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Demon (or Amman) sculpture
Her she is, the Lady about to give birth to the demon child. I was seated too close to get a good picture of the whole sculpture (and I was not about to attempt moving anywher). – so how to summarize 3 months of fieldwork and experiences in India? A task I find near impossible now that I'm starting this 3rd and very late letter. So what has happened? I have experienced some major swinging of my psyche, I have thrown Malinowskis rules about fieldwork into the toilet, I have attended the most crazy and ecstatic ritual so far in my life, I have finaly seen a little bit of North India, I have made good friends in Velankanni, I have near died from heat, I have got slightly drunk on fermented palm wine, I have attended several marriages, I have been to a babtizing – the list goes on and on. I'll try to say something about a few things, no idea about what right now, but I'm sure something will come out as my fingers leap across the keyboard!
I'll make an attempt to make this somewhat cronological, which I'll probably manage, what I most likly won't manage however is to make it short!
Culture Studies has a study centre for Norwegian students of Social Anthropology and the Science of Religion in Pondy, I decided to pay them a visit in their
Amman
It might not look it, but that statue is massive, and rather scary =P 2nd week or so just to hang out a little bit with some Norwegians. Now this is perhaps not the «proper» thing to do if you judge me by old anthropological moral standards, preferably I should have been isolated on some far away island for several years due to a world war (like our great grandfather Malinowski), or something similar. Anyway; I spent a few days in Pondy drinking beer with the students and generally just relaxing, a superb time! I stayed with Harri and his family in a village suburb of Pondy, far from a luxurious house, I was treated like a King, or rather as the long lost son (Harri insists I'm his first son). While I was staying in Pondy a festival dedicated to Amman reached it's climax at the end of the yearly 10 day cyclus. I invited the students to accompany me and Harri to this huge celebration, not realy knowing myself what we were going to, 10 students decided to come along. The whole thing started at the main local temple, where Amman chased a demon down to the beach. The atmosphere at these festivals is amazing, the air is full of anxiety, devotion,
adrenaline, testosterone and a rather rancid sweaty smell. As the 1km chase started the crowd ran for their lives infront of the demons and the angry godess. Harri was more nervous than I have ever seen him and usered the students about 100-200 meters infront of the crowd. However, two students and I defied the anxious Harri and decided to run with the crowd (the front part!), it was rather crazy I can tell you! My adrenaline was pumping and according to two students on VIP position riding a rickshaw together with a film crew i was grinning like a mad man... Woohoo! Once we reached the beach we were seated in a great circle around an imense sandsculpture of a pregnant demon(1). I was dripping sweat from fleeing the demons, and sitting under the midday sun didn't help either, luckily for my selfesteem a lot of Indians had some problems with the heat as well. About 1000 people were waiting anxiously for what they knew was comming (the birth and slaughter of a demon newborn), watched over by a squadron of police men with sticks they were not afraid to use... The ritual progressed with a humerous banter between
Goat - soon to be raw yummy goat
Sacrificial goat in the lap of one of the Amman carriers two persons in crazy costumes whos role I haven't quite figured out, people were atleast enjoying it imensly. The only one not enjoying the whole thing was probably the goat lying in the lap of one of the boys that carried the massive 10 meter tall Amman statue down to the beach (running like mad, upon arrival several collapsed from exhaustion), soon too loose it's head. When the ritual picked up it's intensity and the climax was nearing faster and faster several women seated just a few meters from us went into a trance; tearing at their hair, their eyes swirling around in their soccets, spastic movements of the limbs – the crowd gave them a couple of square meters to do their thing (a crowd that normaly doesn't part for anything or anyone, India is in it's normal state rather packed and unyielding, and a packed ritual scene even more so). All of a sudden the goat was dragged to the crotch of the demon sculpture and got it's head neatly removed by a huge slaughter knife, at this point the whole crowd surged forward (except for the scared whitefaces who ran in the opposite direction!), something happened that
Aiaiai
Thats what I call a knife involved Amman, demons and a demon baby, I know the demonbaby and mother was slaughtered but the exact order of things is hard to tell as the whole scene was a mass of ecstatic bodies jumping around and screaming for a couple of minutes before they all ran off in one direction. Left was an unrecognizable mound of colored sand and a few bloody splatches here and there – no sign of the goat... According to Harri the devotees consume the raw and bloody goat in their ecstacy. We all left the scence feeling slighly shaken, some had troubles sleeping that night, myself I felt a little annoyed I hadn't decided to study rituals of some kind in India – becouse what an experience that was! Even though most of us were shaken to our bones I got the impression that those who attended wouldn't have missed it for the world. Some even commented that it was the climax of their «Indian experience»! 😊 Interestingly the 1 year cycle was 3 weeks later broken, the village was suffering from an attack of black magic, 10 people had commited suicide in a few days, 1 old man died mysteriously and a
One of the weirdos
Between this man dressed as a female and the creature in the next picture some mock fighting went on for 1-2 hours, lost track of time in the exitment and heat. baby died suddenly. Apparently the yearly festival was started 20+ years back after a black magician cast a curse upon the village, in response the brahmins and the local temple initiated a ritual to apease Amman. Now 20 years later the son of this black magician, also a practicer of the black arts, came back to revenge his mother, and cast a dreadfull spell on the people. A curfew was put in place for several days, christian priests, brahmins and muslim mystics went from house to house to cleans it and pray (most houses visited by all three). Parts of the 10 day Amman festival was also re-enacted. On the final day, when intense prayer and rituals were talking place all over (I wasn't able to see this as Harri forbid me to come even close to the village becouse people were so afraid and anxious they might do «anything» to me, white skin and all) the night rained huge stones on all the roofs, that's what it sounded like atleast, most likly it was a demon, or demons, running around – and the spell was lifted. (And yet again I felt slightly – slightly – annoyed that this was
2nd weirdo
I think this is a womman dressed as a man, but im not quite sure... Funny fella atleast. not my thing, not that I don't enjoy what I'm doing, but hey! Demons, curses, ecstatic religion – woah!).
After the quick holiday in Pondy I went back to Velankanni to continiue hanging around... And there slowly, unconciously, my psyche went into a valley. I felt more and more drained of energy, my patience was slipping, my views on the remaining part of the fieldwork was rather clouded, even my views on my future as an anthropologist was slipping away into darkness... Some unexpected news from Norway also added to my feelings of despair. I soon enough recognized that I was actually feeling depressed, a rather new feeling for me (except for that 15-year-old-first-love-heartbreak😉. And I didn't like it one bit (who would!). (My weight dropping a few to many kilos due to the heat stealing my appetite probably didn't help). I knew, rationally, that something like this was bound to happend, it nearly always does to those who are out far away from the known and loved doing some kind of work, usually it happends around midway in the period, its temporary and so on and so forth. However, rationality and emotions hardly cooporate at the best of
1st weirdo
This is after the ritual, weirdo walking around teasing people. times, and even less so when times are not so good. Anyone who claims that rationality can take command over the emotions I'll wack over the head, then call for a shrink! 😊 Ok, so there I was. I struggled along for a week or a week and half not getting much done, snapping at people being nothing but friendly and generally feeling like an asshole and acting like one. It was time to get away, away from Velankanni and the monotous days that led to nothing but brooding. I threw Malinowski down the toilet, called my mother to complain a little bit and fled to Pondy, to cleans my mind, to deal with something totaly different and just relax. My trip to Pondy was already planed, I was going to give a lecture (my first!) to the Culture Studies students about being a fieldworker and my field. Super timing! 😉 I simply left a week early, hehe. Sitting down with my mind and notebook trying to figure out what was happening so that I could communicate it in a sensible way to the students helped me immensely and I had great fun giving the lecture itself. I left Pondy
1st weirdo #2
Fantastic costume! and the wonderfull students feeling somewhat uplifted, I still felt that I wasn't quite myself however, but things were going much more smoothly. A couple of weeks later the students were getting ready to leave back to Norway and I was invited (or invited myself, not quite sure about the order of things here...) for the farewell party, so yet again I traveled on my Honda Splendour 100cc up to Pondy. A good party and a good time, and then the majority of the students left Pondy. 3 students stayed behind, having planed some extra days of traveling in India before returning to Norway. Luckily those 3 students; Andrea, Sandra and Øystein, were 3 of those I had the best relations with and we had some wonderfull days in Pondy. Andrea was planning to take a flight to Delhi for 9-10 days of traveling in the north. She asked if I would like to accompany her and I happily accepted. Both becouse she is a wonderfull girl, I have allways wanted to get a taste of the North and I knew a few more days of mind cleansing would do the remaining part of my fieldwork easier, better and hopefully
more effective. We flew to Delhi with no real idea about what to do (the best way to travel!), except for one thing, we wanted to see Taj Mahal in Agra. We spent a day and a half in Delhi – which, contrary to our expectations, is a wonderfull place! Seems much more orderly and clean than the big cities in the south. Ofcourse, beeing cleaner and more orderly than Chennai certanly doesnt take much, and we didn't see all that much except for the richer parts of Delhi. Delhi undoubtedly also have extensive slums filled to the brim with poverty, filth and despair... Atleast what we saw left a good impression, the new metro in Delhi is the most effective, clean and wonderfull metro I have ever seen. A train leaving every 3 minutes, you travel from the outskirts of Delhi (not outskirts as in suburb outskirts, rather as in not New Delhi(2)) to the centre in less than 15 minutes, a trip that would take anything between 30 minutes and 2 hours by road, depending on the traffic, at the price of about 1 NOK, or 20 cents.
After Delhi we took the train south to Agra,
and went to the Taj Mahal at sunrise. At first it was not so much more than an impressive enough big white lump of marble... But as we sat watching it for two hours it just grew and grew and grew. In the end we left wideeyed and feeling that we had just witnessed something of the most spectacular and beautifull ever built... It simply defies explanation. If you ever go to Taj Mahal you simply HAVE TO spend a lot of time just watching, just as important; go by yourself, dont let a guide impose on the visual experience, history can be read before or after! 😊 By this time we had found out how to spend the remaining days; the original plan of traveling east by train, then south to Chennai by train for Andreas flight to Norway was ditched. It was simply too long and too much train for our limited days of holiday, so we opted for Rajastan and a flight from Delhi to Chennai.
Rajastan was HOT. And I'm talking H O T. Traveling south from Jaipur (the capital of Rajastan, were we saw an impressive old fort and relaxed) to Pushkar by buss
was a crazy experience; we travled with a non-AC express buss in the middle of the day. Windows HAVE to be open, problem is that the wind blowing inn is so increadibly hot it actually burns you. If anyone ever blew hard on you while sitting in a steaming sauna you have some idea what it felt like. We had to hold down a curtain by force in front of the window to stop the searing wind. Rajastan sees about 50 degrees during the midday theese days. (According to locals and most travel books only madmen and badly missinformed tourists travel to deserty Rajastan between april and june, I gues we fall into the first category!). It doesn't help that at times the heat is accompanied by a wind carying sand. However, the heat is not so oppresive as it might sound like, the humidity is blessedly low, howering between 10 and 20% (as opposed to the south where it is now 90-98%!). As long as you drink imense amounts of water and don't mind an ever increasing layer of salt covering your body it's not all that bad... If you are stupid enough to wear tight non-breathing clothes you
Norwegians turning Indian
Here they are, the students who decided to come along to the ritual. After the ritual we went to Harris house and the girls were all, more or less voluntary, dressed up in sarie's. I'm on the far left dressed in a dhoti will suffer – but then you also deserve it, hehe. We experimented with holding a hand tightly against the skin for 1 minute, you wouldnt belive the amount of moisture generated in that small amount of time (the sweat can't vapourize between the two mosisture producing fleshy things). Rajastan was, in other words, HOT, but even more than hot it was BEAUTIFULL! A deserty, mountainish and at the sametime greenish area full of tall skinny men with imense turbans in all kinds of bright colors with big gold earings and clad in thin white shirts and dhoties, they look all the Raj part of their proud state (Raj means Lord or King, or something similar, no decent translation springs to my mind, or rather; I probably don't know one). Outshining the men by far are the women, clad in wonderfully colored saries (or something similar), bejewled with bone rings from their elbows to the shoulders, ankles and wrists weighed down by gold, nose rings and ear rings connected by a gold chain, they swing themselves through the desert carying babies, imense loads of cloth, garden produce, water and anything else you might, and might not, want to carry. Many wear
Taj Mahal and Andrea the Photographer
Taj Mahal and my constantly-taking-photos-travel-companion ;) Now taking pictures of the bussload of typical english/german tourists a kind of thin veil hung infront of their faces, but it hardly disguises their beauty... In some wicked (and probably western-exotic-fantasy induced(3)) way it seems to only enhance it, the veils are not the kind associated with strict muslim communities in the middle east, rather thin thin silk that is rather seethrough... Hot, beautifull Rajastan – Land of Kings.
Puskhar, our final stop on the trip before leaving to Delhi again was a wonderfull place. Little more than a village of 10000 people it's situated in the middle of the desert surrounding a small lake. The lake was created by a tear dropped from Brahman (The creator in Hindu mythology, one of the 3 «main» gods (Brahman, Vishnu and Shiva)). Surrounding the lake are a row of temples where pilgrims flock to pray by the holy water. Puskhar also houses one of the very few Brahman temples in India. According to local legend the scarcity of Brahman temples is due to Brahman, in Pushkar, marrying someone he was not intended to marry when the bethroted showed up late. The heartbroken godess got rather angry and cast a curse so that Brahman would not be worshipped anywhere else. Puskhar
Taj Mahal
This is the obligatory picture of the Taj reflected in the water. You might have envisaged the water being blue, but as with everything in India things are not the way you would think they are, or think they should be ;) was, as I said, a very nice place, with its 1000 temples, and april-may being marriage season there was a lot of activity going on even tho it was approacing the absolute low season. Low season or not foreigners were everywhere, probably becouse of the relative calm atmosphere of Puskhar as well as the easy availability of «special lassies» 😉 In Puskhar we had probably the best night of the whole trip: out in the desert, sleeping with the stars as roof, camels farting night music, a little too large bugs for my comfort tickeling our toes, wild dogs hunting around us – wonderfull! Riding the camles out and back was also fun, a very ... sea-like ... experience. Our guides were full of good humour and cooked us a delicious meal consisting of among other things chappati marinated in cow dung! Good taste 😊
We went back to Delhi, flew to Chennai and I saw Andrea, the best traveling companion a guy can wish for, off to Norway – alone yet again... Going back to Pondy for picking up my bike I got one of my biggest shocks in India. I intended to take an express buss leaving
Taj shoes
You need theese protective thingies to go up to the taj itself, everything is marble and the insane amount of visitors every year wears it down... from Chennai buss station 2330. In good faith I decided to empty my bladder 2217 after placing my bag on a seat to signify TAKEN DO NOT TOUCH NOR SIT, IT IS MINE! The bladder emptying was a failure, the toilet water was not running that day and the stench was too much even for my by now Indian olfactory sense, gagging I left after pressing out half a drop... But the shock, the real shock, came when I exited the toilet – there it was! The buss! It's engine running and wheels starting to turn! Here, in the land of 10 minutes is realy 30, and now is then, and then is later, and later is possibly sometime or never, the buss was leaving 10 minutes early! My legs ran while my brain was reeling from the shock and I collapsed in my seat blessing the stench of the toilet that made me not loose my bag. India just never stops to amaze me =P
And now I'm here, back in Velankanni. Back in my room that I earlier bragged about beeing a cold heaven, but that turned out to be a freaking oven when the sun realy
Puskhar at dusk
No good picture of the lake and the temples I'm afraid (pictures close to the shore were forbidden, along with shoes). But here you see one of the countless temples in Puskhar. started to heat up. Back with an ever expanding circle of friends and enjoying life once again! 😊 Not to mention looking forward to my best friend Jon Anders visiting in June!
The climate coin has, as you might have guesed, flipped. From a nasty winter in Norway and a nice winter in south India, to a Nasty summer in south India and a wonderfull spring in Norway. I can't express how much I miss the smell of fresh spring rain on light green lawns, budding trees and the feel of a cold but warm spring wind... Enjoying the first warm rays of sun light packed in a warm sweater and jacket, compared to a fan at full speed trying to cool a warm body waking up rather sticky at 7AM... Grr.
Håvard
PS! Obviously much much more has happened, but only the most devoted cares to read even 6 pages so I'll stop here 😉
PS!! Pictures will be added later, im uploading at around 100b's :s Which is too low even for my downsized images (80-10kb's).
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1. Some say it's a demon, some say it's God, in this case Amman. Hinduism
As if the heat is not enough
A sandstorm is blowing in over Puskhar, nice hot wind with sand in it. Everyone was confused as it was not the season for this, our guesthouse lord joked (?) that the gods were angry, it might even rain in the dry season :S can be rather confusing at times; atleast it's very flexible and amendable to the individual outlook on life!
2. Delhi consits of 8 different towns. Each one founded by a different set of rulers at different times. The current centre, New Delhi, was founded by the english. There is an old myth that says that any ruling class or empire who tries to make a new centre appart from the old ones are doomed to fall – so far the myth has come true. (The current ruling class/the national state of India hasn't so far been so stupid as to do this). But then again; has there ever been an empire/ruling class that has NOT fallen? 😉
3. Selfreflection is terribly tiering sometimes, heh heh...
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