On Hindi and its friends

I say that I speak English and that I'm learning Hindi. Both of those are, of course, true. Which English I speak and which Hindi I'm learning, however, is a bit more complicated. While in the states, for example, I was in a Hindi class in which the vocabulary skewed slightly Urdu (which is itself very similar to Hindi for everyday use). We would pronounce singular and plural third person pronouns (यह, ये; वह, वे) the same: as “yay” and “voh”. I had a little bit of difficulty when I arrived in India and my Hindi professor (who is also fluent in Sanskrit) insisted that I say the words as written, as that is the proper way to say them. (Indians like to refer to doing things “properly” or “nicely” when I would probably say “correctly”. Indian English isn't American Standard English, I suppose.) I also found later, when visiting my family in Varanasi, that some of the words I was familiar with from my Hindi classes were not the normal words. Of course, my paternal grandparents both have been Bhojpuri-speakers, so that's even another set of vocabulary, even if the basic grammar is the same. To make things even more complicated, I made a friend with one of the guys who works for the university whose English is better than my Hindi and whose Hindi is better than my Marathi who uses “आप" with “हो". (In standard Hindi you would say “आप हैं" instead.) This is probably what is called “Bombay Hindi”.

As I explained in an earlier post, there was a big debate back sixty years ago (though it went on for several decades) on what the language of the federal government should be. Part of the compromise solution was the decision to require all schools to educate children in Hindi, English, and a regional language. That sounded like such a great plan, until I found out a couple days ago while reading an article about the state of the Muslim Community. Apparently, in areas where the dominant language is Hindi among Hindus and Urdu among Muslims, such as much of North India including Uttar Pradesh, offer Sanskrit (which is spoken natively by only a couple thousand people) rather than Urdu courses. This means not only are many Muslim residents deprived of education in their mother tongue, but that many are instead being taught the language of Hindu scripture! And on top of this, of course, majority Muslim areas are often denied infrastructural access to good schools, and in those schools there are very few Muslim teachers and those teachers often face discrimination. There are Madrasas, which primarily teach religious education in Urdu, but only 4% of Muslim school-age children go to those and in any case that's not exactly a substitute for state-run secular education.

Basically, what I'm saying is that these small differences in language aren't just cool aspects of linguistic diversity, but also have political meanings. The lack of Urdu-medium schools and Urdu-language classes is a form of discrimination against Indian Muslims, a deliberate attempt to erase and stigmatize their distinct cultural heritage. It's a reminder that despite India's striving for equality and diversity, sometimes communities get pushed down by something as basic as linguistic discrimination.

Some things only make sense after English-medium education. Some things still don't.
(That's Rachel, Genevieve, and Sarah.)

Interactive question time! In the US, there is no policy for maintenance of linguistic diversity like in India. Should there be? Should schools be required to provide primary education in common minority languages like Spanish, Mandarin, and Tagalog? What about minority dialects like African American Vernacular English or Appalachian English?  If you're not from the USA, does your country act to preserve linguistic heritages? Do you agree with that policy?

Varanasi (part 2)

When I last posted, we had been walking south along the ghats. Upon reaching the south end of the ghats (more or less), we paused to evaluate our own exhaustion. The past two nights of little sleep were catching up with us, along with the brightness of the sun and the thirty-something Celsius heat. We decided that, while we wanted to go exploring and shopping inside the city and wanted to walk back up the ghats to see things like the Aurangzeb Mosque and the Hanuman Temple, we needed to take a break beforehand. At this point, it was around 10 am, so it wasn't near lunch time, so we headed back to the hostel to rest and cool off. On the way back, we passed a man who offered to take us to see a cremation (whom we ignored), which remains, for me, one of the strangest things about Varanasi. While I understand that major life events in India are more community-oriented than in the US (broadly speaking, marriage processions are inclusive of everyone on the streets, and funerals are more open than the hearse-processions of the US), I imagine it extremely uncomfortable to pay to witness and gawk at someone's cremation rituals. Something like mourning should not, in my mind, be used to appeal to the curiosity of religious foreigners with no connection to the deceased. Besides, we passed the cremation ghats going both south and north, and I've inhaled the ash of more strangers than I'd like to, anyway.

A painting of Shiva dancing on a defeated demon, painted onto what is probably a temple along the ghats. Photo courtesy of AJ.

Several hours later, after a lunch with unsatisfactory service and a visit from my बड़ा फ़ुफ़ा and a relative whose grandparents were my great grandparents (I think; he's related through my grandmother and is an “uncle”), our small band of Americans found our way to the ghats and to a German bakery called Brown Bread Bakery. It is situated on a fourth-floor rooftop, with a gorgeous view of the river and rooftops of the old city, and a grate to keep out the monkeys on the nearby trees. Not only were the smoothies delicious (and iced with mineral-water ice), but we got to meet some lovely people from England who were touring the subcontinent. The others all decided to come back in the morning, and I'm sure they had a great breakfast there. It was refreshing to be in a place with familiar food and people whose English was easier to understand, and while I will always advocate for us to spend more time interacting with Indian people, given how stressful the day had been (and, though I didn't know it, would continue to be), it was nice to be able to relax in that way.

Me with a mixed-fruit smoothie. Yum.

That night, after some shopping in which I tried to convince AJ to buy a Ganesh statue to go with the Shiva statue he bought for his father, we made our way to the ghats, where a night of Navatri festivities were in full force. The ghats were covered in people and idols of Durga and company, and we were able to get quite close to a ritual involving blessings of fire. From what I could tell, different ghats had similar ceremonies under the purview of various different temples. The others took lots of pictures (Ryan and Rachel each used my camera briefly), and I'm sure Rachel's blog will have more details.

A ritual performed on the ghats for Navatri. There was lots of fire and it was more amazing than this picture, which is also amazing and was taken by Jenny.

After that, we headed back to the hostel to get ready for dinner (or so I thought) with my relatives. At that point, however, I didn't know that Pranjul-didi's estimated time of arrival home from attending an engagement in Lucknow was 11 pm, far later than anyone in our group was willing to be gone from the festival. I was taken by surprise, then, when my uncles showed up and we left my friends behind. Though we eventually were able to contact each other and communicate our plans, we were unable to all have dinner together. In retrospect, after the lovely day we spent in Sarnath, it wasn't that big of a deal, but that, combined with the crowds and noises of the festival, and the aforementioned sleep deficit (advice: don't go to Varanasi sleep deprived; it's far too intense of an experience to deal with on depleted physical and emotional reserves), left me extremely stressed and touchy. I tended to snap more than I would have liked at my uncles, who I eventually managed to communicate with a desire to just go ahead and go to my cousin's (Pranjul-didi's) home so I could get some rest (since due a computer error Ryan and I were left without a room that night; adaption is key in India, or I guess in life in general). The great thing about family, though, is that they understand when you're tired and cranky, and know how to make you at home.

The sweet shop from which we got lavanglata and mango sweets.

Buddha teaching his first five students. It's now beneath a sapling of Bodh Gaya but was not at the time.

After a blissful night's sleep, a lot of catching up with family, and a visit to a sweet shop which sold the Varanasi-favorite lavang-lata (which tastes a lot like baklava), my didi, jijaji, and fufa went to meet AJ, Jenny, Rachel, and Ryan at Sarnath, which was the location of the Gautam Buddha's first teaching (that is, the birthplace of Buddhism as a religion, since Siddharth Gautam was the first person to achieve enlightenment and be known as Buddha). There was a gorgeous temple there with walls covered in murals depicting scenes from the life of the Gautam Buddha and a golden statue, but the heart of the pace was a tree, grown from a sapling cut by the Emperor Ashoka's daughter from Bodh Gaya, the tree under which the Buddha meditated and received enlightenment according to Buddhist tradition. Sarnath is the second of four pilgrimage sites that many Buddhists take, following the enlightened journeys of the Buddha. All the inscriptions were written in Nepali and English, which I found strange being so used to Hindi and Marathi scripting. There were also these metal cylinders that are to be rolled while meditating, which reminded me (here betraying the depth of my American-centrism) of the symbolism of the Air Nomads in Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Inside the main temple at Sarnath.

Detail of mural. The Gautam Buddha is being tempted away from enlightenment by demons.

My didi also showed us a place where silk is woven into these beautiful-designed cloths, and all of my friends got an item or two. Before my didi and company took us to the airport, we all went to this restaurant called Annapurna's Kitchen, which had various different cuisines from around India and around the world. We all tried a drink that was flavored with black salt, and I had sattu paratha, which is sort of bland on its own but went well with Rachel's vegetable dish. It was a delicious and communal way to end the trip, and my family and friends got along well with each other. Overall, I think that early afternoon meal, not the religious sites or the ancient beauty of the river गंगा, was the most beautiful experience I had in Varanasi. It left me satisfied (and not just because the food was amazing).

All of us enjoying ourselves at Annapurna.

Interactive portion: In your experience, do you find that your memories are more meaningful when they're made with other people?  Or do you find that the fundamental subjectivity of your experience and the knowledge (experiential, spiritual, emotional) is impossible to communicate and share fully?

Varanasi (Part 1)

Though I kept careful notes and could write a play-by-play of my trip to Varanasi, there were so many ups and downs that I will instead provide some images of various points in the trip, in roughly chronological order.

After a sizzling meal in a heretofore unexplored part of Pune, where the speakers played primarily American Top 40 from the last decade with some classic rock thrown in, and after some time visiting with Jenny's host-family and naps in front of the fifth Harry Potter movie, we woke ourselves at 3 am to catch a taxi to Mumbai in order to catch our 9:30 am flight. It was not a comfortable ride in a mid-sized sedan cramming five of us, all of whom are larger than average for Americans, let alone Indians. We found it hard to sleep in that position, but since it was the middle of the night we managed it. I can't speak for the others, but despite the physical discomfort I found it somewhat therapeutic to be squeezed in the back seat with three good friends, especially since we all were trying as best we could to make each other comfortable while not having our feet fall asleep. My doze, at least, was a more zen sort of doze than I'd have expected. Perhaps for our next group meditation we should try all meditating while crammed in an enclosed space with each other.

AJ's sizzler, and Ryan. Several hours later, Ryan's feet were asleep and so was AJ. Coincidence? Regardless, AJ took this photo. I wasn't even there at the time.

 

Flash forward through plane delays, a not-unpleasant flight with samosas, and a stopover in Lucknow, and we were at the Varanasi airport, getting a taxi (two, this time, so it was considerably less crowded). AJ, Rachel, and Ryan took one taxi, and Jenny and I took another. As we were driving, she mentioned how similar the landscape was to other places in India, particularly Rajastan near Jaipur, which she had visited some weeks earlier. I had been thinking the opposite, how the landscape felt less like the flat agricultural land of Karnataka or the bustling cities of Pune and Mumbai. I thought it looked in some ways more like former factory towns of the American south, with many decaying brick sculptures and warehouse-type spaces. Regardless, the area definitely had the high population of cows and wandering roads that many associate with rural India. As we got closer into the city, though, the buildings grew taller and newer and were filled with shops, until we were near the city center, which had the sort of planning that was to be expected in an area that had been settled for thousands of years.

A panorama shot of the city from the rooftop of our hostel, Suraj Guest House.

In downtown Varanasi, we were guided through narrow alley frequented by cows, goats, and far too many two-wheeled motor vehicles for a two-meter-wide passage. Our guest house was situated far enough back from the main road that finding our way out was difficult, but once we learned the route to the ghats we found it was quite close. In the guest house, we met some of the men of the family that runs it as well as some puppies, who were quite friendly and didn't really understand that I had no plans of feeding them. We also got to see the view with the roof, which included Ganga Mata and plenty of old-city rooftops. In some ways it reminded me of old city Istanbul, but there was never any doubt that I was in India.

Rachel took a selfie with a puppy, and the puppy made the same face as her.

That night we wandered through streets and barely looked at the Dasara/Navatri lights as we wandered down crowded streets full of shops in search of the entrance to a temple which we never found (though I saw it the next day right on the main road). After twists and turns and one complete turn around, and the continued encounters with cows and two-wheelers (as well as some AK-47 sightings) we eventually found our way out of the street maze. I hadn't realized that I would be claustrophobic when surrounded by tall walls on all sides, but I suppose since I didn't stop walking or yell at anyone that objectively it wasn't that bad. It's good to learn your limits, and Varanasi definitely showed me those.

Jenny and Rachel take pictures of AJ, who is taking pictures of the three of us. Metaphotos are our meme.

A less abortive but far more comfortable sleep later, I once again woke before dawn in order to make it to an early river-tour of the old city. To get to the boat, we tiptoed across steps covered in alternate streams of running water and cremation ash, skirting near still burning pyres and trying to take in the dawn over a river and city that simultaneously made the mysophobe inside me pass out in shock and the antiquity-fancier inside me indulge in the illusion that it was hundreds of years ago. The boat, they had said, could fit twenty people, but it seemed pretty full with nine (three Germans, our youthful guide, and our group of five). As we paddled out toward the more open water, past still floating remnants of pyres and green bubbles of algae that illustrated the term “eutrophication” far better than anything I had seen before, I was surprised by how clear and cool the air was. I suppose it was early morning, or perhaps my nose was no longer registering scent, but the atmosphere felt almost clean, much more than the dust of humanity and livestock on land.

A submerged temple on a ghat. Photo courtesy of AJ.

Though I, of course, looked at the various ghats, with their walls frequented with art and the temple buildings showing their silhouettes regularly, I also spent some time watching the others in boats. The other people in my group were discussing how Indians always seemed to assume that Jenny was not from the US, despite her DC-suburb accent, and even would contradict her when she explained that she was, in fact, American. After all, if I had a rupee for every time someone here heard my name and was confused as to why I had an Indian name, I'd be able to pay exact change for my rickshaw rides. I found myself considering how throughout the world, people are surprised when any person from the US who is not white tells their country of origin. The US is, undeniably, an ethnically and racially diverse country, but that doesn't translate to being perceived as such abroad, where the vast majority of American ex-patriots and tourists are white (which, admittedly, is mostly due to the fact than those with the income necessary to travel from the US historically have been white). The Alliance program, though significantly whiter than the schools the students are enrolled in, is still much more racially (and probably, though this is harder to tell, socioeconomically) than the average American traveller. As I looked at the other boats, I realized that ours was the only one in which the group of tourists was multiethnic (I thought I saw an exception in one man who looked Indian-American, but then he made an announcement to the rest of the boat and I realized he was a tour guide). It is a bit sobering to realize that even on the other side of the world, in a city that is a pilgrimage point for two major world religions and has been around for thousands of years, that America's white-normativity remains painfully apparent.

Cremation pyres often include plants and other decorations, so this cow is picking through the ashes looking for delicious morsels. Photo by AJ.

Later, after a breakfast at the hostel and a walk past the boy who offered us hash (no thanks), we were walking along the ghats. We saw the cloud of smoke before we reached it, and I wrapped my handkerchief around my mouth and nose and tried to breath shallowly and ignore the smell of smoke. AJ mentioned seeing an attached foot in a burning pile far to small to be a person, and I decided aloud not to think about the implications of that while we were still so close, and possibly never. Rachel brought up a previous discussion we had concerning whether religion would exist without death. She explained that after talking to one of her religious Jewish friends about it she decided that if people didn't die there would be no reason to think there was a world outside of our own since there was no need to put the people who had died there. I commented both that Judaism has a much foggier theology of the afterlife than the other religions that grew out of it and that there would still be a need to explain things we don't understand, such as bad luck or strange phenomena. Ryan commented something to the effect that bad luck and explicable things only made since in the context of a finite human life. I still maintain, though, that the fact of our own mortality is so deeply ingrained in everything that humans do or think that the thoughts of such immortal humans would be impossible for us to predict. I also wondered aloud what immortality even was, if in this world people would just age indefinitely or if at some point they would stop. We decided then to focus our energy on walking through one of the more crowded ghats, which had lots of bathers and people trying to sell us postcards.

In the interest of not making you read 2000 words at once, we'll take a break here. Here's a question for you all: Have you ever had an experience with people whose view of death is categorically different from yours, whether because they do or do not believe in an afterlife or in reincarnation, or because they seem too certain that death is not the end? Did hearing their perspective make you reevaluate your views?

A day in the life: September 30th

Good morning!

 This morning I woke up to the smell of smoke, which was a little bit alarming, but was probably just burning trash fumes wafting through my open windows. Such is life once the rainy season is over, I suppose, though I hear scrap can be a lucrative business if you use it right (see the paragraph about SWACH in the last post).

Speaking of valuable scrap, look what Soren found on the ground on our way to the rickshaw! She had to stop and go back for it. She later found 100 rupees. Perhaps the two are related.

After I got ready and met up with Soren and Casey, we set out to find a rickshaw. We wandered through a bright warm morning, which is apparently typical of the hot season after the rainy season, and searched for a rickshaw. Our normal place was empty of three-wheeled transport, so we ended up walking a good kilometer to the main road, where we found a rickshaw and piled in.

This is what Soren calls a "Casey-Soren Sanjwich", us three sharing a rickshaw. It would be more funny if my name wasn't SUNjay.

At school, we had meditation, breakfast, and our Contemporary India class, in which we discussed language. Specifically, we talked about the choice of Hindi as a national language. On one hand, Nehru and others who were instrumental in the founding of the nation did not want English to be the official language because it was a foreign legacy of imperialism. On the other, there was no language spoken by the majority of Indians. Thus much of the population would see the imposition of Hindi as privileging the North Indian states where Hindi was the majority mother-tongue.

The definition of a language can be complicated. Many languages share common roots, like this banyan tree outside Phule Wada, and it can be hard to tell whether something is a dialect or a separate tree. Regardless, we can all agree that trees, they are us. More or less.

The constitution officially named 12 (now 18) languages as official languages, and each state took the majority language as the language of administration. On the national level, however, since the Indian National Congress was primarily constituted of North Indian, high caste, Hindi-speaking people, their leadership of the independence struggle had been primarily through a Hindustani (lingua franca of North India; if written in Arabic script with Persianate vocabulary it is called Urdu, and in Devanagari with Sanskrit vocabulary, Hindi) or Hindi medium. When they put the issue of a common administrative language to vote, Hindi edged out Hindustani by one vote (presumably because after partition Pakistan's official language was Urdu). This angered Indians not from these northern states, who preferred English, and eventually (and this took until Indira Gandhi's ministry) a compromise was reached in which both Hindi and English were used in an official context and all students were required to learn Hindi, English, and either their mother-tongue or (if they spoke Hindi or English) another Indian language. We discussed whether a stronger effort to make Hindi the lingua franca would have helped or hurt Indian nationalism, and also the relative merits of English- Hindi- or other-medium schools. (We ended up deciding that the teachers should know the language in which they were teaching, which is hardly universal and kind of important, maybe.)

Rachel, Jenny and I near Phule Wada. We got there early.

After that class I had Hindi, in which I learned how to use he particle ही and the verb लगना. So that was cool. Then our Social Justice class went to Phule Wada. There was some initial confusion about rickshaws which led some of us to arrive before the others, and so we discussed the Illuminati and various people's membership within it. I argued that it was irrational to argue who was in the organization specifically, because in reality the organization's membership has to be secret in order to protect it from the lizard people who actually run our society. Who of course don't exist either.

Mahatma Phule Wada

Jotirao Phule, whose house we were visiting, was a Maharashtrian social reformer and critic of the caste system. He envisioned a coalition of resistance between shudras, ati-shudras, and other non-Brahmin castes against the Brahmin caste-based hegemony. He also championed women's rights, viewing women of all castes as a part of the coalition of oppressed people who needed to rise up against Brahmin dominance. It's a couple of steps short of intersectional feminism, but considering that he was active in the 1860s and '70s he was pretty radical.

Busts of Jotirao and Savitribai Phule, social reform and caste-anarchist power couple. Savitribai was a Marathi poet in addition to being an epic social reformer in concert with her husband.

We weren't allowed to take pictures inside his house, so I mostly took pictures of the outside. However, I did take a picture of the well, which was the first well that was shared communally by people of different castes in this part of Maharashtra. Traditionally (and this still continues today in some rural village areas) people who are considered “untouchable” are not allowed to dip their vessels into wells, and instead other people have to draw the water for them and pour it into their vessels without letting them touch. One of Phule's main points was that this sort of segregation is wrong and dehumanizing and was a result of a purity-based high-caste dominance. So, he made a well on his property that all people could draw from. He also provided food for many of the people near him during famines and such.

Our Social Justice class (professor in the back row with the face) making good use of the touchability of the well. And yes, my camera does not take panorama views.

As we were returning from Phule Wada, I had a short conversation with my Social Justice professor where we decided to bring up the subject of class-discussion of readings rather than lectures in class on Wednesday. Apparently in the past there's been a problem with people not doing the readings, and so she lectures instead. That should be cool.

Rachel demonstrating how great FroYo is.

A group of us from the field trip then when back to Ferguson College road, which is close to our program center at Gokhale, and went to a Chinese restaurant. In addition to noodles, we had some delicious pepper-cabbage pickle (or whatever the Chinese equivalent is), and afterward we went to get frozen yogurt. On the way there, we ran into a group of people from the University of Chicago, who are studying abroad for their “civilizations” requirement, which I don't understand but is probably a distribution requirement of some sort. They seemed cool, and we hadn't seen them before because they had just arrived, so perhaps we'll hang out with them some more.

Rachel, Jenny, and AJ demonstrating why we actually went to get FroYo.

Back at the program center, the power went out and all the fans stopped. Since it's quite warm, this was somewhat unpleasant. However, the internet was still working, as were some of the lights, since they were on a back-up generator. Then Katie, Ryan and I had sitar lessons (which I have no pictures, though I might add one from next week). We learned how to play three-note sequences up and down the scale, which is great, though I have yet to develop calluses on my fingers so it was a bit painful. Actually quite painful, but theoretically that should go away over time, right?

Mohammed, Khalid, Naseem, Casey, and I at KFC.

After sitar lessons, Ryan and I went to meet our friend Casey and some of her friends (a couple with one member each from Iran and Iraq, and their friend who is Kurdish but from Iraq) at KFC. They are cool people, and we talked about the things to do around Pune and how much we all love it here. Then we had fried veggie sticks, because it's India so KFC can't just serve chicken (hooray!).
I went home at that point. While I was taking a shower, I was visited by a messenger from the lizard people, who had heard me talking about them earlier (and may cause this blog post to be taken down or me to be disappeared, just to warn you). I didn't have my phone with me at the time, of course, and when I grabbed my towel the messenger scurried across the wall to the window. Luckily I was able to grab my phone and get this picture for you. That I was able to take this picture is proof that I have been chosen by the lizard people to let you all know that while they may be a shadow organization running all the world's governments, they also are watching you. Which should be some comfort, I guess.

A messenger. Possibly a warning, possibly an endorsement.

For all of you reading, here's today's question: Whether your life is affected by hegemonic oppression in the form of high-caste religiously hypocritical patriarchy, like the people Phule helped mobilize, random coincidences like finding 100 rupees, or the politics of language and education, how do you take that opportunity to improve your own lives and those of people around you? Does that mean changing the system through coordinated action, a willingness to accept what cannot be affected, or, most likely, both?