On travelling to India, Part 2
By way of a letter to Ammar, who writes to me from Karnataka in South India. “I do have a long list of questions that I also wonder about…” he writes, “If you can write further posts on them, my happiness will know no bounds.”
Dear Ammar,
Just a few weeks ago, I had the immense pleasure of visiting your country. This evening, I am sitting in a cold house in the fading grey of a winter’s afternoon, still turning my experiences — of warmth, of colour, of “mess” as you say — over and over in my head.
India is imperfect and yet we find beauty in our imperfection. India is a chaos, a mess, there is no denying it and amidst all of it, we do find harmony.
You sum it up beautifully, in just two lines, Ammar. I remember describing India as a land of stark dichotomies, of irrefutable extremes, after just a few days there. And yet, yet. Maybe India is like a Janus word, if one can liken a country to a Janus word.
A ‘Janus word’ is a word that is its own opposite — like ‘fast’, which can refer both to moving very quickly and to staying put.
India is a land of opposites. And yet. Yet. Those opposites function, almost as one. The opposites are contained one inside the other.
Imperfect beauty, you say.
Chaotic harmony, you say. Yes.
As you say it, it is so. I recognise this place, of which you so sweetly speak.
You asked me many questions, Ammar, about my travelling to India. And in this, you remind me of something I’ve seen only one other place in the world. I experienced it again and again as I travelled in Kerala. You express curiosity. Who are these people who’ve come to visit your country, you ask. What brought them here? Are their lives different from my own?
People came up to us relatively often during our visit in early January 2023 and the first question was always, “Where are you from?” Clearly, as we were white, we were different. We were not from “here”. One of the things I loved most about travelling to India was not being “from here”. The whiteness of my skin and the strawberry blonde in my hair immediately identified me as what — a tourist? An expat? A migrant?
Different.
No less human. But different. I was thrilled to be different and to be a minority again. Twice in my life, I had been a minority — once when I was young (for a decade) and once when I was in mid-life (for half a decade). This time I was a minority again as a Caucasian woman from the west.
When we replied that we were from France, the most common response was “Mbappé!” Everywhere we went in Kerala, football (soccer) was the topic of conversation. Our being from the Land of Mbappé was a boon. We loved that immediately, through sports, we could connect with the young (and older) locals and that we could quickly establish common ground across cultures and continents. Interestingly enough, many of the young Indians we spoke to were Ronaldo fans who were switching to Mbappé (as Ronaldo was retiring), another hot topic of conversation. Tell me, are you a Mbappe, a Ronaldo or a Messi fan, Ammar?
So there was only one other place I’ve travelled where the locals were curious about who we were and why we were there. It was Vanuatu, a small, relatively poor island in the middle of the South Pacific. We were different there, too, white-skinned, bearing small machines with moving images. We were subjects of interest, as much for the locals, as they were for us. Mutual curiosity. We experienced this again in India. Ah — to be mutually curious!
You have asked me a series of questions, Ammar, and here, I will answer three of them, as a start. My responses may generate more questions. I hope they do, as honestly, a conversation with you about your country raises my spirits and keeps my love of India alive and bright.
1. What brought you to India?
India has been the country I’ve been working up to visiting all of my life. That sounds dramatic, and I don’t mean it to be. What I mean is that I have travelled to various countries in Asia, Europe, the South Pacific, the Caribbean, the Americas. I still have many countries yet to see.
But I have been afraid of India, of what I would find there. I do not mean to be offensive in any way. It’s just that when I was growing up, we were told the people in India didn’t have enough to eat. They were starving. (So were the people in Africa — and just prior to my birth, tens of millions of people were dying of famine in China. But the children in India were the ones that burned most into my brain.)
Over the years, I’ve read accounts of life in India and watched documentaries. I’ve read books by Indian writers and imagined a life wholly different from my own. In my mind (be it most certainly highly misinformed), India was a place of teaming life and great suffering. To go, I needed to be ready to bear witness to all that life there was, and wasn’t.
What propelled us to visit now? My son is finishing his worldschooling education with us this year. We had, as a family, finally put India on our list of his last countries to visit before launching into the world on his own. India topped our list on 1 January 2002. We decided to go within the year.
Was I ready? As ready as I was ever going to be — and as a family, we were excited about seeing a corner (a first step) of this massive country. What made us want to come? Besides my lifelong fascination with a place I’d heard so many contradictory things about? In short, it was the people. The chaos. The culture. The food (ah! the food!). The history. India’s wildlife (elephants and tigers and [sloth] bears, oh my!). And nature (yes, nature — which is why we chose Kerala).
2. How did you come to know of it (India) for travel?
As I mentioned above, I heard things about people in India when I was little, living in the United States. Later, I read about Americans travelling there in search of themselves, yoga, peace and meditation retreats. I had a friend who moved to Delhi and lived there for several years. And I had another friend who lived in Mumbai for 12 years. Another friend had travelled there, and yet another. People loved it — at least the ones I spoke with. So how did I come to know of it? Through people and books and documentaries; through stories.
3. What intrigued you about India or India travel?
Pretty much everything! The food, the people, how the country functions. I’d read a few manuscripts on how local governments in India function; I’d read about some of their governmental policies. I’d worked briefly on line with people based in India in 2021 during COVID. I’d loved them!
India is vast and it is as different in one state as it is in another. I was intrigued by the differences, the sheer numbers, the density. I was curious to see how it functioned, as the most populous country in the world. I was curious to see how it melded religions (I’d read that there are 8 major religions in India) and languages (780 languages, with 22 of them being official). I wanted to learn more about societal norms and gender equality (How did arranged marriages work? What was the balance of work between genders in India?) Basically, I was curious to see how your country breathes, works and lives, how it celebrates and mourns, how it grows and copes with growth and difference and diversity.
This letter is getting long and perhaps laborious. Let me pick it up again in a few days, Ammar. I will answer more of your questions then. I hope until then, this is a start.
Namaste,
Julie
