A Ride into Delhi's Past

The architectural relics - and the modern Metro - of India's capital

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe, 18/05/09
http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/lifeandtimes/a-ride-into-delhis-past/2035

The early sunlight is falling on the salmon-pink sandstone of Qutb Minar, a monumental victory tower that looms some 73 meters into the hot white sky of south Delhi. The dust-coated trees of the surrounding parkland are full of squawking green parakeets.
The tower was built at the end of the 12th century by Qutb-ud-Din Aibak, the first Muslim conqueror of Delhi. It was meant as a mighty symbol of the victory of Central Asian Islam over the plains of North India. It is still a stunning building, but there are traces of at least eight ancient cities within India’s national capital, and according to a legendary prophecy, whoever builds a new Delhi will lose it before long. Within a couple of centuries Qutb-ud-Din’s dynasty had collapsed and his capital and his tower were left to the ghosts, the parakeets and wandering tourists. On this steamy May morning I am setting out to explore 800 years of Delhi’s monument-studded past — by means of its most strikingly modern aspect.

First, though, I hop into a waiting auto-rickshaw — the familiar three-wheeler known in Jakarta as a bajaj — and head north. Delhi generally makes Jakarta look like a bastion of order and modernity. The gridlock is worse, the potholes deeper, the pollution more choking. But all this mayhem is being mitigated by a new development in public transportation — one that leaves Jakarta very much in the shade. And after this rattling rickshaw ride I will turn to this modern miracle to complete my journey.
The auto-rickshaw drops me at India Gate, another triumphal monument at the heart of the most recent of new Delhis — the British-built imperial capital. British colonialists held sway over the Indian subcontinent for two centuries, but they only shifted their administrative center to Delhi from the humid swamps of Calcutta in the early 20th century. New Delhi, a vast mesh of interlocking boulevards, was designed by the architect Edwin Lutyens and inaugurated in 1931. The new capital was meant as a definitive statement of British power over India, but Lutyens and his masters had also either forgotten or paid no heed to the legendary prophecy. Within two decades the sun had set on Britain’s Indian empire. Today, India Gate, an arch of yellow stone originally a memorial to fallen British-Indian soldiers, is the central icon of New Delhi. This morning, as a pale sun creeps up into a blazing sky, it is crowded with Indian sightseers, snapping photos and eating candy floss.

From India Gate I set out west along Rajpath, the grand avenue of New Delhi. Lutyens clearly had the carriages of kings, viceroys and maharajas in mind rather than humble pedestrians when he planned this city. I am glad when I spot a blue sign in the shadow of looming government buildings. “Metro,” it says, and I slip down polished stairs into icy air-con, away from Afghan triumphalism and British colonialism, and into 21st century India. The Delhi Metro is a miracle in a city that so often seems on the brink of structural collapse. The first eight kilometers of the network opened in December 2002 and by November 2006, three lines comprising 65 kilometers were operational. The Metro carries some 800,000 passengers a day and made a profit from day one. I pay my eight rupees (about 14 cents) and all thoughts I have been harboring about Jakarta’s modern superiority fade. As the train slides into the spotless platform and a bilingual voice-over announces its destination, the Trans-Jakarta busway suddenly seems rather underwhelming.

Two stops and four cool minutes later I am in Connaught Place, New Delhi’s commercial hub. Here flaking neo-classical columns shade designer boutiques. It’s still a far cry from Jakarta’s shopping mall glamour, but that counts for nothing as I slip back down into the Metro. Soon Connaught Place will be the heart of a vast metro network. All over the city cranes are at work. In Indonesia they would be building yet another mall; here they are extending the Metro at a cost of $4.25 billion. By the end of next year you will be able to ride from the airport to the city center, and even out to the Qutb Minar.
By 2021, a vast spider’s web of Metro lines will enmesh the capital. If chaotic Delhi can do this, I wonder as an escalator bears me down to the platform, why not Jakarta? Another eight rupees, another two stops, and I have slipped back some 400 years. Emerging from the Chawri Bazaar station I am greeted with a scene of colorful chaos. This is the heart of the medieval city of Old Delhi, a tangle of narrow alleyways and crumbling Islamic architecture. I pick my way through the mass of pedicabs and horse carts, dodging a wandering cow. Overhead, behind a tangle of wires, is a first-floor cityscape of delicate balconies crumbling under centuries of grime. At the end of the street I spot the onion-shaped domes of Jama Masjid, the great mosque of Old Delhi.
The Mughals, Muslims descended from Genghis Khan, ruled much of India for three centuries. The greatest Mughal builder was Shah Jahan, who commissioned the Taj Mahal and constructed the walled city of Old Delhi in the 17th Century. The Jama Masjid was his finest mosque. The floor slabs of the courtyard are searingly hot underfoot. Flocks of pigeons swoop around the triple domes. The mosque is a beautiful blend of white marble and red sandstone. In the shade at the back of the courtyard I chat with three teenagers from Bangalore in southern India, visiting Delhi for the first time. What do they think of the city, I ask. “Breathtaking,” they say.

From the mosque I pick my way through the bazaars to another breathtaking relic — the Red Fort. This was the seat of Mughal power in India, and its rust-colored wall falls like a theater curtain across the old city. Inside it is all dusty gardens and white pavilions. This is some of the finest Islamic architecture in the world, a style of latticework, inlay and blind arches. But many of the Red Fort’s treasures have disappeared. The Mughals too were victims of the prophecy that condemns the builders of new cities. In 1857 the British captured Delhi, sent the last emperor into exile in Burma, leveled many of the fort’s halls and turned it into an army barracks.
The heat outside is intense now, as I make my way along Chandni Chowk, once the fabled Moonlight Bazaar of the Mughal princes. Today it is an anarchy of traffic and cloth merchants. This is Delhi at its most overwhelming, colorful and disordered. After stopping at a stall for a refreshing glass of lassi — a cool yoghurt drink — I lose my way in the old spice market, a warren of chili-scented alleys. Lean men pulling handcarts hurry by and all modernity slips away. I begin to wonder how exactly I will find my way home. And then, emerging on a slightly wider street, I spot that familiar blue sign, of a kind that you will soon find all over Old and New Delhi. Slipping gratefully into Chandni Chowk Metro station I can’t help but wonder if the builders of this newest of Delhis will end up going the same way as British, Mughals, Afghans and all the others. I hope not, as the doors slide shut, the air-con dries the sweat on my brow and the train slides away, back toward the 21st century.

© Tim Hannigan 2009

Portrait of a Javanese Village

Book review of "A Shadow Falls" by Andrew Beatty

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe, 27/04/09

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/justAdded/portrait-of-a-javanese-village/274300

Andrew Beatty describes travel writing, with its inherent risks of oversimplification and misinterpretation, as “a strange and remarkable art.” He prefers the alternative: instead of ranging widely and treading lightly, the author stays in one place to observe it closely, producing the kind of book filed on “travel” shelves only because of its exotic locale. These books can, of course, be every bit as banal as the traditional travelogue — as countless tales of years in Tuscany, Bali and Provence attest. But Beatty’s new non-moving travel book, “A Shadow Falls: In the Heart of Java,” is anything but banal — it’s one of the most sensitive and insightful books on Indonesia in recent years.

In the 1990s Beatty, a British anthropologist, made two long stays in a village he disguises with the pseudonym Bayu, on the lower slopes of Ijen volcano near Banyuwangi, East Java. This area has always been Java’s Wild East, the last part of the island to convert to Islam, and for centuries a refuge of renegades and rebels. Even today it has a sinister reputation for black magic. But for Beatty, who previously lived among the sometimes troublesome tribes of Nias off Sumatra, it was a place of dreamy mildness – “a featherbed so soft one was hardly aware of its sustaining presence.”

His time in Java produced an important academic book, “Varieties of Javanese Religion.” One of the book’s key assertions was that the familiar arbitrary division of Javanese Muslims into staunchly orthodox santri and avowedly non-practicing abangan was at best an oversimplification. Most people, Beatty pointed out, were somewhere in between. And it was the classic Javanese art of compromise that allowed people from both extremes — as well as those from the middle ground — to coexist happily within one community.

The most striking thing about “Varieties of Javanese Religion” was how readable it was. Rare among books of serious anthropology, this work was rich with color, anecdote and character. It was hard not to conclude that here was a talented travel writer itching to burst out of the confines of academic convention. Now, a decade later, Beatty has returned to the same material to write “A Shadow Falls,” not for students of anthropology this time, but for the wider public.

The same subject matter — the striking diversity of belief and practice among people, all nominally Muslim, in one small community — the same incidents, even the same dialogues, are revisited here. But in this book, Beatty has been free to exercise his considerable descriptive talents to the full. The result is a remarkable portrayal of the rhythms and the rich religious mosaic of a Javanese village.

Clearly no detached observer, Beatty threw himself into the life of Bayu, learning the local Javanese dialect, bringing his wife and young children to live in the village, hosting his own prayer meals and even being initiated into a mystical sect. But Beatty has resisted the populist urge to make this, like so many “living abroad” books, all about himself and his family. The book is principally about the people of Bayu, not the foreigner who lived among them.

Too many books on Indonesia by outsiders descend into cheap exoticism — all wayang kulit and beautiful maidens. But Beatty avoids patronizing his Javanese subjects, or hyping their foreignness. Presented largely through their own words — meticulously recorded as part of Beatty’s original research — the cast of cerebral mystics, simple traditionalists and zealous reformers all appear very much as ordinary people.

For most of “A Shadow Falls” there is little narrative — not much happens in a Javanese village. But the richness of the scene-setting and the strength of the characters make conventional narrative unnecessary. Beatty captures the atmosphere of rural Java very effectively. The taste of sweet black coffee, the women’s gossip over onion-peeling duties in bamboo kitchens, the late-night motorbike trips to smoky pool halls in town and the bleary-eyed wait through the long hours of village dance-dramas for the terrifying moment of spirit-possession that comes just before dawn; all of it appears here in clean, clear prose.

Occasionally the sheer complexity and variety of traditional belief in Java may baffle some casual readers — the old abangan-santri designations could have been better explained, as could the Sangkan Paran mystical sect that Beatty joins, and the endless round of slametan prayer meals that the villagers hold. But without delving into academia you’ll find no other such comprehensive account of religion in Java.

In the last hundred pages, a narrative suddenly emerges. When Beatty and his family stayed for their second time in Bayu in 1996, they found a country where old political certainties were unraveling, and a village where old compromises between traditionalists and Islamist modernizers were themselves being compromised. Mosque prayer-calls were getting ever louder, more girls were wearing headscarves and the mystics and traditionalists were losing ground to the orthodox — defeated, Beatty seems to suggest, by their own passivity and instinct for compromise.

Given its deeper, older complexities, attempts to make sense of Indonesia as an “Islamic country” usually come badly unstuck. Beatty was no passer-by with a phrasebook and a set of preconceived notions, and he fell into no such trap in his academic work. So it’s hard not to suspect an editorial influence in the occasional attempts in this book to hammer Java’s square peg into the round hole of global resurgent Islamism.

But for the most part Beatty avoids making too many definitive statements of his own about such matters. For this book is really just a vivid, non-judgmental portrait of one small village in Java. It gives a voice to the people of that village . In doing this, “A Shadow Falls” is a triumph.

© Tim Hannigan 2009