By Tony Hall
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Ardh Kumbh Mela, photo by elishams
A general look at a subject which is close to my heart - I got to love the country, its cultures and history, very much, from when I first went there in 1973 for Oxfam, moving around the villages and towns of Western India for many weeks, to report on and help publicise the drought emergency. It was about two years later that I was transferred by Oxfam from East Africa to India. We moved as a family from Nairobi to be based in Delhi, and Eve and I both 'covered' India, reporting on emergency and development needs and projects.
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India really is RICH - in peoples, cultures, history. It has exported hard work, skills and brainpower to many parts of the world for ages: shopkeepers and sugarworkers, engineers and intellectuals - and in recent years, a stream of highly educated computer techies to the West.
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Chess was invented in India,and so, they say, were numerals - taken later to the Arab world, from where they finally reached Europe.
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India, more than one billion people over a whole subcontinent, is a vast and intricate tapestry of religions, cultures, languages and castes. It is a miracle really, that it has remained one country, despite many attempts over the centuries, from inside and even more from outside, to split it up along religious or other lines. The tensions are immense, but so far it has remained one nation, within a framework of genuine, working democratic institutions.
That DOES make India "the world's greatest democracy."
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Of course India does also contain an enormous amount of poverty - miserably poor people living on city pavements, in crowded shanty towns and, perhaps poorest of all, the "outcaste" and "low caste" people in the countryside, those Gandhi called the 'harijans' which means children of god. Westerners often think of poverty as the typical character of India, because it is often the picture they are given.
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But we also have to remember that India has a vast and powerful agricultural and industrial economy, and the largest middle class in the world, including people with excellent education and the highest professional standing or technical skills, coming out of some of the world's best Technology Institutes. The elegance and artistry of many Indian cultures and communities really does outshine some of the more primitive expressions of European cultures, even though much of the West is technically more advanced and materially developed.
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The great majority of Indians are Hindu by religion - yet India is also the second largest MUSLIM country in the world (after Indonesia) in the sense that it STILL has the second largest Muslim population - more even than Pakistan itself, which was split off from India at the time of independence from the British in 1947, to become a Muslim state..
All in all, India is so vast and complex that you can hardly generalise about it - and you cannot be indifferent to it.
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Religions:
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Almost 90 percent of Indians are Hindu by faith - those people who flocked to this week huge Kumb Melah festival in Allahabad, to wash away their sins in the waters of the sacred Ganges river. There are hundreds of branches, sects and cults within the Hindu faith - and literally thousands of gods, big and small: from the great Lord Krishna, and Pavarti, to Lakshmi, gooddess of wealth,and Ganesh - also a god of wealth, who is the form of an elephant. One of the greatest and fiercest goddesses is Kali, a favourite among the Bengali Hindus of Eastern India. And remember, cows have holy qualities: if you are hurtling through crowded central Bombay street in one of those yellow taxis, for instance, you may be brought to a sudden halt by a cow standing in the middle of the street munching on some old greens that a vegetable stall owner has given it, or a housewife has bought for it, to show respect.
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About 10 percent of Indians are Muslims, living mostly in the North and the centre. Islam came to India through the conquests by the Persians, and their descendants, the Moguls, were the rulers of north and central India for centuries before the British took India as a colony. They left behind a wealth of beautiful buildings, such as the Taj Mahal in Agra, the Qutub Minar tower in Delhi, thousands of mosques, and a rich tradition of poetry and music..
The Sikhs are a big and influential community in the north, particularly in Punjab, where they formed a breakaway group and faith, several hundred years ago. They are strong in the army, the civil service, in technical trades - and in all walks of life.
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The first ever ruler of what could be called a united India, was the Emperor Ashoka, many hundreds of years ago. he was a Buddhist. The original Lord Buddha himself was an Indian from the mountains of the north, where many of the people, and most of the neighbouring Nepalese, the Tibetans and many Chinese, are still buddhists. But it is very much a minority religion in India as a whole.
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Christianity is another minority religion - though still with a big following and many branches and sects, like everything in India. There are the Roman Catholics in and around the state of Goa, which used to be a Portuguese colony. There are groups of protestants converted by modern missionaries. But the original Christian church, founded by St Thomas ('doubting Thomas'), goes as far back as the time of St Paul himself. It is still strong in Madya Pradesh state.
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Clothes
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Of course modern Western style dress is widespread and very common - jeans and t-shirt are the order of the day among many young people. But the most typical Indian wear, mostly for Hindus, is the sari for women, and the cloth cap and kurta for men. Saris are made of silk or cotton, and you learn how to drape and wear one from a young age. You can very often tell where a person comes from, or what class they may be, by the colour and cut of their sari. Kurta is the shirt of the man, worn with wide loose trousers held up by a drawstring. These are traditionally made of khadi, or homespun cotton - which Gandhi popularised as the appropriate clothes for a patriotic Indian to wear. Traditional Hindu women may cover their faces lightly in public, but they do not go veiled.
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Muslim women are often veiled - but not so frequently or heavily in this still secular country, where fundamentalism is not as strong as in Pakistan, Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia, for instance. Muslim women often dress in pyjama-like wide trousers under a long tunic..
Sikh men wear those long white turbans which they have to wrap round their heads over their long hair, every morning. A sikh man traditionally never cuts his hair.
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A sight you can still occasionally see is a man wearing those curly-tipped sandals - and a curly moustache - swaggering down a small town road.
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Food
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You already know a variety of Indian food from your average high street Indian restaurant around Britain, serving a great variety of mostly north Indian meat and vegetable dishes - tandooris, masalas, jalfrezis etc etc, These are often run in fact by people from a particular part of Bangladesh - not India. When they migrated to Britain, they went in for opening such businesses, and they generally follow the north Indian recipes quite well.
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Most Hindus, even some Indian Muslims, will not eat cow (beef) and many, specially in the south, are complete vegetarians. South Indian thalis - a selection of vegetable dishes in silver pots make a different but tasty meal. There are a few excellent such restaurants around London, for example near Euston station, serving dishes like masala dosa, idli made of rice, and the drink lassi, which is made of yogurt and spices, and can be served with sugar - or salt.
The different cultures and regions of India provide a great variety of local specialities. One thing you can get everywhere, at a truck stop or local village teashop, is a piece of flat bread - a chapati or nan, and a cup of tea, kind of stewed, with sweet condensed milk. Don't think of it as tea, but find it refreshing as you take a break from a long hectic drive down a narrow Indian strip road, swerving to avoid the tinselly hooting trucks, the cows and pedestrians. Now you can rest as you sit cross-legged on a charpoy (a kind of wooden bed) at the roadside, watching the world go by.
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Buildings/Home Life
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India is such a thick spread of different cultures and historical periods, there is an enormous amount and variety of buildings, sometimes side by side, that take you through time. In Delhi there'll be an old Mogul tower from the 1700s, half in ruins with people 'camping' under the broken roof - next door to a modern four star hotel of the greatest elegance; and next door to that, a private mansion from say 1915, designed by the British architect Edward Lutyens - who laid out the colonial capital....
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The great buildings, the mosques and palaces, include the most romantic, grand structures in the world. The Taj Mahal MUST BE the world's most beautiful building - it is more stunning every time you visit. Then there is the Lake Palace at Udaipur, now a hotel, and the Red Fort in Delhi.
The smaller towns and villages are crowded with houses and shops in narrow streets, mostly plain concrete and cement, flat-roofed, and seldom more than 2 floors. Most have inner courtyards, where the women of the house will be at work, and gathered to talk - maybe around the well or the courtyard tap, if they have one. Every suburb will have an open market at its centre, where the householders and servants will go to bargain for food and provisions. There you will get the best idea of the local culture and ways. Only in the last ten years has India begun to 'open up' to international/western culture and its goods - that's why India is still so fascinatingly ITSELF. The way the ancient past and the present are side by side, or just in a continuous living flow, is amazing. You can go into a south Indian village and feel yourself in a province in the Roman empire, or in old Turkey, or whatever.
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One quite interesting thing about buildings: India is movie-mad, the film capital is Bombay, also known as Bollywood, whose films are mostly in Hindi. But the South has its own huge movie industry, centred on Madras, with movies made mostly in the languages of Tamil, and Malayalam, and Kannada,and so on. And all over the South, cinemas are traditionally like large huts with open sides, where you move in the chairs before the show starts.
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Work
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There would be many things to say about work - there is a huge modern sector with the usual suits, offices and temps and managers and teaboys; there is every range of activity you can think of, rural and urban. One special thing about the work tradition in India is realted to the caste system - once a source of stability and a way to maintain the highest tradition of skills, but inevtiably a form of exploitation. It is still alive in the rural areas. If you were born into the priestly caste, the Brahmins, you and your descendants will always be looked up to as the highest born - even if you are poor. If you are born into a Kshatriya family you are of the warrior caste, and also quite high. If a Patel in Gujerat, or a Reddy in Andra Pradesh, you are of the merchant caste, and destined for business. And so on. You will seek to marry a partner from your own caste. But if you are a grass cutter, or a leather worker, dealing with the skin of dead animals, or a sweeper, then you are born and will remain an outcaste in the eyes of the others - unless you leave the village and break out of the mould in the city - or successfully call upon India's liberal laws to fight and break down the tradition, to get a good job in the government, or move into politics.Grandpa, Dad, Tony Hall(2001)
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