Incredible India - Part 3

The fact that I had lived long enough to go to India in my early twenties is itself something of a lucky turn of events.

From a young age I was fascinated by cars. Dinky Toys, small metal replica vehicles, were what I played with most for many years, pushing them round a chalk defined track on the lino floor of my playroom. From about ten I was allowed to get in my father’s car and, sitting on his knee, steer it back into the garage. A little older when I could just about reach the pedals, I could garage it on my own. No surprise then perhaps that I passed my driving test a few months after my seventeenth birthday.

After which I bought an old Ford, rusty and burning oil, for £15, and learned about mending cars. (The mother of my good friend asked him why I always arrived with black oil on my hands…) When I started work as a journalist, I bought myself a Lambretta motor-scooter to get round London. In cars and on two wheels I drove like a maniac. I probably don’t deserve to have survived.

So when I got to Mumbai and was working all week and wanted to explore further afield at weekends, I was drawn to the wonderful Indian Bullet motorcycles, based on the British Royal Enfields. They were treasured possessions and way outside any possible personal budget, but I had ogled them long enough on the forecourt of a Mumbai motorcycle dealer for him to come up with a cost-effective alternative.

At modest cost he rented me for a weekend an Indian version of the French Mobylette moped which had come into local production about seven years earlier. It was a brilliant way to get around and I started to explore the best-known sights within reach.

Pune, then spelled Poona, a Indian Raj-era hill town where the Brits went to escape the blistering heat, was one of the first weekend road trips... I had already been to the nearer Elephanta Caves, on a small island an hour by ferry from Colaba. Other trips were to follow.

When I wasn’t working, I was often reading - novels books about India bought from the local private libraries which lined the streets. You bought a second-hand paperback for about Rs1 and when you had read it you sold it back to them for 50 Paisa (half a rupee).

I had become fascinated by Hindu iconography, thanks to the traditional fables told to me by TK (Chakrapani) and Rao. My very favourite of the deities was Ganesha, the elephant god, from whom so many stories derive. I bet you didn’t know that he’s the reason the moon waxes and wanes. Riding home on his rat (yes, really - every Indian god has a vahana, or carrier) after eating too many sweets at a feast, he took a tumble when the rat was startled by a snake. Because Ganesha had overeaten his already round belly burst open. The moon god, Chandra, laughed at the funny sight, which angered Ganesha who pulled out his tusk and hurled it at the moon, thus creating the lunar phases. Don’t be in doubt. You can see the ‘scar’ the tusk made on the surface of the moon if you look carefully!

With icons and stories like these, who can fail to be fascinated and India is full of renditions of the gods, both in ancient carvings and modern, multi-coloured versions. Many devout Hindus pay particular homage to one of the three main gods, Brahma (The Creator) who brought the universe and all life into existence; Vishnu (The Preserver) who maintains order, balance, and protection and Shiva (The Destroyer) who represents transformation, but some follow at three. In any case the temples and shrines of India are full of imagery which refences major and lesser gods, and nod at the fables that are attached.

You may already be able to tell that becoming immersed in this whole rich culture was stimulating and rewarding. I began to see that that there were other ways of trying to understand the world apart from the one which flows from European cultures and democracies.

Two other amazing journeys on the moped enriched my understanding of India: Elora and Ajanta caves are amazing sites a good half-day journey from Mumbai. Carved out of basalt rock they are in effect holes in the ground where the stone has been hacked out leaving the monolithic temples in relief. I had seen nothing even approaching this in Europe and the sheer industry of creating such monumental shrines was breath-taking.

These visits, the colourful stories of the gods and the friendship of my fellow tenants where big plusses. But so too was the whole ambience of Mumbai, with its exotic smells and teeming life.

I have to say that it was not all easy to deal with. The Indian city slums of the period were like no other. Across the road from our boarding house was one such colony, acres and acres of makeshift structures made from cardboard, discarded building materials, corrugated iron and little else. It was a maze of alleyways and cut-throughs in which families lived squatting on the bare ground and defecating in remote corners. At one side of the area was the sea-front alongside which dhobiwallahs were washing and hanging out the clothing they were paid a pittance to launder. At another, bhangis, or sweepers and scavengers congregated.

I was beginning to learn about the complex and less savoury side of the Hindu religion – that of the cruel caste system that still operates extensively in India today. (While the Indian Constitution legally banned caste-based discrimination and "untouchability" in 1950, the social reality remains deeply entrenched.)

The main layers of the caste system functions through two primary overlapping concepts: varna (broad classes) and jati (sub-castes). Varna consists of four major theoretical social categories described in ancient texts. Jati represents thousands of localised, hereditary sub-castes tied to specific communities and trades. The varnas are traditionally ranked by religious and social status from highest to lowest: Brahmins (priests, scholars and teachers) at the top of the hierarchy, Kshatriyas (rulers, administrators, and warriors); Vaishyas (farmers, merchants, and traders) and Shudras (labourers and service providers). Still more sinisterly, outside this hierarchy are the Dalits – still known as the "untouchables" who are destined to performed society's most menial, hazardous, or polluting tasks and experience social exclusion. Still today Dalits today face persistent social stigma, systemic discrimination, and economic disadvantage despite theoretical legal protections. 

In the 1960s and ’70s this social class system was all encompassing. And it accounted for the way in which the populous nation, rich in resources, failed to lift a large section of its population out of abject poverty. As I understand it, in the Hindu religion, the ultimate aim is to be as good as one can be within your own station in life. So the concept of betterment is only relevant to a very limited extent. It is a cultural straight jacket which for many years accounted for the real lack of social progress. I do not know how it is today, but back then it was very visible, and those slums were a graphic illustration of just such a system. Children with swollen bellies from near starvation, sanitary conditions of unbelievable squalor, economic deprivation off the scale.

I loved the India I lived in and worked in, but have to admit that I hardened myself to the horrors across the street. And, shamefully, I turned an equally blind eye to the countless beggars, adult and infants, whom I passed daily on my walk to work. Perhaps I had to. I’m not sure.

That walk started out as a pleasant stroll in the morning before the day got too hot. But it was getting more humid.

While we in Britain have unsettled and un-predictable seasonal weather, in India there was no such doubt. The monsoon rains were to arrive on June 10, a little more than a month after I arrived. (Actually that year I think the first rains were on June 9 but that feels like I’m splitting hairs). While as an Englishman I was well used to rain, the tropical torrents were spectacular. They didn’t usually last all day, but the rain came down in sheets, soon flooding the streets of central Mumbai sometimes to almost waist height. Buses and taxis and private cars stopped for some of the time. Most days I walked to work but some days I waded! If I got wet from rain, it didn’t much matter because it was warm and I soon dried out. The monsoon season lasts up to three months but at least that year only a small part of it resulted in such spectacular rainfall. What is perhaps surprising given the state of Indian wiring is that we weren’t all either electrocuted or blacked out.

And then, in mid-September, as the season changed, came one of the most spectacular events of my whole stay, perhaps of my life. It is the Ganesha Chaturthi when the entire city takes brightly coloured clay or mud models of the elephant deity and walks them into the sea Chowpatty beach to dissolve among the small waves. People come in small groups, families, or huge community groups, carrying the models on a small tray or on large platforms held shoulder-high. They come from early in the morning until late in the evening and for days on end… There’s drums and music, street parades and more. According to Hindu mythology, Ganesha, the remover of obstacles, was promised that he would be worshipped first, before any other deity, in all rituals reminding devotees to seek clarity and wisdom before taking on major projects. The ritual immersion of Ganesha represents the cycle of creation and dissolution, a reminder that the physical world is temporary.

You might have wanted to visit the Mardi Gras in Rio or be in St Peter’s Square in Rome at Easter. Well I’ll tell you, Mumbai’s Ganesha Chaturthi is up there with both, and it came to me as a complete surprise.

All the while TK and Rao were telling me how wonderful the south of India was, where they came from, and when they still had family. And as I read more about the temple sights of India, I was more and more drawn to some of the most spectacular and some of the least known.

Rao came from a less common sect of Hinduism that worships all three main deities in equal measure, and had been to an Ashram near Goa where that sect was cantered. TK came from Tamil Nadu and spoke of the spectacular gopuram, temple gateways, reaching into the sky and teeming with iconography.

They were tapping on an open door for much as I was enjoying life in Mumbai, I am of a restless nature. While I could continue to work under the radar in India as I was, I was only just paying my way and I was not growing professionally. I would have done better to have made more contacts while still in London, to write Letters from India for papers and journals rather than the solitary Letter from London for the Economic & Political Weekly.

And then I hit on an idea. I could cash in my valuable plane ticket on BOAC (the forerunner to BA), and when the time came, buy a much cheaper ticket on one the world first cut-price carriers, Middle East Airlines. The difference would buy me a nice motorcycle on which to visit some of the things my friends were telling me about and other places I had discovered for myself. Climate-wise it was the season for travel…