One Last Post, post-India

Our India group has been back in the U.S. now for a month, and it's doubtful that any of you who were reading this blog in its early days--when it was full of thoughts and photos from India, seen through my still-fresh eyes--are still following it.  So I think it's time for a final note, and a few more photos.

Our group has gathered a few times since our return.  We'll be sharing some of our thoughts at the daily chapel service on campus on Monday, April 7, should anyone wish to join us for live streaming (or an archived version) on the college website.  But a number of us got together at Prof. Meetu's house last Friday to learn how to put on the saris some had brought back, and to enjoy her vegetarian Indian cooking (she's here for a semester, teaching a course on the Psychology of India).  See photo below!

But I've been receiving a few photos of myself in India, taken by others, which I didn't have earlier.  One is of me at the mosque in Old Delhi (the historic Delhi), which our group explored one day.  I've developed a fondness for mosques wherever I find them, and enjoyed the more Asian/Central Asian architecture you see in the photo below (very different than classic Ottoman mosques in the Middle East).  Note the large, flat, square front of the mosque, said to be the largest in Asia.  Note also the deep blue of my Indian shirt--the kind of strong colors we often saw people wearing, and which I now miss here in the lingering winter of Minnesota.

I should also add a nice photo of Dana, who had organized our course and was holding all our activities together, with some assistance from me.  Here we are, perhaps resting a bit!

And I'll conclude with two more photos of our group.  One is at a famous old Mughal (Muslim) tomb in Delhi, said to be the fore-runner of the Taj Majal, which seems quite plausible when approaching it.

And here's a last photo, our farewell (and fancy) supper at the Barbecue Nation restaurant in Delhi, before our midnight bus ride to the airport to await our very early flight towards home.  I conclude this blog with delight at what I experienced in India, but also with some sadness, as this is likely the last time I will be traveling and living and learning with students in this way.  Thanks to all who've made the journey with me (and usually with Barbara as well).

Families and Marriage

I feel reluctant to generalize about Indian family life and marriage.  But at least I have some impressions!

First, families are still important to many Indians.  While many young Indian women seem to be marrying later (we've met lots of women college students who aren't married yet, at an age when they likely would have been a generation ago), I think most assume or hope that they will marry someday.  And I think most still expect to have children, though perhaps fewer than their grandparents might have, especially for those who expect to provide graduate education for those children and/or to live in a city where housing is expensive.  As in most places around the world, women getting more education and planning to live in a big city will likely marry later and have fewer children.

On the other hand, my impression is that perhaps most of the women university students we've met probably still live "at home," with their parents.  We've met some mid-20's women who live with women roommates away from family, but that seems less common.  I think single young women are often still seen as needing family, perhaps for economic reasons but also sometimes for reasons of protection or reputation, if they are to be most marriageable.

And it may be difficult to resist the expectation of one's parents to live with them until marriage.  Even for young, educated, "modern" young people, there still seems to be some expectation that parents will be involved in the choice of a spouse, whether in using their networks of relatives and friends to locate possible partners (to be accepted or rejected by their children), or (in the more traditional sense) to actually arrange a marriage.  Some young women hope to convince their parent that a young man they've found or fallen for is suitable (once they've checked out his background); others have said they don't feel they can hold out against their parents' choice once they reached their later 20's.

Such dilemmas are, of course, often the focus of romantic Bollywood films--in which falling for the wrong boy, or simply falling in love, goes against the parents' plans or their wisdom that it's best to marry first, then fall in love with the spouse who is after all best for you as the parents have known all along.  Often, as in "Monsoon Wedding," things end happily when the young bride realizes her own choice wouldn't have worked out, and that she could care for her parents' choice even more; sometimes the conflict can end in tragedy.  The hope and expectation that a big wedding will be the finale remains common, either because of or in spite of family traditions, as we see in the photo of a Big Wedding near where we were living in Delhi:

I think my newest insight about all this is that the logic of arranged marriages has made the most sense in the context of "joint" or "extended" families.  One family we met, for example, includes the older married couple, their son and his wife (who moved into the joint household upon marriage), their two teenaged daughters, and the older couple's still-unmarried daughter who's working as a highly-educated professional.  The role of the senior couple in helping arrange (or assist) the matchmaking makes logical sense if the extended family is actually going to be living together and will need to be a good fit; the young will also be the ones who will care for the aging parents, who in India are still rarely moved into an American-style care facility.

Some of this logic can break down in the long run, especially when highly-educated Indian couples move to Britain or America for professional work and success (not uncommon according to India Calling).  If these "children" establish successful lives abroad, and also raise their own children there, they are unlikely to return to India to complete their end of the implicit bargain to care for their aging parents.

Sharing food is something that seems to gather families together.  This is perhaps not surprising, at least for the few families we spent time with: they appreciated good Indian cooking and food, and could afford it, and enjoyed eating it together, in a way that seems to have largely faded in many American families of a comparable social class who are now "too busy" to cook from scratch or eat their meals together (and of course many middle-class Indian families have a cook).  See the photo below of what started as a last-minute, impromptu, mid-afternoon "lunch" (additional foods and tastes kept getting pulled out of the refrigerator and heated up), ending in a very nice meal (probably enhanced by the family's hospitality to us visitors).  (In deference to privacy, the photo shows only the food and not the family.)

Before I close, I include an interesting note on food.  Two young Indian women, well-educated, in their 20's, mentioned that their parents, especially their mothers, used to feed them.  That seemed ordinary enough--don't moms usually feed their kids?  But they meant something more--that their moms, even when the women were in their teens, would often put nice morsels of food directly into the girls' mouth, by hand.  I asked how that felt, wondering if this might have been embarrassing for them, or perhaps embarrassing to talk about--they were hesitant to answer, and I could imagine they would think we would think they were a little strange.  But one said, softly, "it was nice."  It sounded like a situation of care and intimacy.

And one more note on food and moms and daughters.  I'm back at the Minneapolis airport, the day we are leaving for India.  I'm meeting the parents, who are wishing us a good trip, giving their kids one more hug.  But one mom asks me something special: "Please take care of my daughter.  Keep her safe, and bring her home to me."  She is an immigrant mom, and doesn't yet speak enough English to ask me this directly; her daughter has to translate her mom's request.  She's asking me to make a promise I cannot refuse to make, yet am unsure I can keep--how can I know what may become of us, when we are strangers in a strange land?  But I do promise.

Later, the families having departed, we have gone through ticketing and security and have gathered at our departure gate.  Our departure has been postponed several times, as ice storms descend on the east coast airports where we are supposed to make our connections.  The students get restless, then bored, then hungry, and nearly all eventually wander off to see what sort of airport fast-food might await them.  But the daughter, next to whom I'm sitting, remains, and she rummages around in her backpack for something.  It is the package of food her mom has prepared for her.  She opens it up: "ooh, the sticky rice is still warm!"  And there's dense, chewy red pork too.  She offers me some, and munches away happily on the choice morsels her mom has provided, and the love it contains.  My heart is opening, and we have not yet left Minnesota.  (And yes…we all returned home safely.

Social Justice, Social Service, and Empowerment Projects in India

India has a large and growing middle-class, many of whom have many of the same lifestyle and consumer amenities that would be familiar to many Americans: a comfortable apartment (and sometimes a detached house), often a car (and sometimes a hired driver), sufficient and tasty food (and often someone to cook it--servants are a more common middle-class perk than in the U.S.), relatively engaging work, a college education or more, and enough resources to travel not only within India but out of the country as well (perhaps to visit relatives in Britain, America, or elsewhere).

On the other hand, a large portion of India's people still live in rural villages.  As in most poorer countries, the gap between village and urban lifestyles is is often far greater than you'd find in richer countries (the U.S., Europe).  About half of India's children are malnourished, and many show stunted growth from a lack of nutrition during the critical first several years of life.  People often don't have  running water or indoor toilets, or water that's safe to drink, and these are health issues rather than "only" a matter of convenience.  People may be able to provide for their needs directly (such as by growing food if they're farming), needing less cash, and I think one might be able to get by more satisfactorily in the village than in the city if they were truly poor (where one sees the poor sleeping overnight on the streets on a pile of blankets, or seeking food at charities, or begging).  But being village poor is not easy either.  (And take all this with a grain of salt--our stays were short in each place, and these are my impressions.)

As noted in an earlier posting, many villagers are moving to the cities to seek cash-wage jobs.  A changing climate may make it more difficult to farm reliably, villagers who see images of city life on television or Bollywood movies may be pulled by the excitement or glamour,  and people may want to join relatives who moved to the city earlier.  But most who come do not have enough education (perhaps even literacy) to find more than a day job of manual labor at low pay (a migrant to Delhi has little bargaining power when 600 other migrants arrived the same day he or she did, seeking the same kinds of jobs).  Many do find work, but the city is not a subsistence place--one has to buy so much of what one needs, including materials to build one's one-room house, "squatting" on a piece of empty land in a "slum" which may be adjacent to a fancy high-rise and exist only until those with more clout and resources decide to move the poor away.  Teachers we talked with in some of the schools set up by religious or other NGO groups for the very poor told us that they need to provide two or three meals a day to make it possible for the students to concentrate on their school work and keep them attending; after month-long breaks, some of the children return visibly thinner.

This is a rather long introduction to what I want to actually talk about: the admirable and inspiring efforts a number of religious or educational or other organizations are making to address these issues.  Some of these are in the villages: one-room schools to give young children a better start (and in our experience in these classrooms the children seem excited and engaged), or well-baby programs to weigh and vaccinate babies or encourage women to breast-feed, or programs to empower women to develop small-scale economic projects to add some money to their families' resources.

Some of those projects we visited were in the cities.  We visited "slum" projects, sometimes sponsored by our first two host universities (Madras Christian College and Christ University), including multi-grade schools (much beyond the one-room village schools), or projects in which poor women could learn to make use of recycled trash materials to create crafts for sale.  In the photo below, we see women dismantling the "tetra-paks" (juice boxes) in which perishable liquid foods are sometimes sold in places with less refrigeration.  The materials in these boxes are super-strong, and the women weave them into large carrying-bags (I asked if I could take this photo, and one of the women borrowed my

my camera to take several photos like this herself.)  Women also recycle cement bags, which again have a very strong material that, after being cut and washed, can be fashioned into a variety of purses, wallets, and carrying bags which they can decorate with colorful cross-stitch patterns (a number of our students bought some of these).  Such projects as these provide a place off the street where women can work together, and avoid some of the more heavy or dangerous construction labor that women are sometimes hired to do; their earnings may also bring them a bit more influence within their families.

Village migrants (and the urban poor in general) also face a lot of pressures that take their toll on people's emotions, marriages, and relationships with their children.  We visited a community clinic which offered a wide array of services for minimal charges, such as marriage counseling, teen support groups, individual counseling, life-skills training, health-screening, and so forth.  We heard from a number of their professional staff (see photo below) about their work, and were impressed with their decision to put their clinic right in the middle of a community with needs rather than another location outside the community whose people it would be servicing.  (Small detail: note that this women is

is wearing a traditional "kurta," a modest three-quarter length shirt/dress (to the knees) with three-quarter length sleeves, with a scarf, a common and comfortable outfit for women who aren't swearing a sari.  She she also has short curly hair, perhaps just a personal choice, but one also still-uncommon in southern India where most women have long, straight hair, often parted in the middle, with a streak of deep red vermillion down the part if they are married and observant in that way.)

In addition to school projects, women's empowerment programs, mental and physical health projects, and others, I want to end with our experience at the Sikh Temple in Delhi, right around the corner from the YMCA where we were staying.  (See photo below of the temple.)

This temple has a large hall where each day, all day, people in need of a meal may come to fill up, in half hour shifts, sitting on mats on the floor, facing one another.  (Sitting on the floor in India is common; when Barbara and I visited the Minneapolis Sikh Temple for a memorial service for the six Milwaukee Sikhs murdered in August, 2012, while at prayer by a man who believed they were Muslims--Sikh men wear "turbans"--we also sat on the floor, in rows facing each other, for the meal offered after prayers were offered for the dead.  I couldn't help but remember that, in India, where some might have wondered if we were "safe," we felt more safe than Milwaukee proved to be for the Indian Sikhs there.)

We took our turn eating a lunch where meals were being served, when our turn came up.  Some students worried that perhaps we were eating food meant for the poor, when we could of course afford to pay, but my sense is that it was a place where a variety of people were being offered food regardless of their need or the usual stigma that might attach to someone who "had" to rely on charity.  The food was simple--chick peas (chana), dal (lentils), a little bit of spicy pickle, some potatoes, and flat chapati bread.  Servers went up and down the rows, filling the little compartments on our metal trays, and coming by again, and again, if anyone wanted more.  If one wanted another chapati, you would hold your hands in front of you, palms up, which was (to some of us) the attitude in which we might take communion.  And for Indians, chapati is indeed the bread of life.  And the server,  coming by with extra chapatis, always says, when placing the bread in one's hands, "this is a gift from God."  It felt like we were in more than the usual "soup kitchen," as laudable as those can often be.  We estimated that perhaps 5,000 people were served each day.

But that was only the beginning.  For we were also welcome to serve,  and to do so by working in the kitchen, chopping vegetables, rolling little balls of chapati dough into round flat pieces for cooking on the big metal griddle, washing used trays, cleaning up, or even taking a turn serving the food and passing out the chapatis.   One of our students, who in her other life is sometimes a small-town waitress,

chose to serve food; she's also sorting through what her church heritage means to her now, at this point in her life, and I think found it meaningful to encounter communion in a different way.  In the photo above, which is only half the huge kitchen area, you can see two large metal sheets on which the chapatis are cooked (they are the white disks in the left middle), but there are also vats of dal and chana cooking away.  Half the students and I decided we'd try our hand at making chapatis; two older local ladies were rolling the dough balls, and then tossing them at us so we could use our wooden rollers to try to transform them into something round and flat.  I failed every time; a local woman sat down next to me and turned out a perfectly round chapati, and the secret seemed to be turning the dough a little with each sweep of the roller, but without touching the dough with one's hands, just with a little twist of the wrist.  We enjoyed it, and some of the students even went back a couple days later to make more chapatis.

I better stop here for now.  But I wanted to share some stories of people in India who are working to make a difference in others' lives.  Are their efforts "enough"?  The needs seem overwhelming.  But, may days, what they do is at least enough for those whose lives they touch.

India: Old and New

Our students often see India as a place of contrasts and contradictions, old and new (they are also keeping an India blog if you have the time and curiosity to see what India looks like through younger eyes than mine: indiainterim2014.blogspot.com).  Sometimes this is expressed in terms of what they see as the "real India," by which they often mean the India they expected or hoped to encounter, the "older" or "traditional" India.  They like, and are inspired by, Gandhi's India, less so by the display of military might in the annual Republic Day parade we attended (from tanks up through a fly-over by fighter jets) (how can we put those two things together?).

And, of course, there still is plenty of the "real" India to see: cows wandering the city streets, munching on piles of garbage; auto rickshaws or even bicycle rickshaws for transportation, as well as fancy cars and city busses; round discs of cow manure drying by the roadside, to be used as a fuel for cooking.  There's water it is wise not to drink if one can afford to drink water from plastic bottles instead (as we can: while the "real" India is often scenic, it can also include troubles and inconveniences we Americans prefer to avoid--we'd like not to get sick, to have enough to eat, to have at least warmish water for showers, a significant degree of physical comfort and safety, to know we can get the cash we need from an ATM rather than depending on the kindness of strangers from whom we beg or pester--all of which many, many people limited to the real India do not have.  This "real India" thing is complicated.

One place we've encountered what we think of as the real India are the several farming villages in which we've spent time (such as the one described in an earlier posting, a Dalit or Untouchable village celebrating the annual harvest or Pongal festival).  Here we're arriving at a different village (in the photo to the left), greeted by a lot of children excited about who we might be.  We get a chance to walk a woman's fields as she shows us her millet plants, and we are invited into her home, full of an extended family, for hospitality and some food.  But, as noted before, it's not clear whether, in the long run, traditional village life is
viable.  There's less water available for the fields, and the rains have been less predictable, meaning that farmers can't always rely on a harvest, or the income that it might have one provided.  We're told that 600 rural villagers move to Delhi (already around 12 million people) every day, 4,000 a week.  Yet if the farmers eventually leave the land, who will grow the food people need?  Will the children whose classrooms we spend time in, once they have access to more education, want to move to town for the kinds of work, or excitement, available there?

We also enjoy the remnants of earlier Indian civilizations which we've been visiting more often once we were in Delhi and Agra, such as the Taj Mahal or the tomb above with green parrots.  But note that the script on the monument is in Arabic (or Persian/Urdu) lettering, so both the Taj and this monument are not part of Hindu India, but Mughal India (which started in the early 1500's and lasted for several centuries).  Is the "real India" only Hindu (as it was more easy to believe in Southern India), or also Muslim?  And what about the Buddhist heritage (a faith born here as a branching from Hinduism), or the Sikhs (whose temple we so much enjoyed doing service work in), or the Jains (whose dietary restrictions are the most strict of all, sometimes indicated on cafe menus as "safe for Jains to eat").  Or the Christians--early on we visited the Church of St. Thomas ("doubting Thomas"), who did work in India in the first Christian century (52-72) in Madras/Chennai, long before missionaries reached pagan countries like Norway.  Is India all these things?  Are generalizations possible?  

Or, as with this design in the ceiling of a lovely Mughal (Muslim) tomb, do we simply wonder at each piece of India as we find it?  (This is about fifty feet across, high above us.)

Still, there is a "new, modern" India emerging.  In spite of now having almost as many people as China (1.2 billion versus 1.3), India has been growing economically in recent years, less fast than China, but faster than the U.S. and Euro-zone countries.  We could see this when we spent much of a day at InfoSys, one of the first high-tech companies begun in India by Indian scientists and engineers in the 1980's, with only $250 in working capital.  We began our visit in their meeting hall, full of any communications technology you could imagine (see photo below).  

As befits our course focus on psychological issues and human development, we met for a while with Human Resources people; a third of their employees are women (likely higher than you'd find in high-tech firms in Silicon Valley?), and they have strict policies against sexual harassment. If a woman's husband is transferred, they try to find comparable work for her in one of their other locations nearby.  They provide transportation for women to ensure they get home safely. 

Their campus is quite large ("Electronic City"), with grass, trees, lots of water, a workout center, a large library, smooth streets, nice places to eat--everything that we think a "modern" city would need, and a clear contrast with the "real India" we encounter every day.  To the average Indian living on the streets, and sleeping on the sidewalks overnight (whom we see if we go out early in the morning), this would seem like utopia.  We might find it less interesting than the older India (too much like ourselves?) but many Indians, if they had the education to become part of InfoSys, might find it idyllic.

Here we are, for the almost-daily "group photo" while being guided around the InfoSys campus, by an older man who's wearing identification badge #00004, the fourth employee in the company's history.

Our group is also sometimes drawn to modern malls.  They are clean, they have familiar food courts (if with unfamiliar foods from both Northern and Southern India), they have large stores in which we as shoppers are less "encouraged" to buy than at a street-seller's stall, there are multi-screen movie theaters with stadium seats (featuring Bollywood films in several different local languages, usually without English subtitles--but we can still usually tell the bad guys from the good).  You can buy an inexpensive kurta (long shirt worn outside one's pants), get some inexpensive food at the food court, all in a place that's familiar enough to feel safe and comfortable.  One of the more fancy malls we visited is shown below; we noted that in the more culturally conservative South, most girls and women even in "modern malls" were wearing kurtas or saris (but boys and men were rarely wearing traditional clothing).  

Having said all this, I don't want to leave the impression that our students liked experiences that were familiar and safe the best.  They enjoyed them, and I think they're now part of India as well, with its growing middle class and very wealthy 1%, but they found their immersion in the "real India" usually more meaningful, the things they are more likely to remember.  They have liked being with little kids, often from urban slums (the term used in India) or rural villages, who are excited to learn, adorable, and funny.  They have been inspired by our visits to social justice or empowerment projects for women, or by making food for those waiting patiently in the Sikh Temple for the next seating (more on these in the next posting).  

And this is perhaps enough for this entry.  Except…whoops, I almost forgot the tribute, in flowers, at the huge annual flower show in Delhi (in January!  we're not in Minnesota anymore!), to India's latest proof of modernity--the successful launch of a deep-space rocket, a very complex task that only a really "developed" country can usually achieve (I remember China making the most of their own launch when we were there in 2004, as well).  See photo below!

Thoughts about Taking Photos

It's not always easy to know when to take, or how to use, photos we take in another culture, where particular sensitivity may be required.  As we've thought about the issues involved here in India, there seem to be several things to consider, in three steps.  (Note: this issue may not be of interest, but I do include some new photos you may want to see below.)

First, what is the role of taking photos for us as photographers and travelers?  It's difficult not to take at least some photos in a place like India, where images new, colorful, and interesting abound.  We do all take photos here.  But what role do we want that to play in our experience?  Is there a danger in taking too many photos, in thinking that because we've taken a photo of something we have actually seen it, experienced it?  When we're shy, is it easy to "hide" behind our cameras, seeing India through a lens or on our viewscreen rather than in an unmediated way?  When does photo taking complement and even enhance our experience, and when does it replace or get in the way of that experience?

Second, what ethical and cultural obligations and sensitivities do we need to bring to bear when we are making choices among what things, events, people, and places to photograph?  Here, there are several things we should not photograph: a close-up of a Muslim woman dressed in modest clothing that calls us to respect her privacy, for example.  Or the interior of a temple where photos are not allowed, even explicitly forbidden.  (I do not include photos of this kind as examples, for obvious reasons!)

There are also photos that are clearly o.k. to take.  These include the one below of me at our recent visit to the Taj Mahal.  No problem there, it's just me, and I'm joined by a thousand others taking a similar photo!  (Interesting fact for you Taj Mahal fans: the minarets all lean slightly out, away from the Taj, so that in this earthquake-prone region if they were to fall they would not fall on theTaj itself!)

Likewise, photos taken within our group seem o.k., unless they capture someone doing something too embarrassing or personal.  For example, see the photo below in which our group is enjoying large rice-flour crepes called dosas at a roadside eating stop.  This is the kind of photo we are constantly taking of each other and sending home.  Implicit permission to take photos seems clear.

A similar photo is the one below: some of our students, and some students with whom they were doing an observational research project.  We were all taking photos of each other, with "implied consent" the probable norm involved once again.  Here, too, all the students were taking photos of each other to remember their shared experiences. 

In other situations, it's polite to ask people if you may take their photograph.  This is important whenever the person is a stranger, or you're doing a close-up, be even if you just want to be on the safe side.  I asked permission to take the photo below of two women psychology professors whom I spent some time with during our week in Bangalore, particularly one morning at a large park where we strolled.  We were taking photos of each other, we were roughly similar in social status (perhaps me a bit more "senior" due to gender and age, but still using the same terms of address for one another), we were beginning to be friends, AND I still asked if I could take their photo. 

On the other hand, sometimes I've taken photos from a distance, such as at the Taj Mahal, of a crowd of folks, without asking permission, but in a context when we're all taking a lot of photos and crowd scenes are common in a photo.  This photo below might be more a "gray area" photo, but you can think about that for yourself.  Does it seem invasive or rather harmless?

Finally, there's the third consideration: when to circulate a photo as I'm doing here.  I sometimes take a photo but then decide afterwards that I shouldn't share it widely--that is, on a public blog such as this one, even if I keep a copy for myself and what the moment means.  It's not always enough to decide whether to take a photo, but also when to share it.  For example, I have some close-up's of children at several villages where we visited for some time, and the children asked me to take their photo so they could see their image in my viewing screen.  And they are adorable.  But I'm uncertain about putting photos of children out there on the web, especially without their parent's permission.  They are too young to give me real permission for the uses to which photos might be put. So the "last step" in the ethical considerations of photography for me has been not if I've asked to take the photo, but whether on reflection it seems like I should not put the photo "out there" for general viewing.  Related to this, note that I've not given names of people in the photos, or names or locations of the villages whose photos I've posted; this has been another "post-photo" consideration: whether I need to keep the likelihood of viewers identifying the photo or people in it even if I decide to post it on this blog.

And that's it for now.  Stay tuned. 

Religious and Rural Traditions

When we (people in the West) think of India, or at least what we think of as the "real India," we often have in mind India's historic traditions and culture: perhaps the "many gods" of Hinduism, India as home to one of the world's great food cultures, temples, the Taj Mahal (Muslim and not Hindu in origin), perhaps other things like meditation or yoga, or village life.  

New things also come to mind: Bollywood films, or the high-tech centers of places like Bangalore (where we are now), but we may think of these as very recent developments that are somehow, in our images, exceptions to the rule.  

What we are experiencing is that there are many Indias.  Some are very old, and some very new.  For centuries (or millennias!) India has been a place of dozens of different languages (we began our time here in a Tamil-speaking city, and are now in one that counts Kannada as its "home" language, and the other night saw a film in Telugu).  It's been a place of not only Hinduism, but also the birthplace of Buddhism (now found among just a remnant), a place where St. Thomas the apostle left behind Christian churches in the first century C.E., whose descendants we see even today, and Islam, as well as the Sikh and Jain faiths.  There are a number of primary castes, and hundreds of sub-castes, as well as "tribal" peoples in various places, especially the northeast and east of India.  It's a complex place.  

We've had a chance to visit a number of Hindu temples, some in each place we've been.  To the left is the outside of Nandi the Bull's temple here in Bangalore.  Nandi is associated with Shiva in Hindu belief, among other things the massive bull which Lord Shiva rides.  The image of Nandi, in the photo below, was carved out of a massive boulder centuries ago, and the temple was later built around it.
   We take off our shoes before entering, and join others, including pilgrims, who are walking around the statue; at the rear, some drink some sacred water, and as we continue around to the front of the image a priest dips his fingertip into

vermillion (bright red) paste, and puts a mark on each of our foreheads.

Another day, we visit the ISKCON temple, a more recent one (while Nandi's is centuries old).  It's the temple and movement from which a "missionary" left for the U.S. in the 1960's, and helped give rise to the Hare Krishna movement which older readers of this blog may recall.  It's a huge temple, ornate inside; a priest greets us when we arrive, and guides us past images at which worshipers are praying; we are uncomfortable getting what seems like special treatment, especially if we are intruding on people's religious experience, one not our own.  Still, we are impressed by the videos we are shown in a conference room of the temple's good works feeding over 1.5 million poor children each day.  And we eat an excellent buffet lunch (pure veg, of course) in the temple's restaurant before we leave; we enjoy it, yet our students are beginning to ask more questions about their own privileges and affluence, and the contradictions of which we are a part.

In another instance, we visit a temple to watch a performance of traditional karnatic dance.  It's moving and impressive, a single woman dancer, carefully costumed, stomping and twirling and moving in a way both athletic and graceful, with hand and facial and eye movements to help her tell the story about the gods which a small music group is accompanying, including a wonderful male violinist and a woman singer.  Our students seem mesmerized, either by the dances, or by the young local girls who are moving their hands along with the dancers from their seats, perhaps aspiring to such grace themselves someday much as girls in our own may wish to become ballerinas.

We also had a yoga class from a woman psychology professor at the university which is hosting us here in Bangalore early in our time here.  All 22 of us plopped down on mats in one of the classroom buildings, and she led us through a series of increasingly difficult poses or movements, though gently, warning that anything that hurt should be a sign we should sit that one out (was it my imagination she was looking right at me?).  We also worked with our breath.  I was in the front row; as good Muslim women might at a mosque, the women wanted "the boys" in front so they wouldn't peek at them while moving in yet-unknown positions.  It felt good, even though there were several positions I could not do at all, even while our teacher seemed to do them with  such grace, strength, and ease.  It was clear that she is devoted to yoga as a spiritual practice rather than just another kind of exercise; some yoga teachers here seem to lament that yoga practices in the West have been stripped of their spiritual meaning and context.

I'll close with mention of another aspect of "traditional" India.  An earlier posting talked about our long visit to a Dalit farming community for Pongal, the harvest festival.  But we've also visited farming villages here in the state of Karnataka (where Bengalore is located).  A view of the farmyard where the harvest is being processed is shown below.

In this photo we see women winnowing the grain by hand, primarily millet, as well as the tall piles of by-product which can be sold later for animal feed.  We see farm animals wandering about, and a cow peeking into the left side of the photo.  Blue barrels of water are there as well; there's no running water (modern plumbing system) in the village that we saw, though there is some irrigation.  Much of the work is done by hand, though there are other signs that things are changing--there is electricity, and some homes have television, and there's a paved road that meanders through the village along which a bus rolls by several times a day, past the small school.  There are several health and education programs which are sponsored by the social justice folks at the university where we are living while in Bangalore, which is how we happen to be there--once again hosted by some local activists.  We visit the classroom, and spend time with the children, a high point of each day we have a chance to visit schools.  Below is a photo of the side of the service program workplace, illustrating healthy baby issues.

The panel on the left shows a baby in a sling on which a baby is weighed to make sure it's within the parameters (shown in the green band) for healthy development.  Bring your baby in for weighing!  And while you're there, panel to the right, it's good to make sure your baby has its vaccinations (India just celebrated three years as a polio-free country, in spite of reservoirs of the virus in next-door Pakistan).  Another panel, not shown, encouraged mothers to breast-feed.

We visit the home of one family, an extended family of 11 people, who by village standards seem "middle class."  They have a three room home, plus one for the cattle (also part of the house), and a small but tidy kitchen.  The women cook over propane gas, but also have a fire pit for cooking over, in the kitchen.  And the woman of the house has an admirably-organized collection of cooking utensils and dishes (photo below, through a turquoise-painted doorframe), including some pots large enough for Serious Rice Cooking.  Note the orange plastic "pot" for water, as running water inside doesn't seem available, nor an indoor toilet.

Our host cooks "ragi," or balls of cooked millet, and offers them with some green curry; the curry is a good addition, as to our tastebuds the ragi is rather plain, though a nutritious grain.  We are served on the floor, as in the other village we visited; people don't eat on tables.  Yet, we find, the household does own a car.  "Tradition," at least in these times, is a changing and complex thing, hard to define.

And there are paradoxes in efforts to bring better health and education to the village.  Electricity brings new visions of life from the cities on television (Bangalore has grown by several million people in recent years, mostly rural migrants).  More education and literacy for the children, especially girls, may lead to the possibility of more education that the village cannot offer, and once in the city the young people may not return to the life of a farmer.  Girls may have more choices, and both education and lower infant mortality may make choices about children more plausible.  Will the villages die out one day?  Who will raise the food for 1.2 billion people, especially when imported food is becoming too expensive?  Will the virtues of rural traditions and small-town life be enough to keep enough young people at home, or will the changes that have made village life better in some ways undermine its future in others?

In a future posting: life at InfoSys, and the rise of the malls.

Gender on the Street

Here in India, we can't help notice gender patterns and differences--some familiar from the U.S., and some a variation or different.  You see this when out on the street, in traffic, or walking around our current campus (Christ University in Bangalore, or Bangaleru).

What do we see in the photo above?  Lots of traffic, for one thing--though this is a rather less crowded scene than one usually sees on most streets, into the late evening (!).  Among other things, you might be able to see that nearly all motorbike drivers are men, often young men (perhaps because weaving in and out of traffic is a younger man's sport?).  Though one occasionally sees a young woman driving a bike, they are almost always the passenger (and if married, sometimes with a small child in between the couple).  As you can see with the woman in the blue sari, they usually don't hang on to the male driver, but rather balance as best they can, perhaps holding on with one hand.  She's also sitting modestly, side-saddle, with no bike between her legs (having to negotiate her sari might also be a factor), though I think that must also render her perch more precarious; the girl in red on the right is riding more firmly, wearing loose pants.  

The photo also suggests that women, in addition to dressing differently than men, also are more likely to dress in traditional Indian wear, either a sari (especially for married ladies), or at least a kurta (a long shirt, almost a dress, that comes down to the knee, with loose pants underneath, matching the top if one is being stylish).  The men, on the other hand, would likely be wearing dark pants with a western style sport or polo shirt; businessmen or other more elite men would likely be wearing a dark suit, often with a tie.  We see this in the photo of students on campus below.

While some of these young women are wearing jeans, most are wearing more traditional pants (the more daring are wearing tights, but note that no actual legs are to be seen; neither men nor women wear shorts).  Some arms are bare, but I've only seen bare shoulders a few times.  Overall, modesty is the expectation for both men and women, but for women a more traditional version than for men.  (I should add that I love the styles and colors the women wear.)  Another important thing to note in the photo above: there are lots of women students in this photo, taken during the change between classes one day; while female illiteracy is still common among poor women, expectations of not only literacy but also college are common among the growing middle class (at InfoSys, a major Indian high tech corporation we visited the other day--more on that in a later post--about a third of the employees are women).  

Gender also seems to be a largely homosocial world here.  On campus one does see mixed groups, talking and joking, but on the larger street, apart from couples married or who are doing the Indian version of dating, women are often walking around with other women, and men with men.  Men sometimes hold hands with each other (no gay identity implied here by that), and less often one sees women linking arms (but not holding hands).  Cross-sex touching in public seems rare; I've only seen one male-female couple holding hands, and no hint of public kissing or hugging (kissing is almost non-existent even in Bollywood films that feature a certain amount of female skin in the dance scenes).  

Pedestrian traffic continues well into the evening, but my impression is that women "drop out" of street life earlier than men; women alone would be more conspicuous than men alone, and presumably less safe, subject to harassment, or perhaps worse (given some well-publicized recent events of rape).  So who can be out on the street, and when, is also gendered.  Our faculty hosts have told us it's good for women to be settled in by around 9:30.

Much of what I've said applies "more so" for observant Muslims (India has the second largest Muslim population in the world, after Indonesia, even though our program engages primarily with Hindu and Christian India).  Muslim women often cover their hair, and sometimes their face, when out in public, and wear a robe that is even less revealing than kurtis and saris for Hindu women.  Muslim women seem much more likely to wear traditional Muslim clothing, though of course those who are not may not be "seen" by me as Muslim as easily.  (There are some neighborhoods where I feel like I'm back in Cairo, and one does see modest-sized mosques and hear the call to prayer if one is familiar enough with it to hear it amidst the din of constant traffic noise.)

I've been writing here in terms of our conventional gender binary, women and men.  But the other day when we were on a commuter train, a quite tall woman got on the train, and clapped her hands loudly, then began asking passengers for some money.  She looked different in some ways from the usual woman, and acted differently--usually women beggars are very quiet, if sometimes insistent.  We realized she was a hijra, or a "third sex" person, someone born a male who's living as a female.  It's a bit different than what we usually mean by a transgender person, though in fact when we were applying for our visas for India we were asked to check one of three boxes: male, female, and transgender.  Being an hijra goes way back in Indian culture, and involves some ritual and wedding roles, among other things.

Possibly related to this is my experience one day trying to find a kurta for Barbara.  She's not here, of course, to try one on, and Indian sizes are different than in the U.S., so since we are roughly the same size (if not necessarily the same shape), I took the kurtis to the women's dressing room, seeing no men's, to try on.  The ladies who help were gracious, and when I came out a young salesgirl asked me "Would sir be needing some cosmetics to go with his kurtis?"  I felt like I had fallen into some ambiguous gender category.  (I didn't get the cosmetics.)

And one more "gender on the street" observation for the moment: whitenings.  Our students have noticed that beauty or cosmetic shops often advertise skin lightening treatments, often specifically called "whitening."  A "fairer" woman is considered more desirable; one local woman showed me a photo of her brother's fiancee, and commented that she's not as fair as the photo shows, as photographers can lighten the soon-to-be bride's skin to make her "more attractive."  My own personal reaction is unbelief: most of the local southern Indian women I've seen (faculty, local students, on the street) are often darker than many African Americans back home, and they are also lovely in the deep golds, oranges, reds, yellows and other colors, perhaps with a dark green or turquoise scarf.  But I also know this is not necessarily a helpful reaction, any more than if I tell a woman student back home who's worried about her looks that she looks just fine.  

A more sociological response is to think about why lighter skin might seem preferable.  I'm not sure, but there may be several factors at work: class and caste might be one, if darker skin connotes someone who works in the fields, and so is a lower-class farm worker or laborer.  Another might be the increasingly persistent presence of media images of white/European women as the standard of beauty for women everywhere; we often see advertisements that feature white women many shaders lighter than those women towards whom the ads are aimed.  And third, colonialism might be at work: British colonialism, ending only in 1947, justified itself with assumptions about race and racial inferiority, with the darker the people the less civilized they might be.  But there's also an earlier wave of "colonialism," when the Muslims from the areas northwest of Indian established the Mughal caliphates, ruling for centuries (remember that the iconic image of India, the Taj Mahal, was built by the Mughals, and is closed on Fridays, the primary Muslim holy day of prayer); the incoming people were from areas of Persia and Afghanistan and farther west, much lighter in color than the more indigenous Dravidian people of the South.  The Southern peoples with whom we've so far spent most of our time speak different languages than northern ones, are more conservative Hindus, and share various cultural differences with those in the north.  But, bottom line, color makes a difference, and evidently much more so for women than men, for whom beauty is more an issue.

I'll be posting later on some differences in family and marriage patterns, another key aspect of gender here.  

So, how's the food?

As with the travels with students to the Middle East and Asia that Barbara and I have done in recent years, eating local foods is a significant highlight of the experience here in India.  When we were in China in 2004, we realized how much more diverse Chinese food is than what one gets in Chinese-American restaurants back home--and the same is proving true here in India.

At one of our hotel stays (a short one at our most upscale hotel), the breakfast buffet included the following: idlis (soft rice cakes), corn dumplings, vadas (very light doughnut shaped buns), sambhar (a nice sauce that goes with several other things), pongal (a variation on what we had at the village in an earlier post--a rice and sugar cane porridge with whatever else one wants to add), puma (a multi-grain dish), poori (puffed-up, deep-fried items), bhaji, sweet lassi, fresh papaya, curd (a denser, richer yogurt), shikanjii (a sweet and salty drink), watermelon juice, and spider rolls (little dumplings with little sticks of something on them).  And coffee--while we think of tea as particularly Indian (and it is), including spiced tea with milk (chai), coffee is popular here, often served with hot milk (sort of an Indian cafe con leche).  Yum.

Another buffet menu (served yesterday for lunch at our visit to InfoSys, here in Bangalore, to which we've moved in recent days--part of the complex of major information technology corporations here): dahi wadi (small grain dumplings with sweet chutney), Indian green salad (with lots of red onions), tomato with dal shorba, kadai fish curry, tindly varuval, gobi mutter masala, dal tadka, rice pilaf, cured pickles, papad(am) (a very thin, crispy bread), a variety of naan (thicker flat breads), gulab jamoon (like doughnut holes served in sweet syrup), and fresh fruits (papaya, watermelon, pineapple).

We don't, of course, have such extensive buffets often.  We're now staying at Christ University in Bangalore, with a good but modest breakfast buffets: idlis, vadas, hard-boiled eggs, perhaps a rice dish, and some (excellent) fresh fruit, as well as milk coffee or tea.  We also are sampling from the food court at a mall several blocks away, which features a variety of small places (see photo below) with inexpensive ($1-2) items, many of which are tasty, and which we haven't encountered back in the U.S.

We've also cooked our own Indian food--we had a cooking class the other night, taught by the chef who teaches restaurant cooking classes, and his student assistant.  Our group divided into six groups, each responsible for one of the six dishes we would be preparing in the large professional kitchen on campus as part of the Hotel Management Program.  We each got a hat and an apron.  My group was responsible for making dessert, a carrot and raisin halwa (ingredients included many grated carrots, sugar, khova (milk solids), liquid milk, ghee or clarified butter, hand-chopped almonds, cashews, and raisins).  Other dishes included fish tikka (with both fish and prawns), cottage cheese tikka, corn and potato patties, lamb chops (spices/ingredients included coconut, coriander leaves, chili, mint, onion, pepper, cinnamon sticks, cloves, ginger, garlic, salt and oil), peas and potato curry, and mint and cumin pulao or pilaf.

It took several hours to pull all this together by hand (no machine processing!), and the chef had us wash everything (pans, knives, counter-tops) before we were to sit down at a long table to eat our results.   We did most of the actual work, but the chef circulated throughout the process to help us with tricky steps or techniques (his almond splitting technique with a large knife was admirable).  And the results were great; eating them was almost as much fun as the work in the kitchen.  It was an enjoyable group activity, but also gave us insight into the work that goes into Indian cooking, and the kind of knowledge that has made it one of the great "food civilizations."

I should mention a few other things about food here.  One is the north/south India difference: in the south, where we are, rice is the basis or accompaniment to many dishes, and appears in many more forms than just pilaf; in the north, wheat is the basis for breads and some dishes.  The South is also more conservative in its Hinduism, and there are more vegetarians (the upper Hindu castes in particular would avoid meat), while in the north, which is more Muslim (especially the northwest), there are more grilled meats.  Most restaurants have large lettering out front indicating whether they are "non-veg" or "veg" or both; some are "pure veg" (like "glatt kosher," not only veg but more strictly veg--no fish, for example, though foods cooked with ghee would still usually be allowed).  Dana and I went to a cafe last night with a local woman to a cafe which lists further considerations: some dishes were marked with a symbol indicating they were suitable for Jains (one of the Indian religious faiths), including no garlic or onion.

Some of our students encountered such things in unexpected ways when, weary of delicious Indian food all the time, they sought out a McDonald's--not hard to find.  But: no pork sausages (forbidden to Muslims, a number of whom live here in Bangalore), but also no beef (forbidden to observant Hindus), so no Big Macs!  Instead, there's a chicken Maharaja Burger (which the students declared delicious).

And I end with a more somber note about food: not everyone here has enough.  We learned in one of our social work lectures earlier that almost half of India's children are malnourished, sometimes chronically so, resulting in stunted growth (a larger proportion of Indian children are malnourished than in sub-Saharan Africa, they tell us here).  We spent time in classrooms the other day with a program that seeks to educate slum (the local term) children, and found that they provide three meals a day to the children involved; during the month breaks in the school year, teachers said that they could see some of the children "shrink" without the food they normally got at school.  The gap between the middle class and the poor is a key issue here in India.

Until the next post!  Bruce

Winter to winter

Greetings once again from India.  And apologies to those of you who were not able to get access to this blog with the address I sent earlier.  At this point, I think either bruceinindia.blogspot.com or bruceinindia.blogspot.in will work.  No "@"'s!

For local people here in South India, this is "winter."  Yet, in Chennai, it's been in the mid-80's daily, with some humidity.  The experience of weather seems relative; we see some folks with wool hats pulled down over their ears!  But when summer comes, the wet, hot monsoon season, I imagine the weather here now does seem like winter.  In any event, for those of us refugees from a cold Minnesota winter, it's been a welcome burst of summer.  We spent part of one afternoon at the beach just south of Chennai, on the Bay of Bengal.  A few local people were swimming, but most, like the three ladies in the photo below, were content to just enjoy the crashing waves and a day away.

Our group of 20 students seems to be doing well.  For most, India is new, and Dana (the psychology professor who organized the course) has provided a number of ways for us to experience the culture and people.  A key early one has been our contact with faculty and students at Madras Christian College, noted in the first post.  As part of our program with them, we spent a day at a Dalit village (Dalits were formerly referred to as "untouchables," the group below even the lowest of the social castes in India).

That day was the first day of Pongal, or the harvest festival in Southern India.  This included making a special food in terra cotta cooking pots over outdoor fires, a mixture of the recent rice and sugar cane harvests with a few other spices, to make a tasty meal.  A number of such pots are set out to cook at the same time as the village gathers, and they are let to boil over for a moment to symbolize the bounty of the harvest (our pots are overflowing).  In the photo below, we see some of the women around the pongal pots, one of whom is stirring it.  We were included in a brief Hindu ceremony afterwards, and then given a portion of the new harvest food to eat (anything that's been freshly cooked is safe to eat, but we avoid unknown street foods, for example).

After these ceremonial aspects, we shared in some of the music and games (some drumming and dancing--I was invited up to help drum but was well outclassed by the older boys, but some of our women students were active dancers).  One of the more dramatic games included small teams of young men trying to tag and capture one another, hoping to successfully throw the person sought to the ground (see photo below).

Afterwards we adjourned to a house where women who are involved in the various programs seeking to improve village life spoke of what they do in the areas of education and health (these programs are part of social justice outreach from the college) (the woman in the green sari, photo above, as one of the leaders, and helped arrange our visit).  It was inspiring to see some of their efforts, and we were also fed more of the festival food, on banana leaves, most of us sitting on the floor (except for some of us older folks, such as myself, whom local people see as an elder, who were encouraged to take one of the few seats).  A tasty bit of fish curry was added.  Their welcome and their hospitality were humbling.

Some of our students were uncomfortable, as this was a poor village and we were relatively affluent Americans.  How do we know what we're doing here?  Our students want to be sensitive and respectful of the culture, and its rules and etiquette, but we're not always certain we know what they are.  Yet we experienced what is sometimes called an "extravagant welcome."  And no one else would usually visit a Dalit village (nor would ordinary American tourists), nor perhaps accept food from their hands (whose touch was once considered to make that food ritually impure), or hold their babies.  And the kids found our visit exciting, asking our names and we theirs in turn, shaking our hands.  And we were invited and expected.  But are these the kinds of rationalizations it's easy to make when you're having a good time?  And, too, we come from a society ourselves in which welcoming the stranger has a ragged history.  Now we, in a small way, are "strangers in a strange land," yet also privileged ones, uncertain what that means.

I was grateful that some of our students were asking these kinds of questions, as the kind of interaction we hope for between us (our group) and local people of varying genders and classes is always complicated and needs a sensitivity that takes time and care to develop.  On the one hand, there's no differences between our and their (local villagers) ability to dream, to take small pleasures, to love one another, and to find purpose in something larger than ourselves.  Yet we do differ in important ways, in social class, comforts, language, safety, health, color, access to safe water, and education.  We have privileges of which we are usually unaware, or take for granted.  We are trying to learn, to find a way through to our common humanity in situations in which that humanity has sometimes been denied--in this situation, particularly for Dalits.

I'll conclude for now.  Stay tuned for more!  Namaste (see last photo below).  Bruce

Early Days in Chennai (south India)

I open the curtains in my hotel room here in Chennai (formerly Madras).  The apartment building next door is a bright lime green, shaded by tall coconut trees.  On the outdoor stairs two older women in saris are chatting, while nearby a younger woman stands and joins in.  The late afternoon sun lights up her deep yellow sari, and she glows.  It is a peaceful sight, yet set in the constant background roar of traffic and honking and city noises in this town of eight million people.  

I am, once again, traveling with students to a place I've never been before: India, for the month of January, with one of St. Olaf's study abroad programs.  It is strange to be here with 20 students without Barbara, as leading such programs together has been one of our more significant experiences over the years.  And I'm playing her role, helping to manage the finances and other such tasks, as well as helping in other ways.  I'm assisting Dana Gross, a psychology prof and friend (and long-time carpool rider) with her course here on human development issues in India (family, gender, children, poverty, caste, economic development).  But it's good to be here, as India's been a place I've long wanted to visit, and I continue to enjoy time with students in this kind of setting, learning and experiencing along with them.  In the photo below, Dana and I are on the lower right, and Prince and Miriam, local social work professors at Madras Christian College who have been generous hosts to our group, are on the lower left.

We are getting used to being here.  We left on a Sunday morning (Minnesota time), and arrived in the middle of the night on Tuesday morning (India time), a long journey--to a local temperature over 100 degrees warmer than the one we'd left behind.  We're almost adjusted to jet lag, and find our hotel is both modest and comfortable, often with some warm water, and always with some good food.  Students are enjoying idlis, round white rice cakes with coconut chutney, dal (lentils in a wide variety of preparations), fresh juices, coffee with milk and sugar, a spicy rice dish, and a few other things that rotate each day.  (Southern India is more rice and lentils based, often vegetarian, while northern India is more wheat based, and more meat-eating.)  

We are almost used to the traffic.  It's always busy, a little scary for first-timers; busses, trucks, auto-rickshaws (motorized three-wheelers for a few passengers), two-wheelers (motorbikes), and occasional bicycles compete with each other for space, avoiding what looks like an inevitable collision at the last moment, on streets in which lanes are optional and pedestrians are often on their (our!) own in getting across a street (while also avoiding the occasional cows that do indeed wander the city streets).  Travel times on the bus are sometimes an hour or two.  But we do get a chance to see more of the city, which is often a dizzying mix between very modern business and apartment buildings and some fancy malls, and shacks and shanty communities, or people who are simply homeless and on the street.  

The faculty and students at our host college, MCC, have been very good to us.  Students went with our folks to some local shops to get inexpensive "kurtas" (long pullover shifts that go down to mid-thigh or one's knees, something in between a dress and a shirt), and so our students are each day looking a bit more local (at least superficially).   The picture below shows a lunch with both groups of students in the courtyard by our classroom.

I will post again soon.  This is a sampling for the moment; you can decide whether future postings might be of interest to keep up with!