Banyan Tree Adventures

by Keith Forrester

  So it was very much a ‘non-scientific’ series of discussions with these foreign tourists. I have used their observations and experiences throughout the book but especially in the next two chapters. Their comments and observations have provided a springboard as it were for me to bounce off and to add my own commentary and experiences. Above all though I learned from them a lot about India. They had done things that I hadn’t or had been to places I wouldn’t be visiting. The discussions broadened my understandings, introduced me to new topics and, sometimes, forced me rethink my own experiences. Very briefly the people I interviewed were:

  • Gina (with her partner Mick in the background) who has visited India some 24 times. She first came to India in 1991 because of the Gulf War. It was either going to Africa or India – India won. Gina is from Britain and works part-time in a post office.

  • Steven is a chartered accountant and works in the City of London. Like Gina, it was in the early 1990s when he first came to India. Since then he has returned to the country many times.

  • Andy has been to India 8 or 9 times, usually for quite long stays of 2–3 months. Andy works as a care assistant in Britain but likes to get away from the British winters as often as possible.

  • Janet and Mike have been to India about 8 times and usually stay for about 6 months at a time. They own a caravan park in Colorado in the USA, probably “like a Hill Station here in India”. Their park is high in the mountains at around 3,000 metres and during winter is closed due to the depth of the snow.

  • Sheila and Tony who first arrived in India in 1986 have returned 20–30 times. They have been elsewhere but “nowhere else filled the gap”. Sheila and Tony live near us in Yorkshire, UK and it was they who first suggested we visit India and them, on our trip with the children in 2003–4. Both Sheila and Tony have traditionally worked on a part-time basis (in education and landscape gardening) back in England.

  • Helle Ryslinge is from Copenhagen, Denmark. She is an actress and filmmaker who has been to India “many, many times”. I didn’t know Helle before I interviewed her. I met her as she was staying next door to me in the homestay.

  • Sany from Paris, France has been coming to India for 10 years and occasionally spent considerable time on particular visits – up to two and half years on one trip.

  • Pauline and Sjoerd first came to India in 1997 and have visited India about 13 times. Pauline is from Britain and Sjoerd from the Netherlands.

  • Jeff is from Britain but lives and works in Munich, Germany. He first visited India in 1997 and has returned about 12 times. Jeff works as a tour guide in Munich and is able to take time off from his work during European winters.

  As is clear from these notes, this is a very eclectic but experienced group of visitors to India. As already mentioned, they were not a selected group but simply, in the main, stayed at the same homestay as myself. The only criteria used in their selection was that they had visited India a number of times. I had never come across groups of ‘frequent travellers’ to the same place before. I was staggered. And as I have come to realise, there are hundreds and probably thousands of other frequent visitors I could have interviewed. Each of them would have very interesting, absorbing but different stories to tell about their times in India. I am most grateful to my small group for agreeing to discuss with me their experiences and for their patience and insights.

  The issues and questions that I discussed with these frequent returners to India will become clearer in subsequent chapters, especially in the next chapter. Why India for example, and why not some other country? What is it and where is it in India that attracts them, and how do they choose to spend their time while in India? Where have they been and what aspects of Indian culture, policy and history interest them and why? So, while the Taj Mahal or the magnificent medieval Meenakshi Temple in southern Tamil Nadu do not prominently figure in the following chapters (see the numerous guide and sightseeing books), there is instead a focus on trying to understand and interpret the ‘everyday’ sensitivities of being-in and travelling-around India. Given that trains are the preferred mode of travel for these Indian tourists, for example, what I wondered is the financial health of the network, how was it shaped by the colonial powers and what part does it play in the lives of Indians? Or take one of the most infamous features of India today – poverty; how widespread are the poor and what are some of the reforms and political initiatives that have attempted to address this problem? How does caste, religion and gender contribute towards resolving or strengthening poverty in India? How do these overseas tourists cope, understand and explain the shocking evidence of poverty while travelling around the country? Their ‘understandings’ and mine as well to these and other complicated questions and issues don’t take the form of dissertations. Instead, they are the result of an interest and enthusiasm to people and things around them, a working knowledge developed through reading and conversations with other interested parties while in India, and also on their return home. Regularly reading some of the numerous English daily newspapers available in India as is done by many long-stay visitors develops a growing awareness of macro and micro Indian agendas that informs discussion and analysis in the local community as well as at the national level. There is, in other words, an everyday working knowledge of aspects of India that contextualises this tourist group’s experiences of ‘being a tourist’ and which, in my interviews with them, I was keen to explore.

  It is this ‘context’ that is a major consideration for me as will be seen in the discussions within this book. I remember one morning in February 2013 sitting down after breakfast, having finished the morning’s newspapers, and jotting some notes on these ‘wider happenings’ that were around at that time. Some of the ‘contextual headlines’ during this period, for example, included:

  • Continuing mass demonstrations in Delhi and elsewhere in India against the rape by a group of six men of a 23-year-old physiotherapist student in Delhi on 16th December 2012.

  • On 8th February 2013, Mohammed Guru from Kashmir was secretly executed in New Delhi. According to the Supreme Court, Guru was one of those responsible for the attack on Parliament House and which resulted in the death of nine people. Against a background of widespread protest in Kashmir, the region was placed under indefinite curfew. A number of Indian journals were busy examining the “mockery of the constitutional principles of the rule of law and due process”.

  • On 9th and 10th February, over 120 million devotees attended the Maha Kumbh Mela (religious festival held every 12 years) near Allahabad in North India where the sacred rivers of the Ganges and Yamuna meet.

  • On the 12th February, another major corruption scandal was outlined in the national press involving several major politicians and military officers allegedly receiving bribes from the European helicopter manufacturer AgustaWestland. India purchased twelve helicopters at a cost of 560 million Euros in 2010 from AgustaWestland.

  • On 20th and 21st February, a national strike organised by all eleven national trade unions closed down most urban centres throughout India. This was the first time ever that all trade union confederations had worked together.

  • On 21st February two ‘terrorist bombs’ exploded in Hyderabad in Andhra Pradesh, killing 17 people and injuring at least 119 other people.

  • On 21st February, India played Australia in the first of four cricket Test Matches. India won all four matches.

  • Throughout February, there was a relentless push within the State and national media promoting Narendra Modi from the BJP political party as a Prime Ministerial candidate in the 2014 general elections. Modi is a controversial and divisive politician in a controversial and divisive party.

  Doing tourism

  Was this an unusual month? Would any other month have been different to this February in 2013? Of course, I don’t know but I doubt it. Corruption scandals, the fortunes of the Indian cricket team, military activity in Kashmir, religious festivals, trade union activity and even ‘b
ombings’ are not rare events in India. However, what these February headlines do illustrate is the day-to-day ‘background noise’ within which touristic activities are situated and experienced. Visiting Jodhpur in Rajasthan or trekking in the mountains around Darjeeling in West Bengal does not occur in a vacuum – there is always ‘background noise’. Most of the ‘tourists’ interviewed for this book were aware to a greater or lesser extent of these February news items. These episodes helped shape and influence their understandings and narratives about where they had been and what they had seen. Despite being ‘outsiders’, there was this engagement with aspects of Indian everyday reality as portrayed in the newspapers and as discussed with local people. In a small number of cases, this engagement resulted in extended periods of professional practice being undertaken in India over a number of years. For most people, their visits to India had resulted in the discovery and practice of new interests and of a deeper historical awareness not only about India but also their own country. None of this of course is particularly unusual or surprising although it is rarely documented. Instead the overwhelming emphasis in the media and in the written word on visits to India is on ‘touristic’ descriptions and itineraries, many of them very valuable and illuminating. In my own case, it was this unusual, I think, encounter between the ‘outsider tourist’ experience with the routine contextual circumstances in India that was of interest and that I missed when reading some of the popularly-available travel literature. Do most people go to school, how much does it cost and is it any good? What is that film that is drawing crowds every day outside that cinema? What do people do when they are ill, how do they earn a living, and have things changed that much over the years? None of these questions are particular to India – indeed, they might be very similar to Indian tourists visiting Europe or some other unfamiliar country. The interesting thing though – for me, anyway – is that for this particular group of ‘tourists’, it was tourism or ‘being a tourist’ that opened up these areas of interest and inquiry. Tourism as a way of engagement or agency is not usually coupled together.

  If these ‘contextual features’ of February 2013 listed above and the subsequent questions that arise from the list suggest the sort of things that interest me as a traveller, they also hint or suggest why this is not a guidebook or a travel diary or a holiday memoir. Most of the things that interest me while in different or new countries are not the focus of guidebooks although you often find brief historical or cultural outlines in the Appendix sections.

  The notions of ‘tourist’ or of ‘tourism’, however, carries a variety of connotations – passive, consuming, escapism, arrogance, affluence, for example. This is especially the case when talking about ‘foreign’ tourists which is invariably the case in this book. These implications are often negative and mainly embedded within a marketing or business model. The ‘tourists’ in this book who discuss their experiences of India are of a particular group (of which I am a member) in that they are white, from rich parts of the world, include both females and males and have visited India many times but, apart from Sany, don’t speak any of India’s indigenous languages. These characteristics will shape obviously their perceptions and understandings of India as is explored in later chapters – as they shape mine. In one sense, the entire book can be read as a discussion of ‘tourism’, albeit a particular variety of tourism. It is perhaps more a tourism of ‘everyday life’ in India set against a varying background of geography, history, politics and culture. In fact, ‘tourism’ – its nature, its consequences, its relation to other sectors and developments in society – emerged as an interest for me while thinking about India and this book. How could this not be the case when I was one of these ‘tourists’? It was quite an eye-opener. I didn’t realise for example how large and popular a subject ‘tourism’ or ‘hospitality studies’ is within British higher education – very large and growing. This probably reflects the heightened emphasis on jobs, employment and vocationalism that seems to define increasingly university learning in Britain today. But there were also more interesting perspectives to some of these studies; a more sociological influence that treats the nature of ‘the tourist’ or of ‘tourism’ as problematic and not something straightforward. By adopting a view that tourism is not understood similarly by everyone provides a more critical discussion of people like me and what we do when we travel to other countries. In contrast to these more critical discussions, there are numerous government and multi-agency reports and studies on tourism that reflect the economic importance of tourism to local and national development from around the world. In fact, this perspective seems to be the dominant narrative within these types of studies and generally to have a simple, causal and operational focus. There appears to be a large quantity of literature discussing how best to measure this growth and significance. More interesting though for me are the former, more conceptual and critical explorations of trying to understand the nature of the tourist experience. In such discussions for example, there is analysis of tourism as expressions of power, of seeing tourism in poorer countries as incorporating existing exploitations, inequalities and social divisions, of ignoring the displacement (of people, of traditional jobs such as fishing, of lands, of forests) and of ignoring other aspects such as the climate change consequences of the industry. The ‘tourist industry’ in any country and not just India doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Instead it is a part of wider economic and social relationships. Even ‘socially responsible tourism’ manages often to hide the implications of these wider concerns and relationships. From a post-colonial perspective there is talk of a modern tourism characterised by the servant of yesteryear becoming the host of today, often in partnership with the local or national state. Other more theoretical studies concentrate on understanding the nature of ‘being a tourist’ where attention focuses on a detachment from one’s natural environment, the importance of ‘play’ as part of being a tourist and the importance of ‘being away’ (language, infrastructure, ethnicity, values) from one’s normal environment. These are important considerations and are worth the effort of trying to get to grips with the issues they raise. Some of these issues will be returned to in subsequent chapters. Difficult as are some of these issues, they certainly go way beyond the rather bland, uncritical definition of tourism by the World Tourism Organization (WTO): namely, that “tourism comprises the activities of persons traveling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure…”

  So yes, I did get more interested in all things ‘tourist’ when thinking, discussing and reading about Indian travels, and also, thinking about my own experiences. I understood along with the people I interviewed that ‘understanding’ India would always be a very partial and incomplete process, irrespective of how much time and attention we spent on this effort. We would always be ‘like fish out of water’, different, materially and culturally set apart. Our arguments and analysis with each other deep into the warm Indian nights would and will always display gross misunderstandings and cultural prejudices despite our best efforts and ignorance on a grand scale. But and here is the strange thing, it doesn’t matter. What we and me in this book are doing is trying to better understand and engage with this country that fascinates most of us and which we return to periodically. Yes, we might go elsewhere away from home on visits but India somehow retains this special affection and interest that has developed over many years. India is so different and mind-boggling. Everyone soon realises that after their first few hours in the country. The ride from the airport to the city centre remains an abiding memory for most first-time foreign visitors. Regular returners have realised this but enjoy the emotional, aesthetic and intellectual experience of trying to make sense of the country. It is an ‘enjoyment’ characterised by frustration, self-satisfaction, cul-de-sacs, contradictions and achievement, as my interviews demonstrated. It’s all very strange. I’m sure that within the vast annals of ‘tourist studies’, there will be some studie
s of the ‘psychological deficits’ of these types of visitors but I won’t be bothering to track them down.

  The Raj

  So yes, my own visits to India and thinking about this book led to a general interest in tourism and being a tourist. The other unexpected ‘discovery’ that emerged in visits to different parts of India and in my reading and explorations of various issues was the Raj connection. The Imperial connection between India and Britain is hard to ignore for Western visitors. It depends obviously on where you go, but in most areas and regions of this vast country, there is seemingly this British connection. For me coming from Britain, these connections might be more pertinent, raw and immediate than for visitors from other Western countries. Irrespective of where these foreign visitors come from, however, they will be aware to some extent of this colonial relationship. Some of the seminal and globally important historical episodes of the twentieth century revolved around the breaking of this relationship. The Independence of India in August 1947 for example was not only the culmination of many decades of struggle by Indians through the subcontinent but also heralded the beginning of the end for the mightiest Empire the world had ever seen. Africa and especially South Africa together with Vietnam recognised what was possible and drew inspiration from India’s struggles. For Britain in the end, it all unravelled so quickly that the country today continues to adjust to this loss of imperial legacy and understand itself as a small insignificant island situated offshore from continental Europe. It is finding this new role difficult as assumptions of ‘what once were’ continue to inform its present-day practices, assumptions and policies, especially in the area of foreign policy. A key to any understanding of Britain over the last six or seven decades is India – not the only key, but one of the master keys. It might have been ‘in the past’ but it continues today to haunt and shape who we are as British and, possibly, the slow break-up of the ‘United Kingdom’.