There is a Continent Outside My Window: Seven Observations from the Outside Looking In
By Emmanuel Greenberg ‘15, Jagori Grameen (2015-2017)
It is unusually cold today. The bright sun is here but the air has yet to catch up. I walk out the large metal gate in front of my rented flat and my eyes fall on the piles of brick, concrete, and sand in front of me. The piles are not separated by material. There are bricks stuffed in the sand and dirt running through the slate tiles. The group of workers are a bustling of bodies—men, women, and children—haphazardly assembling the building in progress. Saris drape over women and their small children circling their legs. I look down to see the soil beneath my feet. Grass, glass, gravel, plastic wrappers, dirt, and sand.
I keep walking and approach and old village temple. It’s made of concrete and marble and wood and laced with flowers. Colors are many and vibrant. It is a humble structure, but it is seething with energy. A group of older women sit quietly amidst the burning incense and Sanskrit chanting. Through all the layers of development, echoes of antiquity still resonate.
The morning frigidity evaporates into warmth. The sun falls affectionately on my arms and back. I reach the main road and turn left towards the mountains. The fog creates a halo around the peaks. They appear regal, the kings and queens overlooking the Kangra valley. Today they speak to me in the voice of Vijay Seshadri
“there is a border but it is not fixed, it wavers, it shimmies, it rises it plunges into the unimaginable seventh dimension”
To my left there are more piles of building material. More bricks, more stones, more sand.
The land is a palimpsest of lives. Rewritten, reshaped, and rewritten again. I have encountered a place that shows its history so openly.
By the time I reach the top of the hill, people are up and bustling about. Cows are being milked and men splash warm water over their bodies, bathing in the morning sun. Children are in their crisp blue school uniforms hauling oversized backpacks wait anxiously for the school bus to come roaring up the freshly paved road. Again, the landscape has taken a new form. The sun has burned the halos off the mountains and now the sky is clear. Once again the changing landscape draws my attention.
The experience of the morning is wonderful, but to experience the morning day after day, at the same time and from the same angle, in this beautiful village, it feels something like a gift.
The morning light that falls on the Dhauladhar range on a typical winter morning.
II. Amritsar
The plan had been hastily set the night before, but it was a plan nonetheless. We would wake up early and take a taxi to see the Golden Temple in Punjab, a powerful Sikh temple that, largely because its proximity to Pakistan, has been at the center of raw and often violent political and religious turmoil. The prospect of visiting the Golden Temple drew my parents and I both because my mother is Punjabi and the fact that the trip would be relatively easy: just a 5-hour drive through the mountainous state of Himachal Pradesh and the plains of Punjab.
The morning begins with a knock on the door. Omijii, a taxi driver with whom we had made plans with, tells us in cheerful disbelief that 80% of the cash currency (500 and 1,000 rupee notes) has been voided and no establishments will accept the payments. My parents and I consider the situation practically, but we are more preoccupied with the culminating presidential race, reaching us 13.5 hours later in Indian Standard Time.
“Do you have small bills?” He asks our family in formal, polite Hindi.
“Not really,” we reply, remembering that we didn’t have much cash at all.
“Do you still want to go?” Omiji asks earnestly.
“Yes, we would like to.” We reply haltingly.
As we get in the car and head for Amritsar, updates on the narrowing presidential race periodically arrive. The result is becoming clearer and the news is difficult. There is disbelief and periods of silence in the car: my parents and I are trying to digest the political presidential result in America while Omiji pays close attention to the national updates on Prime Minister Modi’s demonetization scheme, trying to understand the impact on his own life. Omiji has saved tens of thousands of rupees in cash over the years—a common practice in this community—to finance his son’s upcoming wedding. He is openly concerned about the near future.
The demonetization scheme took full effect in a sudden and startling way. With no prior announcement, Modi voided a vast amount of cash currency in order to expose untaxed money and get more Indians to store their personal savings in bank accounts. The implications are immediate and striking. Shopkeepers standing idle beside their closed shops. Emptied streets with ATM lines lengthening and lengthening. Mobs of people pushing relentlessly towards the bank storefronts while government bureaucrats wave their tired arms trying to establish order. As our air-conditioned taxi weaves through the narrow village roads, I can see the beginnings of long-lasting economic problems soon to come, and I can feel my distance from it.
I am looking incessantly out the window trying to make sense of what’s going on. We are traveling deeper into the plains of Punjab and the landscape outside continues to change. It is deserted farmland, baking in the morning sun. The vast stretches of turmeric yellow land stretches out from the thin paved road beneath us. The occasional highway pedestrian slinks along, but really, there doesn’t seem to be anyone at all. The mountainous foliage of Himachal slowly thins and I begin to feel the energy of a desert. The sun beats down relentlessly and my focus stays on the soil. The land is parched from deforestation and has been doused with chemicals to promote a fleeting idea of fertility. But still, there is the apparition of the once fertile, alluvial plains, irrigated with crisscrossing rivers and canal systems that thrusted Punjab into wealth and prosperity as the “food bowl of India.”
The post-colonial history of India is deeply connected with the history of agriculture. After Indian independence, several overlapping factors led to the threat of constant food shortages. Questions arose. Can India organize itself politically and democratically in a way that allows herself to feed all her people? The ghost of Malthus was hovering over the land, but inevitably the nascent country’s solution came in the form of chemicals, planned irrigation systems, and a scientific approach to agriculture.
But the story of agriculture in India begins long before India freed themselves from British rule, back when the Vedas ruled the intellectual and spiritual world. These Vedas, which consist of hymns, spells, liturgical formulae and theological argument, continue to be the main entry point for scholars to understand Aryan culture. The name Aryan comes from Sanskrit and refers to the nomads and pastoralists from the west who settled the Indo-Gangetic plains in the first millennium BC. Before that, the vast Indo-Gangetic plain was largely forests cultivated by the heavy rains of the monsoon and fresh soil from the Himalayas. Natural historians describe it as a kind of horizontal Amazon rainforest, dense forests lining the banks of small rivers of Himalayan glacial waters.
I cannot help but lament the beautiful picture of the land that historians have painted in my mind. Lush forests and biodiverse ecosystems have been replaced with drought-ridden wheat and rice fields. Looking out into the chemical farms passing by, I can’t help but wonder if the ancient Vedic scholars considered such practices “natural.”
As the Aryans travelled east into the forests toward the Gangetic plains in modern day Bengal, they began to favor the needs of humans. Forests could be burned and the animals slaughtered and eaten. Soon Vedic knowledge became a tool to benefit the rich and powerful, those educated people who could access the knowledge and reinterpret it for their own benefit. The land was no longer seen as a complex natural system but instead a set of resources to develop human civilizations. My operative thought—that only Western religion and philosophy considered nature exclusively in terms of its usefulness to humans, that Eastern philosophies always promote conservation and harmony—again rearranged and reconsidered. I am reminded that the world is not always neat binaries.
This all makes for a confusing understanding of colonialism and its impact on the health of people and land. How have we reached a point where we have such reckless disregard for the earth?
My work at Jagori Grameen over the past (almost) two years has been largely focused on agriculture. By working with farmers, working with the land, and studying the science of the soil and the history of agriculture in India, I have developed an approach to understanding the many challenges of food production in this country. Driving through Punjab, it is impossible to overlook the ecological devastation as a result of the Green Revolution, but with roots dating back to the Vedic Aryans.
As Amritsar nears, the farms shrink and sprawling urban development begins. Gutted hotels, unfinished bare concrete buildings, piles of rubble creating clouds of dust, and the shirtless children wandering aimlessly amongst the empty developments. Vacant architecture and unfinished building projects are not unique to the developing world. I am reminded of Trump’s failed New Jersey casinos and the many ways powerful Americans have used the political guise of development for personal gain. It occurs to me that the same psychology of power that has written the American landscape also rules India.
Approaching the Golden Temple is an experience unlike any other. The temple is situated in the interior of Amritsar and local laws prohibit motorized vehicles to enter after a certain point. The result is somewhat of a strange experience: walking through a heavily populated urban center in India, but without any honking or exhaust fumes. The chowk—the marble and cobblestone square surrounding the temple—is incredibly theatrical. There is a fountain running and people are washing their hands and feet in the streams of water running alongside the outer temple walls. People have clearly pilgrimaged from all over as the sounds of Hindi, English, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, and many other languages drift in and out.
Once inside, the Golden Temple presents itself in all its glory. It is a truly breathtaking sight. A reflective pool surrounds the temple and it appears as if it is floating on the water. Devoted Sikhs walk around the interior pathways with rags and brooms and clean the ground incessantly, twenty-four hours a day. The place is spotless. The method of worship is casual but highly organized. It feels like theater, like a performance for God and for each other. The repetition and ritualism, the many people in casual conversation and others in deep contemplative thought give the feeling that this is all a rehearsal. Both deeply personal and intensely performative. Daily ceremonies are performed with the same intensity and concentration as the last.
In one memorable moment, I am walking alone in the early morning, listening to the prayer songs and enjoying the cool morning air and I come across a young Sikh man who appears to have down syndrome. He is ecstatic and filled with energy. His head is perfectly wrapped in a bright orange turban and his clothes nicely ironed. I watch him from a distance. His motions are sporadic but he performs the many prayers with such attention and fluency that I can sense the depth of his spirituality. I am suddenly overwhelmed with a great deal of love for this man and this temple and everything in front of me.
A volunteer at the Golden Temple dining area serving water with an innovative machine. Sources say that the Golden Temple serves up to 100,000 people per day. Everything is free.
III. Neighbors
There is a continent outside my window. The concrete tumblers purr all day between screeches of bandsaws. Clouds of dust seep through my screened windows. There are two new homes under construction. They are right next to each other and they are mirror images. The houses are imposing and made of concrete. I have watched the erection of these mammoth buildings for over a year, from when there were only a few piles of dirt and sand on the vacant lot. Now they are many walls and railings and wood doorways and verandas.
One image: the sun sets behind the Dhauladhar ranges, casting a strange refracted light on the Kangra valley. What is usually blue becomes red. The many families of Bihari laborers are finishing their work for the day on the new residential constructions. As I approach the site on my way home, I make eye contact with a young mother. She is tall and thin and her sari is somehow still perfectly wrapped after a long day of manual labor. She looks back at me, or maybe she is looking through me. I smile. She nods. She holds a bucket of sand on her head, balanced atop a cloth wrapped like a donut. From behind her spindly legs appears a young boy, her son, I presume. He is mimicking her actions, contributing to the work in a small, playful way. He carries not a bucket, but a bowl, about the size of my fist. He holds the bowl on top of his head, with his own childish version of the donut cloth. It’s a face, just one face, in the middle of all the faces and “meaning nothing more, in that blank face, than History’s innocence or its remorse” (Walcott 452). I quietly wonder what this child is seeing, what this child is learning, and why this child is not in school.
The new constructions in Rakkar are large and quickly built, changing the landscape in dramatic ways.
IV. Broken Speaker
My older brother gifted me this portable speaker and when it finally broke, I was filled with frustration. It was one of those items that you might not expect to use, but soon becomes part of your everyday life like tea or a radio show. I quicky missed the companionship it offered and how it brought music and memories when I most needed them.
I decide to spend my day-off travelling to Dharamshala main market to find a solution. At first I thought it was the cable, but a quiet electronic salesman informs me the bad news: the problem is internal and must be shown to an electronics repair man. He points across the street—across the finely balanced road traffic of cars, auto rickshaws, cows, motorcycles, shepherds, sadhus, busses, beggars, and travelling street vendors—to a small, dark enclave.
As I approach the shop, I almost walk right past. Inside there is a dimly lit room spilling with electronic waste and half dissected household appliances. The room is still and only a small fluorescent desk lamp illuminates a table littered with screws, soldering irons, hammers and piles of circuit boards. Above the desk hangs a calendar open to November 2012.
Feeling stuffed, I quickly retreat, hoping to get some air and locate the shopkeeper. As I turn, I look down to see a small, sweet looking young man.
“My speaker has broken,” I tell him.
Without a response, he reaches toward me and gently receives the speaker from my hand.
He shuffles past and seats himself at the workbench, a fluid motion that instantly recalls the long hours fiddling with the many varieties of electronic hardware malfunction. He begins aggressively unscrewing the tiny bolts and opening the boxy machine. I am amazed at his ability to navigate the machine. Each wrong turn quickly turns in the right direction. After a tense 5 minutes, he successfully isolates the circuit board.
He looks up at me. His eyes are relaxed and calm.
“This will take time, come back in 20 minutes.”
I am so intrigued by his method that I shrug him off and continue to stand hunched over his desk, staring at the operation. At this point the speaker is completely nonrecognizable. It sits in three pieces connected by only a wire, a string of igneous islands falling of the southern oceans. I suggest that we plug in my phone and try to play some music.
No sound. We make eye contact for a moment but he quickly disengages and looks down.
I leave the phone plugged in and he continues to fiddle. After some time, he presses his small screwdriver into the circuit board and a single bass thump shakes the lifeless machine and spreads throughout the dank, still space. I look to my left and I see that a small boy has appeared, maybe about 10 years old or so.
Another heavy bass and suddenly loud hip hop music explodes into the room. On the highest volume level, the bass is heavy and the entire shop is filled with energy.
“All the memories collected, moments you could never touch,”
Kendrick spits through the broken speaker.
I pause, startled by the power of music to awaken my emotions.
“Thanks so much. Should I turn off the music?” I ask, embarrassed.
We make eye contact and then I look at the boy and then I look back at him. He sits, arms folded, leaning back in his wooden chair. He smiles at me. The speaker is laying on the desk surrounded by stray screws and shivering as it scurries across the desk, its delicate wire pulsing it with life. I let it play.
“Time passin’, things change
Revertin’ back to our daily programs,
Stuck in our ways?”
Kendrick’s voice resonates throughout the still shop.
We all three sit, arms folded at our chests, bobbing our heads and enjoying the music.
An elderly Sikh man poses for me in an art museum. Amritsar, the site of the Golden Temple, is an extremely important place for Sikh people.
V. Antyesti
One morning an elderly man from the village came to me and alerted me about the death of another man in the village. The elderly man was very small and wore such thick glasses that the entire lens was filled with the magnification of his eyeball. When he blinked, it was startling.
I had known Lal Chand, the man who passed peacefully in the morning, primarily from working in the local health clinic. He would come in each week and request the same two things: an inhaler and some moisturizing lotion. It had been clear for some time that he was dying from heart disease, but he did not want treatment and I decided not ask the two doctors to explain the unspoken decision to let his disease follow its natural course and to only provide palliative care. I would sit with him for exactly thirty minutes, every Wednesday between 9:00am and 11:00am while he breathed into the breathing machine. He took long, chest-filled breaths and as he inhaled, he would open his eyes wide with strain.
On the day of his funeral, I saw his body a total of three times. The first time, I glimpsed through a dark doorway to see an old woman gently wave a jhadoo, a handmade broom made from wheat husks, over his small body wrapped in a white sheet. Only the torso and legs were visible in the shadows, as his cold body lay lifeless on a cot.
A man approached a group of us and requested we gather wood to burn the body. We all quietly stood and wandered toward the main road. The dust was strangely unsettled and I could feel the small particles irritating my eyes. For the next four hours, we wandered around the area looking for trees to cut down. Every ten minutes we would all stop and sit down. Some people smoked beedis and others simply sat and talked. The same paths were traced and retraced with no clear intention. It felt more like wandering than searching. The mood was anything but glum. Everyone focused on gathering the proper amount of wood, but for some reason there wasn’t any clear progress. The way in which we went about gathering wood was inefficient, even dysfunctional, but above all I was overwhelmed by the feeling of togetherness.
As we wandered through the forest, more men came to search with us. Some brought tools and others just came and lingered. At some point, about three hours into the search, a few trees were chosen to cut and the process started without much deliberation. The pace picked up and suddenly the wandering transformed into direct action. A pile of heavy logs grew and we began lifting them and carrying them toward the pyre. As I carried the log on my shoulder I briefly considered the fact that I was wielding the energy that would burn the flesh of a human. The thought passed and I was weighted down by the dense log and navigating the difficult path demanded my careful attention.
The second time I saw Lal Chand’s body, it was laid atop thick bamboo branches—being marched from his home to the river. Men threw small white popcorn-like balls over his shrouded body s I stood on the side of the road and watched. The men with shaved heads and white dhotis carried the body with dignity. Their posture and stoicism caused all onlookers to step back and fall into silence. I too, without knowing, found myself with my head down, suddenly evoking memories of the man whose body was before me.
The last time I saw the body, it was engulfed in flames. A man came and removed the sheet, everybody—again, all men—looked up and nodded, as if to confirm Lal Chand’s identity. The same man raised the hand of the dead and removed a silver watch. Crackling wood and leaves and skin and bones sounded and I was suddenly immersed in smoke and ash.
Goats cuddling in the sun at a Shiva temple in a nearby town.
VI. A Conversation with a Tibetan
“Let’s talk about China,” he suggests.
He sits cross-legged in front of me, wrapped in a shawl.
I blank. He is a Tibetan and I have little to say about the difficult and ongoing conflict between China and Tibet.
“Okay,” I finally say, matching the intensity of his stare. “but first tell me a story about your trip to Tibet.”
He speaks slowly and with close attention to words. Listening to him reminds me of the poetry of the English language. Mixing memories with emotion and straddling the line between what is concise and what is beautiful. His eyes are large and dark. He continues to speak in energetic but flat tones.
“The Chinese government does not allow Tibet to function as an independent political entity, so all political work is done in silence. I followed those ballots,” he says, “went to the dark rooms and watched democracy work in a place with the lights off.”
I immediately think of America’s dream of democracy. Have I ever inhabited those dark, silent democratic spaces in my own community?
“There is so much that isn’t said, but is felt by the Tibetan people,” he continues.
Waiting in the customs line in an Airport in China, he explains, he was interrogated and educated about his identity.
“I slipped,” then a pause, “they asked about my nationality and I immediately told them that I am a Tibetan. It’s just habit. Or its identity. No, it’s just a habit. Identity is false.”
“You are Chinese, they told me, Tibet is a province of China and you are Chinese.” Now he is speaking with a slight smile as if to remind me of the absurdity of the whole situation. Again, they ask him what nationality he is. He tells them he is Chinese. They let him through.
I look for words, for anything. I have the framework to understand the colonization of Tibet in an intellectual way, but those words won’t work here. There is no analysis. Not in this context and not with Tenzing Rigdol (“if you are paying attention,” he tells me, “you will understand that there is no debate here. There is no way to defend the Chinese occupation of Tibet”). This man is deep and powerful and his soul is on fire, engulfed in flames and demanding people hear the struggle of the Tibetan people. He is an artist and his work is expansive and expressive.
“You see,” his narrative tone switching to something more didactic, “Americans think they are free, but they don’t know what is freedom. We Tibetans know freedom because we know what we don’t have.”
I still have nothing to say, I feel silenced by his words and his energy. I don’t want to bullshit anymore and I don’t want to act like I can relate to his struggle. But everybody struggles, right? No, that phrase doesn’t normalize the experience of the person sitting in front of me.
Wait, how did I end up here, talking with a group of Tibetan activists about China?
Rewind a few hours: It's gotten late on a Friday night. the cold Himalayan front has laid itself down like a blanket, trapping us between its folds and stitches. I have slept all evening, waking up to darkness. The temple near my home is broadcasting an evening bhajan. Things are still. The phone rings.
"Come to Menzakong tonight," the voice declares, "there will be people and conversations and you should get out every once in a while." Get out once in a while? What does she mean by ‘get out’?
"Okay." I guess I’m getting out. I rub my eyes and stare blankly at the wall while my mind reboots.
Together we climb the mountain. The taxi weaves through the narrow streets, dodging livestock and sleepwalking dogs. The Hindi word dharamshala can be translated to “spiritual dwelling,” implying that there is shelter or refuge from the surrounding area. It seems aptly named because it is a place in the foothills of the mountains that gives a sense of sanctuary. Sometimes it is unclear what is being worshiped, what is sacred.
The streets bring me close to the shopkeepers. With only the window glass between us, the brief moments of pause welcome the sounds of the street. I hear snips of conversation and bargaining in the market.
Climbing up the roads from the valley of lower Dharamshala to the bustling tourist town of McLeod Ganj can sometimes feel like teleportation. Faces, smells, temperature, and the physical landscape change rapidly. Small Shiva temples sit between colonies of Tibetans, with Buddhist tapestries and groups of women weaving winter garments.
When we arrive, I catch eyes with a seated man wrapped in a beautiful red woolen shawl.
“My name is Tenzing,” he starts.
I introduce myself and begin to listen.
A few cows and water buffalos bathe in the sun. I am always amazed at the contrast between new construction and the vernacular architecture of Himachal Pradesh.
VII. Ode to India
I love you, India. Time and time again, you have unstitched and restiched the fabric of how I see the world. You have welcomed me into your ancient arms and helped me see the world with closer attention, more focus.
You taught me to look for the good in people, even when it’s hot and dry and I am tired and homesick. You taught me to value nature and to see how much damage humans can do. You taught me to consider religion and all its complexities, to look deeper into the origins of difference.
To understand that every person has many identities, and most importantly, that recognizing these identities makes our own lives richer.
For this, I am indebted. I have nothing to offer you now, but if, in my short life, I can give you back only a fraction of what you have given me, I will be at peace.
A travelling fair in Dari, a town near Rakkar. Merchants, religious people, stuntmen, and street food vendors come from all over north India to sell their goods and bring entertainment to rural communities.
References
Seshadri, Vijay. 3 Sections. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2013. Print.
Walcott, Derek. The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. E-Book.
Mishra, Pankaj. An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World. New Delhi, India: Penguin , 2004. Print.
F.R. and B. Allchin. The Birth of Indian Civilization, Delhi, Penguin, 1997. E-Book.
Thapur, Romila. Interpreting Early India, Delhi, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992. Online.