Rajasthan is the Land of the Kings, homeland of the Rajputs. Elsewhere in India, where the Moghul influence had been strong, there was a balance between the temporal and spiritual; Islam proved a crucial ally to the expansionist ambitions of the emperors, but it also exacted homage as more than an equal. In Rajasthan, the warrior ethic was all.
This is visible in the massive forts which dominate the towns throughout the region, and in some cases wholly contain them. Like Chittorgarh, once the scene of numerous acts of suicidal chivalry according to the haughty Rajput code. Now the small modern town camps outside the broken walls surrounding the long low hill of the city, as if aware of the disparity between its glorious past and quiet, dusty present.
Most of the cities in Rajasthan have been touched by the Rajput vision; but one of them has been completely shaped by it, and remains its greatest achievement: Udaipur. It was founded in 1567, born of the third and last sack of Chittorgarh, and a monument to its people's indomitable spirit.
The magnificent city has grown up around the lakes and the palaces built by its successive rulers, As if conscious of their standing – the Maharana of Udaipur is the highest ranking of the Rajputs - each strove to enhance an already impressive city with new expressions of their majesty. First came the artificial Pichola Lake, a huge sheet of water which provides the centrepiece of the city's design. It must have seemed paradise for the erstwhile dwellers of the cramped and arid Chittorgarh.
Then, to match the lake, and use its incomparable setting, the huge City Palace was built, an Escher-like concoction of towers, arches, balconies and cupolas. Appropriately enough, it is the largest in Rajasthan. Today it is a museum; its collections are varied but curious in their scope. There are extensive memorials to the region's past, faded delicate miniatures, fragments of ancient stone inscriptions, and a pair of stuffed siamese-twin deer. All are displayed amidst genteelly run-down surroundings evocative of the passing of time. The overall effect is one of Udaipur as a forgotten oasis amidst the bustle of the outside world.
From the City Palace there are impressive views over Pichola Lake, set amidst the surrounding hills, and of the two island palaces. The later and more famous of these is the Lake Palace on Jagniwas, which covers the island entirely. It has been converted into a gleaming white hotel, and looks like nothing so much as a floating iced wedding cake. Less prettified, and more romantic, is the Jag Mandir island palace. It sits at the southern end of the lake, a little apart from the city, hovering like some unearthly vision in the still green water,
The rest of Udaipur has grown in response to these elements. Answering Pichola, another artificial lake was built to the north. The city itself clusters around the great palace on the banks of the lake. Its narrow twisting streets, many of which are steeply inclined, recall the stern hilltop forts of Chitttorgarh and the rest. For all its extravagant glories, Udaipur remains true to its origins.
A Partial India A to Z
The best way to experience India is to travel by train. It is not the fastest: in 20 hours, an express may cover only 500 km. But the leisurely and continual journeying gives you an idea of the scale of India. It also allows you plenty of time to look out of the window, to see India in all its slow rolling details. This is true travelling in a landscape.
Trains are not only a vital element in modern Indian life, they are splendid cultural artefacts, living dinosaurs of the Raj. Steam rather than diesel or electricity powers the thousands of locomotives on the network. In part this reflects the country's limited resources; but it is also of a piece with much else in India today. Whether it is in transport, language or bureaucracy, the country preserves, as if in amber, the rhythm and rituals of fifty years ago. To step onto a platform as a battered hissing train arrives, is to step back in time,
With a resource as complex a railway network, the Indians are able to indulge their love of paperwork to the full. Buying a ticket, reserving a berth - anything to do with the railways - involves queues, forms and interactions with countless species of clerks, most of whose responsibilities are so carefully circumscribed that an ordinary enquiry is likely to involve a platoon of them. Along the bustling station platforms, a small forest of signs hanging above offices maps out the hierarchy of this station world.
Fine distinctions extend to the trains themselves. As well as the express, mail and passenger trains, there are a variety of track gauges: broad, narrow, and narrower. On board, the railway has its own caste system, though less stringent than the Hindu scheme. At the top is the first class air-conditioned car, followed by ordinary first class. Then there is second class reserved and second class unreserved at the bottom.
First-class, like express, is a word used loosely on the Indian railways; first-class sleepers feature hard seats which turn into harder bunks. Most Indians bring their own sleeping-bags. Food and drink, on the other hand, are readily available on the journey. At every station stop – and there are always many - the air is full of the reedy mournful diphthongs of the chaiwallahs as they hawk their small thermos flasks of hot tea. Around mealtimes, men with trays of food pass through the train,
For the westerner, the stations and the trains are like something out of an old film-set, with the hub-bub of the milling crowds, people jumping on moving trains, the steam and the screaming whistles. Indians harbour no such romantic illusions. For them, they are often simply the only way to get to work in the towns. In the early morning, the seats in the already overflowing passenger compartments are supplemented by people crowded into freight wagons hitched behind; some even sit on the roof, or stand on the links between carriages. The builders of the railways, the red-faced, moustachio'ed Victorians, would probably have approved. For all their sentimentality, they too were hard-headed about trains. They knew that, like the roads for the Romans, railways were instruments of empire. And they remain today as the British Empire's most valuable legacy to India.
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The Kashmir railhead lies at Jammu, some 600 km and 15 hours by train from Delhi. The journey along the only road from Jammu to Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir, takes another 12 hours. Two thirds of that is uphill.
As the road winds its way round mountain after mountain, leaving the narrow valley floors further and further behind, the landscape gradually changes. Trees give way to low shrubs, then barren scrubland. With each hairpin twist of the snaking road, the landscape to the south folds itself, pleating the horizon with soft-contoured hills. The road peaks at 3000 metres, then begins a partial descent.
The dusty valleys are exchanged for a deep gorge: below lies the huge River Cherab. From this height, its surface is deceptively still and jade-like. The conjunction of placid glistening water with ranks of mountains shouldering each other into the distance looks like nothing so much as the Lake District - writ five times larger.
As the road follows the Cherab upstream, the gorge gives way to a narrow valley, with fertile land edging the river. Small villages are visible among the neatly-parcelled fields with their low mud walls. To conserve valuable space, some houses hug sheer rock faces shrouded in shadow like a colony of bats. Thin, sill-like terraces are carved into the steep concave bowl of the mountainside to eke out the arable land yet further.
The road turns off, following a tributary; its valley rises and narrows to nothing. The land begins to spread out before the final wall of mountain tops. The Jawarhar tunnel under them is long, dark and damp - a last rite of passage before entering the light and spacious Vale of Kashmir itself. As you emerge from the tunnel, and turn a couple of corners, the whole valley is spread out before you with the clarity of a map.
It is ringed by majestic mountain peaks which block out the world. To the west is Afghanistan, to the north Uzbekistan, and to the east, the Himalayas. The Vale itself lies at over 1500m, and is about 100 km long by 20 km wide. It is flat and abundantly fertile.
To understand and appreciate Kashmir, its position as an impossible kingdom must be grasped. This is best done by arriving slowly overland. As each metre in height and kilometre in distance is dearly won, and each hour paid out in the journey, so the true co-ordinates of Kashmir are fixed within you.
In contrast, departure should be a swift and effortless escape that allows the essence of the Vale to carried away intact. A flight is ideal. As you rise out of Srinagar airport, the valley contracts to a giant's footprint. Like the old land it is, creases run over its smooth surface. To the north, the great snow-capped peak of Nanga Parbat gleams like a fang; to the east, the Himalayas lie like hundreds of huge, jagged flints. Set amidst this frozen sea of raging peaks, the calm and peace of the Kashmir valley is all the more miraculous. It can be no coincidence that an anagram of Srinagar is Sangri-ra.
A Partial India A to Z
Wherever there is open ground, children in India play cricket. The bat and stumps may be no more than sticks, but the game is conducted with a fervour which would not be out of place on the playing fields of an English public school.
Cricket, and the way it permeates modern India, could stand for much of the heritage of the Raj, Following Independence in 1948, the sub-continent was crudely dismembered, and thousands were murdered in sectarian violence. Yet there was little anti-imperial iconoclasm. Instead of dismantling all the apparatus of the hated colonial oppressors, the new Indian ruling classes simply shifted across into the places left by the departing British. The system they inherited was so complete, and in many respects so appropriate for India's problems, that the spirit of the Raj, as well as many of its details, survives to this day.
As well as the army, the main pillars of the British Empire in India were the English language, the railways, and the bureaucracy. They remain just as central to the modern country. Without English as a common, neutral, lingua franca, communications would be hampered across the disparate linguistic zones of the sub-continent. Worse, the imposition of Hindi as the only other viable national language would aggravate regional tensions, and bolster the destabilising movements for local autonomy which already pose a major threat to the integrity of India.
The extensive railway network serves a similar dual function. Railways are the key element in the country's transport system; but, like English, they provide also a unifying factor across different geographical regions which otherwise have little to connect them. Only bureaucracy seems an ambivalent legacy. True, the enormous Indian infrastructure does at least act as a stabilising and moderating element in a labile society; but the price paid is a stultifying slowness, and a lack of receptivity to innovation. Rooted in the past, Indian bureaucracy may serve the present,
but it seems to block the way to the future.
The continuing presence of these major imperial relics has made it all the easier for memories and minutiae of that period to linger. Everywhere you go in India, there are signs and notices in the stiff, hortatory English of an earlier age; railway stations are exotic reworkings of interwar images; the whole political process is carried out in a sober imitation of the Mother of Parliaments as she used to be; and the newspaper reports and television quiz shows dwell endlessly on trivial details of life back in Britain, assuaging a strange, phantom homesickness which lingers on. It is as if the British had never left.
One of the most impressive monuments to the Raj is in New Delhi. Running for over two miles past ponds and dark green sward - the apotheosis of the Surrey garden - a long straight road links India Gate with the ensemble of government buildings placed dramatically at the top of the hill. At the end of each day, the sun sets behind these buildings, casting huge shadows over the broad road and lawns below. This great east-west axis of Sir Edwin Lutyens's designs for the new capital is called Raj Path.
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To do anything in India, you have to queue. Several times. For example, to get a rail ticket to Kashmir, you queue at the ticket reservation office; who tell you that you need a special permit from the Ministry of Home Affairs, several miles away. So you queue at the door there, in order to get a security pass to be able to queue upstairs for a form, which is then processed once you have queued at another door. At that point, you can return to the reservation office and queue for your ticket.
Everywhere you go, there are Indians patiently queuing. They rarely push, and are almost invariably good-humoured however long their wait. The same goes for the clerks who, slowly but inexorably, deal with the queues. The British might like to think this deep-seated respect for queuing is part of the legacy of the Raj, just like cricket. But unlike sports which seem to transfer readily enough between races, the phenomenon of queuing is too firmly rooted in the Indian character to be explained away so easily.
Queuing in India is intimately bound up with, though not totally caused by, that country's love of endless, intricate bureaucracy. Every stage of every transaction is noted, registered, approved. There are special forms for each stage, many of which require other forms, duly completed. Forms often require queuing.
This is partly a reflection of an almost Victorian state of organisation within Indian society. Although computers are beginning to appear, notably in booking airline seats and banking, the systems elsewhere are manual and the main medium is hand-written paper. It is a universal rule that paper begets paper, both in the form of multiple copies and as records of other records; yet there is a level of redundancy in India which goes beyond any normal wastage. The Indian nation does not just connive at bureaucracy on this scale, it seems positively to welcome it.
An obvious universal benefit of functional redundancy of this kind is the creation of much-valued jobs: it takes five people to do what only really needs one. But beyond this, there is a deeper psychological reason why queuing and bureaucracy are so central to the Indian way of life.
To queue is not only to recognise an order, it is to affirm it. If you queue, you suffer the inconvenience of waiting; but while the queue lasts you know that by waiting long enough, you will be attended to. Without queuing - that is, in an anarchic world - there is no such guarantee. If you are strong, you may push your way to the front; but with 750 million people out here, you will have to be very strong. Better to queue.
The very size of India's fragile society imposes an even greater need for order. Queuing and bureaucracy are a kind of microscopic order which everyone can contribute to. The theory is, if you acquiesce and aid at this level, society will pay you back by exhibiting a similar degree of control on a larger scale. It seems to work. Maintaining the world's largest democracy - especially one created so recently and in a relatively artificial way - is a considerable feat. Having to queue, then sign in triplicate, is a small price to pay for freedom.
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For the visitor, India offers a rich spectacle. The land is a seamless backdrop for the entrances and exits of massive Moghul forts, holy mosques, and towns which hover between the twentieth and the twelfth century. Around these impassive architectural displays, the Indian people swarm like a distracting cloud. If they are seen at all, it is only when they stumble into the picturesque: the wizened old man guarding shoes at a mosque; the bent forms of the women gleaning in the fields, swathed in coloured saris; naked nut-brown children playing by the river; the Sikh hotel doorman with his turban, moustache and thin-lipped salute. There are beggars and hawkers too, but they seem just another component of the bustling tourist scene. The abiding poverty of India, which lies behind all these images, too often remains invisible.
That poverty lives in the spaces between the sights on the tourists agenda. The planes fly above it, the air-con coaches ride round it. Only the riders of trains and rickshaws discover it.
Stations act as magnets to poverty. Enter them, and you find rows and rows of bodies lying on the ground, quite still, as if lined up to an attractive magnetic pole. But it is only the poor, camping out on the platforms. Elsewhere, the ground is littered with people hunkered down beside their few belongings. Like the porters balancing impossibly huge and precarious loads on their heads, everyone seems undernourished, their skin leathery.
But these are simply the relatively poor. Some may even be waiting for trains. To see real poverty you must take a rickshaw. In the tourist area of Delhi from Connaught Place, down Janpath to India Gate, there are only taxis and moped rickshaws. Further north, as New Delhi gives way to Old, the bicycle rickshaws begin to appear. In outlying cities and towns they are the norm. For a journey among India's real poor, a rickshaw is the only proper vehicle,
You begin to learn something of poverty and its impotence even as you climb into the bicycle rickshaw. In front of you is a tiny stick-man, his blue-black hair shining, his shirt greasy and frayed. He moves his almost muscleless legs with difficulty, rising high in the pedals. Throughout the journey you stare at his thin body as it sways with exertion you have bought. He will pedal all day, waiting patiently wherever you stop, not eating until you have done; for this he may be paid a couple of pounds. The poverty of India begins to rise in you from the pit of your stomach.
And yet the rickshaw driver is not poor. To find poverty you must travel further into Old Delhi. There the streets are lined with poor people; this is where they live. Around them are their few possessions: a pot, a blanket. They eat, sleep and die on this street. They wash at the public standpipes, their only privacy a cloth held up around them. And yet they seem strangely oblivious of the outside world, It is as if they had reached an accommodation with their poverty, having worn it so long. They are not abject or bitter. And this is disturbing. Angry poverty in the face of wealth would be reasonable, and could be coped with, This lack of reproach reproaches the visitor with the worst meanness of all: of spirit.
A Partial India A to Z
From the air, the flat Indian landscape looks like a huge dusty carpet. The monotonously regular fields form a huge patchwork where each square is a variation on the fundamental hue. Tan, dun, tawny, beige; fawn, bronze, khaki; bistre, sienna, umber, ochre: India exhausts them all in the infinite varieties of dull brown its earth assumes.
Nor does the sky offer any relief to this pitiless landscape. During the long summer it is an unbroken dome the colour of faded blue Wedgwood. There are no swirling cloudscapes to captivate the eye, no gradations of mist and vapour to provide variety. Apart from the occasional bird of prey wheeling in the sky, there is not a single breath or movement to break the mutual stare of the earth and heavens.
To this bleached-out brown and burnt-out blue is added a third element which seems another product born of the sun's furnace. The rocks of northern India, and hence the great forts built from them, glow with a dull hot redness which wearies the view like the land and the sky. To visit the empty palace of Fatehpur Sikri is to enter an oven for the eye as the stone throbs redly around you. Only the lush green grass of the abandoned courtyards provides any respite or offers any balm.
Perhaps as a defence against this stultifyingly narrow natural palette, the Indians love bright and varied colours. The saris ot the women are a blaze of impossible shades; the more they clash, the better. The moped rickshaws are often gaily painted with intertwined flowers and coloured patterns. And the cheap pictures of Krishna, the Indianised Christs, the saccharine-sweet images of chubby children - all are tricked out in the most garish and cloying combination of hues. Likewise the huge cinema hoardings everywhere, which seem to promise plots just as colourful and as unfettered by the constraints of subtlety.
The Kashmir valley is less afflicted by the sense of monochrome found on the plains. Partly this reflects the fact that it is the expansiveness of the colour which makes the brown plain or blue sky so exhausting, The essence of Kashmir is that the scale has been reduced and humanised. The valley is only a few tens of kilometres long, and even the sky's extent is bounded by the mountain peaks which rear up on all sides.
It is not only the fields which spawn brown: the Kashmiri houses, with their timber frames and mud-coloured bricks, contribute as well. And yet though the colour may permeate the region, it does not overwhelm. The landscape is saved by the trees, which stand like great fountains and torches of colour. Unlike those on the plain, they are deciduous. As a result, their myriad autumnal hues echo, extend and finally redeem the surrounding countryside. The gamut of scarlets, vermilions, russets and golds justify their staider setting.
Ultimately, the difference is that Kashmir's hues are those of an English landscape; with the trees in their full dismantling glory, it is easy to relate to the ensemble. The ochres of the plain are alien. They make no concessions to previous experience. They are the true colour of India.
A Partial India A to Z
