A&C's 2012 India Trip Log
We will be traveling in western and southern India to meet friends and colleagues and to enjoy learning more and vacationing. Please enjoy our trip through our posts!
Bombay: Sunset over the Arabian Sea
The end of one adventure, the beginning of another. For almost 6 weeks we’ve been traveling through western India meeting people, renewing old friendships and acquaintances and making new ones, engaging with and sharing ideas, enjoying aromas, sights, and sounds, negotiating traffic and travel modalities and bureaucracies. We’ve been pursuing our projects related to gender studies and understanding more about Christianity in India. But we’ve also had wonderful new insights about ourselves and about this vast and fascinating country.
We’ve had incredibly gracious and generous hosts, some who barely knew us, and others whom we’ve known for decades. We’ve noticed many changes in the countryside and cities, and much that hasn’t changed. Sometimes the changes are stark, like seeing women driving small motor scooters, “scooties” here, with scarves covering their foreheads and faces except for their eyes. They look like ninja terrorists, but it’s just a practical way of fending off dust and flying insects while traveling at about 20 miles an hour! We never used to see women using this very popular means of travel! Sometimes the changes are subtle and almost hard to recognize, but quite profound. We learned of marriages between high caste Brahmins and Dalit former untouchables, and of marriages between men from the northern state of Haryana and women from the southern state of Kerala because of a shortage of women in Haryana. The women are frequently more educated (college) than their husbands and are also forming groups with their fellow Kerala women while building new lives in Haryana. These changes create new categories and ties in India that are quite amazing and will have a significant impact, socially, politically, and in other ways as the younger generation matures.
Now we are wrapping up our time in Bombay and preparing for our flight to California. We have many new activities there with family and friends and we’ll also be working toward our next visit to India. In the meantime, we’ll continue to post pictures and thoughts as the days go by and we have time to sort out more of the ideas and thoughts into manageable bites. It’s been wonderful sharing these thoughts with our readers and we invite your feedback and questions.
We went to all the places I mentioned before, and had an especially enjoyable visit to the college yesterday to make my arrangements, and to talk with people broadly, as we like to do. Today we went to the Rock Temple and it was everything Bill and Barb had said it was: very atmospheric, cut deep into the rockface, with gorgeous pillars and streams of reverent worshippers.
The biggest surprise for me today was to return to the 1636 palace of the Indian king Thirumalai Naiker (who rebuilt the Meenakshi temple into the huge complex it is now). Charles hadn’t seen the palace, so I wanted to go, too, but I didn’t expect what I saw. The building is being restored and refreshed, and the beautiful molded elements above the pillars are now painted, with their trellis decorations picked out in red against white or yellow. The enormous open hall has been made into a public performance center facing the throne room, which has enough marble floor space for Bharat Natyam performances that we could well imagine. Inside the throne room, the broad ceilings have their richly and deeply molded elements painted in brilliant colors, and the banner-like center is surrounded with exquisite painted medallions. The building looks beautiful from every angle, and especially impressive from the entrance, from which you now see ranks of halls in clear relief against one another.
We fly to Mumbai tomorrow (Thursday), and after midnight Sunday, we depart for home.
Alice
We are in Madurai, and done with the whirlwind tour. We can see the Meenakshi Temple from our hotel window and balcony. It’s good to be back on our own again for the final week here in India. Three days here in Tamilnadu, then a travel day, and a final three in Mumbai. This evening we’ll stroll through the immense temple precincts. Tomorrow we’ll visit Lady Doak College, a progressive Christian women’s college with a Congregational missionary legacy. There I hope to talk to the director of the Women’s Studies Centre about my research plans for next year.
The trip to Kanyakumari was kind of a pilgrimage, and it would have had to be, with all the waiting in line to get on the boat to the island where Swami Vivekananda meditated for several days in 1892 before embarking for Chicago to set the world on fire with his preaching on the universal vision of Hinduism. We undertook this voyage on the 150th anniversary of his birth—for us, a coincidence.
We were lodged in Kanyakumari in the nicest hotel of our stay, the Sparsa, located on a rise looking out over the sea and into the sunset. We enjoyed its pool and its comforts, then arose early this morning for one last ride with our driver, Rithu, bidding him farewall at the railway station. The train journey north wended through agricultural fields and tidy-looking villages, a familiar India again after the startlingly developed look of almost all of Kerala. Where Kerala wasn’t urban or suburban, it was honed for the enjoyment of the visitor to an almost uncanny extent. It was surely beautiful; I have seen no more beautiful scenery anywhere than along the road up to Thekkady. But Tamilnadu looks more like the India I know. Improved over the years, but familiar.
Alice
After our stay high in the hills of eastern Kerala, literally on the border of Tamil Nadu, we had a 4 hour drive back down to the coast to Kumarakom and met up with our houseboat for a relaxing day on the waters of Lake Vembanad. We were very comfortable sitting in the shade of the roof and enjoyed the pleasant breeze as we passed palm lined shores and some resorts. After a few hours we tied up to a tree to be still and for lunch to be served while we saw a tree filled with blue herons and a number of snowy egrets looking for their own meals. After an hour or so we were off again passing other boats and looking out at rice paddies that, as one of the tour books said, were ridiculously green! Our boat’s cook asked if we would like to pay the extra for a special dinner of Tiger Prawns and we jumped on the opportunity. About 4:30 we stopped at a small fish store and helped choose 4 of the prawns, caught a few hours earlier. They were huge, about 6” long in the body and another 9” for the main claws.
After another hour we tied up near the boat’s cook’s home on the jetty for the night. The smells from the food cooking were magnificent and we had the pleasure of watching the sun set on the opposite bank of the wide canal we had entered and of listening to the evening sounds of this riverine village. There were occasional water taxis going by, some music from a distant temple, the slap, slap, slap of laundry being pounded on the stones, laughter of children playing, the smack of fish jumping and lots of quiet.
About sundown the evening insects made their appearance and we were glad that we’d brought mosquito repellent, but soon the bugs left us alone. The dinner was fantastic, almost like having small lobsters that had been grilled in a magnificent blend of garlic, ginger, chili powder, and other spices. We also had Kerala rice, plump and brown, curry, dal, chapati, and chopped bhindi (okra) in a tangy blend. Soon afterwards we were ready for bed and a night in our air-conditioned cabin.
The next morning we were up at dawn to see the sun rise and enjoy breakfast of Kerala pancakes (similar to crepes with a sweet cocoanut filling), coffee and a large omelette with plenty of green chillies stirred in. Too much!!! Then we were off for a final hour to our docking station and meet our driver for the next leg of our journey - the drive to the Kerala capital, Trivandrum. More on that another time!
Rice paddies near Lake Vembanad
Alice and our houseboat at the stop to choose our Tiger Prawns
