Class all day. Mostly Krishna as depicted in myth and art. Highlight was watching excerpts from the 94-part TV version of the Mahabharata, which aired from 1988 to 1990 and apparently had the power to bring the entire country to a screeching halt, 45 minutes at a time, for two solid years. A brief glimpse at one of the extracts we watched, showing the confrontation between Krishna and Shishupal, should explain why.
Day 10: Tuesday, July 9
Trip to Kurukshetra, center of Krishna devotion, where the blue-skinned playboy is said to have recited the Baghavad Gita and perhaps done some other things. Three and a half hours there, three and a half hours back, along the Grand Trunk Road, which sounds a lot more romantic than it is. Intriguing glimpses of rural north Indian life - rice paddies, brickfields, smoggy cities, and painted temples - which sometimes looked like this:
Pilgrimage sites in Kurukshetra were workaday and undramatic, mostly pools surrounded by marble or concrete with a few temples and statues sprinkled here and there. We made quite an impression on the sadhus and other loiterers at our first stop, who blessed us and sang to us and tried to sell us rosaries or whatever. A sadhu house looks like this:
Most impressive site was the complex surrounding the Immortal Banyan Tree, said to be the actual site where the Gita was recited, though scholars question this, since a) it doesn't appear to be 5000 years old, and b) it's unlikely such a tree would be standing in the middle of a battlefield. To me this seems like the least problematic aspect of the Mahabarata, factchecking-wise, but this really isn't my field. Unusually for an immortal tree, the banyan appears to be dying, its roots constrained by the marble platform surrounding it, but I'm sure everything will work out fine.
Before leaving the complex we all made a wish and tied a bit of string around another tree, an even older tree shrine dedicated to Vishnu. Then we went to the Krishna Museum, which has a handful of great ancient artifacts and perhaps a shade too many specimens of contemporary "folk art." Mercifully the electricity went out twice while we were there, so I may have skipped some of the gaudier or gorier ones (Krishna could get pretty gory - he makes Old Testament Jehovah look like Mahatma Gandhi). Also visited the multimedia Mahabharata exhibit, which included a video of Krishna and one of his consorts doing a Bollywood dance, and was careful to observe the posted prohibition on throwing feces. Long bus ride home.
Day 11: Wednesday, July 10
Ashram day. Went to the secret hideout of Swami Agnivesh, the first swami I ever met. Big social reformer, former Member of Parliament, active in combatting communal violence, as well as poverty, as well as alcohol. Big name in the interfaith spiritual world peace community, sort of a Gandhian figure, minus the anti-modernity schtick (he tweets). He's the current president of the Arya Samaj group, a Hindu-Vedic sect that promotes social justice and rejects things like caste and gender distinctions. The ashram is a simple place that works to empower the powerless through education and vocational training. We all sat around a green room and heard a bit about the Swami's life and beliefs, which actually got me thinking in a much more critical way about the Hindu beliefs and practices that we've been learning about. Our tendency as curious outsiders is to romanticize Hinduism - the picturesque gods, the complex iconography and numerology (the six thises and seven thats, the four thingies and twenty-two doodads), the seeming antiquity and dignity of it all - and it's easy to overlook some of the destructive aspects of the faith as actually practiced - the ways it can encourage materialism, misogyny, obscurantism, fatalism, etc. Swami Agnivesh (as I understood him) believes that once you strip away all the outer manifestations of the faith - the myths, the rituals, the social practices - you're left with an essential truth that underlies Hinduism but also transcends all religions, i.e., we're all one, we're all God, and we should all be nice to each other. As if to prove the urgency of his message we drove home through the booming suburb of Gurgaon, where the shiny headquarters of multinational tech companies loom over the muddy shantytowns of the people who clean them.
Days 12-13: Thursday, July 11 and Friday, July 12
Class both days. Thursday a talk by a well-known film journalist, Friday a lecture on Sarnath and Varanasi in preparation for our weekend trip. Free afternoons both days, so I hightailed it to the archives and managed to find some decent notes. Am getting accustomed to the Metro ride. This is how it goes:
1) Descend stairs into sleek, modern metro station and purchase token from human being who will always require you to repeat the name of your destination at least once, even though the destination has an English name and you are speaking perfectly ordinary English.
2) Place bag on airport scanner, pass through metal detector, and spread limbs for usually perfunctory, but sometimes surprisingly intimate, frisking.
3) Descend further to platform, observe orderly rows of men queued up to get on train. Note that most women are clustered toward the rear, where they will catch woman-only train, a perfumed paradise that your stinky ass will never enter.
4) Watch contentedly as train arrives and serried ranks of Indian men in slacks and shiny shoes wait patiently for passengers to exit the train before trying to board.
5) Watch in horror and confusion as crowd rushes into train before everyone has disembarked. See real pain on the faces of those who have to fight upstream to get off train, buffeted on both sides by men in slacks and shiny shoes, like a car going through an automatic car wash, the kind with the rolling vertical brushes. See grown men scurry and push one another like frenzied chickens while the last few stragglers, still determined to disembark, grab onto one another for dear life. Not all of them make it.
6) Stand around placidly with everybody else and ride train to destination.
7) When arriving at destination, disembark AS FAST AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN to avoid getting caught in the crosscurrent and getting trapped on train for the rest of your life.
8) Spin and twirl as people run by you on their way to this platform or that, where they will arrange themselves into neat rows and until the next train comes.
9) Take escalator up, drop token in slot, take another escalator, and exhale.
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