Travelogues  
Empires and Dust
Travels in Modern India – 1
by Ashish Nangia

I do not know who I am.  
 

Let me be precise, clearer: I know what people call me to my face, sometimes I even know what they think of me.  But this is all reflected knowing-ness, a construction of myself as a mosaic.  So lets put it this way – I am everything that everything else is not.  I am not my mother, not my father, neither my aunt nor my uncle.  I am not this pen on the wooden desk in front of me, nor the tilted lamp that hangs above.  I am not this rotting plastic diskette slotted into a drawer, nor this pile of paper on the right.  I am not this curtain, and neither am I the wet monsoon shower that comes down slowly outside this window.  I am not the mosquitoes caught in the netting at night, nor the maid that sweeps out the room.  I am none of these things, nor anything that has ever been anything that I can name.  
 

If I cannot say what I am, let me first, at the very least, find a measure of comfort in knowing what I am not.  In the way logic works this is an important first step, eliminating the poisoned bottles, as it were, and coming down to a final, fatal choice.
 

And when I think about it, it seems simple to know why I am not any of these things.  I can move my hands and feet upon command. I can wriggle my fingers, I can raise my eyebrows, I can stop my breath (for a while, at least), and I can wipe tears from my face, or another’s.  So then this ‘myself’ comes down to being those things I have a measure of control over.  But what, then, is their name? There are labels for all of these things, but none of them is me.   

Lets not digress, lets come back to definitions, lines and facts.  Its simple to think of the world as divided into nations, but right now I’m not sure if that is a luxury that I can afford.  In the land of my birth, people ask me if I am a foreigner and deny what is to me an essential part of myself.  I have always thought of myself as Indian, schooled in these things by education and society.  Yet this concept is difficult to hold on to, is constantly under attack by the very people with whom I profess similar citizenship.  I asked a man in Jaipur once – he was trying to sell me kurtas – what it was about me that he took to be ‘foreign’.  “Your clothes, your hair, the air that you have…” he replied.  And yet I doubt that the answer is as simple as that.  Perhaps you breathe and live in another land, and you become, in some ways, part of it, something that goes inside you and is not easily removed.  I am sure I am not alone, but just a very small part of a global community of people who feel the same – foreigners in their own land, and foreigners outside.  This is an uncomfortable feeling in the beginning, for I feel the need to belong; to be part of something, and do not like my patriotism or loyalty being tested.  I did what I did not because of choice, or free will, or an expectation of reward, but because this is the way my life turned out and because there was something that needed to be answered, a need to see what was beyond the horizon.  
 

To be fair, this process works in reverse as well.  If I am seen as different, then I too look out with different eyes.  This trip across India is a (re) discovery, of the land, of its people, but also of myself.  I went outside this land to find myself, to answer a call of what-I-know-not, and I find that the process is not over.  There are new layers to this land, waiting to be uncovered, and as I uncover each I find a little of myself revealed – like a reflection in a hall of mirrors that repeats infinitely; or a fractal pattern in a kaleidoscope that twirls around to catch its own tail. But if a point of origin has to be taken, then let it be here, right now, from where I grew up, in a town that came out of the dust, a creation of modern India, a ‘foreign’ implant that, in a fantastic reversal, is now becoming ‘Indian’, in all the problematic senses of that word.   
 

So then let us start, and choose a beginning.  Let’s zoom into Chandigarh from the air.  The mighty Himalayas border and defend India, and give rise to five great rivers and a land named after them, the Punjab.  And then in 1947 an Englishman draws a line in the sand and cuts off one from the other.  A few years later a Frenchman draws still more lines - a grid laid out on a plain at the foot of the mountains, he calls this a town, a new capital town for a new country.  But this is 60 years ago, and a different story.  We are here today, in the center of this town, where there is a clunky structure in concrete and stone.  Zoom in a little more and we’ll see people, thousands of them, and buses, hundreds of them, and now we know this is a bus terminal.  An incongruous beginning, but at least is a point in time and space.  Oh wait! – we know the space, but lets also set a time – and so its morning, the 24th of June, and lets add a little color and describe how it feels.  
 

Of all the seasons there are in north India needs to be added another one – that of the time spent waiting for the monsoon.  While one can write lyrical stories of Indian summer and the beauty and fury of the rains, very little can actually describe being in this time – when to the full heat of summer is added the tension and humidity in the air.  Its exactly this time that I chose for a trip, of all places, to Rajasthan – that land of kings and forts.  Getting there, however, is not so easy from Chandigarh - a young city though curiously old, that epitomizes the best of new India, and in some ways, its worst.   

The bus from Chandigarh to Delhi takes 5 hours and costs between 100 and 300 rupees.  This depends on the kind of bus, the ‘deluxe’ stopping rarely, its interiors padded with fake leather, and a television hanging in the front providing movie entertainment.  Public road transport remains the almost exclusive preserve of state governments, and in this case Haryana Roadways paints its deluxe buses an inevitable blue and grey reflecting the monsoon sky, scurrying and swarming over the state like ants to a feast.  Monsters on the road, these buses are the lifeline of India, accessible to all for a price lesser than, for most things, the cost of a beer.  The fleet was new some years back, now the buses are beginning to reflect the toll of years of use and misuse, and heavy service. In the de-luxe version and the anonymity that marks public transport there are, if nothing else, two events of social significance -  the first when the ticket assistant hands out bottled water; and the second when the bus stops for its passengers to have a meal.  Suffice it to say that ‘deluxe’ and bottled water go together. A potentially potent status symbol, bottled water is right up there with the other icons of new India – the mobile phone and the Hyundai - and goes well with the ‘deluxe’ of the bus, and the price of the ticket.   

Bus on route to Delhi 
 

Its morning at 8 am on the 25^th of June, and the day is already hot, and getting hotter.  The monsoon hangs in the air without quite being there, an omnipresent mugginess.  The bus rumbles its way out of its Chandigarh bus terminal. In 15 minutes we cross the city limits.  The road link to Delhi crosses Ambala, the largest military base in north India, where MiGs regularly blast across the sky and trains can be seen loading and unloading lumbering T 72 tanks.  This is also historic country, the heart of north India, with Kurukshetra of Mahabharata fame, Shahabad where the river is named after the sage Markandeya, and the battle plains of Panipat, where the fortunes of Delhi were made and unmade more than once.  There is history spilling out of the seams, and there is a place for it, but for the moment there is the present.  The road is busy, full of traffic now near the middle of the day, and this is India of truckers and new construction projects, of highway towns and content fields smiling upwards, waiting for the next rains.  It’s fascinating to watch a road link develop.  The Delhi – Chandigarh road corridor is one of the busiest in India, and an offshoot from one of India’s oldest, the so-called G.T. road.  The Grand Trunk Road was constructed by Sher Shah Suri, the Afghan ruler of Delhi who temporarily supplanted the fledgling Mughal dynasty in the 16th century.  A prolific builder, he connected the breadth of his empire, from the Punjab to Bengal to cement his rule.  Ever since, the G.T. road is the main artery of north India and the vast Gangetic plain.  Today the modern road roughly parallels the original, and kos minars from the 16th century and later still mark off distances.  Crumbling, in disrepair, they’ve survived several empires and are witnessing the rise of yet another – the new Indian State.  
 

Kos Minar, Grand Trunk Road 
 

The Grand Trunk Road is one of the chief sites of the country’s efforts to build a world-class road network.  Widened to two, and then four lanes, construction continues, with international construction firms joining in the act, bidding for contracts that guarantee work for decades.  None of this new road infrastructure comes free - a price has to be paid.  The Indian janta, long used to free government sops, is getting used to the idea of paying toll for a road.  Perhaps this is not so alien as it sounds, in the time of the Mughals caravans and traders had to pay tax for safe passage and the protection of empire, and what was the British empire but a wholesale toll tax on an entire nation?  

– Continued
 

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