Originally published in The Saint, March '10
I was in Ajmer, Rajasthan, on the way to the Sufi dargah (shrine) of Khwaja Moin-ud-Din Chisti. An experience I can't quite shake off. It went like this:
The rickshaw negotiated the potholes, cows and market stalls of central Ajmer, and the crowds grew and began to choke the lanes. We were approaching the dargah. The rickshaw stalled and started to creep, as austere-looking men in kurtas, beards and prayer-caps pressed in from both sides. ‘You know Ben, I’m not sure about this,’ said Vijay, my travelling companion. Ahead of us came reverberating crashes and shouts of ‘Allaaaaaaaaah-hu-akbar’. A procession, lead by three young men bearing immense drums, was making slow, determined progress to the dargah entrance. The rickshaw-wallah announced that this was as far as he was prepared to go. Before leaving he said something in Hindi to Vijay, who translated to me: ‘Look after your wallet. Thieves everywhere, apparently.’ With trepidation we joined the pilgrim horde. I was the only white person among what seemed like thousands and, in a laughable attempt to blend in, I bought a black-and beige patterned prayer cap from one of the infinite stalls selling Islamic paraphernalia.
At the gates of the compound we were met by a pageant of human misery. A teenage boy with a back bent ninety degrees crawled, quite literally, through a forest of fast-moving legs. An old lady in grimed rags and clouded eyes, two stunted children at her side, tugged at the arms of passing pilgrims and shrieked religious invocations. A man with no legs was dragged by a companion on a tiny cart improvised from a wooden fruit crate, their progress stuttering yet dignified. In India holy sites of any faith are magnets for the dispossessed, the diseased, the crippled – those that seem as remote from God’s grace as possible. They gather at these places to channel off the pity, humility and consequent charity undergone by the faithful in the presence of God. Many take up the trappings of religion themselves and become wondering mendicants, the life of poverty and freedom from worldly possessions being, after all, a prerequisite for the Sufi as much for the Hindu ascetic.
There was something more fearful than the facts of poverty here. The twisted arms and blotched faces seemed to tell a story of reverse evolution, of mankind collapsing backwards into the animal kingdom. It is at times like these that I begin to question my motives as a traveller. I was reminded of the first day of my first visit to India, landing in Mumbai as an eighteen-year-old gap-year student, all alone with an oversized backpack. The taxi ride from the airport to the city is a grand tour of the largest slum in Asia. I was swiftly greeted with the sight of a young girl, under the approving gaze of her mother, defecating on the roadside hardly a metre from the taxi-cab. This was the signature tune of my first few days in Mumbai, where I found myself unable to look beyond the human degradation that pervaded in India’s wealthiest city.
The visitors’ initial encounter with India is often a troubled one; it seems irrational, even perverse, that anyone could possibly enjoy themselves in such an environment. The traveller, if he is to adapt and remain sane, has to master the art of ‘not seeing’ – of looking beyond the dismal foreground in order to perceive what is genuinely beautiful and magnificent about India. To quote V. S. Naipaul: ‘In India the easiest and most necessary thing to ignore [is] the most obvious.’ The initial fixation with India’s poverty is later looked back on with curiosity. After weeks and months of travel it becomes obvious, self-evident – it is simply just there. I would probably enjoy Mumbai if I were to return there now; it would be precisely the ‘vibrant, happening city’ described in guidebooks. Right then, in Ajmer, it was a mark of how desensitized I had become that it was only before the gates of the dargah, with destitution at its most concentrated and theatrical, that I registered shock. This was a step up from the ‘common’ poverty of urban India, and I felt as new the fight between revulsion and guilt that took place on my first ever day in India.
I was in Ajmer, Rajasthan, on the way to the Sufi dargah (shrine) of Khwaja Moin-ud-Din Chisti. An experience I can't quite shake off. It went like this:
The rickshaw negotiated the potholes, cows and market stalls of central Ajmer, and the crowds grew and began to choke the lanes. We were approaching the dargah. The rickshaw stalled and started to creep, as austere-looking men in kurtas, beards and prayer-caps pressed in from both sides. ‘You know Ben, I’m not sure about this,’ said Vijay, my travelling companion. Ahead of us came reverberating crashes and shouts of ‘Allaaaaaaaaah-hu-akbar’. A procession, lead by three young men bearing immense drums, was making slow, determined progress to the dargah entrance. The rickshaw-wallah announced that this was as far as he was prepared to go. Before leaving he said something in Hindi to Vijay, who translated to me: ‘Look after your wallet. Thieves everywhere, apparently.’ With trepidation we joined the pilgrim horde. I was the only white person among what seemed like thousands and, in a laughable attempt to blend in, I bought a black-and beige patterned prayer cap from one of the infinite stalls selling Islamic paraphernalia.
At the gates of the compound we were met by a pageant of human misery. A teenage boy with a back bent ninety degrees crawled, quite literally, through a forest of fast-moving legs. An old lady in grimed rags and clouded eyes, two stunted children at her side, tugged at the arms of passing pilgrims and shrieked religious invocations. A man with no legs was dragged by a companion on a tiny cart improvised from a wooden fruit crate, their progress stuttering yet dignified. In India holy sites of any faith are magnets for the dispossessed, the diseased, the crippled – those that seem as remote from God’s grace as possible. They gather at these places to channel off the pity, humility and consequent charity undergone by the faithful in the presence of God. Many take up the trappings of religion themselves and become wondering mendicants, the life of poverty and freedom from worldly possessions being, after all, a prerequisite for the Sufi as much for the Hindu ascetic.
There was something more fearful than the facts of poverty here. The twisted arms and blotched faces seemed to tell a story of reverse evolution, of mankind collapsing backwards into the animal kingdom. It is at times like these that I begin to question my motives as a traveller. I was reminded of the first day of my first visit to India, landing in Mumbai as an eighteen-year-old gap-year student, all alone with an oversized backpack. The taxi ride from the airport to the city is a grand tour of the largest slum in Asia. I was swiftly greeted with the sight of a young girl, under the approving gaze of her mother, defecating on the roadside hardly a metre from the taxi-cab. This was the signature tune of my first few days in Mumbai, where I found myself unable to look beyond the human degradation that pervaded in India’s wealthiest city.
The visitors’ initial encounter with India is often a troubled one; it seems irrational, even perverse, that anyone could possibly enjoy themselves in such an environment. The traveller, if he is to adapt and remain sane, has to master the art of ‘not seeing’ – of looking beyond the dismal foreground in order to perceive what is genuinely beautiful and magnificent about India. To quote V. S. Naipaul: ‘In India the easiest and most necessary thing to ignore [is] the most obvious.’ The initial fixation with India’s poverty is later looked back on with curiosity. After weeks and months of travel it becomes obvious, self-evident – it is simply just there. I would probably enjoy Mumbai if I were to return there now; it would be precisely the ‘vibrant, happening city’ described in guidebooks. Right then, in Ajmer, it was a mark of how desensitized I had become that it was only before the gates of the dargah, with destitution at its most concentrated and theatrical, that I registered shock. This was a step up from the ‘common’ poverty of urban India, and I felt as new the fight between revulsion and guilt that took place on my first ever day in India.
