A large board looks down at a busy intersection in old Delhi. It reads 999,871,144.
This is the population of India. A billion people.
I am out of my depth here. I am on a bus with a group of travel writers with only a week or so to take it in. I haven’t done this before: go on an all-arranged tour with someone else organising top hotels and the full itinerary. We are going to all the BTIs (the big ticket items): the Taj Mahal and the Red Fort in Agra, the Jama Masjid, Safdarjang’s tomb, the Qutab Minar and the administrative buildings in New Delhi and the forts at Jaipur. But how does one admire the splendour of all this amid the poverty and squalor. And how does one take in the squalor when there are more people in India earning more than the Australian average weekly earnings than in Australia. That very day there was a story in the Times of India about a young man who had got a Master of Computing Science from a US university over the internet without leaving the country. He was offered a $100,000 a year job there. Meanwhile, there is teeming under-employment. An agent, a local guide, a travelling, a driver and a baggage handler travel with us. Everywhere jobs are being done by hand or by three people when one would do.
Then one of the travel writers says: “”No-one is allowed to write, “India is a land of contrasts’.”
Damn, I think, so much for that opening line.
What about, India is a melting pot. After all, look at all these Muslim and Hindu forts, tombs and temples happily coexisting. But that’s no good either. Something is missing. You see, there are signs in English everywhere, but there are no signs of the English.
The British came, saw, divided and conquered. In their slow, haphazard conquest of India, the British united the place. Over 165 years to 1930, Britain managed to unite a disjointed collection of maharajah’s territories into a cohesive force under the Indian Congress Party that wanted a single independent nation. Indians saw themselves as Indians for the first time. Before that, loyalties were local. But in 1947 the British once more divided India. This time it was not divide and rule, but divide and leave.
The signs in English on city streets are testament to American commercial strength rather than a legacy of British rule. There are far more people of Indian descent in Britain than of British descent in India. After nearly 200 years in India, there is no living sign of the British people in the gene pool. Never was a conquest so thoroughly reversed. Even the industrialisation has been indigenised. You see reversed engineered and rebadged 1950s Morris Majors everywhere. And some very new 1950s Enfield motorbikes. All made in India after the patents ran out.
The British presence in India (much agonised over in Britain) is downgraded in India. One guide tells us the British came in 1857. A hotel owner tells us Lord Curzon was Governor-General in 1860s. Another guide tells of a visit to India by Queen Victoria’s husband Prince Albert in 1876. I thought that was taking reincarnation a bit seriously. Albert had been dead for 15 years. I muttered to myself, “”On your special subject, the British in India, you come up to zero points”. No problem. Understandable. The British did not mix, so out of sight, out of mind. The real interest is in a earlier time. And on the Hindu-Mughal integration, architecture, religion and politics, the guides are exquisite. The flowery, lyrical Indian laced with superfluous present participles is a miracle – you are listening to a foreign language and understanding every word of it.
For example, at the modern Lakshmi Narayan Hindu Temple in Delhi our guide narrated the 8000 year history of the Swastika (the Hindu word), and how it appears in all the Aryan languages: Sanskrit, Greek and Roman. It is an implied prayer for success. “”But if you are reversing it, as Hitler was doing, you are getting the reverse of success.”
The British conquest was utterly different to the earlier conquest by the Mughals beginning in 1526 and consolidated in the next 100 years. This event seems to shapes modern India more than British rule because the conquest was so different. The Mughals (all Islamic) came down from Afghanistan under the first Mughal Babur and conquered Delhi. He foolishly razed the temples. That’s why industrialist B. D. Birla, felt he had to build the Lakshmi. The Hindus got Delhi back again for a while, but Babur’s son Humayun reconquered it in 1555 and his son Akbar came to the throne the following year and ruled for half a century. Akbar did something the British never did. Unlike his grandfather who smashed up Hindu temples, he recognised the Hindus were far too numerous to subdue, so he included them as administrators and in top positions in his armies. Islam and Hinduism were practised side by side. Akbar’s grandson, Shah Jahan, built the Taj Mahal.
Shah Jahan’s son was the last great Mughal ruler and after that (1707) it was all downhill.
This mingling of Moslem and Hindu culture puts its stamp on nearly all the travel BTIs and also on the major political, social and economic issues in India: the rise of the Hindu nationalist BJP, the stand-off in Kashmir and the nuclear friction with Pakistan.
Cricket and the Westminster system hardly make a veneer on this.
The Hindu mentality dominates the traffic. The pre-destination of Allah’s will that causes drivers in, say, Cairo, to drive as if there was no tomorrow is not present in India. Rather, there is an understanding that if any are to get through each must give and take. Our bus weaves through an astonishing array of human, animal and mechanical transport. At first it seems chaotic, but there are some simple rules. No sudden movements. Always honk from behind. No road rage. Buses give way to trucks. Cars give way to buses. Motor-bike taxis (autos) give way to cars. Pedestrians give way to motor bikes and bicycles give way to everything, even pedestrians because they can knock you over.
Does it work? Four people died on Delhi roads the day we were there. A sign told us. The year-to-date figure revealed a toll of about 1200 in a population of nine million. About three-fifths of Australia’s toll with half the population. Not bad considering the state of the roads and the age of the cars.
And so to the BTIs. The Mughals liked their tombs. Safdarjang’s tomb in Delhi and the Taj Mahal in Agra were both ostensibly built for love (of father and wife respectively). The Taj, particularly, has succumbed to this mythology. Shah Jahan built it as a tomb for his wife, Mumtaz, who died after giving birth to their 14th child in 1631. Construction took 21 years.
But religion, politics and power are greater motivators for grand buildings than love. The Taj, as a political building, says look how powerful and wealthy we Mughal rulers are. We can marshal 20,000 skilled artisans (not slaves) and we can create this magnificent structure.
The Taj, as a religious building, is a statement of the Islamic version of paradise – its orderly regimentation of design, its geometrical gardens, its peace and symmetry.
And back to the throng of traders and traffic. The entry fee ensures contemplative quiet and few people inside the Taj and the fee funds the upkeep and cleanliness. Outside there is noise and crowds – showing that India is …er, a land of contrasts, but I better not write that, I’d get in strife with the travel writers.
But the cliché of the teeming millions cannot be denied. There’s the population sign again. While we wait for the traffic lights to turn green 327 more people are born.