Sunderbans

Our boat, the Mangrove Matal

We travelled to the Sundarbans with backpackers, 4 Tottie Lane, Sudder Street, Kolkata. 
Our departure was delayed by the New Zealand bloke forgetting to bring his passport, which entailed a long diversion to his hotel to collect it. As we drove through the city we passed numerous people washing clothes, dishes, themselves by the side of the road where the city taps are opened twice a day for the use of the homeless and all those who do not have running water. Men strip off down to their underpants and scrub themselves enthusiastically right beside the road, as the heavy traffic thunders by. I never did discover how the homeless women manage to wash adequately. We were driving through a part of Calcutta with tree lined streets, the trees leaning over the road to touch in the middle, creating a dappled green canopy. We entered a market, selling garish bright coloured clothes and ground to a halt amidst hordes of people, queues of buses hooting deafeningly, out of frustration, since no amount of hooting made any difference to the traffic jam. It took an hour and a half to get out of Kolkata, into a lush, green area of smelly canals, banana trees, maize, vegetables, trees, coconut palms, villages, lakes and a gigantic rubbish dump. Then we passed a series of fish farm lakes on one side and a whole area given over to brick kilns, belching out evil looking smoke on the other.

After three hours we reached our boat, the Mangrove Matal. We stopped at the first island to buy beer at the request of the New Zealand bloke, who, it seems cannot function without the stuff, but the beer shop was shut, so we continued past rows of pleasure boats anchored and waiting for tourists, but the main tourist season was over. All manner of small cargo ships ply this waterway between Kolkata and Bangladesh.

Originally all the branches of the Ganga and the Bramaputra between them emptied their sweet water into the Bay of Bengal giving rise to hundreds of mangrove islands which thrived on the sweet/salt mixture of water. The area was called by the locals Sundar, meaning beautiful and bans, meaning forest: hence Sundarbans. In the sixteenth century the British East India Company, wanting to create a trading base in this watery swamp, constructed Fort William on one of the islands, then, afraid of being attacked by the Marathis, they began building walls and dikes round the island, eventually blocking off all the outlets of the Ganga except the Hoogli, thus depriving a large part of the Sunderbans of its sweet water source. Fort William was later to become the centre of the new town called Calcutta. The tide continued to flow in and out of the area, so the environment changed to a salt water one, the trees adapted by reducing their size and the animals adapted to drinking salt water when they couldn't find any fresh water. The animals managed to survive long enough to breed but they lived, and live, short lives, eventually suffering multiple organ failure, all except the aquatic ones, such as the crocodiles, which thrived.

Churchill, who hated all Indians with a passion, drew a line through Bengal, determining where the state would be partitioned, thus separating the jute growing area from the jute processing area and so ruining the jute industry at a stroke. Churchill's line cut right through the Sundarbans, granting two thirds of the mangrove islands to East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and one third, the salt water third, to India. There are 102 islands on the Indian side, some of which are inhabited, many of which, on the other hand, form an uninhabited wildlife reserve. The Bengal tiger lives in the wildlife reserve, venturing into the inhabited areas occasionally to steal the odd goat or chicken. But should the islanders venture into the uninhabited areas, which they do during the honey collecting season, they run the risk of tiger attack and indeed tigers kill about sixty men a year.

The banks of the Sunderbans, showing severe erosion

I'm sorry that the pictures of the Sundarbans are so uninspiring but our boat kept to the wider channels, well away from any potential attacking tiger, so all we could do was listen to our guide telling us the names (including Latin binomial) of the different species of mangrove, as we went past them: there are 84 different species of mangrove in the Sundarbans and none of them look like the mangroves I have seen in other parts of the world, such as Florida or Vietnam. They do not send down rooting branches but rather drop their seeds into the salty water to send up shoots and grow into fresh trees. But they send up 'breathing roots' which stick out of the mud at low tide in a multitude of different styles, some thick and fierce looking like dinosaur teeth, some thin and fine like hair, some forming stilts leaning round trees like many legged giant spiders. 

The biggest salt water crocodiles live in the Sundarbans, king of the predators, capable of catching a tiger as it swims from island to island. The crocodiles are well hidden below the turbid water and extremely fast moving. Our skipper spotted a crocodile basking on a bank and steered the boat right up close to it so everyone could take photos. There was something primeval about such a massive beast ending in such a huge scaly tail, moving its head from side to side as it surveyed the boat. Then it waddled forwards, jaws pointing towards the water, slid into the water and disappeared. 

On the first day we landed on the island with the eco village, were shown to our rooms then treated to a sumptuous lunch of fish, vegetables and rice.

Eco village

After lunch boatmen poled us in little boats into one of the narrow channels of the mangrove forest, where the trees lean in low over the water and the sun glistens on the muddy banks between the trees. Unfortunately one of the villages across the water from us was celebrating a wedding with bad Bollywood music bellowing forth from massive loud speakers, which drowned out the sound of any birds or animals we might have heard. 

But our guide had other ideas anyway, inviting everyone to step out of the boat into the mud, then started throwing mud. I stayed in the boat, as the boatman backed down the channel, away from the mud fight. This was not what I came for, to watch grown men, including a middle aged New Zealander, behaving like small children, as though they were not interested in the environment they found themselves in. I would have liked to have spent far longer quietly exploring the narrow channels of the mangroves, which were mysterious, cool and leafy.

Bauls singing and playing

In the evening we were treated to a Baul concert. The Bauls were originally Hindus who rejected the rules and strictures of their religion, forming a sect which expressed its philosophy through music. They grow their hair and beards long, sometimes coiling dreadlocks on the tops of their heads, wear necklaces (malas) of basil stem beads. Since they have renounced the world and the pursuit of money their musical instruments are simple, such as the ektara (a single stringed wooden instrument), wooden flutes and drums. They live on whatever the villagers give them, sleeping wherever they can, as they travel from village to village. The owners of the eco village host the Bauls because they love their music, providing them with transport to and from the island. 

Talking to one of the owners of the eco village about Shantiniketan, he introduced me to Souvik, a young man who lives in Shantiniketan and would be travelling there soon. We arranged to meet in two days time to travel together.

Next day we left the island at 6 am gliding through the smooth waters in the early morning mist. It was low tide as we left and the mud banks rose beside us, showing clear signs of erosion. In places the islanders have been planting mangroves in a desperate attempt to halt the erosion. Sadly the rate of erosion is increasing and in 60 years they would be gone, our guide told us, as would all the predators.

We stopped at an island with a marketplace to pick up 2 cooks and a load of food. The two cooks descended into the bowels of the boat and clattered about, shouting merrily to each other all morning. By now the sun was glittering on the water as our guide told us that the Sundarbans contain forty types of mammals, fifty six types of reptiles, including the strange monitor lizard, four types of turtles and two hundred and fifty types of fish, including sharks, sting rays, sword fish and even a unique fish that wriggles around on the mud at low tide.  

We came to an area where the mangrove palms grow, trees without trunks, giant feathery fronds sprouting straight out of the mud in dense thickets. The guide told us that the forest department had tried various ways to carry out a tiger census, such as putting radio collars on the tigers, which cease to function after a few months since the tigers swim in the salt water; placing 300 cameras around the Sunderbans, not nearly enough for such a vast area and lastly using drones.  

The two cooks produced another sumptuous meal at lunchtime, after which a general somnolence took over, many passengers on the shady side of the boat falling asleep on the narrow benches, until we turned a corner and the sunny and shady sides of the boat changed sides. 

Hazaribagh

Painted mud house in tribal village near Hazaribagh

I've just spent two intense days at Sanskriti https://buluimam.wixsite.com/sanskritimuseum 

staying with Bulu Imam and his family, visiting painted houses in tribal villages, meeting the villagers, very lovely people who welcome visitors, inviting them into their houses, proudly showing off their painted walls, inside and out. These people's carbon footprint is zero. Their villages are clean, without a scrap of rubbish. In some villages they have enough land to grow vegetables and build nice big mud houses with plenty of storage space. In some villages they have very little land and the government policy of introducing concrete houses is eroding their way of life. 

10,000 BCE cave paintings 

On the second day we visited caves covered with geometrical paintings that have been dated to 10,000 BCE. Bulu has spent days camped out in these caves, copying the paintings in pen and ink into a book which he has printed one copy of. 

He told me about a a wonderfully proud, strong, healthy nomadic community called the Birhors, who lived in houses made from leaves, who hunted, trapped and gathered. Bulu went hunting with them when he was young and recorded everything about them, the plants that they used as medicine, their hunting and trapping methods, their habits, beliefs and customs. They claim that their ancestors painted the rock art in the caves near Hazaribagh and it is indeed identical to the rock art of the oldest layers in Hazaribagh. Their art is not pretty but simple, strong and authentic, the art of one of the world's First Peoples. It is different from that of the other tribes, because it tells stories and depicts series of events related to their survival in the scrub jungle environment. Village art depicts the developed form of the abundance of nature, the 'overflowing vase' of the natural environment, a common theme in ancient Indian art.

Unfortunately the government has forced all the Birhors that they could find to abandon their nomadic way of life, building them ugly concrete houses, where we saw them sitting and lying, with lifeless eyes, utterly dejected. There may be some Birhors still hunting and gathering, wisely keeping a very low profile, who hopefully will survive, for those who have been forced to settle will not. I noticed that many of the concrete houses were deserted. Hopefully they have left them and gone back into the forest, but life will be harder and harder for them as the wild animals decrease.

Jhharkhand is a beautiful state with rolling hills covered in Sal forest which sheds its leaves in 'autumn': March April, growing fresh new leaves in May. There is a huge coal deposit in a valley in Jhharkhand, which the government is allowing various mining companies to exploit. The coal is forty metres below the surface, so the mining companies strip off all the top soil and vegetation to dig out the coal with their gigantic machinery. In the affected areas they have mined right up to the villages, leaving the villagers staring out over a cliff into a vast, dusty wasteland. I did not visit the mines. Visiting the concrete houses of the Birhors had made me sad enough and I'd seen photos of the mines. However I did see the road widening scheme that is stripping the land of its beautiful trees, all the way up to Hazaribagh, creating immense amounts of dust, that left me with a sore throat that lingered for a day or two. Again the government is destroying the environment in the name of progress, driving the highway right through the middle of the national park which is supposed to be protected. 

But there is still much of Jhharkhand that is beautiful and untouched. After visiting the caves we visited another village where the villagers spend more than half their time in the forest. The villagers welcomed Justin, one of Bulu's sons, crowding round him, asking him questions. The headman's son put his arm round Justin's shoulder affectionately and accompanied us to the caves and back to the village, chatting with Justin all the way. Many of the old women had tattoos on their arms, in the form of bracelets and necklaces round their necks. 

This old woman is magnificent, straight and upright without an ounce of fat on her, despite numerous pregnancies. These people live a hard life and yet they welcome us cheerfully, offering us everything they have. One woman insisted in filling Justin's bag with tomatoes. "I never tell them when I'm coming," he told me, "otherwise they would cook for us." Even so while we were visiting the cave they cooked rice for us, which we had to refuse because it was getting too late. 

Journey to Rishikesh

Sunset on the Ganga

I left Rhotak, where I'd been visiting the school where Tansy is working, early in the morning, on the rarest of rare beasts, an almost empty train to Haridwar. The only other person in my compartment was a young microbiologist who told me that:

"In India, when a doctor orders a test from the pathologist, the pathologist has to pay half the fee to the doctor. So the doctor always orders several tests that the patient does not need, just so that he can profit. Ideally," he told me, "I would like to set up my own lab where I only perform necessary tests, so that poor people can save a lot of money."

How he was going to avoid the doctor ordering unnecessary tests I really didn't know, but a far more pressing problem was how he was going to raise the money to build the lab in the first place.

During the three hour journey to his destination we chatted happily, the conversation covering environmental degradation, the evil Mr Modi stirring up hatred between Muslim and Hindu, out of control population expansion in India and his concern for his little two year old daughter, in a country where girls were never safe. 

"I want to send her out of India," he told me.

"And your wife?" I asked him.

"She can't work, although she is a dentist by profession, because our child is two."

"She must be bored and frustrated."

"And my mother interferes with the child care, bosses my wife around all the time."

" It must be very hard for her."

"Yes. It's the Indian custom that the son looks after his mother. It's hard for his wife. Sometimes when my wife is really fed up I send her home to her parents for a break, or I take her away somewhere, leaving my mother behind."

After he left, a loud family of Sikhs, all shouting at the same time, got into the compartment. I retreated to the top bunk.

We arrived in Haridwar at four in the afternoon. For once I allowed a porter to carry my big suitcase on his head, up the staircase and over the platforms. By the time we left the station touts were circling round us like a swarm of mosquitoes, offering rickshaws to Laxman Jhula for 500 rupees. I laughed at them. My porter proudly carrying my suitcase on his head, despite the fact that we were now on flat ground and the suitcase had wheels, continued walking beside me out of the station, ignoring my suggestions that he put the suitcase down. He smiled as I fended off the touts, now grown into a bigger, fiercer band of snapping crocodiles, all in agreement that rickshaws to Laxman Jhula cost five hundred rupees. 

"No way," I countered "shared rickshaw."

"No shared rickshaw," they chorused.

Eventually I persuaded the porter to put the suitcase down, pulling it behind me out into the main road, where the contest of words continued:

"Shared rickshaw."

"No shared rickshaw."

Until a shared rickshaw drew up, squeezed me and my suitcase in, leaving the touts still shouting

"More comfortable rickshaw," pointing to an empty one, as I left.

It was a long walk down hill from the rickshaw stand in Laxman Jhula, Rishikesh, on bumpy, twisting roads. Just as I reached the point where I needed to start looking for my hotel, Angelica called out. She had booked me a room in a hotel at the end of a narrow allay, which I might never have found if we had not met.

The day ended happily in Little Buddha cafe surrounded by friends.

Next day Angelica and I walked up the steep hill through the forest until we were looking down on Rishikesh from above. 

Back to Smelly Dehli

I caught the night train from Jodhpur to what I thought was Delhi central to arrive at six thirty in the morning. Luckily it arrived at seven. I dragged my big bag off the train and joined the crowd heading for the exit like a sheep. I must be at the back of the station, I thought. I don't recognise anything. Confusingly the sign on the station platform said Delhi Junction.
"Is this New Delhi," I asked an Indian passenger.
"No," he said "it's Old Delhi."
The next task was to find the left luggage - called the cloakroom in Indian stations, which was down a hidden passageway behind one of the platforms. One has to fill out a form stating name, address (in UK), date, ticket PNR number, passport number, mobile phone number, visa number, colour of one's cat (I added the last one in), padlock one's suitcase and lift it up onto a counter, behind which the cloakroom attendant stands, ready to store it, numbered and ticketed, on one of the large number of shelves in the cloakroom. I indicated that I couldn't lift it. The cloakroom attendant left the cloakroom by a side door, came round to get my suitcase, then, instead of taking it inside through the side door, he lifted it up onto the counter, walked back round through the side door and lifted it down from the counter.

I joined the throng of passengers leaving the station, struggling through the hooting rickshaws and taxis and made my way along the road to where I thought the metro was, missed it, asked a passing man, who pointed it out to me. More helpful people pointed me in the right direction to catch the metro on the various lines I needed to take to get to Rama Krishna Ashram Marg, gateway to Parharh Ganj, by which time it was eight o'clock.

Parharh Ganj was mostly asleep, cafes, restaurants and shops shuttered, piles of rubbish on the sides of the dusty streets, the odd wandering cow (all of whom are banished during the days in Delhi and only appear at night).

I made my way to Ajay's restaurant, where, like Alice's Restaurant, you can get anything you want: gluten free muesli, yak cheese, peanut butter, tahini, honey, brown bread, tropical fruit salad, omelette, bacon (!!!), sausage, jam.... in a cavernous space under a hotel with no windows to the outside world (a blessing in disguise in this part of Delhi), an Aladdin's cave of clothes shops, shelves full of jams, spices and herbs, and tables full of breakfasting tourists.

World Sacred Spirit Festival

www.worldsacredspiritfestival.org
I described this Sufi music festival, held in the Mehrangarh Fort, in detail last year, so I won't bore my friends with another long description.

Mehrangarh Fort

On the last night there was a wonderful Indian contemporary dance performance choreographed by Astad Deboo and Guru Seityaban Singh with the Drummers of Shree Shree Nat Sinkirtan. The drummers were from Manipur, on the border with Burma and they were dancers and acrobats as well as drummers. I loved the slow, tai chi like movements of the drummers without their drums, the bird like hand movements of Astad Deboo, the wonderful acrobatic leaping drummers with their drums, the ever changing soundscape, the lighting: I loved everything about the performance. 

The Last Nomads of Kutchch

French tourist in a chai shop

At breakfast in the city guest house one meets all sorts of people, the current contingent hailing mostly from France and Japan, who sit in little huddles, speaking in their respective languages. But there's always a sprinkling of people from other countries, such as Austria, Switzerland, Greece, even a few British. On this particular morning there was a British Indian woman, Sonum Sumaria, who was making a documentary about the last nomads of Kutchch.

"The Fakirani Jat tribe," she told me, "are still nomadic. "There are only sixty families left, who travel with their camels during the day. They live on camel milk, selling the surplus to buy millet, which is the only other thing they eat. The camels graze on a multitude of different herbs, so their milk is very nutritious. The tribe sleep on the ground at night, beside their camels, under the stars."

"Do you travel with them?"
"Yes," she said "I have to run ahead of them in order to film them walking towards me. I take my sound technician and an interpreter. We go back to a hotel to sleep at night though.
(I'm sure she speaks Hindi, but these tribes speak Kutchch, a completely different language.)
"The children start to look after the camels when they are six years old. They have a lot of fun playing and never go to school. School would not be of any use to them as long as they continue with their nomadic life. But things are getting more and more difficult for them as their tribal lands are less protected and more and more people are buying parts of it for agriculture, where they can no longer go. Of course, before Partition they could travel from one part of the desert when it became too dry to another part where there was better vegetation. But now they cannot cross the border."

Hopefully she will show the film at SOAS in London. She told me about another film she made about the RSS (far right Hindu party who are virulently anti-muslim). Under Prime Minister Modi the RSS has gained status and popularity, a very worrying trend. Sonum told me that since Modi came to power the RSS have been visiting the villages of Kutchch twice a week, villages where Hindus and Muslims have lived together peacefully for hundreds of years; to hold meetings for the young Hindus, inspiring anti-Muslim hatred in them. She has made a documentary about this too.

These are not the Fakirani Jat camels, but rather camels employed to transport tourists (almost all Indian tourists) the short distance from an expensive tent city into the salt desert. We travelled to the salt desert and were horrified by the Disneyland atmosphere that surrounded the tent city, where people pay a hundred and twenty pounds a night to stay in a tent.

Bhuj

One house in Bhuj that survived the earthquake

The city of Bhuj, jewel of Gujerat, built in 1510, with its beautiful stone houses, delicately carved doorways and window surrounds, its palaces, mosques and temples, surrounded by high city walls with magnificent city gates, was blasted to rubble by the earthquake in 2001, killing 2000 people and destroying 1.2 million homes. The houses were rebuilt along the same narrow streets, but in plain concrete, without decoration, forming the same intricate maze as before. Parts of the city walls survived, together with the Aina Mahal, a rather dark palace with dark wooden ceilings and pillars, a place designed for night time pleasures in the central chamber which had an ingenious system of cooling fountains.

Lakhpatji was one of the princes of Bhuj during the eighteenth century. His father sent him to Delhi to attend a darbar (meeting) of the Kutchch ruling family with the ruling Mughals, at the imperial court. In those days princes travelled with camels piled high with enormous tents, carpets and wall hangings, kitchen equipment and many servants. When he arrived Lakhpatji ordered his servants to set up his tent then hired musicians and dancers to entertain his guests in the nighttime, after the serious discussions with the Mughal rulers were over. He entertained lavishly and word went around that the best entertainment was to be enjoyed in his tent. From time to time he sang softly and sweetly, entrancing some of the female musicians who decided to travel with him to Kutchch. In 1752, after his father died he was enthroned as the Raj. He built a palace inspired by the Mughal style he had seen in Delhi and invited many musicians and artists to the Kutchch court.

Bhuj is the capital of Kutchch, the wild west desert region of India, where tribal pastoralists roamed for centuries up until recently, when they settled in villages of round houses with conical thatched roofs. Traditionally the tribal women spent years embroidering clothes for their weddings, wearing all their wealth on their backs. In recent years an enormous industry has grown up around the traditional tribal weaving, dying, block printing and embroidery of Kutchch and the little shops in Bhuj overflow with colourful textiles, old and new. You can buy every kind of textile here, from vegetable dyed block printed cotton to factory made brilliant synthetic prints. Tribal women walk in the streets, their long skirts swishing around them, wearing an infinite variety of embroidered clothes with sparkling mirrors, jingling anklets and backless churlies, covered by the floor length scarves they drape over their heads. They crowd into the shops selling synthetic materials, sitting cross legged on the floor as the shopkeeper throws roll after roll of material in front of them. I spend hours in the shops selling old embroideries, taking them to my tailor to incorporate into new clothes, which he does with wonderful skill.

City Guest House
City guest House is in the centre of Bhuj, one of those places where travellers congregate  every morning at a long breakfast table in a courtyard surrounded by three levels of rooms in long rows with balconies. There is nothing beautiful about the place. The concrete building is strictly utilitarian with wooden doors and barred windows, brown tiled floors, the fourth wall of the courtyard bordered by a high concrete wall painted dirty yellow. The tables are covered in plastic tablecloths, usually covered in crumbs. But the conviviality makes up for the dull setting. New people from all over the world arrive every day. Some stay a day, a week, some for months. The rooms are cheap and clean. A fat rickshaw walla joins the throng every day and tries his best to inveigle tourists into making trips in his over priced rickshaw. I do my best to persuade people to catch buses or share taxis. The day before yesterday I organised a taxi for five people to visit the white Rann (the salt desert), a trip that turned out to be rather like visiting an Indian version of Disneyland.


The Rann of Kutchch
As we drew nearer to the White Rann tent cities sprang up on either side of the road.
"Five thousand rupees a night to stay in a tent here (sixty pounds)," our driver said, pointing right, then:
"Six thousand rupees a night for a tent here (seventy pounds)," pointing left, and so on, until we came to the last tent city of all:
"Ten thousand rupees a night to stay here (a hundred and twenty pounds)," he said; "one thousand and fifty tents." There was an ugly wall along the side of the road and flashy stalls selling packaged junk food on the other side of the road. We groaned, horrified. The car drew into an asphalt parking lot, full of cars, camels pulling trailers, horse and carts and masses of Indian middle class people, all wearing jeans and teeshirts.

An asphalt causeway led out into the salt desert, where hundreds of Indian tourists were standing, sitting, taking photos of each other, all waiting for the sun to set. Rows of camels waited patiently to ferry the tourists back to the tent city. After sunset people piled onto the camel trailers, whooping and shouting as their camels raced back along the causeway.