Shunya's Notes

As Though We Were Immortal

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)

Some travel impressions prompted by the living and the dead of Varanasi, India.

In early 2006, I was on a train to Varanasi when my mother called from Jaipur. Terrorists had just hit Varanasi with explosions at multiple sites, including at the train station; many had died. Since I was going there as a tourist, she urged me to postpone the trip and get off earlier. I was traveling with my partner and two white American friends, both on their first visit to India. They seemed rattled enough and I worried about their safety. What if Hindu-Muslim riots broke out? We were ten nighttime hours away from Varanasi, so we had to decide fast.

The reality of the event sunk in further when an NDTV reporter and her camera crew got on the train. With time to kill, she began quizzing tired and bemused passengers about their take on the news. And she did so in an overexcited style that seemed to dominate live reporting in India. When she thrust the mic at me, I could only mutter something about my worry for my companions.

I persuaded my fellow travelers to continue. The terrorists had already done their deed; Varanasi was likely the safest place to visit now. Worst case, we could stay holed up in our hotel. Truth be told, I was also drawn to this unbidden frisson of travel. When we arrived in the morning, we found a part of the train station cordoned off by the police. I could see blotches of red on the ground. The driver of the taxi we took into town had witnessed the explosions: flying body parts, screams, the ensuing melee. He had helped take the injured to the hospital. But our decision to not abort our journey turned out to be a good one—the city remained calm and we moved around freely. I felt proud of my fellow citizens for being so mature about the situation. It was my first time in Varanasi as an adult, and the place did not disappoint.

BBC Series on the Ganga

Here is an excellent BBC documentary, Ganges, on the river's Himalayan birth and descent, its journey through the plains, and its end in the Bay of Bengal in what is the largest river delta in the world. The series focuses on the natural history and human life along the river's course. The three episodes embedded below (one hour each) are: (1) Daughter of the Mountains, (2) River of Life, (3) Waterland. One critique I have is that by concentrating the most beautiful and the rarest nature and wildlife footage, the series encourages the highly misguided impression that the environment along the river's course is robust and thriving.

On Change in India

An excerpt from Siddhartha Deb's portrait of contemporary India, The Beautiful and the Damned.

The highway out of Hyderabad towards Kothur village was still being worked on, with new overpasses and exits being constructed next to the lanes that were open to traffic. Vijay and I were halfway to our destination when we saw the man appear, standing in the middle of the road and waving us down. We were traveling fast, moving much too quickly to understand immediately what the man’s appearance meant. A few days earlier, on this same road, we had been stopped by two police constables. Assigned to guard duty at another point on the highway and left to fend for their own transportation, all the men had wanted was a lift. But the figure in front of us now was not in uniform, and his objective was far less clear, although I had the impression that he was part of the knotted confusion of people and cars that had sprung up suddenly on the smooth thread of the highway.

Vijay brought his tiny car to a halt, and the man loomed up in front of the windscreen, a dark, stocky figure dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. He put his right hand down on the bonnet of our car. In his left hand, he held an automatic pistol, its barrel pointing up at an acute angle.

More here. Read reviews of the book in the NYT and Himal.

Curiosity for Mars

NASA just launched its newest Mars rover, Curiosity. This super cool animation shows how it will get to Mars and some things it'll do there.

An Indian-American in China

By Usha Alexander

In a large mausoleum on Tiananmen Square, Beijing, lies a crystal sarcophagus containing the mortal remains of Mao Zedong. Every day, masses of Chinese citizens line up on this largest of the world’s public squares to view and pay tribute to him. An immense, framed portrait of Mao gazes beatifically upon them from the high walls of the once Forbidden City, a palace fortress at the edge of the square. A few years ago, I too had arrived hoping for a glimpse of the man—the spectacle of Mao’s refrigerated body held for me nearly as much morbid fascination as my interest in his legacy and place in the Chinese imagination.

As it happened, the mausoleum was closed for renovation. Disappointed, I mused that perhaps the real reason for closing the mausoleum was to hide the evidence that Mao had been turning in his grave of late: watching China grind from feudalism to communism to capitalism in a mere half century cannot be good for his repose. If “communism” means a classless society with a centrally planned economy in which the state owns the primary means of production, then poor old Mao—as the man who fought for it, forged it, and upheld it for decades—became irrelevant long ago. And though the frozen Mao may still be revered, the pulse of China throbs now to a different beat. 

For some years now, the zeitgeist in China has been closer to what Deng Xiaoping, a successor to Mao, neatly voiced in 1993: “To get rich is glorious.” And today it seems that the only thing still communist about China is the name of the party that continues to rule it with an iron hand; for while China’s communist leaders have embraced capitalism with an astonishing zeal, they have not allowed the free flow of ideas and information within China. Ordinary citizens are actively kept in the dark even about the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square. As I stood on the square, among the crowds of locals and holiday makers, flying kites or striking “I was there!” poses in front of Mao’s portrait, it struck me that most of the people around me—and most Chinese nationals under the age of 35—do not even know about the event that transpired there.

The Chinese are Coming

This breezy BBC documentary (early 2011) explores the nature and impact of China's rising influence around the world, especially in Africa, Brazil, and the U.S., and how China is reshaping the balance of power among nations.

Over a million Chinese now live and work in Africa, running high-yield chicken farms to giant mining operations, selling goods, lending money, building infrastructure. Inevitably, they have also brought with them a range of cultural values and economic practices that cause friction at times. Pop pundit Tom Friedman says of the chinese: "what's most unsettling to most Americans is not their communism, it's their capitalism". That said, you can also see this two-hour documentary as a series of human stories from a rapidly changing world—from Angola, Zambia, Congo, Tanzania, Brazil, and the U.S.—and ponder the role each of us plays in the unfolding of the world as it does.

The Lost City of Ugarit

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily.)

With Syria in the news, I’ve dusted off an account I wrote a few months after my visit there in Feb 2001. I’ve also created an 8-min video from my archives, using music by Fairuz for soundtrack. While I look at contemporary Syrian society and politics, the bulk of my narrative is on Ugarit, a nearly 4,000-year-old city held to be the birthplace of the alphabet. We know a fair bit about it from its surviving clay tablets, written in this first alphabet. One tablet even has this timeless reminder to men: ‘Do not tell your wife where you hide your money.’

The road to Lattakia goes over the Anti-Lebanon Range. I had left Aleppo under a blue sky at noon; now a thick fog rolls in, tall conifers appear in the valleys, visibility drops. The pop Arabic music in the bus gets louder but does not deter my fellow passengers from dozing. Handsome villages with brick houses, clean streets, and small domed mosques appear now and again. The bus stops at a rest area with gift shops and restaurants and arrives in Lattakia by early evening. I take a cab to the city center and find a hotel. It is my tenth day in Syria.

Lattakia lies on the Mediterranean coast of Syria and is one of its most modern towns. I see well-groomed women flaunting their feminine charms in tight jeans, sleek coats, flowing dark hair, makeup, décolletage. It feels like Eastern Europe. The evening prayer from a mosque comes wafting down rooftops just in time to remind me: I am in an Islamic country. Its socialistic aims clearly run counter to those of radical Islam, virtually absent in Syria. Just days ago, curiosity led me to ask a few urban young men: which Arab country has the hottest women? The winner: Lebanon, Syria next, and tied for third spot: Tunisia, Jordan, Kuwait. I imagine local young women waging a million mutinies daily—in dress, movement, occupation, choice of mates. Each new threshold crossed a potential source of angst and family drama. An intricate web of connections, customs, certitudes, all subject to modernizing change.

Indians Abroad: A Story from Trinidad

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments. A shorter version appeared in Himal Southasian, Oct-Nov 2011.)

I somehow managed to write a 3,500-word essay on Trinidad without mentioning cricket, rum, or the steelpan. Can I be forgiven for that?
_____________________

In April this year, I visited the Indian Caribbean museum near the town of Chaguanas in Trinidad. Set in a large hall, the museum had no other visitors. Its curator, Saisbhan Jokhan, 69, came out to greet me. Jokhan, I soon realized, not only loved to talk but was also a trove of information. As I began taking notes, he asked if I was a journalist. Yes, I said; I wrote for a venerable publication called 3 Quarks Daily, and I intended to write about the Indo-Trinidadian experience. His eyes lit up and for the next ninety minutes, he accompanied me in the museum, explaining and answering my questions.

The museum commemorates the history of a million Indo-Caribbeans whose ancestors came as indentured laborers from India between 1838-1917. Its panels include details on immigrant ships, copies of girmits, or indenture agreements, and rare archival photos of life on sugarcane plantations. Evocative objects abound: an improvised sarangi, a pair of wood slippers, a rotary sugarcane press like the ones still used in mofussil India, even a lifesize model of an indentured worker’s hut. Other displays show milestones in the life of the community, such as a 1970 photo of the first Indo-Trini policewoman; a panel on Alice Jan, the first lady of Indo-Trini culture; Indo-Trinis winning the right to build their own schools in 1952, allowing them to replace Christian teaching with Hindu teaching.

The museum is run by the Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha, a conservative Hindu organization that also runs many temples. Talking to Jokhan it struck me that he lived with a clear sense of ‘his people’, what they have suffered, what challenges awaited them. His tone, and the museum’s singular focus, brought to mind a pastiche of Jewish museums I have seen over the years. This too felt like a museum designed to preserve the collective memory of a people’s suffering and struggles, and Jokhan seemed to me the right man for the job: proud of his identity, devoted to his community, slightly paranoid.

Jokhan’s historical memory is alien to people like me who have joined the Indian diaspora in recent decades. We have fostered the stereotype of Indians as a model minority, led by professionals and marked by diligence and enterprise in the pursuit of opportunities around the globe. But most of the Indian journeys in the colonial era were very different. They involved harsh unskilled labor on sugarcane estates, horrible living conditions, and severe discrimination. Trinidad, which I will look at here, is one chapter of that past; others include Guyana, Suriname, Jamaica, South Africa, Fiji, Mauritius, and Réunion. 

The Leatherbacks of Trinidad

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily.)

Grande Riviere, a tiny village on the northeastern coast of Trinidad, is one of the few beaches in the world where the leatherback turtle comes to nest. It lies near the end of a serpentine road that hugs the palm-fringed Atlantic coast for miles, then cuts through the lush rainforest of the Northern Range. A river, for which the village is named, and the rainforest—abuzz with the sound of crickets and birds—tumble onto its Caribbean sands, giving the place a remote and sensual air.

Cacao plantations once flourished here but the few hundred people of Grande Riviere now rely on fishing and ecotourism. All three or four of its pricey tourist lodges are near the beach; a village bar, a couple of provision stores and eateries, and a post office are on the main road further behind. The star attraction, and the primary reason for our visit last month, is clearly the leatherback.

My partner, Usha, and I arrived in the early evening with Ulric, our gentlemanly guide of Afro-Carib ancestry, whom we had hired in Port of Spain to drive us to a few places on the island. After we decided to stay at the Le Grande Almandier (the LP guidebook called it "the best value"), he left to spend the night at a friend's place in a nearby town. Being the kind who love their work, he had gone out of his way to bring alive the island and its people to us, not the least through his own personal history. All day his Trini English had grown on me. Dinner consisted of vegetarian pickings from a Creole-French menu, a legacy of the plantation era culture in these parts. At the Visitor Center, we secured our permits to see the turtles, saw a documentary film on them, and waited.

Is there another animal that appears more often in human mythology, folklore, and literature than the turtle and its land dwelling cousin, the tortoise? They have variously stood for wisdom, tenacity, longevity, fertility, or stability in cultures around the world. The leatherback is the largest of all living turtles, the male up to 900 kgs and 3 m. It feeds mostly on jellyfish and lives up to 45 years (a disputed number). Unlike other turtles, it lacks a bony shell but has a hard leathery skin. That plus its powerful flippers and hydrodynamic body allow it to dive down to 1400 m and swim as fast as 35 kmph. Given its large size, its natural predators include only sharks, killer whales, and now humans.

Vacation Break

We're off to Trinidad and Tobago. There may be no new posts for at least a couple of weeks.

The islands of T&T, by Caribbean standards, are a tourist backwater. This despite the fact that Trinidad has a unique natural history. It was once a part of the South American mainland, which has endowed it with the greatest biological diversity of any Caribbean island. Both islands harbor old growth rainforest and unspoiled beaches.

Centuries of colonialism saw the islands' indigenous populations almost entirely wiped out and then replaced first with Africans, brought as slaves, and later with indentured laborers brought mostly from India. Today, Trinidad has perhaps the most cosmopolitan population in the Caribbean, with about 40% claiming African heritage, 40% Indian heritage, and most of the remaining 20% claiming mixed ancestry, also including French, Spanish, British, Chinese, Syrian, and Amerindian. Tobago, on the other hand, had a separate history, which never included the importation of indentured labor, and the population of that island remains almost entirely of African descent, with strong French influences. This cultural diversity is evident in the islands' music, food, religions, festivals, languages, pop culture, and more.

Both islands were sugar plantation colonies, and the planters did what they could to maintain an abundant supply of cheap labor at their disposal. For this reason, even a century after manumission, in 1833, and for decades after the indentured labor system was dismantled in the 1920s, no systematic attempt was made to provide education for the laboring masses, leaving most of them stuck in poverty and illiteracy. Needless to say, the non-white majority of the population was never invited to participate in the governing of their colony.

All this changed when the country gained it's independence from Britain in 1962. Inheriting a largely impoverished, uneducated, and ethnically fractured population founded in bondage and maintained under centuries of oppression, Dr. Eric Williams—the country's first Prime MInister and a leader of the independence struggle—challenged his citizens to build themselves into a society and a nation:

On August 31, 1962, a country will be free, a miniature state will be established, but a society and a nation will not have been formed. After August 31, 1962, the people of Trinidad and Tobago will face the fiercest test in their history—whether they can invest with flesh and blood the bare skeleton of their National Anthem, "here ev'ry creed and race find an equal place." That is their challenge. They may fail. Others more important and better endowed than they have failed conspicuously. That would be no justification for their own failure. But merely to make the attempt, merely to determine to succeed, would be an enormous tribute to their capacity, a powerful inspiration to frustrated humanity, a wonderful opportunity for self-gratification. This will be their final emancipation from slavery, this will be their final demonstration that slavery is not by nature and that the Humblest antecedents are not inconsistent with the greatness of soul.

The discovery of oil in the mid-20th century has given T&T an economic lift. Prosperity has been filtering in, first into Port of Spain, San Fernando, and Mayaro, then through the rest of the country. About two-thirds of the country's 1.3 million people remain in villages, fishing, growing cacao, coffee, or vegetables, or running small, local businesses. It's not clear how much of the new prosperity has yet filtered out to them. In 2010, the country elected its first female Prime Minister, Kamla Persad-Bissessar.

Human Planet

Look out for Human Planet from the BBC, "an awe-inspiring, jaw-dropping, heart-stopping landmark series that marvels at mankind's incredible relationship with nature in the world today. Uniquely in the animal kingdom, humans have managed to adapt and thrive in every environment on Earth. Each episode takes you to the extremes of our planet: the arctic, mountains, oceans, jungles, grasslands, deserts, rivers and even the urban jungle. Here you will meet people who survive by building complex, exciting and often mutually beneficial relationships with their animal neighbours and the hostile elements of the natural world." YouTube has many clips from the series.

The series began airing earlier this month in the UK and will have an international release later this year.

A Large-Hearted Gentleman

The Bengal Tiger, India's national animal, once thrived all over South Asia in a range of habitats, from mangrove swamps to savanna to rainforest. It frequents Indian art and folklore and appears even on seals of the Indus Valley Civilization. But owing to the human population explosion in the last century, trophy hunting by former British and Indian royals and others, shrinking habitats, and the importance of tiger parts in traditional Chinese medicine, it is severely endangered today.

Barely a thousand tigers now survive in the wild, down from 40,000 a century ago. As recently as the 1990s, there were 3X more tigers than today—implying a tiger lost every third day since! Seems to me that the majestic animal that Jim Corbett called "a large-hearted gentleman" is heading for extinction (I saw one in the Corbett NP in 2005). This is despite Project Tiger, a major conservation effort begun in 1973 with 9 tiger reserves, expanding to 27.

In 2003, I visited the Sariska Tiger Reserve in Rajasthan with my parents. I took some video footage that I've edited and posted below (8 mins). It shows no tigers but includes an interesting segment of a local man, Dharma, employed by a guesthouse at the reserve, reminiscing about the olden days when the area was full of tigers. Brimming with stories of close encounters, he had honed a bard-like storytelling style replete with bluster and machismo to convey all the drama, and was happy to have an audience. Curiously, he told us that there were no tigers left in Sariska, well before a 2005 investigation revealed that the park had "lost" all 26 of its tigers that were supposedly there when we visited in 2003 (after that disaster—listen to Attenborough describe it—a few tigers were recently reintroduced from a nearby reserve). The video also includes scenes from the reserve with animals like cheetal, sambar, nilgai, peacock, wild pig, langur, and more. Enjoy!

Photo source.

On the Void of Nagarjuna

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments; a shorter version appeared in the Jan 2011 issue of Himal Southasian.)

Five years ago, going west on a bus out of the coastal city of Vijayawada in South India, I passed small towns and villages whose names—opaque to me because written only in Telugu—I kept guessing at from a map. After years of drought, the monsoon had been bountiful. We passed field after verdant field of cotton and pepper in a region infamous for its depleted water tables and farmers fleeing to other regions, or committing suicide to escape debt. It took most of the morning, on three buses and an auto-rickshaw, to reach my destination: a village with tourist facilities near the ruins of Nagarjunakonda.

A city flourished around 1,800 years ago at Nagarjunakonda, the Hill of Nagarjuna. A great religious and educational center of Brahmanism and Buddhism, one of the names it had then was Vijayapuri, after king Vijaya Satakarni of the Satavahana dynasty. Thereafter a capital of the Ikshvaku dynasty (225-325 CE), it fell into terminal decline after the demise of the last Ikshvaku king. A teacher, S Venkataramayya, discovered the ruins of the ancient city in 1926. Much of it now lies under one of the largest manmade lakes in the world, Nagarjuna Sagar, formed in 1960 by the Nagarjuna Sagar dam across the Krishna River. Archaeological digs in 1926–60 turned up finds from the early Stone Age to medieval times, spread over 130 sites across 24 sq km. Many structures were moved and reassembled on what is now an island on the lake, as well as on the lake’s eastern bank at Anupu (much like the ‘saving’ of Abu Simbel from the Aswan Dam in Egypt).

The island’s modern name was inspired by one of its most illustrious citizens, Nagarjuna, a Buddhist monk-philosopher and founder of the ‘Middle Path’ school, who most likely lived there sometime in 150-250 CE. Called by some ‘the second Buddha’, Nagarjuna’s work is indispensable to several Buddhist schools, particularly Mahayana. ‘Nagarjuna’s philosophy represents something of a watershed not only in the history of Indian philosophy but in the history of philosophy as a whole,’ writes Douglas Berger, a scholar of Southasian thought, ‘as it calls into question certain philosophical assumptions so easily resorted to in our attempt to understand the world.’ [1]

§

Not much is conclusively known about Nagarjuna’s life. Born into a Brahmin family, he later became a Buddhist. He likely spent many years at a center of learning that later evolved into Nalanda University, in modern-day Bihar. Many scholars consider his exposition of the concept of shunyata (‘emptiness’ or ‘voidness’) to be a critical achievement, central to a remarkable understanding of what it means to be human. Nagarjuna is best known for two works that have survived in Sanskrit: Madhyamika Karika (‘Fundamental verses on the Middle Way’) and Vigrahavyavartani (‘The End of Disputes’), ‘both critical analyses of views about the origin of existence, the means of knowledge, and the nature of reality.’[2] We can think of his work not only as a revival of the Buddha’s views on such topics—then losing ground to rival views—but also their further development. In the West, Nagarjuna’s ideas bear a striking resemblance to those of the later Wittgenstein.

Ten Years of Nothingness

Observing anniversaries is often a way to mark the passage of time, celebrate small achievements, and reflect on the journey. It can also be an exercise in self-absorbed narcissism. ☺ Be that as it may, I'd like to observe a minor milestone in my creative and online life. Earlier this year, Shunya completed its 10th anniversary. I created this website in 2000 to share my travel photos from around the world—photos that were fading away in cardboard boxes—and to learn web publishing. It was to serve as my web address, and perhaps become a quiet record of a personal history. ("Shunya" means the number "zero" as well as "void" or "nothingness" in Buddhist philosophy.)

The site has since evolved much and now includes prose by me and others, photo essays, and videos. A big expansion came when I took a two-year break (2004-06) to visit 100+ destinations in 20+ Indian states. As a result, nearly half of the ~15K photos on Shunya are from India, the rest from ~50 other countries. In the last two years I've added a host of essays to it, including ones I've written for 3 Quarks Daily as well as by others on this group blog. I've even made new friends through Shunya, found long lost ones, and received many notes of appreciation.

Encouraged by the inquiries I got out of the electronic blue, I also began licensing my photos based on the buyer's means and ends. Over a hundred organizations, including 15 museums, 25 academies, and 35 publishers have since licensed photos from Shunya. I've given away quite a few for free, especially to progressive non-profits, students, and starving artists. They have inspired paintings (samples below) and adorned calendars, posters, music CD jackets, slideshows, brochures, ads, postcards, websites, and book and magazine covers.

 
(Artists: Mukta Sareen, Trevor Guitar, Neelam Solanki (3-4), and Cristina Goia.)

Google Analytics reports that Shunya got 3+ million page views in the past year. Each month over 100K people—45K+ from India, 25K+ from the U.S.—stop by at least once. According to Alexa, ~15 out of every million people on the Internet visit Shunya (15 ppm, as I like to think). In 2005, I put ads on the site, which has since paid for at least one vacation abroad each year for me and my partner. Not bad for what is still a labor of love and lunacy (fortunately, I have a day job ☺). Shunya will continue to evolve, but it has already been a very gratifying journey that has helped me grow as a person, writer, and travel photographer. Thank you for your interest, friends and visitors!

(Shunya home pages from 2000, 2004, 2007, and 2010, respectively.)

James A. FitzPatrick's India

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily.)

James A. FitzPatrick (1894-1980), American movie-maker, is best known for his 200+ short documentary films from around the world. They appeared in two series, Traveltalks and The Voice of the Globe, which he wrote, produced, and directed from 1929-55. Commissioned by MGM, the shorts played before its feature films and were no doubt a mind-expanding experience for many. Some of them are now online at the Travel Film Archive. Nearly eighty years later, what should we make of FitzPatrick and his travel films?

FitzPatrick's shorts on India—including Jaipur, Benares, Bombay, The Temple of Love (Delhi & Agra, no audio), and others not yet online—are a rare and unique window into Indian public life in the 1930s. We can see what many of these cities' prominent streets and traffic looked like before motor vehicles and billboards, what familiar urbanscapes and skylines looked like, and how uncrowded these cities were before the big rural migrations, not to mention 70% fewer Indians. It is interesting to hear an American public figure from the 1930s pronounce on the castes of India, the religiosity of the Indians, and how they shared their public spaces with animals. They have the charm of quaint narrative conventions we find in period pieces. His films are valuable records of history also because they are a unique encounter of two very different cultures—illuminating the world behind the lens through the one in front. 

But having said that, I also think their present value owes more to the paucity of video records of everyday life from that era, than to the quality of FitzPatrick's mind. FitzPatrick seems to me very much a man of his time. In his directorial choices and opinions, he may well qualify as a textbook orientalist. This is not to say that his films are devoid of truth, empathy or humor. It is to say that he brought along with him a marked sense of cultural and racial superiority, as he trained his viewfinder on what he found amusing, outlandish or admirable.

§

FitzPatrick saw Bombay as "the first constructive imprint of western civilization upon this much talked of and generally misunderstood country." He was impressed by the cosmopolitan life and energy of Bombay, whose population was "over one million people, representing practically every race and creed in the world." But even in Bombay, he notes, "the 15th century is constantly rubbing shoulders with the 20th" and "the ancient procession goes on in strange defiance."  In his day, Jaipur was apparently "off the beaten track of tourist travel" despite being "unquestionably the most colorful of all the cities in India [and] one of the cleanest and most prosperous." He doubts if there is another "place in the world where birds and beasts live in closer proximity with mankind." The people of Jaipur, he finds, have "a contented and peaceful nature, living in a sort of bovine resignation to life".  While in Benares, "the Hindu Heaven", he suspects that "in the whole world there is no stranger manifestation of human faith in the supernatural than what is witnessed here on the banks of the sacred Ganges." It confounds him that millions of "dumb animals", "made and kept worthless by the Hindu religious code, roam the land devouring annually millions of dollars worth of food for which they produce nothing."

The Loire Valley, Aug 2010

I had meant to post some pictures of my Loire Valley vacation with Usha's family in August, along with a few travel impressions. Given that I have made no progress with the latter, I'm decoupling the two and posting the pictures for y'all to browse. This vacation was different from my usual ones: it was not planned by me, relatively expensive, and in a group. But it was perfectly enjoyable, largely because Usha's family is pretty cool (and I feel fortunate to be part of it), but also because the six-day, sixty-mile walk through the countryside was very pleasant; the chateaus were impressive; the local bread, wine, and cheese didn't disappoint either. Yummy food shots from four restaurants included.

 Today, dear reader, is also the fourth anniversay of Shunya's Notes. Thanks for reading!

Last Hippie Standing

Last Hippie Standing is a documentary on Goa, "the hippie paradise of the 60s", with interesting footage from that period, including their wild parties and the Anjuna flea market. It tracks down and interviews some who never went back. It also looks at the more recent crop of ravers, hipsters, and vacation hippies who now visit Goa (45 mins; see video in larger format; via Leanne Ogasawara).

I also spotted a book by Arun Saldanha, Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race, whose description looks promising. That said, his related article, White Ravers in a Goan Village, starts out well but then descends into jargon and obscure invocations of theory—the kind of stuff that gives contemporary academic writing on culture a bad name among general readers.

Also check out Lost in Goa, a story about a few Israelis in Goa, including how they think and relate to India. Israelies visit in large numbers after their mandatory military duty. "India is a decompression chamber that keeps these young Israelis from imploding and revivifies them so that they can rebuild themselves and function in the civilian world." The story is in three parts: one, two, three (via Louise Gordon).

The Minangkabau: Mixing Islam and Matriarchy

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)

“In your marriage, who is the boss?” our driver, Arman, asked in a playfully provocative tone, like he was setting up the punchline of a joke.

My partner and I looked at each other, laughed, and shrugged. Arman belonged to the Minangkabau, the society recognized among anthropologists as the world’s largest and most stable surviving matriarchy* (though some prefer to call it a gylany, matrix, matrifocal or matricentric society, or something else to avoid conjuring images of mythical Amazons). Knowing this, I presumed his question was part of a routine entertainment for tourists.

“For us it is the woman who is boss,” he continued, predictably. “The woman has all the privileges; she owns everything. The men, we own nothing.”

I knew that the Minangkabau, like most Indonesians, are Muslims. In May 2009, one of the first things I noticed upon arriving in their homeland—a stretch of volcanic highlands running along the western coast of Sumatra—was that a higher percentage of women here wear the hijab (here called jilbab) than did further north, near Medan and around Lake Toba. In fact, well over half of the adult women covered their hair in public. But here, as elsewhere on Sumatra, the headscarf appears to be as much a fashion statement as a covering for modesty. It’s often brightly colored or festooned with beads, sequins, rhinestones, small brooches, lace, or shimmery ribbons. Many women sport styles with a dainty sun visor in the front. Pretty much anything you can do to a hat is done to the Sumatran jilbab.

These observations, and Arman’s good humor at his lack of patrimony, made me wonder how I should understand the Minangkabau matriarchaat (their word, borrowed from the Dutch). What truce had been struck between Islam and matriarchy?

§

In the small villages surrounding Mount Merapi, which lies at the center of the Minangkabau creation myths, Arman lead us down tangled lanes lined with traditional Minangkabau homes. Many of these were great wooden structures, some as much as 300 years old, tattered or rotting in places, patched or expanded upon over the years. These traditional homes are long, each enclosing a broad rectangular hall over an empty ground floor, once used to house livestock. Their roofs are arched to suggest the horns of a buffalo. There were newer dwellings too, without the ground floor for livestock, with SUVs parked out front, satellite dishes growing like mushrooms of modernity from balconies and awnings.

A Folk Singer from Himachal

Here is a folk singer I recorded in May 2005 in the highlands of Khajjiar, Himachal Pradesh, India. He sings in a language called Pahari, derived from Sanskrit and Prakrit, with many dialects across the Himalayan belt. We were near the town of Chamba, so this particular dialect is probably Chambiali, though I can't be certain. I speak Hindi, also with roots in Sanskrit, so I can make out many words—enough to say that he is addressing his beloved in the first song and his attachment to place in the second—but not enough to translate (any Pahari speakers reading this?). Such are the myriad indigenous musical forms that globalization will probably make extinct in the years ahead.

Amazon Rainforest, Ecuador

For its size, Ecuador may be the most geographically diverse country in the world. Besides the volcanic islands of Galapagos, it has three distinct regions: a coastal belt, the Andes mountains, and the sparsely inhabited El Oriente, or the Upper Amazon Basin to the east. El Oriente is mostly primeval rainforest, merging into cloud forest in the eastern foothills of the Andes. It teems with rivers that feed the mighty Amazon, the lifeblood of the "world's richest and most varied biological reservoir, containing several million species of insects, plants, birds, and other forms of life, many still unrecorded by science. The luxuriant vegetation and wide variety of trees include many species of myrtle, laurel, palm, and acacia, as well as rosewood, Brazil nut, and rubber tree." As in parts of Brazil, the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador is also shrinking, led by the usual economic motives (timber, petroleum, etc.) and new human settlements.

About six years ago, Usha and I went to El Oriente. We took a bus from Quito to the tiny town and jungle outpost of Tena, where we hired a taxi and went further east to a point along Rio Napo called Puerto Barantilla, where we took a boat to our jungle lodge near the mouth of Rio Arajuno. Over the next three days, we explored the region with local guides, including a memorable all-day hike through primordial forest, buzzing with streams and massive diversity of life (it rained hard that afternoon, making our hike path quite treacherous). We also went river rafting one day after assembling a raft out of logs with our guide's help, and hiked to amaZOOnico, an animal rescue and rehabilitation center run by local and overseas volunteers. Here we saw some of the great variety of Amazonian wildlife, including macaws, toucans, trumpet birds, tortoise, many kinds of monkeys, jaguars, ocelots, peccaries, tapirs, capybaras, agoutis, etc. The lodge served all of our meals. Dinner staple was fish with vegetables, rice, yucca or plantain, and tropical fruit, served by candlelight (the lodge had no electricity). The mosquitoes were large and vicious. The forest comes alive at night with the sound of a gazillion crickets.

The 10 min video below is based on the footage I took there (turn on HQ mode after it starts playing; a QuickTime version is here).

Greetings from Goa

The Dark Side of Dubai

British journalist Johann Hari goes to the desert kingdom and finds a sea of disturbing stories:

There are three different Dubais, all swirling around each other. There are the expats...; there are the Emiratis, headed by Sheikh Mohammed; and then there is the foreign underclass who built the city, and are trapped here. They are hidden in plain view. You see them everywhere, in dirt-caked blue uniforms, being shouted at by their superiors, like a chain gang – but you are trained not to look. It is like a mantra: the Sheikh built the city. The Sheikh built the city. Workers? What workers?

Every evening, the hundreds of thousands of young men who build Dubai are bussed from their sites to a vast concrete wasteland an hour out of town, where they are quarantined away. Until a few years ago they were shuttled back and forth on cattle trucks, but the expats complained this was unsightly, so now they are shunted on small metal buses that function like greenhouses in the desert heat. They sweat like sponges being slowly wrung out.

Sonapur is a rubble-strewn patchwork of miles and miles of identical concrete buildings. Some 300,000 men live piled up here, in a place whose name in Hindi means "City of Gold". In the first camp I stop at – riven with the smell of sewage and sweat – the men huddle around, eager to tell someone, anyone, what is happening to them.

More here (and some videos: one, two, three). For this article, Hari was banned from Dubai and his writing blocked from access there.

Dalrymple on Travel Writing

William Dalrymple on the future on travel writing in the shrinking, globalizing world of the Internet age: 

Today, however, many of the most interesting travel books are by individuals who have made extended stays in places, getting to know them intimately: such as Iain Sinclair's circling of the capital in London Orbital or Sam Miller's Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity. There is also Ghosh in his Egyptian village, published as In an Antique Land, or Christopher de Bellaigue's magnificent recent study, Rebel Land, which examines the way that the ghosts of the Armenian genocide and Kurdish nationalism haunt a single remote town in eastern Turkey. As Mishra puts it, in a more globalised, postcolonial world the traveller "needs to train his eye in the way an ethnographer does . . . to remain relevant and stimulating, travel writing has to take on board some of the sophisticated knowledge available about these complex societies, about their religions, history, economy, and politics."

The last world should go to Thubron, the most revered of all the travel writers of the 80s still at work. He is also clear that travel writing is now more needed than ever: "Great swaths of the world are hardly visited and remain much misunderstood - think of Iran," he told me recently. "It's no accident that the mess inflicted on the world by the last US administration was done by a group of men who had hardly travelled, and relied for information on policy documents and the reports of journalists sitting interviewing middle-class contacts in capital cities. A good travel writer can give you the warp and weft of everyday life, the generalities of people's existence that are rarely reflected in journalism, and hardly touched on by any other discipline. Despite the internet and the revolution in communications, there is still no substitute."

More here.

The Art of Borobudur

Three months ago, Namit and I traveled to Indonesia. One of the highlights of our trip was a daylong excursion to Borobudur, where we spent nearly 6 hours climbing it up and down, wondering at the history it represented, and admiring its sculpture and workmanship.

Borobudur stupa is the world's largest Buddhist monument (as large as a Giza pyramid) and a UNESCO World Heritage site. Located near the city of Jogjakarta on the island of Java, it's a stunning remnant of the days when the Dharmic religions were politically ascendant in the islands. It was commissioned and built between 800 and 900 CE by the local monarchs so that devotees need not travel all the way to India for spiritual pilgrimage. Drawing Buddhist pilgrims from as far away as China, its grandeur would have raised the stature of the local monarchs in the eyes of the Buddhist world, which at the time encompassed the whole of southern and eastern Asia. Some say that the site was chosen for being surrounded by three volcanoes, which can be seen in the near distance, and the confluence of two rivers, meant to represent the Ganga and Jamuna of India.

It took two generations of workers to fashion the remarkable monument from over 2 million little blocks of lava rock, gathered from the nearby volcanoes, then grooved and notched to fit into place like a 3D jigsaw puzzle for the gods. The massive black stupa must have been impressive, rising above a sea of unbroken jungle, like a lotus floating on a green pond. When it was completed, the pious meditated as they slowly circumambulated its 10 levels.

Traveling upward from the bottom, levels 2-6 are covered by scenes from Buddha's life and teachings, carved in low relief, each one of the 3,000 panels entirely unique. These levels are meant to represent the concerns of this material existence. On the top 4 layers one sees only bell-shaped stupas and statues of the Buddha, which represent increasing degrees of perfection and proximity to Nirvana. Altogether, Borobudur monument is adorned with 555 Buddha statues. Its 10 tiers form a mandala when viewed from the sky (which no one in those days could have done). The resulting symmetries and geometries make for an immersive experience of entering a hallowed place. In those days there would have been thousands of monks from all over Asia, making it a great religious center.

       

A surprising feature of the monument is the degree to which the artisans mimicked the Indian style of sculpture and relief. They nearly replicated the look and feel of contemporary Indian Buddhist carvings, while creating an original design for the stupa as a whole. Many of the relief panels are simpler in scope than those from ancient India, yet the craftsmen reproduced very well the fine and nuanced expressiveness of the faces, similar to what one sees on Indian stupas and temples of that period. To accomplish this, legions of Indian craftsmen were brought in to teach, train, and work alongside the local craftsmen. Many of them married in and stayed on here for the rest of their lives.

       

The stupa at Borobudur was in use for only 150 years before the site was abandoned. The local populations fled eastward (probably to Bali), possibly because of insurmountable devastation caused by a volcanic eruption. Thereafter, the monument fell to ruins and was reclaimed by the jungle for almost 800 years. It was finally uncovered, during colonial times, by the Dutch and English, who began to restore the pile of tumbled stone to its former glory in a series of Herculean excavation and rebuilding projects, culminating in the most ambitious archaeological restoration project in history, between 1975 and 1982.

I've put together a short video tour (3:45) of Borobudur using the video and photos that Namit captured.

In Light of Nalanda

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)

I don’t know many books in which ‘Go west, young man!’ would be a call to go to India. One such book is Journey to the West, ‘China's most beloved novel of religious quest and picaresque adventure,’ published in the 1590s in the waning years of the Ming dynasty. The novel’s hero, ‘a mischievous monkey with human traits ... accompanies the monk-hero on his action-filled travels to India in search of Buddhist scripture.’ [1] It allegorically presents pilgrims journeying toward India as individuals journeying toward enlightenment. [2]

The inspiration for this novel was a journey made by a 7th cent. CE Chinese man, Xuanzang. [3] Though raised in a conservative Confucian family near Chang’an (modern Xian), Xuanzang, at 13, followed his brother into the Buddhist monastic life (Buddhism had come to China around 2nd cent. CE). A precocious boy, he mastered his material so well that he was ordained a full monk when only 20. Disenchanted with the quality of Buddhist texts and teachers available to him, he decided to go west to India, to the cradle and thriving center of Buddhism itself. After a yearlong journey full of peril and adventure, across deserts and mountains, via Tashkent and Samarkand, meeting robbers and kings, debating Buddhists on the Silk Road and in Afghanistan—where he saw the majestic Bamiyan Buddhas—he reached what is now Pakistan.

He spent 17 years, from 629-645 CE, in the Indian subcontinent, traveling, visiting places associated with the Buddha’s life, learning Sanskrit, and studying with Buddhist masters, most notably at the Nalanda University in modern-day Bihar, one of the first great universities of the world, where subjects like grammar, logic, philosophy, metaphysics, astronomy, medicine, and theology were taught. His erudition seems to have brought him fame and royal patronage in India. In a convocation of religious scholars ‘in Harsha’s capital of Kannauj ... Xuanzang allegedly defeated five hundred Brahmins, Jains, and heterodox Buddhists in spirited debate.’ [4]

The Nalanda establishment greatly admired Xuanzang. Beseeching him to stay, they even offered him a senior position on their academic staff. But he declined with this reply: ‘Buddha established his doctrine so that it might be diffused to all lands. Who would wish to enjoy it alone, and to forget those who are not yet enlightened?’ For scores of years, he was accorded a place in Indian temple paintings with his ‘hemp shoes, spoon and chop sticks mounted on multicolored clouds.’ [5]