The question is deceptively simple, the answers predictably flaccid, propped up by the interpretive crutch of cliché. Comforting abstractions have been exchanged for oppressively concrete facts, and a corresponding loss for words. Not that your preconceptions simply vanish upon arrival; without them there could be no constructing of yourself and your environment, no being “you in India”. But whereas before these categories and concepts played in an autonomous world of thought, now they are kept busy and breathless assembling and integrating a rush of sensory input: sights and smells and sounds and everywhere a visual field punctuated by bright and shocking difference, from the unflinching stares of the people to the enticements of the exuberant signage. Expanding, combining, rearranging, solidifying: your frame of reference, and with it a part of yourself, pulsates in phenomenal exchange.

Of course, things do settle down after a while; with experience comes familiarity and even a modicum of comfort. You get used to things: the pressing heat, the stark landscape, the chaotic roadways, the ubiquitous temples. But if this process of acculturation is reassuring, it also portends more substantial challenges ahead; beyond mere survival lie the pitfalls of comprehension, interaction, meaning. If anything, adaptation exacerbates your coming difficulties; by reducing superficial difference it highlights fundamental discontinuity: between you and this place; between you and different visions of yourself; between you and the world.

You came toting clichés, stylized portraits and catch phrases, but now you know better, know something of the feel or taste or sound behind the glib phrase or telling story. Your clichés begin to sound rough and passé; their smug tone catches in your throat and mars the appearance of your printed page. Easy words reveal their brute intentions of synopsis cum possession; you are reminded forcefully about the urge toward ownership that lies deep within the quest for knowledge. In moments of seeming clarity, you repudiate your accumulated stock of facile understandings, but this only leaves you feeling alone and adrift, either speechless or else capable of speaking only rudimentary sentences of consternation: “Ye kya hai” (what is this)?; “Maim kaun hum” (who am I)? 

That which troubles and eludes you is deeply entwined with the richness of human culture in all of its massive facticity. You have come to understand and engage with India but the task overwhelms you, for this ‘India’ that you covet spans dizzying landscapes of meaning, from the tangible physicality of climate to the vast sweep of human activity: religion and politics and warfare and agriculture and art and architecture and so on. Hundreds of millions of people implicated in vast networks of cultural practice constructed upon on layers of complex historical fact: the collective effect is bewildering. Moreover, that which appears from a distance as a coherent whole is actually riven with fault-lines and points of contestation; what you can’t comprehend turns out to not even exist.

Humanity is a kind of enormous family, such that human cultural worlds bear deep family resemblances. This generic commonality gives license for the cautious employment of categories like religion and politics and economic development, organizing principles that help prevent sensory overload. What’s more, globalization is daily reducing the magnitude of cultural difference by increasing global traffic in all manner of ideas and images; India for a westerner is not quite the absurdly fantastic and utterly removed outpost it once was. But in the end, difference still rules the day, a fact that turns you into a stranger who is strangely in between, too involved to simply let go of the need to understand, too removed to be capable of mustering satisfactory explanations. Everything from the music and the clothing to the regional identities and religious ideologies are over-determined and culturally embedded in ways that restrict your comprehension. Thus, you come to appreciate the sounds of the veena but never figure out when to raise your hand in praise; you master the grammar of Hindi but never get any of the jokes. 

Perplexity of the sort you find here can be productive, cathartic, spiritually enriching; it can also be frustrating, disconcerting, oppressive. At its best, such perplexity generates breakthroughs of insight, at its worse, sheer paralysis. But perhaps these two poles are not as dissimilar as they first appear. India leaves you deluged by the incomprehensible and awash in the ridiculous. In disgust, you insist that you don’t belong here, that your high-minded ideals about inter-cultural exchange or global consciousness are nothing but arid delusions. And yet somehow it is in these very moments of darkness that a certain sense of honesty and humility arise to recharge and reinvigorate you. Purged of ebullient romanticism but holding fast to a considered idealism, you find the strength to persevere in an enterprise whose very elusiveness is perhaps its greatest virtue.