Jaipur, India
The traveler always travels from somewhere. You carry your lenses from home. Yet the point of the lenses, to belabor the obvious, is transparency proof that the world remains new, proof that the world is older than your eyes, proof of the worldliness of the world.
Toward the end of approaching an impossible transparency, you commit yourself to remain open-eyed, beyond smugness and also beyond abjection. Discovery is the mission, including discovering the color of your home lenses. The stranger goes everywhere to prove his own strangeness and to improve upon it. Yet the farther you travel, the stranger home appears.
As Ive traveled in Greece, Turkey and India over the past seven weeks, Ive sometimes been gripped, sometimes amused, sometimes frustrated by the mental gymnastics I perform as I try to grasp the evidence of my senses to see what I see (and hear, and taste, and smell). If I scramble to keep my gyroscope upright, does this keep me balanced or uncomprehending? The various exercises in familiarization we ambitiously call understanding, but the more we see, the stranger the world appears, and the stranger the world appears, the less confident we should be that we understand.
The women carry pots of soil on their heads away from construction sites; the torpor of unemployed men squatting in the dust in the blazing heat while, across the road, piles of trash accumulate; the women in splendidly colored saris pumping water from village wells; the cows, water buffalos, donkeys, goats and pigs wandering the Indian streets; the brilliantly maneuvering rickshaws, autorickshaws, and bicycles, the lumbering, overloaded tractors, ox-carts, truck sand buses; the frescoed palaces and marble mosques; the temples, the temples, the temples; the castes and the untouchablesare these not elements of a different civilization?
Omit the computer schools (Om Logistics Ltd. one is called) and this is still not San Jose and never will be. For all that one may want to agree with Amartya Sen that a civilization is a conversation and not a monolith, how can anyone think that all conversations are equivalent? They may not be destined to clash, in Samuel Huntingtons famous words, but can they really constitute proof that the human condition is essentially one?
In the Madhya Pradesh town of Orchha I attended a Hindu ceremony just before sunset at the gleaming Ram Raja Temple with its pink and gold domes. There were not more than one or two other tourists. After ringing a bell upon entering, some of the visitors held back in the central courtyard, but a hundred or more crowded into a fenced-off area close to the shrine, the sanctum sanctorum, where the scent of incense was heavy and a young priest stood before the stone icon. People wearing scarves damp from the ritual bath theyd just taken in the nearby river crowded as close as they could get, kept at bay by a soldier bearing a rifle with fixed bayonet. Many worshippers strained forward to get a look at the gilded peacock feather that the priest spun around and around the statue. Then they craned to get a look at him circumambulating. They surged forward to get dampened by the holy water he tossed into the crowd. They chanted.
A few chatted, greeting friends, as in the back rows of any European cathedral, but many of these Hindu devotees leaned forward as the chanting continued. You could see the hunger in their faces their lust to get close to the god whose palpable sign stood right over there.
I couldnt help but wonder whether some of these ritual devotees had also been among the fanatical Hindu mob that stormed a 15th-century mosque in Ayodhya, a couple of hundred miles away, in 1992, some of them chanting Atomic bomb! Atomic bomb! as they smashed the mosque to pieces because they believed it usurped the birthplace of the god Rama. Not so long ago, mob violence led to hundreds of deaths in the state of Gujarat. Narendra Modi, the formerly disgraced chief executive of Gujarat who played communal violence to the hilt, is creeping back into prominence while at the same time the ruling BJP, not far from its Hindu-fundamentalist origins, is playing the Muslim card in the current campaign.
Though people in the tourist business tend to downplay the danger, chiming with the BJPs India Shining campaign (a success with young voters, if the polls are to be believed), the traveler cannot help but wonder when the smoldering fires of communalism might flame up again. Everywhere outside Europe, it would appear, religious purification is a tempting ticket for politicians and secularism is always a struggle.
On the surface, at least, India has more constructive work to do than rekindle religious hatred. The country today votes its third election round, with one more remaining, and though politicians are widely suspect, the verve of campaign rallies is still impressive. In Agra, I saw a caravan of local party supporters surge down the street in trucks, cars, and autorickshaws waving their yellow flags bearing the party symbol, a yellow airplane. (There was even a model yellow airplane, probably papier-mâché, on the roof of one of the cars.) In Americas late 19th century, the history Michael McGerr has taught us, elections were also festivals; the parties mounted cavalcades and parades to rev up civic commitment and celebrate themselves. The electricity of crowds is a thrilling and fearsome thing.
But the absence of that electricity is also fearsome in its own way. In November-December 2000, as the Republican party apparatus (all the way up to the Supreme Court) ran rings around the Democrats, America stood still for a slow-motion coup detat. Was it a mark of democratic maturity that the worlds oldest democracy permitted George W. Bush to ascend to power without putting up an honorable resistance? More like a mark of lethargy.
Four years later, on the other side of the globe, America indulges again its own democratic ritual of symbolic genuflections, moral evasions and intellectual defaults. To the extent character is brandished, nobility is lacking. With the connivance of a show-business press, the Bush team or so I read seems to have succeeded (so far) in branding John Kerry a flip-flopper, as if changing ones mind were a sign of bad character and as if, when Bush reverses policies, its a measure of his manliness. America Slashing might be his slogan.
And so, back home in my benighted, scarred, oblivious land of donkey and elephant, against the odds that reason can prevail, what the political scientist E. E. Schattschneider called the semi-sovereign people are bestirring themselves, and the consequences, as in colossal India, will be vastly more imposing than the glittering, trivial surfaces suggest.
