A modern mural on the walls of the Udaivlas resort in Udaipur depicts in the traditional Rajasthani style a procession led by oxen.
India
LAND OF LIVING TRADITIONS
Photographs by Michael Freeman
Essays by Alistair Shearer
Published by Periplus Editions with editorial offices at 364 Innovation Drive, North Clarendon, Vermont 05759 U.S.A and 61 Tai Seng Avenue, #02-12, Singapore 534167
Text copyright © 2008 Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd.
Photographs copyright © 2008 by Michael Freeman
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2008927101
ISBN: 978-1-4629-0923-0 (ebook)
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Printed in Malaysia
12 11 10 09 08 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
A painter in Cochin continues the Indian tradition of giant hand-painted posters, this one advertising perfume.
Contents
| Introduction | 4 |
| Land and People | 16 |
| History | 34 |
| Religion and Ritual | 50 |
| Architecture | 64 |
| Arts and Crafts | 74 |
| Visiting India | 86 |
In the foothills of the Himalayas, yoga classes take place in the open pavilion of a palace in Rishikesh.
Introduction
“The sole country under the sun that is endowed with imperishable interest…the one land all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for the shows of all the rest of the globe combined.”
—Mark Twain, ninteenth-century
American writer and traveller.
India is not just another country—it is an extraordinary adventure. Nowhere else has the same power to ravage the senses, strain the credibility, expand the mind and open the heart as this teeming kaleidoscope of seeming contradictions, a land full of contrasts as legion as they are legendary. It is the living museum of the human mind; to journey here is to time travel among sights, beliefs and practices that have long since disappeared elsewhere. Nothing is hidden in India. She is the land of dreams and tales, where travelling storytellers still mesmerize their village audiences, yet she is simultaneously the world’s biggest inventor of sophisticated computer software. A fabulous, ancient and stately civilisation, where respected feudal rulers still live in palaces and millions hold the cow sacred, India somehow manages to be the world’s largest democracy, which, while only 52 per cent literate, contains the world’s second largest pool of trained scientists and engineers.
Everywhere one looks in India, time-hallowed tradition meets the twenty-first century head-on in a dizzying cocktail of intense impressions. Peacocks sit imperiously atop satellite dishes; elephants and cows cause good-natured traffic jams; processions of naked ascetics amble past crowded cybercafes. All humanity seems to be on the move on India’s roads, where the latest Mercedes jostles with wooden bullock-carts designed five thousand years ago and painted trucks, vertiginously laden, lurch past brilliant swathes of cotton, silk and chillies spread out to dry in the scorching sun beneath impossible tangles of telephone wires. The city streets, sizzling with entrepreneurial energy, are packed with people, yet beyond the cities lie the somnolent villages where seven out of every ten Indians live and time hangs suspended; beyond them again stretch tranquil forests and silent deserts where wild animals still reign.
India’s uniqueness has attracted adventurers—merchants, poets, artists—for millennia; today’s tourists are merely the latest wave of visitors to stand and marvel. This is a civilisation that has suffered and absorbed innumerable foreign conquests, creating a a richly variegated tapestry of peoples and traditions, yet it is today facing perhaps the greatest threat to its survival. For traditionally India—and this is part of her fascination—has stood for values that are very different to those of the modern, secular West. She has believed that humanity is inextricably part of nature, not merely its exploiter; that human communities—family, tribe, caste—have enduring value, not just their individual members; that the worlds of the imagination, the hidden realms of gods, myths and magic, are just as real as the daylight world of history and science. Above all she has taught that we should lead a tolerant and balanced life in rhythms well-established, the goal of which is not merely to accumulate money, power and things, but to find God. In the brave new world of globalisation