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Following
Gandhi's Path - Part 1
Really,
India shouldn't be possible
By Jan
Oberg
TFF director
Travelling is living, as H. C. Andersen has said.
Travelling in India is like living another kind of life.
Actually, the only way to do it successfully is to leave
Swedish life at home and not think anymore about it.
India is infinitely large, mysterious, wonderful and
disgusting. It is poor and rich; it is sublime,
meditative and infernally noisy. It has a dazzling beauty
but it is about to die because of the pollution. It is
nice and friendly; yet I haven't seen any other place in
the world where there are so many tiresome, nagging,
obtrusive and indeed insolent people, according to the
Swedish norms that is.
It is perfectly impossible to make sweeping general
statements about India, other than that it makes
generalizations impossible. Travelling in India is
experiencing a constant interplay of love and hate. And
of positive surprises about life. A challenge, to say the
least!
India is one and yet many civilisations in a
particular arrangement, a part of the world which
probably would survive without difficulties even if the
rest of the world disappeared - maybe even enjoying a
renaissance. It is neither Orient nor Occident. It is
both of them but it is first and foremost India, nothing
else. India is not its name, which is something invented
by westerners; its real name is Bharat. Hinduism has not
only one, but at least 300,000 manifestations of gods,
including actors from the Bombay film industry,
Bollywood. Yet they have a Hindu fundamentalism, all the
same. The word "Hindu", just like the word "curry" is not
part of any language in India; it refers to a people
living beyond the river Sindu or Indus. Indus has given
name to the country of India, but the region today
belongs to the country of Pakistan!
How to write about a country or rather a notion, which
has the longest constitution in the world (400 pages), 17
official languages, 35 different languages being spoken
by more than one million people and 22,000 dialects? A
society where Hindi is understood (but not spoken) by
somewhat less than half of the population, making it and
all other languages minority-languages. What to think of
the assertion that India is "the biggest democracy of the
world", when half of its people are still illiterate and
the majority, the 700,000 villages, do not seem to make
any kind of progress at all?
This India is a myth, a dream, a vision which is not
thought to be true. Still it is a very tangible reality
which no one in the world can avoid being influenced by,
whether travelling there or not. India is the mother of
two world religions, Hinduism and Buddhism, and of
Jainism and Sikhism. It is also the biggest Muslim
country. India is backward, but at the same time it is
one of the most outstanding countries in the world as far
as research and technology is concerned. It is also a
nuclear power. Here you can live on US$1,5 a day with
full pension, but you can also find the most luxurious
hotels with rooms that cost US$ 400 a day. India remains
obstinately itself, yet it is also a tragic product of
colonialism and present globalization.
I shall write about this enigmatical Bharat in a
series of articles under the title, "Following
Gandhi's Path". Well, not exactly, since during nine
weeks of wandering about, I never went further south than
Bombay nor further east than Sevagram, a tiny village in
the middle of the country, where Gandhi once was sitting
in a clay hut and through a telephone installed by the
English directed most things. Thus, I have familiarized
myself with a third of this macrocosmos, and, in truth,
know just a little about India. My purpose was not to
study India, just let it be the environment in which I
had four other objectives.
© Photo Jan Öberg TFF
2001
Massage at
Varanasi
To begin with, I wanted to live a different life. I
wanted to look at my ordinary life in Sweden and the west
from the outside, at a distance. I wanted to be quit of
all the material profusion, live simply, reflect on what
I am actually doing, take it easier, be open to
impressions, and just be carried along by a slower
rhythm. However, for reasons I'll tell you later on, I
could not enjoy too much peace of mind, the woods and
beaches of Skåne in southern Sweden seem to be more
apt for that, but India has much that Skåne is
missing!
Another purpose I had was the lectures I was to give
to young Tibetans in Dharamsala at the foot of the
Himalayas. Under the guidance of the Danish Center for
Conflict-Resolution, they will establish a training
centre which teaches young Tibetans how to handle their
own conflicts, which they inevitably have in the Indian
communities where they live. It gave me an opportunity to
come to a better and useful understanding of the question
of Tibet, and to realize how huge, deep and unhappy a
matter it is and how ignorant I had been for so long as a
person in my profession - a peace researcher.
A third purpose of mine was to visit the places of
central significance to Mohandas K. Gandhi, whom I don't
call Mahatma, i.e. "Great Soul", because he really didn't
like that word used about himself. At the same time I
also wanted to meet researchers and popular movements who
act in the spirit of Gandhi.
So I travelled to Delhi, Amritsar, Bombay, Puna,
Sevagram, Ahmedabad (however, after the earthquake),
Surat, Dandi and Dharasana. Gandhi does not play much
more than a symbolic role nowadays. Still he means a lot
to many people living in the countryside. If he was
living now, the federal politicians would certainly have
imprisoned him. Today India is practising politics that
are a systematic negation of all that Gandhi stood for.
And I daresay that this is an important underlying reason
for the tragedy that is also happening in India right
now.
A fourth matter concerned the fact that it is
practically impossible to travel to India without
thinking also of religion, even if the interest is purely
that of a tourist. Varanasi is the centre of Hinduism.
Bodghaya and Rajgir are two of the most important places
of Buddhism. This is where Shakyamuni had wandered
around, dedicating his life to full asceticism, but
discovered better ideas and reached full wisdom under the
papal or Bodhi tree at Bodghaya. At Sarnath outside
Varanasi he started spreading his newly won philosophy to
his disciples.
Of course, I also wanted to see The Golden Temple at
Amritsar in the Punjab in order to understand at least a
small part of Sikhism, which can be defined as a sort of
mixture of Hinduism and Islam. Finally I went to see all
the small Jain temples I could find. Jainism is the most
ascetic and non-violent of all religions. There are
Jainists who sweep the way clean before their feet in
order to eliminate the risk of trampling any living
organism to death! However, Jain temples are wonderfully
un-ascetic, they are filled with fantastic statues,
colours, bells and mystery.
Finally, I also had a fifth purpose: to have India as
the background to the other four. The world cannot escape
India anyway. Not taking account of it is impossible.
Whatever its millions of inhabitants decide to do today
or tomorrow is of great importance and is likely to
affect the rest of the world, as is the case with China.
I decided to be a special sort of tourist. Most of them
arrive in buses, are guided around in groups and fly
large distances from one city to another. Others try to
manage it on their own, hiring cars with a guide or
buying local travel packages.
I decided to do it in a more "Indian" way by arranging
the travel on my own, travelling by train and local
coaches, trying to find tickets and sleeping
accommodation using the Lonely Planet-bible as well as
local (mis)informants. This way I met people of all kinds
and I was compelled to share the rhythm of the local
population; average speed of a coach is 20-30 km/hour and
that of the express train is 50-60 km/hour. In the
beginning, it is totally frustrating, but then, little by
little, you discover that this slowness makes you feel
better.
Leaving one's ordinary life in order to enter another
world is like leading a fascinating double-life. You
become more observant; life feels more vital. Describing
such a journey is actually a way of prolonging life.
Please come along with me, but do also travel on your
own!
Translated by Alice
Moncada
Translation edited by Sara E. Ellis
Other
articles about India, "Following Gandhi's Path" and
picture galleries
©
TFF 2002
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