INDIA AND ITS PEOPLE This land is a constant challenge to mind and body, a glorious shock to the system. It is no place for the faint-hearted. India is exhilarating, exhausting, and infuriating — a land where, you’ll find, the practicalities of daily life overlay the mysteries that popular myth attaches to India. In place of the much-publicized, and much-misunderstood, mysticism of its ancient religions, India in reality has quite another miracle to offer in the sheer profusion of its peoples and landscapes. India comprises a diamond-shaped subcontinent that stretches over 3,000 km (1,800 miles) from the Kashmir mountains in the north right down to Kanyakumari, or Cape Comorin, on the Indian Ocean. From east to west India also covers about 3,000 km, from Arunachal Pradesh and Assam on the border with its neighbors China and Burma to the Gujarat coast on the Arabian Sea. Only in more recent post-colonial times did its natural geography exclude the countries of Pakistan and Bangladesh. Even there, for all the hostilities, there’s an undeniable cultural affinity with India — feuding brothers rather than unrelated strangers. In fact, when you look at its 4,000 years of history — or any of today’s newspapers, for that matter — its countless feuds seem to be a perpetual but necessary dynamic of Indian civilization. India is a massive family, with a lot of different and inevitably conflicting regional and sectarian interests. Rupee banknotes are printed in India’s 15 official languages: Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujurati, Oriya, Punjabi, Assamese, Kashmiri, and Malayalam, as well as Kannada, Tamil, and Telugu. A count of the languages spoken all over India, leaving out the dialects, comes to 1,652, written in 13 different alphabets. The national language of Hindi is spoken by less than the majority, and English, for which the government has a permanent program of modernization, is spoken by just 3 percent of the people, mostly in the largest cities. Everybody “speaks” cricket, though, with its innings, wickets, and boundaries present in every dialect. One of the first impressions you’ll get at the airport in Delhi or Mumbai (Bombay) is the diversity of ethnic types. From blue-eyed and sometimes red-haired Kashmiris and the Chinese-Tibetans from Sikkim or Darjeeling, through all the shades of coffee of the heartland, right down to dark-skinned, often curly-haired, Dravidians from southern India, you soon realize there’s no such thing as a “typical” Indian. India’s prehistoric settlers were probably what anthropologists call Proto-Australoids. They’ve since been joined by Mongols, Aryans, Greeks, Arabs, Turks, Persians, and Afghans, while Dutch, British, Portuguese, and French have also left their traces. The landscape is alternately rich and arid, lush and desolate. The majestic Himalayas in the north make an appropriate home for Shiva, one of the most-revered Hindu gods. Kashmir is a serenely beautiful and coveted land of green forest, alpine meadows, and lakes, while the Punjab in the northwest is the fertile center of the country’s Green Revolution, supporting the nation’s self-sufficiency in wheat, barley, and millet. On the doorstep of this wealth, the Thar Desert of noble Rajasthan heralds the vast Deccan plateau of parched, ruddy granite that dominates the peninsula of southern India. Delhi stands at the western end of the Ganga (Ganges) river basin in which India grows much of its rice. Flanked with patches of forest leading up into the foothills of the Himalayas, the flat plain stretches right across to the Bay of Bengal 1,600 km (1,000 miles) away, but some areas are kept as nature reserves for the country’s wildlife, notably its tigers, leopards, and elephants. Bengal’s greenery is the threshold to the tea plantations of Darjeeling and Assam. The rugged southern peninsula is hemmed in by low-lying mountains — the Vindhya and Satpura to the north and the Western and Eastern Ghats running parallel to the coasts. The forested Malabar coast in the west is sown with crops of coconut, betel-nut, pepper, rubber, and cashew nut, which today still tempt ships across the Arabian Sea. Some of the palm trees in the area provide shade for beach resorts in Goa and Kerala. India’s landscape also features man-made architectural treasures, bearing witness to the many great religions and civilizations which have enriched the country — monuments now, after centuries of neglect, preserved by the restoration program started by the Archaeological Survey of India. The sights are endless: the Hindu gopuram tower-gates of the south, the temples of Varanasi (Benares), the cave monasteries of Ajanta and Ellora, the beautiful and erotic sculptures of Khajuraho, the splendid marble palaces, fortresses, and mausoleums of the emperors and maharajas in Delhi, Agra, and Rajasthan, the colonial government buildings in New Delhi, or the unusual style of the Gothic-Oriental railway station in Mumbai (known until 1995 as Bombay). The cities’ shanty-town districts are often directly in the shadow of the shining skyscrapers, built by the shanty-town residents themselves. Here women carry bricks on their heads as gracefully as a pitcher of water. The women are also responsible for one other characteristic of Indian “architecture” — cow-dung patties which are preserved and kept for fuel and artfully shaped into mounds with shapes that differ from region to region, some of them resembling a Buddhist stupa, a Hindu gopuram, or even a Moslem minaret. The only constant in this huge landscape is the people themselves. Even in the vast open spaces of the Rajasthan desert or the Deccan plateau of central India, people appear everywhere, a tribesman on camel-back or lone woman holding her headdress in her teeth to keep out the dust as she carries a huge pitcher of water or a bundle of firewood on her head. If, as the road stretches before you empty and clear right up to the horizon, and you can see only one tree, it’s a pretty safe bet you’ll find at least one sadhu (holy man) resting in its shade. The teeming millions living in Calcutta and Mumbai have become legendary. They crowd each other into the roadway, bulge out of tiny auto-rickshaws, and perch on top of buses and trains; a family of four or five clings onto a motor-scooter, and a whole school class on one bullock-cart. It’s hazardous; buses do topple over, rooftop passengers on trains do occasionally get swept off the top by an overhanging steel rod, but they accept the risk for the free ride — rooftoppers aren’t in the habit of buying tickets. It’s important to remember not to apply Western values to everything you see here. The poverty, for instance, does not create the sense of shame as it does for people who live in Western countries. In India poverty is borne with considerable dignity and even with a cheerfulness that some may find difficult to understand. The same form applies to jostling, which is a whole way of life in this country. Everyone makes way for the cow, sacred to the Hindus. The cow has right of way everywhere, whether walking nonchalantly through the center of a city, or reclining across a new expressway. After a while you may begin to detect something a bit uncanny in the way a cow seems to look around and beyond her immediate surroundings — it’s as if she knows that she’s sacred. You can’t get around it: India is a country where religion is ever-present. Although the constitution of today describes India as a secular State, religion still plays a vital part in everyday life — in its streets as well as in the architecture, sculpture, and painting of its great monuments. A little background information on the major forms of faith may help. Religions of India Hinduism If Hinduism is more or less India’s national belief system, this may be because it offers something for everyone: mysticism and metaphysics for scholars, ceremony for ordinary people, austerity, sensuality, tranquillity, and frenzy. Building on the ancient cults and Vedic teachings of the Indo-Aryans dating from 1300 b.c. , Hinduism began to take its present form in the fourth century a.d. , under considerable pressure for a more “accessible” religion. Popular devotional worship, with its appeal to the common people, replaced the sacrifices practiced exclusively by the Brahmins. It is said there are 330 million gods in the Hindu pantheon, but they might be seen as 330 million facets of a single divinity. The three most important manifestations of the Brahman, or godhead, are Vishnu, Brahma, and Shiva, which are often presented to Westerners as a trinity, though this is not really comparable to the Christian concept. The “big three” are by no means accorded equal status. Vishnu, the preserver, is regarded by his worshippers as a god from whose navel a lotus grew bearing Brahma whose task it was to create the world. Vishnu, a four-armed god with mace, conch, discus, and lotus, has many incarnations, of which the most famous is Krishna, who appears as conquering hero, flute-playing lover, or mischievous baby. Vishnu’s wife Lakshmi is goddess of good fortune. Shiva is the dancing destroyer-god, wearing a garland of skulls and snakes around both neck and arms. As the god of time and ascetics, he decides the fate of the world. As Lord of beasts and king of dance, Shiva is as passionate as Vishnu is serene. Just in case you think you have got it all clear in your mind, remember that Vishnu destroys by not preserving and Shiva preserves through the renewal arising from destruction. Hindu ethics say that the path to salvation has three principles: righteousness, prosperity honestly achieved, and, not least, pleasure. At the center of the confrontation with the harsh reality of daily life is the concept of karma; that is “work” or “deed,” and the implication that the sum total of one’s acts in a previous life will determine one’s present station in life. A better reincarnation is promised those whose deeds and actions are good in this station. The ultimate goal is spiritual salvation, or moksha, a freeing from the cycle of rebirth. While this teaching has served to sustain the rigid hierarchy of the caste system, it is not so “fatalistic” as some would have it. The Hindus say we cannot escape our karma, but that with good judgment and foresight we can use it to our advantage. By the 19th century, reformers such as the Bengali Brahman Ram Mohan Roy tried to rid Hinduism of primitive idolatry. The self-immolation of widows, known as sati — a widow becomes sati, a “virtuous woman,” by climbing onto her husband’s funeral pyre — has disappeared, but the monkey-god Hanuman and elephant-headed Ganesh are still idolized, and nobody will dare to deny the sanctity of the cow and all her products: milk, curd, butter, and dung, the last of which is used for fuel. More than 83 percent of the population embraces Hinduism, which is more a way of life than a religion; its sacred rituals and observances are only a small part of what good Hindus believe makes them good Hindus. Much more than the mystical elements which fascinate and draw so many Westerners here, Hinduism is concerned with the basics of everyday life: birth, work, health, relationships, and death, all of this helped along by regular consultations with a local astrologer. Even today, the intricate Hindu caste system can play a role in the Indians’ choice of job, spouse, and political party, despite the numerous anti-discrimination statutes passed since Independence. Brahmins, the priestly caste, fill many of the top posts in the universities and administration; many Indian Army officers can trace their ancestry to the proud Kshatriya warrior caste; business is dominated by the merchant or Vaishya caste; and Shudras till the land. The so-called Untouchables have greater opportunities now to rise on the social scale, a few of them becoming captains of industry or cabinet ministers, but it’s still their brethren who sweep the streets. Most marriages in India are still arranged traditionally with carefully negotiated dowries. While ever more matrimonial advertisements in the weekend editions of The Times of India and other newspapers mention “caste no bar,” just as many specify the required caste or insist on a “fair-complexioned” bride while touting a university diploma or an American work permit. Islam Following a conflict in India almost as old as Islam itself, a peaceful coexistence between Hinduism and Islam seems hard to achieve. It’s hard to imagine a faith more hostile to all idolatry, fierce in its uncompromising monotheism, and opposed to the caste system as Islam When sufi mystics or the emperor Akbar tried to create a synthesis between the two faiths, the orthodox on both sides resisted. Hindu conversions to Islamic faith were more often performed out of hope of social advancement under a Muslim government than out of conviction. Muslims in India today, as fervent as their brethren in Pakistan or the Middle East, are mostly descendants of those converts. Over 80 million Muslims form the second-largest religious group in India — almost as many as the population of Pakistan — most of them descendants from Hindu converts of the Mughals’ empire, who bore the brunt of Hindu retaliation for long years full of subjection and an often unfair identification with British rule. Left behind by the exodus to Pakistan at the 1947 partition, they make up the peasantry in the north. While they mostly keep a low profile, you may hear of “communal incidents” in the cities between the Hindus and Muslims. Followers of Islam in India are divided into two primary groups: Sunnis (adherents of the Sunna law expounded by Mohammed’s own words and deeds) and Shiites (followers of those interpretations proposed by Mohammed’s cousin Ali). Every day, the devout face Mecca, bow their foreheads to the ground, and proclaim: “There is no god but Allah; and Mohammed is His Prophet. ” Sikhs The one attempt to merge the principles of Hinduism and Islam is that of the Sikhs (“disciples”). Nanak, their guru (teacher), was born a Hindu in 1469 and reared on the egalitarian principles of Islam. He opposed idolatry and the caste system (which was subsequently too strong to resist). From Islam he took the idea of one God, but refused any such specific conception as Allah. He saw God’s manifestation, like Hinduism, as being everywhere in the world He created. Nanak’s teachings were written in the Adi Granth, which acquired for Sikhs the sanctity of the Koran. According to this faith, alcohol and tobacco are forbidden. The militancy of the Sikhs came about only as Nanak’s successors got embroiled in politics — with dire results for the Sikhs — when their leaders challenged the Mughals. After the execution of Guru Tegh Bahadur, his son, Guru Gobind Singh, exalted the faithful to be ever ready for armed defense. They all took the surname Singh, meaning “Lion” (all Sikhs are named Singh, but not all Singhs are Sikhs), and wore a turban and kept the five K’s: kesha (uncut hair and beard), kanga (comb for their hair), kara (steel bracelet), kachha (soldier’s shorts), and kirpan (dagger). Their distinctive appearance made them highly visible and so inspired an unflinching courage. Sikhs make up just 2 percent of the population. With the consistent militant need to defend their faith, they make up a fiercely competent élite in the Indian Army, but they are also skilled farmers at the spearhead of the Green Revolution in the Punjab, where most of them live. Their rights have been the source of conflicts in the central government. Buddhism Bu ddhism was founded over 2,500 years ago in reaction to Brahmanic orthodoxy, but it practically vanished as an organized religion from the Indian scene by persecution and absorption into the Hindu mainstream. It continues, however, to exert influence on India’s spiritual and artistic life to the present day. Buddha’s own life explains his teachings, but the truth is buried in both legend and historical fact. He was born Siddhartha Gautama in a grove of sal trees at Lumbini (just across the Nepalese border) around the year 566 b.c. His mother, who was queen of the Sakyas, is said to have conceived him after dreaming that a magnificent white elephant holding a lotus flower in his trunk had entered her side. Siddhartha grew up in princely luxury, but when he was taken out one day to the edge of the royal parks, he saw the poor, the sick, and the aged. Then he saw a religious beggar who seemed serene, and he realized the path his life must take. Abandoning his riches, Siddhartha went off into the kingdoms of the Ganga valley. For six years he begged for his food, learned to meditate, and practiced severe self-mortification, but still felt no nearer to understanding life’s suffering. Then, aged 35, sitting under a tree at the place now known as Bodh Gaya (south of Patna), he vowed to stay there until his goal was achieved. For 49 days he resisted demons and temptresses, and became truly Enlightened — Buddha as he is called today. He preached his new wisdom at Sarnath (near Varanasi) and with ever more disciples went out to spread his word. Buddha himself converted ruthless bandits and whole armies from the path of violence. In Kushinagar, between Bodh Gaya and his birthplace, he died at age 80 of dysentery, it is said, from eating pork. Preaching that suffering came from the pursuit of personal desire, Buddha had advocated the Middle Way of the Eightfold Path: right views, right resolve, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right recollection, and right meditation. Only thus could the enlightenment of Nirvana be achieved. This original doctrine, without any sense of Buddha’s divinity, was embraced by the Hinayana (Lesser Vehicle) school which spread to Sri Lanka, Burma, and Thailand, as well as Cambodia and Laos. The Mahayana (Great Vehicle) school added the concept of Bodhisattva as divine savior, and was then the most dominant form of Buddhism, spreading to China and Japan. After centuries of almost total eclipse, Buddhism today has been able to achieve a revival in India, in part by offering its egalitarian philosophy to Hindu Untouchables as an escape from discrimination. There are now more than 5 million Buddhists in India, many of them in Maharashtra. Jainism As old as Buddhism, Jainism has made its mark with its concept of ahimsa (non-violence) and is much more pacifist than its name, which means religion of the conquerors. Vardhamana Mahavira was its founder. He was born in 540 b.c. in Bihar and, like Buddha, was the son of a chief. He, too, abandoned riches to become an ascetic. But Mahavira (the Great Hero) pursued self-mortification to the end of his life, stripping off his clothes to take his word from kingdom to kingdom. He died of self-inflicted starvation at the age of 72 in Para, near Rajgir. His followers were later to divide into the Digambaras (“space-clad,” i.e. , naked) and the Svetambaras (“white-clad”) you see today. The religion, in which Mahavira is seen as the manifestation of 24 Tirthankaras (teachers), attributes souls to all living creatures, as well as other natural objects. Agriculture was therefore abandoned for its destruction of plant and animal life. The doctrines survive in vegetarianism, with Jain monks carrying dusters to sweep insects away from where they tread and wearing a gauze veil over their mouth to avoid breathing in flies. Jainism, which never spread beyond India, claims 2 million followers, including many businessmen in Gujarat and the Deccan, with a few in Bengal. It had considerable influence on Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violence movement; he used its fasting-unto-death as a potent moral and political weapon. The Jains’ non-violent religion excludes them from agriculture as a profession, but they dominate the electronics industry in Bangalore. Parsis, Jews, and Christians The tiny but powerful community of Parsis brought Zoroastrianism from Iran, and its people shine in business today. The Parsis, as their name suggests, originate from ancient Persia and today form only a minute community in the world of religions, with barely 100,000 living in India, mostly in and around the city of Mumbai. They have been and are still enormously influential in this country’s economic life, often serving as all-important go-betweens in the sometimes immensely difficult relations between Hindus and Muslims, and between India and Pakistan. Their religion dates as far back as the seventh century b.c. , when their prophet Zoroaster contrasted his peaceful and sedentary People of Righteousness with the polytheistic nomadic People of Evil. His was an attitude that probably determined not only their general ethics, but also their occupational destiny as highly sophisticated businessmen. The Parsis base their elaborate code of ethics on the concept of a constant struggle existing between the forces of creation — that is, light and good — and those of darkness and evil. Its teachings puts great emphasis on the very purity of the world’s natural elements, fire, earth, and water. For instance, to avoid polluting the elements, Parsis do not bury or cremate their dead, but lay them exposed and naked on their famous Towers of Silence for the vultures to devour. India’s Jewish community is ancient indeed. Some texts claim that the first Jews arrived in India at the time of the Babylonian exile, in 587 b.c. ; others bring them to Cranganur, on the Malabar coast, in a.d. 72, about the time that the disciple Thomas is thought to have brought his Christian mission to India. The oldest Jewish community still in existence is situated down the coast at Cochin (see page 182), dating back at least to the fourth century a.d. Some others, less orthodox, can be found in Mumbai, but most emigrated to Israel when it was founded in the year 1948. The earliest Christians other than St. Thomas (see page 197), were the so-called Nestorian “heretics” of the Syrian Orthodox Church, also living on the Malabar coast since the first centuries of the Christian era. Modern Indian Christians, some descended from the Syrians, others from those converted by British and Portuguese missionaries, number about 19 million. They are mainly Catholics, living in Goa, and elsewhere you will find all the British variations on Protestantism, all with a certain Hindu tinge to them. The new religion of India is of course modernization, and young, upwardly mobile professionals are everywhere. Growing involvement in electronics, telecommunications, nuclear power, and space satellites is intended to take the country, as one official said, “directly from the 19th into the 21st century. ” To achieve this transition, the government is cutting through bureaucracy to break with political corruption and find some kind of peaceful modus vivendi for communal and regional interests. Former US ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith called it a “functioning anarchy. ” The miracle of how it functions is well worth observing.