Dancing in the Streets

It is festival season here in Central India.
When I first came to India, I was puzzled by the apparent absence of public outlets for expressions of joy and wildness. In the US, of course, we have bars and football games. Traditional rural life, we are led to believe from old songs, cowboy movies, and Wendell Berry novels, centered around barn dances, and when I was in college we would hire bands to come and play and dance the night away. When I travelled in Latin America, I recall that every small town had its disco, where salsa music blared on Saturday nights, and in places which were too rural for this, the local elementary school would be appropriated. It was in one such place, on the Costa Rica Panamanian border in 1999, where I first heard the music that later became world famous as Reggaeton. On Friday and Saturday, a truck would drive through the mountainous countryside with a powerful PA system, announcing, "Sabado, Sabado, Sabado - Gran Baile Sabado!"

On Saturday and Sunday evenings in Thrissur, the first city I lived in in Kerala, throngs of people filled the shops, restaurants and roadsides. Then, sometime around 8 or 8.3o pm, I would notice all the throngs seemed to be moving in one direction. I would follow and find people packing into busses. By 9 pm a few stragglers (all men) would still be crowding onto the buses to go home, and by 10, you would be quite alone. There was nothing like a disco, and to the extent that there were bars, they were disreputable places, where no well-behaved woman had ever set foot, and where no respectable man would want to be seen.

Then the rains ended. In Kerala, the dry season is the season for local festivals. Every temple, church and mosque holds a festival, and although the Hindu festivals seemed to me to be the most colorful, there wasn't much difference between them and the Christian and Muslim festivals. The three elements by which the festivals were judged were (1) elephants (2) drums and (3) fireworks. A good festival featured lots of elephants, who stood in a row in the temple yard and were fed giant balls of cooked rice.

The chenda drum orchestra would hammer away, their rhythms and levels rising and falling, as men stood upon the caparisoned elephants, raising and lowering colored banners in time with the music. At the peak, the horn players would blast out a brief, loud melody. As the day dragged on, the drumming would grow more intense and feverish. At first it would seem that the 40-50 drummers were playing in unison, but as the hours grew longer, you'd start to hear back rhythms and syncopations sneaking in, until at last the music would reach its feverish pitch. The poor elephants stood in the hot sun peacefully at all the festivals I attended, but you'd read in the papers about elephants that would get fed up, and run rampant through the crowds, trampling people as they went.

At night lamps would be lit on the temples. Colored light displays would be attached to the front of churches and to the commercial buildings surrounding the temples that put the best American Christmas lights to shame. I recall one in downtown Thrissur which animated the lord Vishnu striking down a crocodile with his discus. And then came the fireworks. I saw some good fireworks displays, so I was interested to see the fireworks display at Thrissur Pooram, Kerala's largest temple festival. I had heard it was so big that it sometimes shattered windows in our suburban neighborhood, 6 km away. My friends advised me not to attend the main display, which was in the middle of the night and too crowded, but to attend another, earlier pre-display. We came to downtown Thrissur, and found all the streets blocked off, as a great mass of people struggled to find the best seats. My friends and I stood in a sweaty throng as we waited for the day to end and the display to begin. The display was spectacular, but not beautiful - the loudest noise and the biggest explosion I have ever seen, but not the brilliant Gandalfian colors I had hoped for. Afterwards we rode home in a bus so crowded that even when the driver slammed on the brakes, the neighboring bodies prevented us from shifting forward.

Last week it was Ganesh Chaturthi, a 10 day festival to celebrate the birthday of the popular elephant-headed god. India is often described as a traditional or timeless society, but it seems that every time I delve into one of these timeless traditions, I discover peculiarly modern origins. Ganesh's birthday has always been Ganesh's birthday, but the festival we were celebrating was invented by Lokmanya Tilak, one of the early leaders of the Indian National Congress. He sought to create a holiday that would unite the people of his region (western Maharashtra) beyond boundaries of caste, in opposition to British Rule. In the late 19th century, he began the tradition of placing a Ganesh statue in the home, and another larger one in the public square, to be worshipped for ten days, after which the clay statue would be immersed in water, where it would dissolve. Unlike so many other traditions, this one would be open to people of all castes, and would bring people together both as families and as geographical (as opposed to caste) communities.

The festival has been a success, and its popularity has spread across much of India. On the days before the festival, the markets were filled with Ganesh idols for sale.

On the first night of the festival I went to my neighbors apartment. We sat around, ate sweets (Ganesh is particularly fond of ladoos - balls of dough filled with sugar), and they explained to me the meaning of the various decorations. With the sweets and decorations and gathering of family and friends, I felt like it was Christmas, only with the Ganesh statue substituting for the tree.
Later in the evening, the community idols started arriving. These were much larger, and arrived on the back of trucks. A second truck often followed, carrying a generator to power bright lights and a sound system. Each idol was accompanied by a drum corps of 15-30 young men, playing a mixture of giant bass drums and smaller snare style drums, and a bevy of young revelers. Sometimes firecrackers were set off in advance of the statue The drumming was steady, and all the drum corps seemed to play the same few rhythms over and over as they marched past my house to the various neighborhoods where their Ganesh statues would be installed. The revelers danced and threw colored powders at each other. It has been my experience that women in contemporary urban India rarely have the opportunity to participate publicly in such revelry, but I was pleased to see that accompanying at least some of the statues were big groups of young women, dancing away, usually separated from the groups of dancing young men by the drummers.
The Ganesh in this picture is rumored to have been the largest in Nagpur. It was pulled by a team of gigantic oxen, and was accompanied by teams of men with long bamboo poles, who tried to push the electric lines up so that Ganesh wouldn't get tangled in them. The number of local Ganesh statues is quite large - I think there were half a dozen installed within a ten minute walk from my apartment.
It struck me, as I participated in these festivities as a curious outsider, that there was a striking contrast between those areas of Indian society that are orderly, clean, and predictable, and those that were chaotic and dangerous. The streets of most Indian cities and towns are filthy. There appears to be no functional system of public garbage disposal, and even in beautiful Landour (which had clean trash cans posted every 100 m along the road), I watched tourists who'd come to enjoy the clean mountain air dropping their chip wrappers on the street. Public restrooms are filthy at best. Traffic is chaotic (and India has the highway fatality statistics to show it). Public schools and health facilities are of abysmal quality, and in many regions of India, it seems that there is essentially zero provision of public goods.

But I've never been in a private home (even the homes of very poor people) that wasn't spotlessly clean. I remember sitting by the water in Mumbai once, watching a little slum of people living in tiny shacks made of plastic and driftwood, anchored to the beach-side highway. It was midday, and presumably the men were off trying to earn some money, because I saw only women and children. Although these people were obviously living in abject poverty, there wasn't a woman who wasn't dressed in a bright clean sari, and as they sat there cooking on driftwood fires on the tiny highway fringe beach, they scrubbed each pot they were using clean in the filthy urban ocean.

This contrast extends far beyond these obviously visible signs. For most of the young people I've made friends with in my years in India, life is quite predictable and orderly. While my American peers wander the world, trying one thing and then another, changing jobs every couple of years, back to graduate school in fields only distantly related to their undergraduate studies, My Indian friends follow predictable career paths. If their examination marks are good, they pursue careers in medicine or engineering. If they pursue higher studies, it is in the field in which they began, and they look for stable, predictable jobs. Although it would be misleading to think of this as a continuation of the caste occupational system that existed in rural India in the early 20th century, it remains the case that one's family situation has an overbearing influence on one's occupational goals and opportunities. A book I read recently described attempts to develop local school committees in the notoriously poor rural areas of Bihar, Jharkhand, and West Bengal. These committees failed to attract members of the lowest castes because such people assume that no benefit can come to them from education. By contrast there is a certain social strata - primarily among the wealthy in the largest cities - where an American education is an assumption. Studies of how people get jobs in India reveal the importance of family connections.

This orderliness of life progression extends to marriage and family. Although arranged marriage was once the norm among my own ancestors (at least if I can accept the stories of Sholom Aleichem & Isaac Bashevis Singer as based on a realistic portrayal of life among the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe), its influence has disappeared. Arranged marriage is no longer a viable option for American youth because we do not live lives which are predictable based on what our parents' lives have been. Most of my American friends would be terrified to allow their parents any significant role in choosing a mate. Arranged marriage continues to be dominant in Indian society in part because people's life roles continue to be predictable based on an ordered progression from their family. To be a respectable Indian adult, it is not necessary to demonstrate one's independence from one's family, and many of my friends expect to live in their parents' home for their whole lives - or perhaps to move into their husband's family's home on marriage. In such predictable circumstances, arranged marriages make perfect sense: if your parents know what life you will lead, and have more experience than you in observing human relationships, you would be crazy not to take their advice seriously.

This societal orderliness also applies to the ways in which people let loose, as I have observed during these festivals. Rather than anonymous concerts and bars, Indian celebratory revels are centered around the same features of family and community. I do not know Indians who go out dancing on Saturday night (some exist, I suppose, among the westernized elites of the big cities). I know Indians whose parties center around the Ganesh festival, the family wedding, the community feast. It is striking that even in places where the provision of public goods is remarkably weak (such as in Kolzari), the provision of public religious goods remains strong. One of the few successful examples of collective action in Kolzari since its relocation is the building of a new temple, built through voluntary contributions by people who say they don't have enough to eat.

There is a theory in contemporary social science that the core institutions of modern society depend on the development of generalized trust. In traditional societies, one does not exchange goods with those one doesn't know. Trust is based on continued reciprocal exchange. We know our neighbors won't steal from us because they know that if they do, we can effectively retaliate against them. Such societies may seem harmonious, but they can also be incredibly confining. Not only does it limit the kinds of exchange you can participate in, but it is also based on a sort of mutually assured destruction. Our neighbors may be good people, but if they are not, we may spend our lives tied to people whose actions are constant threats to our well being.

Generalized trust allows us a much greater level of interaction. We can go to the grocery store, and assume that the anonymous clerk will not cheat us. We order goods using our credit card online, and trust that the vendor will deliver the goods to us (while the vendor trusts that our credit card numbers are legitimate). We pay our taxes and assume that the government will provide us with useful services. If they fail to, we believe we can protest without negative consequences to ourselves.

In India, it seems that the level of public, generalized trust is limited. Instead, people trust their families, their acquaintances, their connections. I have found, in my research, that it is very difficult to walk into a government office without a proper letter of introduction. If I am not recommended by their boss or friend, the government official will not want to talk to me. On the other hand, with the proper introductions, doors swing open. On the other hand, relative to the society I grew up in, Indian society's family and community bonds are much stronger and more dependable. I could hardly depend on my family's connections to make my career or to find me a wife. I have to do these things on my own, almost regardless of my family's wealth or social position. In India, many of my friends can depend on their family - even if their family is only of modest means and status - to smooth their way through life.

I have often wondered if more could be done to build on these powerful societal foundations. There is a tendency in contemporary India to look to the US as a model, but I happen to think that there are a multiplicity of ways to alleviate systematic human suffering (and in any case, I hesitate to see the US as a model, as in spite of its great wealth, it contains persistent deprivation and discrimination). Instead of assuming that it is necessary for a human society to become atomized and privately chaotic in order to become publicly "developed."

At the end of the Ganesh festival, the parade is reversed.
People bring their household idols to the lake, for a final puja.
The big community statues are loaded back onto their trucks, and to the accompaniment of the same drummers and dancers (but it seems, with a bit more of those colored powders and a bit more wildness), make their way to the lakes. At the lakeside, people gather, and one by one, the statues are immersed.


The end of this festival bears a remarkable resemblance to littering. The traditional statues are made of clay and natural dyes, and dissolve in the water, but in recent years the market has been flooded with cheap plastic molds, which, of course, do not dissolve in water. This year there was a big campaign to prevent such idols from being dumped. Even with the clay idols, I wonder how much clay this city's 7 lakes can absorb each year. The water afterwards is covered with plastic bags filled with flower garlands (the garlands are removed prior to dumping, but I saw many people then take the garlands, stuff them in a plastic bag, and throw them in the lake.)
Larger Ganeshes are taken out in to the middle of the lake by raft.
In the evening I have to go out to buy milk. The milk comes in a thin plastic satchet. I will boil it and then culture it to make yogurt. There was a sharp thunderstorm earlier, which is why I didn't make it out in the daylight. Now it is raining lightly, and everything is wet & cool - the temperature on my digital alarm clock/thermometer reads 80 - about as low as the temperature has been since I came to Nagpur in early August. The rains are coming to an end now, and the air is becoming drier, as the temperatures start to climb. I see through a window a woman rolling out chapatis for dinner. Someone is burning incense, and the air smells like sandalwood and roses. Men are sitting in the motorcycle shop downstairs. Across the street, the proprietor of Sri Sai Hot Chips is slicing potatoes into a wok of boiling oil. he also has fresh banana chips, and green beans, and rice crackers, and various other deep fried chips that I can't identify. As I step out into the street, a jeep almost rolls over a boy on a motorcycle making a turn. I watch for an opening to cross the street. I think I've found one, but then an autorickshaw rolls by with its lights off. You can hardly see it. It is a good thing the traffic moves slowly, because it never stops... I've always been terrified of the traffic here.

Down at the corner, someone in the temple is ringing a bell incessantly. It seems to be in a curious rhythm with the constantly honking horns, making a chaotic sort of music reminiscent of early New Orleans Jazz, or late Coltrane, or the brass bands that play in wedding processions in North India. It is worshipful music, but also joyful and disordered and urban and gritty. Lights blaze out from the temple onto the flower wallahs, with their great garlands of marigolds. Across the street, there are carts selling bananas, apples from the Himalayas, chai, and fried snacks. I get my half liter of milk, look at the ice cream advertisement (this milk stall, unfortunately, does not carry kulfi, but he does have various kinds of chocolate covered bars, a childhood flavor, and unlike in the US, the serving size on Indian ice cream bars is reasonable), find another gap in the traffic, climb up the stairs, and push the humidity swollen door open to my apartment.