The busy, booming Maharashtra state capital of 8 million people is a rich, cosmopolitan human stew. Urban Bombayers include Parsees, descendants of refugees from Muslim religious persecution in eighth century Persia, dark Tamils, tall, turbaned Sikhs, Gujeratis, Rajasthanis, Sindhis, Goans and all the races of the sub continent bubble along in this pot that does not melt.
The Portuguese, who built a fort in these low-lying, malarial mud flats, bequeathed it to England’s King Charles II as a part of a dowry in 1661. After the British government leased Bombay to the British East India Company for £10 gold annually in 1668, its long and prosperous years in the British Empire began. Bombay reached its “Golden Years” in the Victorian reign. Today, India’s most modern, prosperous city aspires to be the most Western.
“This is India’s Manhattan,” boasts a Bombayite, pointing out the solid row of skyscrapers overlooking the Arabian Sea. This curve of Marine Drive, now Netaji Subash Road, is called the “Queen’s Necklace” for the way it twinkles with lights at night. If a map of Bombay resembles satan’s profile, Malabar Hill, at one end of Marine Drive, is the hook nose. The hill is India’s most expensive residential area, with spacious, Western-style homes.
Behind the skyscrapers and tree-shaded homes, the Banganga area is village India. Tin smiths in ice cream-vendor hats squat before open forges under the eyes of god calendars, insolent children prance noisily around offerings before a gaudy, incense-scented shrine, and in a temple compound, ancient priests prepare vats of spicy food for the poor.
Local fisherwomen in dazzling, day-glo saris and heavy silver jewelry dripping from wrists, ankles, ears and nose, wash clothes in sacred bathing ghats. Bathers claim that the pond, and the surrounding shambles, is as holy as Benares. Looking down on rotting flower blossoms floating on slime-green water, a passing policeman remarks on their beauty. Jabbing his steel-tipped lathi stick at logs as thick as corpse’s legs piled in a nearby compound, he adds, with civic pride, “Very nice cremation grounds.” Bright paintings of the Virgin Mother and Child, Ganesh the elephant god, and Saint Sai Bapu discourage men from urinating on the compound wall.
A holy man with trident and begging bowl walks barefoot past the nuclear research center in the heart of chaotic Bombay. Beneath elegant Malabar Hill, one of the world’s most expensive residential areas, Hindus wash in the Banganga bathing ghats that are as holy as those at Benares. Goats and ravens pick through the refuse and festering vegetation around the holy pond. Logs like twisted corpses are piled nearby, fuel for the cremation grounds. At the washing ghats, dhobi-wallahs (washermen), part of the fourth, laboring, caste, steam, boil, wash and spread clothes out to dry in spaces they rent by the hour.
Religion intrudes everywhere in India. Paintings of gods -- Virgin Mother and Child, Ganesh, the elephant god, and great scholar-worker Sai Bapu -- stop men from urinating on walls. Hindu and Jain temples, Muslim mosques and Fire Temples of the fair-skinned Parsees, or Zarathustrans, are scattered throughout the city. Religious pictures decorate walls of the smallest curry stall or dry goods shop.
Chaotic Bombay is home to a nuclear research center, and Zoroastrian Towers of Silence, where Parsis dispose of their dead. Evenings, well-fed vultures circle the sky over the towers, near the city reservoir. Local legend has it that vultures dropped human tid-bits into the reservoir before it was covered.
One evening, scores of religious processions block traffic for hours as devotees bear statues of the pink, pot-bellied elephant god to Chowpatty Beach for his annual bath. Celebrating this Chaturthi festival, worshippers smeared with red paint play flutes, bang drums and dance through the streets. All of Bombay stops when Ganesh takes a bath.
In Falklands Road, the infamous Bombay Cages red light district, harsh fluorescent lights pierce the darkness. From behind iron bars, dwarfish girls of many different Asian races -- dark Tamils, Chinese-looking Nepalis -- clutch beseechingly at passersby. A block away, Ganesh followers prance and chant around their dancing god.
Things are never as they seem in India. Even Bombay Duck is a dried, fried, salted jelly fish (also known as stinkfish). India has as great a variety of cuisines as all of Europe, and Bombay is India’s gastronomic capital. There is Kutchi food from the frontier with Pakistan, pungent Maharasthra fish, Goan prawn curries, spicy northern Mogul cuisine, more subtle Persian, or Parsee dishes, tandooris, vindaloos and even chow mein. (Bombay has India’s best Chinese food). The curious, but cautious, diner may dip a tentative taste bud into the mulligatawny at any of the good hotel restaurants, especially at the Sunday tiffin buffets, or in regional restaurants such as the Khyber, Delhi Durbar or Copper Chimney.
Foreigners unfamiliar with India find doing business difficult. “We suffer diarrhea of words and constipation of action,” goes an ancient Indian saw.
Dominating Bombay’s vast harbor is Elephanta Island, with its a monolithic Hindu temple devoted to Lord Shiva. Launches for the island and the holy Sixth century Elephanta Caves leave from the downtown Gateway of India, a Gujarat-style Triumph Arch. Here, a chaotic collection of snake charmers with baskets of cobras, monkey men with playful simians and “filthy-postcard” wallahs selling bad reproductions of the erotic carvings of Khajuraho attempt to squeeze a few rupees from the mainly-Indian tourists.
At the island, fat ladies, chapati-swelled bellies bursting from saris, ride crude palanquins, wooden chairs roped onto poles, up the steep steps. Monkey beggars demand banana baksheesh (tips), from photographers.
Grandmotherly guides squabble over long pointing sticks, a mark of office, then go on to give their own interpretations of Hindu sacred art. All art in India is basically religious in nature, a guide explains, as her flock studies Vishnu’s consort, Parvati. This hourglass female body, with perfect full breasts, narrow waist and swinging hip, suggest that the ancient Hindu and modern Playboy magazine physical ideals of womanhood are identical.
Yoga, too, is religious, a guide says. “Not just head down, legs up.” Statues depicting normal solitary figures doing yoga have only two arms. The windmill effect of multi-limbed gods is meant to illustrate motion. “Like you make Mickey Mouse film,” the guide explains.
Film? Bombay is South Asia’s Hollywood, the world’s largest film-making center, its dozen studios churning out half of India’s 800 pictures a year. Every film, in Hindi and regional languages, is a mixture of romance, adventure, music, action, drama and dancing. The genre is known locally as marsala, a mixture of spices for curry. Most action consists of chubby girls running around trees singing and batting kohl-darkened eyes at porky heroes.
Plump is sexy, and successful, on the subcontinent. Western stars balloon up on Indian billboards; poster artists make even Jane Fonda pleasantly plump.
A tattered hoarding breathlessly promises “RAPE-MURDAR AND ROMANCE FILM” with “Sex Bomb Silk Smita.” This in a country that barely tolerates on-screen kisses.
Glossy Indian film magazines, the Bombay weekly city magazine, Business India, and Debonair, a down-scale, modest Playboy, keep the Bombay sophisticate posted as to what is happening in his swinging city.
The bar guide in a local weekly says, “the Hi-Time has a balcony reminding you of bars in the Wild West.” Not that western, though. A wine-glass-shaped menu card on the bar proclaims: “Dear Guest. The State Prohibition & Excise Notification No. FLR 1079/105-A PRO dated 20-9-79, prohibits the sale of alcoholic beverages to Indian Nationals on ‘dry days’.”
In the evenings, much of Bombay gathers at Chowpatty Beach for a sunset circus. Couples who have escaped from the watchful eye of parents, snuggle on the rocks. Pan salesmen roll betel nut and spice mixtures on betel leaves to sell. Children line up before crude, hand-powered miniature merry-go-rounds. Yogis bury themselves in the sand like human crabs, waving their arms for alms.
Bombay is like a Maharashtra curry, mysterious and overpowering at first, rich and wondrous to those with the taste.
RAJASTHAN
Castles in the Sand
&nb
sp; September 1997
“Your conveyance is approaching sir,” the giant Punjabi doorman in the tightly wound turban announces, a smile as bright as the desert sky creasing his fierce, bearded face.
A white Ambassador Nova, a replica of a 1950s British Morris Oxford with rounded fenders and roof, pulls up under the Oberoi hotel’s porte cochere. The uniformed attendant opens the door, stiffens to attention, and throws a snappy salute worthy of a Rajput warrior.
I am off on a tour of maharajahs’ palace hotels in Rajasthan, the desert state south of New Delhi, India’s capital. Until Indian independence 50 years ago Rajasthan, Rajputana of old, was a turbulent land of fierce people, of 22 warring princely states. But the maharajas and maharanis lived in regal splendor rarely seen elsewhere in the world, creating an imposing architecture of magnificent forts, palaces, castles and sandstone cities scattered across the desert.
I settle into the back seat on the carpet-like tiger print seat cover as Suress, the driver, points the blunt-nosed car into Delhi’s morning traffic of soot-belching buses, three-wheel scooter taxis, ancient khaki colored motorcycles, numerous other lumpy shaped Ambassadors and grazing sacred cows. Road travel in rural Rajasthan is for the adventurous who can tolerate some discomfort and intimidating traffic, I quickly discover.
On The Road
The main Delhi-Jaipur highway is like the world’s longest dodgem-cars track, the chaotic animal and mechanical traffic reflecting the anarchy of India. Jeeps, cars and huge TATA brand buses with passengers overflowing out the doors weave past Sikhs on cycles, bicycles piled high with carpets and baskets, tricycle taxis bearing a half-dozen passengers, bullock carts, white oxen with brightly painted horns, camels and donkeys.
Caravans of boxy, brightly decorated trucks embellished with illustrations of Indian gods crowd the road, every one with the elegant script on the back urging “Horn Please.” It is an unnecessary exhortation on this highway, as Indian drivers use the horn as much as the accelerator or brakes. With the chaos, color and craziness, India is not for the faint-hearted, but it provides endless entertainment.
In roadside villages, men in loose-fitting white cotton dhotis sit or lie around on their charpoys (rope beds on simple wood frames). Barefoot women with ankle bangles and flowing. brilliantly colored saris balance huge tin or clay pots on their heads as they stride along the dusty road, as graceful as models. India is a land of incredible color, from the iridescent tails of the peacocks, India’s national bird, to the fantastically decorated temples and the fluorescent flash of women’s saris.
And it is a land of constant surprises and anomalies, such as village merchants naming their businesses for deities -- the Ganesh Cleaning Service, the Siddhartha Restaurant, the Shiva Metal Works.
Loo With a View
After two hours (and just 76 miles) of frenetic driving, we spot the Neemrana Fort-Palace, like Disney’s castle clinging like a limpet high on a cliff in a fold of the Aravalli mountain range. The incredible structure, India’s oldest heritage resort and the closest palace hotel to Delhi, was built over five centuries, starting from 1464 A.D..
Halfway up the hillside, we park at the foot of the stepped palace, spreading across three acres. Beyond the imposing gates, a steep, winding stone ramp leads into the fantastic, multilayered structure, with four wings rising nine levels up the cliffside. It is a maze of hallways, stairwells, overpasses, turrets and dead ends. Meals are sometimes served on balconies or terraces atop small towers, with views over the plains far below.
The 35 suites and rooms with such romantic names as the Palace of Breezes, Cloud Palace, Sky Palace, Palace of the Goddess and Abode of Peace all have private balconies or courtyards facing panoramic vistas, perfect for the old Indian custom of sundowners. One suite even has a “loo (bathroom) with a view.”
Time for a Tiger
Further south, a road off the main highway leads through ancient, rural India, with horse and donkey carts, women in vibrant dress working the fields, and farmers in huge, bright turbans herding long-horned cattle, water buffalo, camels and goats. The temperature rises into three figures Fahrenheit as the surroundings become more desert-like, and bridges cross over rivers of fine sand.
At the entrance to the Sariska Tiger Reserve, once a maharajah’s private hunting grounds, we reach our second palace. Huge gates lead to palatial grounds, and the grand, if not particularly maharajah-like, Sariska Palace Hotel. Maharaja Jai Singh of Alwar built the place at the turn of the century as a royal hunting lodge.
With the main structure curved like a ship’s hull and towers at each corner, the architecture seems Indo-art deco with Saracenic touches, such as arched doorways. It is grand enough, but needs a touch up. Fortunately, renovations are proceeding and painters are at work in the dining room as I check in.
Several stuffed tigers prowl the lounge, and the hall walls are hung with ancient black-and-white photographs of hunters posing before supine felines. The great hunting parties of the past included hundreds of men: maharajah’s cradling their rifles, fierce retainers in tight turbans, dozens of beaters, gun bearers, professional hunters and elephants with costumed mahouts posing sternly on the howdahs. And standing among them is an occasional colonial Brit, out hunting in pith helmet, three-piece suit and tie. No wonder they sang of mad dogs and Englishmen out in the noonday sun.
Like many of the remote palace hotels, Sariska is not deluxe. Accommodation is clean, but basic -- heavy on character, light on maintenance. “In India, we are big on ambiance, light on amenities,” shrugs one mustachioed retainer.
Jackals and Hide
At dawn, an open Maruti Gypsy jeep appears in front of the palace. As in the African game parks, the lodge provides game viewing safaris into the park, daily at 6 a.m. and 4 p.m.. It is offseason, so I am the only guest going out.
Past the entrance, we follow the paved road into the park a short distance before turning off on a dirt track through the dry brush, thorns, bamboo, prickly cacti and flame of the forest trees. The Sariska Sanctuary, spread over 335 square miles of dense, dry forest, streams, steep ridges, valleys and hills, is considered one of India’s finest. The number of tigers here has increased from 15 when it started in 1979 to 24 now. While April to June is sizzling hot and dry, it is the best time for game spotting, as the animals come down to the waterholes.
In a sudden flash of color ahead, a peacock flutters across the road trailing its iridescent tail behind it, like a flamboyant opera star flaunting a flashy cape. These grand creatures are everywhere, perched in the trees, flying through the air, scurrying along the ground.
Deep in the bush, the driver points out some high stone watchtowers. Not so long ago, hunters would dismount from elephant back onto these hides, and shoot tigers from the vantage point.
Small herds of ungulates graze these dry, scrubby trees -- spotted deer, four-horned antelopes and large blue bull antelopes, who give warning honks like a TATA bus horn before leaping into the bush. In the open jeep, we approach within yards of porcupine, mongoose, civet cat and wild boar crusty with mud. And we see large groups of two kinds of monkeys: rhesus, with no tails and dangerous dispositions; and gentle brown langurs, with long tails and black faces.
At one waterhole, adolescent langurs playing like errant schoolboys drop out of tree branches, furry cannonballs hitting the water with a splash. A brilliant peacock, tail spread out in a great fan, does a strutting mating dance, trying to impress a pea hen with its avian antics.
When the driver stops and turns off the engine, it is remarkably peaceful, with only the wild sounds of the high, two-toned screams of peacocks, bird calls, the shrill clicking of cicadas, animals rustling in the underbrush. It is remarkable that tiger, leopard and panther prowl these forests just a few hours from Delhi.
Later, on a jungle walk, we follow an ancient aqueduct along the river and into the forest. The guide, armed only with a makeshift swagger stick, points out a spot nearby, where tigers come down to drink. Farther on, we find a
pile of peacock tail feathers. “A leopard had his lunch,” he explains.
A half-hour later, we reach the Royal Watchtower, from where the maharajah and his fellow hunters once shot tiger. Guests can stay overnight here, sitting up by candlelight, and in the morning watch game coming down to the river to drink. From the hide, they might spot jackals, deer, boar or even, if they are lucky, tiger.
Although it is the dry season, it rained a few days ago, and there is water in the forest. There will be no tiger for me today.
Pink Gin in a Pink City
Several hours later, driving into Jaipur, Rajasthan’s capital, we turn off towards the hilltop Amber Palace and Fort. The city’s major attraction is noted for its pink stone architecture, and its shops. Approaching the palace, the driver speaks his first English words today.
“Factory looking?”
“Factory no looking.”
Rajasthan is known for its great variety of arts and crafts. Shops and factories sell hand-woven silk and wool carpets, tie-dyed fabrics in shimmering colors, hand-blocked printed muslin and silk clothes, wood and ivory carvings, and lacquer and filigree work.
Across the river, decorated and adorned elephants, their ears and trunks painted with vivid floral patterns, carry tourists up a rampart to the imposing hilltop fort. But the vast complex of ancient palaces, pavilions and fortifications is a fort for looking at, not staying in, so we continue on to Jaipur, the Pink City.
This 18-century planned capital, modern by Indian standards, was built of pink sandstone in the Mughal style, which makes it appear much older. Driving though the city, slowed to a camel pace by the frenzied traffic of vehicles, people and animals, we pass the elaborate Palace of Winds. The peculiar five-story facade of pink stone fronting the street was a kind of elaborate modesty curtain. Palace ladies could look out onto street activities through some 953 latticed windows without being seen.
The Peace Correspondent Page 21