computers.

We had a quiet dinner with the people who live here (all the food is vegetarian, grown either on the property or on nearby farms), spent a little time singing together in the dining hall, and then went to bed. It is surprisingly cool here. We’re at 3,000 feet and I needed a blanket to stay warm. After breakfast this morning some of us did yoga together and others walked the trails that branch out into the forest (I explored the area of farmland that spills down to the small lake, and it was on that walk that I spotted one of the small temples I referred to earlier). At 11:00 this morning we gathered for our first extended discussion with two of the principles behind Navadarshanam ,T. S. Ananthu and Om Bagaria. You can read on their website details of how the place came into being, but essentially it grew out of a study group centered in Delhi in the 1970s, people mostly in technological or scientific fields (Ananthu worked for Xerox and Om is a mechanical engineer) who were interested in governmental change. Although some of the structural changes they wanted finally did occur, they found themselves increasingly disenchanted with the direction of contemporary commercial and technological development and finally made a commitment to try their hand at creating a self-sustaining community based on Gandhian principles, and so they bought this fallow, over-grazed land very cheaply and set to work partly doing nothing so that the forest would return (it has, in dramatic fashion), building the facilities and small scale infrastructure for power I described above, and beginning to farm organically. Early on they had trouble with herds of elephants who would plunder their potatoes, so they put up an electrical fence around the property to keep them out. Apparently an occasional panther can wander onto the property.

Our discussion this first morning focused on Gandhi’s critique of modern civilization in his controversial 1909 book, Hind Swaraj. Ananthu presented his own sense of what Gandhi was getting at in the book, and the ways in which his arguments are connected to the community here. Those who founded Navadarshanam, of course, share Gandhi’s critique of modernity, partly because of their feeling that modern industrial society produces alienated people whose spiritual lives are undone by an increasing preoccupation with a market-driven desire for material possession, and partly because at the rate we’re going such a society is simply not sustainable world wide given the drainage of natural resources and the environmental pollution it produces. Their point was that even if only China and India succeed in creating a level of consumption like that we currently have in the U.S., the world will run out of resources quite quickly. It’s hard to argue with this analysis. The question, however, is what’s to be done about the problem. The general Gandhian answer, keeping in mind there are different versions, is to scale back radically on cycles of production and consumption, shifting away from material production and acquisition and the technologies and machinery that supports them toward a scale of production that is much more austere, local, and egalitarian. Their vision for India in particular, as I’ve said before, is to revitalize the villages (70% of the Indian population is rural) along Gandhian lines and to abandon the modernization and industrialization characteristic of India’s urban areas (which they often see quite understandably as the imposition of an alien culture on a country with a 4,000 year old history of rich cultural practices). For them, these modern cities are homogenous and unsustainable, and so the village, where most people live still, is the most attractive option. As I’ve said before, it still is not clear to me what future, if any, the Gandhians see for the city. Some keep telling me there’s no reason cities have to disappear, but I haven’t heard anything like a plan for India from any of them that deals systematically with the problem of urban areas other than a focus on the village as an alternative, which seems to suggest an embrace of Gandhi’s desire at independence that people move back to the villages. Again, I keep hearing this isn’t the case, but absent any large scale plan for dealing with urban areas as well, it too often seems like it is. When I brought this question up at Navadarshanam the assumption seemed to be that cities like Bangalore would soon enter a period of crisis and finally collapse of their own weight.

My own problem with this Gandhian vision has less to do with their analysis of the effects of development and modernization, which certainly are long past needing to be scaled back, made more socially and economically just, and more environmentally friendly, than with their wholesale rejection of modern culture and the extent to which their prescriptions for change are completely focused on revitalizing the village to support an austere lifestyle centered on the local production of food, clothing, and shelter. Such a revitalization, I believe, is crucially important for villages and those who want to live in them, and so the methods of organic farming and the environmentally friendly production of power advocated by the Gandhians are, to my mind, fundamentally sound. But I don’t believe modernity and the culture it has spawned in cities and suburbs is going to go away, and without some kind of structured and systematic attention to the problems there, we aren’t going to solve the systemic problems the Gandhians rightly call our attention to. I believe no matter how appealing you can make farming and spinning cotton young people are going to continue to want more than that, more variety in the lives they live and the jobs they do. Cities are going to continue to attract people and we’re going to have to find a way to make urban life in them sustainable along with improving life in the village. I don’t see the masses who live in cities suddenly deciding any time soon that they want to go back to living in villages (the trend is the other way), and no Gandhian I’ve talked to has suggested the most un-Gandhian solution of forcing people back to villages. So, we’re stuck, for better or worse, with large urban centers and the cultures they’re producing (I’m committed, by the way, to the idea that cultures are fluid and changing, not only urban ones in the U.S. and the West, but Indian culture as well, which has changed dramatically in 4,000 or so years). It seems to me the only viable option, then, is to regulate growth, production, consumption, and pollution aggressively in urban areas, and to move away from our dependence on oil and toward sustainable and renewable power. Gandhian principles can be central to that effort, but I haven’t heard many Gandhians talking about this in our meetings, as exciting, moving, inspiring, and enlightening as they’ve been.

Frolicking in a Monsoon

2008-07-28T09:04:00.000-07:00

Here's a brief clip I took while we were at the Sevagram Ashram when the monsoons really let loose and a few of us got a little crazy.

For a short post about today in Pune and another video clip from our day in the village yesterday, please see the post below.

Signing Off for a Few Days

2008-07-28T08:42:00.000-07:00

We're winding up our trip in Pune tonight, and tomorrow fly to Bangalore and then head by coach to an organic farm about 1 1/2 hours outside the city. I'm assuming they won't have any internet so you probably won't hear from me again until we get to our hotel in Chennai on, I believe, August 2.

I've posted here a short video clip from our visit to the village yesterday, a brief selection from the question and answer session we had with the village elders. If I have time I'll try to post the longer clip of the music they played for us.

Today we attended a day-long series of lectures, one from an activist who told wonderful stories to us about her meetings with Gandhi as a teenager in the last years of her life, another from a poet who talked to us about some of the differences between thinking of Gandhi as a political leader and thinking of him as a spiritual leader, a lecture on Islam with an emphasis on the distinction between seeing Islam in historical terms and as a set of doctrines and principles (and some discussion of the role of women in Islam, both historically and in our own time), and finally a discussion of Gandhi as a philosopher. It was a full and very thought-provoking day. Wish I could go into more detail here, but I'm shot and have to get up at 5:00 a.m. for the trip to Bangalore. More when I resurface in Chennai.

Bombings in India

2008-07-27T19:30:00.000-07:00

I know most of you are aware of the bombings that have occurred in India in the last few day. This is just a quick note to let you know we're alright. It's a little unsettling to have this happening, especially in a city like Ahmedabad that we just visited. Regarding Bangalore, where there was also trouble, though we're headed there tomorrow we're just driving through on the way to a rural farm, so we won't be in the city. We're aware of the dangers, but they're really quite remote -- flying or riding the crazy autorickshaws is a much bigger risk, believe me.

Life in a Village Near Pune

2008-07-26T19:51:00.000-07:00

Today we had another chance to visit a rural village, this one about an hour’s drive from Pune. We were picked up in the morning by Ashwin Paranjpe, the Principal Coordinator of the Gomukh Centre for Rural Sustainability, an NGO devoted to supporting organic farming among a group of 17 villages nestled in a beautiful valley. When we arrived we were met by the village elders and a swarm of children. The elders ushered us into the spacious Hindu temple off the main plaza of the village that’s also used for town meetings. There we had a chance to hear them talk about their lives as farmers, how the village is structured and governed (the caste system and attempts by the government to overcome the forms of discrimination it sustains are a charged topic in villages like this, we discovered), and to engage in a discussion with them about village life in India and farming in the U.S., a topic they were quite curious to explore. Some of the village children performed songs for us, and the whole group performed a traditional song accompanied by harmonium (which Ted later played) and sitar. This visit was particularly special for me because the elders traditionally welcome groups by presenting a set of gifts to the eldest member of the visiting group. That was me. I was invited up to stand with the group of village elders, and was given a traditional cap and shawl, along with a coconut to symbolize good luck. It was a moving moment for met, and I’ll treasure the gifts. Later we broke up into small groups to have lunch in a village home. Our group had a wonderful meal with a gracious family, a couple, the mother-in-law, and the couple’s two daughters. Language was a bit of a barrier at first but we got past it and had a lot of fun figuring out how to communicate with one another. Indians traditionally sit on the floor to eat, but for us the lunch was spread out on the family bed and we sat in plastic garden chairs. After lunch I asked to see the kitchen and eventually ended up in a little cooking room with an open fire on the floor. There I took a hand at working with the wife and mother-in-law to make roti bread. I failed miserably but had a wonderful time trying. It was amazing to watch the women’s hands at work making the roti. At one point she got to slapping the bread flat on a round little cutting board with a rhythm that got me clapping first, then scat singing. They got quite a kick out of that.

The visit with these people was very special, a chance to sit down with villagers and to talk with them about their lives and how Gandhian principles of self-sustainability are beginning to transform their lives. But they have a long way to go. It is important to remember that the so called “Green Revolution” in the 1980s and early 1990s swept away traditional forms of farming and instituted a whole economy and set of practices based on the use of hybrid seeds, pesticides, and machinery. Though yields go up with this type of farming the cost of transition puts many farmers in debt, the quality of the food produced is low, and worst of all, the environment becomes polluted by pesticides. Organizations like Paranjpe’s are dedicated to helping farmers return to traditional organic methods. Another factor at work here is that traditional crops (grown both for consumption and local sale) have been replaced by sugar cane, a cash crop of now value to the sustenance of local farmers. The transition to sugar cane works like this: large sugar can companies come into an area, build a processing factory, then systematically get each farmer to change their production to sugar can. Soon whole valleys like the one we visited go from producing a variety of vegetables and rice for their own consumption and local sale to the production of sugar cane for the world market.

We had an interesting discussion on a range of topics with Ashwin on our drive to the village. At one point we drove through a bustling commercial district with homes that branched out along streets running off from the main road. We stopped here to buy some bottled water and umbrellas (it rained lightly most of the day). Ashwin commented off handedly that this used to be a very small village but now it was a bustling commercial center, but one that had outgrown the older infrastructure of roads, drains, sewage, etc. that sustained the original village. It was still in place, while the village had grown into a town. I asked him if this growth was evidence of significant economic expansion, and he said that yes, it was, that things really had gotten much better here. The problem is that the village panchyat (like a city council) didn’t have enough revenue or technical expertise to keep up with growth. So, in miniature, this area in some ways represents the India we hear about in the West, a country which, along with China, is supposed to be modernizing rapidly and where economic expansion is roaring along. It often doesn’t look like it as we drive around India, but if we had been in this commercial town 25 years ago we would have seen a small place with little money and few jobs. The expansion here is apparently representative of that taking place in the country at large, but it’s very uneven, and in places like this is happening so fast they can’t keep up with it, so jobs and population growth far outpaces necessary improvements in the infrastructure of the country.

Please click here to see some pictures associated with this post.

Autorickshaw Ride in Ahmedabad

2008-07-26T19:21:00.000-07:00

These little three-wheeled auto rickshaws are one of the main forms of public transport in Indian cities. You haven't visited India unless you've been whizzed around in one of them. You just have to put your trust in the driver and hold on--the traffic is horrendous and zooming around in one of them seems life-threatening, but it works. Here's a short clip of what the ride is like.

Video Clip: Music at Sevagram Ashram

2008-07-26T09:38:00.000-07:00

Here's a clip from a wonderful impromptu concert by staff members at Sevagram. See below for some other videos and a long entry on yesterday's activities.

Cooking at Navdanya II and a Brief Note About Today

2008-07-26T09:16:00.000-07:00

For the first in this series from the kitchen at Navdanya, see the post below. My latest narrative, from Pune, is below these video clips. More news tomorrow when I get back from a visit with my group to a village outside Pune.

Today we met with a lawyer, Asim Sarode, who has devoted his practice to social justice for impoverished people unfairly accused of crimes. A selfless lawyer who rejects high salaries and the pretensions of the legal system here, he does what in the U.S. we call "pro bono" work, but on a systematic scale. Another inspiring person putting Gandhian principles into practice to deal with social issues right now. He is particularly devoted to the protection of exploited sex workers and the whole issue of violence against women in Indian society, as well as working with HIV/AIDS discrimination cases. He's got a group of wonderful interns working with him and has begun to get a lot of attention here and in England. The press attended our meeting, and Madhuri and Katherine were interviewed by a TV station for broadcast tomorrow.

Cooking at Navdanya I

2008-07-26T08:55:00.000-07:00

Navdanya is the wonderful organic farm where we spent a week earlier in the trip. I talked the cook into letting me help out with dinner one night. This is the first of a series of clips I shot while cooking that I'll try to post in the next couple of days. I wish you could smell the food.

Congratulating the Kitchen at Ranjani Restaurant, Delhi

2008-07-26T08:39:00.000-07:00

I'm finally going to start posting my backlog of video clips. This one is from our second night when we got invited back into the kitchen after our meal.

Our First Days in Pune

2008-07-25T22:43:00.000-07:00

Saturday, July 26. We all had a wonderful time at the rural Sevagram Ashram and the surrounding villages, as I reported in an earlier post, but we were also pretty elated to arrive at the Park Central Hotel in Pune, which is air conditioned, roomy, and just on the edge of being a little swanky. Our first afternoon we just enjoyed the hot showers and air conditioning (not to mention the free wireless internet, which, alas doesn’t work in my room so all posting is done in the lobby) and we treated ourselves to pretty competent pizza and red wine at an Italian restaurant not far from the hotel. I felt like I went back to the U.S. for a few hours to recharge.

Pune is very different from the other cities we’ve visited, Delhi and Ahmedabad. The fact that it has sidewalks, which I’ve been remarking to others seem totally absent in India, immediately caught my eye and has become for me a kind of symbol of the relative prosperity and sophistication here. Pune is known as the “Silicon Valley” of India, and you can see the effects of software industry money everywhere in the new buildings, fancy shopping districts, and the abundance of restaurants. This last adds to the city’s cosmopolitan feel. There’s a much wider range of cuisines here than we’ve seen elsewhere, and the city is full of, hip, sophisticated looking young people in western dress. Which is to say the effects of globalization with its general trend toward westernization and homogenization is pronounced. It’s a little too easy to romanticize India (women in flowing saris, orange clad wandering sadhus, cows in the middle of traffic, men in turbans and imams hurrying to mosques, makeshift Hindu temples and cobbled-together commercial districts right out of the 19th-century or earlier) but this India is a little harder to find in Pune, which is westernizing at what appears to be a pretty torrid pace. The city is also one of the intellectual centers of India, which helps account for some of the sophistication and cosmopolitanism I’ve noted. It has some of the feel of a large college or university town. Everywhere there are huge billboards advertising new, luxury condominium complexes marketed as resorts (swimming pools, golf courses, gyms, etc.). They seem indistinguishable from what we’d see back home and caught my attention for the way they underscore the rapidity of modernization here, and the huge gulf between the poor and the young, aspiring middle classes who are being seduced by a kind of globalized style of living that seems rather incongruous when experienced in the context of all the poverty we’ve seen. I suspect, too, that some of these are stand-alone complexes with their own water and power sources. Some even have their own schools. Organic farmers are finding ways to live “off the grid” but so too are these luxury complexes, which I can’t help thinking of as versions of the 21st-century village. But not the kind of village Gandhi had in mind, that’s for sure. Pune in this respect represents all of the changes the Gandhians (or most of them) we've met with on our trip despair over, for the economic effects of globalization in India (as elsewhere) are dramatically uneven, sap resources (and poepole) from the villages, contribute to environmental pollution, and undermine or erase traditional cultural forms and practices.

For a selection of pictures associated with this post, please click here.

Yesterday, our first full day in Pune, was pretty jam-packed, fascinating and moving. We began our day with a long visit to a substance abuse rehab center called Muktangan Mitra. It’s run by Dr. Anil Awachat, a noted writer and social activist. The facility incorporates elements of AA and the kind of programs you can find in U.S. rehab centers but with a Gandhian focus on promoting self-sufficiency (derived in part by Dr. Awachat’s devotion to Thoreau, who of course influenced Gandhi as well). Dr. Awachat, trained as a medical doctor, gave up his professional practice (and his early devotion to socialism) to help set up Muktangan with his wife, and he’s particularly interested in working with people living in villages to promote self-sufficiency along the lines Gandhi advocated. We had an informative meeting with him, and a very moving exchange with a group of around 75 male patients at the center. Some of them told us their own stories about how they became involved in substance abuse, and we were able to ask (and answer) questions in a wonderful give and take. Muktangan Mitra is another in a series of examples of institutions created by people influenced by Gandhi who opted out of mainstream careers to work on behalf of other who are marginalized, deprived, or suffering.

After our visit to the center we had a wonderful lunch at a Persian restaurant Madhuri recommended. It was wonderful, a huge open-air wood and bamboo structure in a kind of tropical setting that was part restaurant, part hookah bar (lots of young people sitting around smoking and just hanging out together), and part jazz club, with huge posters of Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Billie Holiday, and others on the wall. The food was fabulous (I had an Iranian dish, cranberry rice with chicken), and the ambience great. After lunch we went by coach to one of the main tourist sites in Pune, Shaniwar Wada Palace, a huge 18th century fort and palace that became one of the last centers of resistance to the British. The vast array of wood-built structures that formed the palace burned down in 1828, but the grounds and foundations are intact and the huge fortified wall in the front with its beautiful rooms above were wonderful to visit. After I’d seen the fort I walked out to the street and around to the front to get a picture of the whole fort, but I got distracted by the array of sidewalk merchants who were running ingenious little businesses on blankets. There was a woman selling locks, another fellow selling keys who was repairing the lock on a suitcase, jewelry vendors, palm readers and fortune tellers, and, my favorite, a woman sitting on a chair who simply had a bathroom scale sitting in front of her. That was it. A business pared down to the bare minimum. She didn’t care if I weighed myself but she wanted me to take her picture and she whooped with delight when she saw her image on my LCD screen. For me she symbolizes Indian ingenuity and the drive to find a way to get by under difficult circumstances. Again, it's easy to idealize or sentimentalize people like her, but she impressed me, and she seemed just as happy as could be.

Riding the Train

2008-07-25T05:30:00.000-07:00

One adventure you don't want to miss in India is riding the trains, and I've just posted a few shots I've taken from our rides between Delhi and Dehradun. These train rides are a great way to experience India, both because you see so much of the countryside, and because you inevitably get to meet some Indian people, who are wonderfully friendly and curious. Some of these shots are of people in the group relaxing at cards, and there are a couple of shots of Ellen with a youngster who adored her. Then there are the hijra, Indian transsexuals I mentioned in a previous post. Barbara got to talking to them and soon a number of us got involved. I've included a few shots of them. They were great fun, gregarious, spontaneous, playful, open, and as curious about us as we must have seemed about them. You can view the pictures I've posted by clicking here.

Update on Pictures

2008-07-24T05:03:00.000-07:00

It turns out the hotel in Pune has free wireless internet, blogger heaven. And the uploading of pictures to my web gallery seems much quicker now, so I'm slowly uploading a backlog of selected photos. While I'm pasting links to the photos into my previous posts (Jambughoda and Temples and Shrines so far) you can just go directly to my web gallery home page and see the pictures I'm uploading. Newest galleries will be in front. Click here to go to the gallery. The shot above is of me romping in a monsoon downpour yesterday. If I get the courage later I'll post the picture of Paulo and I dancing in the rain . . .

A Note About Pictures and Posts

2008-07-23T22:45:00.000-07:00

It turns out that Apple's introduction of the new iPhone, which also involves a revamping of their mobile software, which is what I've been using to upload my photos, is not going very well and wreaking havoc with my ability to upload photos to my web gallery. I'm trying to upload some now, but it's horribly slow, so blame Steve Jobs (who I normally idolize) for screwing up my photo posts.

NOTE: If you're having trouble finding the posts from Jambughoda onward I published the other day just scroll down to the bottom of the current posts and click "Older Posts" and you'll find them. Just published a few photos from the Jambughoda Palace.

Sevagram Ashram

2008-07-23T22:08:00.001-07:00

This post was written yesterday and comes to you today compliments of free internet access at the Indore airport, where we're waiting to change planes for Pune. I'll try to post pictures later to get caught up.

Tuesday, July 22. When Gandhi left his ashram in Ahmedabad for the Salt March he vowed not to return until India gained it’s independence. He eventually relocated to a very small village called Wardha, near the dead center of India. Having taken a stand in favor of people returning to the village, he felt he ought to follow his own advice. Eventually he founded an ashram and a school, and his mail became so voluminous they had to create a separate post office for him. Sevagram is now a vibrant institution. People come from all over to visit and study, the school was reinstituted in 2005, and there is building going on all around. Sevagram is a kind of living museum, dedicated to the historical responsibility of maintaining the buildings where Gandhi and his associates lived and worked directing the independence movement in the final decade or so of his life, keeping up the ground he walked and the shade trees he sat under. But it’s also a living, thriving hub of activism and education.

We arrived yesterday late morning after getting up at 3 a.m. in Delhi and taking a short flight to the city of Nagpur, making our way in a convoy of jeeps to Sevagram in time for tea and a rest before lunch. In the afternoon we had a long meeting with one of the principal administrators at Sevagram, Shiva Dutta, with the discussion focused on Gandhi’s theories about education and how they are being employed at the ashram’s school, Na Talim , which means “New Education.” Dutta was formally trained in economics and math but decided to renounce a mainstream career and dedicate his energy to the educational mission of Sevagram. According to Dutta, Gandhi’s approach to education was to focus on producing people for the “future, a process that involves growing ideas that can lead to productive, collective change. But the key thing is that the process of education was linked inextricably in Gandhi’s mind to the central importance of the small, independent, self-sustaining village. Peoples’ needs ought to be basic (austerity is the hallmark here) and they ought to be fulfilled by local goods and local labor. Indeed, Gandhi insisted everything villagers need ought to come from no more than 5 km. away. His educational model is linked to this idea by its stress on producing knowledge that has practical use in this context, knowledge that breeds self-reliance, ingenuity, and the ability to understand local conditions and to work with them to produce the basic needs of food, clothing, and shelter. Education at the ashram’s Na Talim is organized around handicrafts, so that knowledge about math, geography, science, and history grows integrally out of learning about how to produce things the village needs. As an educator myself I found this approach to education a challenge to some of my own assumptions, which is a good thing. Here the problem I’ve been productively struggling with the whole trip, how nurturing a simple and austere village life can lift everyone in India up, those who live in rural areas and those of live in cities, and how the life of the village can be made appealing enough to people who find modernity in the 21st century so seductive kept dogging me. No simple answers here, of course.

There are prayers every evening at 6:30 in the evening and again at 4:30 a.m. I attended the 6:30 prayer and, though I’m not a religious person myself, I found it quite moving and relaxing. Hindi, Muslim, and Christian prayers were chanted and in a variety of languages. A man playing what looked like a very simple sitar occasionally played a quiet tune, another person beat time with finger cymbals, and here and there men were meditatively spinning cotton on portable wheels. After dinner we were treated to an informal concert by two of the teachers, one who played the sitar and the other the tabla (drums). Staff members from the ashram joined us and sang along. This was the kind of special experience we’ve been privileged to have on a trip where we’re able to move beyond the tourist sites and have access to people in their homes, offices, villages, etc.

Today, the 23rd, was a very full day. We began with a visit to an ashram run completely by women. It is situated on a lovely spot above a wide, rocky river. The living quarters surround a small farming plot, and many women were working the field or cleaning the property. We heard a wonderful talk by one long-time inhabitant, Nirmal Bhen, who spoke to us about her own spiritual life, the power of the mind and the senses, and her belief that the purpose of life is to experience joy. She defined her life at the ashram as “spiritual experimentation,” and I think we all found her soulful energy contagious. We spent the rest of the day at an extensive center devoted to engineering and scientific innovation. They have a dizzying array of environmentally friendly, sustainable projects, everything from honey harvesting to metal works to paper making to textile weaving and dying. One whole section of the place is devoted to experimenting with toilets that process and purify their own waste materials, either to recycle them into the earth or capture them to produce gas. While we were all impressed with the ingenuity guiding their various projects there were some questions about just how all these projects will directly effect villagers. The textile production section in particular seemed dedicated to finding ways to market fairly high end khadi projects as commodities, a project that one of the directors of the ashram here later told me wasn’t really in accord with its Gandhian commitment to austerity with a focus on the production of goods to be consumed by the villagers.

This again raised for me the question of what relationship there would be in this Gandhian vision between the village and larger urban areas, between a culture of consumption focused on basic needs and one based on the production of new products and services tied to the kind of complex market economy we currently live in. While this predominantly western-driven market economy, and the patterns of consumption it feeds off, clearly isn’t sustainable world-wide, I am still having trouble seeing the “village” as an answer to the overwhelming problems of poverty, environmental pollution, and a crumbling infrastructure I’ve observed all over the country. The Gandhian principles we’ve been learning about, based on a mix of beliefs and practices that are both traditional and innovative and which tap into and thus preserve deep cultural roots, seem promising as vehicles for stabilizing and improving the quality of basic life in India’s villages. But we’re talking here about the basics, food, clothing and shelter, and a system (depending on who you talk to) that seems narrowly focused for reasons both moral and practical on austerity and on staving off the effects of modernization. Yet modernization is everywhere in India, aggressively marketed on billboards and television and realized everywhere in planned communities and building projects both in the countryside and the city. This makes for the kinds of stark juxtapositions only a visitor to India can appreciate, you see poverty and wealth side-by-side everywhere, ox-carts pulling piles of shrubs to feed cows being passed by shiny new cars and dwarfed by gleaming new buildings. Our trip has heavily emphasized how Gandhian principles can help renew and sustain basic life in villages (which make up some 70% of the population), but we’ve seen little to help explain how the quickly modernizing urban centers of India, with their vast slums and decaying infrastructure, can be stabilized and transformed. The challenges are enormous. Opting out of continued modernization and some kind of global system of linked economies (which is going to bring cultural change, but what’s new about that?) seems to me rather inconceivable, but that system needs to be made fairer, more socially just and environmentally responsible, less exploitive all the way round.

I'm Back!

2008-07-21T05:29:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone. Sorry about being out of touch for so long but I've been without an internet connection for almost 2 weeks. But as you'll see below, I've been writing, and I've just posted everything to bring you up to date with our travels and my own thoughts about what we've been doing, hearing, and discussing. If you go down this page to "Jambughoda" and work your way up you can read these posts in chronological order (but see the headnote to the first post, below). Alas, I don't have time right now to upload pictures since we're just passing through Delhi on our way to Nagpur and no more internet for 3 days. But soon after that we'll be in Pune and I'll catch you up with what we've been up to and hopefully post some pictures.

One more thing. More and more these new posts reflect my own thinking about what I've been hearing, my own responses, and my evolving ideas. Of course they don't reflect what others may think, i.e the ideas and opinions below reflect those of the writer and aren't meant to speak on behalf of the group. I just wanted to be clear about that.

Later, Paul

Adivasi Academy

2008-07-21T05:28:00.000-07:00

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS POST IS OUT OF ORDER. It should have been posted below between "Jambughoda" and "Dinner at the Jambughoda Palace." Sorry for the slip up.

Friday, July 11. Gandhi was committed to reviving life in the villages of India, and this, coupled with his sweeping and controversial critique of modern civilization, was a key component of his vision of an independent India. This means that any trip to India to explore Gandhi’s legacy has to include time in the villages and a look at the work of people who are actively involved in helping to sustain and enhance the quality of life in them, where poverty is rampant and the impact of globalization on farming has vastly undercut the ability of rural Indians to grow the crops they need to sustain themselves, let alone to make a living. This means that the economic viability of village life is in a critical state, and the culture of the village is in danger or disappearing. All of these problems are even more acute in tribal areas, where the indigenous people of India (called adivasi, which roughly translates as indigenous) have been marginalized and oppressed under the British, who branded them “criminals,” and even the independent Indian governments, which have been slow to find a way to help insure the economic viability of tribal villages and to find ways to preserve the cultural traditions of the adivasi. Many of these villagers are leaving with the hope of finding work in the cities, adding to the population of slums like those we saw in Delhi and Ahmedabad. Moreover, the state government in Gujarat, where we are, is totally preoccupied with modernization and seems content to have these tribal areas disappear altogether, sucked up into the drive toward urbanization and industrialization.

Ganesh Devy and his staff at the Adivasi Academy (also called the Tribal Arts Academy) have a deep institutional commitment of helping tribal societies to recover and sustain their histories, traditions, languages, and artistic practices, and today we had an inspirational day meeting with Devy and visiting his academy. Devy himself is a remarkable man, having left a successful position as a professor of English literature (he is an eminent critic with an international reputation) to commit himself, initially, to the preservation of tribal languages and then, more ambitiously, to the education of students from the villages surrounding the academy and the creation of a museum dedicated to the preservation of adivasi arts and crafts (though Devy doesn’t like the term “crafts” and rejects the separation of art from life--he underscored in his talks to us both the artistic quality of the objects produced by the adivasi and the link between their art and their daily lives). Devy started from scratch with his project, first by publishing materials aimed at studying and preserving tribal languages, then constructing a museum space on the academy property, then developing an academy or school complete with library and computer resources. He has attracted the attention of both private foundations and the government, successfully developing a solid funding stream for the academy and gaining recognition by the government as a “Center of Excellence.” The academy is wholly staffed by young adivasi men and women who have studied at the academy and taken by Dr. Devy’s passion for preserving adivasi culture and enhancing the economic status of tribal peoples.

During our visit to the academy we had a number of meetings and discussions with Devy about the importance of sustaining and enhancing tribal cultures and the villages where the adivasi live, and particularly of preserving their languages. He talked with us about the archival work the Academy is doing and the educational philosophy he has instituted there (non-hierarchical, decentralized). We saw a short play put on by some of the students that dramatized the history of oppression tribals have faced, had lunch with Devy and his staff, and later heard some songs sung in both Hindi and English by the students (including “We Shall Overcome”). Particularly illuminating for me was the final discussion we had with Devy regarding the influence of Gandhi on his work. Like many Indians we’ve talked to, he grew up with Gandhi as only a dim presence and came relatively late to a serious engagement with his work. Others who have spoken with us were committed Marxists when they were younger or, like Devy, taught literature. Like them he’s wary of making a saint out of Gandhi, approaches him with an appreciative and a critical mind, and seems focused on the practical, imaginative application of Gandhi’s thought for our own time, inspired more by his principles and methods than by a desire to follow Gandhi in some kind of dogmatic or devotional way. For example, he doesn’t have his students spinning cotton every day as is done in some other schools, and he said at one point that if advocating for micro-credit for villages will help them, he’d rather do that than teach everyone how to spin cotton to make their own clothes. I was impressed with the mix of principle and pragmatism he was taking from Gandhi. His contemporary approach to Gandhi seemed consistent with what other speakers had said to us about avoiding thinking of Gandhi in conventional, quasi-devotional categories some acolytes put him in.

Today, by the way, was the first day we experienced India’s famous monsoons. It rained hard the whole day, but though we met outside a good deal of the time we were sheltered from the rain by a series of porticos where we sat. But it turned out it had rained so heavily that the dip in the road leading into the Academy was traversed by a roaring river and we had to roll up our pants and wade through the waste high water to get back to our jeeps. I shot some video but don’t know when I’ll have a chance to post it. Lot’s of incredulity at having to do this, initially, but then it turned into a lot of fun.

Temples and Shrines

2008-07-21T05:23:00.000-07:00

For some pictures related to this post please click here.

Monday, July 21 aboard the 5:00 a.m. train from Dehradun to Delhi. We all got up at 3:00 a.m. today to pack and head off to the train station for our 6 hour return trip to Delhi. Tomorrow we have an early flight to Nagpur, and then we head by coach to the Sevagram Ashram, established by Gandhi during the last decade of his life, where we will stay for three days.

Since some of our lecturers at Navdanya unexpectedly cancelled over the course of the week we had enough free time yesterday to explore some sites in and around the small city of Dehradun, which is a kind of gateway to the hill towns that eventually take people up into the Himalayas. We’d all had a very relaxing and intellectually stimulating time at Navdanya, but there seemed a collective sense of excitement too about getting away for an afternoon and diving back into the maelstrom which is India. We weren’t disappointed. Our first stop was a huge Buddhist temple or “stupa” outside of Dehradun in an area that was predominantly Tibetan. It was striking how quickly the look and feel of people and things changed as we made our way into this district. The temple itself (called “The Great Stupa” at the “Mindrolling Monastery,” at 60 m. high it claims to be the world’s tallest stupa) is immense, a full three floors that constitute areas of worship and meditation, each of which are filled themselves with smaller shrines. The walls on each floor are painted with fantastically intricate scenes from the life of the Buddha. Here and there young monks sat under windows where the sunlight flooded in, deep in study. Others worked to guide tourists through the temple. One was so young I saw him playing with a small green plastic car or toy of some kind while standing watch. A stairway on the top floor leads to a small terrace that rings the top of the temple and provides spectacular views of the outlying buildings, the town, and the countryside beyond. Faded, weathered prayer flags hung in small clusters in the trees, and in the far distance a large swath of prayer flags at least a dozen rows high and 25 yards across flickered in the light breeze. In the farther distances you could see the mountains below the Himalayas, but we weren’t really high enough to be able to see the Himalayas themselves. This was a spectacular place and full of an interesting mix of people, some whom were clearly on a pilgrimage but others, mostly tourists like us, were just curious to visit the carefully tended temple and finely manicured lawns that surrounded it.

After our visit to the temple we made our way back into Dehradun so that some of us could get on the internet and do a little shopping. A chain of clothing stores called “Fab India” has become a favorite destination for a lot of us (women’s blouses, men’s kurtas, pants and scarves), and a few of us spent some time there. They’ve got a big website so just google the place if you want a vicarious shopping experience. At 4:30 we piled back into our convoy of jeeps and headed for what we were vaguely told was some kind of Hindu shrine or monument just outside of Dehradun. We threaded our way through town, then past a forested area where some military training camp was located (a number of security checks here since Muslim/Hindu tensions are high and there have been occasional bombings throughout India), then through a smaller residential area until the road narrowed into a dead end where carts selling colorful devotional items ringed a huge tree wrapped in layers of rope and fabric, at the base of which were a number of small shrines. Vendors cooked food or sold candies and snacks, and the atmosphere was relaxed and festive. At the end of this area was a large gate and beyond that a wide stairway that spilled in a curve to the left down to the rain swollen Tons Nodi river and the Tapkeshwar Temple.

Descending this stairway took me, stunned and literally open mouthed, into another world. On each side of the stairway were small, open-air rooms inhabited by “sadhus,” holy men who wander through throughout India but often reside at the entrances to temples, setting up small but elaborate shrines and asking for money. Some were simply dressed, others were more elaborately clothed in flowing robes and bright turbans. One had his face painted orange and wore a kind of crown, mimicking the monkey god, Hanuman. Scruffy children and old women begged for coins on the steps among the sadhus, and Hindu families taking the day off (it was Sunday) threaded their way down to the shrine or back up to the parking area. Descending the stairway I could see the river and, on the other side, a strip of small structures running from right to left that eventually met a stairway that led to a large shop and restaurant with a broad terrace looking back across the river and up the stairway where I stood. At the base of the stairway and above the river there is a small shrine and a lookout, providing views up and down the river. From here I could see the entire area was comprised of natural caves, one on each side of the river, caves that had been carved out by the flow of the river over the centuries. To my left steps led down to the main temple area, housed completely inside a cave the outer walls of which are painted a light blue. To my right, upriver, a wide walkway led to a narrow set of stairs that took me up to a shrine, and then to the left there is a bride over the river. Reaching the other side I turned left and walked through a kind of grotto, moss covered overhanging rocks dripping streams of cooling water that eventually opened into a vast open-air cave filled with shrines and statues (each of the major shrines has an attendant, and Hindus leave small offerings they have brought with them, or coins and bills). I explored each of these, then made my way down to the river and then up the stairway to the restaurant and terrace. From here I saw that all my friends were on the other side, having gone the other way at the base of the stairs for a visit to the main temple in the largest cave. So after a few minutes taking all of this in I backtracked over the bridge and entered the temple, which consists of a small labyrinth of brightly lit shines (all housed deep in a cave) leading into a much larger interior space where a sadhu waits to bless you and mark your forehead in red. Behind him another man sat in the lotus position on an elevated stand with a bed behind him, incense burning in the shrine beside him. Beyond this man’s platform, inexplicably, was a large, wide office space, which seemed to be the administrative center of the complex. This also housed small sleeping areas. Moving past this space took me back to a narrower path through the cave, filled on each side with shrines and burning incense. Eventually I spilled out again into the light of day above the river and made my way back up the stairway filled with sadhus, beggars, and families leaving the shrine area.

It is difficult to describe without clichÈs the sense of wonder I felt here, especially as I first began to descend the stairway, saw the sadhus on either side of me, and the then the roaring river below and the colorful buildings and shrines in the far distances across the river. I’d seen photos of sadhus before, and the iconography of Hinduism is somewhat familiar to me, as are the small shrines and the imagery you see in them of various Hindu deities. But the collective effect of what I saw, the reality of the teeming panorama before me, the smells, the sounds, the hubbub of movement, the fact of actually being in this place which was real but felt in part hallucinated, theatrical, unreal, was finally a kind of physical experience of the senses. There were moments I just stood there, my mouth slightly open in wonder and my body literally tingling at the sights and sounds. These are the kind of moments when you get jarred out of your body and your everyday, familiar self, when the world turns and resets itself and you enter another place, another dimension of experience. The only thing I can compare it to was the feeling I had marching up the side of the mountain at Delphi, in Greece (where the “Delphic oracle” resides) and spilling out into the large athletic stadium the Greeks somehow built there. At that moment my whole familiar world spun away and I wasn’t quite sure who I was anymore. That’s what it was like here at this shrine. It’s a quite wondrous place, and a striking contrast with the Buddhist temple we’d visited earlier. The temple was monumental, impeccably clean and groomed, sited on manicured grounds and carefully guarded by attendants. It was a site for tourists, and we marched through in the orderly way we were supposed to. By contrast, the Hindu shrine was a place only the imagination over centuries could cobble together, built bit by bit in a river gorge, all haphazard but somehow hanging together. Worn, scruffy, well tended but gritty, and full of everyday people, families, and devotees whose experience there was inextricably connected to their daily lives. We were the only tourists there, from what I could tell, and we were about as far off of our beaten track as we could get. This was another India, at once like the India I expected from travel books, yet unimaginable until I actually found my way to this place.

A concluding note: We just pulled into the first station since leaving Dehradun. We’d had the car we’re in pretty much to ourselves, but there was a large crowd of people waiting to get on, and they poured into our car. Among them were Hijra, the name that has been historically used for transsexual males in India. I’ve read about the Hijra before but it took me a moment or two to realize who these colorfully dressed women taking seats nearby actually were. You can read more about Hijra and the communities they form online. There are lots of sites about them, some with wonderful photo galleries.

Models of Social Activism at Navdanya

2008-07-21T05:22:00.001-07:00

Saturday, July 19. I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’ll call the different activist styles modeled by our last two speakers. It’s easy for me to find Chisti’s style more appealing, but easy too to see why I might want to think critically about that choice. Sharma tends to see the world quite starkly in terms of good and evil. For him the world is a little too neatly defined in terms of industrialism (evil) and agriculture (good), between states and multinational corporations who work in close collusion to manage the flow of cash and commodities and regularly turn to violence to ensure their hegemony, and people who are inherently peaceful, beyond corruption, and are overtly oppressed by the operations of state and corporate colonialism. There are some fundamental truths here, but I find his vision much too simplistic and conspiratorial. I’m attracted more to Chisti’s sense that the world we live in is a mix of the designed and the chaotic, that there is a level of idiosyncrasy to the social, political, and economic structures we inhabit, and that good and evil are spread around in fairly complicated and contradictory ways. It seems to me that in some key ways this vision is closer to Gandhi’s than Prof. Sharma’s, which is for me too doctrinaire and too often based on pat, overly simplified analyses. But, on the other hand, Sharma is much more serious about radical political change than Chisti, and once could argue that his historical analysis of the relationship between state colonialism and corporate colonialism, and what is required to reverse their disastrous effects, is both more comprehensive and politically hard-headed than Chisti’s. Sharma makes it much more challenging to be an activist in his insistence that we need to be “freedom fighters” in the specific mode outlined by Gandhi (including celibacy and non-possession), while Chisti makes it relatively more easy (be yourself, use your energy, be creative, accept that the world if crazy and full of contradiction). Sharma is a political worker, Chisti a cultural worker. If you’re committed to the idea that real change has to be effected politically and that cultural work is in some senses secondary to the primary work of changing political and economic structures, then Prof. Sharma is going to seem the more compelling figure. If, however, you see the political and the cultural as inextricably intertwined and view the whole history of political and economic development over the course of the late-19th and 20th-centuries as more chaotic and less managed than Prof. Sharma does, and if you buy into the idea that cultures and economies are always fluid and changing in ways that make it difficult to identify “pure” cultural forms, then Chisti’s vision of things is going to seem more comfortable.

One striking contrast between the two speakers that underscores the difference I’m trying to get at is that Prof. Sharma was insistent that multinational corporations and industrialism itself had to be eradicated altogether, whereas Chisti sees her artisanal production of khadi as a supplement to mass produced textiles. The two forms of production, in her view, ought to be able to exist side-by-side in a symbiotic fashion. What’s troubling here, of course, is our need to recognize the massive level of worker exploitation and environmental pollution produced by mass market textile production. The whole point of producing khadi is to produce textiles in a way that does not exploit workers and that does no harm to the environment. Prof. Sharma, I believe, would respond by saying right, that’s why the textile industry needs to be eradicated and be replaced by local production utilizing indigenous methods. Chisti, I expect, would respond by arguing that the mass production of textiles is simply a necessity in the contemporary world we live in and that the best approach to reversing exploitation and environmental pollution is through regulation and restructuring, not by a massive and inevitably violent overthrow of “the system.”

Backward Into the Future: Spinning Khadi for the 21st Century

2008-07-21T05:20:00.000-07:00

Friday, July 17. Yesterday it was politics and manure, today it was spinning and textiles. Our speaker for today, Rta Kapur Chisti, is the founder of Ananda Delhi Textile, an organization devoted to the marriage of organic cotton farming and hand spinning in the production of khadi, the Indian textile championed by Gandhi. Gandhi’s vision of “swaraj” or self-rule was centered in part on the rejuvenation of the village organized around the spinning of cotton, which also had the political goal of freeing India from its artificially created dependence on British textiles produced in Manchester. Chisti is hard at work reinventing Gandhi’s kadhi revolution in the 21st century as part of her commitment to what she characterized as “alternative culture,” a movement aimed at developing a positive response to contemporary material culture fueled by globalization. I think of her work as analogous to the slow food movement. This is slow textile in the classic sense of “slow” as a response to the quick mass production of goods under globalization. Her organic cotton, grown here at Navdanya, the spinning done in villages throughout India she coordinates, and the careful vegetable based dying processes her workers use, are wonderful examples of the world-wide return to local products produced by local artisans that is the hallmark of the slow food or slow culture movement.

Chisti’s overview of the production process her organization facilitates was detailed and fascinating, but I was also quite taken with the comments she made about how she came to the work she’s doing and, especially, her attitude toward Gandhi. Like many of our speakers, Chisti grew up as an activist but became disenchanted with what she came to believe was the level of dishonesty in contemporary politics (on both the left and the right). A political science major, she also studied theater. Later, she began to write a column for the Economic Times that profiled craftsman. Through this work she was asked to do a series of profiles of spinners and weavers, turned that project into a book, and eventually became involved in the production of khadi. Her commitment to helping foster a business culture and artisanal practice that resists the practices of the dominant culture seemed rooted in her desire to spend less time writing and talking and more time taking some kind of action. Her metaphor was “getting off the bus.” If you’re dissatisfied with the status quo, how do you “get off the bus?” For her the key is to find something to do that will both make a contribution to social change and allow you to remain “true to yourself.” There are huge parts of the population of India and in countries throughout the world who have no choice. We’re privileged to have a choice about how to channel our energy and our productivity, and for her that choice was to get involved in rejuvenating a dying practice (much like Ganesh Devy has done with tribal languages at the Adivasi Academy, or Vandana Shiva is doing with her seed bank here at Navdanya). Her challenge to us as educators was to get our students to see that they’re privileged to be able to make a choice as well, to educate and energize them, and then to let them go and see what they will do.

About Gandhi she reflected an ambivalence characteristic of many of our speakers, insisting that you can’t “throw him out the window” but you can’t “live with him in the house” either. Her Gandhi was brilliant and comical, idiosyncratic and imaginative, a man who embraced contradiction and lived it. Chisti is much less interested in devotion to Gandhi as a historical figure or as someone whose principles and ideals must be applied in some kind of absolute way, than as someone whose imagination ought to be an inspiration for action in the present. This is a thread running through what for me are the most inspiring speakers we’ve heard, those like Ganesh Devi and Vandana Shiva who have found ways to construct institutions which draw on Gandhian principles to deal with contemporary problems. They have Gandhian imaginations in the sense they’re able to replace the spinning wheel with another object that has both real and symbolic value (tribal languages, indigenous seeds), or, in Chisti’s case, to re-imagine the function of the spinning wheel and the products it can produce for a new century. This is becoming, for me, the most impressive kind of Gandhism. It isn’t doctrinaire and rigid, it isn’t stuck in the past, it isn’t politically smug or self-righteous. This Gandhism emulates Gandhi by deploying his genius for invention and his ability to respond strategically and morally to contemporary problems in imaginative ways.

Politics and Manure

2008-07-21T05:19:00.000-07:00

Thursday, July 16. We were introduced to Navdanya on our first day as both an experiment in organic farming and a political movement, and true to that introduction, our second and third days here have been organized around lectures and discussion about the politics of Gandhism and a hands-on introduction to methods of organic farming. Our speaker over the past two days has been Banwari Lal Sharma, a mathematics professor by training and a life-long political and social activist devoted to using Gandhian principles in the struggle to free India from what he sees as the grip of corporate colonialism under globalization. In his lectures Prof. Sharma distinguished between three facets of Gandhi, the rebel, the inventor, and the liberator. Together these three versions of Gandhi represent for Prof. Lal a model for social and political action in the 21st century. Like most of the contemporary Gandhians we’ve met, Prof. Sharma doesn’t see Gandhi as a static historical figure to be revered, the “father” of Indian independence, but rather, as a deeply moral and inventive thinker whose philosophical outlook and political strategies can be used today to fight against a new form of colonialism related to globalization. As he argued in his provocative final lecture today, India, like other so-called developing countries, is being run on economic polices formulated by organizations like the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, and GATT, groups dominated by huge American run multinationals who have, together, developed policies designed to ensure new markets for themselves, markets that too often undermine local forms of productivity wherever they become dominant. He made a compelling (if, at least to me, not a wholly convincing) case that economic globalization is being designed and run by western multinationals in ways that flatten local economies and cultures of scale into markets for the consumption of mass produced western commodities, commodities produced in ways that pollute the environment and which are uniformly inferior to those produced locally. Prof. Sharma believes nothing short of a revolution against these multinationals and the industries they support is required, a revolution that will liberate India and other developing nations from corporate colonialism. On the one hand, his vision of social change was breathtaking in its scope and a testament to how Gandhi’s thought can help us to confront contemporary problems. On the other, it seemed to me to be unrealistically ambitious in the scope of change it envisioned, and failed to consider the massive level of economic and political upheaval, and, I believe, mass violence the changes he envisions would probably unleash. The other approach to fighting the destructive effects of corporate colonialism would of course be through regulation, sanctions, restructuring, etc., a more piece meal approach to change but one that perhaps has a more realistic prospect of success with a minimum amount of violent upheaval.

The American literary and social critic, Kenneth Burke, once told me that the cure for a few good ideas was digging in the dirt, and the cure for digging in the dirt was a few good ideas. He had a piece of property in rural New Jersey and, when he got tired of theorizing and writing, he would work in his vegetable garden. But sooner or later, while working in his garden, he’d start getting some new ideas and would rush back to his study. The rhythm here at Navdanya reminds me of Burke’s story, because for every every hour we’ve spent discussing Gandhi’s thought and its impact on political activism we’ve been getting our hands or feet dirty becoming familiar with the whole cycle of organic farming, from the production of manure to the cooking of vegetables. Over the course of the past two days I’ve shelled peanuts in the hot sun with my friends, sat outside sifting rice for stones and bugs, trudged through rice paddies and corn fields to listen to the staff discuss experiments in planting and soil preservation, and attended an on-site seminar on how cow dung and water are used, in conjunction with twigs and leaves, to produce manure. I can also explain to you how cooking gas gets produced from cow dung and fuels the stove in the kitchen. And last night I spent an hour with the cooks in the kitchen helping to prepare dinner, chopping vegetables, cooking a few pieces of chapati bread in a frying pan, and helping with the dal (I did a video clip while cooking and will try to post it at some point).

There’s a link, of course, between these two sides of our experience here, for organic farming, is, in a very real sense, a political act, especially when done within the framework of Gandhi’s wider vision of “swaraj,” or self-rule, and “ahimsa,” or avoiding doing harm. Organic farming, as it’s taught here, can be the basis for the decentralized, small-scale production of foods that are healthy, environmentally friendly, and free of pesticides, and thus in a small but important way can be integral to the resistance to what Prof. Sharma characterized as corporate colonialism. This focus on organic farming in a village setting was central to Gandhi’s vision of a liberated India, an India free not only of British colonization but of the grip of modernity itself. Gandhi’s critique of modernity and western civilization was, of course, extremely controversial (Nehru, for example, was quick to reject it), and it remains so, even within our group. What role can villages and small scale farming play in saving a country like India, which is rapidly urbanizing and whose economy is being driven increasingly by industry and technology? Can its economic problems be solved by shifting most people back to the villages where they must be content to farm and to spin their own cotton? What role does the city and urban culture play in a Gandhian vision society? If it does have a role, what kind of balance can be created between rural and urban India in the 21st century? These are questions we all look forward to exploring as we continue with our trip, but there is no doubt that as a a model for small scale, organic, sustainable agriculture Navdanya is a very impressive, even revolutionary place.

In the late afternoon we took a short walk to the nearby village of organic farmers, who are predominantly Muslim (each afternoon the prayer calls from their mosque faintly echo through Navdanaya, along with the “hut, “hut” shouts of the men employed to scare the birds out of the mango trees). There we met with two different families. The men discussed with us their experiences as organic farmers while their children scampered about and there wives stood nearby. If I am able to post pictures from this walk you’ll find them here (I’ve also included a couple of shots from the main road from which we could see the Himalayas in the distance).

Navdanya I

2008-07-21T05:18:00.000-07:00

NEW: Selection of pictures from Navdanya are here.Some of these pictures are of the grounds, a few of us shelling peanuts, and others of people who work at Navdanya, including women working in the rice fields. The interior shots with paintings are of the seed bank.

It’s early evening on Tuesday, July 14th, and I’m sitting on the stone veranda outside my modest room at Navdanya, the biodiversity farm founded by Vandana Shiva, just outside of Dera Dun, a town in the foothills of the Himalayas. From this spot I look across unmown grass, a footpath, a few rows of wide, flat tumeric plants, fruit trees further in the distance, and beyond, in the grey mist skies a faint outline of the Himalays shimmers above the trees. There is a light rain, and thunder in the distance, punctuated by the shouts and laughter of a group of Navdanya staff members sitting under a huge thatched roof meeting room playing a card game called “Uno” with Wendy Brown, a member of our group.

We arrived at Navdanya late last night after a 6 _ hour train ride from Delhi. We had gotten up at the Jambughoda Palace Resort at 4:00 a.m. and driven for an hour to the airport at Baroda, where we caught a plane to Delhi. We had another driver committed to showing off his reckless driving to the Americans. We started off behind the other two cars in our convoys but our driver passed the other two cars and sprinted into the lead as if we were in a race to the airport. Contemporary Hindi Hip Hop blared from the stereo, and we careened through the dark swerving to avoid the dim images of children, adults, cows, goats, and the occasional autorickshaw or truck. At one point I heard the back door to the jeep slam shut and turned to see the driver’s companion crawling up onto the roof. He made his way to the front of the car and swung himself around so that he could wipe the windshield clean, then crawled back over the roof and into the car again. This was all done while we were driving at a good 45 mph. I guess the windshield wipers don’t work and, like I said, these guys like to show off.

We had a nice lunch break in Delhi at a very fancy restaurant in a large hotel. We could have been in Chicago. Most of the patrons of the hotel seemed to be very well off westernized Indians or, perhaps, NRIs (non-resident Indians) visiting from somewhere else. I decided I needed a break from Indian food and had, of all things, pasta carbonara. It would have been a disappointment at home but under the circumstances I loved it. From the hotel we took our private coach to the raucous New Delhi train station, a place I’ve described before that is absolutely teeming with people from all over India, some seemingly carting their whole lives around with them (others seems to have next to nothing, or perhaps live in the station, for there are people with no possessions sleeping on the floor everywhere, and here and there you see the occasional sadu or holy man). A group of men who make their living as porters at the station contracted to carry our bags to the train and store them in the small overhead bins. More than one man carried two full suitcases on his shoulders through the crowded station in the hot, humid heat of the day, up and down stairs and across platform after platform until we got to our gate at the far end of the station. It was quite a scene. The ride itself was quite relaxing. Everyone napped or read or played card games, which attracted quite a crowd of kids. Barbara has now run out of balloons but the kids loved to watch a group play scrabble and hung around long after to chat with us.

The scene at the Dera Dun train station, much smaller than Delhi’s, was quite a contrast. The floors were clean and the place well lit, and where in other stations people were sleeping everywhere and whole families dined on blankets spread with food, pots, and utensils, here people were simply making their way out of the station or onto cars. As we drove from Dera Dun to Navdanya we could see the town was much cleaner and relatively more prosperous than anywhere we’d been before. As we left the town itself we drove through what looked like a very nice, middle class neighborhood of stucco homes with courtyards, parked cars, and verandas. Eventually the neighborhood turned predominantly Muslim and we drove by a large mosque. By the time we settled into our rooms at Navdanya it was nearly 11:30. A long, long day and I slept like a baby under my mosquito net with the fan whirring as fast as it could go. No airconditioning out here.

It wasn’t until morning that we could see what a beautiful place we’d arrived at the night before. We’re in lush foothills, with green and tropical plants everywhere and the sound of birds, many of them, singing nearby and in the distances. The low, redbrick buildings, all single story, are spread around the property so there is plenty of open space. All of the sleeping quarters are small and modest, but each has a large stone veranda that opens out to views of the countryside. We were offered elephant grass tea in the morning before breakfast. For a guy who takes two espressos every morning to wake up it was a shock, and at first I could barely taste anything, but the more a drank the more I appreciated the subtle flavors, and later we were served classic masala chai, which got my system kick started. Breakfast was a delicious mix of hot, whole grain cereals, fruit (local bananas and, of course, mangos) and a potato patty crusted with amaranth seeds. Delicious. At Navdanya everyone wipes off their plates with newspaper sheets into a bin for composting, and then washes his or her dishes.

During the morning we had an introduction to Navdanya from one of its senior staff members, who gave us an overview of the on-the-ground experiments they are doing here with organic farming. He also discussed the social and political advocacy Vandana Shiva and her program are involved in as they urge farmers and villagers around the country, and the Indian government, to modify their reliance on mass produced hybrid seeds and return to the use of indigenous seeds for the production of crops so that the diversity of crops historically grown in the country can be rejuvenated. Where Ganesh Devy is hard at work at the Adivasi Academy preserving, cataloguing, and reviving the indigenous languages of India, Dr. Shiva and her organization are working to preserve, catalog, and revive indigenous seeds in India. Both see their projects in metaphorical as well as practical terms, for in their view the reviving of languages and traditional methods of farming can form the seeds for the rejuvenation of villages and peoples all over India.

Navdanya was described to us as both a “seed college” and a movement. Dr. Shiva told us she thinks of seeds as “the spinning wheel of now,” a vehicle both practical and symbolic for rejuvenating village life and providing swaraj or self rule for Indians. Taking control of seeds away from multinationals driving the hybrid, pesticide driven business of agriculture under globalization by returning to basic organic farming methods is, for Dr. Shiva, like Gandhi’s earlier move to counter the British textile industry’s decimation of Indian cloth production by encouraging the spinning and weaving of local cotton. At Navdanya they keep a seed bank and offer the seeds free to farmers, asking only that at harvest they return a portion to replenish the bank. Most of the planting areas are devoted to various forms of experimentation with soils and planting techniques, all of which are monitored in their laboratory by the staff scientist. Navdanya encourages mixing crops on a single property, part of their commitment to diversity. The educational component of the institution is a mix of lecture and hands-on work. Dr. Shiva’s lecture today was exemplary. She provided a condensed overview of the effects of globalized farming techniques on Indian farmers (who have a high suicide rate—they drink the pesticide when smothered in debt), the positive effects of organic farming, and the success she has had both in getting Indian farmers to adopt Navdanya’s practices and in rolling back at the international level some of the more insidious practices of the multinationals, like Monsanto and Coca-Cola. Be sure to visit their website to find out more about the inspiring work she and her organization are doing.

Art and Heritage Among the Adivasi

2008-07-21T05:17:00.001-07:00

Friday, July 12. This morning we took an unplanned trip at the suggestion of yesterday’s speaker, Ganesh Devy, to a World Heritage Site only a _ hour from hour hotel. The site consists of the ruins (very intact, as you’ll see from the photos) of three early 16th century mosques. It was a rainy, misty morning and we were the only visitors. We explored two of the mosques. The largest, the Jama Masid, had a large enclosed courtyard and a vast pillared area designed for prayers. The layout here was very similar to the mosque we visited in Delhi. The place is inhabited by about a dozen monkeys who had the run of the place, hanging around inside and scampering about the roof and minarets. Adjacent to the mosque was an enormous, very deep well, about 50 yards across. A second, smaller mosque lay about 10 minutes beyond along a very muddy, pool-filled road. Just as we were turning to enter the gate to this mosque a man appeared in the distance carrying a baby goat in his hands. It had just been born and still had the umbilical cord attached. The mother came trotting along behind and we spent a few moments watching her clean the baby off as it tried to figure out how to begin to nurse. A number of us climbed the interior steps of the minaret in this mosque for a panoramic view of the countryside. You could see the minarets of the third mosque in the distance, towering above the forest below.

In the afternoon we set out in three jeeps for a long drive to a remote village and the home of a tribal man whose father is a well-known painter. The particular painting we saw on the wall of what is now his son’s home, is a ritual painting called “Pithora.” As it was explained to me the next day by a man who has dedicated his life to studying tribal practices, when a family has run into some form of misfortune (it might be related to farming, or to personal relations within the family) they may decide to take an oath with the village shaman to have a Pithora picture painted on the wall of their home. This involves a heavy financial commitment on the family’s part. It’s hoped that making this special commitment, which involves an elaborate feast and festival at the time the painting is done, will help the family overcome their misfortune. There are accomplished Pithora painters throughout the area, and while historically these paintings have been restricted to village homes and have a specific ritual function related to village life and thus are not “art” in the western sense, more recently they have begun to be produced on sheets of paper or canvas for sale to visitors (or reproduced as weavings). The Adivasi Academy defends this change in its museum statement about the Pithora paintings, insisting there’s a value in having the pictures, and the cultural significance they have for the adivasi, communicated to a larger audience beyond villagers and those who study them. As you’ll see from the pictures I’ve posted of the Pithora we saw, these are intricate paintings that represent animals, spirits, and other key figures in village life. Some sections seem to have a narrative element to them, as with Italian frescos, and the local villagers who took us to see the Pithora painting were able to explain the symbolic meaning of each figure in detail. It was wonderful to see the painting, meet the artist’s son, who has become a painter himself, and to spend time in his home with he and his family.

Dinner at the Jambughoda Palace

2008-07-21T05:15:00.000-07:00

Dinner with Royalty at the Jambughoda Palace

Saturday, July 13. On our last night at the Jambughoda Palace resort we had dinner in the home of the resort’s owner, who on his elegant business card, complete with family crest, calls himself Maharana Vikrimsinh. Vikram is a descendent of royalty, one of hundreds of princely families throughout India who were given authority by the British colonialists to help administer their affairs. The Raj couldn’t have survived without them. These royal families had a pretty good deal under British rule. They lived a rich life, were cultivated and indulged by the curious British, and were able to exercise power in the areas over which they had authority. At independence these royal houses were disbanded in order to make way for democracy, and the families, while able to keep their estate properties, lost specific political power over their villages and, of course, the more general power they derived through being in the good graces of the British. Later, under Indira Gandhi, the financial stipends they had been receiving from the Indian government were revoked altogether. This meant they were left with huge estates but had little money to keep them up. These royals, who must be seen as complicit with Britain’s colonization of India, seemed bathed in a kind of dilapidated nostalgia for the days when they had stature and socialized with British officials. These days are documented in the array of old photographs and prints that cover the walls of Vikram’s large living room. There are regal family portraits and scenes from tiger hunts interspersed with huge, elaborately staged dinners in which the royal family entertained visiting British officials. It look like a pretty even trade-off. The Indian royals get to rub shoulders with the powerful western colonialists while the British get a close up view of exotic Indians. The more I looked at the pictures of these dinners the more connected our own dinner with Vikram and his family seemed to be to the earlier ones documented in the pictures. History was repeating itself as farce. Our little band of American educators in search of Gandhi’s legacy in India had quite improbably taken the place in the minds of our hosts of the British official of long ago. We came baring the imprimatur of the west and all of the trappings of “civilization” it had represented to Vikram, his father, his grandfather, and great-grandfather. To have us in their homes (bewildered guests though we were) somehow replayed those earlier times when their families consorted with western power and bathed in the illusion that real civilization somehow resided with these westerners and would rub off on them.

All of this called attention to the ruined state of the institution to which Vikram and his family once belonged, and the slow but steady decay of the house is a material embodiment of the loss of their stature and their power. Yet you couldn’t help appreciating their graciousness and hospitality (although we were presented with quite a large bill for food and drink at the end of the night, something I doubt happened to the Brits who dined there), and even having some measure of sympathy for their plight. They’re marginal victims of the very colonial system they helped support, attached to their estate and the illusion of their royal status, insistent that the country somehow owes them a living, or at least, ought to declare their estates “heritage” sites important to documenting the history of India and plow some money into their upkeep. I asked Vikram, politely, if he had a job (which I thought might help his family out), but he said no, struggling to keep the palace above ground was a full time job. And his children won’t be off to school in the U.S. or entering the IT sector in Bangalore very soon, for they’ve been called back by their father to help save the estate.

We were able to meet Vikram’s wife and some of his extended family, the most colorful of whom was his uncle, Rana Harishchandrasinji, who in his 79 years seemed to have failed successively at selling petrol at wholesale, running a painting contracting business, raising chickens, and running his own organic farm. He was an elegantly dressed man with huge muttonchops who spoke impeccable British English and spoke as fondly of his days at Cambridge as he did of his attempts to make a living at organic farming, a next to impossible enterprise, he claimed, since all of the surrounding tribal families now had their own land to work. This of course brought me back full-circle to thinking about Ganesh Devy and his work with the adivasi. What an irony that our group spent time being hosted by these two men, the one on the cutting edge of reviving historically oppressed indigenous peoples and trying to help them gain a real economic foothold in a new India, the other consumed in resentment and a decaying nostalgia for the very system that oppressed both the adivasi and himself.

Jambughoda Palace

2008-07-21T05:13:00.000-07:00

(For pictures please click here)

Thursday, July 10. We’re now at the Jambughoda Palace hotel near Tejgadh, far from Delhi and Ahmedabad and deep in the tribal forests of Gujarat. We’ve left the city with its hectic traffic and pollution for clear air and the sound of birds singing in palm trees. Jambughoda Palace is an old estate that has been turned into a kind of nature retreat resort. We drove four hours from Ahmedabad to get here, the last hour of which took us up into foothills and into the forest where people officially categorized by the government as “tribals” are working small farms off the main road. While we passed some of the same kinds of shanty towns here we saw in Ahmedabad the people seem marginally more well off than the urban poor. Some of the homes are stucco with tile roofs, and there are farmhouses dotting the landscape. People were at work in the fields sowing seeds behind cows pulling plows, and others were busy fetching water, keeping house, or selling things by the side of the road (there is a dizzyingly complex network of impromptu roadside commerce everywhere we go) and kids in uniforms were getting off school buses and heading home. These people are working hard to scratch out a very basic living, but the conditions here strike me as better than in the city, for the landscape is beautiful, the flora and fauna are dense and green, and the whole rhythm of life is much more relaxing than anything we’ve experienced before. But the poverty remains stark, the living conditions often bleak and unsanitary.

The somewhat pompously named Jambughoda Palace Resort is beautiful, but pretty funky. The building is stately and has a lot of character, but it’s quite run down, even dilapidated, and the rooms are very basic (no AC, but we’ve got ceiling fans, and the bathrooms are in a tile room out in back of our rooms—you can have a cold shower or fill up a bucket of warm water and dump it over yourself). No one is complaining too much, however. We’re pretty glad to trade AC and hotel rooms for the sound of birds and the absence of traffic noise, the constant din of honking that dogged us in Delhi and Ahmedabad. The grounds are beautiful, as you’ll see from the pictures, lush and colorful, with a large outdoor veranda adjacent to the main house for dining (we just finished a wonderful dinner out there). The Jambughoda is adjacent to a wildlife sanctuary featuring panthers, hyenas, and antelopes. We’re told panthers occasionally roam on the property. I’ll let you know if they do. Tomorrow we head to the Tribal Arts Academy for a full day. See the link on this site for details about the academy, which works to preserve and enhance the culture of the tribal peoples of the area.

This morning before leaving Ahmedabad we stopped for a tour of the Calico museum, one of the jewels of the city. The building and grounds of the museum are beautiful, and the collection of weavings, carved statuary, and bronze work is amazing. The collection is housed in a palace with beautiful marble floors, intricately carved wood inside and out, and a maze of rooms, stairways and terraces, all of which are covered with displays of quite stunning woven work of all kinds, carved statutes and carts, replicas of the interior of royal tents, and bronze works. It’s much too vast to see properly in less than a full day, and we only had a couple of hours with a guide. More an introduction than anything else, but quite marvelous. Take a look at the website if you want to see more since, as I said, photos were not allowed.

I'm Coming Back!

2008-07-20T03:10:00.000-07:00

Hey friends sorry but I've been out of internet range for the last 10 days or so. But've been writing posts and taking pictures and should be able to put them all up tomorrow when we get to a hotel in Delhi. Everyone is well and we've had a wonderful time at the organic farm called Navdanya. Right now I'm at an internet cafe in Dehradun, the small city near where we're staying. We just came from visiting a huge Hindu temple nearby, in a section of the area that's very Tibetan. What a change. More tomorrow, hopefully, when I'll catch you all up on what we've been doing.

Old Ahmedabad

2008-07-09T09:24:00.000-07:00

I’m going to keep this pretty short since we depart tomorrow for our next destination, the Tribal Arts Academy in Tejgadh. This morning many of us took the city’s “Heritage Tour,” which covers sites in the old walled city of Ahmedabad (please click here to look at a selection of the photographs I took there). As usual, half the fun was in getting there, for we finally had a chance to ride in India’s auto rickshaws, those little, three-wheeled green and yellow vehicles you’ve seen in a lot of the photos. They whiz through traffic (harrowing), zigzagging in and out of larger cars, scooters, bikes, and assorted carts. When the aim right at you, they mean business and you’d better get out of the way. But they get you where you want to go, and quickly.

The tour starts at the largest Hindu temple in the city, which was full of worshipers. These temples are colorful affairs, painted in bright colors and with lots of statuary (compared, for example, to the mosques and the Jain temples, which are built of natural, unpainted stone). The old city itself is a maze of narrow streets, alleys, and corridors divided up into discrete sections (the name of which I forget). The architecture is an eclectic mix of architectural styles (Muslim, Indian, Persian, etc.). The areas we saw were mostly residential. The entrances to homes are right on the street and you can see people preparing food, eating, or just milling around looking out at you as you walk by. Take a look at the pictures I posted to get a feel for the facades, which I thought were a wonderful play of structural styles and colors. The streets were filled with people living in the area. We never saw any other tourists, which has been the case at many of the places we visited (its off-season for tourists given the heat, and besides, we’re visiting a lot of places most tourists don’t get to), and we elicited a lot of curiosity, with some people following us for a block or two just to look. We ended the tour at the mosque in the old town, a smaller version of the one we had seen in Delhi, a beautiful place with just a few men lounging by the wash basin or sitting or sleeping among the pillars in the portico. From there we want on by auto rickshaw to a Jain Temple, beautiful again but in its own way, distinct in style from either the mosque or the Hindu temple. You’ll have to check it out online because they don’t allow pictures.

We ended our tour with another harrowing auto rickshaw ride to an elaborate 15th century well that is five floors deep and is an architectural structure unto itself, as long as a building with an elaborate array of pillars and stairways that descend to the well at the bottom, which is now dry due to a low water table. You won’t be able to imagine what this place looks like without the pictures I posted. I wish I had time to write in detail about the really illuminating talk we had later in the afternoon from a woman named Suchitra Sheth, who works at the Center for Social Knowledge and Action here in Ahmedabad. She helped clarify for us the various political debates current in India regarding Gandhi and his legacy, and reported on the important work she and her organization are doing in a state, Gujarat, currently dominated by a rigid and pretty intolerant party of Hindu nationalists (one of our speakers got arrested for saying this, so I hope they’re not reading this blog).

Dethali and The Vidyapith

2008-07-08T10:48:00.000-07:00

Tuesday was a very special day for all of us because we finally got out into the countryside, to experience the village life Gandhi championed. Our destination was the village of Dethali, in the distract of Kheda, and to a school run on Gandhian principles, the Gujarat Vidyapith Rural Service Centre. As is often the case, the journey was nearly as exciting as the destination. The bus ride from the hotel took us through some of the busiest streets of old Ahmedabad, and busy here is way, way busier than it is in Chicago, New York City, or anywhere else. Three wheel auto rickshaws share the road with pedestrians, cars, buses, flat bed trucks, commercial trucks, bicyclists, camels, and elephants. The commercial activity along the sides of the road, which I’ve described before, is mind-bogglingly complex, run out of ramshackle shacks, push carts, stalls, and more conventional spaces like stores we’re used to back home. Many of these are make-shift repair shops, for everything here gets recycled, but these shops are interspersed with food, fruit, and spice vendors, clothing outlets, and tobacco shops. Every once in a while side streets run from the main road back to slums where people are scratching out an existence as best the can in shacks put together from discarded materials. I’ve taken to shooting pictures out of the bus windows with my camera set on the “sport” mode to freeze the movement, and it works surprisingly well. The shot of the three elephants in traffic I’m linking to this post, for example, was taken with my zoom lens from about 75 yards as we whizzed by at 35 mph.

It took a good hour-and-a-half to reach the turnout to Dethali, and after turning off the main highway we drove for quite awhile along a narrow road with rice paddies and small villages on both sides. Women in colorful saris were working the rice paddy fields or washing clothes in streams, along with a few men. Occasionally we passed camels, donkeys, and white spider monkeys, either in the fields on the road. We nearly reached the town when we found out the road ahead of us was blocked or out for some reason, so we had to turn around, drive all the way back to the highway, head up the highway to the next small turnoff, and start all over again. Nobody cared. We were enjoying the ride too much and could have gone on all day. Please click here for pictures of the drive.

Soon, however, we pulled slowly into the village of Dethali. This was the first real village we had seen the whole trip, and it presented us with a rural India magically different from the busy, kinetic ruckus of Delhi and Ahmedabad. People are poor here, the dwellings humble (mud or concrete) and the shops make-shift affairs like those we’d seen by the side of the road, but the pace of things was a world away from that of the city. More about the village later, for we drove right through and into the Vidyapith Institute where our guide had arranged for a tour. Some students from the village attend, but many are sent by their parents from all over India to get a “Ghandian” education, that is, one oriented toward hands-on practice with spinning cotton and growing organic vegetables and rice as well as courses in the traditional academic disciplines. We toured the facilities, met the director, and interacted with students in a number of classrooms. They were a joy to be with, so open and curious, waving, smiling, gawking at us in curiosity. In one room a bunch of kindergarteners began to cry when we overwhelmed their classroom. Some had never seen white people before, and it was too much. Not even Barbara’s balloons would placate them. We finally left them in peace so they could calm down. Another class, full of 9 or 10 year-olds, was giddy at seeing us and they couldn’t get enough of waving and staring. They sang us a wonderful song about the virtues of village life. It was marvelous. Later some of us gathered in the Director’s home to visit and hear one family member play the harmonium. At one point he offered Ted a chance to play, and he did a more than credible performance, with the young man accompanying him on tables. I shot a video of it and will post it some day when I can find the time (videos have been skimpy because they take a long time to upload). Please click here for pictures of the institute.

The school was an inspiring place to visit and it was exciting to see how they put Gandhi’s philosophy into practice. But I really wanted to get back to that village, and finally I decided I would head off on my own and ask the guide to just pick me up when the bus drove out. He agreed, and I headed off, joined by Adam, a great young guy who teaches history at Evanston Township High School and shares my passion for photography. We walked down the driveway to the school, out the gate, across the street, and down into a small field with a path that took us into the village. We passed a woman tending a water buffalo, saw kids with umbrellas playing on a bridge in the distance, and ended up where the road spills into town. It didn’t take long for us to be mobbed by kids and adults alike. You would have thought Brad Pitt and Matt Damon had come to the village. We chatted as best we could, exchanged names, and shared our curiosity about one another. We’ve discovered people love having their pictures taken and seeing the image on the LCD screen, so we did a lot of that. We were invited to stroll up streets and visit with shopkeepers, and at one point it began to rain pretty hard and we ran to the closest shelter along with about 20 other people. This turned out to be a Hindu shrine, tended by a garrulous man who spoke some English. He was eager to have us look in the temple and even blessed us by doting our foreheads with red powder. We chatted with him and the kids who were tagging along with us until the rain stopped, and then we headed down a road adjacent to a beautiful open field with grazing water buffalo in the distance and a huge flock of what looked like white heron nesting in a tree. Please click here for pictures of the village.

Its easy, and of course dangerous, to romanticize or sentimentalize this village and its people. Judged by the standards of modernity we bring to the village they live in economic and material poverty and seem to be scraping out a subsistence living in dwellings that seemed solid but in disrepair, with little in the way of what we think of as amenities, let alone paved streets, sewers, sanitation facilities, etc. Their happiness during the moments we were with them was clearly connected in part to the fun they were having with these curious white strangers (one of whom is 5’ 4” and the other well over 6’—Indians are quite short). Still, life here was to my mind preferable to life in Delhi (certainly in its slums) or in Ahmedabad. I’d choose Dethali without giving it a second thought. The natural beauty of the place, and the relative quiet, is striking, and people here are taking care of their basic needs with dignity. Visiting there was a highlight of the trip.

Jama Masjid and Qutub Minar, Part II

2008-07-07T09:15:00.000-07:00

Last night I posted a quick note about our last day in Delhi and now, on the plane flying to Ahmedabad, I want to fill things in a little bit. Well, maybe more than a little bit. (Please click here to look at the pictures mentioned in this post.) We were met at our hotel in the morning by a young guide hired by our group leaders to take us on a tour of some selected sites in Delhi. We started out by walking around the corner to the metro station, which we hadn’t been in before. I’ve written earlier about the vast gulf in India between the well-off and the poor, indeed, this is probably the thing visitors from the west remark on most when they talk about their time in India. This gulf couldn’t be more stark than when you descend from the hurried, rough streets of Delhi into the wide, clean, marble stairway down into the city’s new metro system, built to accommodate the Commonwealth Games in 2010. Entering the station complex is like walking into a sparkling new mall in the U.S. If you’re from Chicago, think The Water Tower or Northbrook Court. The place is cavernous, sparkling new, and extremely well lit, with small food courts and other services. Because of ethnic and religious divisions in India, particularly between Hindu nationalists and Muslims, there have been bombings and attacks throughout India, and security is much more pronounced than in the U.S. (for example, our plane is currently sitting on the tarmac at a stop half-way to Ahmedabad and military personnel just came on the plane and searched all carry on baggage to make sure no one deplaning left an explosive device on board) so when you descend the escalator to the train you have to go through security, and you won’t see any pictures of the system because cameras and filming are prohibited. The train cars themselves are huge and comfortable, and there are no dividers between each train (they were made in Korea). This is simply a state of the art system that puts every metro station I’ve been in around the world to shame (but to be fair, it is brand new).

When we got off at the stop for Old Delhi we emerged to find ourselves in a narrow little street full of trash, garbage, and beggars. On our right was a Hindu temple built in a little square of the shopping area (indeed, Old Delhi seems to be one big shopping area with residents living above and behind the shops). An old, darkened man with long, stringy grey hair was bathing in a tub adjacent to the temple (the Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim temples all have some facilities for ritual bathing before entering) . You’ll find a few photos of the temple on the web gallery I posted. Leaving the temple we moved through the streets of the Old City, which I’ve described in an earlier post. We stopped to listen to our guide tell us how street vendors put together something called betel, which is a leaf folded over some paste and a seed which people chew on. The betel juice aids digestion but produces lots of saliva, and often the sides of buildings (inside and out) are stained with its juices. Again you’ll see pictures of the betel vendor in my web gallery, along with other shots of the street life along the way to the mosque.

You get to the mosque, an imposing sight from the street below, by walking up a steep, wide stretch of stairs, then through a gate into an expansive and breathtaking courtyard. Here you take in the full sweep of human activity at the mosque, which is not at all like a church where you file into a room full of pews, hear a sermon, sing, pray, and leave. People seemed to be spending the whole day here, lounging around with friends and family in the shade of the walls around the courtyard, washing in the large, square pool in front of the mosque itself, or in the entry to the mosque itself, which is a kind of long, pillared portico of shiny marble. There is space inside to accommodate over 200,000 people, but it wasn’t open during our visit (it’s open for prayers on Fridays). The play of color from the clothing of the worshipers against the cool, marble stones and the muted light filtering in was beautiful (again, see my photos, where I tried as best I could to capture the feel of this space). The play of color against marble, tile, water, walls, and the sky beyond in the courtyard where people were bathing was also quite beautiful. Looking back across the courtyard from the mosque you see a gate, and beyond the gate are stairs that spill down into a huge marketplace below. The mosque, by the way, was built by Shah Jahan (and designed by his daughter), the same Mugal emperor who built the Agra fort and the Taj Mahal (which, I learned from the guide, was an exact replica of a smaller building already in existence—so much for originality).

Our guide was really helpful in explaining the history of the place. We gathered around him in a circle and, as I listened, I began to notice Indians in the courtyard beginning to mill around behind us. Soon we had a very large crowd, 7 or 8 deep, ringing our circle. Young men with cell phone cameras were taking our pictures as we took there’s, another example of how our tourist’s curiosity about Indians, who seem in many ways to look so different from us, is matched by theirs. It’s all relative.

After our visit to the mosque we drove across town to some ruins that were part of the first city of Delhi (according to our guide there have been seven). This complex, called Qutub Minar, is dominated by the ruins of a mosque and a beautiful, quite massive decorated minaret. The mosque was built in part by pillars and stone taken from Hindu temples, a striking example of how the conquering Mugals established their authority. The catch, of course, is that pillars in Hindu temples contain figurative carvings, and these are strictly forbidden by Muslims whose mosques are decorated only with script and abstract designs. How did they deal with this? By scratching out, flattening, or obliterating the images. We spent a lot of time just wandering around this place, which is quite beautiful and was full of Indian families (it was a Sunday) and some tourists. There are some pictures on the web gallery, of course. The place reminded me of the forum in Rome, actually (which for centuries was simply used as a salvage heap for building supplies, especially when Christians took to building churches in Rome, all of which have a variety of pillars that often don’t match and that originally stood in Roman temples and government buildings). The look of the grounds here is very much like the look of the current forum, though on a much smaller scale and done in red stone rather than white marble.

We ended the day at a crafts museum. Our guide, Ranjith Henry (more about this extraordinary fellow a little later, for he deserves a long post all to himself) insisted we go here because we’d spent the whole day looking at monumental architecture produced by the elite ruling classes of India, and we ought to spend some time with art and craft produced by ordinary people in the villages of India. He was right. Although we got there too late to see the entire collection, the carvings (huge and tiny) and tapestries we did see were extraordinary, and the grounds, which contained authentic reproductions of typical villages throughout India, were quite beautiful (tropical, like Hawaii, and at one point we heard a huge peacock scream from atop a towering tree). Quite a sight. Quite a sound.

I’m leaving out the food for the day, a south Indian lunch and a farewell dinner at our hotel, but I’m written out. I’m sure you’ll hear from your friends and family about it. We eat a lot of Indian food because our home is just north of Devon Avenue in west Rogers Park, a very large Indian-Pakistani neighborhood, but the versions of the dishes there we are getting here (especially the uttapams and dosas) are much richer in variety and dramatically better. And of course we’re coming across food we never get there. More on that later in the trip.

Touring Jama Masjid Mosque and Qutub Minar

2008-07-06T10:00:00.000-07:00

Today we had another extraordinary day touring Delhi (we get the weekends off from school!). We visited a part of the old city and were taken for a guided tour of the largest mosque in Delhi, the Jama Masjid. Simply extraordinary. For pictures that tell it all, please click here. We then went on to Qutub Minar, a wonderful site of ruins from a mosque in what was the oldest part of Delhi. There are pictures of this too on the link above. We also visited a crafts museum and had a wonderful final dinner. Tomorrow we're up at 3:00 a.m. to head off to our next destination. If I have internet there I'll keep posting. And I repaired the link to my Agra photos. Please see post below.

Agra Pictures

2008-07-06T09:49:00.000-07:00

Something seems wrong with the link to pictures from the post below. Please try clicking here to access them.

Visit to Agra and the Taj Mahal

2008-07-05T20:40:00.001-07:00

Yesterday (Saturday, the 5th) we took time out from our lectures and discussion of Gandhi and contemporary India to go to some of the great tourist sites near Delhi, the Agra Fort and Taj Mahal (that’s me in the photo, for those of you wondering what the guy who is doing this blog looks like), sites which are about a 2 1/2 hour train ride from Delhi. For a selection of photos I took yesterday, click here. The night before we had a chance to socialize with our speakers and some of their colleagues at a dinner we hosted for them. The talks we have heard have provided us a stimulating and challenging opportunity to discuss some of the crucial problems facing contemporary India, and the dinner provided us a relaxed environment for continuing those discussion. We’ve all found our reading and discussions about Gandhi, his ideas, and his relevance for contemporary India profoundly rich and challenging, and the dinner gave us a chance to extend our exploration. It has been wonderful being able to get to know a range of important Indian intellectuals and activists and, working with them, to consider the paradoxical challenges globalization, economic expansion, poverty, and environmental pollution present to India in the early 21st century.

I say paradoxically because that’s what visiting India and thinking about its growth and its problems is all about. When you visit call centers, drive around parts of New Delhi with fancy new buildings housing transnational corporations, and consider the explosive economic expansion India is experiencing you see first hand where all the talk about this emerging giant (along with China), is coming from. But when you move around other parts of New Delhi, or go to Old Delhi, or visit a town like Agra, and you could be in the 16th century. Shanty towns, people literally dressed in rags living on the streets in makeshift shelters or just sleeping on the sides of the road or the center median, trash piled everywhere and no sanitation facilities, and you understand the economic and social challenges facing the country. Will the wealth developing at the top just naturally trickle down, or does India require dramatic systematic changes instead, changes that will train the unemployed and create jobs to transform India’s infrastructure and redistribute it’s wealth, which is there, but concentrated at the very top. Modern capitalism argues that trickle down will work, but Gandhian principles argue for a dramatic humanizing of the systems of modernity currently ruling India and for social and economic justice to drive change. But how do you convince a county as huge as India to stop simply paying lip service to Gandhi’s importance as the father of the country and seriously consider how his moral and ethical system can be put in service for the good of all? And when this happens how will people deal with Gandhi’s sweeping critique of modernity in a 21st century rolling full steam ahead? Gandhi was committed to the village, to people spinning their own cloth, growing their own food, and living simple, humble lives. How can all of this work in a world of commodification, rapid modernization, technological innovation, and urbanization, the key engines driving development in India? And how will India find a way to be a truly multicultural democracy with the increasing divide between Muslims and Hindus, a divide, by the way, that is not deeply historical but caused by British colonialism, a divide deepening now into fundamentalist nationalisms on both sides? These are some of the vexing problems we’re grappling with on this trip, and it is inspiring to meet with people so committed with social change (some of them have been arrested, beaten, and picketed against, so you can rest assured they are asking the right questions and pushing back against the inequities of the system here).

But back to our trip to the Agra Fort and the Taj Mahal. We went by bus to the largest train station in Delhi, and for me the walk through the station (going and coming) was as dramatic an experience as seeing the Taj Mahal. When you travel abroad by train you not only see the countryside. You travel along side the people who live there, and they come from all classes and walks of life. The Delhi station was packed with people from all over India. They wait hours together for their train and while doing so take out dishes and pots and dine together on the floor of the station, or just fall asleep together on the floor and benches. Beggars of all ages roam through the crowds, men and women pass by carrying huge loads on their heads or pushing impossibly large loads on carts. I took some pictures in the station, so you’ll see.

We started at Agra fort, a massive palace built by Shah Jahan, one of the last of the Mugal rulers of India, who also built the nearby Taj Mahal. The fort is built of red stone but inside has many structures of white marble. It goes on, and on, and on, beautiful buildings, a dizzying array of courtyards, reception areas, and living spaces. The stone work and decoration (none representational, of course, for this is barred by Islam, just beautiful abstract decorations or script—same at the Taj) are amazing, and we had a wonderful visit there. You can check out the pictures I’ll upload to get a sense of the place.

Everyone has seen pictures of the Taj Mahal and knows it is one of the so-called “wonders of the world” but you have to see it (from afar and up close) to really understand why. It is all about grandeur, symmetry, color and texture. The play of these elements, that is, its grand scale, the aesthetic beauty of its symmetry (all four sides are exactly the same and reading left to right or right to left the structures mirror each other) and for me, the muted play of off whites and light and dark greys that create an eerie soft-focus texture when seen from afar, all combine to make the building what it is. The gardens show it off like a great setting for a beautiful diamond. You’ll see from the pictures I upload, but you’ve seen pictures like this before and you really have to be there to appreciate the place. Adjacent to the Taj on either side are a mosque and a palace. They are, of course, identitical, and I found their interior spaces dazzling. As you’ll see from the photos, I got carried away taking pictures of light and shadow (Jay Boersma are you out there?) and architectural details. A photographer’s feast.

In the town of Agra we experienced a more rural India with a remarkably vibrant set of shops, homes, repair facilities, etc. Here you see the same shocking disparity between the well off and the poor you see in Delhi. We visited a marble workshop where we saw craftsman at work producing the kind of work that went into the building of the Taj Mahal. The owner is doing just fine. His children are headed off to elite universities in the states. They may never return, or if they do, they will live in a world very different from those others we saw in the town who are living in shanty towns and make-shift enclaves with no facilities and little to do but try to grind out a living selling this or that or recycling bicycle tires. I wandered alone for awhile in the back streets of Agra and was able to see the people up close. I’ll post some pictures I took on the walk. By the way, I felt totally safe on this walk and others like it. People are very curious seeing this white guy in a Nehru shirt walking around with a camera, but they are wonderfully friendly in their curiosity and happy to have their pictures taken.

This reminds me of an incident that happened at the Taj I’ll close with. As I’ve said before, there are very few Anglos in the parts of India we’ve been going and we elicit a real curiosity. One Indian woman just walked up to my wife and took her chin in her fingers and wiggled it. At the Taj Wendy (she’s the one in the pictures with blond braided hair) was nearly mobbed by a big Indian family who wanted to take their pictures with her. And not just one big picture. Each family member, it seemed, wanted a separate picture. It was fun to watch, and for someone like me who sometimes feels ambivalent taking pictures of the locals on my trips, it was a little reassuring.

Political Demonstration Video

2008-07-04T03:59:00.000-07:00

On our way to visit the NIIT Technologies Call Center outside of Delhi we got stuck in a massive traffic jam due to a demonstration by transport drivers over increased toll rates. I shot a video clip of the demonstration and had a chat with the riot place. I thought readers might find it interesting. I may skip blogging tonight and try to catch up on posting some other video clips I've been meaning to put on the blog.

Another Great Day in New Delhi

2008-07-03T10:17:00.000-07:00

We began our day with a visit to The Centre for Science and the Environment. The Centre is located in the bustling suburbs of New Delhi, but don’t confuse these suburbs with the ones we’ve got in the U.S. We drove for quite awhile (we’re traveling in two mid-size vans, by the way) along a busy, traffic-choked highway to get to the Centre, and on either side nearly the whole way out there was a sea of activity. These highways are crammed in places with small businesses, some in make-shift shacks, others in more established buildings. People are also selling food, drinks, and tobacco off of carts and tiny stalls. These spaces along the side of the road are shared by individuals and families who are literally living on the street. Some rickshaw drivers seem to live and sleep in their rickshaws. Others take shelter under pieces of wood, metal, or tarp that have been cobbled together to provide some shade and a little protection from the rain. Down side-roads and off in fields are whole shanty towns, again a mix of tarps, tents, wood, and metal. These are like little impromptu villages, and the poverty here is stark. You see such scenes repeated all over Delhi. Goats roam the sidewalks, live chickens are for sale in cages, and here and there is a bull, cow, or water buffalo.

For pictures, click here. Most are of street life taken from the bus, but others include the grounds of the Centre and interior shots from the Gandhi museum (see below).

The Centre for Science and the Environment is an important and impressive institution. The building itself is a model of water harvesting, and we started with a tour of how the facility works to re-circulate rainwater back into the soil and for use in the building. It’s a model of self-sufficiency, and the grounds are lush, nearly tropical. The facility is really impressive, but more impressive is work the Centre does to advocate for responsible policies to protect and enhance the supply of water in India. The Centre draws on the basic Gandhian commitment to the local solution of problems and to the use of traditional, environmentally friendly processes for harvesting and renewing water for both farming and consumption (and for avoiding pollution). They’ve been quite successful with the government and India’s Supreme Court in advocating for progressive change when it comes to the environment. We were extremely impressed with the programs they have in place (including the digitalizing of newspaper articles about the environment in India they are beginning to put online on their website).

After our visit to the Centre, where we also had lunch, we went to the Birla House, where Gandhi spent the last 144 days of his life and where he was assassinated. On the grounds we visited the site where he was shot, marked by a simple column housed under a temple-like structure. The house itself contains a museum dedicated to Gandhi’s life and teachings, along with an impressive bookstore. We talked as much about the curatorial style of the place as we did about the substance of what was on display. Downstairs is a very traditional museum, Gandhi’s room as it existed on the day he was killed, and halls and halls of pictures of Gandhi from all phases of his life, with enough text on the walls to keep you busy for a couple of days. But upstairs is a different story. The whole space is a postmodern, interactive multimedia extravaganza. My own view was that this floor was an example of how a mania for multimedia and interactivity can overwhelm the substance of a presentation. Beneath all the bells and whistles the content struck me as, well, banal. But you might check with others and get a different story.

We ended the day with a wonderful visit to the Dilli Haat Crafts Bazaar, a beautifully kept commercial space for craftspersons selling silks, scarves, rugs, artwork, sculpture, jewelry, puppets, a dizzying array of things. We started with some food and drink at a little outdoor restaurant run by Navdanya, a biodiversity farm we’ll be staying at later in our trip (you won’t find drinks like we had in the U.S.—ask when we get back, but think a mix of fruit juice, sweetness, and salt), and then spent a couple of hours shopping. The place mainly caters to the Indian middle class rather than to tourists, though some find out about the place. But there aren’t parking lots of tour buses here, the quality of what’s on sale is impressive, and the prices are pretty reasonable.

Most of the pictures I took today were of the roadside shops and activity I mentioned earlier (the bus rides give us a kind of panoramic view of street life in Delhi and I’ve taken to shooting a lot of stills and video every time we stop). I’ll try to post some of them before I collapse.

Old Delhi

2008-07-02T10:47:00.000-07:00

New Delhi has been great but Old Delhi is where India really takes off for a visitor from the west. We had a wonderful set of lectures today running from 9-5. A very illuminating lecture on representations of Gandhi in Indian cinema by Vinay Lal, a video lecture by the late grandson of Gandhi, and an inspiring talk by Madhu Kishwar, who spoke to us about Gandhi and the question of women's rights in India, and about her work on behalf of street vendors in Delhi, who are subject to oppressive police corruption. The work she's doing is heroic, and has literally put her life in danger.

Lat in the afternoon a few of us took off for Old Delhi and spent a couple of hours wandering through the streets. Check out a selection of my photos here. We were greeted impromptu when we got off the bus by a young one-legged man who hung along beside us for many blocks. This happens regularly to us in Delhi, young men just following us around and gawking. But Madhuri asked him directions at one point and it turned out he spoke very good English. We all took to him and spent the rest of the time letting him escort us around the streets. What a difference that made. I spoke to him for awhile about how he learned English from working with tourists like us. He's a great example of how people scratch out a living here on their own, one way or another. It was wonderful having him along (and of course we all chipped in to pay him for his time). Old Delhi is, as Paulo put it, "controlled chaos." It's hard to avoid cliches here, I'm afraid. Narrow little streets full of shops selling everything you can imagine, but sorted out street-by-street (auto parts, vegetables, spices, candies, jewelry, anything you can imagine buying, all crammed into tiny colorfully lit shops. Rick shaws, motor scooters, bicyclists, and other assorted vehicles roar through the narrow streets swerving and honking but somehow everyone survives. It was a busy rush of a visual feast, sensual really, for the smells were wonderful too, and the noise a kind of crazy music. I wish I could say more but I'm running out of words and internet time! But look at the pictures and tomorrow I'll post a video clip.

Our First Dinner: A Video Clip

2008-07-01T11:03:00.000-07:00

For news about today be sure to see the photos and the post below, but here's a video clip of our dinner on the first night. Amazing food.

New Photos Online

2008-07-01T10:56:00.000-07:00

Hey everyone, I just posted a small batch of photos from today. They're on my mac.com web gallery. Just click here. You'll find shots from our trip to the Gandhi museum (the portrait is of the Director), some shots of workers on the museum grounds, a horse-drawn cart in traffic, photos at the site of Gandhi's cremation, and a few night shots I took after dinner in New Delhi. I've got some video clips but am struggling to find time to post them. Enjoy.

Day Two in New Delhi

2008-07-01T10:22:00.000-07:00

Our group had another fabulous day in New Delhi. We began the day with two excellent lectures on Gandhi, the first by Dilip Simeon on Gandhi’s thought as a constructive response to nihilism in the modern world. He was wonderfully helpful in focusing our attention on how Gandhi’s commitment to non-violence was both a moral position and a political strategy, deeply ethical and brilliantly pragmatic at once. Purushottam Agarwal spoke to us about what Gandhi meant when he invoked the western concept of religion. According to Agarwal “religion” was always a translation of the Hindi concept of “dharma,” which he said meant tradition (rather than fate or belief system). He emphasized Gandhi’s acceptance of all religions but his insistence on elevating the universal truths contained in each over particular beliefs that contradicted those truths. This led to a fascinating discussion of Gandhi in which we considered him both as the “last” traditionalist and the first ethical multiculturalist. Between them the two talks were richly suggestive.

After lunch we headed by bus to the Gandhi museum. The road took us through pockets of poverty much more striking than we’d seen before. We skirted the gates to the old city, which we plan on visiting tomorrow. After a brief orientation by the director we toured the museum, which contains a rich pictorial history of Gandhi’s life, a display of spinning wheels, and a collection of Gandhi’s personal effects. Later we moved on to the memorial site where Gandhi’s body was burned in a funeral pyre after his assassination. Then we drove to the Khan market, a fairly modern outdoor market where we took a coffee break, then shopped (fabric, shirts, dresses, kurtas, etc.). Some of us stayed in the market area for a wonderful dinner at a restaurant serving a variety of Asian cuisines. Another amazing day, one which opened up for me new facets of the city and a deeper understanding of what is at stake in confronting Gandhi’s philosophical writings, his moral system, and his political vision.

I'll try to post some pictures later if I can squeeze out the time.

Our First Dinner!

2008-06-30T19:16:00.000-07:00

First Photos Online

2008-06-30T18:59:00.001-07:00

Please check out my Mac Web Gallery for photos of our first day. As you'll see, I love to take pictures of people, but that off course includes many from our group, and there are some shots as well of streets and buildings in the city. Enjoy.

Our First Day in Delhi

2008-06-30T18:45:00.001-07:00

We started the morning at the Fulbright House where we were welcomed by a Fulbright official, Adam Grotsky, and heard from three Fulbright scholars who are studying in India. Together they provided a wonderful introduction to Delhi, and talked glowingly about their research opportunities in India. Then we heard a brilliantly incisive discussion of “Gandhi” by the scholar Vinay Lal. I put “Gandhi” in quotation marks because one of the points implicit in his talk was that there are many versions of Gandhi and that those of us interested in studying him ought to be wary of the standard-issue Gandhis currently in circulation. He insisted that in spite of the voluminous amount of writing we have about Gandhi we have little in the way of interpretations of Gandhi, critical analyses of his thought that move beyond celebration or condemnation, question traditional ways of categorizing Gandhi, and develop what he called a new hermeneutic approach to Gandhi. It was a stimulating and challenging talk, and we had lots of lively discussion afterward. These presentations were a great way to start the trip.

After lunch at Fulbright House a few of us took our first foray out into New Delhi. My little group walked down a large boulevard to Connaught Place, a huge traffic circle and park with one of the central shopping districts of Delhi. Shops ring the roundabout which is teeming with people, and street vendors are everywhere (selling roasted corn, chewing tobacco, sweets, jewelry, fabrics, and books). Busses, cars, and scooters whiz by in a deafening roar. I’ve seen chaotic traffic in lots of places but nothing like here. There is an elaborate culture of honking in New Delhi, not just “watch out” or “get out of my way” but much more subtle, honking that seems obligatory. The lights turn red and immediately everyone starts honking. If you don’t, it seems you’re a whimp. Any way, at Connaught Place young men began to swarm around us, trying to make friends on some pretext or another and then directing us to shop at some particular place. They were our constant companions, partly because we really stood out as tourists, of course. There are very few, if any, American or European tourists in the city right now, so we really stand out. People gawk at as and take our pictures. Here, we are the Other.

In the late afternoon we toured some of the public buildings of New Delhi, including the Parliament building and the President’s palace. These are at the head of a long mall (as in Washington, D.C.), and at the other end is a monument called India Gate. We headed there next. The Gate is the center of a huge public park with ponds and fountains. Even on a Monday afternoon it was packed with people, and the diversity of India was clear, for Sikhs and Muslims mingled with Hindi, some people dressed traditionally, others in western clothes. For dinner we all hopped in four cabs for a chaotic ride through traffic and construction to an absolutely fantastic restaurant that serves Thali, Rajasthan style. This is a traditional style of food consisting of a dizzying array of small dishes, dals, pastes, bread, rice, etc. (think Dim Sum or Tapas). Truly outstanding. And we got to tour the kitchen at the end of our meal, the hottest place on earth and absolutely teeming with workers. We all walked home together and agreed this first day exceeded everyone’s expectations.

We've Arrived!

2008-06-29T12:06:00.000-07:00

I'm just writing a quick note to let everyone know that our group has arrived safely in Delhi. We had a great flight, very smooth, and we were excited to meet up with Madhuri and Mr. Henry, our travel agent. We're staying at the Hans Hotel in New Delhi. The drive in from the airport took us through a relatively prosperous part of New Delhi lined with embassies and the homes of government ministers. A very wide boulevard built by the British. It used to be the neighborhood where colonial administrators lived but has long since been taken over by Indian government officials and the embassies. There were beautiful parks lining the road and in the traffic circles, with many Indian families out to enjoy the sultry evening.

Tomorrow we have some welcoming lectures in the a.m. and then a chance to see Delhi on our own in the afternoon. The adventure begins!

India's Moderate Muslims See Peril In Growth of Stricter Form of Islam

2008-06-28T12:28:00.000-07:00

Wouldn't you know it. I'm just about to head to the airport when this article pops up on the Washington Post website. I've just had a chance to skim it, but it obviously reports on a significant problem.
More later, perhaps, but gotta call the taxi!

Two Indias, Again

2008-06-23T19:43:00.000-07:00

On Sunday I did a post under the title, "Two Indias" (see below), about the collapse of the agricultural sector and the rise of bling culture in Mumbai. Today's New York Times has another set of articles underscoring the diversity of cultural production in India. "Town in India Rocks (No Use to Wonder Why, Babe") discusses the popularity of Bob Dylan and American rock music in Shillong, an area of northern India that's predominantly Christian. Here, culture is getting transformed from the bottom up among a rag-tag group of Indian rock musicians inspired by Dylan and Pink Floyd. The other article, "Bollywood Goes to Hollywood, Seeking Bargains," reports that "Reliance Entertainment, part of an Indian conglomerate controlled by the telecommunications and finance mogul Anil Ambani, is in talks to finance Steven Spielberg and David Geffen in a new venture. The company has also recently signed production deals with several Hollywood directors like Jay Roach and Chris Columbus and stars like Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Jim Carrey." The article about rock music charts the conventional flow of culture from the "center" to the "periphery," from the west to the rest, but the second article suggests that flow is about to reverse as Bollywood moguls begin to invest in Hollywood. These two articles suggest that musical culture in India continues to be influenced by western culture, but that in the world of film Bollywood is just beginning to exert power on film in the west. Add to this the fact that at the Tribal Arts Academy (see post, below) indigenous cultural forms and practices are being recovered and taught and you can see how rich and diverse the cultural flows in India are.
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Adivasi/Tribal Academy & Bhasha Research Centre, Tejgadh

2008-06-23T07:27:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Madhurai Deshmukh, co-leader of our trip, for sending around "Here, Literacy is Unimportant," an article about Ganesh Devy and the Tribal Academy we'll be visiting in Gujarat. The Academy is part of the Adivasi Academy and is associated with the Bhasha Research Center (see their "India Together" website for more information and news). "Tribal" populations in India are officially recognized by the constitution (as "Scheduled Tribes") and given special support to overcome the effects of past discrimination. According to the article the syllabus at the Academy is an "improbable grouping of nature studies, tribal culture, language and history, art and craft, dance and music, drama and farming. This is the empirical portion of their education that receives no attention in government schools, and one that is valiantly working to reinstate the children's fast-falling indigenous identity."

You might want to take a look at Devy's 2005 article, "Nomads Together," for a discussion of his specific interest in working with nomadic communities, historically designated as "criminal communities" under colonialism. According to Devy, these are "denotified communities," and they "think of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes as far more fortunate."

Two Indias

2008-06-22T07:32:00.000-07:00

Two articles in today's New York Times remind us once again of the economic and social divide defining India. A front page story, In Fertile India, Growth Outstrips Agriculture, reports on the steep drop-off in agricultural production in the wake of the so-called "Green Revolution," a movement critiqued by Vandana Shiva in India Divided (alas, she isn't mentioned in the Times article). The second story, 36 Hours in Mumbai, appears in the travel section. Here you can read about a "populous metropolis . . . bursting with stock-market money, a shimmering art scene" that "has a growing global presence, and young people . . . exploiting their newfound freedoms in dim bars until the wee hours. Indeed, in the city’s more rarefied circles, Champagne is sipped every night and everyone knows everyone, darling." But don't worry, the article features a "Reality Check" tour of the city's slum in case you start feeling guilty about how much you're enjoying Mumbai's bling. I know. How cynical can you get?

Ahmedabad Live In Action

2008-06-21T07:36:00.001-07:00

I've been asked to do a short presentation when we are in India on contemporary life in the city of Ahmedabad (pronounced "emdahbahd"). I couldn't do better than this great video, full of information with a Bollywood frame and just a bit of kitsch.

Gandhigiri

2008-06-18T07:12:00.001-07:00

A few days ago I posted an article about the film "Lage Raho Munna Bhai" winning an award in India as the best popular film. Today I was perusing The Times of India and I came across a headline that included the word "Gandhigiri," a term I'd never heard of (the article is about a former convict on a hunger strike to retrieve his passport and visa--you can read the article here).

It turns out the term "Gandhigiri," used in the film "Lage Raho Munna Bhai," has become something of a phenomenon in India and is routinely linked to the resurgence of Gandhian ideals. I guess I missed this since I don't speak Hindi. The film contrasts the concept of "dadagiri," which is apparently used in India to refer to the use of bullying or force, with "Gandhigiri," which is now regularly used to refer to the use of moral persuasion and non-violence. There's a long entry on "Gandhigiri" in Wikipedia and a host of sites and news reports about this (not uncontroversial) phenomenon. Follow the link below if you're interested in a more in-depth discussion of the "Gandhigiri" phenomenon.

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Murder and the Politics of Class (Or is it Class and the Politics of Murder?)

2008-06-17T16:41:00.000-07:00

With less than two weeks before we leave, I've started to read the Indian newspapers (they are linked in the menu to the right). If you've been visiting this blog you've seen a few postings. I'm trying to follow the political news but for the last week no one reading these papers has been able to miss the media frenzy surrounding the murder a girl named Aarushi, the daughter of a dentist. It's everywhere. I got intrigued with the case because it reminded me of elements of the plot of The White Tiger, a new novel by Aravind Adiga about a driver in Bangalore who cuts the throat of his boss. More about that in a minute. Today Eric Schuster, Katherine's husband, sent me the link to an excellent article on the politics of class in India as it relates to the case. You can read the article, "India's dirty laundry: The murder tearing Indian society apart," by Andrew Buncombe, at the online version of London's The Independent. The article briefly notes the way Adiga's novel intersects with the prejudices surrounding the case.

If you want to read more about the case and how it relates to Adiga's novel (a wonderful book I highly recommend) just click here.

Updated Itinerary with Links

2008-06-17T06:51:00.000-07:00

I've just posted an updated version of our itinerary with links to information about most of the sites and institutions we'll be visiting, and background information about some of our speakers. Click here to see the itinerary.

Thoughts on Vandana Shiva's India Divided: Diversity and Democracy Under Attack

2008-06-15T10:07:00.000-07:00

I found Vandana Shiva’s opening stress on the historical diversity of India wonderfully helpful, particularly her quick historical overview of how the term “Hindu” has morphed from designating a geographical area of diverse populations into a religious and nationalist designation (and the role the British played in the transformation of this term). This puts the contemporary struggle between, in particular, Hindus and Muslims in a helpful historical perspective.
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Modi govt files case against Ashis Nandy

2008-06-15T08:01:00.000-07:00

New Delhi: The Narendra Modi government on Sunday decided to file criminal cases against noted sociologist Ashis Nandy and the resident editor of a national daily in Ahmedabad. While Nandy has been charged for an article he wrote in January, the newspaper had published stories critical of the Ahmedabad commissioner of police. An irate Nandy told CNN-IBN that the state government is taking such steps to silence its critics. “I have been charged with creating animosity between communities for publishing a column. They want to threaten me but they also know that their case has cannot stand against me,” Nandy said.

Jump to News Article

Jump to Nandy Video Interview

Jump to Nandy Commentary that led to charges

Monsoon May Hit Deli Soon

2008-06-13T07:46:00.000-07:00

From today's The Hindu:

NEW DELHI: There is some good news for Delhi and surrounding areas. The India Meteorological Department on Thursday announced that the monsoon could arrive over the Capital and other parts of North-West India well ahead of the normal date of June 29.

Jump to Article

'Lage Raho Munnabhai' Best Popular Film

2008-06-11T11:28:00.000-07:00

From today's Hindu Times comes word that our favorite Bollywood film has just won a major award! Here's what they say about the film:

"Bollywood super-hit film “Lage Raho Munnabhai” by director Raj Kumar Hirani has been adjudged the best popular film providing wholesome entertainment. The film has won the award for revalidating the philosophy of non-violence in a strife-torn world and helping rediscover the Gandhi within the common man. The film also won awards in the best screenplay and best lyrics category."

Jump to Article

Dalit Women Crank Camera to Showcase Life

2008-06-11T11:11:00.000-07:00

From today's online edition of The Hindu, one of India's leading newspapers, comes a wonderful story of how the kind of commitment to biodiversity advocated by Vandana Shiva has become linked to the imaginative use of video technology. Here's the opening two paragraphs:

NEW DELHI: What began as a means of sustenance for poor farmer women, many of them Dalits, in the Telangana region of Andhra Pradesh has over the years developed into a powerful tool for their empowerment to address the issues of sovereignty over land, traditional seeds, nutritious food, natural resources, traditional knowledge, education and health.

More importantly, the women from 80 villages in Medak district, who came together to form grass-roots Sanghams, stepped out of the shadow of ignorance and intimidation and carved for themselves a niche in the challenging area of multi-media. They now wield their own movie/video cameras to tell their stories in their own manner and language.

Jump to Article

Inside Gate, India’s Good Life; Outside, the Slums

2008-06-09T07:21:00.001-07:00

Today's New York Times contains yet another article about India, this one featuring the widening gulf between India's growing middle class and those mired in poverty. The article focuses on the emergence of gated high-rise communities with their own utilities, social services, and infrastructures.

Jump to Article

Royal Care for Some of India’s Patients, Neglect for Others

2008-06-04T06:49:00.000-07:00

Sunday's New York Times carried an interesting article on the unevenness of health care in India. On the one hand, Americans are going all the way to India for top-of-the-line surgery at a fraction of the cost in the U.S., but on the other, poor and working class Indians suffer with sub-par health care and hospital facilities.

Jump to Article

Red, White, Sultry: The Wines of India

2008-06-04T06:40:00.000-07:00

Who knew? According to an article in today's New York Times India has a growing wine industry (Cabs, Sauvignon-Shiraz blends, peppery on the nose, etc.) located not far from two of our destinations, Pune and Bangalore. If you want a break from your seminar reading, take a look at the article (alas, not a word about Gandhian principles being applied to wine making, so perhaps a Satyagraha is in order).

Jump to article

Thoughts on Ashis Nandy's book, The Intimate Enemy

2008-06-02T08:57:00.000-07:00

This is an intriguing and challenging work of postcolonial criticism, although Nandy doesn’t really invoke the term “postcolonial” (see below) and, indeed, has some scathing things to say about postcolonial criticism in the West (criticism he sees as elitist, critics who are in his view “ornamental dissenters” [p. 10] though he doesn’t name names). His focus on the psychology of colonialism is what sets this book apart and what I found most engaging about it. I think it begs the question of what relation there is, however, between the psychology and the politics of colonialism. It seems to me they’re intimately linked and the book could have stressed this more, i.e. the politics of colonialism produces a range of psychologies that feed back into political behavior, so the relation between the two is a little more symmetrical than he suggests. But all of this is implied and the value of the book is how it gets you to think about the relationship between the two.

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Gandhi on YouTube

2008-05-29T10:51:00.000-07:00

There's an interesting 5 part series on the life of Gandhi called "Pilgrim of Peace" available on YouTube. Click here to access the complete set of videos. The image quality is quite good. I haven't watched all the episodes yet, so I can't comment on the version of Gandhi that emerges from the documentary.

"Why Terror"

2008-05-28T09:01:00.000-07:00

I've posted the imaginary exchange between Osama Bin Laden and Mahatma Gandhi that we've been asked to read. You can access it here.

Postmodern Gandhi and Other Essays

2008-05-19T08:20:00.000-07:00

I'm going to start posting some of my musings about the texts we're reading for our trip. Click here for some thoughts on the essays in Postmodern Gandhi.

Welcome

2008-03-15T10:26:00.000-07:00

I'm thrilled to be joining a group of other teachers and scholars this summer for a five-week trip to India funded by a Fullbright-Hays Fellowship. The trip has been generously organized by two Oakton Community College faculty members, Madhuri Deshmukh and Katherine Schuster. Our main aim is to explore the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi's work in India, a project associated with the Peace Studies programs at Oakton Community College and Loyola University Chicago, where I teach in the English department. I want to use this blog to provide links for the sites and destinations we'll be visiting, and later, to post reports and photos from the trip.