Feb 28, 1994
John E. Bonine
We have several sensation-pounding days in part of the State of Rajasthan, India. We headed here after nearly a month of almost non-stop, seven-day-a-week work in the Philippines, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India. That month was filled with lectures, meetings, conferences, and consultations with public-interest lawyers and professors.
We finally cried "Enough!" and went off to see some parts of India as tourists. At the same time, we will be able to visit the sites of two of Indian lawyer M. C. Mehta's public interest environmental law cases, in Udaipur and Agra.
This little essay avoids the work to come, however, and records some of the impressions of our first week in Rajasthan.
NAGAUR CAMEL AND CATTLE FAIR
NAGAUR, RAJASTHAN, INDIA
21 Feb 1994
As I start writing these notes, I am sitting in a tent in Nagaur, in the Great India Desert of Rajasthan. We are just a couple of hundred meters away from one of the largest camel (and cattle) fairs in the world.
Thousands upon thousands of camels are tethered in ones, twos, or threes, while their owners barter over sales or trades. The owners are proud Rajasthanis with bright, full turbans and totally excessive handlebar mustaches. The few women that we see in this setting are in brightly colored "salwar kameezes," their heads always covered and a veil often drawn across their faces.
Two nights ago we were at an ashram in New Delhi, in accommodation arranged by the most famous and successful environmental lawyer in Asia (if not the whole world), M.C. Mehta. Then we flew to Jodhupr (home of the famous riding breeches) and stayed at a small "haveli" (a former merchant's mansion). Tonight we shall be in Jaisalmer, in the former guest house of a maharaja (at a cost of $26).
Jaisalmer is almost as far west as one can go in India without running into border patrols along the always-sensitive frontier with Pakistan. Before Partition and Independence, in 1947, Jaisalmer was a stop on the overland trade route between India and the West. Now it is a stop on the independent travelers' route around South Asia.
I am delighting in operating my subnotebook computer in each place, and in the prospect that I may be able to send this by electronic mail from one of our stops in Rajasthan. (If not, I shall send it when we return to Delhi to attend court with M. C. Mehta during hearings on his cases to protect the Taj Mahal from growing air pollution and the Ganges River from water pollution. But I must stop now, for breakfast awaits in the dining tent, and we must figure out some way of getting across the desert to Jaisalmer.
JAWAHAR NIWAS PALACE
JAISALMER
22 Feb 1994
MORNING
Well, we got to Jaisalmer by a cross-desert bus that the American Express contact in Jodhpur said did not exist, and of which the Rajasthan tourist authority at our tent camp in Nagaur was unaware. The narrow, single-lane, pot-holed, numbness-inducing road was at times almost obscured by drifting sand. But by taking this route we got to see little villages of mud walls and thatched roofs in back-country Rajasthan that contrasted sharply with the bustle of Jodhpur and now Jaisalmer. We also saw camels at work everywhere, occasional wild antelope, and a fair number of wild peacocks casually strutting about.
Here in Jaisalmer, I have just come down from the roof of our "haveli," the Jawahar Niwas Hotel, a former guest house of the Maharaja of Jaisalmer. A haveli is a city mansion, many of them now turned into hotels of one class or another. They are intricately carved in the local, golden sandstone. Over our bed hangs an oil portrait of one the Maharajas when a child. A steep, spiral staircase goes up from our bathroom to the roof balcony.
On the roof I stood before sunrise to catch the first rays of the day, streaming from behind Jaisalmer Fort and Castle and across to our chosen lodging place. While watching the bright, orange sun throw its arrows toward my perch in the sky, I chanced to turn in the opposite direction. In the shimmering distance I saw what appeared to be a mounted cavalry troop cantering toward town.
As they drew nearer, however, it was apparent that the 20-odd riders were astride camels, not horses. As they drew nearer still, and I raised my telephoto lens for a picture, I saw that on the side of one bounced a plastic lawn chair. They were obviously getting into position for the day's assault on the tourist population of Jaisalmer.
That assault takes many forms. At the benign end, it consists of so many "hello, one rupee, one pen?" remarks from small children that one is not just ready to scream, but sometimes actually reduced to it. At the more objectionable end, the assault consists of waves of young "touts," which greet each bus and train arrival wih pressure so intense that the tourism authority has arranged with the Army to provide "tourist protection squads." Equipped with lathis (long stickes), they beat back the mobs if you are lucky enough have them present when you arrive.
EVENING
We spent time today just wandering around the fort of Jaisalmer, drinking in the atmosphere, and clicking the lens of my camera at sundry sights. Beneath the walls of the fort, village women squat behind bright piles of fresh fruits and vegetables and await those shopping for the day's meals, while sadhus (wandering holy men in orange and red cloth) ask passersby for some rupees and musicians strike up their Rajasthani instruments at the first sight of a tourist.
We met a young couple from Bombay and their two boys at our hotel, who invited us to take a late-afternoon trip out into the desert to see the San sand dunes and take a short camel ride. This enabled us to get the "classic" sunset photograph that Anne said would be an essential for our trip: camel silhouetted against dying sun in flaming red sky.
ON A ROOF TOP RESTAURANT
JAISALMER
23 Feb 1994
It is a moonlit night in the desert, as we sit in a rooftop restaurant beneath the brooding hulk of the Jaisalmer Fort, after another busy day of sightseeing. We have been watching the final rays of the sun turn the fort into an even more golden color than in mid-day.
On the restaurant's sound system, "Killing Me Softly" is killing our eardrums, not so softly. We ask that it be turned down. Independent Western travelers obviously arrived here many years ago, as reflected in the many restaurants and two-dollar (or less) hotels catering to them.
But stepping a few paces off the main street puts one several hundred years back in time. The Rajput turbans on the men and brilliant saris on the women mingle with goats, donkeys, goats, and the inevitable sacred cows to create a sensation of the Middle Ages still in progress. We have to step carefully to avoid getting pungent aspects of the Middle Ages on our shoes.
There is little time to type these notes on my 20th century computer, and I have little inclination, given the lure of the amazing scenes that lie before us at every moment here in Jaisalmer. We visited several Jain temples up in the fort earlier today, with yet more amazing carvings. Tomorrow we will see the parade that opens the Desert Festival, and then endure a bone-shattering bus ride to Jodhpur, and after that on to Udaipur, the Venice of the East.
JODHPUR
25 Feb 1994
We are back in Jodhpur. We have put several more rolls of film away after furiously clicking images of mounted camel cavalry at the Desert Festival. The subsequent bus ride to Jodhpur was, indeed, bone-shattering. But to soothe our spirits as well as bodies, Our hotel in Jodhpur featured a delicious moonlit buffet for dinner, accompanied by local Rajasthani musicians.
What remains most strongly in our minds are the images of poverty and hopelessness on the streets, more so here in Jodhpur than in Jaisalmer. Those are not the only images of Jodhpur, to be sure. We negotiated for a auto-rickshaw ride up to the Meherangarh Fort, in one of the three-wheeled scooters (also called "baby taxis") that clog the streets of Indian cities, foul their air with noxious pollutants, and deafen the eardrums. This 500-year-old fort and the Maharaja's palace within are truly stunning sights, perched high above the cacaphony of the city below and exuding an air of power and dominance.
But going to and from the fort, we walked through the streets of Jodhpur, turning into blind alleys and emerging into the jam-packed spaces of the Sardar Bazaar. Travelling in India always moves one between delight and despair. I have chronicled some of the delights above. But the despair is never far away.
Traveling through Bombay in late evening, we saw hundreds of forms curled up on sidewalks, trying to get some sleep for the night. Deformed, or even merely poverty-stricken, beggars tapped at the windows of the taxicabs whenever they stopped for a traffic light, some of the beggars holding emaciated infants in their arms. On the bus ride from Jaisalmer, a teenage boy with deformed leg and primitive, wooden crutch begged at our bus window for some rupees. One must always make decisions, to give or not. Solving the horrors of poverty and illness through handing out rupees on the street corner is obviously impossible. But when one also sees Indians dropping coins into outstretched hands, to do less as a Westerner seems cruel and arrogant.
In Jodhpur we came across a group of about five persons in the marketplace who were chanting their woes to encourage coins from passersby. One man was carrying an old, crippled woman on his back. All around them swirled the hubbub of the marketplace, noisy auto-rickshaws, slow and meandering cattle (leaving piles of manure everywhere), and trash. On that one occasion, I chose to take a photograph from a distance. How else to show friends back home something other than temples and palaces as present-day India?
It is impossible to experience India without experiencing the hopelessness as well as the high points. It does not make for a continuously pleasant trip, but it can make one think hard about social justice as well as environment, and about how poverty and pollution are intertwined. Only in North America and perhaps Europe do we draw bright lines between environment and poverty, human rights and environmental rights. In the South countries of the world, those who work on one can often be found working also on the other. Those who battle the destructive effects of pollution or deforestation do so not to protect green lawns or recreational areas for the privileged. They wage their battles for human rights and human dignity in the context of environmental protection, but almost without exception they do so as a commitment to environmental and social justice.
John Bonine