Everyday Life in Nagpur

For the last month and a half I have been based in the city of Nagpur. According to one tourist bulletin board website, Nagpur has nothing to attract the traveler unless you like highway flyovers. I think this demonstrates the kind of workaday beauty that we miss when we go off in search of the spectacular.
Fruit stall, Dharampeth Bazaar

Nagpur claims to be the geographic center of India, and although I'm not sure which India it is the center of (British India? India including the areas occupied by China & Pakistan but claimed by the Indian government? India as shown on maps in the west, excluding these areas occupied by other countries), it is still true that if you look at the dead center of a map of India, you are pretty much looking at Nagpur. It was the capital of the British Central Provinces, and is thus blessed with a number of very beautiful British-era administrative buildings. In his later years, Gandhi located his ashram at nearby Sevagram (Seva = service, gram = village), in part because the poverty of the area enabled him to devote himself to service of the poor, and in part because from here, he could hop on a train and be anywhere in India within 24 hours. It continues to be a major transit hub and administrative center, although it is now the 3rd city in the vast state of Maharashtra (about the same size as Germany). Mumbai and Pune are a 15 hour train ride to the west, and although the state capital is in Mumbai, one does not feel its influence in these distant provinces. To the north, you'd have to travel to Delhi or the other cities of the Indo-Gangetic plain to find a bigger place (again, a 15 hour journey), while to the east, Calcutta is even farther away. Even Hyderabad, the other great city of the Deccan, is a 10 hour journey to the South.

Dharmapeth - I was surprised to learn that Nagpur has its own, 100 year old daily English newspaper. The other day I hailed a sitting autorickshaw to go to a friends house, and was surprised to find that the rickshaw-wallah had been reading the Hitavda.

Nagpur has played an important role in the political history of India, although in strangely contradictory ways. The militant Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a volunteer organization closely tied to the assassination of Gandhi and the rise of the modern Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP - the largest national opposition party today and the ruling party from 1998-2004) was founded here in the 1920s, modeling itself after volunteer organizations rising in Germany and Italy around the same time. While it has drawn its support primarily from the Brahmin castes, Nagpur's other great political movement draws its support from the Dalit or oppressed castes - formerly known as untouchables. The great untouchable leader Ambedkar, who also wrote the Indian Constitution, converted to Buddhism here in 1956, a year before his death.
When you walk through the slums of the city you frequently come across small shrines such as this one. Over the course of a life spent fighting for the rights of the dalit castes (like the RSS, often in direct opposition to Gandhi), Ambedkar came to believe that Hindu religious beliefs held back his people, and adopted Buddhism as an older, anti-caste religion of India. Hundreds of thousands of Ambedkar's followers joined him in his conversion, and today there is a great modern stupa marking the place of conversion. Unfortunately, Ambedkar passed away shortly after his conversion, and, at least from what I've heard, his followers had little knowledge of the teachings of the Buddha - their Buddhism was a defiant political gesture more than a religious one. I hear from my friends at the local Vipassana Meditation Center that many of the Ambedkar Buddhists have started coming there for teaching.

Being in the midst of the Deccan plateau, far from the ocean, Nagpur is very hot. When I first came to Nagpur in June 2009 for an exploratory visit, the monsoon rains, which typically arrive in mid-June, were three weeks delayed. Summer in Nagpur is miserably hot - beginning sometime in March, and lasting until the arrival of the rains, daytime highs stay above 40 C, and regularly reach 47 - 120 F. Being a New England boy, I had never experienced heat like that. I remember getting up before dawn to go jogging - when it was still a relatively cool 90 F. Summer ends with the arrival of the rains, and July, August, and September are hot and humid, but not that hot. It isn't that different than a wet summer in the midwest. Some days it rains, some days it pours, other days the sun comes out, things dry out, and the temperatures climb up into the 90s again, but most days stay in the mid 80s. At night, at least in the city, the warm air stays and I run the fan all night when I sleep. Occasionally, on very rainy nights, the temperature drops below 80, and I turn the fan off, and wonder how I will dry my clothes without the benefit of sun or the electric wind.

There are several temples clustered near my flat, and cultural associations for the many south Indians who have settled here. The temples and cultural centers, like everything else, are unimpressive concrete block buildings. One directly across the street from me offers morning and evening tuition (we'd call it tutoring) for first year engineering undergraduates. At 6 AM, when I go to my yoga class, I find crowds of 18-20 year olds arriving on their scooters (the boys park on one side, the girls on the other) for their classes, which last until 8 AM. There is another batch in the evening. Unlike in the US, where top students commonly aim for a liberal arts education, and engineering is only one of many respectable professions, engineering here is The profession towards which young people aspire. When I tell people that I'm from Massachusetts, I commonly hear a note a recognition: "Ah yes - Massachusetts, home of the world's greatest university." This part is not surprising. Many people in the US also think that the greatest university in the US is located in Massachusetts. The next part is surprising: "Massachusetts Institute of Technology - MIT." Surely MIT is one of the world's great universities - but greater than Harvard? Well... of course Harvard doesn't have Massachusetts in its name, so maybe they just don't realize that Harvard and MIT are neighbors - but no - when I mention Harvard they often give a note of non-recognition.

The predominance of engineering is probably related to the phenomenal growth of the IT sector in India over the last 20 years - I read in a recent newspaper that there is a severe shortage of civil engineers in India, as all of the best civil engineers high paying jobs in the IT sector instead of building roads and bridges. Nonetheless, I find it a little disconcerting. I'd like to think that there are smart, privileged Indians going into other professions that are crucial for building a strong and free society - such as the arts, journalism, natural sciences, social sciences, and perhaps most importantly, education. Yet I frequently hear from young people that these professions are only chosen by those who can't get into engineering school. Natural sciences at least can lead to a medical career, which still seems to be highly valued, though not as popular as engineering, but I also hear that social science programs are starved for talented students, and I've observed that many of India's most prominent contemporary intellectuals are engineers, at least by undergraduate training. I'm disturbed by the low value given in mainstream education to India's incredibly rich linguistic, cultural, literary, musical, spiritual, and artistic heritage. I think that engineering is crucial to a successful modern society, yet I worry that basic engineering education has a strong tendency to promote linear thinking that is insufficient for problem solving in a complex, non-linear world. I'm most deeply disturbed by the low value given to careers in education, even lower than in the US. I can't think of anything more fundamental to the development of a healthy society than elementary education, but I've never met and Indian who aspired to teach 3rd grade.

That said, my neighbor is a retired high school science teacher. Her husband passed away recently, but I had the privilege of meeting one of her daughters recently, and she illustrated the value of having a teacher for a mother: she is a professor of physics at IIT-Delhi, one of India's most elite institutes of higher education, while her sister teaches and practices as an ob-gyn in Dubai.

A five minute walk through the temple area brings me to the yoga mandal. I grew up in a segment of America where yoga was pretty normal. I can remember my parents practicing yoga. When I was a child, and I knew several people who made their living as yoga teachers, and several of my housemates in college went for yoga trainings. But yoga in the US never made a strong appeal to me. I liked to stretch, but I found something not quite right for me in the effort to integrate spirituality into physical exercise that most yoga teachers made. It seemed like they wanted to do something spiritual, but only knew how to teach me how to move my body.

I feel very differently about this yoga center. To begin with, the spirituality is front and center. The yoga studio features a shrine in the front, and every session begins and ends (and is sometimes interrupted in the middle) with singing of devotional songs and chants. Not being a Hindu, and not understanding Hindi very well yet, I can't tell you exactly what the songs mean, but I love that an integral aspect of the class involves people singing together. Instead of having teachers who are overly flexible young hippie women who want to be dancers, my yoga classes are taught by very normal seeming middle-aged men (classes are gender segregated), who will later go to work in normal jobs. One teacher I met is a doctor whose family owns a large local grocery store. Another, perhaps more relevant to me, is a retired forest officer.

The classes here have been offered for decades. The swami who founded the center was one of the first to teach yoga to women, and he established this center to offer all of its classes free of charge. When I think of it, I have a hard time imagining a real spiritual teaching that requires up-front payment. When was the last time you heard of a church or synagogue with an entrance fee? The fact that this yoga center has thrived and grown (long outliving its founder) implies that people find the classes of great use, and are willing to donate their time and money to support the place. I'm impressed when I see older middle-class men sweeping the floor: one doesn't often see such people doing household chores. (I could say the same about the Vipassana meditation center here, although it is less surprising to me, since I grew up in that tradition and am aware of its strong presence even in the US).

This morning, for the first time since I began taking classes there about a month ago, I was able to meet the Guru - a quiet white-haired who looks more like a long retired civil servant than a typical swami. I've struggled with back pain ever since I was rear-ended by an emergency room doctor in 2003, and this last year I developed a persistent pain in my right shoulder from working too hard on my dissertation proposal. I've seen alot of health practitioners in the US for these problems, and I think I've learned a little about how to judge their practice. Daily yoga sessions have certainly helped, but the pain doesn't seem to completely go away. The guru spent about 5 minutes massaging my back (and also an area on my upper chest and on my palm), and I could tell I was in the hand of someone who knew alot about soft tissue. It was only temporary, but for a few hours afterwards, I really felt no pain. It moved me to think that one of the best treatments I've had for my back was given to me as a gift, free of charge, with nothing asked or expected in return. I feel very fortunate to have found this place.

In the nearby dharampeth bazaar, I can find anything I might need:
Chile, ginger, lemon, garlic, cilantro...
winter squashes, summer squashes, cucumbers and warty bitter gourds...
Mirrors, combs, and other household paraphenalia...
Incense, dyes...

And of course, garlands of marigolds to decorate the household gods. I might add that Haldirams, one of India's largest maker of sweets and namkeens (salty snacks), has an outlet here.
The traffic isn't particularly bad here, but there are no crosswalks to speak of, and I'm generally a pedestrian. It is not easy to reach the other side of the road. The neighborhood cows sit on the street (the streets are dryer than the sidewalks, and really, where else would they go? they belong to a neighborhood dairy, but there is no grazing land here for the dairy cows. Asphalt-fed milk anyone?), and people zip around them on their Honda scooters and Bajaj motorcycles and aging bicycles, or in their little Maruti cars. As in the US, the wealthy have taken to big jeeps and SUVs. Unlike many other cities I've been to in India, women drive. A friend suggests that the necessity to drive is driven by the poor public transit available in this sprawling city. Most of the women drive scooters (women don't drive motorcycles), and they take their dupattas - the scarves that are part of their salwar kameez - and wrap them around their face for protection from the sun and dust. With only their eyes visible, I think they look like some kind of strange figures, transposed from the Arabian Nights onto their Hondas.
I like to jog up to the university. The campus is free of the busy cars, and has a bit of greenery. One day I found this handsome buffalo grazing on the main quad of the Laxminarayan Institute of Technology.

On the edge of the campus are slums, who throw their trash into this field, where the cows and pigs and dogs rifle through it, searching for edibles.

Farther afield, but within distance of a jog or a long walk, are two lakes. There are parks on their banks, and in the evening people gather to catch fish, socialize, watch the sunset, enjoy the cool breeze, and eat chaats (snacks made of little bits of fried things, spices, chutneys, and chopped onions and tomatoes - possibly the best food in India, but full of untreated water, so I avoid them), ice creams, and fried noodles.
Sunset at Telankhedi Tank.