A sundry clutch of largely dilapidated villages and the grand opening of a department store. India is a place of drastic extremes, opposite poles pulling away from each other though intrinsically intertwined, leaving economic disparity, poverty, and contorted cultural norms in the wake of their conflict, and a fair amount of torn plastic bags lying on the side of the road. This past weekend we had our summer 'language camp' that seemed much more like a strange family vacation of a particular family that no forces, be they biological or social, would have normally ever constructed. Nevertheless, the lot of us - seven students and three teachers - awoke around four Friday morning and made our way through the slowly awakening streets of Kolkata to the train station, boarding a relatively posh 2nd class AC car of a train to Bishnupur, a town about five hours to the northwest of the city.
As soon as we cleared the slums and sprawl of Kolkata, a constant reminder of the less seen edges and faces of this city though well-recognized for its urban blight and poverty, the expanse of rice paddies extended in every direction towards the horizon, loose rectangles of varying shades of brown and green, from the neon of a freshly sprouting paddy to the steelish blue-brown of a paddy churned up by a recent plow. Dotting the landscape were the occasional yoke-tied oxen, crouching farmers, solitary bunches of palm trees, and a gently hobbling goat.
"At one point this was all jungle," said one of the other students with a look mixed with regret and disgust souring his expression, his relationship to this India tinged by a dozen years as a Hari Krishna, a former lifetime holed up in celibacy and ecstatic asceticism. This is however is a landscape of 'development', the much celebrated or criticized fact of what one might hope or hate is the world today. At times, development isn't issues of identity and sustainability, nationalism and globalism - it is an endless quilt of rice paddies stretching towards the horizon where once there might have been jungle, its crocheted surface the product and symbol of a burgeoning population exerting itself on its land.
"My mother tongue is English too," said the rather rotund man sitting across my row from me, a geology professor from some college of whose name I only caught a possible Christian nomenclature. He was a man who revealed himself to me to be both quite friendly and all too picky about his tea, often rejecting several cha-wallahs' (tea vendor) products served in tiny 2-3 ounce terra-cottas for being too dark/black (khalo) before gleefully being satisfied by one or another's murky white drink. This fellow also revealed himself to be the other half of a chortling pair of friends completed by one of the train conductors, also a quite friendly man for whom English was however not even a second-cousin-once-removed tongue. My fuzzy mind and morning-mouth made for some difficult Bengali conversation, a 'kobe' misheard as 'khabe', turning what had been a question of asking the date when he had visited America for his storied bank business trip into a both grammatically and socially friendly offer of my breakfast. He kindly declined, no harm done.
Bishnupur was like most Indian towns with an Archaeological Survey of India endorsed cachet of temples picked up off the ground and stacked up again with a bit of cement mortar, and its correlating trickle of tourism, primarily of Indian origin. The town lay stretched along a couple roads, the dimly lit phone-booths, sweet stores, and questionable internet-cafes in serial succession, men milling in front of dirty stoops, concrete always in a state of slight decomposition. Slightly outside the town were a series of spaced out but slightly-numbingly repetitive and long inactive Vishnavite temples of what was gleefully purported to be a distinctive terracotta construction, their backsides often having lost much of their decoration in sacrifice for a more uniformly adorned front.
On other days we went out farther a few hours by car, barely clearing the massive water-filled potholes increasing with the day's progress of the monsoon, seeing a teacher's childhood village, an adibashi village, and an extremely poor - though it escapes me if truly 'adibashi' village with a desired economy of terracotta handcrafts. To explain, 'adibashi' is a government designation, implying a population of 'aboriginal' people, an oft-debated racialization and perhaps concretization of poverty - the word literally translating to 'original inhabitant'. We weren't entirely sure why we went to these places, the people curious but unfamiliar enough with outsiders that timidity or disinterest kept away any real interaction, and a strong accent and dialect of Bengali prevented us from understanding or being understood. As we purposelessly walked through the dirt path that defined the village's central street, a small parade of children following in our wake or standing watch on an idle cart, the overwhelming atmosphere was that of an all too pictorial national-geographic poverty: children either mostly naked or wrapped in shockingly brightly colored clothing congregating in a sea of organic construction and decomposition, a backdrop of rough and crumbling browns and tans. This magnetic parade strung itself along to the nearby pond where on opposite sides of the pond two groups - one composed of slightly confused and sweaty Americans and their strangely content teachers, the other not even half their height and much more touchy with one another - engaged in the same exact activity of skipping stones while never actually interacting more than the occasionally crossing paths of their pebbles. An odd mirroring along an imaginary vertical line materialized to compliment those real reflections lying on the surface of this pond being dappled by friendly contests. A different kind of reality making itself quietly but consistently known.
The other day we went to this terracotta village, the mud here seemingly deeper and more invasive, this red mud making itself the overarching grammar of the village. the apparent center of the village was a no man's land of puddles, the houses replete with Bengali inscriptions begging godly mercy and exclaiming their own poverty. One after another, identical caricatured statues of horses and elephants lined almost every porch, trays of just produced limbs waiting to be assembled nearby, pieces of their unwanted fallen comrades slowly returning to the earth in small trash heaps. The monsoon unleashed itself again, the pathway became a stream and we stood under strangers' porch roofs for a while, wondering about our purpose, if any... if my 20 rupee purchase of a couple tiny horse figurines would make much of a difference.
While village life - often mixed with the sunny disposition childhood takes on in retrospective memory - is by city-dwellers celebrated in a deep and somber remorse for what they have lost, this is the flip side of India, or at least one of its many more murky and less seen undersides. The frantically happy stories of rural childhood, simple days spent eating fresh fruit from trees and milling about in ponds and underbrush, are replaced by more palpable and current visions of poverty and hard work, a vacuum of technology and convenience. Again, the open ended questions of development hung in the air made heavy with sheets of rain.
And then it was back to Kolkata. While of course there are other tales of this still amusingly named 'language camp', for the sake of brevity and thesis I'll avoid their description. The ride back was in the non-AC car, still a few notches above the lowest rung of Indian train travel, but much more crowded and with no obvious person of authority in place, its clientèle 'mixed' for lack of a better word, fewer English novels being read and professorships being proudly proclaimed. As I turned between my book and the slots of the thick nighttime that shown through the window bars, the phrase 'deepest darkest India' kept running through my mind. I was aware of both its orientalism and its material truth (it was quite dark out there) but feeling its gravity. This depth, this darkness, was the lop-sided development of the dense endlessness of India. While many receive phone calls anywhere in the countryside, and soda bottles pop up in almost every corner of the countryside, entire towns remain off the electrical grid and subsisting on shallow and insubstantial wells, becoming more and more distant from the rapidly changing urban population. However, instances of development and interconnection with larger networks of development bring mixed promise. Often illegal, over-polluting and dangerous small-scale coal mining operations have created employment and income for far-flung villages during the agriculturally nonsustaining winter-time, at the cost of human and ecological destruction and degradation. This is an implication of development, sooty clouds pock-marking the sky above this boundless rice-paddied countryside. My pondering was interrupted by an odd series of altercations happening in quick succession down the aisle of the train. A hijra was accosting men rather violently, moving directly into their seat aisles, waving his/her money in a fan with his/her left hand, pushing them about with his/her right while the men tried hard to avoid any eye contact long enough for him/her to leave them alone. Oh, ok... like I said, there was no obvious authority aboard this train.
A day after returning, I went to a department store still in its grand-opening week in search of brown rice to address more personal and nutritional needs. Middle class Bengalis and one other foreigner milled among the aisles, Indian staples such as daal and oil in neatly ordered rows, complimented by such far-flung items as imported peanut-butter and canned corn. Supermarket musak interspersed with sales announcements of what were to me mysterious products and brands floated above our heads, an army of employees and guards idling in the aisles, usually getting in the way but occasionally straightening a row or helping an elderly man get his bag of over-inspected atta or moong. These shopping centers have begun to pop up throughout the city, a celebration and slightly nauseous product of India's new middle class, a bizarre blend of commodity and context, over-packaged products lined up in a shiny over air-conditioned palace of shopping, its doors bookended by guards dressed in outfits fit for the British Raj of the late 19th century. Their outfits always involve jodpurs, handle-bar mustaches, and turban-like hats with loft feathers. I saw the faults of the American consuming population abounding halfway across the world - overuse of shipping and packaging, fetishization of the foreign or popularized 'convenience' - and my knee-jerk criticism of this emerging fact of modern India mingled with the tinkly music from the sound system.
"They want to keep us backward and poor." I remembered these words being uttered by the son of the family from whom I am renting my room, thoughts concerning those people resisting these kinds of transformations of economy and polity. He is a middle-class college art student, with both a bodily demeanor and size, atypical among Indians, especially his his head of long uncoiffed hair, a human product of this development. My aversion to Walmart and its derivatives and derrogatypes was thrown into opposition with a more personally emotional and practical stance on this issue of development.
Like I had started off this little diatribe, India, really seems to be this place of strong oppositions not just placed in contrast and juxtaposition but tied together through causation and negation. I don't know exactly the implications of these symbols and snapshots of development - the emerald expanse of rice-paddies, the soot drifting off a creaking coal works, the dirt-smeared declarations of poverty on door-posts, the milling air-conditioned middle-class looking through packages of beans and Ramen noodles with a discerning eye - but I do know that they all definitely do mean something and that there is a dissonant yet codependent origination of it all.
By the way, still missing Amerika, even though I did splurge and buy a jar of peanut butter imported from Illinois.
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