Monsoon Meanderings – Amritsar

Our journey continues from Benaras via Delhi where we pick up my mother.

August 3, 2006

This is the farthest north I have ever traveled in India – there is a special thrill in every first. Yet, there was a tinge of nostalgia in the train journey on the Shatabdi Express with Ma and Rishi for company, staring at the green granary of Haryana and Punjab through the windowpanes, drinking Lallu’s tea and Lallu’s fancy breakfast, reading Istanbul – of times gone forever – times of innocence when green fields gave me all the happiness I sought from freedom.

It takes all of about five hours and a half to reach Amritsar from Delhi. The station is fairly clean and so are the roads on which we move – are we conditioned by Benaras? Ranjit Svaasa has sent a car to pick us up from the Station and take us to the Heritage Hotel about a mile away. The large Heritage bunglow is aesthetically very pleasing with ornamental shrubs, flowering plants in large pots, an abundance of terracotta, hand-crafted antique furniture, woven upholstery and spacious rooms. The elegance can perhaps be combined with a little more functionality and ergonomic concern by avoiding sharp edged glass tabletops and electric appliances with better wiring and plugs. Ah, well. Heritage … One good thing here is the food – simple, non-greasy and mildly spiced which implies that we can stay away from heavy Punjabi restaurant food that our stomachs can ill-afford.

We set out for Wagah around 4.00pm. 30 km away, marking the formal Indian border with Pakistan, so close to Lahore and yet so far, that conflicts over territory and faith seem at once remote and real. We take rickshaws to the Railway Station where Rishi finds a cab to take us to Wagah from a hundred cabbies that swarm around him.

It is hot and relatively dry in Amritsar. The road to Wagah straight and smooth, first speeds through the town giving us the chance to see the strikingly elegant architecture of the century old Khalsa College then across rural landscapes and an occasional army encampment. Wagah is in the middle of nowhere cutting across green fields, an erection of gates with flagposts and knotted barbed wires stretches beyond the horizon representing the “shadow line” between two States tied and separated by history.

We are expecting a few hundred visitors to the evening parade during which the flags are lowered and gates are closed until the morning, not the thousands that are waiting to enter the open-air auditorium. The people have come in buses, trucks, jeeps and cars in their fancy bright colorful clothes, young and old, men and women, children, urban and rural India, working class India, bureaucratic India, corporate India, curious foreigners, many with cell phones stuck in their ear desperate for a signal that has weakened appreciably. A few hundred meters away from the gates before the barricades that do not allow vehicular traffic a dozen shops are doing brisk business selling food, water, beer, whiskey, music and symbols of nationhood. In the hot evening sun, this looks every bit like a carnival.

The Border Security Forces (BSF) men periodically make announcements over the microphone on the timing and schedule of the event. The entry to the seating enclosure is opened at 5.30 pm and a complex process of walking around the first gate is initiated first for women and then for the men. Ma and I refused to go with the gender-separated queue. By now I sense a deep disquiet settling within me.

We finally make the maneuvers necessary to walk to the arena and sit amidst the women. The only other public space in India where I have seen women nearly outnumbering men is in queues outside temples. The BSF clearly preferred to segregate men and women here. However, the first enclosure closest to the scene of action is earmarked for foreigners. It is evident that we natives need to be segregated.

In the hour that follows, we sit in the uncomfortably warm evening sun falling on our faces while the BSF jockey conducts the darshak to build up a crescendo of national pride and unity in a manner that appears to me crude and undignified. It first starts with old Hindi patriotic songs “aapni azadi ko hum hargiz mita sakte nahi…” but very soon denigrates to the pop culture of the present. Songs from presumably LoC and Border blare loudly while little girls from age 5 to older ones about 20 gyrate on the road. These girls are urged by the BSF jockey to come and add color and fervor to the evening. There are other antiques such as men and women are invited to come and carry the flame to the main gate and back – some of them run, some walk, they sing, they yell – they look ecstatic, almost as if they have this unique opportunity to become a part of history. I wonder whether our lives are so devoid of excitement that we need to be here in the middle of nowhere to find novelty and meaning in life. Or is it just that we have become such exhibitionists that we want to perform, be watched and loved all the time like our Bollywood heroes.

In the meantime, from whatever we can see on the Pakistan side, people are fewer in number and it is relatively quiet. There is evidence of some live music but the noise from this side drowns any sound from some hundred feet away. The closing parade begins at 6.30 pm after a final hysterical round of slogan shouting and lusty cheering.

Ma is sitting beside me shocked by the Bollywood dances on the street. She notices that the Pak flag is fluttering in the air while ours droops sullenly. The Parade itself is a brief 20 minutes affair. The BSF men shout commands and march up and down with great aplomb, chests out and full of gusto. The Pakistan marchers are also in action – they meet at the center of the two gates in ones and twos to complete the formal closure ceremony that ends with the simultaneous lowering of all the flags.

The first gates are then opened and the audience starts to troop out. Rishi and we meet up. I am mad with rage with what I have just witnessed. Rishi in his own practical way has a different argument – he says that the BSF jockey perhaps conducts the whole event in order that the audience is engaged positively in entertaining themselves rather than resort to shouting anti-Pak slogans.

I suspect Rishi is right. And I know I do not belong here. I would rather spend 60 minutes in silent meditation over lives sacrificed for the sake that we may be free.

August 4, 2006

We had been told that the Golden Temple is particularly beautiful by the early morning and evening light when the holy Akal Takth is moved from its place of rest to the main temple. Exhausted by the overwhelming hegemony of the rituals associated with auspicious times in every place we visit, we choose to visit the Harmandir Sahib well after breakfast. We go in rickshaws – Amritsar seems to have plenty of these narrow slightly rickety modes of public transport. We hold on the edge of the seat bench while the pullers cycle across the roads with faster vehicular traffic to a part of town that looks obviously older than the glitzy parts of the Mall where our hotel is located.

The Golden Temple is at one end of a fairly wide road with colorful shops on either side. After paying the rickshaw wallas, Rishi buys a nice big handkerchief and ties it to cover his head. Ma and I have dupattas to cover our head. Covering the head is mandatory for all who enter the temple. We leave our footwear in the large covered place outside the temple where kar sevaks put them away in neat racks. The path to the temple from the storage space is laid out in such a way that everyone dips and cleans their feet in flowing water in a few inch-deep rectangular stone tub and has the chance to wash their hands in taps that stand right next to it before entering the temple.

To me the two most striking thing about the temple are the immense sense of peace in the large placid holy tank of crystal clear water and in the strains of the sonorous Gurbani. Along the entire perimeter of the tank, is placed two parallel tracks of mats. The mats protect the feet from rain and sun and also help keep the floor clean. Pradakshina happened naturally here – at every corner of the square there is a kiosk for water – kar sevaks serve water to the devotees and visitors. Along the walls are inscribed names of many thousands of martyrs who have died in wars and those who have helped in the building and construction of the temple complex. On one side, there is a huge enclosure where langar is being prepared – we do not partake of the langar though. On the other side there are many other buildings presumably for the pilgrims and the Sikh granthis. In one of those places had hidden Sant Bhindranwale. In the serene dignity of the Golden Temple, it is impossible to imagine gun shots of the Operation Bluestar. The sight bears no visible memories of a ‘war against terror’. Bhindranwale had after all been obliterated, as was the instigator of the military operation in the precincts of a holy shrine. And life goes on humming the resilience of India.

As we enter the actual Golden Temple, I am struck by the hundreds who are seated there with their holy book open, quietly reciting, singing, or listening to the gurbani being sung by numerous devotees. The gurubani is at once so powerful and so beautifully gentle that I feel I could sit there for hours just listening to this heavenly music. We climb the multiple floors of the temple and see the vestiges of Sikh religion – there is no one to explain – so nothing makes sense except the devotion of the devotees spread across all the floors while the music enables the collective spirits to soar into the open blue skies.

The visitors maintain remarkable decorum as they walk around the tank and purvey the main temple. The experience is such a contrast to the Kashi Vishwanath temple, the Ganges and Wagah that I feel that I have sensed within a matter of days the entire bandwidth of the Indian spirit and spirituality.

The taste of delicious halwa mingles with the graciousness that inhabits every aspect of the temple. I have never before been so touched by such a large place of religious worship…

*****

Jallianwalla Bag is barely a few hundred metres from the Golden Temple – a small board in the midst of a crowded marketplace announces its existence. We walk through the long narrow passage from where the bullets had been fired to massacre hundreds of innocent Indians and change the course of our history. The passage with really high walls on either side stands as a grim reminder of a hard earned freedom after centuries of subjugation leads to an open area that has been landscaped with beautiful gardens, a small museum with pictures, photographs and historical notes on what had led to this singular event in our history in the year 1919 and its aftermath.

At one end of the garden, stands the well into which several people had jumped to escape General Dyer’s bullets. Beyond the gardens are old building walls where the holes drilled by the bullets have been preserved for posterity.

The land within the Jallianwalla Bagh had been acquired by a Society that was set up by the government of free India soon after independence to protect this monument. It feels like a mausoleum.

Amritsar reaffirms freedom for me.

(concluded)