. . . .
From Udaipur I left warily on the evening of holi, wondering whether I would suffer a fate similar to those mauled westerners who were brave/stupid enough to go out during the day. I did not, finding instead a very deserted train station and a very strange train which did manage to take me over the course of twelve bumpy and halting and mostly sleepless hours to Ajmer. Met some cool folks from Britain on the train - basically the first western "travelers" I had a chance to talk to since being here. Definitely drove home the ways in which my experience coming here is fundamentally different from a typical tour through India: what with having such strong personal connections here as well as some genuine knowledge about India and determined interest to aquire more through study of language and culture (most people in the guest houses are definitely not reading Sumit Sarkar's _Modern India 1885-1947). But also revealed that there is no easy classification as such and people come here for all different lengths of time, for all different purposes, with all different levels of knowledge and understanding and good or ill will. This is hardly the end of that story: the whole issue of traveling through India
or indeed of traveling at all in pursuit of cultural difference, spiritual experience, purifying hardship or whatever else people are after when they embark upon such journeys is fraught with significance and can hardly be brushed aside with a sort "each to his own" acceptance. But more on that later. . For the present, my train friends (Matt and Briney (sp?)) were great companions who I managed to meet up with later in the travelers haven of Pushkar for food, conversation, companionship.
But first Ajmer at 8 AM with bleery eyes. I was there mostly to see the Dargah - the saint of Chishti, a famous Sufi saint whose followers are legion in Asia. A ten minute walk through the predominantly Muslim old city had me in front of the shrine, where I bought a cloth to cover my head and entered a bit self-consciously. Thankfully, I was pretty much ignored and so could peacefully make my way in a roundabout way to the main tomb, where I was allowed to enter (this is never a guarantee at temples, where foreigners are sometimes are not allowed), receive blessings from the priests inside, have a thread tied around my neck, circumabulate the tomb, throw prasad (flowers) and generally participate in the intense, claustrophobic, mildly ecstatic activity surrounding the tomb of this great man (for only a few rupees donation!). It was a really intense scene and I was able to just stand in the small building housing the tomb and watch as people cycled endlessly in and out. Another hour was spent wandering the vast grounds of the shrine, which included the offices of all sorts of sheikhs who presumably dispense blessings or advice or something, musicians, families sitting, all sorts of activity. Even found a quiet spot to meditate and pray in front of the tomb, only to be disturbed by a young girl begging, which seemed fitting in a very cliched way. As is my refrain, its a bit hard to capture the thriving feel of this pilgrimage center, or even the bare fact of Indian Islam in its full swell for that matter, as despite all that I might know about Islam's vast presence in Asia and the diversity of form and practice generated by the openness of Sufism to certain forms of syncretism, we are still force fed on images of Arab Islam that are not particularly helpful in understanding this setting. Ajmer's sites also include the ruins of a beautiful old mosque and a Jain temple with a wild golden model of the universe (Im talking about a really big model, here), so by midday I had definitely had my fill of sights (and dust and heat and rickshaw wallas) and was thinking mostly of shower/bed. After picking up my bags at the train station, (. . . oh, if only I had the time or descriptive talent to convey the profundities of those little trappings of life here like the bag pickup room at the station, overseen by the officious man with the enormous head who insists that I have a lock for my backpack, which clealry cannot be locked. . . ) and struggling mightily to find the bus stop to Pushkar only to be whisked helpfully to the necessary place by a sort of city bus driver's assistant, I boarded a bus for the short ride to Pushkar, one of the centers of the travelers scene in North India.
Pushkar is a very strange place. Population is only 10,000 which means there is the lake (very holy, basic reason for town existing), the ghats (steps) around the lake, a couple of streets that make up the old city, and then just some farmland. Pushkar has existed for years as a major pilgrimage site for Hindus, but for some reason now the pilgrims are almost outnumbered by the videshis, who come to, well, hang out with each other, I guess. Oodles of Israelis, so many that some of the shopkeepers speak Hebrew. But also travelers from everywhere, old and young, with children, solo etc. Mostly poorly dressed (i.e. men looking dirty and unkempt, women looking slightly less dirty but by Indian eyes essentially lascivious with their low cut tanktops and shorts), most in India for a few months. Major activities: shopping, hanging out at one of the ghats that faces the sunset, getting and smoking overpriced charas (hash), hanging out and eating, drinking chai etc. Pretty laid back existence, and a comfortable enough place to do it what with the pretty lake, a town small enough to not require rickshaws, locals who are very very used to westerners. All of which is to say that there is definitely an appeal to this place, and at some level the monopoloization of the town by tourists even creates some interesting inter-cultural forms and interactions. At the same time the whole thing is a bit repellant or at the least kind of boring. The virtue and vice of Pushkar is that you could stay two days or twenty and it would not simply be that you would do the same thing everyday, it would be that at the end you wouldn't even know how many days you had been there. Timeless, but in a frightening sort of way. And they don't even let westerners into the nice Ram temple there! I did get a chance for some good old human companionship in Pushkar that was not centered wholly around buying or selling petty goods and services, which was very nice. I also got a chance to really develop my haggling and purchasing techniques, as every store in Pushkar seemd to sell about the same products, so that was good too. After a few days I was definitely ready to head on, this time to Japiur . . .
But first Ajmer at 8 AM with bleery eyes. I was there mostly to see the Dargah - the saint of Chishti, a famous Sufi saint whose followers are legion in Asia. A ten minute walk through the predominantly Muslim old city had me in front of the shrine, where I bought a cloth to cover my head and entered a bit self-consciously. Thankfully, I was pretty much ignored and so could peacefully make my way in a roundabout way to the main tomb, where I was allowed to enter (this is never a guarantee at temples, where foreigners are sometimes are not allowed), receive blessings from the priests inside, have a thread tied around my neck, circumabulate the tomb, throw prasad (flowers) and generally participate in the intense, claustrophobic, mildly ecstatic activity surrounding the tomb of this great man (for only a few rupees donation!). It was a really intense scene and I was able to just stand in the small building housing the tomb and watch as people cycled endlessly in and out. Another hour was spent wandering the vast grounds of the shrine, which included the offices of all sorts of sheikhs who presumably dispense blessings or advice or something, musicians, families sitting, all sorts of activity. Even found a quiet spot to meditate and pray in front of the tomb, only to be disturbed by a young girl begging, which seemed fitting in a very cliched way. As is my refrain, its a bit hard to capture the thriving feel of this pilgrimage center, or even the bare fact of Indian Islam in its full swell for that matter, as despite all that I might know about Islam's vast presence in Asia and the diversity of form and practice generated by the openness of Sufism to certain forms of syncretism, we are still force fed on images of Arab Islam that are not particularly helpful in understanding this setting. Ajmer's sites also include the ruins of a beautiful old mosque and a Jain temple with a wild golden model of the universe (Im talking about a really big model, here), so by midday I had definitely had my fill of sights (and dust and heat and rickshaw wallas) and was thinking mostly of shower/bed. After picking up my bags at the train station, (. . . oh, if only I had the time or descriptive talent to convey the profundities of those little trappings of life here like the bag pickup room at the station, overseen by the officious man with the enormous head who insists that I have a lock for my backpack, which clealry cannot be locked. . . ) and struggling mightily to find the bus stop to Pushkar only to be whisked helpfully to the necessary place by a sort of city bus driver's assistant, I boarded a bus for the short ride to Pushkar, one of the centers of the travelers scene in North India.
Pushkar is a very strange place. Population is only 10,000 which means there is the lake (very holy, basic reason for town existing), the ghats (steps) around the lake, a couple of streets that make up the old city, and then just some farmland. Pushkar has existed for years as a major pilgrimage site for Hindus, but for some reason now the pilgrims are almost outnumbered by the videshis, who come to, well, hang out with each other, I guess. Oodles of Israelis, so many that some of the shopkeepers speak Hebrew. But also travelers from everywhere, old and young, with children, solo etc. Mostly poorly dressed (i.e. men looking dirty and unkempt, women looking slightly less dirty but by Indian eyes essentially lascivious with their low cut tanktops and shorts), most in India for a few months. Major activities: shopping, hanging out at one of the ghats that faces the sunset, getting and smoking overpriced charas (hash), hanging out and eating, drinking chai etc. Pretty laid back existence, and a comfortable enough place to do it what with the pretty lake, a town small enough to not require rickshaws, locals who are very very used to westerners. All of which is to say that there is definitely an appeal to this place, and at some level the monopoloization of the town by tourists even creates some interesting inter-cultural forms and interactions. At the same time the whole thing is a bit repellant or at the least kind of boring. The virtue and vice of Pushkar is that you could stay two days or twenty and it would not simply be that you would do the same thing everyday, it would be that at the end you wouldn't even know how many days you had been there. Timeless, but in a frightening sort of way. And they don't even let westerners into the nice Ram temple there! I did get a chance for some good old human companionship in Pushkar that was not centered wholly around buying or selling petty goods and services, which was very nice. I also got a chance to really develop my haggling and purchasing techniques, as every store in Pushkar seemd to sell about the same products, so that was good too. After a few days I was definitely ready to head on, this time to Japiur . . .
