On the Road to Rajasthan

Since I wasn’t able to keep up with my blogging while on the road, now I’ll go back a week in my mind and try to recall all our adventures in Rajasthan. We left Anand last Friday morning for a week’s trip during mid-semester break. A car and driver from IRMA drove us to Udaipur (about 200 miles; a four hour trip) for the first leg; since this driver was a particularly aggressive honker and passer (which in India is really saying something!), Bob – in the front seat – had a white-knuckle ride, while I, comfortably fatalistic in the back, enjoyed the passing scene, both the crowded, trash-filled small towns and the intervening stretches of green countryside.

Udaipur, where we settled for the first four days, was a relaxing, quite lovely small city, made particularly enjoyable by the facts that 1) we lucked out with our hotel choice, the unusually pleasant Mahendra Prakash Hotel (more on this later); 2) the scale of the city and the location of our hotel meant that we could walk or take a short auto-rickshaw ride most everywhere we wanted to go, which made everything feel very manageable; and 3) since we knew Vidhi and Manish Jain (Vivek’s sister and brother-in-law) we were able to spend time with them and people they knew as well as on our own.

According to the guidebooks, Udaipur’s three biggest claims to fame are its very large lake (and chain of outlying lakes), which led Lonely Planet to label it “the Venice of India,” the extremely pricey luxury hotels that have been created out of old palaces on two islands in the lake, and the City Palace, an absurdly huge palace started by Maharaja Udai Singh II, the city’s founder, in approximately 1560 and added onto by numerous other maharajas over the decades, which is now a historical monument with museum. All of these things had their charm, but also their limitations, so my favorites were different. The lake, for example, while indeed lovely, especially when viewed from the heights of the City Palace grounds or at sunset, when the light sparkles on the water, flocks of birds are silhouetted against the sky, and the mountains rise mistily in the distance, was also pretty swampy and covered with unattractive patches of green goo when seen close up, since several years of drought had evaporated a lot of it – hardly Venice material. The City Palace has beautiful grounds overlooking the lake in which to walk (and, at Rs. 25 admission, are a bargain pleasure), but the palace itself is SO big and confusing to walk through that it is more like a feat of endurance than a total treat. I haven’t visited palaces in Europe, which may be the same, but most of the palaces I’ve seen here so far strike me more as something to marvel at rather than something to enjoy – and I haven’t found them at all tempting, even in fantasy, as places to live.

Mostly I find myself thinking about how many people must have worked themselves to the bone to build the place and how many more would be necessary to make living there on a day-to-day basis even vaguely bearable in the days before electricity, not to mention plumbing – just to light the candles necessary to bring some light into the gloom after sunset must have taken a staff of dozens! I’d never thought much about Indian royalty before this trip, but now I feel clearly it wasn’t only the British who oppressed the Indians – whatever the British sins (and I’m not denying they were many), the indigenous ruling class, with its maharajas, nawabs, and maharanis, certainly did a good job of standing on people’s necks itself.

So my favorite things about Udaipur were 1) the Jagdish temple, a magnificent carved Hindu temple built by Maharaja Jagat Singh in 1651 that was right in the center of town up a long flight of stairs from the street, 2) just walking around the streets filled with endless stalls of fabric, clothing, jewelry, leatherwork, miniature paintings, vegetables, block after block after block of crowded, lively, colorful, intriguing markets, 3) our hotel and the huge public park and garden across the street from it, and 4) meeting the painter Shahid Parvez, a friend of Vivek’s sister and brother-in-law (Vidhi and Manish Jain) who live in Udaipur, who shows his work at his own gallery, the Gallery Pristine, on one of the downtown streets. I think I’ll pause now and post this much; I’ll save for later why these were my favorites, and the rest of the stories about our trip.

Three Performances and a Plan

The last week or so has continued to be quiet as we've mostly stayed on campus, but the weekend before last was alumni weekend at IRMA, which brought a lot of graduates and their families to campus, as well as featuring various speeches, seminars, and other activities, including two of the three performances I'm reporting on here. The first, on Saturday night, was a student show -- part talent show with dancing and singing, part satirical skits of student life, and part nostalgic photo shows of various classes past and present. The most wonderful thing about it was the infectious enthusiasm of both performers and packed audience -- it's hard to communicate in words how joyfully boisterous and high-energy it was. The photo above of one of the dance acts only captures a bit of the spirit. In one skit of classroom life, apart from the very familiar types that Bob and I had no trouble identifying despite the Hindi dialogue (the sleepy student with disheveled hair, the flirting couple paying more attention to each other than to the lecture. . . .) there was one student character dressed like Superman with a big red CP on his costume who spent most of the skit with one hand raised high in the air. "Is this about the Communist Party?" I whispered to Bob. He shrugged, not getting it. Only later we found out from a faculty friend that "CP" actually stood for "class participation" -- the extra some professors added onto student grades for excellence in class participation. And thus that constantly upraised arm -- which we had interpreted as some kind of political gesture -- turned out to be about grade grubbing instead.

The second performance, on Sunday night, was a professional group singing and playing traditional Indian music -- not a formal classical concert, but what seemed like music that fell somewhere between folk and pop. While some of the music was good (and some just o.k.), again the real pleasure of it was the enthusiasm of the audience -- people shouting out their favorite numbers for the group to play, people coming in groups up on the stage to dance, people snaking in dancing lines through the audience. It was just tremendously enjoyable to see people enjoying themselves so much.

The final performance was unconnected from alumni weekend, and quite a bit more homey, but very nostalgic for Bob and me, since it brought back memories of many long-ago performance events starring Tova, Rebecca, and Ariel. This time the stars were Vivek and Charu's daughter Barkha and her friend, and Vivek's sister's daughter, who was visiting with her parents, on the drums. A medley of songs and dances, finishing with a musical prayer, was quite captivating, as perhaps the photo suggests.

At the end of this week, after this quiet period of laying low, Bob and I are going to hit the road for Rajasthan, so stay tuned. Between mid-terms, which happen during several days of cancelled classes, and then a break week following them, I have almost two weeks off from teaching, so we are going to visit Vivek's sister and brother-in-law, Vidi and Manish, in Udaipur, and his parents, Ashok and Usha, whom we've gotten to know here (they've been visiting for over a month, since before we arrived) in Jaipur. They are all interesting people in quite different ways -- more to come soon, but now I'm off to bed so I can get up early and write my mid-term exam in the morning.