Shunya's Notes

Numen Inest

A slideshow of my landscape photos set to music (7 mins).

The Orangutans of Sumatra

In May 2009, Usha and I visited the Gunung Leuser National Park in north Sumatra to see orangutans in the wild. We hired a guide in the gateway village of Bukit Lawang and hiked several miles into a dense primary growth forest. Heavy rain on the previous night made the hike rather treacherous and we had to grab on to branches and roots to go up and down the hilly terrain. But the forest was beautiful, abundant with tropical flora and fauna (some of it unique to the island), rushing streams and animal sounds, and we did get lucky: we saw about ten orangutans on our daylong hike. One middle-aged female—rescued years ago by the orangutan center in Bukit Lawang and reintroduced into the wild—even came down and held Usha's hand! Other primates we saw include gibbons and Thomas's Leaf-monkeys.

The orangutan (“person of the forest”), whose habitat has shrunk to parts of Sumatra and Borneo, has cognitive abilities that rival those of the gorilla and the chimpanzee, the only primates more closely related to humans. Placid, deliberate, and mostly vegetarian, orangutans are known for their ingenuity and persistence, particularly in manipulating mechanical objects, and for their "cognitive abilities such as causal and logical reasoning, self-recognition in mirrors, deception, symbolic communication, foresight, and tool production and use. In the wild, orangutans use tools, but at only one location in Sumatra do they consistently make and use them for foraging, [defoliating] sticks ... to extract insects or honey from tree holes and to pry seeds from hard-shelled fruit." We saw one juvenile male using a stick as a tool.

Here is a slideshow of my best orangutan shots set to music (2 min, 25 sec). Check out some more pictures and a primer on orangutans.

China's Final Frontier

Prospect Magazine has an interesting article by Parag Khanna, who "visits China's remote, rebellious western provinces of Tibet and Xinjiang—and sees how China's government is today bending central Asia to its will." (Thanks, Peony.)

Both Tibet and Xinjiang have the geographic misfortune of lying either on top of resources China wants, or on the path to resources it needs. Texas-sized Xinjiang has the country’s largest oil, gas, coal, uranium and gold deposits, while Tibet has timber, uranium and gold.... Since most of the ethnically dominant Han Chinese are in the east, and most of China’s resources are in the west, this ongoing westward march [of the Han Chinese] is inevitable. And it has meant the wholesale, systematic repression of the indigenous inhabitants by a mix of military, economic and, above all, demographic means. Like the native Americans, the Tibetans and Uighurs have been cornered, corralled and relocated under a system which condescends and harasses at every level. Han Chinese have been taught to think of Tibetans and Uighurs as barbarians, viewing their mission civilatrice today the way American settlers did: they are bringing development and modernity to people and places that have always lacked them.

Indonesia Vacation Break

Indonesia is one of the most diverse countries in the world, with over 17,000 islands spanning one eighth of the earth's circumference, 300 languages, hundreds of ethnic groups, and an impressive history shaped by Melanesians, Malays, Chinese, Hindus, Buddhists, Arabs, Europeans, and others. What region does one focus on for a vacation? After much agonizing, Usha and I have a plan.

Our journey will begin in Medan, the largest city on Sumatra, an island known for its biodiversity and wildlife, indigenous cultures, active volcanoes, coffee, and Srivijaya, the first major kingdom of Indonesia. Medan is comprised of Batak, Javanese, Chinese, Indian, Minangkabau, Acehnese and other ethnic minorities such as Sundanese and Madurese, who have apparently turned the city into a foodie's paradise. Close to Medan is Bukit Lawang at the eastern edge of Gunung Leuseur National Park, where we hope to see orangutans in the wild. We will then proceed to the town of Berastagi and hike up an volcano called Sibayak. Atop the rim and peering into the cone, will we see tell-tale signs of this not-yet-dormant volcano, or will the view be obscured by clouds? Our next stop will be Danau Toba, the largest volcanic lake in the world. We plan to stay on an island in its middle—Pulau Samosir—as big as Singapore and home to the indigenous Batak tribe, who mix Prostestant Christianity with animist belief, ritual, and powerfully emotive hymns.

The action then shifts to West Sumatra, to Padang and the cool and lush region around Bukittingi, ringed by three active volcanoes and home of the Minangkabau tribe, who are Muslim but matrilineal; property and wealth are passed down through the female line, and every person is identified by his or her mother's clan. We hope to hire a local to take us on a day-long hike through the countryside, visiting market towns, old Dutch homes, and soaking in vistas of terraced rice fields and Minangkabau village houses adorned by buffalo horned roofs.

The final leg of the vacation unfolds in and around Yogyakarta, a short flight away on Java island. One guidebook claims that if Jakarta is the financial and industrial capital of Indonesia, Yogyakarta is its soul. It is also the launch pad for Borobodur and Prambanam, perhaps the two most stunning archaeological sites in Indonesia. Borobodur, a colossal Buddhist temple and monastery with finely sculpted panels depicting scenes from ordinary life, was built between 760-830 CE by the kings of the Sailendra dynasty, who sought to recreate Indian pilgrimage sites on Java. Prambanam, the largest and most exquisite set of Hindu temples in Indonesia, is known for its sculptural detail, including scenes from the Ramayana. They were built by the Sanjaya kings between 8th and 10th centuries CE when Hinduism was all the rage. Centuries later, when Islam was introduced by Arab traders, the realm of Hinduism shrank to the island of Bali. At the open air theater near the temples, we hope to see a performance of the famous Ramayana Ballet, Java's "most spectacular dance-drama".

As is our custom, all we have booked are the flights. For the daily journey on the ground, we will have to rely on our wits, guidebooks, and the kindness of strangers. We have packed a mosquito repellent and I will definitely take lots of pictures.

A Treasure Trove of Archival Footage from Around the World

I recently came across a YouTube channel, the Travel Film Archive, with over 300 short videos featuring archival footage from around the world, from the city streets of Trinidad, 1938, to the Ituri Forest in Africa, 1929; from the New York subway, 1905, to the Sahara Desert, 1953, or Sri Lanka, 1932. Much of the footage is silent, with only title frames to describe the location or action, but some is accompanied by documentary style voiceover. One James A. Fitzpatrick, something like the Rick Steves of his day, is a frequent narrator.

The footage itself, along with the commentary, is a fascinating glimpse into the past, a window on how people lived 60 or 90 years ago. We see bits of fading or vanished cultural practices in their local context, from a time when they were still real: Native Americans in Idaho in full feathered regalia, participating in a drumming ceremony; Australian Aborigines painted in white stripes, throwing boomerangs; Alpine Germans carving wood and staging the Passionsspiele; young Tahitian women dressed to pass as their French colonizers; life in a Sinhalese village, when coconut was king and people remained happily unfettered by excessive clothing.

Though the commentary will strike the modern viewer as naive, amusing, or poorly informed about the world (perhaps even offensive), one can't also help but be impressed by the boldness of those who endured the foreign climates and conditions, huge heavy cameras in tow, to learn something about other peoples and produce what's clearly meant to be a mind-expanding educational experience for the millions back home, who would never in their lifetimes have opportunity for such adventure themselves. The power of such films to transport us and bring us the mysteries of the world today is damped by the ubiquity of images and information. But I imagine that in their day, these gems must have gone some way toward enriching the lives and minds of their viewers.

The collection also provides a window on how Westerners (mostly Americans, here, it seems) thought of Others in those days, how little they saw as they looked on so earnestly. What struck me generally, as I watched and sampled many videos, was the way that things have changed as much as they have remained the same.

The full range of videos is definitely worth perusing. Here are a few random highlights that may be of interest to readers of this blog:

Asian Food for Thought

Growing up in India, I ate meat only a handful of times until I left home for college. My mother, a moderately pious Hindu, had a deep aversion to eating animals and wouldn’t allow meat in her kitchen (I also remember her kindness and sympathy towards the ragged animals that shared our city streets: cows, dogs, horses, goats, cats, donkeys, and even occasional elephants and camels). My father was vegetarian for the most part, except when, on rare occasions, he pretended to enjoy a few morsels of meat. I think he did this despite himself, mostly to project the public image of an adventurous, cosmopolitan man. If no one were looking, I’m sure he would have picked a vegetarian option ten times out of ten.

The only times I ate meat was when my older sister brought home a chicken or mutton (goat meat) dish from a friend’s place, or cooked it herself on a Sunday morning on a kerosene stove in our courtyard. When she cooked, my task was to procure the meat. I would bike up to the butcher’s shop and await my turn, squeamishly eyeing the goat carcasses hanging on hooks, and gallantly ask the man for ‘the best cuts,’ to which he always replied, ‘only the best for you, son.’ Washing and cleaning the meat, I felt a strange exhilaration—I saw it not as food but as the flesh and bone of a dead animal, hacked to bits just hours ago. Mother allowed my sister to use only the most beaten down utensils from her kitchen and later instructed the maid to scrub them clean thrice as long.

Still, my parents encouraged us, holding meat to be salutary for growing kids. Their attitude later struck me as similar to Gandhi’s own during his early struggle and experimentation with eating animals. Gandhi saw meat as a contributor to the enviable vigor, material progress, and sturdier physiques of people from the West, while battling his own and his society's traditional dispositions against it.

I was introduced to eating fish and prawns in college. Thereafter, living outside India, I began eating other animals too—cow, pig, turkey, crab, squid, etc. I had non-vegetarian food several times a week and it became a key part of my cooking repertoire—I acquired a bevy of fans for my spicy lamb curry and barbequed chicken. On my travels, I even sampled lobster, shark, snail, venison, guinea pig, and wild boar. But in the ensuing years my meat intake began to decline. I came to relish it less and less. About eight years ago, I gave up eating mammals, and now almost always choose vegetarian. Long live tofu, beans, lentils, and the huge range of Indian vegetarian cuisine.

Marco Polo's India

Returning home from China in 1292 CE, Marco Polo arrives on the Coromandel Coast of India in a typical merchant ship with over sixty cabins and up to 300 crewmen. He enters the kingdom of the Tamil Pandyas near modern day Tanjore, where, according to custom, ‘the king and his barons and everyone else all sit on the earth.’ He asks the king why they ‘do not seat themselves more honorably.’ The king replies, ‘To sit on the earth is honorable enough, because we were made from the earth and to the earth we must return.’ Marco Polo documented this episode in his famous book, The Travels, along with a rich social portrait of India that still resonates with us today:

The climate is so hot that all men and women wear nothing but a loincloth, including the king—except his is studded with rubies, sapphires, emeralds and other gems. Merchants and traders abound, the king takes pride in not holding himself above the law of the land, and people travel the highways safely with their valuables in the cool of the night. Marco Polo calls this ‘the richest and most splendid province in the world,’ one that, together with Ceylon, produces ‘most of the pearls and gems that are to be found in the world.’

The sole local grain produced here is rice. People use only their right hand for eating, saving the left for sundry ‘unclean’ tasks. Most do not consume any alcohol, and drink fluids ‘out of flasks, each from his own; for no one would drink out of another’s flask.’ Nor do they set the flask to their lips, preferring to ‘hold it above and pour the fluid into their mouths.’ They are addicted to chewing a leaf called tambur, sometimes mixing it with ‘camphor and other spices and lime’ and go about spitting freely, using it also to express serious offense by targeting the spittle at another’s face, which can sometimes provoke violent clan fights.

They ‘pay more attention to augury than any other people in the world and are skilled in distinguishing good omens from bad.’ They rely on the counsel of astrologers and have enchanters called Brahmans, who are ‘expert in incantations against all sorts of beasts and birds.’ For instance, they protect the oyster divers ‘against predatory fish by means of incantations’ and for this service they receive one in twenty pearls. The people ‘worship the ox,’ do not eat beef (except for a group with low social status), and daub their houses with cow-dung. In battle they use lance and shield and, according to Marco, are ‘not men of any valor.’ They say that ‘a man who goes to sea must be a man in despair.’ Marco draws attention to the fact that they ‘do not regard any form of sexual indulgence as a sin.’

Their temple monasteries have both male and female deities, prone to being cross with each other. And since estranged deities spell nothing but trouble in the human realm, bevies of spinsters gather there several times each month with ‘tasty dishes of meat and other food’ and ‘sing and dance and afford the merriest sport in the world,’ leaping and tumbling and raising their legs to their necks and pirouetting to delight the deities. After the ‘spirit of the idols has eaten the substance of the food,’ they ‘eat together with great mirth and jollity.’ Pleasantly disposed by the evening entertainment, the gods and goddesses descend from the temple walls at night and ‘consort’ with each other—or so the priest announces the next morning—bringing great joy and relief to all. ‘The flesh of these maidens,’ adds Messer Marco, ‘is so hard that no one could grasp or pinch them in any place. ... their breasts do not hang down, but remain upstanding and erect.’ For a penny, however, ‘they will allow a man to pinch [their bodies] as hard as he can.’

Wade Davis on the Human Imagination

In this beautiful TED talk, Wade Davis, anthropologist, ethnobotanist, National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, author, documentarian, and photographer takes us on a tour through the wild ranges of the human imagination as manifested in the breadth of human mythology and cultural life. As members of the same human family we all share the same raw human genius and imagination, he reminds us, and while some have chosen to apply that to developing technologies, others have applied it to other mysteries of existence. Different ways of life and mythological systems are not failed attempts at being modern—at being us—but merely different human responses to the essential human questions: what does it mean to be human and alive.

"All peoples are simply cultural options, different visions of life, itself.... making for completely different possibilities of existence," he says. And as such, the breadth of human cultural variation is a treasure trove of imaginative insights and knowledge. If we discard our human diversity, we lose a hundred thousand years of accumulated knowledge and wisdom about ourselves and our planet. Modern western culture is hardly 300 years old, he cautions, and it's folly to imagine that in those 300 years we've learned as much as we need to face the challenges of living.

By way of example, he tells us about—and treats us to some stunning photography of—several completely different indigenous cultures from around the globe, including the following:

Polynesians, who can read wave patterns the way a forensic scientist reads fingerprints, enabling them to identify land that's far beyond the horizon. Wade suggests, "If you took all of the genius that allowed us to put a man on the moon and applied it to an understanding of the ocean, what you would get is Polynesia."

Buddhists, who have spent 2500 years engaged in empirical discovery of the nature of mind.

Andean peoples, whose engineering prowess and intimate familiarity with their sacred mountainscapes guided the building of their great cities. Their ancient lore is alive today, enacted in ritual, including, for one tribal group, the annual performance of a breathtaking, high-altitude marathon—undertaken by boys who are pumped up on coca—that affirms the strength of their community.

(video 19 minutes) Here's more on Wade Davis at TED. Wade Davis is actively involved in educating people about the richness and value of human cultural diversity. To this end he maintains a website, Cultures on the Edge.

The Tiger of Jelepara

The amazing Sunderbans, land of superlatives, is where the Ganga River meets the Indian Ocean, a great expanse of flat, mangrove covered islands, and estuaries that change salinity with the tides. Both the world's largest river delta and largest estuarine mangrove forest, it's also home to the world's largest population of Royal Bengal tigers as well as some of the world's largest crocodiles, which can get to be over 20 ft. long, with the girth of two grown men. Every year villagers are killed by the local wildlife. Three years ago, we took a boat ride through the uninhabited regions of the wildlife sanctuary. Since the islands are heavily forested and we were confined either to the boat or to fenced-in walkways on a couple of the islands, we did not see much of the unique wildlife (except baby crocs at a breeding station). No doubt, the water, too, teems with life, including elusive pods of rare freshwater dolphins, but it's too full of silt to see anything at all. The Sunderbans felt wild to me, and mysterious, a place where a thousand eyes peer at us, unsentimentally, though we are blithely unaware.

Here's a recent article on the increasing conflicts between tigers and humans in the Sunderbans. It's a story with a tragic ending, from every point of view, but it brings together several strands of complexity on questions of how people co-exist with nature (or don't), and might have done throughout human history. The people in this article live by forest subsistence in tiger territory, much as people would have throughout southern Asia for perhaps the last 60,000 years, until the tigers (and lions, and forests) were mostly killed off, in just the last hundred years. John Vidal, of the Guardian, vividly recounts the story of one tiger:

Tarak was walking along the high earth embankment that protects Jelepara from the river Chunkuri, and had just passed a small Hindu temple with its gaudy, painted wooden effigies of the tiger god Dakshin Ray. He would not have seen the real tiger that had just swum across the river from the great Sunderbans forest 400 yards away. It hauled itself out of the water and mauled him from behind. No one even heard Tarak cry out.... But that was just the start of the drama in Jelepara that night....

Now it was the animal's turn to run. First dozens of men tried to corner it, blocking off its escape routes and chasing it away from the village. The tiger was tracked through long grass and rice fields. Finally it leapt on the roof of a house. Film shot on a mobile phone by a villager shows the tiger looking perfectly relaxed.

You can see that video here—it's poor quality and grim, but worth a look. Read the full story, loaded with interesting information (via Asian Window).

Dholavira: A Harappan Metropolis

(A longer version of the article below appeared in the Dec 2008 issue of Himal Southasian.)

The road to Dholavira goes through a dazzling white landscape of salty mudflats. It is close to noon in early April and the mercury is already past 100F. The desert monotones are interrupted only by the striking attire worn by the women of the nomadic and semi-nomadic pastoral tribes that still inhabit this land: Ahir, Rabari, Jat, Meghwal, and others. When I ask the driver of my hired car to stop for a photo, they receive me with curious stares, hoots, and giggles.

This is the Rann of Kutch, an area about the size of Kuwait, almost entirely within Gujarat and along the border with Pakistan. Once an extension of the Arabian Sea, the Rann ("salt marsh") has been closed off by centuries of silting. During the monsoons, parts of the Rann fill up with seasonal brackish water, enough for many locals to even harvest shrimp in it. Some abandon their boats on the drying mudflats, presenting a surreal scene for the dry season visitor. Heat mirages abound. Settlement is limited to a few "island" plateaus, one of which, Khadir, hosts the remains of the ancient city of Dholavira, discovered in 1967 and excavated only since 1989.

Entering Khadir, we pass a village and find the only tourist bungalow in town. It hasn't seen a visitor in three days; I check in and head over to the ruins. I've planned this for months; even the hottest hour of the day cannot temper my excitement for the ruins of this 5,000 year-old metropolis of the Indus Valley Civilization. While hundreds of sites have been identified in Gujarat alone, this is among the five biggest known to us in the entire subcontinent, alongside Harappa, Mohanjo-daro, and Ganeriwala in Pakistan, and Rakhigarhi in India.

At the site office, a caretaker and his friend are playing cards on a charpoy. They offer me a chair and a glass of water, cooled in an earthen surahi. On a wall are the mysterious inscriptions from the famous signboard of Dholavira, painted above contemporary motifs to suggest a continuity of sorts. I learn from the caretaker that the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) still excavates each winter, alongside researchers from overseas. Hundreds from the local village are then employed on site. He says he has learned directly from the experts and offers to be my guide. I readily agree but hope that as part of the deal, he will overlook the "Photography Prohibited" injunction I had noticed earlier—a perfectly exasperating habit of the ASI—else I would have to attempt a bribe. I am relieved when the caretaker does not press the issue.