One day, as we got on a bus in Delhi, a young Muslim was taking up a seat for two and I asked him courteously if he would move up. He stared at me, blank-faced. I realised that it was culturally not appropriate for him to move for a woman and tactfully indicated to Stephen that he should sit there; the young man immediately moved up. It was only later than I felt incensed. Who did that jumped-up little twerp think he was?!
Now, as we travelled on a local train from Kolkata to Chandanaggar, standing, pressed together with the elbows of fellow travellers in our ribs (shades of rush hour on the Northern Line), I was once again uncomfortably aware of my femaleness: despite modest clothing, male eyes were always on me, bodies pressed against me, not always accidentally. A white woman was enough of a novelty for provincial men to find me fascinating.
Chandanaggar was an oasis of peace. Like Pondicherry, it is a French town and had had a brief spell as an independent city state, between its time with colonial status and when it became part of the rest of India. We travelled to our host’s home by three-wheeler bicycle taxi, gliding silently along the broad streets, among other cycles, hardly a car in sight, barely a sound to be heard. And there we had our first sight of the Ganga river, Mother India.
Our host, Viswenath Singha Roy, had visited me in England a year or so before we set off on our travels. Margaret, a mutual friend and British Quaker who has spent a lot of time in India, brought him to my flat to have tea. He was involved with the introduction of microcredit in some projects in India, and they wondered whether I could be of any help. So I arrived in Chandenaggar in expectations of some focussed work at last.
Vishy lives with his wife, Lipika, and two teenage children, Sharmistra and Subesh, in a small vertical house with a roof garden. Despite our protests, we slept in the main bedroom; the family shared a large bed and small camp bed in the sitting room. Owners of a more substantial house in the country, they were renting this house in town for the duration of their children’s schooling. They had a “houseboy”, a man who is like one of the family. Almost destitute, he had been given this job, earned some self-respect, and was thus able to feed his wife and family.
It was a delightful household; a civilised and educated family with generous open hearts. They were devout Hindus: Lipika and Sharmistra performed their puja (shrine worship) every evening, and both blew the haunting conch shell at sunset. Their particular household goddess was Sarasvati, the goddess of knowledge and music, a statue of whom Stephen bought me for my birthday.
Vishy is a small man with a thin face, long hair and an immense enthusiasm that revived it in Stephen. The two of them joked and larked about like two children for much of the time we were together. Indians are reticent about relations between members of the opposite sex, and frown on any demonstration of affection, even holding hands in the street. Between men, however, it is quite usual to see displays of affection, holding hands, embracing, sitting on each other’s laps. Vishy’s natural inclination was to be demonstrative with Stephen, who, a true Anglo-Saxon, found it hard when Vishy held his hand, and tried to interpolate me between them as we walked along the road.
Vishy works as an international fundraiser and generator of ideas for two charities, and is also employed by the government as an inspector of NGOs. If there is a complaint against an NGO, he and one or two others go to look at the charity and see if there is any basis in the complaint. It is an extremely responsible job, and it is only because he is a man of the utmost integrity that he has been chosen.
He told us of an occasion some years before when he had been sent to a poor village to look at a water project. The village lake – the water supply for the village – was meant to be passed into the official ownership of the villagers. Instead, it became clear that the village chief was gradually processing documentation for ownership for himself. On arrival at the village, Vishy asked him for his accounts.
“How much do you want?”
“I don’t want anything,” said Vishy, “except your accounts on my desk by the end of the week.”
The man prevaricated and a few days later Vishy became suspicious when all the staff in the house that had been assigned to him asked for the evening off. He had by then made himself popular with local villagers, so he alerted them to the fact that he would be alone in the house that evening. So when late that night several armed men turned up on motorbikes, the local residents came round in force and drove the men away. Finally all the proof of the fraud was in Vishy’s hands. The chief came to him, and begged him to let him off, said that he would be ruined, pleaded not to be sent to gaol. Vishy said that it wasn’t up to him, that he would have to hand him over to the village. A village meeting was called, at which the chief was utterly humiliated, but was allowed to leave without being further punished. The villagers felt that he had suffered enough.
Our expectation was that we would get a chance to roll up our sleeves and muck in. Far from it. We were driven in one of the ubiquitous white Ambassador cars – embarrassingly, with VIP plates on it – to Ramagiri, the headquarters of ISARA. This was. one of the NGOs that Vishy advised, an organisation which works on a variety of projects with hill tribe people. As we drove, Vishy broke into song – astonishingly, evangelical Christian hymns such as “I have been Washed in the Blood of the Lamb”.
I was amused, then realised that he was completely in earnest. It turned out that he had worked for some years for US Aid, with a group of evangelical Christians, and these hymns and the Bible became part of the fabric of his faith. He broke into songs of this kind throughout our two weeks with him and although I cringed at the sentimentality of the tunes and lyrics, and sometimes light-heartedly asked him to desist, his faith was such that it completely won us over. He was a deeply spiritual man – conversations with him sometimes felt like a religious service. I agreed wholeheartedly with him about the beauty and fundamental importance of the Beatitudes – they are quite central to life and faith. For the first time I understood the strength of phrases that before had seemed superficial and facile. If taken away from its normal context, even “born again” is beautiful.
We found out later that Vishy had become a Baptist in the 1990s, his baptism causing a great deal of trouble in the family. The seventh son of a seventh son, it was unacceptable for him to leave his faith for another, and he was deprived of his lands and even, for a time, of his wife. When they came back together again it was agreed that the children would attend Catholic schools.
Men of integrity such as Vishy are not rare, even in a country where corruption is rife. Nor, as we found, are people who devote their lives to the service of others. What I found interesting about Vishy, apart from his engaging cheerfulness and positive attitude to life, was his conversion to a faith so different from his original one. He sees no contradiction between the traditional Hinduism of his family and his own Christianity.
From all such encounters it was clear that Quakers are not alone in their universalist tendencies. I was excited by these conjunctions of faith; by the recognition not only that there are many paths, but that they can run alongside or even join together for much of the way.
Gandhi, for whom interfaith reconciliation was a crucial part of his mission, was interested in the role of Quakerism in such a union. A friend of his proposed a founding of a “religious fellowship which can be and will be joined by adherents of all the chief religions. I am not thinking of a syncretistic movement like Theosophy, which deliberately tries to take the best of each faith and joins them together. I am thinking of a union of hearts, a fellowship in which men of each faith, Hindu, Buddhist, Parsi, Jew Muslim, Christian, all find themselves at one … And I wondered whether the Society of Friends, the “Quakers” so called, could help to provide such a meeting ground.”
Gandhi’s response was to ask if Quakers would be prepared to “recognise that it is as natural for a Hindu to grow into a Friend as it is for a Christian to grow into one”. Many of us do. That is the whole point of the universalist position.<
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Chapter 12
India: Service as Worship
True godliness don’t turn men out of the world but enables them to live better in it and excites their endeavours to mend it
William Penn, 1682
Christians and Quakers tend to think they have a monopoly on “good works”, on the notion of service as worship. It is true that something about Quakerism has traditionally led people into action. It may be something to do with the do-it-yourself nature of the Society. We have no paid priests; we take responsibility for our faith and for the running of our organisation. Maybe that has led us to take responsibility for the state of the world: “If not me, then who?” It also comes, I think, out of the Meeting for Worship itself. The movement of love in our hearts impels us to express it in our relationships with other human beings. A belief in the Spirit leads to an enabling culture, which does not demand qualifications or experience from someone who is inspired to act.
But one of our principal discoveries in India was that Hindus also believe and practise service as worship, to a humbling degree. Sri Aurobindo, in particular, stressed the importance of work. Like William Penn, he felt that godliness was expressed in one’s work in the world, that old traditions of monastic life were missing the point, that the purification advocated by Hinduism and other faiths was a stage to be reached in order to serve God better in the world.
Our first experience of voluntary work in India was in a charity school about a hundred kilometres outside Delhi and a pet project of a Quaker friend of Stephen’s. We duly reported for duty, and were billeted, to our delight, with the headmistress, Kamla, in a little house complete with monkeys.
Kamla comes from a highly educated family. Originally from the Islamabad area of what is now Pakistan, she had had to leave college just before Partition and for safety’s sake moved to Kashmir. Kamla is a mathematician with a master’s degree from London University, and had been teaching at one of India’s elite schools. A non-practising Hindu, she felt impelled to move to the provincial town of Sohna in Haryana Province, and live in a house much smaller and with very basic facilities, in order to start up the school and charitable foundation. Now, at 73, she is tired, and longs for a successor to appear
I talked to Kamla about her motivation. She says she doesn’t feel she has a choice; that although she does not practise or talk about religion, she feels called “by something outside” herself. She is a scientist and an intellectual. She does not have much time for gurus who are worshipped for their “magic tricks” and don’t appear to have anything new to say. The attraction of Hinduism for her is that it enables individuals to worship in the way they think best, that it does not dictate practices but encourages choice. Like many Quakers and other Hindus that we met, she feels that the way of life is what matters.
Sangam School is a fascinating educational experiment. Situated in an educationally backward area in the village of Indri in the Kangra valley near Sohna, it seeks to provide a good basic education for 5 to 13 year olds within a caring environment, without any divisions or prejudice according to religion or caste. The word “sangam” means “integration”. No child is turned away for lack of money; parents are asked to contribute what they can, and the foundation provides the rest. The school seeks to provide “a balance between the material and the spiritual; the rural and the urban; and the aesthetic with utilitarian; the traditional and the modern”.
Teaching at Sangam
It is easy to underestimate the achievements of Kamla and her staff. The aims of the school seem so commonsensical, so central to any idea of good education that it is hard to imagine that it is revolutionary or extraordinary in any way. But in the context of the school system in India, particularly in rural areas, it is extraordinary. Many private schools are set up to make money for their administrators with very little concern for the quality of the education offered. In the State schools teachers are often sent miles from their homes unless they are prepared to bribe an official to avoid such a fate, and often end up bitter and demotivated. A large number of children do not attend school at all. The result is a system that fails the children of India with a colossal wastage of talent. While we were there, the newspapers reported underspending of public schools’ budgets, so that even the basic fabric of the buildings is crumbling.
Kamla works with complete dedication, as do her staff, who accept wages about half those in the public sector. We thoroughly enjoyed our two weeks there, teaching English as a double act. We taught the children action songs – “Head and Shoulders, Knees and Toes” – and tried to get them to speak. Their grammar was far better than that of most English schoolchildren, and they had learnt a great deal by rote, but found it very hard to speak or show any initiative.
We found the children delightful: the smallest of them running in late across the field, smart in their blue and white uniforms, each with an over-large satchel on the back, a tiffin tin in the hand. At break we were besieged by groups of children wanting to spend time with us, the girls dragging me off to play badminton in the playground. At the end of the week several groups of children presented us with beautiful colourful handmade cards, one in an envelope marked “OPEN WITH LOVE”. The whole school put on a performance of poetry reading, dance and playlets for “Uncle and Auntie” on the natural stage outside. We sang for them, but were embarrassed to find we only knew one verse of “We shall overcome” whereas the children of all ages could sing the whole of it, in English! We were staggered at the keenness and discipline of the children who seemed to attend school not least because they wanted to.
Paul and Martin are an Australian and a New Zealander who have lived in India on and off for many years. They are both Quaker attenders, and when we heard of them as isolated Friends, we made an effort to meet them in Chennai, where they now live. Paul and Martin belong to a self-financed community called Jesus Christians, and devote their life to working for the poor. They try to live as much as possible in the way of the first disciples, with no money, no thought for the future. Inspired by the film of Gandhi, they came over to India some 20 years ago, in the first place to cover over sewers so that a children’s playground might be built. They then ran a first aid clinic, and now, with others, devote themselves to creating spiritual books in English with a simplified vocabulary, and selling them on local trains. They had joined the band of vendors that tramp up and down the carriages of many of the trains we had travelled on.
Modest, devoted, models of a Gandhian Christian life.
The motto of the multi-faceted charity of ISARA is “dedication, devotion and discipline”, and we certainly saw it in evidence among the young staff, living in difficult conditions in most cases far from their homes. Two of the senior staff were Brahmins consecrating their lives to working with untouchables. Unlike the staff of some of the large international NGOs, their pay was negligible; conditions of work basic. They ate in the office building, and slept there too, on mats on the floor. Their washing facilities consisted of a bucket in the yard; they had little in their lives except work.
We were put up at a government circuit house in Ramagiri, Orissa, opposite their headquarters. It was prestigious and roomy accommodation, though very poorly maintained. There was only one mosquito net, so we had to use it sideways to cover our top halves. No running water, and the one light switch worked all the lights including the one in Vishy’s quarters. I did find Indian bathrooms difficult. Most are permanently wet underfoot, often with precipitous steps and bitey insects; only buckets of cold water to clean ourselves and the pan; a hose instead of toilet paper. Stephen rather took to these methods, and when we had an Indian visitor after our return to England, she requested two buckets instead of using the shower.
After a couple of nights we had to leave our quarters to make room for a local MP, and were transferred to “the Tibetan bungalow” in the Tibetan refugee village of Chandragiri some miles away. We were given the room next to the one reserved for Dalai Lama when he visits and were a
llowed into his room, which has incense burning continually in the shrine. The whole place was very spacious, in its own grounds, with a sitting room and hot water. How could we be so lucky? But it poured with rain most of the time we were there, and we had to walk in the pitch dark to a village a mile or so away to eat. The power was off a good deal and both of us got the runs. The Tibetan caretaker, with whom we sadly could not communicate, was a broad-faced friendly man. He stood and watched me write by candlelight, fascinated by our script, and thought nothing of wandering into the bedroom when I was still in bed.
Vishy was trying to raise money for a tribal centre near by, and he felt that its propinquity to the Tibetans would be beneficial; he was most impressed by what they had achieved in the years that they had been there. Hardworking and clear-sighted people, they had acquired a lot of funding and were doing pretty well. Indeed, when we went to visit the Tibetan offices in the village, the young man who greeted us was rather complacent, and indicated a community content to rest on its laurels, even though a number of them were unemployed.
With ISARA we travelled to projects far in the interior of Orissa: to hill tribe villages, where the inhabitants speak their own language and had not seen Westerners before. We were stared at with amazement everywhere we went – dropped jaws at the strange sight of white-skinned people, one with a bald head, the other with very short white hair. Creatures from another planet. The villages were so remote that they could be reached only on the back of a motorbike, so, taking my courage in both hands, I rode pillion, without a crash helmet, sometimes for up to an hour and a half over stone filled dirt paths, praying that I would not be thrown off. But what sights! We travelled through jungle, with limpid pools on either side, along winding little paths, past isolated houses and villages. Again deep resolve and fear fought within me as I affirmed to myself that THIS was what I had wanted from the entire journey. Here was where I wanted to be.
Call of the Bell Bird Page 14