The Gargantuan Fort at Jodhpur

  After the Venetian splendour of Udaipur, Jodhpur was a rude awakening back to open sewers and rotting garbage, ubiquitous roaming cattle and piles of dung. There was however one imperious exception.
  If you are a fan of the epic architecture of Lord of the Rings (I have a soft spot for it myself....) Jodhpur is the closest representation outside of 3D rendering. The fort here is so absolutely vast that the scale of it defies understanding. Especially when you consider it was built in the desert.
  In comparison it makes the Tower of London look like a shoebox. And despite its muscular and brutal size it is also extremely aesthetic, wrought in the typical Rajasthani Hindu-Mughal hybrid style.
  Rather than witter on I've just included a bunch of photos. Hope you enjoy.

Udaipur, Princely States and the curious nationalism of India

Not my picture! See here:- http://www.tsperspective.com/2011/02/25/dailypics-22511-udaipur-view/

  Indian cities are not beautiful up close. That is one lesson I have learned over here. Dirty, crowded and haphazard is the order of the day - and if you want to appreciate the aesthetic of something you need to take a step back from it. However Udaipur totally explodes this conclusion through being resolutely and resonantly gorgeous.
  This 17th Century city sits on a tributary to a large artificially expanded lake which glints charming deep blue and turquoise in the changing light of day. Ghats cling to either side of this river as it sweeps beneath several bridges and then into the open water. Two palaces rise elegantly up like islands in the lake, while on the hill above the city yet another palace - the pre-eminent seat of the descendants of the last maharajah (great king) - looks out to its waterborne cousins. In the city itself the well appointed Havalis of historic nobility cluster the roads while scented gardens full of lush green, budding yellows and purples are liberally scattered across the landscape. This is a place that can truly hold a candle to the most beautiful cities of the world. Indeed it is of such glamour that it was decided to film Octopussy here - one of Roger Moore's James Bond movies - back in the eighties. I am not sure there is any greater allocade than that. It was an absolute pleasure to explore.

  Also, the history of this corner of Rajastan is an interesting one which raises questions about how India came to be the nation we know today. If you go back two hundered years, before the British had penetrated this far in land, Udaipur was its own fiercely independent city state which in turn was part of the loose confederation of 'Rajputs' - Hindu warrior kings yet greatly influenced by but at war with the Islamic Mughals. There was no notion of an overarching 'Indian Identity' here or anywhere else. Languages ranged quickly from one territory to the next as did ethnicity and religion, and there were far closer cultural similarities with Persia or what would be Pakistan than with southern or western India at that moment.

  When the East India Company did extend it's influence into Rajasthan in the nineteenth century it did not seek to annex these territories outright. Rather the British formed broad alliances which gave them trading monopolies and a control over foreign affairs. Udaipur remained an absolute monarchy which was able to run its internal affairs as it saw fit, although the Maharaja did decide through his own free will to appoint a British first minister (Colonel Monroe) to help with modernisation.
  In 1857 after the First Indian War of Independence (taught as the Indian Mutiny in British schools, but it's India's history so they can call it what they like in my opinion) the EIC was relieved of its executive role and the Indian territories governance inherited Westminister with their existing arrangements. So Udaipur came to the British State as an autonomous kingdom where the British exercise little influence on internal government.
  This state of play persisted to the dismantlement of the British Raj in 1947 where each territory was treated as a separate unit right to the arrangements for transition to independence. In the Indian Independence Act of 1947 three options were offered to each Princely State- to join Pakistan (a Muslim majority state), India (a Hindu majority state) or maintain individual sovereignty.*
  Virtually all of the Princely States - a third of the territory of India in 1947 - chose to join India or Pakistan rather than independence, including Udaipur and the other Rajasthani princedoms, due to the groundswell of nationalism which had its birthing in the late nineteenth century and was spearheaded by Mahatma Gandhi in the 20th Century. Such was the potency of the idea of India's nationhood that the Maharaja (great king) of Udaipur said on the accession to the Union of India that:-

  “Today is a day of which to be greatly proud. India is independent. It brings to fulfilment the 1500 years’ struggle and endeavour of my forefathers. It becomes my holy duty, on behalf of my ancestors, to hand over to the leaders of free India, this cherished and sacred Flame of Freedom to the country as a whole.”

  This was no small offering. For the Maharaja it meant giving up a right to power that had been his family's alone for 1500 years (the Udaipur monarchy was the longest running living dynasty in the world). And his statement makes a manifest destiny argument which contended India was always supposed to come together as a single entity. There is no real historical basis for this view as far as I can see, but such was the fervent  nationalist climate of 1947. It's a curious phenomenon I would like to investigate further, how a vast rainbow of nationalities artificially compressed together by a foreign imperial state can transform into a broadly single coherent identity. I suppose it is something which can be seen in Africa as well, but in India it seems extremely successful as can be seen in the rabid support for the national team at the current Cricket World Cup.

Not my picture! - See here:- http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/2KO_Q7KT-s6uqxl4o7CRXw

*Hydrabad, the largest princedom geographically locked into the heart of India, was the sole exception as it decided to try and maintain independence as it's Nazim (prince) was Muslim and had little sympathy for the Hindu dominated India. However the Indian government refused to accept an independent and Pakistani sympathetic state in the centre of it's territory and invaded in 1947 in an action called Operation Polo. This was resolved in a matter of days and Hydrabad was incorporated into India successfully, mainly due to the massive groundswell of support amongst the Hindu majority of working class Hydrabadis for Indian nationalism.

Holi

     Sunday was the religious festival of Holi, another occasion of pure pandamonium. Hoil, for me, is the key to the spirit of Hinduism. Religion in the West is celebrated as a outwardly solemn event, lead by a priest.in an ordered fashion in contemplative churches. Hindu ritual on the other hand is noisy, it is invasive, it is exuberant, and it goes on for a long time. Chanting, the crush of bodies filing past the temple, dancing, pushing, grasping, praying. And Holi catches all of this and elevates it to a further level.
     The outward concept of Holi is that entire populations of a city arm themselves with a vairety of coloured powders and run around throwing them at each other.  It's a lot of fun and based on the idea that 'God isn't looking' so I am told.

     The specific backstory is a little bizarre. A deamon called Hiranyakashipu was elevated to the positon of invulnerability by Brahma. This privilege eventually inspied him to vanity (quite a big paralell here to Satan in the Biblical tradition) and he wanted to be worshipped instead of Brahma which was wicked. Hiranyakashipu then had a son and a daughter. The son was good and prayed to Brahma, the daughter was bad and followed in her father - therefore evil Hiranyakashipu wanted to kill his son. He attempted this a variety of ways which failed, eventually deciding to burn him on a fire with his sister (the sister was luckily invulnerable to fire so he thought this was a good trick). However Brahma protected the son and revoked the daughter's (called Holika) invulnerability so that she died.
     Why this means you throw around colours is not clear. And it is a convoluted origin I know, but this is the sort of detailed richness of Hinduism that goes right down to the wall carvings of temples which team and overflow with images and deities.

     Sadly there is a bit of abuse of the festival too. While most of the decent sort celebrate Holi with their families many local sex starved young (and old....) men on the street use it as an excuse to grope foreign women. This is done in a sort of good humoured way, as after all 'God is not looking', but I lost my rag as the line was stepped over time and time again with the people I was with. The constant regarding of foreign girls as sex objects by a proportion of the locals gets you eventually. Such is life I suppose.

The Elephant Festival

  On Saturday I headed out with a group of girls I met at the Polo Grounds in Jaipur to the "Elephant Festival". We were pretty excited - the program promised a parade, tug of war, and a game of elephant polo. Upon arriving we were shepereded into rows of seats alongside a pavilion looking out over the polo pitch over the low barrier. It was a cloudy day, not too hot, and the grass was clipped underfoot while green deciduous trees ringed the playing area. The whole setting was reminiscent of the cricket pitches out the back of the school I went to in Hertfordshire, so really quite incongruous with being in the middle of the Rajastani desert.

  The crowd was touristy. Baseball caps and swimming shorts, large bumbags, octogenarians, a liberal spread red sun burn. Two upper class sounding Indians from the tourist office simpered about the entertainment in store for us in the curious subcontinental interpretation of RP, their approach to event announcing seemingly inspired by 1950s Pathe newsreels.

  It was all a bit staged to be honest, and had the tepid air of school sports day so I wasn't anticipating much. Thank God for the elephants. As soon as they turned up the crowd went totally bananas, and a mass pitch invasion took place to get pictures of the ridiculously tarted up big mammals.  Ethically dubious as it is to paint a bunch of elephants and march them round a field for the enjoyment of a bunch of wealthy tourists, it does not diminish how awesome they looked as you can see.

  As it turned out the polo never happened which was a shame, the pitch invasion completely derailing the arranged events, but I think I preferred the chaos of it to the intended spoon feeding of culture that seems to imply a lack of independence of thought and deed on the part of bovine westerners.

Jaipur

     The Pink City of Jaipur was set out in a grid like shape in the seventeent century to make it the first planned connurbation in India. The city itself which is made of a strange powdery sandstone, and the enormous Amber Palace nearby, manage to mix a Persian Islamic style with that that of organic Hinduism - this was due to the intricate relationships forged out of peace and war between the Rajputs (the Rajasthani Hindu kings in this province) and the Mughal Empire (the vast Islamic state which covered much of Northern India).

      One example of this cross pollination of cultures is that the Rajputs would enforce purdah - the Islamic practice of maintaining entire hareems of women in almost total seclusion from the rest of the city. No man, unless very carefully vetted or a eunuch, was allowed to see the women let alone interact with them. This was achieved through the construction of huge intricately carved building faces, latticed and without glass, through which the concubines could sit behind and be able to see the cityscape outside without anyone outside being able to see in.. The largest and most beautiful of these is the Hawa Mahal (the Palace of Winds).

     The people in Rajastan are interesting to look at. There is a tendency to be taller and leaner, with the cheek bones more defined, and a keeness for enormous curled moustaches. The men have a habit of wearing jewllery - including pairs of evenings - and there is a massive predisposition to wear bright colours (Rajasthan means 'land of colours'). Turbans are in bright mixes of different shades while the saris glint and shift in the sunlight, from reds and golds to greens.

Agra, Rickshaw Mecca

As if you don't know....

   India changes you sure enough, but perhaps not in the ways I had suspected. I've been touched by the ideas and clarities of Buddhism, humbled by people's generosity and kindness, awed by the monuments to civilization I have seen, taken aback by sheer scale and diversity of the nation. Yet the single most remarkable alteration is a desensitisation rather than anything more noble.
  Not just to poverty which is ever present, and frankly sometimes frightening to the point where you filter it out. But distancing of yourself extends to basic interaction with the local population. The countless times I have been asked if you want a rickshaw, where you are going, if you want to see a shop, to spare some rupees, to enter this or that restaurant, to see their friend's hotel - this has made me both consciously and unconsciously cultivate a persona. Grim faced, staring ahead, walking quickly, never making eye contact with anyone in the scant hope of being left in peace. It has got to the point where I ignore people completely when addressed, especially here in Agra - the epicentre of India's tourist industry.

The stupendously massive Agra Fort

  And what's alarming about it, probably partly a product of travelling alone, is that it this habit is getting so entrenched that it has started slipping into my normal demeanour. Today in the Taj Mahal I was stopped by a kindly lady in a sari and a Bindi dot who asked if I was depressed. We were inside the grounds, well away from the rickshaw-wallahs and chai vendors, and I realised that I had been walking round this fabulous wonder of the word with a face like thunder, locked in from running the gauntlet in town. It is ironic that while  travelling to see a country I am putting a barrier between myself and it. I don't want that. But the other side of the coin is it is a necessity if you want to do as you intend rather than be constantly waylaid and pressed to purchase things.

Me cycling Amir's rickshaw

  Anyway, I did have a bit of a conversation today with a rickshaw fella. Called Amir, he pursued me down the road for about five minutes. I explained I wanted to walk the 4km for the exercise. This alien concept took sometime to sink in, then he suggested that if that was the case maybe we could reverse roles and I could cycle him in his rickshaw. This struck me as a great idea and it was a laugh, although the rickshaw was hard to control. Eventually we ended up with an arrangement where he sat on the front and steered while I peddled. He took some photos, I got off and gave him some money, we shook hands, I thought we were done. But then he pursued me for around 45 minutes more looking to give me a lift somewhere else,. So I had no option but to ignore him eventually just to be left alone. It soured what had been a jovial and friendly experience and essentially made me feel like a very bad person. Hum.
   Ah well, enough moaning. The Taj is beautiful. Agra fort also huge and impressive. And I have lots of photos, a couple of which are here.

A traffic jam and nine people in a rickshaw. Typical India?

Varanasi, Death City

The Ghat waterfront temples

  Varanasi is the centre of death in Hinduism. It lies on the holiest river in India, the Ganges which is said to run from Shiva's feet, and thus it is held that if you manage to expire here then - murderer, thief or blasphemer - you will go to heaven and escape being reborn as a lizard or a moth. For that reasons thousands of the sinful and contrite stack up in the guesthouses and hostels across the waterfront.
  But despite the presence of death and religion there is no sense of piety, at least in the Western sense. I watched men on three different occasions hitch up their tunics and shit on in the middle of a crowded pavement without warning or ceremony. The alleys are crowded with bulls, chickens, goats, monkeys, and their accumulated effluent and, preposterously, dozens of food stalls. The cars honk, the sellers scream. And at one point while wondering at night I turned to be borne down upon by four pall bearers chanting hymns and jogging in short steps like soldiers. They carried a bamboo stretcher covered in a purple sheet, out of the bottom corner of which stuck a stone dead foot. They marched passed me and as I pressed against the wall the appendage passed within an inch of my nose. The next day I saw a corpse burnt on a pyre of sandal wood.

More temples

   Yet despite the smell and the chaos there is a lot of beauty here. The water front is surprisingly relaxed and spacious, and the ceremonies of puja (prayer) to celebrate Shiva and the river are grandiose affairs with incense and coordinated hand gestures from young apprentice Brahmans (priests). And as the sun sets and you sit on a roof terrace looking over the temples and the ghats you can feel the age of the place in spirit if not in stone.

Puja

Bodhgaya

The Bodha Tree

   One day around 2500 years ago Siddhartha Gautama sat in Bodhgaya and achieved enlightenment and thus became the Budda. Around 250 years later a temple was started the culmination of which still exists in a beautiful and tranquil yet mosquito infested garden. And while the tree is not the original - this was destroyed by a jealous wife of the Buddhist emperor Ashok who she felt paid it too much attention - there is a replacement a mere thousand odd years old.
Bodhgaya and Buddhism is in someways a parallel of Christianity and Jerusalem - the most important pilgrimage site of the faith now located in the land of another different religion. Bodhgaya is an island of Buddhism surrounded by Hindus. The history is that Buddism flowered from Bodhgaya to be exported across the waves and dominate in Sri Lanka, Japan, Burma, Thailand and Korea. Yet India enjoyed only a short period of Buddhist majority, soon wiped away by a resurgent Hinduism and then its marginalisation compounded by invading Islam.
  So the faces you see here in Saffron robes and shaved heads, gripping texts and Apple iMacs (Buddhists as a whole seem a technological lot), are East Asian rather than South. And each foreign Buddhist nation has built it's own monastery (officially atheist China aside) in a charming haphazard of different architectural styles.
  Unfortunately I couldn't go in to see any of them because the monks were universally on strike - something which I did not realise was philosophically possible. The issue apparently was the electricity bill coming out to around ten times what was expected, therefore went unpaid and the juice turned off. Far too much of an affront for these gadgetphiles who locked their gates in response.

The temple

Kolkata and World Women's Day

   As I flew into Kolkata at night the city reared up from darkness. Spidery half finished concrete structures and teaming blinking lights reminded me of scenes from Blade Runner, less the digital advertising hoardings. There was definitely something dystopian about it. This feeling of unease wasn't much helped by the drive through the city to my hotel in a battered 1950s Ambassador, each block we passed containing at least one shell of a building and vast mountains of rubbish piled by the roads. I had booked on the Internet into a place for three times my budget just to have somewhere to stay as I arrived so late. Upon arriving I found the shabby grotty room bore no relation to the one presented on the slick Flash website sadly.

Typical Kolkata...

   However in the morning light the city was not so grim, the people friendly and cheerful as ever, the downtown area split by an enormous green park called the Maidan which gave it an airy feel.  I went to the Indian Museum - disappointing in terms of actual information but in possession of a lot of attractive sculptures including some interesting greco-Indian hybrids, a legacy from those Greeks who stayed on in the Indus valley after Alexander made his way home through Persia. I've included a photo.

A Greco-Indian Krishna statue

   After that to the Victoria Memorial - a palatial mass of white marble set in well manicured gardens. Perhaps the zenith of Raj architecture in India, and a rival of sorts to the Taj Mahal. It has etched in the main hall a laughable pronouncement from the British queen that ""under our rule the great principles of liberty, equity, and justice are secured to [Indians]" Fine words hardly backed up in action, but such was the imperial way. It is hard not to wonder how history would have been different if there had been serious intent behind this lofty statement.

   I found myself to be there on World Women's Day and a talk was held at the Memorial about the position of women in India today. The speakers, three lady professor' were informative as much as they were eloquent. The feminist situation in India on the surface seems positive, an example even. A current national woman President, several state governors who are female as well and leaders of political parties are well represented by women. Indira Ghandi was smashing heads together in Dehli long before Maggie ascended to do the same in Number 10.

   However more generally only about 8% of the seats in both houses are held by ladies, and the near total absence of women on the streets, running rickshaws, acting as waiting staff, running businesses, points towards a heavily male dominated society.

The Victoria Monument

   One speaker, a lady of seventy or so in a red and gold sari and holder of a lecture chair at Dehli, became impassioned as she spoke, clenching her right fist in the air. "We need to take action now. Feminism in India is not just about the ability of women to buy mobile phones and the vote, it is about jobs, representation, liberty, independence!" Her voice cracked and tears formed in the corner of her eyes.
   But there were only about sixty of us in the room listening, and of those only six or seven were women. The struggle seems a long one ahead.

Faith

   The cliche is that Western people come to India to find a faith of one sort of another. Perhaps of the spiritual kind - in Gurus and the colourful pantheon of Hindu gods, in Buddhism and meditation. Or through the more modern notions of exploring ones own psychological landscape, distilling the truly fulfilling from the materialistic baggage of consumer society.
   I certainly haven't achieved either as yet. But I have found a faith of another kind.
   At dusty bus stations you wait surrounded by a wild mix of Indians some in shirts and trousers, others wrapped turbans and traditional dress, and spot small groups of white skinned folks offer up little prayers.
  The driver approaches. His eyes are wild with blood vessels inflamed and red, he is agitated and shouting grabbing tickets and ushering and pushing. Many people end up on the wrong bus. The driver does not care, he is outraged that people complain. You turn to a fellow traveller and speculate glumly about what amphetamines the driver has been taking, how many hours it is since he last slept.
   Bags are flung inside. A crush forms as bodies pile up rushing to grab seats - bookings have little currency you find. You sit, squeezing beside three locals who smile and nod accommodatingly in their appallingly carefree way, and then your gaze lifts trepidatiously to the mountain side far above. To the road you can see precariously tracing 500 ft drops onto rocks. With a jerk the bus sets off.
   The first few times you run this high wire gauntlet it is a disconcerting and nauseating experience. Careering by at 50 miles per hour, honking and turning blindly round corners, needless overtaking on narrow cloud sprinkled highways. Each new corner brings fresh visions of the 5 ton 1952 Ashok Layland bus skimming gracefully out into the open air and descending so very fast.
   For three hours white knuckle ride frays the nerves. The brakes are slammed all too often, the bus slewing to a standstill inches from the blinking eyes of an oncoming trucker. You wave at him, hoping that this show of cheeriness hides your grimace. The bus readjusts, a passing point is found, and you are off again.
   Yet slowly the impetus to be afraid dulls. Your glands cannot offer anymore adrenaline. The beating of your heart settles. You start to find prettiness in those deep valleys below, in the endless undulating views. You learn that the only option is to trust the jittery devil behind the wheel. And soon you find you are drifting contentedly, as the dusk comes in and hazes the mountains now studded with village lamplights. You eat an apple your neighbour gives you.
   Is that not faith? Attritionally acquired perhaps, environmentally induced, but oh so very real. These small paunchy men, with their moustaches and disjointed barking English, hardily surviving poor roads and poor judgement. These men are my gods. I pray to them all the time.

Munnar

   North along the mountains from Periyar is Munnar, a hill station perched in the Western Ghats. Hill stations are places set up by the British in the 19th century for two reasons. The first was to escape the suffocating heat and deadly plague of malaria that claimed hundereds of colonial lives on the plains. The second was to grow vast quantities of tea, the greatest cash cow of all the Empire's commodoties.

   In 1947, with Independece, the British left nearly to a man. The Indian middle classes stepped in and bought the plantations up. The greatest of these was the Tata company, headed by Jamsetji Tata - a native of Kolkata who moved south. Branching out from tea this corporation now makes everything from trucks to mobile phones to televisions. In a post colonial irony it also bought up British Steel (or Corvus as it is now known)..
Munnar is a small town of maybe three thousand people. But over seventeen thousand more live in villages situated in the tea plantations. The women work in the fields for nine hours a day plucking the crop for 715 rupees a week (around £10) while the men work in factories and spraying crops for even less money.
Schools, hospitals and tiny two room houses are provided for the workers by Tata. And while pesticides and modern processing techniques have been introduced the field work is largely the same as it was in the 1880s when the Munnar plantations were first created.
   Against this stasis tourism is slowly promising much larger revenues. And you can see why people are drawn in increasing hordes. The tea plantations and the epic mountainous landscape offer a lush trekking environment. I can't get enough of it. I've been out three times, and between the vegitation, the drama of the hilltops and the colourful smocks and headgear of the workers it makes for an intoxicating combination of nature and a bygone lifestyle.
I'd recommend it to anyone.

Safaris demand early starts if you hope to see wildlife in action - so by 5.30am I was in the jeep with three other folks. The sky was pale gray with mist rising above the deciduous forest.
The landscape was stunning - reminiscent of Scotland, the air cool and mountainous and without tropical vegetation. Our driver was a star too, his eyes spotting far away wildlife while piloting the vehicle that us with our eyes and attention free would have missed. Over the course of the day we stopped to see bison, giant squirrels and monkeys jumping from branch to branch. We came across no tigers unfortunately, or elephants. But tigers especially are a real rarity (one guy I met only saw a tiger after 14 attempts) and wild elephants are a mixed blessing as if come upon individually can become very dangerous.

It was expensive - around 2000 rupees for the 12 hour day - but we were fed well at breakfast and lunch, and went hiking and boating through the park. It was so quiet there, so utterly in opposed to the honking and hubbub of the most of the India I have experienced. I loved it.

All the guides and workers in the park are from local villages and proud of their environment. The national parks are about the only place you don't see piles of plastic and other detritus strewn beside the highways and in bushes.
I got a lot of good photos, the best of which are here. Apparently in Rajasthan I will have a better chance of seeing the bigger wildlife. Ron, one of the people in the jeep, showed me some pictures of a couple of tigers he saw playing the other side of the river. I was very jealous.