Who Could Live in Pne?

Towards the end of the program, many of our ACM students have reached the peak of their emotional frustrations about the mishaps they had during both their intellectual pursuits and leisurely travels. And my roommate told me that he would leave India with mixed feelings. There isn’t any doubt that this has been a rewarding experience for them, but I sense that their (or, rather, our) feelings, especially about life in urban India, are as complex as the heterogeneous Indian society itself.

I have to say, however, that I have learned to love India to the extent that I feel like I could survive here happily, and this is something that is surprisingly rare among the American students I have been studying with for the past semester.

Against all odds, I ‘d say that there is something to love in the middle of the unbelievably lethal traffic, among the surly police officers, in-between the piles of stinking trash, and in the heart of pesky beggar kids. Life is hard for those squashed in this swarm of humanity, and yet, life here is tenaciously beautiful.

I could live here and be happy. I’m glad I can say that.

A vacation in Goa!

Now it's time for a little bit of a break from the heavy-duty academic stuff I've been pretty busy with in the past two months!

The Dussehra holiday happened to fall on my birthday and us ACM students decided to go on an adventure to India's smallest state and probably the country's most exciting playground - Goa. It was a small Portuguese enclave until 1961 and even now the architecture, the food, and the atmosphere in general is, in a way, more "relaxed", or sussegad in the local version of Portuguese, than the neighboring industrial powers of Maharashtra and Karnataka.

Our hotel was at Colva beach, a popular destination among domestic tourists, and probably Russians to since I found signs written in Cyrillic! We went to a local restaurant that offered an amazing variety of seafood as well as, for the daring, drinks concocted with cashew or palm liquor.

The second day was a trip to a beach that was amazing beyond description. Palolem in South Goa - made famous by The Bourne Supremacy. It was just perfect - a bay where it is safe to swim for yards and yards away from the sands, a courteous crowd of young Western neo-hippies and adult Indians, and palm-covered, hilly islands on the fringes.

We went to a a Portuguese church in Old Goa the next day - apparently the largest in South Asia, and took a good break from the party-ridden beaches. The tomb of Saint Francis Xavier, the first Jesuit missionary in South and Southeast Asia, is nearby and filled with devout Catholic pilgrims from all over India.

The ride back was characterized with a bumpy ride through the scenic villages of Maharashtra. I'm still tired after being crammed into a car for 12 hours, but I'm definitely content!

Mother India and the New Nations

For our Indian Cinema and Society Class, we’re watching what could be called an Indian epic in a cinematic form, Mehboob Khan’s Mother India (1957) – also one of India’s first movies in color! Set in an apocryphal northern Indian village during the late colonial period, the film featured the struggles of the single mother Radha against rural poverty and the seductions of the local moneylender Sukhi-lala. The three-hour film was such a phenomenal success such that, between 1957 and the early 1990s, the film was in continuous circulation in movie theatres throughout the country as well as in Africa, the former Soviet Union, and parts of the Middle East.

Gayatri, our instructor, has written a Penguin-published book on the movie, and the lectures on the movie has understandably spanned from Aristotelian narrative theories to Indian politics in the 1950s!

The non-linearity and multiplicity of its narrative as well as its reference to numerous Indian mythologies renders the movie a complexity that can only be justifiably treated by treating it as an allegory of the nation. Perhaps it’s not surprising that two of the main stars of the movie, Nargis and Sunil Dutt, were still beloved by the Indian people during their short but vibrant political careers.

What I am seeing in this movie too, however, is that it’s also an excellent parable of not only India in its early years of independence, but also of many other post-colonial nations in their formative years. Radha, in her early years of marriage, was not only brought into the financial difficulties of her husband’s mortgaged farmland, but also into the village’s entire system of moral economy that is evaluated through collective female honor. In a similar sense, India in its early years faced not only the turbulence of trying to achieve self-sufficiency, which has been slowed down before by the relentless pressure of producing agricultural commodities demanded by the British, but also the challenge of “honor” in asserting its national identity over a diverse matrix of autonomous cultures.

Ben Anderson’s idea of the nation as an “imagined community” is extremely relevant here, since the film itself is a way of reimagining the land as a feeding and caring mother who had gone through monumental difficulties to raise her children. In fact, there is a panoramic high-angle shot in which the farmers of Radha’s village stacked hay in the shape of an unpartitioned Indian subcontinent.

I haven’t seen this level of national re-imagination in Hollywood or even European movies, probably since the nation-state as a coterminous manifestation of a single ethnolinguistic identity is much more prevalent in the First World. Even mainstream Hollywood productions tend to portray either the “dominant” Anglophone society or the experience of immigrants and minorities, but rarely the interface of both, albeit with some notable exceptions.
On the other hand, plural communities such as India and Indonesia (and, much, much more discreetly, countries like China and Israel) have a much more obvious challenge of trying to accommodate their mosaic of divergent identities into a nation-state.

Mother India, therefore ,is a justifiably an epic of not only India in its entire complexity, but of many other post-colonial worlds as well.

Industrializations and Revolutions

"The Mahabharata and the Ramayana never knew of a revolution. Something new. And these [Javanese] farmers never knew that this Earth has witnessed so many revolutions. And their own ancestors has witnessed one, although their poets has never mentioned it: the Revolution of Arok, the opening of a new era, from the Javanese Hindu to the Hinduist Java..."

-A Mute's Soliloquy, Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Toer was arguably Indonesia's most prominent author who was nominated for a Nobel Prize shortly before died. His works, many of them written during his fourteen-year internment, are incredibly reflective of the Javanese identity and the invention of Indonesia as a nation-state. I stumbled upon PDFs of his work here in Pune while working on a Sanskrit epic - the Mahabharata - thousands of miles away and enabled by American universites, yet this Indian experience is only inches away from my feelings as an Indonesian, and as a (half) Javanese. And so, for the next couple of paragraphs, allow to generalize South and most of Southeast Asia as post-colonial nations.

If the Industrial Revolution and the two World Wars are what propelled the Western world and Japan into their current states of relative political and economic well-being, then I'd say that most if not all post-colonial nations have never experienced revolutions that propelled them into modernity. We were, for the lack of a better term, dragged into the vulnerability of post-colonial independence by the well-intended albeit idealistic evolutions of our Westernized indigenous elites in the middle of the 20th-century. Since then, my older Indonesian cousins, like so many upper-class Indians, are corporate professionals and IT executives capable of working easily with their counterparts in virtually every wired city in the world.

Yet we are still, for good and bad reasons, nations of servants.

The peasantry may have moved to the cities to work blue-collar jobs, or even abroad to find low-key employment as migrant workers. And in the process we have hailed them as heroes of development through their stream of remittances that keeps the engines of construction chugging in palces like Kerala and Central Java. Yet we never propelled them into the state of ideological and economic autonomy that is the middle class, because of, among others, we have never experienced a state of industrial revolution as much as a state of industrialization.

I'm not arguing for a forced overnight transformation through double-digit growth that, for instance, China is experiencing, but post-colonial nations would never achieve the state of well-being that they associate with the devloped world until we reach a tipping point during which the descendants of the colonial peasantry cease to be servants - a point at which politically-motivated religious and moral dogmas cease to numb the jarring disparity their developmental policies have maintained. Maybe that will inevitably be a painful moment of upheaval, but perhaps that is the only alternative to a permanent state of complacency.

Seeing First- and Third-World Exchange Rates

Converting prices in a foreign country to the currency back home is so intuitive for travelers such that I almost feel like a walking calculator in an Indian supermarket. What’s interesting for me is that I have two currencies to convert to: the Indonesian rupiah and the American dollar.

An above average commute to ACM from a suburban Pune neighborhood is about 60 rupees, which is about a dollar and twenty-five cents or fifteen thousand Indonesian rupiahs – easily a very small when amount compared to $ 4.50, which is the cost of commuting to downtown DC from a Maryland suburb. Nonetheless, 60 rupees, $ 12.5, or Rp. 15 000 would buy you a satisfying lunch in Pune or in Jakarta, whereas a Quiznos sandwich would be set you back six times that amount of money.

A biking trip to Konkan on the southern coast of Maharashtra is about 600 rupees a day, or $ 15, which is fantastically cheap for an upper-middle class American family, but I found myself thinking about whether I should spend that amount or hypothetically feed an Indonesian family of three for an entire day!

I found it so funny to see how American students, at least in the beginning, are so pleasantly surprised by how cheap things are, yet, for me, it’s actually a little bit more expensive than business as usual.

Maybe it’s time to see the global economies in a post-colonial light – a third world upper-middle class family would need to save every penny to afford a modest lifestyle in the U.S., yet a typical suburban American family would find themselves a significantly elevated economic status in India.

Where did this gap come from? Is it a morally justifiable disparity?

Best pictures so far - Part 2

Pic. 1: View of ricefields by the Karla caves in Maharashtra

Pic. 2: Waiting for police registration by an old banyan tree

Pic. 3: Anju walking up the stairs at a temple on Parvati Hill, Pune

Pic. 4: Another funny sign for a doctor's surgery

Best pictures so far - Part 1

Pic. 1: Waiting for the bus by the ACM office

Pic. 2: Vishrambaugh Palace in the Old Town district of Pune - the former residence of Shivaji

Pic. 3: Colorful textiles at the Tulsibaugh market

Pic. 4: Landon prefers the bandit attire for rickshaw rides

The Pronoun Penguin

This guy was standing outside the ancient Bhaja caves in Maharashtra. Looks like he's into some really intense philosophy of personhood and totality.

The Kitchen Asymmetry

In an upper-middle class urban Indonesian family, the parents and the children probably won’t do the dishes, since they are likely to have a housemaid living in the house who would be up for the task. In an upper-middle class (sub)urban American family, the parents and the children would probably take turns loading and unloading the dishwasher.

So far, it’s either outsourcing dishwashing or distributing the amount of work equally, however, there’s a different story in India!

In an upper-middle class Indian family, a mother would do the dishes late at night when everybody else is asleep, and she is happy to do so, since that’s a task she has been doing for the household since a very long time ago. I’ve never seen a person who so willingly enjoys doing chores for others, without any payment.

Indianized Signs

These are words and symbols that already mean something to me, but it's so fascinating to see them in a different context, in a different spelling, and in the middle of different colors.

And of course it's so hard to resist the picture of a really cool cat.

Numpang di rumah orang, or, my way of travelling

Numpang di rumah orang is the Indonesian phrase for simply crashing at someone else's house. For the past five years, I've trotted cities around the globe thanks to the the countless wonderful people who've offered me a bed, a meal, and a roof over my head at the very least. Here's where they live:

An investment portfolio executive's house on the Eastside suburbs of Seattle

A retired economist's row house in Leidschendam, south of the Hague

A graduate student's attic apartment in the Hague

A veterinarian's row house on the northern side of Rotterdam

A computer engineer's house in Nagano, Japan

A small-town doctor's sprawling ranch in Wessington Hills, South Dakota

A restauranteur's farm house in Brookings, South Dakota

A professor's split-level house, built in the 1950s, in Northfield, Minnesota

A world bank researcher's Victorian row house apartment in downtown Washington D.C.

An undergraduate student's NYU dorm room in Manhattan

A journalist's red-brick house in a leafy Washington D.C. neighborhood

A sales executive's low-rise in suburban Maryand

And, soon, an Indian family in Pune.

Man I'm probably the most indebted person in the entire world!

T minus 4 hours

It's four hours before my flight leaves for Mumbai, or, more specifically, before I enter fourteen hours of being in the Twilight zone. Some things I've learned from the last few days at "home" (well, at Carleton):

1. The hardest part about choosing a topic for the independent study project is about building enough self-confidence. It took me so long to convince myself that my ideas do matter!

2. Fast internet connection definitely slashes your productivity. JSTOR surfing is something that will last many, many hours...

3. Americans are so generous about giving hugs. And more hugs. This applies to both males and females and is such a comforting experience when you're 10 000 miles away from home.

Anyway, I'll be doing a project on the folkloric and contemporary forms of the Mahabharata, an ancient Hindu epic of the "eternal battle between good and evil." Something I grew up with in Indonesia too!

Parallel Places

I’ve heard of India as a world of organized chaos. A world of gaping disparity between rich and poor. A world of spontaneity where things don’t run according to a pre-conceived schedule. If I were granted a right to generalize, perhaps I would say that this is, among others, the quintessential experience of being in a developing country. But there is a lot to explore even with multitudes of traits in common between the two countries.

I grew up in Jakarta, Indonesia, where the river is choked full of trash and untreated sewage, where traffic is governed by the law of the jungle, and where people live in shantytowns squeezed between neighborhoods with comfortable, air-conditioned house. And all of that is, even then, home and perfectly rational to me.

The last cross-cultural experience I had was when I began college at an American institution, where millions are spent to revitalize local rivers, where pedestrians are almost treated like royalty by cars, and where socio-economic classes are often rigidly segregated in terms of space. All of those are often the complete opposite of what I have lived before, and yet, after two years of trying to make sense of what is different, these opposites have become things that I appreciate as well.

India, where I will come in a few weeks, sounds like a place where the experiences of growing up in Indonesia will be echoed in a very similar tone for me. It won’t probably be a radically different setting, but I feel that the similarities are very significant. They are both battling fundamentalist, singular religious and political aspirations in a struggle to accept plural identities. They are both nations trying to come into terms with blurring the colonialist binary of the developed and the developing.

I’m looking forward to see these similarities flourishing under the cover of different languages and colors.

A very short summer in DC!

It's been months since I've posted - but it's been a great albeit super-packed summer in DC working for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and Our Task in Arlington!

This blog will look a lot better soon with a new layout and photos! Time to give some audiovisual quality to record my travels in India.

Moving

I play with pi, parentheses
Man of science, and science of man
I wondered and wandered, following
Boas, submerged in the color of seawater