Journeys to the Edge: In the Footsteps of an Anthropologist

Savoring India Personally

Savoring India Personally Our Itinerant Year The scattering of my anthropology colleagues is one reason our year in India involved a lot of travel. Another is that, even though people treat India as a “country” today, it has long been an entity on the order of Europe. It approaches Europe (minus Russia) in its size; its population is similar, too; it has even greater linguistic diversity than Europe; and, previous to modern times, just like Europe, it has had only two brief periods when empires gave it a degree of political unity. I knew only one Indian state well from direct experience, Tamil Nadu. One can no more visit a single Indian state, and then maintain that one knows the whole land, than one can visit just Bulgaria, or just Scotland, and say one now knows the continent of Europe. The landscapes differ in fundamental ways across India, as do foods, houses, tools, clothes, marriage arrangements, and patterns of worship. Aware of this diversity at the outset, I thought that savoring Hindu culture as broadly as possible would carry me a few steps toward comprehending it. Family travel is not easy in India unless one has a great deal of planning time and a liberal budget. To reduce the expense and difficulty of our moves we bought a car in Calcutta. This also allowed us to schedule trips at our own convenience; we could take routes of our choice, even on short notice, and follow whatever meandering side roads promised to be fruitful. Because there were long waiting lists for new cars, the only one immediately available in Calcutta was a classy little sky-blue Triumph 104 Herald, assembled in India and marketed as a “Standard”—the closest thing to a sports car I would ever own. It would be easy to resell when we left for home. Admittedly, it was small, but with a luggage rack on the roof to hold our three suitcases, it was not too much of a squeeze. We did have one problem with the vehicle. I returned it to the dealer the day before we were to leave on our first long drive, up into the Himalayan mountain range, because a persistent rattle beneath the right side concerned us. The sales manager asked a senior mechanic to go for a spin with me to see if he could pinpoint what was bothering the picky Americans. I had not gone a quarter mile when he turned pale, bellowed “Stop!” and crawled underneath, right there on the street. He emerged with oil in his whiskers to tell me that, when the car had been assembled, the body had been bolted to the chassis along one side, but not along the other. To put it in simple terms, we were flapping. I hate to think what that might have led to as we tooled around hairpin mountain bends! With the car fixed, off we went to Darjeeling, within sight of both the border of Tibet and two of our planet’s three highest mountains— Everest, of course, and Kanchenjunga. We would also visit Bodh Gaya (the site at which Buddhism was born) and the ruins of Nalanda (a vast monastic college to which Chinese monks came in AD 401–410 and 630– 645 to learn the early Buddhist texts). Then there would be Banaras, Lucknow, Agra, New Delhi, and, by air, Bombay and Cochin. We were able to take in numberless palaces, temples, tombs, and monuments, enter a Tibetan lamasery in the Himalayas, drive through the deep forest of a tiger preserve, and picnic privately on the grassy ruins of an early fourteenth-century fort, doing all this as weather and circumstances suited us. Shortly after we reached the midpoint of north India, in Lucknow and Agra, we began encountering language riots. It had been twenty years since India had won its independence from colonial rule; the prearranged time had come to knit the nation together with Hindi, India’s new national language, in place of English. Yet license plates, clocks, signs in railroad cars, and much else still used the English letters and numbers of British days. “Indians must start honoring that which is Indian,” the politicians and students cried. This impacted us when our car’s name and license plates were smeared with tar while I was lecturing at Lucknow University. Although the university’s vice chancellor apologized and sent over a staff member to scrub off the tar, I decided Savoring India Personally...