Jambughoda Palace

(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!

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

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

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

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

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

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