Returning

So, I’m back in India. Its acid-spice palette of colours, enigmatic people and complex cultural and religious landscape haunted and taunted me for weeks after returning home from Jaipur last February. No other country or culture has ever had such a profound effect on my psyche. It challenged me more than any other place on earth and hit my body hard, but despite this, and perhaps because of it, I’m excited about returning.

My journey is different this time. I’m travelling alone, but that’s ok as I rather enjoy going solo. I got used to it commuting back and forth to Dubai and New York in my late 20s and early 30s. I enjoy the freedom, how it forces you to turn outwards and throw your lot in with humanity all around you, place your trust in a magnanimous universe, and actively connect and converse, rather than relying on a travel companion for a semblence of security and companionship. It’s the best way to meet new people, open yourself to new possibilities and discover inner resources. 

Being alone within such a different culture also provides a vantage point for reflection. It enables us to leave behind patterns, habits and ways of being that are the weft and weave of our existence within a familiar place and community. It opens up a host of possibilities, different ways of thinking and engaging, challenging us to see ourselves and our world from a different, more spacious perspective. These are conditions that attract and nurture adventure, not necessarily of the swash-buckling variety, but certainly of the soul-soaring kind. 

 

Leaving Delhi behind, bound for Jodhpur

 This afternoon, while boarding a dinky plane for a short internal flight from Delhi to Jodhpur, that opening to conversations and the making of friends began. Travelling musicians and artists the world over are easy to speak to, and relatively easy to identify, as they generally carry instruments. My new found pals are a pair of Flamenco-jazz musicians, Antonio Serrano and Josemi Carmona from Madrid in Spain. Like me, they were bound for RIFF festival in Jodhpur, a world renowned showcase of Indian traditional arts and world music. They’ll be performing at the festival, having spent much of the last year travelling across Asia, absorbing rich cultural and music traditions into their own performance, making a living whilst having an adventure. I’m at RIFF, thanks to Wales Arts International, to develop a relationship between this Festival and Beyond the Border Storytelling Festival in Wales, to hopefully find artists for our festival, and some with whom we can develop a Wales-India storytelling project, perhaps based around our core mythologies, the Mabonogi and the Mahabharata respectively, and an exploration of identity. 

India it seems is going through a period of intense questioning about its own identity. My time here in January was filled with conversations with old and young people who, in different ways, were questioning how India would develop in the face of increasingly pervasive westernisation and globalisation. At that time, Prime Minister Modi and his Government made overtones about their commitment to guiding India’s social and economic development without succumbing to western capitalism, instead, by holding true to India’s own religious, cultural and spiritual values. It’s an aim to be admired, but difficult to see how that can be achieved without breaking apart the caste system which keeps most Hindus at least, in a rigid, birth defined, social order. The caste system is certainly more fluid in more cosmopolitan cities such as Mumbai, but elsewhere, it is as strong, and clearly defined and strictly maintained as ever. You only have to take a tuktuk through any city here to see vast shanti settlements and understand that living on the street and taking your chances alongside stray dogs, cows and vermin is normality for many, many thousands of people in Indian cities. There is no social care or welfare state here, there are only a plethora of western NGOs that nibble and gnaw at the very edges of the problem which is held in place ultimately by the Hindu belief that you are born into the life that you deserve, that your caste is a core part of your karma. 

 

Crowds gather and clamber for the best view of RIFF opening concert

 The lowest rank of the caste system are generally believed to be the ‘untouchables’, but this is not the whole story. Those outside the Hindu religion such as the diverse, ancient tribal peoples of India are below even that, beyond the grace of the colourful and numerous Hindu gods and goddesses. Interestingly, I suspect that some of the performers at RIFF may well be non-Hindu, tribal tradition bearers. I’m keen to understand more about how this dynamic works in terms of artists and performers, how it is that those below ‘the untouchables’ are regarded within a cultural festival where their talent is fated. Our western society is full of ‘working class singer becomes a global music star’, rags to riches stories. 

  At the Festival’s opening concert this evening, I was lucky to sit next to one of RIFF’s founders. We spoke about the dynamics that existed between caste and artistic talent within the folk and roots genres in India. He was very clear that while talent will improve an artists capacity to earn money, it has no effect on their caste. Most of the traditional artists at RIFF in fact come from the’ Sudra’ caste of ‘commoners, peasants and servants’, understandably perhaps as we’re dealing in traditional ‘folk’ artforms. John explained it like this, referring to a female singer who performed, “When I first met her some six years ago, she lived in a very poor, tumble-down house at the edge of her village. Today, she still lives in the same house, but now earns more and has improved and extended it. But, it is the same house, in the same place, and she can only marry a man of the same caste as her.” 

There are other types of performers across India drawn from higher up the caste ladder, but their style of singing or dancing is different, more classical perhaps. So in a way, the caste you are born into determines your creative output, the genres in which you can create and perform, as well as your socio-economic sphere. Imagine saying to Pavarotti when he was young, that he would only ever be able to perform folk songs, that he was born too low for opera!  

 

Tuktuk weaving towards the old Blue City, Jodhpur

 I am glad to be here, glad to be challenged by the shabby grandeur of this deeply human place again, with its soaring hill top fortresses, its honking tuktuks, seatbelt-free traffic chaos that runs on intuition and a life necessitating co-operation, where lay-bys are lay-byres for holy cows, stray dogs and displaced people, where identity is forged despite caste, and creating beauty, even in the darkest places, is deeply valued.