Travelers' Tales India

by James O'Reilly

  I kept my gaze down and walked rapidly toward the market, but I was quickly encircled by a wall of pubescent males shouting insults. Boys on bicycles surrounded me like savages around a wagon train.

  “I love you,” they shouted. “Kiss my penis lady.”

  All my frustrations with India rose up in an insuppressible shriek. “Pigs, you’re just little pigs! You should be ashamed. Go away!”

  My shouts only whetted the crowd’s appetite for mass hooliganism, and they pressed against me, pushing and grabbing. The circle of bicycles tightened until metal was almost scraping me. They smelt blood. I was scared. I noticed an elderly chai-wallah at a nearby stand and made a pleading gesture at him. He shouted something to the boys. In this class and caste conscious culture the old man could not have much status, but they reluctantly started to disperse. I was surprised that they obeyed him. However low his status, it was evidently higher than mine.

  I touched my hands to my forehead in thanks.

  As I turned to walk off, the boys had one final say. A large stone hit me directly between the shoulders.

  Bridget McCoy is a long-time resident of Sonoma County in Northern California. Periodic attacks of wanderlust have drawn her to near and far-away places. Her other passions are photography and riding her horse, Taxi.

  At passport control [in the Delhi airport], the Indian official, who obviously thought he was “a bit of all right,” wobbled his head in quaint Indian fashion and said, “No allowing you to passing.”

  “Why not?” I said.

  “You stay in my country. You are making me fine wife.”

  “Sorry,” I told him,“but you should have thought of that earlier. I have to go home now.”

  “No problem.”

  “What do you mean, no problem?”

  “No problem you staying in India. You making me very fine wife indeed.”

  “It’s a nice idea, but I’m afraid I’m fully booked. I already have another twenty-seven husbands dotted around. I’d like to fit you in but, you know—you have to put your foot down somewhere.”

  “No problem,” (wobble, wobble), “you fine wife.”

  “If you’d like to take a look at my passport, I’ll be on my way.”

  “Please, first one kiss as you are hurting my heart.”

  “Now look here, Sunny Jim, you’re supposed to be a sensible passport official. I don’t want to hear about your personal emotional upset.”

  “One kiss.”

  “No one kiss. Passport look.”

  “One kiss.”

  “Good grief!”

  “Good grief?”

  “Yes, good grief—you’re working your ticket.”

  “One kiss.”

  “Look! Passport—is good yes?”

  “One kiss no problem.”

  “Okay. One kiss, but on passport picture, okay?”

  “No problem.”

  With that, he delivered a wet one on my photograph and, casting a woeful look towards me that would no doubt linger until the next Western female came along, he let me go.

  —Josie Dew, The Wind in My Wheels: Travel Tales from the Saddle

  The Die is Caste

  STEVE COLL

  Human greed and cruelty do not respond well to legislation.

  I DO NOT KNOW THE NAME OF THE MAN I ADMIRE MOST IN INDIA. He may have left a business card but I did not retain it.

  He showed up unannounced at my front door in New Delhi one afternoon in the midst of the 1990 caste riots. An affirmative action plan promising reserved government jobs to a wide tier of India’s lower castes had sparked a violent reaction in the north. Mobs of upper-caste university students fearful of losing opportunity through reverse discrimination roamed New Delhi’s wide avenues, trashing cars and grocery stores stocked with smuggled imports from the West. Lower-caste students and farmers staged their own demonstrations, battled with police, and erected makeshift roadblocks on the highways out of the capital, where they burned buses and pelted cars with stones. Hysteria about the riots and the divisive consequences of affirmative action sang daily from the Indian national newspapers which are owned, edited, and written by members of the upper castes. Fueling the apprehension was a spreading wave of ghoulish self-immolations by aggrieved upper-caste teenagers and preteens. The burnings had been sparked by Rajiv Goswami, an obscure, quiet upper-caste student at Delhi University who stood one afternoon on the perimeter of a street crowd of chanting protestors and then, in circumstances which remain unclear, doused himself with kerosene and set himself alight. Soon Goswami, wrapped in gauze and fighting for his life in a New Delhi hospital, was being hailed as a tragic but noble paragon of self-sacrifice in a worthy cause, namely the development of a society based on “merit,” not caste or feudal identity. Seeking to emulate Goswami’s reputation, and perhaps to resolve troubles unrelated to political dilemmas such as affirmative action, dozens of other upper-caste teen-agers in New Delhi and elsewhere began to soak themselves with gasoline and set themselves on fire. Panic and dread spread among parents of the upper-caste urban middle class—accountants, clerks, bureaucrats, and businessmen born to social privilege but struggling under varied pressures in an increasingly competitive political economy. In my neighborhood, which was dominated by such relatively wealthy but insecure households, parents kept a sharp eye on their matches.

  In this atmosphere I opened my door and stared in disbelief at a smiling young man on my front stoop who clutched a cigarette lighter, a bottle of kerosene, and a fire extinguisher. He was perhaps twenty-one, clean-cut, dressed in pressed slacks and a knit shirt. He announced that he was a salesman, appointed representative of the finest manufacturer of fire extinguishers in India. He said that if I would spare a minute of my time, he would provide a demonstration that would not only amaze me but would convince me of the immediate need to stock my house with his fine safety products.

  “Sir,” he asked, “shall I set myself on fire?”

  As he began to pour kerosene onto his forearm, I recovered my voice in time to object. I noted that as a foreigner, I had no great worry that my children would immolate themselves over a caste-based affirmative action plan. But I did wonder whether this sales pitch was working very well elsewhere in the neighborhood.

  “Business, sir, is booming,” he answered.

  I invited him in and asked about his background as he unpacked demonstration fire extinguishers and promotional videotapes. He said that he was lower caste by birth. His father was a peasant farmer who owned and tilled a couple of acres, meaning that he was better off than those at the very bottom of the rural ladder, the landless. Still, his parents had worked mightily and saved scrupulously to put him through school, he said. Now he was at university, an undergraduate in engineering. He hoped eventually to study abroad. Meantime, to earn money for school and to keep himself in style, he was moonlighting as a fire-extinguisher salesman, tromping door to door through upper-caste neighborhoods offering to rescue the privileged from themselves at twenty U.S. dollars a pop. It was a very good franchise, he said.

  Though uncertain about the quality or utility of his extinguishers, I told him that I would buy three, strictly on the principle that such audacity must be rewarded if India is ever to realize its ambitions. I think the salesman wasn’t sure what I was talking about, but he remained polite enough, no doubt on the principle that the money of lunatic foreigners was just as good as the money of frightened Brahmins.

  I tended to invest my hopes in such quixotic characters because otherwise it would be easy to give in to despair about the legacy of feudalism and caste in South Asia. Even in Pakistan and Bangladesh, where casteless Islamic ideology has helped to decouple feudal economic arrangements from spiritual tradition, the old system clings to the land like glue, trapping all sorts of ambitious people in place. The system finds a thousand ways to perpetuate itself, including forms of religious sanction, as in the exploited tradition of living Islamic saints in the Pakistani countryside. As with race in
America, it is difficult to be certain when you care too little and when you care too much about feudal and caste discrimination. But if you believe in virtually any version of the egalitarian ideal, and if you confront with open eyes what this discrimination means in South Asia today and how it operates, the enormity of the problem can be staggering.

  In India, ancient caste identities remain very much alive, despite the determined efforts of Nehruvian policymakers to kill them off. If you could produce a satellite photograph of India with different colors marking the prominence of different castes, the result would be an indecipherable patchwork. There are thousands of castes and subcastes sanctioned by Hinduism as divinely ordained earthly stations from which one cannot escape except through death and reincarnation. Some castes are large, such as the superior Brahmins or the inferior Untouchables, but even these have regional subdivisions notable as much for their differences as for their shared status. Other castes are tiny groups, confined to a single clan of artisans or laborers in a single village. The overall stratification is roughly symmetrical. About 15 percent of India’s population are reckoned to belong to the upper castes at the very top. About 20 percent belong to the very lowest castes or to oppressed indigenous tribes at the very bottom. (Untouchables are in this group, though technically they are not a caste at all, but a spiritually homeless group of “outcasts.”) This lowest tier is designated by the government as “scheduled castes and tribes” and has been targeted in various affirmative action programs since just after independence. In the middle, some 65 percent of the population belong to what is known these days as the “other backward classes”, lower and lower-middle castes and minorities such as Muslims and Christians. Within this grouping are some clans that have done very well since independence, some that have done very poorly, and some that have simply remained in servitude to their landlords. It was a doomed attempt by India’s crusading prime minister V. P. Singh to initiate for these other backward classes a new, sweeping affirmative action plan in public employment that sparked the caste riots of 1990, including the upper-caste self-immolations that brought the fire-extinguisher salesman to my door.

  Caste was created by force, it is true. About three thousand years ago India was invaded by the Aryans, a race of light-skinned warriors from the harsh foothills of the Caucasian mountains. The conquerors built a thick wall to separate themselves from the land’s subjugated natives, a wall that stretched the length of the subcontinent. It was a solid wall of ideas, a wall unbreachable by any weapon because it existed in people’s minds. The Aryan men-at-arms became the Kshatriyas, the priests they brought with them became the Brahmins, and the indigenous multitudes who now served them became the Shudras. Later, once trade joined war and farming as a major way of life, the new class of merchants and shopkeepers became the Vaishyas.

  Once the sting of invasion faded to a faint memory, caste developed into a central tenet of the nascent Hindu faith. The children of victors and vanquished alike subscribed to the evolving belief.

  —Jonah Blank, Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God: Retracing the Ramayana through India

  For decades now, South Asian politicians and activists have been attempting sporadically to untie the hierarchical binds of history, religion, and culture through land reform legislation, speeches, symbolic acts, marches, electoral campaigns, industrialization plans, welfare programs, and government hiring schemes. Many of these efforts reflect the noblest aspirations of the Nehruvian state: social mobility and an end to caste distinctions through universal education, full employment, widespread health care, and a benevolent, leveling bureaucracy. That Indian society continues to honor these ideals is evident in the way it can still be shocked by dramatic instances of their breach. Indian newspapers, magazines, and video news programs controlled by the upper castes report regularly and prominently on the continuing murder, rape, and arson attacks carried out in the countryside by upper-caste landowners against the lower-caste landless. But often implicit in such reporting is the idea that these cases are archaic exceptions, abhorrent to the enlightened sensibilities of the cities, where castes and creeds mix freely and can stake their claims to the future. What the opinion-making upper-caste elite does not often wish to reckon with is how the Nehruvian state itself has been constructed to preserve caste roles—and especially in the cities. Too often what the state has created is not a level playing field but a series of interlocking, competitive clan- or caste-based mafias—vote banks, as they are called by Indian politicians—where the organizing principle is not merit but patronage. And patronage flows not only from the state machinery but from the advantages of birth. Upper-caste networks are enriched and often protected from challenge by inheritance of land and state-sanctioned business franchises obtained from the precolonial princes, and later, the British imperialists.

  The independent Indian state has partially undermined the strength of upper-caste networks. In the cities and in such institutions as the bloated military, old caste and feudal identities are dissolving. A younger generation is rising with attitudes significantly more egalitarian than those of their parents and grandparents. New lower-caste mafias have attached themselves to the state, mainly through affirmative action and electoral politics, and have built up their own networks of patronage and wealth, lifting some of their members to new social and economic heights—in some cases, even overthrowing local upper castes who used to hold them down.

  Yet progress toward the creation of a casteless society has been much slower than the Nehruvian idealists promised. One bit of anecdotal evidence was what Indians would say when I asked whether the old caste and feudal identities really made any day-today difference in their lives. I asked this question of hundreds of people in cities, towns, and villages. Almost invariably, those of high birth said that feudal and caste origin mattered less and less in swirling, modernizing South Asia. Younger Brahmins and Rajputs would say that they had lost their parents’ ability to determine the caste of a stranger with a few subtle, well-chosen questions about family background. But not once did a person of low birth tell me the same. They knew exactly how to determine the caste of a stranger and did so regularly; to them, caste and feudal identity made all the difference in the world.

  It was not difficult to see why, even within a square mile of my supposedly exclusive neighborhood of “luxury” concrete-block three- and four-bedroom homes inhabited by upper-caste Indian bureaucrats and multinational businessmen. Just a few hundred yards from my driveway, on a sheltered hill up a dirt alley, lived a colony of untouchable “ragpickers” who made their living from the refuse of the Delhi rich. Their small compound, perhaps two acres square, consisted of a dozen low tar-paper shanties; a “school” constructed from a canvas canopy, rope, and wooden pegs; and heaps upon heaps of steaming, stinking garbage, which the residents collected, sorted, and sold off to Delhi scrap dealers. Flies and mosquitoes swarmed through the colony, far outnumbering the residents. Unwashed, unclothed children chased one another through the trash as their parents squatted beside the great piles, picking and sorting. In economic terms, the ragpicking colonies—there are scores of them nestled into major cities—are carefully integrated into urban life. They serve as partial substitutes for municipal garbage collection. There is little public refuse collection in India, in part because there is little household waste that the larger economy wants to dispose of entirely. One man’s scrap is another man’s house. One man’s newspaper is another’s shopping bag. One man’s lawn trimmings are another’s donkey feed. Ragpickers are intermediaries in these recycling transactions. But while they operate in a market-based, cash-driven subeconomy, they cannot be thought of as free agents. The roles they played centuries earlier as bonded, landless peasants in the rural villages, many of them now play again in the new cities, despite the job set-asides and education schemes that have brought a relatively small number out of the trash heaps and into the dimly lit offices of the bureaucracy. The exploitation these urban Untouchables face today is more
complicated than it used to be, but to the ragpickers themselves it does not seem different because it arises not merely from poverty but from the stigma of low birth.

  I have always found it uncomfortable to travel in a group in which a member, whether a driver or otherwise, is excluded at mealtimes. In India with its complex caste separations the situation was more tricky than in England, for people who seemed to mix easily enough when working together sometimes appeared to withdraw into a strange dietetic purdah when mealtimes arrived. I had already noticed that when we stopped for tea at one of the dhabas, Devi refused to eat and our driver immediately disappeared from sight.

  —Norman Lewis, A Goddess in the Stones: Travels in India

  I drove up to the ragpicking colony one afternoon and sat on rope cots with a dozen residents to talk about caste and politics. Surely, I argued to them, despite the timeless degradation and poverty, there were scraps of progress here in the colony as well—the school provided by the government, for example, or the fact that they had escaped from the isolated oppression of the villages to a city where they could better protect themselves and their children. Didn’t it seem likely, at the least, that some of their children’s children might find a way off these heaps, propelled in part by the hard work and willingness to migrate of their courageous grandparents?

  But it was difficult to find anyone who held this view. They understood my argument well, they wrestled with it privately themselves—they just did not believe it.

  “I’ve been here since 1974,” answered one emaciated man, Om Prakash. “I haven’t seen anyone rise out of this. We have all stayed poor. Not a single person has become big. We only watch after our own children. I had a brother, he came to New Delhi and did a bachelor of arts degree. Now he’s back in Haryana working as a ragpicker. This is the place for us. We can’t get out of here. We hope and we try. There’s always hope, but we never reach anything. I’m sure my grandfather hoped, too. Even if I work hard, if I go forward one step, there are ten people pushing me back again.”